KNOXVILLE’S CLOWNS IN HUELESS AMBER
JUNE 25, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM
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Kn oxv How Th nt moir e l o e i ill e e Of Gritty, Noisy,And Sometimes V llic M 1915 C y ompares To James Agee’s Id by jack Neely
JACK NEELY
A Tour of Market Square’s Problematic Plaques
MUSIC
Tina Tarmac and the Burns Return to Rock
FOOD
In the Land of Lavender and Honey
THE VAULT
Pioneering Journalist Carl Warner Opens His Archive
Ijams’ Meadow Lark Festival The annual Meadow Lark Festival starting at noon this Saturday at Ijams Nature Center is one of Knoxville’s biggest outdoor music festivals, a celebration of Americana music that will feature Pokey LaFarge, Scott Miller, the Lonesome Coyotes, and Emi Sunshine, among several other acts. But every year, the headliner is the setting. Ijams is extraordinarily unusual among American nature preserves, lately offering a new outdoor rockclimbing feature, Ijams Crag, and, opening in July, something never seen here before--a new “canopy tour” a zipline-based trip into the treetops. Ijams has an equally remarkable history.
youngest, Mary, died in a car wreck. The Ijamses donated part of their property to the Girl Scouts, to use as a camp in her memory. Camp Mary Ijams served as a popular girl-scout camp for about 40 years.
Harry “H.P.” Ijams (1876-1954) was a commercial artist whose often humorous drawings appeared in newspapers and magazines, but he was also a naturalist who had a special interest in ornithology. The cave formerly known as Cave Springs or Maude
After H.P.’s widow Alice Ijams’ death, in 1968, the family and local civic leaders established 16 acres of the property as a memorial, originally called Ijams Park, then Ijams Nature Center. For 20 years, it didn’t change much, a modest refuge known to birdwatchers and gardeners. It wasn’t always quiet. During the early years of Ijams Nature Center, adjacent Mead’s Quarry was still operating as a limestone processing site.
His unusual name is pronounced with one Moore’s Cave on the Tennessee River Boardwalk at Ijams Nature Center. syllable and a silent J. It rhymes with “rhymes.” His father, Joseph H. Ijams, had come to Knoxville from Ohio just after the Ijams expanded in 1990, to about four times Civil War to be superintendent of the Tennessee School for the its original size, and added some interesting features, like a Deaf, when it was located downtown. riverwalk by a natural cave. H.P. grew up in Knoxville. In 1910 he and his wife Alice acquired 26 acres along the river that had once been part of merchant Perez Dickinson’s 600-acre “Island Home” estate. The Ijamses raised pets and farm animals on the property, and their interest in birds and conservation started their place’s reputation as a bird sanctuary. It was a popular place for birdwatchers, and for conservationists, who were friends and allies. The Ijamses were actively involved in the movement to start the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1920s. H.P. helped establish the first permanent campsite on Mount LeConte. In 1924 they helped found the East Tennessee Ornithological Society. H.P. Ijams was especially interested in endangered species, and became an authority on the extinct passenger pigeon. His friends and frequent guests Jim and Nancy Tanner had studied the ivory-billed woodpecker, and were the last to see one alive. Ijams features exhibits about both extinct species. The Ijamses raised four daughters on the property. The second
Some years after the quarry went out of business, leaving tons of rusting machinery, Ijams Nature Center acquired the 80-acre property, and expanded again, encouraging parts of it to return to a natural state. Then, an unexpected turn of luck resulted in the acquisition of an even larger adjacent quarry, all but forgotten but sometimes known as Ross Quarry. The French industrial stone company who owned it donated the 103 acres to Ijams. Ijams is now about 300 acres, close to 20 times the size it was when it first opened as Ijams Park. Today, Ijams is one of Knoxville’s most popular refuges, and a site for symphony concerts, weddings, hikes, rockclimbing, and paddleboarding excursions, while always serving as an educational center concerning ecology and ornithology, with special initiatives like the Getting Kids Outdoors program and a new exhibit about Earl Henry, a local ornithologist who was killed in World War II. Its new zipline “treetop challenge park” is just the latest chapter in Ijams’ ever-evolving story.
For more, see ijams.org, and Paul James’ book, Ijams Nature Center (Arcadia Publishing, 2010).
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 June 25, 2015
June 25, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 16 knoxmercury.com
CONTENTS
“The mere attempt to examine my own confusion would consume volumes.” —James Agee
14 The Neverending Summer COVER STORY
In the minds of people around the world, many of whom have never been to Tennessee, the word “Knoxville” will be forever associated with the Summer of 1915. That’s thanks to Knoxville-born author James Agee, who wrote a poetic and almost universally resonant memoir called “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” but maybe even more so to composer Samuel Barber. Barber’s 1948 soprano composition uses Agee’s text as a sort of libretto. It’s a classic of modern vocal composition, performed regularly all over the world. Jack Neely tells the stories behind these two compositions, and provides a picture of Knoxville 100 years ago.
INSIDE THE VAULT
21 Carl Warner’s Archives In the mid-1960s, Carl Warner came to Knoxville to pursue a teaching degree at the University of Tennessee. He also produced short on-location news segments for WBIR and soon began turning in half-hour documentaries on often controversial topics. For a 1970 piece on a Children of God colony, Warner moved into the group’s Fort Sanders communal home for several weeks. He fought with news producers over content they found too sensationalistic or scandalous; he says he was fired and rehired multiple times. Eric Dawson gives us a taste of what’s inside Warner’s archives.
Join Our League of Supporters! 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.
DEPARTMENTS
OPINION
A&E
4 6
8
20
38
Letters Howdy Start Here: Ghost Signs by Bud Ries, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory. PLUS: Words With … Wendy Cox ’Bye Finish There: Restless Native by Chris Wohlwend, Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely, Spirit of the Staircase by Matthew Foltz-Gray
10 12
The Scruffy Citizen Jack Neely takes a closer look at some problematic plaques in Market Square. Perspectives Joe Sullivan hails UT’s efforts to increase graduation rates. Small Planet Patrice Cole points out Knoxville’s recycling economy—and where we could be benefitting even more.
21 22 23 24
CALENDAR Program Notes: Jack Evans attends Secret City Cyphers’ one-year anniversary show. Inside the Vault: Eric Dawson examines the archives of former local journalist Carl Warner. Music: Matthew Everett gets down and dirty with Tina Tarmac and the Burns.
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Spotlights: Whitey Morgan and the 78’s, Meadow Lark Music Festival, Faun Fables
FOOD & DRINK
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Home Palate Dennis Perkins travels to the land of lavender and honey—which happens to be right here.
Movies: April Snellings feels the buzz behind Dope. Video: Lee Gardner braces you to see Hard to Be a God. June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3
LETTERS Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015
SEIZE THE MOMENT! JUST TRYING TO KEEP THE GOOD THINGS GOING
MAY 28, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM
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THE LAST DRIVE-IN Walmart’s threat to the Parkway Drive-In puts Maryville’s future in the spotlight BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN
NEWS
Historic Christenberry House Demolished
JACK NEELY
The Problem With TN—Not the Logo, the Abbreviation
BOOKS
NPR’s Steve Inskeep Talks Andrew Jackson
BIG BOX REVENUES
FOOD
Glenwood and Broadway: New Foodie Corner
I read with interest your article, “The Last Drive-In” [cover story by S. Heather Duncan] in the May 28th edition of the Knoxville Mercury. I live very near the Parkway Drive-In but have never been to a movie there. On Monday, June 8 there was a public hearing about a proposed 201516 budget, which would require a 47-cent property increase. This is on the table because of a shortfall of revenue to support various programs and current debt. You quoted a lady who stated, “We already have the best schools and parks in the state…”— that’s why property owners may face a tax increase to cover the cost of education and services in our county. I am all for nostalgia and preservation of historic and cultural sites, but I have to look at the big picture when it comes to my pocket book and the future of Blount County To preserve the drive-in and keep Maryville “quaint,” we would be asked to turn our back on the tax revenues that a Walmart and ancillary business would generate. Compare these figures to a business that is open two days a week for eight months of the year and employs only a few people. Will a “Big Box” tax revenue solve our shortfall? No. But it would help. There is more to this story than big business trying to scuttle a local icon. Doug Anderson Maryville
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S. Heather Duncan’s article on the Pryor Brown garage was informative and timely. [“Pryor Brown’s Integrity,” news feature, June 18, 2015] If the collapse of the garage’s roof is determined to have been caused by the owner’s negligence or deferred maintenance, perhaps the city should consider including the garage in a redevelopment plan where it could be seized as blighted under eminent domain laws. Then this beautiful building could be the subject of a Request for Proposals where the building might be adaptively reused as workforce or artist housing, or even as a downtown community center to replace the Candy Factory. Public/private joint ventures of this kind are being developed in many cities, and would likely find support from downtown residents as well as the community at large. Michael Kaplan Knoxville
SUSTAINABLE SPACES A THING OF THE PAST?
Thank you, Jack Neely, for capturing this so succinctly. [“The Howard House,” Scruffy Citizen by Jack Neely, April 23, 2015] The workmanship of current times certainly does seem lackluster compared to our older structures. Makes one wonder what we will treasure 75 years in the future. Too often, community impact or architectural beautification do not appear to be a factor in the equation of new buildings. I appreciate the time you spend highlighting the importance of preservation. We can only hope that education on this subject will offer a challenge to young, hungry architects and builders to create sustainable spaces. Let there be incentives for craftsmen to reach legacy status instead of just meeting a budget and time schedule. Quality must be factored into upfront planning to promise sustainability in buildings, that the future will want to save. Tamera Easterday via Facebook Knoxville
CORRECTIONS
In our June 11, 2015 news feature about UT’s decision to override Fort Sanders’ NC-1 zoning and buy up Victorian houses on White Avenue to construct a new lab building, we had two errors: • Knox Heritage had paid $1,300 for an appraisal of a prospective lot for the houses—not for an appraisal of the houses themselves. • Although we stated former Mayor Victor Ashe’s home had been torn down, he says the house he grew up in at 1811 Melrose Ave. is still standing (with major additions), and is currently the Baptist Collegiate Ministry.
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
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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 5
Illustration by Ben Adams
HOWDY
GHOST SIGNS BY BUD RIES
Before they burned down last year, the McClung Warehouses on Jackson Avenue were home to some of the greatest ghost signs in the city. An ad for Philco color TVs and VCRs sat on top of a psychedelic mural painted for the 1982 World’s Fair by local artists Jeffrey Ryerson and Leon Weisener.
QUOTE FACTORY “ If I were there I would certainly vote to have it come down. It serves no purpose anymore. Especially after what has occurred.” —Republican U.S. Sen. Bob Corker in an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Monday, commenting on whether he thinks the Confederate flag should be removed from the South Carolina state capitol. Corker was born and raised in South Carolina.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
6/26 KUUMBA FESTIVAL FRIDAY
5-10 p.m. Market Square. Free. Kuumba, Knoxville’s annual celebration of African American culture, is actually a four-day festival, but the Market Square parade and party is its most visible event. There will be performances by the Kuumba Watoto Dance and Drum Ensemble, arts and crafts, the Kuumba market place, and live music. Things kick off on Thursday with a luncheon at the East Tennessee History Center, while on Saturday and Sunday there are live concerts at Haley Heritage Square in Morningside Park. Info: kuumbafestival.com.
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Believe It or Knox! BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX One of the most famous people buried in Knoxville is jazz singer Ida Cox, who was at the height of her popularity in the 1920s and ’30s, when she recorded her own song, “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues.” She lived in Knoxville during the last 20 years of her life, and recorded one final album, Blues for Rampart Street, before she died in 1967. She has become only more famous since. However, her original graveyard, which was called Longview, on Keith Avenue, went out of business and her grave was moved to New Gray, on Western. Although it’s in a 1980s-style strip mall, Long’s Drug Store was established in 1956, and its interior has changed little since then. It still has a working soda fountain and lunch counter. Although it offers a working pharmacy, many of its customers come there just to eat! Maynardville, Maryville, Grainger County, Sevierville, Sevier County, Roane County, and Blount County, are all named for people who never lived in those places. THEY ALL LIVED IN KNOX COUNTY!
6/27 MEADOWLARK MUSIC FESTIVAL SATURDAY
Noon, Ijams Nature Center (2915 Island Home Ave.). $20 Ijams and WDVX crank up the Americana in a pastoral setting in what has become another Knoxville summer tradition. Performers include Pokey LaFarge, Scott Miller & The Commonwealth Ladies Auxiliary, The Lonesome Coyotes, Emi Sunshine & the Rain, Guy Marshall, Mountain Soul, John Myers Band, Subtle Clutch, and the Knoxville Banjo Orchestra. Info: ijams.org.
6/28 ‘THE BIRDS’
SUNDAY
2 p.m., Tennessee Theatre. $9. The Summer Magic Movie Series provides a respite not only from the heat, but also from multiplex bombast with some genuinely good movies. Here is Alfred Hitchcock in his prime, revealing just how horrific pigeons can be. Or nature, for that matter. “I don’t know how this started or why, but I know it’s here and we’d be crazy to ignore it…” Ah, well.
6/30 JAZZ ON THE SQUARE TUESDAY
8 p.m., Market Square. Free. Completing our lazy days of summer theme here, the Marble City 5 provide a perfect excuse to take a seat on the Square, perhaps on a quilt, and while away another summer evening in Knoxville, Tennessee.
HOWDY
THINKING OF GOING PAPERLESS?
WORDS WITH ...
Wendy Cox BY ROSE KENNEDY Competitive bowler and manager for Western Avenue and Fountain Lanes Strike and Spare franchises, Wendy Cox implements their Kids Bowl Free summer programs, which run through Sept. 30. A national marketing effort in cooperation with schools, the program allows children under 15 accompanied by a parent or guardian to bowl two free games each of the five sessions offered weekly. Discounted monthly family passes are also available so adults can bowl with them.
Did you bowl when you were a kid?
Definitely not! Anyone can bowl. New bowlers can use bumpers—you have more fun if you can knock down pins instead of throwing it in the gutter every time. We also have ramps for those with special needs or the real young ones.
games involves about a half mile of walking and can burn between 300-500 calories. It even improves balance and posture. Knox County Schools, through Scott Bacon, helped us get the word out about the program through 54,000 cards that Tracy Davis-Miller helped us get out to P.E. classes. The school system participates because they are interested in encouraging low or no-cost ways kids can get active with their families over summer break.
Can you stand closer to the pins if you’re not a strong bowler?
You don’t mind if kids use the pass every day?
I did not. I wish I had. It’s a great team activity and helps kids bond.
Do you have to be good at sports to bowl?
Oh no, you can’t do that. There is a foul line a bowler cannot go past. The lanes are conditioned with oil and slippery, and you would bust your hiney if you slip on that.
What’s the youngest you’d encourage a child to bowl?
Any child who can reach up and push a ball, maybe 3 or 4 being the youngest. Any younger and they’re not really going to get what’s going on or enjoy it.
Really little kids can participate in Kids Bowl Free?
Any child under age 15 can bowl two free games every day we offer the program. But they have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. It’s designed to provide a family function, not for day cares or camps or big groups.
The parent does not have to buy a family pass or bowl when the child does?
They can just bring the child and the child can bowl, and that’s fine. The whole idea is to get the child off the sofa and off video games for a while and doing something active. Bowling two
Not at all. We have several who use their passes religiously, several times a week, weeks after summer break is officially over. I run KBF through Sept. 30 because my youth leagues and youth-adult combined leagues start in August and I like to spread the word through KBF members. Our marketing goal with KBF is to get children involved in the sport, because youth are the future of bowling. We did get a lot of youth bowlers out of the program last year, expanding to more than 50 youth league bowlers from about 20. I would like to expand that many more this year.
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Do you have to know how to keep score? Everything that used to be so scary about scoring is now electronic. You just type your name in and hit “Bowl.” But if you want the math practice, we can teach you to keep score.
Sign up and register for family passes at kidsbowlfree. com or call 888-444-0717 for more information. KBF hours at Western Lanes: Sunday 1 p.m.-4 p.m.; Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Fountain Lanes Sunday 1 p.m.-4 p.m.; Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Family Bowl (not managed by Cox): Monday-Thursday 11 a.m.-7 p.m., Sunday 2 p.m.-6 p.m.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7
SCRUFFY CITIZEN
Legible Market Square Notes on some problematic plaques BY JACK NEELY
M
arket Square’s bell finally has a story. You can read it right on the brand-new plaque. For a decade, the bell, which weighs more than a ton, has puzzled visitors. Here’s a big bronze bell, with the date of 1883 and the brand of the McShane Co. bell foundry in Baltimore, sitting upon a brick pedestal near Union Avenue, and no explanation of what it is or why it’s here. Every day, newcomers would pause and pay it homage. It has an interesting tale, and now, thanks to the city administration and the Market Square District Association, it’s on a plaque. I won’t ruin it for you. Visit the Square and read it for yourself. Thousands of people walk through the Square every day. Naturally, it attracts plaques like my neighbor’s baby pool attracts mosquitoes. But they all have problems. There’s a beautiful statue of three suffragists, weighed down by a base with marble panels bearing hundreds of words of text about the national feminist movement. There’s very little about anything that happened in Knoxville, though a lot happened right here on Market Square, in both demonstrations in the street and lectures in the Market Hall’s auditorium. The Elvis plaque, put up in the late ’90s, relates one of my favorite stories about Market Square. For the first decade it was there, its overwhelming image was a big glamour photo of Elvis, not enterprising record-store owner Sam Morrison, or his clientele so diverse that his store
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was on the national recording-industry radar as a bellwether for popular music. Elvis probably never set foot on Market Square, but the plaque, with his oversized picture, left some people with another impression. However, nature has outed the truth. I just noticed the other day that the image of Elvis is ghostly now, almost completely sun-bleached away, but the story about Sam Morrison survives legibly. It was part of the Cradle of Country Music Tour effort in the late 1990s by the East Tennessee Historical Society, which I helped with and generally thought was a great thing. There’s a lot more that could be commemorated about the Square’s 150-year history of live music, which included Fiddlin’ Bob Taylor, Roy Acuff (some used to claim he began his influential career there), and even Duke Ellington. The most venerable-looking plaque on Market Square is the one headed “Market House.” Its embossed text is problematic. Many, on a quick reading, gather that Market Square was founded in 1816. A big chunk of the text is about a small market on Main Street that lasted only seven years. By the time our Market Square opened in 1854, few Knoxvillians remembered that 1816 experiment. Despite all the interesting and relevant things to say about Market Square’s own long history, more than a quarter of the text is about another, limited and unsuccessful 1816 market, several blocks away. That plaque’s loudest and most perplexing message may be the colorful
symbol at the top. The U.S. flag and Confederate flag are crossed co-equally. They’re even-steven, as if we’re trying to hurt no feelings among our friends in the Confederacy, and demonstrate that it’s every bit as important as the United States of America. That duality is how several Southeastern states viewed their history, more than 50 years ago. Maybe it’s based on the assumption that history’s mainly about wars, and that the Civil War was the big one, so the history of anything must be about the blue and the gray, and it wouldn’t do to show favoritism. The fact that the centennial arrived right at the hottest era of the Civil Rights movement, when the flag emerged, sometimes more extravagantly than it ever was during the war, as a rallying symbol for whites defying desegregation, complicates things. Today, such an emphasis on that war, in itself, might seem puzzling, even absent any controversy about symbols. Confederate occupation of Knoxville, and of Market Square, lasted about two and a half of the Square’s 161 years. Whether the so-called “battle flag,” which emerged during the course of the war as an unofficial symbol, was ever flown during Confederate occupation of Knoxville is a question for another day, and another columnist. So why is it embossed, in color, on a durable plaque? A clue is in the fine print at the bottom of the plaque. There it credits the plaque to the “Knoxville – Knox County Civil War Centennial Committee.” Of course. That explains the Confederate flag and dates the plaque to about 1961. At the time, Knoxville cherished the bright hope that
Americans would be driving across the country in their Ford Country Squires, looking for Civil War sites to photograph. If Knoxville was no Chattanooga, in terms of Civil War bloodshed, it did have a battle, and deserved a slice of that pie. So the plaque wasn’t the city’s attempt to tell the history of Market Square. It was a Civil War Centennial committee, which, upon looking around, realized we’d torn down most of the buildings that had been relevant to the Civil War and found old Market Square—and learned it had hosted, for a few months, a Union ammo dump. Even if we’d torn down all its Civil War-era buildings, the Square itself is in the same place, and about the same shape, as it was during the war. So the plaque tells us about the Union ammo dump. Not the kosher fishmonger from Vienna who worked there every day for more than half a century, or the Greek restaurant that for decades never locked its doors because it never closed, or Booker T. Washington or William Jennings Bryan exhorting crowds with speeches during the progressive era. The centennial plaque has become an artifact in itself. It refers to the Square as “the Mall,” the modernist reimagining of the Square that made it seem fresh and modern by 1960s standards. If we keep it, this plaque requires its own plaque. Legible Market Square is a patchwork of efforts of different interest groups with different motives from different eras. Most motives, and most eras, aren’t represented at all. Assuming we like plaques, we need a comprehensive one that at least touches on a much broader story of a complicated and vital place. ◆
Of course. That explains the Confederate flag and dates the plaque to about 1961. At the time, Knoxville cherished the bright hope that Americans would be driving across the country in their Ford Country Squires, looking for Civil War sites to photograph.
June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9
PERSPECTIVES
Getting On Track A salute to UT’s rising graduation rate BY JOE SULLIVAN
A
ugmented student supports that the University of Tennessee has put in place these past few years are paying off in a dramatic increase in graduation rates. Over the past five years, the percentage of entering students who graduate within six years has risen from 60.5 percent to 69.3 percent, and the four-year graduation rate has jumped even more, from 30.6 percent to 42.8 percent. These gains have earned the university what’s known as the Trailblazer Award from the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities for “Most Visible Progress” in raising student graduation and retention rates. Spearheading the effort have been UT’s Vice Provost for Academic Affairs, Sally McMillan, and Associate Provost for Student Success Ruth Darling. But they are quick to credit a collaboration involving the faculties of all nine of the university’s undergraduate colleges, their student advisory staffs, and UT’s Office of Information Technology. Credit also goes to Chancellor Jimmy Cheek for directing more resources to the effort during some very lean budget years in the wake of the Great Recession. These included hiring 20 additional student advisors along with adjunct faculty to teach more sections of courses identified as “bottlenecks” and a multifaceted systems development effort to create
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what is known as uTrack. One spur was the 2010 enactment of the Complete College Tennessee Act, which modified the state’s higher-education funding formula to reward institutions for enhanced student outcomes rather than just enlarged enrollment. uTrack is akin to an academic GPS navigator guiding students toward their
The rise to 69 percent over the past five years has lifted UT from near the bottom in the Southeastern Conference to the middle of the pack.
graduation. Darling explains that, “It provides very focused attention on how students are progressing in any given curriculum and have the courses that they need to complete in the right sequence in a timely way.” Prior to each term, every student and his or her advisors get a computerized report showing whether the student is “on track” or “off track,” based on completed course results and course selection for that term. If it’s “off track,” Darling says, “Advisors have an indication of what the trouble may be and meet with those students to adjust their schedules. Too often in the past we didn’t know what was happening until it was too late.” While uTrack does generate a suggested list of courses for every student each semester, Darling insists the system isn’t intended to regiment them. “We want students to explore, and uTrack isn’t meant to deny them that.” She also acknowledges that, “At first there was a fear that they were being watched. But actually students like to know where they stand and to have a continuing conversation about the path they are on and whether that’s a path where they are going to be successful.” In some cases, that conversation may lead to a change in majors or even career choices. Since uTrack wasn’t implemented until 2013, McMillan believes it will
contribute to further gains in graduation rates in the years ahead. Another innovation that same year which should help was to start charging incoming students tuition based on a 15 credit-hour course load, up from 12, and commensurate with getting the 120 credit hours typically needed for graduation in four years. At least partly as a result, the percentage of freshmen taking 15 hours or more rose to 64 percent this past year from 52 percent in 2010. McMillan is hesitant to predict a graduation rate for 2017 when both uTrack and the 15-hour tuition base will hit the four-year mark. But by 2020, she foresees the six-year rate rising to 77 percent, another dramatic gain. The rise to 69 percent over the past five years has lifted UT from near the bottom in the Southeastern Conference to the middle of the pack. But it’s still far short of the SEC’s two state university front-runners: Florida, at 87 percent, and Georgia, at 82 percent. After five years of accomplishment, McMillan is leaving her administrative post to return to teaching and research as a professor of advertising and public relations. “Sally has made incredible contributions while she served as vice provost, and I expect she will make many more when she returns to her role as a professor,” Darling says. ◆
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June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11
SMALL PLANET
Recycling the Economy Knoxville needs to cash in on recycling’s economic opportunities BY PATRICE COLE
W
hat motivates you to drop that empty can or bottle into a recycling receptacle instead of a trash can? Are you mainly thinking about saving landfill space? Is conserving energy and water your goal? Are you more concerned with the environmental damage from mining to create new metal and glass? Maybe all of these are your motivations, but you might also consider that you are contributing to a growing sector of the economy that is well represented right here in Knoxville and nearby communities. For most of us, even if we’ve been recycling for many years, our relationship with recycling ends at the point at which we drop our recyclables into a container from which someone else recovers it. But those recycled items have just begun their journey at that point. Someone is then paid to collect and transport those items to someone else who is paid to sort and otherwise process them to go to a facility where old stuff becomes new stuff to make into a new item for someone to sell. That amounts to several jobs and dollars flowing through the economy. An example from the Southeast Recycling Development Council shows how value is created at every step in the recycling process. A secondary plastics processor buys baled bottles for maybe 20 cents per pound, converts them into pellets that are sold for around 70 cents per pound to a manufacturer that makes polyester fiber for prices in the range
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
of 90 cents to $1.40 per pound. So you make the decision at the point of disposal to either make that empty plastic bottle or other recyclable item an economy-driving commodity or a costly waste. SERDC estimates that only about one-third of the “focus materials” (paper, plastic, glass, aluminum, and steel) in the residential waste stream is recycled in Tennessee—that means in 2012 more than $180 million worth of a potential commodity ended up in landfills. That also represents lost employment opportunities for people to collect and transport that material, sort and bale it, and manufacture new products. How many of these “green jobs” that depend on recycling are in the Knoxville area, and how much of the local economy do they represent? It seems those statistics are currently unavailable, but a quick look around reveals that every step in the recycling process employs some people in and around Knoxville. City and county workers who collect and transport recyclables are the first in line to benefit from our willingness to recycle. Workers who maintain trucks and equipment, as well as other support staff, can be considered part of the recycling economy. Private employers at this stage in the process include employees at PSC Metals and Tennessee Metals Co., which buy scrap metal, and Southeastern Recycling, which collects carpet and padding. RockTenn is a high-volume
material-recovery company with facilities around the country; its Knoxville arm buys most of our area’s recyclables from companies and municipalities. RockTenn sorts and bales recyclables by type to sell to secondary processors and end markets. Tennessee American Recycling and SP Recycling Southeast are additional private baling facilities in Knoxville. End markets are those businesses that make new products from recycled material. Gerdau Ameristeel, which makes new steel products from scrap metal, is one local end market in the middle of Knoxville with over 200 employees. TAMKO makes roofing materials from recycled cardboard in Lonsdale. Just to our south, Alcoa makes new aluminum for beverage cans from what used to be aluminum beverage cans. They employ about 1,500 people. Kimberly-Clark, with about 370 workers, has been making commercial tissue products from recycled office paper in Loudon County since the early 1990s. Are we missing opportunities for even more jobs and tax revenue from the recycling economy? The SRDC says we are, especially with regard to plastic and glass. Much of the plastic that is recovered in Tennessee is shipped out of state for processing. Meanwhile, Tennessee industrial users that consume recycled plastic purchase it from processors in other states. Glass also needs secondary processing to meet the specifications of bottle manufacturers, and glass processors are usually located near a
large supplier of glass or an end user. A large, consistent local supply of recycled glass could attract a processor, which could in turn attract a bottle manufacturer. Food and beverage manufacturers that use glass bottles and jars for their goods might follow. In that sense, our Knoxville Chamber and economic-development community should be more closely involved with efforts to increase local recycling and build the regional system of collecting and processing recycled material. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that the recycling industry compares favorably to other key industries, such as auto manufacturing and mining, as a driver of economic activity, employing over 1.1 million people nationwide and paying above the average national wage. The key to growing the recycling economy is to increase the amount of recycled material to be processed and remanufactured, because the demand is already there. Perfectly good metal, paper, and especially plastic and glass is being dumped in the landfill everyday instead of being fed into the resource stream that drives investment in material-recovery facilities and end markets. Recyclables are a commodity that we can no longer afford to waste. Hopefully, a waste-disposal behavior study being conducted by the University of Tennessee Institute for Secure and Sustainable Environment will show the way toward greater participation in recycling so we can expand our economy locally and nationally. ◆
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 13
rry, pasteboard and st e b w arc stra hed , a l l mi i n lk va
THE NEVERENDING rocking gent ly
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Kn t oir oxv How Th n e e Grit iol Mem ill V s e ty e Of tim ic l l 1915 C , Noisy,And Some y ompares To James Agee’s Id by jack Neely
Postcards courtesy of Mark Heinz. Photos courtesy of Knox County Public Library Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection. (cmdc.knoxlib.org)
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
I
n the minds of people around the world, many of whom have never been to Tennessee, many of whom have never set foot in North America, many of whom don’t even speak English, the word “Knoxville” will be forever associated with the Summer of 1915. That’s thanks to Knoxville-born author James Agee, who wrote a poetic and almost universally resonant memoir called “Knoxville: Summer 1915”--but maybe even moreso to composer Samuel Barber. One of the two or three great American composers of the 20th century, Barber never lived here, but his 1948 soprano composition uses Agee’s text as a sort of libretto. It’s one of his most famous pieces, a classic of modern vocal composition, performed regularly all over the world. But it was kind of a sleeper of an essay, with a story unlike any other work of short prose. Its history surprises even those who can quote passages from memory. Over a period of 20 years, it evolved from an obscure prose poem in an intellectual magazine in New York into an classic of modern literature known around the world. We’re revisiting Agee’s most famous piece on the centennial of the particular summer he remembered so vividly. In the mid-1930s, Agee, then known primarily as a poet and slightly off-the-rails young magazine journalist, homesick perhaps for the fi rst time in his life, wrote a short essay, or vignette, or whatever you want to call it, recalling a time when he was just 5 years old. It was perhaps the last summer in his life when nothing was wrong. He wrote about Knoxville in a summer just 21 years earlier, mainly in terms of sound. He had a good memory, and a good ear. When he wrote “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” he was just 26 and had not lived in Knoxville for more than a decade. He was born in 1909 at 1115 Clinch Ave., at the home of his mother’s parents, the Tylers. The Agees lived there for a couple of years before moving just over the hill to 1505 Highland Ave. His 38-year-old father, whose name was also James Agee, died in a car wreck on Clinton Pike in North Knoxville in May 1916. About three years later the widow moved with her son James and his little sister, Emma, to Sewanee, Tenn., where the future author enrolled in St. Andrews, an isolated Episcopal school. Agee
returned to Knoxville in 1924, and attended Knoxville High School, a very different place. For more than a year, the teenager lived back with the Tylers on Clinch Avenue, in a tiny house behind the main home, the artist’s studio his Uncle Hugh had built. In 1925, when Agee was not quite 16, his mother moved him to New Hampshire, where he attended Phillips Exeter Academy before enrolling at Harvard. He settled, as much as he ever settled anywhere, in the New York area, where he was known as a poet and magazine journalist, writing mainly for Fortune magazine. By early 1926, when patriarch Joel Tyler died, the remarkable Agee-Tyler clan was dispersing from Knoxville. Hugh Tyler, the most widely traveled of all of them, returned to Knoxville for a couple of years in the early ’30s to work with Charles Barber on architectural jobs, but after that Agee’s only Knoxville relatives were cousins he didn’t know well. Even his little sister, Emma, ended up in New York, working as a copy editor for Time. Agee wasn’t always nostalgic about Knoxville. At Phillips Exeter, he wrote satires about home, ridiculing overcrowded, unsophisticated Knoxville High School. In a long article about TVA for Fortune in 1935, Agee refers to Knoxville only briefly, and without obvious personal fondness, describing the approach to TVA’s headquarters, in the building we now call the Pembroke: “Walk up sooty Gay Street and turn down smudgy Union and on past Market Square…” But then, just a few months after that was published, he wrote this extraordinary thing, on the surface a memory of his early life with his mother and father and aunt and uncle in a lush, peaceful streetcar neighborhood on a summer evening. It was then known as West End— it would not be known as Fort Sanders until the 1950s, though some neglected ruin of the earthen Union fort was still discernible. Knoxville still listed it as one of the city’s historic attractions; you could see it, they said, if you sat on the left side of the Highland Avenue streetcar. Agee’s vague memory of the overgrown earthworks, recounted in his autobiographical novel, A Death in the Family, are among the last known sightings of the actual fort, which had
Above, a period postcard of “West End,” before it was known as Fort Sanders, looking toward a downtown skyline hardly recognizable today. At top left, a rare photo of Agee’s Highland Avenue home, immortalized in A Death in the Family, but demolished in 1963, for a modern apartment complex. At top right, a picture of James Agee as a child, with sister, mother, aunt, and grandmother, probably a couple of summers after 1915. disappeared altogether by the 1920s. Highland Avenue was roughly the economic center of the neighborhood, with neither rich nor poor. Agee later claimed he wrote “Knoxville: Summer 1915” in a sort of stream-of-consciousness flow, in about an hour and a half. “I was greatly interested in improvisatory writing,” he later wrote of the Knoxville piece, “with a kind of parallel to improvisation in jazz.” Agee was a pianist himself, and listened to language, valuing its sound. In 1938, he found an unlikely publisher for it. The New York-based Partisan Review was a sometimes-controversial leftist political publication. Dwight MacDonald, an erudite political radical, was the editor who chose to publish it. Agee’s piece is not political, but in a literary sense it may have been satisfying to people drawn to the radical. Although it was about a specific time and place, Agee’s piece touched on
something universal, and people responded to it. It’s not clear whether the piece was ever well-known in Knoxville in the first decade after its publication. It became known mainly among intellectuals in East Coast universities and the cafes of Manhattan. Meanwhile, Agee became known mainly as a book and cinema critic, and one who dabbled in movie scripts himself. “Knoxville: Summer 1915” got an extra boost in 1946 with the hardback publication of The Partisan Reader, an anthology of the best of the Partisan Review’s early publications. It was apparently in that form that Samuel Barber encountered it.
S
amuel Barber, born in the small town of West Chester, Pa., near Philadelphia, just a few weeks after Agee was born in Knoxville, was an early bloomer, too. He had some early success with his Adagio for Strings, composed about the same time Agee wrote “Knoxville: Summer June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 15
Some text from liner notes of an Eleanor Steber album featuring Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” Author James Agee’s memories of a youth on Highland Avenue is global. 1915.” In 1938, Barber wrote a “song” based on Agee’s early poem, “Sure On This Shining Night.” It was considered one of Barber’s early successes. Barber had still never met Agee personally, and in fact didn’t read “Knoxville: Summer 1915” until about eight years later. By some accounts, soprano Eleanor Steber, then in her early 30s and rather famous, asked Barber to interpret Agee’s text for her to sing. It’s not surprising that a piece inspired by jazz, and that’s very much about sound, would appeal to musicians. In any case, Barber was impressed with the Knoxville work. “The text moved me very much,” Barber wrote a friend. “It is by the same man who wrote ‘Sure On This Shining Night.’” Barber wrote an odd sort of rhapsody around it, called “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.” (The word “of” appears only in the title of the Barber composition, and distinguishes it from Agee’s original.) Barber didn’t use all of Agee’s original, but excerpted some vivid passages. It premiered at the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1948, with 73-year-old Russian-born conductor Serge Koussevitzky in charge—a rare circumstance in which a conductor was 35 years older than the composer. But Steber, then a 33-year-old soprano, sang Agee’s words. She later recorded it, as did many of the great sopranos of the era—among them Leontyne Price and later Dawn Upshaw, who named an album after the Knoxville work. It was so well known that when Agee died suddenly at age 45 in 1955, his hometown paper identified him 16
KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
not as the author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, which was forgotten, or A Death in the Family which was unknown—but that he had written the text that had inspired the famous Samuel Barber piece. It was only later that “Knoxville: Summer 1915”—an essay written in an hour and a half, then published in a radical magazine, then anthologized, then set to music—found its way into a mass-market novel. When he died, Agee left hundreds of pages of manuscripts for an autobiographical novel he’d been working on for close to 20 years, but wasn’t near publishing. It was the choice of editor David McDowell to put it into the novel, as a prologue in italics. A Death In the Family, with “Knoxville: Summer 1915” as the prologue, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958— even though there’s little fiction in it— and has been in print for almost 60 years. Today it’s available, mostly in paperback, in thousands of bookstores around the world. Twenty years ago, an audio crew from the BBC recorded an audio documentary called “Knoxville: Summer of 1995.” Broadcast globally to accompany a performance of Barber’s piece by the London Symphony, it won an international prize, the Prix Italia. In late 1995, during their Monster tour at their arena-rock height, the band R.E.M. played to a giant house at Thompson Boling Arena. In the middle of the first set, singer Michael Stipe stopped the show and told the crowd they were lucky to live in a city that was the subject of one of the greatest pieces of literature, and he read from “Knoxville: Summer 1915,”
perplexing an audience that came for rock ’n’ roll. In 1999, when A Prairie Home Companion came to the Civic Auditorium, Garrison Keillor made a last-minute addition to the script, scotching a planned song about tomatoes to read from Agee’s text for millions in a national radio audience. In 2007, University of Tennessee Professor Mike Lofaro startled the Agee world with the publication of A Death In the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text, published by UT Press. At 582 pages, the hardback tome, readable but intended for literature scholars, is an unabridged and strictly chronological arrangement of Agee’s drafts as he left them at his death. It includes “Knoxville: Summer 1915,” which Lofaro argues was never intended to be part of the novel, but only as Appendix III. In its place is a little-known, much-longer introduction, a transliteration of a bizarre dream/nightmare narrative about Knoxville and John the Baptist. It’s a visit to a slightly dystopian Knoxville, in which “for every old site which touched him and made him happy and lonely, there was something new which he disliked.” The nightmare Knoxville was “a bigger,
worse, more proud and foolish city.” Titled “towards the middle of the twentieth century,” it may not promise to become a classic for soprano interpretation, but it’s interesting reading, and suggests that Agee’s preoccupation with his hometown was a lifelong thing. In 2009, Penguin Classics released a new edition of A Death In the Family, the more familiar novel, with a surprising introduction by rock-country star Steve Earle, who refers to Lofaro’s book and opinion, but opines that “Knoxville: Summer 1915” does indeed belong there. Explaining that he became acquainted with Agee by way of “local hipsters,” in the 1990s, “a handful of hyper-literate hillbillies who spoke in reading lists, all of which began and ended with James Agee,” Earle observed, “the bones of Agee’s Knoxville still protrude visibly through the more recent layers of spackling in places along Gay and Market Streets.” Earle became fascinated with Agee, and in particular quotes lines from “Knoxville: Summer 1915”—”Now they are so indelibly etched someplace inside of me that I couldn’t reach to rub them out even if I wanted to.” ◆
SummeR KNOXVILLE, IN THE
of 1915
“T
here is little if anything consciously invented in it,” Agee wrote later of the famous piece. “It is strictly autobiographical.” There’s no reason to question his claims that it was realistic. Highland Avenue was a comfortable place to live in 1915, and most 5-year-olds don’t see the worst. Many readers here and elsewhere have read Agee’s piece assuming it was a typical view of an idyllic city, or an idyllic summer, or both, that’s now lost forever. Agee’s text is “a tender,
nostalgic, poignant text which very simply evokes a quiet evening in a small, quiet town,” wrote British broadcaster and music critic Robert Cushman, in the liner notes of a 1991 Barber CD compilation. He added, “Knoxville has much changed since then.” Of course, Agee never claimed it was a comprehensive profile of his hometown, though many readers like to think of it that way. Knoxville in the summer of 1915 didn’t always suggest quiet contempla-
tion. Even if you look past that summer’s daily front-page anxieties about the war in Europe, of Gallipoli and Warsaw and Armenia, the aftermath of the torpedoing of the Lusitania, and the ever-more-likely prospect that the United States would be obliged to get involved, Knoxville had its own anxieties. It was a mostly industrial city of perhaps 40,000— though city boosters liked to put it at 88,000, including suburbs like Island Home and Lincoln Park, and a mostly undeveloped peninsula not yet called Sequoyah Hills, which were outside of city limits. Half-plumbed, half-electrified, often corrupt, Knoxville in the summer of 1915 could be gritty, noisy, and sometimes violent. Knoxville kept most of those citizens occupied with its 30 or 40 factories: hat factories, candy factories, mantel factories, sock factories, glass factories, railroad-car factories. The sprawling Coster Shops served as the giant pit stop for the whole Southern Railway system. Brookside Mills was the most famous of Knoxville’s six or seven textile mills. Weston Fulton’s new “sylphon” metal-bellows plant rose on Third Creek. Highland Avenue was a quiet part of a noisy city. Few factories were noisier than Ty-Sa-Man, the heavy-machinery company run by Agee’s Michigan-born grandfather, Joel Tyler. The Ty-SaMan company specialized in building saws that could cut stone. The factory was on 10th Street—the street no longer exists, but the factory thrived on what’s now the World’s Fair Park’s South Lawn, a spot much greener and quieter now than it was in 1915. Agee’s father, who had worked for the post office and the L&N Railroad, but may never have found his calling, was lately working for his father-in-law’s company as a stenographer. Nine movie theaters, not counting the biggest theater, Staub’s, one of a few that still hosted mostly vaudeville, kept Knoxville entertained. The ones for whites were all on Gay Street. Two theaters for blacks were down near Central. Thanks to Jim Crow laws, segregation was getting worse, not better. Decades of black representation in city government seemed to be coming to an end. The new five-member City Council didn’t make room for blacks. Downtown was brightly lit with electric lights. But poorer neighbor-
hoods lacked electricity, and would for decades to come. Another book, Road Without Turning, offers a sort of contemporary counterpoint to Agee’s nostalgia. Born two years before Agee, James Herman Robinson (1907-1972) remembered the same summers on the opposite side of town, in the Cripple Creek area, where hundreds lived in Third-World conditions, lacking electricity and plumbing and fearing violence and seasonal visits of flooding, typhoid, and smallpox. “Our homes in the Bottoms were hardly more than rickety shacks, clustered on stilts like Daddy Long Legs along the slimy bank of putrid and evil-smelling Cripple Creek,” wrote the Rev. Robinson, who became known for his leadership in major foreign-aid programs for Africa. “Hemmed in by the muddy creek bank on one side, by tobacco warehouses and a foundry on the other, and by slaughter pens on a third, it was a world set apart, and excluded.” He remembered floods, one in particular around 1915: “By afternoon the creek was alive with outhouses torn loose from their foundations, logs, paper boxes, chicken coops, drowned dogs and poultry…” He watched houses and parts of houses give way to the swirling filth. “There were only two good things about the flood. It made us conscious of our oneness, black and white alike. And to our great relief, it swept away for a brief moment the stench of the outhouses and the slaughter pens.” Same city, same era, different neighborhood, different childhood memory. Agee recalled that his parents and aunt and uncle “are not talking much, and the talk is quiet, of nothing in particular, of nothing at all in particular, of nothing at all.” Maybe they just didn’t want the kids to hear. There were things to talk about on Highland Avenue in the summer of 1915. Just beyond the end of the Highland streetcar tracks was a field with some woods, and on Saturday morning, July 10, a man looking for a lost horse found something else there. He found a young man lying in the field. The dark-haired young man was thin, he wore a slight mustache, and he was dead. His hat and coat and collar were lying some distance away. It was peculiar, and it would have been something for the
Market Square, which in 1915 had a large Market House in the middle of it, is described in detail in Agee’s A Death in the Family: “There was no music: only the density of bodies and of the smell of a market bar, of beer, whiskey, and country bodies, salt and leather….” grownups to talk about, in the gloaming. uring the summer, when the air was hot and humid, exacerbated by the soot in the air, Knoxville could be unpleasant. The city had two train stations, and Knoxvillians used them to get out of town, especially to the mountain resorts of Western North Carolina and the beaches of South Carolina. An overnight Southern train with sleeper cars reached Charleston in 19 hours. Northern cities were tempting in the summertime, too; New York’s Plaza Hotel ran big display ads in Knoxville newspapers. Automobiles were just catching on with a mostly young and affluent minority who could buy them. The Agee family acquired a Ford Model T, for better or worse, but there were fancier ones, like, that season, the Paige Fairchild Six-46. Some with automobiles drove up to Montvale Springs, “the oldest resort in East Tennessee,” which featured dancing every night. At that time, few Knoxvillians had been any closer to the Smokies than that. Most of the Smokies were either wild and trackless or clear-cut. There were attractions in town. Cherokee Country Club had completely redone their golf course. Chilhowee Park, “the South’s Most Beautiful Playground,” where there were still several big white monuments left from the National Conservation Exposition of less than two years earlier, had a roller coaster and merry-go-round and
D
roller-skating rink. It also featured the “finest bathing beach in the state,” and a live brass band every night with dancing, and hosted an extended engagement by the daring Quincy family, featuring Margaret Quincy, “the Diving Venus.” There were, of course, no big lakes. The Tennessee River flowed free, for better or worse, but sewage and industrial waste drained into it with little to check it, and it showed an unsettling tendency to flood. When a Knoxvillian of the summer of 1915 talked about going to “the lake,” he was talking about Fountain City Lake or Lake Ottosee at Chilhowee Park. At Woodruff’s on Gay Street that year, the British razor company Durham Duplex had an extraordinary promotion. Stare-O was a robotic “wax man” demonstrating a new straight razor. Was he a real man or a mechanical automaton? Woodruff’s wasn’t saying. You had to come to see for yourself. Architect George Barber had died early that year, but his son, Charlie, was just starting his own company, Barber McMurry, at first specializing in posh residences, and often collaborating with Agee’s uncle, decorative artist Hugh Tyler. There were grand houses in Knoxville, especially on Broadway, and Lyons View, but there were also ghettos, especially along First Creek, where squatters lived in dangerous third-world conditions. There were “skyscrapers,” the Arnstein, the Burwell taller than it, the Holston taller than that one. The city’s June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17
Chilhowee Park, which could be reached by streetcar from Highland Avenue, was probably Knoxville’s most popular summer attraction in 1915. A surprising omitted chapter about a trip to Chilhowee Park appears in Michael Lofaro’s A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author’s Text: “There was more than you could even see all at once, and even what you could see, it would take more than all day to do all of it. It was the most wonderful and beautiful place in the world except maybe the circus.”
two biggest hotels were the Atkin, near the Southern station, and the older, ornate Imperial, at the northeast corner of Gay and Clinch. The Imperial had only a few months left before it burned down in a lightning fire. The fanciest store was Arnstein’s, followed by Miller’s and George’s. Baseball was Knoxville’s sport, and had been for almost half a century, but the summer of 1915 was a melancholy season for sports fans, the first year in a while that the city didn’t have a professional baseball team at all. However, the city and suburban leagues kept things lively. The YMCA’s team was far in the lead, with Knoxville Railway & Light a distant second. The Y was then based in the old Palace Hotel at the corner of State and Commerce, near Marble Alley. The city was officially dry, three years before the rest of the nation joined it in shunning legal alcohol. There were no open saloons. The old brewery on Chamberlain Street had been shut down. But it was not hard to fi nd a drink, especially if you weren’t particular about what it was. That summer, a liveryman at Jackson and Central was discovered to have been running an ingeniously hidden and well-stocked whiskey bar behind a false wall, accessible via a secret passageway. What was legal, and served in some of the former saloons, and at 18
KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
Kern’s soda fountain on Market Square, was Tenn-Cola, “Made in Knoxville.” Knoxvillians read two newspapers, the morning Journal and the afternoon Knoxville Sentinel. The Journal was run by elderly Union veteran and former Mayor William Rule. There were no radio stations, though a teenage kid named Roland May, who lived not far from the Agees, was that year experimenting with radio, fashioning what was apparently Knoxville’s first homemade transmitter. Market Square was booming, and for the fi rst time dressing up a little. In the summer growing season, the produce vendors overflowed the Square and spilled down Market Street, or Prince Street as it was known then, along what was called “Watermelon Row.” The same block serves as an extension of the Market Square Farmers’ Market today. Scholars have found it remarkable that Agee rarely mentioned the presence of a university in his
hometown. In fact, in 1915, UT was small, offered few attractions to non-students, and wasn’t an obvious part of Knoxville’s daily life. Over on Highland Avenue, half a mile from the Hill, UT was easy to forget, most of the year. But during six weeks in the summers from 1902 to 1918, UT hosted the biggest event ever seen on campus until football became broadly popular, years later. The Summer School of the South was a sort of progressive Chautauqua-style series of seminars for teachers from across the South and beyond. Though founded by UT administrators and held on campus, it was separate from UT, and attracting about 3,000 at a time. The public, rarely tempted to set foot on campus during the school year, was invited to attend some events, like the five-day Music Festival, which that summer hosted well-known violinist Albert Spalding and several other classical musicians, including pianist Andre Benoist and
cellist Paul Kefer, who were on the cusp of national recording careers. Also in residence that summer were the Coburn Players, a husband-wife team that performed Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid. The leader of the Coburn Players was Charles Coburn, who 30 years later was a well-known actor in Hollywood, familiar in dozens of movies. The critic James Agee would review several of his fi lms. Police identified the young man found in the field near Highland Avenue. His name was Warren Ayres. He was the son of Brown Ayres, who was the president of the university. Warren Ayres had been an especially bright kid, earned two degrees from UT. He studied for a year at Heidelburg and returned to take a job as an associate professor of German at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. The family reported vaguely that Warren had been suffering from some “ill health” for about a year. “It is thought that his extreme devotion to scholarly pursuits and performance of duty had seriously impaired his health,” went one report. He’d come home for the summer of 1915, and was staying at the university farm because it seemed like a healthy place to recover. The coroner determined he’d died of an overdose of some unspecified drug. He died a week before his 29th birthday.
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noxville’s best-known writer before Agee, Joseph Wood Krutch, graduated from UT and left town forever that same summer, settling in New York, where he would get a reputation as an incisive drama critic. Clarence Brown was just ahead of him; 1915 was the year Brown met director Maurice Tourneur, in Ft. Lee, N.J., and began his career as a fi lmmaker. Bernadotte Schmitt, the former Rhodes Scholar, taught at Western Reserve University in Ohio, but spent summers with his widowed mother, who lived at 13th Street and White Avenue. He was already becoming one of the nation’s foremost scholars of the war most people knew only from the newspapers, and it would be the subject of his Pulitzer-Prize-winning book. The neighborhood’s two future Pulitzer-winners, Agee and Schmitt, probably didn’t know each other. The Agee-Tyler family stood out as
creative sorts. Even before James Agee was famous by name, News-Sentinel columnist Lucy Templeton recalled them as an especially creative family in that neighborhood. James Agee was one of five she mentioned. Two others come up in Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915”: “One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home,” wrote Agee, of the people who joined him and his parents, lying on quilts on the grass that summer. The “artist” was his mother’s twin brother. In his early 30s, Hugh Tyler (1884-1976) was a well-traveled painter who was one of the younger members of the Nicholson Art League, a vigorous group of painters, photographers, and architects promoting the fi ne arts in Knoxville. Among the Nicholsonians were well-known portraitist Lloyd Branson, who kept his studio on Gay Street in 1915, where he sometimes got a hand from his teenage porter, a young genius named Beauford Delaney. On White Avenue, in Fort Sanders, 36-year-old Catherine Wiley was doing some of her fi nest work in impressionism. “A Sunlit Afternoon” and “Girl with a Parasol,” were summery subjects both fi nished in 1915. Uncle Hugh—who appears as “Uncle Andrew,” a key figure in A Death in the Family—was a talented but offb eat painter, known for his exotic, almost fantastic landscapes, but also for his decorative stencil work on several prominent buildings. Some, like the old Belcaro mansion in Fountain City and the Melrose Art Center are now gone. His work is still prominent on the interior of UT’s Hoskins Library. Less well known locally was the “musician” mentioned in that paragraph, and sung about regularly, all over the world, in the Barber piece. It’s Agee’s Aunt Paula Tyler (18931979), who turned 22 in the summer of 1915. Barely mentioned as “Amelia” in the novel, she was an accomplished pianist, sometimes described as a “concert pianist.” Two or three years after the summer of 1915, she would move to New York, and eventually became a prominent teacher and dean or “co-director” of the Diller-Quaile School of Music, which still thrives on 95th Street, near Central Park. She and Hugh both did live “at home” in 1915, that is, at their parents’ house, at 1115 West Clinch, which was
“A streetcar raising its iron moan; stopping, belling, and starting; stertorous; rousing and raising again its iron increasing moan and swimming its gold windows and straw seats on past and past and past, the bleak spark crackling and cursing above it like a small malignant spirit set to dog its tracks; the iron whine rises on rising speed; still risen, faints; halts, the faint stinging bell; rises again, still fainter, fainting, lifting, lifts, faints forgone: forgotten.” - James Agee, “Knoxville: Summer 1915”
also James Agee’s birthplace. Both the house and the cottage/ studio in back were demolished without memorable comment in the late 1960s—five or six years after the Agees’ house on Highland met the same fate.
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oes anything distinguish a summer in Knoxville from a summer in other cities? Agee didn’t mention our sometimes thrilling but usually not dangerous late afternoon storms. He didn’t mention fresh tomatoes, either, but should have. Some things have changed. Streetcars no longer raise their iron moan, and horse and buggies are rare. We do have “loud autos” and “quiet autos.” Firefl ies, not as obvious in all cities as they are here, are still prolific, if a little less conspicuous,
due to our modern habit of floodlighting the streets and yards. Cold toads may still thumpily flounder, but they’re probably rarer now. Electronic communications leave us more distracted. One distinctive sound hasn’t changed. “There is never one locust but an illusion of at least a thousand,” Agee wrote. “They are all around in every tree, so that the noise seems to come from nowhere and everywhere at once, from the whole shell heaven, shivering in your flesh and teasing your eardrums, the boldest of all the sounds of night.” The city still has “locusts,” direct descendants of the ones Agee heard. We now know them as cicadas. They’ve already started up this year. Agee’s paragraphs still describe their sound. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much. In fact, Agee’s picture of
his childhood was not just nostalgic, it was a little bit futuristic. It wasn’t until the New Deal that laws enforced the 40-hour week. In 1915, families weren’t all able to gather in the evenings, because many fathers, and many mothers, were working long hours in factories. It probably wasn’t until after World War II that most Americans lived in houses with yards, with grass to take care of. It’s the suburban ideal that has driving most of the city’s residential development in the century after 1915. But that’s not necessarily the main message of the piece, or what makes it sing to so many people of different cultures around the world. It’s a question about the meaning of existence, and an attempt to capture life as it fl ies away. In 2015, a much greater proportion of Knoxvillians have yards, and shade trees, and garden hoses, than they did in 1915. There may be more who can enjoy a leisurely summer evening on the lawn, whether they do so with quilts or not. If it’s not a contemplative or insightful experience for us, we can’t blame the fact that it’s 2015, not 1915. It’s our choice to distract ourselves from the questions Agee was asking, although they’re just as relevant. ◆ June 25, 2015
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P rogram Notes
Cypher Space A pop-up performance series celebrates a year of music and dance in unexpected public spaces
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ason Hart can’t contain his excitement until he gets out of the car. “Oh my god! I’m already having nostalgia,” he yells out the window of a dark gray Mazda6 as it turns into a parking space on the top level of the Market Square Parking Garage. Hart, 34, is the founder of Secret City Cyphers, a series of pop-up events that falls somewhere between performances and workshops. He started the series as a way for musicians to create and network after performing his own music (he raps under the name Mr. Ill) on Market Square and at open mics and deciding to do something different. Wednesday, June 17, marked the Cyphers’ one-year anniversary and Hart celebrated it with a rare return to a familiar location. “We change locations every time,” Hart says. “This is the first repeat of a location that we’ve had in a year.” The Cyphers often occur in unconventional public places: World’s Fair Park, Krutch Park, a swimming pool in Fort Sanders, a skate park. Hart says interactions with police and security have been minimal and friendly. Equipment manager and bassist Daniel Worley says these spots promote spontaneity; Hart says they add to a community atmosphere he’s trying to cultivate. Wearing a Puma baseball cap and a pair of Adidas sneakers, Hart darts around the garage roof. He unloads water bottles from a blue drum emblazoned with the Bud Light logo and lends a hand to Worley and drummer Terry Weaver as they set up
equipment. He chats with first-timers like Tara Craw, who drove from Asheville for the event, and Eric Bowlin, a 43-year-old break-dancer who prefers the Cyphers to the club scene. “There’s so much more to life than this Babylon B.S., everybody wasting all their money and time to be stressed out and still barely getting by,” Hart says. “So why not have something where everybody can forget about all that for a minute, even if it is once a month?” After seeing a successful first year of Cyphers, Hart is turning his career interests toward music. He recently left his general manager position at Fuddruckers—the job that brought him from Asheville to Knoxville in the first place. His planned ventures include an entertainment company, a record label, and a recording studio, he says. The Cyphers, though, don’t need to be moneymakers. “This is for the love,” he says. “We need this.” By 7:45 p.m., the Cyphers kick into gear. Worley, Weaver, and guitarist Travis Lakin lock into a groove, and someone backs in a Mitsubishi Spyder convertible with a beat machine hooked up to it. Hart and a couple of other MCs exchange bars. Two women with long curly hair start hula-hooping in an empty space across the drive, and there’s a strip of cardboard set out for breakdancers. Many of the people who have gathered just watch, clapping to the beat or cheering when the moment demands. They range in age from very
young to middle age. As the sun sets, a toddler escapes her father’s grasp and runs toward the musicians, but he scoops her up immediately, and she laughs as he lifts her into the air. Just after sundown, a singer/ guitarist named Ms. Lu finishes her second song just as a trio of blue-shirted parking-enforcement officers break up the Cypher. “Should’ve gotten a permit,” one announces. An abrupt location change doesn’t pose much difficulty for the Secret City Cyphers. As the crowd begins to disperse, Hart yells out for someone to make a post on the event’s Facebook page; they’re moving to the Market Square stage. Some of the organizers pack up equipment, while others converse with the parking enforcers. (It’s another friendly interaction with authority, as Hart is quick to point out). Six stories down and a block over, the gathering only gets bigger. Musicians set up along the back edge of the
stage while the hula-hoopers take up farther down the Square. There’s more space for dancers, and someone’s brought out more cardboard, too— taped together with hot-pink duct tape, it’s a more appropriate terrain for breakdancers who share the space with pop-and-lockers and a young woman with a light-up hula-hoop. More MCs join, and before long, scene veteran Black Atticus is trading the mic with redheaded, fast-rapping 16-year-old Austin Lynn, who performs under the name Psych. Near the end of the night, the crowd on and around the stage totals about 100 people. Before they left the garage, one of the parking enforcers had a suggestion: Secret City Cyphers should try Scottish Pike Park in South Knoxville—it might be a good spot for them, he said. Hart turned around and flashed a broad smile. “Hey, we got a new park!” —Jack Evans
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Inside the Vault:
KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
Music: Tina Tarmac and the Burns
Movies: Dope
Video: Hard to Be a God
Inside the Vault
On the Line Pioneering local journalist Carl Warner opens his archive BY ERIC DAWSON
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ne day in the mid-1960s, a college student in his 40s who had recently arrived from Atlanta turned up at WBIR and asked news director Jim Early for a job. Though Carl Warner had no experience as a television news producer, Early was so impressed with his enthusiasm and resume that he hired Warner to produce weekend segments. Local news had yet to see the kind of lengthy magazine-style pieces he would create, and Knoxville probably hadn’t seen a figure like Warner before. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1924, Warner had already had a storied career in television and motion pictures before arriving in Knoxville. After earning a degree in radio, television, and film at the University of Miami, with a minor in journalism, he worked as a sound mixer for motion pictures, TV commercials, and the TV series Route 66. At various points, he worked for all three major television networks as either a cameraman or sound engineer, including a stint covering the White House. He first stepped in front of a camera in 1964, when he snagged an important interview while working for United Press International in Miami. No news organization had interviewed Cassius Clay since the boxer had announced he would be changing his name to Muhammad Ali. Warner got to him first and, with no reporter around, he set his camera up and interviewed Ali himself. Warner spent some time as a news cameraman in Latin America, was jailed in Cuba and Jamaica, and was shot in the chest when terrorists shot up the UPI bureau in Caracas, Venezuela. A telegram from his wife sent during the 1961 upheavals in the Dominican Republic reads, “DONT WANT RICH DEAD HERO COME HOME IMMEDIATELY BARBARA”.
Warner came to Knoxville to pursue a teaching degree at the University of Tennessee. He wanted to earn some money but could only work weekends, so he produced short on-location news segments for WBIR. He soon began turning in half-hour documentaries on often controversial topics. For a 1970 piece on a Children of God colony, Warner moved into the group’s Fort Sanders communal home for several weeks to get a sense of how the so-called “Jesus Freaks” really lived. He fought with news producers over content they found too sensationalistic or scandalous; he says he was fired and rehired multiple times. Warner loved to court controversy. His editorials for Cas Walker’s Watchdog seemed crafted to bait local politicians and liberals. In the 1980s, he hosted “On the Line With Carl Warner” for WETE radio, and he’s upfront that many of his shows were designed to create controversy. Sex, politics, and religion were frequent topics. He recalls with glee the ongoing arguments he had with one particular liberal caller and says that, though they both believed in their stances, they also knew it was good theater. Now retired, Warner is moving to California to live near his son. He’s getting rid of a lot of things from his home in Clinton. Much of it made its way to the landfill, but fortunately he donated film, audio tapes, and work-related documents to the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image
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and Sound. We’ve been going through them the past week or so, and there’s some pretty fascinating stuff, including some of his man-on-the-street interviews conducted downtown in the 1960s and ’70s for WBIR. One peculiar cassette tape held an episode of his radio show in which he had invited a prostitute on to discuss her profession. The calls that came in to the Tennessee Playgirl were equal parts curious, condemning, and condoning, but one particular truck driver seemed a bit too enthusiastic, and funny to boot. As he went on, it became clear the caller was local prank-call legend John Bean. On another tape, Cas Walker calls in from a nursing home to give his thoughts on candidates for local office, with Warner egging him on. Given such an eventful media career, it’s good to be reminded why Warner came to Knoxville in the first place. As proud as he is of his media work, he is just as proud of his work as a teacher and brings it up often in conversation. He taught at Vine Junior High School for years and says he was the first white teacher there. He went on to work at numerous elementary, high school, and colleges around the area. As he prepares for his move and recounts story after story of what has been an uncommonly interesting life, Warner says his only regrets are the things he didn’t get a chance to do. “It was in my DNA,” he says. “I had this talent and inspiration since I was a baby to do exciting things, interesting things, challenging things. And that’s what I did.” ◆ Inside the Vault features discoveries from the Knox County Public Library’s Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, a collection of film, video, music, and other media from around East Tennessee.
The calls that came in to the Tennessee Playgirl were equal parts curious, condemning, and condoning.
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June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21
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Music
Photo by Bill Foster
Road Burn Tina Tarmac and the Burns deliver old-fashioned rock, five songs at a time BY MATTHEW EVERETT
O
ne of the first things Sara Washington had to do after Horns of the Headless broke up at the end of 2013 was to convince Horns guitarist Blake Womack to buy back all his guitars and amps—he’d sold them all after the collapse of the hard-rock band he’d been leading for the previous three years. “I quit,” Womack says. “I was through with it. I put my hands up. I sold my gear. She talked me into getting new gear, and then I came up with a new riff. I recorded it on my
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phone and sent it to her. She listened to it and said keep going. I was like, ah, you’re right, and I started writing more.” Womack and Washington, who had played bass in the band, regrouped with Horns drummer Derek Harvey in January 2014; the three rented a rehearsal space in Bearden for jam sessions that gradually turned into official band practice. “We didn’t know what we were going to do,” Harvey says. “We were just going to come in here and have
some fun and see where it went.” Then, while the trio was looking for a singer, Washington took her place behind the microphone. The initial idea was that she would be a placeholder during practice until the group found a full-time vocalist. Instead, she found herself in the new and unexpected role of rock ’n’ roll frontwoman. “The people we wanted to join as a singer, they were either in other projects or couldn’t commit for personal reasons,” Washington says. “So I just started singing.” Washington has been a fixture on the local music scene since the 1980s—you might recognize the Rush tattoo on her shoulder—but she only started playing in bands in 2009. Stepping into the spotlight has been a revelation, for her and for audiences. Her bandmates have taken to calling her Beyoncé. “I love it,” she says. “I love being on stage. There’s something special about it—that’s why people do it. It’s amazing. It makes you feel alive because it’s in the moment. You’re very much living in that moment and nothing else exists but your performance. It’s otherworldly. It takes you out of your reality.” The new group, Tina Tarmac and the Burns, is more than just a retread of Horns’ stripped-down punk-metal; on its self-titled debut EP, released in December, the band offers a survey of classic ’70s and ’80s rock—proto-punk, punk rock proper, power pop, arena-ready hard rock. You can hear echoes of the Ramones, Kiss, the Runaways, Patti Smith, the Dictators, Sonic Youth, and Cheap Trick in the Burns’ hard-charging, melodic riff rock. A cover of the Shangri-Las’ deep cut “Heaven Only Knows” gets a treatment that’s halfway between early Clash and Joan Jett. It’s so straightforward and accessible that it defies description beyond just “rock ’n’ roll.” “It’s easy to listen to and it’s easy to digest,” Womack says. “I want every song to be a hit. I want to be able to open with any song and have it be a badass opener—every one. That’s the attitude I’ve always had. Every song
has to be dead on.” The Burns have refined their live set through efficiency—Womack aims for a streamlined 45-minute show with no fat and no filler—and frequent performances. Over the last year and a half, they’ve performed dozens of times around town, figuring out which songs work and which ones don’t. “That list of keepers, it’s a slow-growing thing,” Washington says. “There are so many songs that we write and then get them stageready and go play them a couple of times and we’re like, ‘You know what? No.’ The list is slow-growing, but it’s solid.” Instead of following up the first EP with a full-length album, the Burns plan to record a second five-song EP this summer. It’s a move that gets new material to fans without exhausting them, and keeps the band’s catalog lean and mean. “We like the idea of putting out five and five,” Harvey says. “We came out and did the five, so now we’ve got five more—let’s go ahead and spit those out. They’re not expensive, and people aren’t paying $10 for six good songs and two that are decent and two others that are just filler. If you keep it short and sweet, people will listen to it more.” ◆
WHO
Hudson K with Tina Tarmac and the Burns, Little War Twin, and Amythyst Kiah
WHERE
Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square)
WHEN
Friday, June 26, at 9 p.m.
MORE INFO
scruffycity.com
Movie
Malcolm in the Middle Dope reinvents the teen comedy for a new generation BY APRIL SNELLINGS
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ike so many of the high-school movies that influenced it, the endlessly entertaining Sundance hit Dope centers on a group of wisecracking misfits trying to navigate their senior year. But Ferris Bueller had it easy compared to Malcolm Adekanbi (Shameik Moore), a black teenager coming of age in an impoverished Inglewood, Calif., neighborhood known as the Bottoms. Malcolm and his best friends, Diggy (Kiersey Clemons) and Jib (Tony Revolori), are self-proclaimed geeks obsessed with ’90s hip-hop culture, as you can tell from Diggy’s baggy crop tops and Malcolm’s impressively towering fade. They go through life with metaphorical “Kick Me” signs taped to their backs. At school they’re harassed by bullies, drug dogs, and
cynical guidance counselors, and their routes home are blocked by gangsters making YouTube videos. Malcolm’s chief concern, at first, is getting into Harvard, which means he’s got to ace his upcoming SATs, write an unusually persuasive personal essay, and dazzle a local alumnus at his college interview. He has a pretty good grasp on things until he and his pals, desperate for one night of coolness before they graduate, accept a party invitation from a mid-level drug dealer. The three pay dearly for their night of drunken glory. The next day, Malcolm finds that his backpack has been stuffed with a massive quantity of street-grade MDMA and a handgun. When he gets two phone calls giving him conflicting instructions to deal
with his unwanted stash, Dope switches gears from high-school hijinks to raucous, often violent action-comedy. It’s a tricky leap, but writer/ director Rick Famuyiwa (The Wood, Brown Sugar) sticks the landing. Dope has many virtues and a few flaws, but the quality that bears mention before all others is this: It is relentlessly entertaining. Famuyiwa directs with equal parts sensitivity and swagger as Malcolm and his good-kid pals pinwheel from one strange underworld vignette to the next. Their journey takes them from dark alleys to the dark Web, with hardly any time to catch their breath along the way. Anchored by Moore’s terrific performance as the soft-spoken Malcolm, Dope is perhaps not always completely coherent, but it’s never less than engaging. From its opening title card explaining the etymology of its namesake, Dope is fast-paced and stylish. Maybe it’s a little too fastpaced at times. It’s stuffed to the gills with subplots and quirky walk-on characters, and there are stretches when it tries to do too much. But after an early summer of mostly bland and listless blockbusters, it feels crabby to fault a movie for being too energetic and having too many ideas. By the time it cuts to black after its wonderful final shot, Dope has covered a head-spinning amount of territory, both narratively and thematically. But it’s a smart and self-aware addition to the teen-movie canon, so there’s still time for a couple of musical numbers—Malcolm and friends have a punk band called Awreeoh, pronounced “Oreo”—and a seduction scene that’s both funny and
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astonishingly gross. In case the name of Malcolm’s band doesn’t make it clear, Dope isn’t exactly subtle in its manipulation of stereotypes. Drug dealers engage in well-informed debates about drone warfare, and Malcolm himself is a walking subversion of racial and societal expectations. In fact, that’s the heart of the film—there’s a constant tension between what everyone expects of Malcolm and what he wants for himself. In many ways, he’s a classic teen-movie protagonist. He wants everything that teenagers want, but with the added pressures of running from murderous drug dealers, securing a golden ticket out of the ghetto, and wrestling with ideas of black authenticity. (Other people’s ideas, it should be noted—Malcolm is precocious and unusually self-assured.) If I have a real beef with the movie, it’s that shies away from any meaningful interaction with its female characters. For a movie that’s dedicated to subverting stereotypes, Dope is pretty content to embrace them when it comes to women. Diggy, a charming, tomboy-ish lesbian, is mostly treated as one of the guys by the plot and her fellow characters. Then there’s the sexed-up rich girl (Chanel Iman), the buttoned-down good girl (Zoë Kravitz), and the hard-working mom (Kimberly Elise). Dope certainly doesn’t look down on its female players. It just keeps them at a distance. But that’s not enough to kill Dope’s buzz. Fumayiwa’s ebullient and often-poignant romp proves that the spirit of John Hughes is alive and well, and it’s sporting a mean pair of vintage Jordans. ◆
Famuyiwa directs with equal parts sensitivity and swagger as Malcolm and his good-kid pals pinwheel from one strange underworld vignette to the next.
June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23
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Video
Dark Star Aleksey German’s Hard to Be a God depicts an alien world mired in medieval misery BY LEE GARDNER
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inema has been transporting us to other worlds since the Méliès brothers sent us on our fi rst trip to the moon in 1902, but no moviegoer has ever before glimpsed a planet as miserable and mud-spattered as Arkanar. It is Earth-like, and indeed bears inhabitants and a culture similar to Earth’s, but the Earth of a millennium ago. It’s mired in its dark ages, a world of fi lth and violence and faint fl ickers of enlightenment struggling against militant ignorance. Spending nearly three hours there courtesy the late Russian writer/ director Aleksey German’s Hard to Be a God, now out on Kino Lorber DVD, Blu-ray, and streaming, is as astonishing as it is grueling. You experience Arkanar through Rumatsky (Vasiliy Domrachyov), a member of a small group of Earth scientists sent to the planet to study it and, if possible, guide it unobtrusively out of its medieval despond. In his guise as a nobleman, he searches for a poet named Budakh in order to save him from a Cultural Revolution-like purge of what pass for intellectuals. But be forewarned that this thin sliver of plot will not sustain you. To experience Hard to Be a God properly and emerge on the other side, you have to give yourself over to its dreadful immersion. German starting working on the fi lm in 2000 and wasn’t done with post-production at his death in 2013. And every day he spent is there on the screen, in gorgeous black and white. His restless camera tracks and pans endlessly. Most sequences are shot in tight quarters, often in near close-up, and every other shot features a hank of dangling rope, the passing point of a spear, a torch, or even a warty villager, all barging into the foreground, creating another layer of
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claustrophobia. And then the camera will glide through a stone doorway and reveal an entire castle, writhing with activity, clumps of black-robed monks huddled in its mud in the distance. Every face you see, apart from Domrachyov’s lank but conventional looks, appears hand-picked with Fellini-esque care for maximum unpleasantness. And in nearly every scene, excrement competes with mud, blood, and mucus for the focus of a new abasement. Hard to Be a God was adapted from the novel of the same name by the Strugatsky brothers, the Russian sci-fi titans who also wrote Roadside Picnic, the novel that served as the basis for Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Hard to Be a God resembles Stalker only in its uncompromising nature; if there is any film to compare it to, it’s Andrei Rublev, Tarkovsky’s own medieval opus. But the very fact that German’s film can be mentioned in that company should give you some idea of its singular, otherworldly power. ◆
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
Thursday, June 25 ASHES TO LAKESHORE • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM MATT BREWSTER DUO • Mulligan’s Restaurant • 7PM THE BROADCAST WITH BOSS AWESOME • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM CAPTAIN IVORY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Greasy Rock n’ Roll meets Motor City Soul. GHOSTWRITER WITH THE BLAINE BAND AND HAILEY WOJCIK • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 THE GREYHOUNDS WITH MUDDY RUCKUS • 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 GREYHOUNDS WITH DEVAN JONES AND THE UPTOWN STOMP • The Bowery • 7PM • 18 and up. • $10 J.C. AND THE DIRTY SMOKERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM 2015 STEVE KAUFMAN CONCERT SERIES • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Featuring instructors from Steve Kaufman’s summer instrumental camps. Shows will be held Monday through Friday, June 15-26. Individual tickets are $20. Passes for all 10 shows are $85. • $20 KELSEY’S WOODS • Market Square • 7PM • Part of the city of Knoxville’s spring series of free concerts on Market Square. • FREE LIVE AT THE FILLMORE: A TRIBUTE TO THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND • The Concourse • 7PM • All ages. • $5 MUDDY RUCKUS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. • $3 CHRIS PORTER • Center for Creative Minds • 8PM • Austin based singer songwriter Chris Porter is supporting his recent solo release, This Red Mountain. REWIND • Clancy’s Tavern and Whiskey House • 6PM SICK OF SARAH • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • All-girl rockers Sick of Sarah make their way through Knoxville on Thursday, June 25 at The Open Chord. • $10-$12 THE THIRST QUENCHERS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM • The Ps and Qs house band. Friday, June 26 ACOUSTIC EIDOLON • Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center (Townsend) • 7PM • $5 THE BLAIR XPERIENCE • Mulligan’s Restaurant • 7:30PM KIRK FLETA • Jimmy’s Place • 6PM • Blues, rock, and soul. • FREE FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE HEADROOM WITH THE SPACETWINS, WILL AZADA, RICK STYLES, AND BORG • The Concourse • 9PM • Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. 18 and up. • $5 HUDSON K WITH TINA TARMAC AND THE BURNS WITH LITTLE WAR TWINS AND AMETHYST KIAH • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM • See Music Story on page 22. 2015 STEVE KAUFMAN CONCERT SERIES • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Featuring instructors from Steve Kaufman’s summer instrumental camps. Shows will be held Monday through Friday, June 15-26. Individual tickets are $20. Passes for all 10 shows are $85. • $20 WHITEY MORGAN AND THE 78S • The Bowery • 8PM • Whitey Morgan and the 78’s are a Honky Tonk band from Flint, Michigan. They haven’t re-invented the wheel, they just picked it up and started it rolling all over again. • $20 THE TYLER NAIL TRIO • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE SUSAN PRINCE • Susan’s Happy Hour • 8PM • FREE PURPLE 7 WITH BIG BAD OVEN AND TANGLES • Pilot Light •
10PM • 18 and up. • $5 SINNERS AND SAINTS WITH HEYDAY REVIVAL • 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 DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards. CHRIS STALCUP AND THE RANGE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM TALL PAUL • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM TREEHOUSE WITH DON’T FEAR THE SATELLITES AND HEYDAY REVIVAL • Preservation Pub • 9PM • 21 and up. A TRIBUTE TO THE R&B CLASSIC HITS • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • With Donald Brown & Evelyn Jack. A fond tribute to the hits of Marvin Gaye, Chaka Khan, The Temptations, Donny Hathaway, and more. • $15 THE LARRY VINCENT GROUP • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE THE WHISKEY SESSIONS • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE WOODY PINES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Ragtime, Boogie, Viper Jazz, Lighting Speed Folk. Full of stomp and swing, and jump and jive. It’s old-time feel-good music done by a young master who clearly understands that this kind of music was always about having a great time. Saturday, June 27 AS A FRIEND • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM BRAD AUSTIN • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 7PM BACKUP PLANET WITH CBDB • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM THE BEARDED • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE FAUN FABLES WITH HORCERER • Pilot Light • 9PM • Faun Fables are known for exquisite, visceral adventures in song & theater and riveting live performances. Faun Fables vocals ride through solid, elemental structures of guitars and percussion like Valkyries. All manner of flutes dance through the arrangements. • $8 SAMANTHA GRAY AND THE SOUL PROVIDERS • Jimmy’s Place • 6PM • Classic R&B. • FREE RAY WYLIE HUBBARD WITH BRANDY ZDAN • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 6PM • Ray Wylie Hubbard started his journey as a folk singer in his native Oklahoma before falling in with the wild and wooly cosmic/outlaw Texas country scene of the ’70s — in large part by way of penning the immortal “Up Against the Wall (Redneck Mother),” which Jerry Jeff Walker recorded on his seminal 1973 album ¡Viva Terlingua!. He’s moved from strength to strength ever since, recording a handful of acclaimed albums with noted producers Lloyd Maines and Gurf Morlix and cementing his standing as one of the most respected artists on the modern Americana scene. • $20 MEADOW LARK MUSIC FESTIVAL • Ijams Nature Center • 1PM • The Meadow Lark Music Festival 2015 is a day of incredible Americana music at beautiful Ijams Nature Center, just minutes from the heart of downtown Knoxville. Hosted by Ijams and community radio station WDVX, Meadow Lark is a day of music, food, and local artists. The complete lineup for this year includes Pokey LaFarge, Scott Miller & The Commonwealth Ladies Auxiliary, the Lonesome Coyotes, Emi Sunshine and the Rain, Guy Marshall, Mountain Soul, the John Myers Band, Subtle Clutch, and the Knoxville Banjo Orchestra. Tickets on sale now online and in person at Ijams and WDVX. • $20 THE NORTHERNERS WITH BILL AND ELI PERRAS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-aweek lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE
Photo by Clay Abbott
MUSIC
CALENDAR
WHITEY MORGAN AND THE 78’S The Bowery (125 E. Jackson Ave.) • Friday, June 26 • 8 p.m. • $20 • carleoentertainment.com
The main storyline in Nashville these days might be bros and pickup trucks, but traditional country music’s having its own kind of lower-profile renaissance. From Pistol Annies and Lee Ann Womack to Chris Stapleton and Sturgill Simpson, there’s a lot for country purists to root for in 2015. Add Whitey Morgan to the list—the Detroit honky-tonker’s new album with the 78’s, Sonic Ranch, released in May, is his best so far, a convincing recreation of Waylon Jennings’ early ’70s blueprint for outlaw country, Buck Owens’ hard-edged Bakersfield sound, and Merle Haggard’s barroom laments that still manages to sound relevant and contemporary. Morgan’s a no-nonsense singer, and he and the band nail the details on Sonic Ranch, like the steel-guitar solo on “Good Timin’ Man,” the guitar reverb on a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s “Waitin’ ’Round to Die,” and the tasty Telecaster licks on “Still Drunk, Still Crazy, Still Blue.” There’s nothing on the new disc that will surprise fans who know Morgan’s previous records, 2008’s Honky Tonks and Cheap Motels and 2010’s self-titled debut for Bloodshot Records, but even skeptics will find Morgan at his best here. (Matthew Everett)
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Spotlight: Meadow Lark Music Festival
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Spotlight: Faun Fables June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25
CALENDAR O’POSSUM WITH REALM AND WHITE STAG • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 7PM • Local heavy rock. • $8 THE POP ROX • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM REDLEG HUSKY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM RETURN OF THE PUNK NIGHT • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 7PM • This punk rockin’ evening will include performances by local bands: The Harakiris, Final Fight, The Billy Widgets and Burning Turley. ROMAN REESE AND THE CARDINAL SINS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes. SECOND OPINION • Mulligan’s Restaurant • 7:30PM BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE THE WHISKEY SHIVERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM YELAWOLF WITH DJ KLEVER AND HILLBILLY CASINO • The International • 9PM • $15-$75 Sunday, June 28 THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM DEVAN JONES AND THE UPTOWN STOMP • Star of Knoxville Riverboat • 5PM • Part of the Smoky Mountain Blues Society’s annual season of summer blues cruises. • $16-$19 SCARLET VICTORY • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz. SPROCKET GOBBLER • Pilot Light • 10PM • $5 SYDNI STINNETT AND CHAD CORN • Mulligan’s Restaurant •
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
4PM SUNSHINE STATION WITH MONK PARKER • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. Monday, June 29 THE PAT BEASLEY 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 FOUNTAINSUN • Pilot Light • 9PM • $6 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, June 30 JAZZ ON THE SQUARE • Market Square • 8PM • Featuring the Marble City 5. Every Tuesday from May 12-Aug. 25. • FREE NORTH SEA RAMBLERS • 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 Wednesday, July 1 THE HONEYCUTTERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • Asheville-based Americana band The Honeycutters bring their Appalachian honky tonk and honey sweet vocals to
PRESENTED BY
ND THIS WEEKE !
www.TennesseeTheatre.com
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
Tennessee Shines • $10 MEGAN JEAN AND THE KFB • Preservation Pub • 10PM PAUL PFAU • 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 Thursday, July 2 FREEQUENCY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM 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 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. 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 DEVAN JONES AND THE UPTOWN STOMP • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE 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 HIP-HOP FOR THE HOMELAND • Longbranch Saloon • 10PM MANN • NV Nightclub • 9PM • Best known for his singles “Buzzin” with 50 Cent and “The Mack” with Snoop Dogg and Iyaz. • $5-$10 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
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
FINKELSTEEN • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 6PM • $20 Sunday, July 5 BREAKING BENJAMIN • The International • 8PM • 18 and up. • $35-$70 DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz. TSUNAMIS WITH PSYCHIC BAOS AND OFFING • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5
OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS
Thursday, June 25 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM •
CALENDAR
Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. • FREE BREWHOUSE BLUES JAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM
Hosted by Sarah Pickle. • FREE Wednesday, July 1 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
Friday, June 26 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OPEN SONGWRITER NIGHT • Time 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
Thursday, July 2 IRISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the first and third Thursdays of each month. • FREE 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, June 30 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • A weekly open mic. OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM •
DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS
POKEY LAFARGE
Friday, June 26 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM Saturday, June 27 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM
Photo by Joshua Black Wilkins
MEADOW LARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Ijams Nature Center • Saturday, June 27 • 1 p.m.-11 p.m. • $20-$25 • ijams.org
Ijams Nature Center is one of Knoxville’s best secret destinations—even if the urban wildlife preserve isn’t exactly a secret anymore, it can certainly feel that way when you’re exploring the solitude of its network of trails and scenic overlooks. And even though Ijams has been hosting the early summer Meadow Lark Music Festival for several years now, with notable headliners like St. Paul and the Broken Bones and Donna the Buffalo, the outdoor fest can still feel like a pleasant surprise; the charming combination of Ijams’ scenery and a full day of local and national roots music can feel like an antidote to something you didn’t even know you had. This year’s lineup includes old-style guitar-jazz aficionado Pokey LaFarge; Scott Miller and an adapted version of his backing band, the Commonwealth; local honky-tonk/rock vets the Lonesome Coyotes; preteen country-music star Emi Sunshine; local folk-rock band Guy Marshall; and more. (Matthew Everett)
Sunday, June 28 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. LAYOVER BRUNCH • The Concourse • 12PM • Featuring music by Slow Nasty, Psychonaut, and Saint Thomas Ledoux. Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions on the last Sunday of each month through October. • FREE Friday, July 3 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM Saturday, July 4 TOTAL REQUEST DJ DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 8PM 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.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
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 June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27
CALENDAR COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD
Sunday, June 28 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic hosted by Matt Ward. Tuesday, June 30 OPEN MIC STANDUP 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 Friday, July 3 BILLY WAYNE DAVIS WITH ERIN DEWEY LENNOX AND JASPER REDD • Pilot Light • 9:30PM • 18 and up. • $5 Sunday, July 5 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic hosted by Matt Ward.
FESTIVALS
Thursday, June 25
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
KUUMBA FESTIVAL • East Tennessee History Center • 12PM • The Kuumba Festival serves as the largest African American Cultural Arts Festival in East Tennessee. Every year the festival is a Four day and four night multi-event celebration with hundreds of entertainers performing throughout the festival. There will be live Entertainment with a world class African Marketplace that will host Many crafts and food vendors for your cultural shopping experience. Friday, June 26 SUMMER ON BROADWAY AND BBQ BASH • Founders Park (Maryville) • The 2015 Big BBQ Bash is set for June 26-27 at Founder’s Square in historic downtown Maryville, TN, located at the scenic foothills of the Smoky Mountains. The event is a barbecue cook-off and fundraiser for the Helen Ross McNabb Center, created by the Leadership Blount Class of 2007. Admission is free to the public on Friday and Saturday. Competing BBQ teams may charge a fee per plate to the public on Saturday; giving attendees the chance to taste some of the best barbecue in the south. A variety of vendors will also be set-up to feed and entertain guests of all ages. BBQ teams are invited to “smoke up or shut up” by cooking their best barbecue. Categories include Wampler’s Sausage, pork, chicken, ribs, beef brisket and “anything butt.” Prize money totaling $7,000 will be awarded. This year the Big BBQ Bash is a Kansas City Barbeque Society (KCBS) sanctioned competition. KCBS sanctions barbecue and grilling competitions across the U.S. and promotes barbecue as America’s cuisine. In addition, KCBS has an extensive
Certified Barbecue Judging program. It is the largest society of barbecue enthusiasts in the world. Governor Bill Haslam has proclaimed the Blount County Big BBQ Bash as a state championship, making the competition a qualifier for the American Royal Barbecue Cook-Off and Jack Daniel’s World Championship Invitational Barbecue. The 2014 competition will also be the third leg of The Triple Crown, a series of barbecue competitions in Knoxville, Sevierville and Maryville. HOPS IN THE HILLS • Founders Park (Maryville) • From the bine to the glass . . . as part of this celebration, we will be hosting two seminars. The Hops seminar will launch a conversation into the agriculture involved in artisan brewing. Along with a discussion of the art of crafting a fine brew, the Craft Beer 101 seminar will introduce you to some of the best brewers and specialists in the area. Hops in The Hills is the anchor event to Summer on Broadway, which will include The Big BBQ Bash*, Last Friday Art Walk, Maryville Farmers Market, and many other activities. KUUMBA FESTIVAL • Market Square • 5PM • The Kuumba Festival serves as the largest African American Cultural Arts Festival in East Tennessee. Every year the festival is a Four day and four night multi-event celebration with hundreds of entertainers performing throughout the festival. There will be live Entertainment with a world class African Marketplace that will host Many crafts and food vendors for your cultural shopping experience. • FREE Saturday, June 27 SUMMER ON BROADWAY AND BBQ BASH • Founders Park
(Maryville) HOPS IN THE HILLS • Founders Park (Maryville) KUUMBA FESTIVAL • Morningside Park • 12PM • The Kuumba Festival serves as the largest African American Cultural Arts Festival in East Tennessee. Every year the festival is a Four day and four night multi-event celebration with hundreds of entertainers performing throughout the festival. There will be live Entertainment with a world class African Marketplace that will host Many crafts and food vendors for your cultural shopping experience. • FREE FIRE ON THE WATER • Sequoyah Marina • 2PM • The largest 4th of July Fireworks show on Norris Lake. Enjoy food and fun on Norris Lake at Sequoyah Marina. For more information, call 865-494-7984 or visit www. sequoyahmarina.net. Sunday, June 28 KUUMBA FESTIVAL • Morningside Park • 12PM • The Kuumba Festival serves as the largest African American Cultural Arts Festival in East Tennessee. Every year the festival is a Four day and four night multi-event celebration with hundreds of entertainers performing throughout the festival. There will be live Entertainment with a world class African Marketplace that will host Many crafts and food vendors for your cultural shopping experience. • FREE 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
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
CALENDAR 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. 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
SPORTS AND RECREATION
FAUN FABLES Pilot Light (106 E. Jackson Ave.) • Saturday, June 27 • 9 p.m. • $6 • thepilotlight.com • 18 and up
Faun Fables is more than just a band—the Oakland-based project, a partnership between singer/ songwriter Dawn McCarthy and the multi-talented artist and musician Nils Frykdahl and a rotating cast of collaborators and contributors, is as much a theater troupe as a music group now. The last two Faun Fables albums, The Transit Rider (2006) and Light of a Vaster Dark (2010), were accompanied by elaborate stage productions; the duo’s videos, costumes, and sets are as important to its art as the music, which draws on European folk and pastoral traditions—think The Wicker Man, Fairport Convention, Hammer Films, Thomas Mallory, the Brothers Grimm—and contemporary art. It all adds up to something familiar and challenging, cozy and a little scary. With the local experimental rock band Horcerer. (Matthew Everett)
Friday, June 26 MUSIC: BEST SERVED COLD • Ice Chalet • 7PM • Visit Knoxville is delighted to announce that the revolutionary event, Music: Best Served Cold, a collaboration between ice skating group Ice Cold Combos and Virginian band The Northerners, will be coming to Knoxville. The show will be performed from June 26th - 28th at 7:00pm, located at The Ice Chalet. This show offers an immersive and involved experience for the viewer with 360 degree views of the action. Eleven World-Class Skaters from all over North America will be performing in the show. Breaking the stereotype of classical music and fancy dress typically associated with ice skating, Ice Cold Combos’ partnership with The Northerners offers a completely new angle on each form of entertainment. The experience as an audience member has been likened to that of listening to a local band play at a bar. However, in this case, the audience is in the middle of the action as opposed to just watching. The performers will mingle with the viewers between sets of hard-hitting numbers combined with equally intense choreography. Saturday, June 27 MUSIC: BEST SERVED COLD • Ice Chalet • 7PM • Visit Knoxville is delighted to announce that the revolutionary event, Music: Best Served Cold, a collaboration between ice skating group Ice Cold Combos and Virginian band The Northerners, will be coming to Knoxville. The show will be performed from June 26th - 28th at 7:00pm, located at The Ice Chalet. This show offers an immersive June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29
CALENDAR and involved experience for the viewer with 360 degree views of the action. Eleven World-Class Skaters from all over North America will be performing in the show. Breaking the stereotype of classical music and fancy dress typically associated with ice skating, Ice Cold Combos’ partnership with The Northerners offers a completely new angle on each form of entertainment. The experience as an audience member has been likened to that of listening to a local band play at a bar. However, in this case, the audience is in the middle of the action as opposed to just watching. The performers will mingle with the viewers between sets of hard-hitting numbers combined with equally intense choreography. Sunday, June 28 MUSIC: BEST SERVED COLD • Ice Chalet • 7PM • Visit Knoxville is delighted to announce that the revolutionary event, Music: Best Served Cold, a collaboration between ice skating group Ice Cold Combos and Virginian band The Northerners, will be coming to Knoxville. The show will be performed from June 26th - 28th at 7:00pm, located at The Ice Chalet. This show offers an immersive and involved experience for the viewer with 360 degree views of the action. Eleven World-Class Skaters from all over North America will be performing in the show. Breaking the stereotype of classical music and fancy dress typically associated with ice skating, Ice Cold Combos’ partnership with The Northerners offers a completely new angle on each form of entertainment. The experience as an audience member has been likened to that of listening to a local band play at a bar. However,
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
in this case, the audience is in the middle of the action as opposed to just watching. The performers will mingle with the viewers between sets of hard-hitting numbers combined with equally intense choreography. 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. 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.
FILM SCREENINGS
Friday, June 26 SUMMER MOVIE MAGIC SERIES: ‘THE BIRDS’ • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • The Birds is a 1963 thriller directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock. A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people in increasing numbers and viciousness. • $9
Sunday, June 28 SUMMER MAGIC MOVIE SERIES: ‘THE BIRDS’ • Tennessee Theatre • 2PM • The Birds is a 1963 thriller directed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock. A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people in increasing numbers and viciousness. • $9 Monday, June 29 BIRDHOUSE OPEN SCREEN • The Birdhouse • 9PM • Birdhouse Walk-In Theater and SAFTA films are proud to present Birdhouse Open Screen. Open Screen is an open-mic night for local filmmakers and film lovers happening the last Monday of every month at the Birdhouse located in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood. Videos can be of any length, from 1 minute to 1 hour, and anyone can submit. The screenings are free and open to the public. If you are interested in screening any of your work or have questions contact Blake Wahlert at: birdhousewalkin@gmail.com. • FREE Wednesday, July 1 FLICKER AND WOW: EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • For our first program of experimental shorts, The Public Cinema presents six pieces that revolve around that age-old question of the avant-garde: How do we see? Is it a matter of biology, technology, ideology? The individual pieces are, by turns, intense, confrontational, confounding, beautiful, and laugh-out-loud funny. • FREE
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
8203 Chapman Hwy.
(7.2 Miles South of the Henley St. Bridge) (2 1/2 Miles South of Walmart)
865.609.0480
Mon-Fri 10:30-6 • Sat 10:30-6
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. JUNE 5-30: artwork by Marjorie Spalding Horne and Hugh Bailey. 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.) Bliss Home 29 Market Square JUNE 5-30: artwork by Brian Murray. Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. MAY 1-JUNE 27: Richard J. LeFevre’s Civil War series of mixed-media works. JULY 3-31: The Land Report Collective exhibit. (An opening reception will be held on Friday, July 3, from 5-9 p.m.)
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
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 Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. JUNE 5-30: Origins, an exhibit of handmade masks by Stephen R. Hicks and photos by Nicole A. Perez-Camoirano. JUNE 5-27: Knox Photo Exhibition and exhibits by Ryan Blair and Robin Surber, Rachel Quammie, and Anna Rykaczewska. JULY 3-31: Hola Hora Latina: Photographs of Cuba; 17th Street Studios: Amalgam Volume 3, a grouo 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.) 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 Zach Searcy Projects 317 N. Gay St. THROUGH JUNE: Knox u30 v1.0, an exhibit by Knoxville
CALENDAR
artists under the age of 30. On display through June by appointment. Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church 2931 Kingston Pike MAY 8-JUNE 30: Knoxville Watercolor Society Exhibit.
LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS
Thursday, June 25 DALE SADLER: GENERATIONS TO COME: BECOMING ALL THINGS TO YOUR CHILD • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Book signing with Dale Sadler reading from his new book, Generations to Come: Becoming All Things to Your Child. • FREE Saturday, June 27 VALERIE AND MARILYN SCOTT-WATERS: ‘A YEAR IN THE SECRET GARDEN’ • Union Ave Books • 2PM • Book signing with Maryville authors Valarie & Marilyn Scott-Waters discussing their book, A Year in the Secret Garden, for readers of all ages. • FREE Sunday, June 28 SUSANNE VANZANT HASSELL • Union Ave Books • 3PM • Book signing with Susanne Vanzant Hassell author of two books, Pilgrim Walk by the Sea and Pilgrim Walk in the Woods. • FREE
FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS
Thursday, June 25 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE SUMMER ACTING CLASSES • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 9AM • Knoxville Children’s Theatre, a non-profit theatre producing theatre for children by children, will hold week-long, intensive acting classes during late June and July. Most classes will culminate in a “showcase” presentation for family and friends at the end of the term. All classes include 2 free tickets to a KCT performance. To reserve a seat in any class, or for more information: e-mail Academy Director Dennis Perkins at dennis@childrenstheatreknoxville.com, or call (865) 208-3677. • $240 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 Friday, June 26 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE SUMMER ACTING CLASSES • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 9AM • Knoxville Children’s Theatre, a non-profit theatre producing theatre for children by children, will hold week-long, intensive acting classes during late June and July. Most classes will culminate in a “showcase” presentation for family and friends at the end of the term. All classes include 2 free tickets to a KCT performance. To reserve a seat in
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CALENDAR any class, or for more information: e-mail Academy Director Dennis Perkins at dennis@childrenstheatreknoxville.com, or call (865) 208-3677. • $240 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, June 30 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 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 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,
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
Thursday, June 25 - Sunday, July 5
first served basis. For grades K-5. • FREE
CLASSES
Thursday, June 25 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. OUTDOOR WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA WORKSHOP • Knoxville Convention Center • 3PM • The Outdoor Writers Association of America will kick off its 88th annual conference in Knoxville, Tennessee, by offering a free, half-day workshop titled “Becoming an Outdoors Communicator.” The workshop is the perfect opportunity for anyone interested in pursuing a career in outdoor communication – whether through writing, photography, radio or media relations - to learn about the field, how to break in and how to be successful. Hear established professionals share industry tips and tricks. Please pre-register at http://owaa.org/2015conference/agenda/ boc-workshop/. • FREE BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 TENNESSEE CITIZENS FOR WILDERNESS PLANNING BUTTERFLY PROGRAM • Roane State Community College (Oak Ridge) • 7PM • Glenna and W.C. “Dub” Julian and their Kodak neighbor Lois English, Master Gardeners, share a passion for butterflies. On June 25, Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning will host a program in which the three—the “Kodak Butterfly Keepers”—will discuss butterfly habitat preservation, as well
as the beauty and complex lives and needs of butterflies. The program will begin at 7 p.m. in the City Room at Roane State Community College-Oak Ridge.The Julians garden at their pre-1850 home on two-plus acres. They plant for butterflies and hummingbirds; their garden is certified by the National Wildlife Federation and is a Monarch Way Station. They have been presenters at Wilderness Wildlife Week since 2006, doing programs on butterflies, herbs, and backyard birds. Their garden has been featured in the Knoxville News Sentinel, the Mountain Press, Tennessee Conservationist, and Blue Ridge Country magazine.The program is free and open to the public. For more information, see www.tcwp.org or call 865.583-3967. • FREE Saturday, June 27 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. Sunday, June 28 SLOW FOOD JAMMING WORKSHOP • Just Ripe • 12PM • As the summer harvest season gets into full swing, you may be asking yourself: what am I going to do with all those amazing berries I got at the farmers’ market?If you’ve ever come home from the market or the u-pick farm with more berries than you can immediately use (and haven’t we all at one time or another?), making jams and jellies is an excellent way to carry the taste of summer into the fall, winter, and beyond.Don’t know how to turn your berries into tasty fruit preserves? Come to Slow Food TN Valley’s jam making workshop and we’ll teach you!The
workshop will be held on Sunday, June 28th from 12-2 at Just Ripe in downtown Knoxville. Esther Zimmerman will show us how to make berry jam using the bounty of the season. Participants will get a copy of the recipe, as well as a jar of jam to take home.Ticket price is $20. Space is limited, so buy your tickets early to reserve your spot! Questions? Contact us at info@slowfoodtnvalley.com. • $20 Monday, June 29 JUNE 29 • Gentle Yoga and Meditation • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-5772021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Tuesday, June 30 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Tuesday, July 2 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. 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.
CALENDAR MEETINGS
Thursday, June 25 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, June 28 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • Narrow Ridge invites you to join us for our Silent Meditation Gathering on Sundays from 11:00 am to 12:00 pm at Narrow Ridge’s Mac Smith Resource Center (1936 Liberty Hill Rd., Washburn). 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, June 29 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 gaygroupknoxville.org. 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
ETC.
Thursday, June 25 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • The New Harvest Park Farmers Market will be open every Thursday through November from 3 to 6 p.m. The market features locally-grown produce, meats,
artisan food products, plants, herbs, flowers, crafts and much more. • FREE Friday, June 26 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, 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, June 27 OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • 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, 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. SEYMOUR FARMERS MARKET • Seymour First Baptist Church • 8AM • Home grown and home made produce, honey, baked goods, crafts and more. MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • The Market Square Farmers’ Market is an open-air farmers’ market located on Market Square in the heart of downtown Knoxville and is celebrating its 12th season this year. Hours are: Wednesday from 11a.m. to 2p.m. & Saturday from 9a.m. to 2p.m., May 2- November 21, 2015. The MSFM is a producer only market; everything is either made or grown by the vendor in our East Tennessee region. Products vary by the season and include ornamental plants, produce, dairy, eggs, honey, herbs, meat, baked goods, jams/jellies, coffee, & artisan crafts. With interactive fountains, delicious local food and entertainment, as well as tasty lunch options from some of Knoxville’s best food trucks, the MSFM is a perfect family destination. • FREE NORTH HILLS GARDEN CLUB TOUR • North Hills • 10AM • Celebrating its 80th anniversary this year, the North Hills Garden Club will host a Private Garden Tour on Saturday, June 27 from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. The event is open to the public and will take place rain or shine.The tour will feature seven residential gardens located along the historic neighborhood’s boulevards. While on the tour, participants can speak directly to home owners about the
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Tuesday, June 30 EBENEZER ROAD FARMERS’ MARKET • Ebenezer United Methodist Church • 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, 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 Wednesday, July 1 MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • The Market Square Farmers’ Market is an open-air farmers’ market located on Market Square in the heart of downtown Knoxville and is celebrating its 12th season this year. Hours are: Wednesday from 11a.m. to 2p.m. & Saturday from 9a.m. to 2p.m., May 2- November 21, 2015. The MSFM is a producer only market; everything is either made or grown by the vendor in our East Tennessee region. Products vary by the season and include ornamental plants, produce, dairy, eggs, honey, herbs, meat, baked goods, jams/jellies, coffee, & artisan crafts. With interactive fountains, delicious local food and entertainment, as well as tasty lunch options from some of Knoxville’s best food trucks, the MSFM is a perfect family destination. • FREE Thursday, July 2 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest
Park • 3PM • The New Harvest Park Farmers Market will be open every Thursday through November from 3 to 6 p.m. The market features locally-grown produce, meats, artisan food products, plants, herbs, flowers, crafts and much more. • 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, 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 • 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, 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. MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • The Market Square Farmers’ Market is an open-air farmers’ market located on Market Square in the heart of downtown Knoxville and is celebrating its 12th season this year. Hours are: Wednesday from 11a.m. to 2p.m. & Saturday from 9a.m. to 2p.m., May 2- November 21, 2015.The MSFM is a producer only market; everything is either made or grown by the vendor in our East Tennessee region. Products vary by the season and include ornamental plants, produce, dairy, eggs, honey, herbs, meat, baked goods, jams/jellies, coffee, & artisan crafts. With interactive fountains, delicious local food and entertainment, as well as tasty lunch options from some of Knoxville’s best food trucks, the MSFM is a perfect family destination. • FREE SEYMOUR FARMERS MARKET • Seymour First Baptist Church • 8AM • Home grown and home made produce, honey, baked goods, crafts and more.
Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com
34
KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
A vibrant district along Central Street and Broadway.
various plants, flowers and techniques used in their gardens.Tickets are $10 a person or $15 for a family. Participants can purchase tickets and begin the tour at two locations: 1927 North Hills Blvd. or 3033 Fountain Park Blvd. All proceeds go back into beautification of the neighborhood’s boulevards and park.For more information on the North Hills Garden Club, including details on the garden tour, visit the club’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/NorthHillsGardenClub. • $10
Visit Downtown North
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FOOD
Home Palate
Sweet Complements Knoxville’s fast becoming the land of lavender and honey BY DENNIS PERKINS
O
n a recent Saturday morning in Market Square, there was a wild scent in the air that soared above the usual farmers’ market aromas of bread, coffee, and garden. If you followed that scent, as I did, you’d find yourself in a very long line due to that most odoriferous of herbs, lavender. At the end of the queue of patient shoppers lay the stall for Smoky Mountain Lavender and their $3 bundles of lavender in bloom. This herb seems to have found a home in the hearts of Knoxvillians. The line for this freshly cut lavender was fueled by the distinctive aromatic personality of the herb,
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
which is decidedly floral and sweet and is sometimes described as having the nuance of pine and a hint of camphor. It’s a clean, fresh smell that’s popular as a scent for laundry detergent, dryer sheets, and perfume. Still, there’s a lot more to lavender than meets the nose. There are over 400 varieties of this flowering herb, which is a member of the mint family, and most are edible. But it’s English lavender, with its particularly sweet and light lemony character that’s preferred for culinary use. You may have already eaten the herb in some American mixtures of herbes de Provence
(French versions don’t often use it in the blend), and it can be used in lieu of rosemary in many dishes, particularly lamb. Lavender has crept into Knoxville’s diet surreptitiously and often in liquid forms like lavender water or soda at the likes of the Public House, Crown and Goose, and the Peter Kern Library; Sapphire and even Bonefish Grill use lavender bitters in cocktails. But eating lavender is a whole different experience, and it’s one that you can tiptoe into via a sugarcoated path paved by two of the city’s sweetest tastemakers. They both use a spoonful of honey to help the lavender go down. Magpies Bakery and Cruze Farm Dairy both sell lavender honey treats that are easy and delicious initiations into culinary lavender and make fantastic use of this herb’s particular affinity with honey. Honey and herbs are fond playmates. Greek bees have produced thyme honey for thousands of years, while their French cousins in Provence feast on lavender pollen to produce the famous Miel de Lavande, which, like the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy, enjoys a protected name status. At Magpies and Cruze Farm, the blending of honey and lavender occurs in-house. Both start with the dried bud of the flower, which is ground into a powder before use. The honey is added separately. At Magpies, lavender shows up in the form of a cupcake. The cake itself is moist and subtly flavored only with wildflower honey and vanilla—it’s one of the most satisfying of the many tasty cakes that Magpies produces. On top of that cupcake sits a dollop of light purple lavender buttercream icing and a drizzle of honey that adds an additional sheen to this already attractive treat. Despite the sometimes overwhelming smell of the purple herb, these cupcakes never struck me as perfumed. Magpies’ owner, Peggy Hambright, says she’s sensitive to floral aromas and is careful about how she uses them. “We tried to make a rose buttercream once, but it was awful—too strong,” Hambright says. “But
lavender is more subtle. I think it’s a lot more appetizing.” The key, she says, is balance. “We put lavender in the cream that makes the cupcake icing. We don’t use it in the cake recipe—that would be overwhelming. But I think when you put lavender with cream and honey it works—the mix brings out the sweetness, and it’s not so flowery.” Still, there’s a lightly floral taste that’s always part of lavender’s flavor profile. In these treats, however, it’s complemented by the floral nuances that are always a part of honey. Cruze Farm also puts honey and cream to good use in lavender honey ice cream, which comes in an appetizing shade of yellow cream. The dairy adds lavender powder to the ice cream base, which includes cream, sugar, and egg yolks. Co-owner Colleen Cruze laughs when she admits that she wasn’t sold on the idea. “Honestly, when we first started making it, I was not obsessed with it,” she says. “But the girls who work at the dairy were, and they kept forcing me to make it. … It’s one of our most popular flavors. It grew on me, but I think a lot of that is mental. A lot of people think that it will taste like soap, but then they try it and they start craving it.” Cruze likes the honey element a lot. “It makes the ice cream better,” she says. “It gives it a really nice texture.” It’s hard to imagine that Cruze Farm ice cream could be any easier to swallow, but the honey lavender flavor is particularly unctuous. As with Magpies’ cupcake, the taste and texture of honey predispose the palate to be happy with whatever follows; once the lavender flavor appears, it’s so very well wrapped up in honey and cream that it tastes like something you’ve always loved. The cupcakes only show up periodically, so it’s worth keeping an eye on Magpies’ social media to find them. Cruze Farm regularly includes this flavor in their Saturday morning lineup at the Market Square Farmers’ Market, but you’ll want to get your ice cream early, since they frequently sell out. You may have to get in line, but apparently lavender is worth the wait. ◆
June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37
June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37
’BYE
R estless Nat ive
Of Blackberries and ‘Panters’ Miz Lusby’s cautionary tales to a rapt audience BY CHRIS WOHLWEND
M
iz Lusby lived on the street that ran the length of the ridge that defined the southern edge of Burlington, a block or so from our house. She was, according to word around the neighborhood, a bit of a witch. Because of that reputation, and because of the tales she told, she was popular with the kids. During warm weather, after supper when twilight was deepening, she could often be found sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair that appeared to be even older than she was. And often we would be gathered around, waiting for one of her stories. She liked to scare us with accounts of in-house wakes, the honoree stretched out in his or her coffin in the parlor, mourners gathered around in the dim light of
candles or lanterns. The memories that were shared by the mourners in attendance would invariably involve a violent act, sometimes following a mysterious night-time chase. One such chase, one of the more memorable, involved a “panter.” Panters—panthers or cougars— were a particular favorite of Miz Lusby. Though they had not been spotted officially in East Tennessee for decades, she was sure they were still around. “A panter is smart,” she would say. “He learns how to stay away from human beings, only coming out at night to raid a barn or a pig sty, grabbing a baby pig or a newborn calf for his supper.” So, according to her, panthers were responsible for the mysterious disappearance of farm animals, or,
BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY June 25, 2015
she would imply, somebody’s dog. “They wouldn’t mess with cats,” she contended. “Some people say it’s because they’re too small, not worth messing with. But the real reason is because they’re cats, too. They’re kin, so the panter don’t mess with ’em.” And, she liked to emphasize, “a panter’s cry is just like a baby’s—if you ever hear one in the middle of the night, it’ll sound just like a little baby crying.” Of course we all knew the sound of the neighborhood tomcats as they made their nighttime rounds, wailing at each other, so we could easily imagine the sound of a panter. And, just to make sure we understood what she was talking about, she would demonstrate, executing a long, drawn-out cry that sounded just like a baby. Miz Lusby was a “widow woman.” Her husband, according to neighborhood lore, had disappeared not too long after they were married, then turned up dead in Texas. Some said he had been shot. Miz Lusby had lived alone ever since, with a dog and a house cat or two. No one ever said anything about how she survived, except that she took in sewing. And she had a garden during spring and summer. We weren’t interested in such details. We only wanted to hear her tales. Sometimes, we would ask about how to keep a panter away. She would say that it didn’t always work, but there was a spell you could use. She
would then tease us. If we could find her a black-cat bone she would tell us how to use it. “It takes some practice, and it don’t always work,” she would insist, “but it’s your best chance.” Once, Earl Presley brought her a small bone he’d found, claiming that he was sure it came from a black cat. She took one look and said, “No, that’s from a ’possum.” About the time I got a decent bicycle and was getting old enough to start scoffing at her stories, she delivered the tale that topped them all. She delivered it so believably that I forgot my recently acquired skepticism and sat up and listened. She had heard, she said, a panter the night before, and it was so close it had to be in the Holler, several acres of bushes and weeds that began only a couple hundred yards behind her house. We were all familiar with the Holler—it was full of blackberry bushes as well as rabbit tobacco and hidden spots for smoking it. Eyes widened as she demonstrated the panter’s cry, and provided details of her two cats trying to get out of her house when the wailing began. “They were wanting to go join it, I reckon,” she said. “I didn’t sleep another wink, I can tell you.” Then, a few days later, at the height of blackberry season, I saw Miz Lusby in the Holler, busy filling a pan with berries. She had the entire place to herself, all the kids staying away lest there be a panter present. ◆
’BYE BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY
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June 25, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39
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. CEN PILOT
L AV TRA
EXIT 108 MERCHANTS DRIVE
E. P IKE
ONLY 5 MILES FROM DOWNTOWN
120 Merchants Dr. • Knoxville, TN
OUR COMMITMENT TO THE COMMUNITY 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.
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