APRIL 16, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM
EARTH DAY SPECIAL!
1 / N.6
V.
John Coykendall’s efforts to preserve heirloom seeds may be homespun, but they have global consequences BY ROSE KENNEDY
* PHOTOS BY DAVID LUTTRELL
NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
MUSIC
OUTDOORS
Assessing Knox County Schools’ Proposed Balanced Calendar
Downtown’s Condo Market Sees a Resurgence
The Black Cadillacs Update Their Southern Rock Sound
A New Quest for Walleye at Tellico Lake
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
April 16, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 06 knoxmercury.com “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
14 Seed Savior COVER STORY
John Coykendall has preserved or “grown out” some 500 varieties of heirlooms, the seeds from old-time and open-pollinated varieties that are able to regenerate from their own seeds with each new planting. He is part of a circle of 13,000 international members of the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), and is one of the group’s—and the nation’s—most prolific seed savers. And though he may look like an ordinary East Tennessee country fellow in his overalls and work boots, Coykendall and his seed-saving peers may have the preservation of the world’s food supply in their dirt-stained, gardening hands. Rose Kennedy profiles.
NEWS
12 Balancing Act
Knox County Schools is studying whether to convert to a “balanced calendar,” which shortens summer vacation for longer seasonal breaks. At more than 30 public meetings about the proposed calendar, school officials listened and answered the questions they could. But in many cases, no one knows the answers yet. S. Heather Duncan reports.
Win Tickets to Vollapalooza!
Answer our Mercury Question of the Week online to be entered for a drawing. It’s about food! Go to: survature.com/s/knoxmercuryApr162015 (case sensitive, BTW).
DEPARTMENTS
OPINION
A&E
4 6
8
20
38
Editor’s Note Howdy Start Here: Ghost Signs, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory. PLUS: Words With … Charlie Thomas ’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
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The Scruffy Citizen Jack Neely tells the sometimes lurid tale of the Knoxville family whose fortune eventually funded the construction of UT’s University Center. Perspectives Joe Sullivan sees all the signs of a condominium-construction resurgence in downtown Knoxville.
21 22 24
20 The Future of
Public Cinema
The Public Cinema is KMA’s new art-film series organized by filmmaker Paul Harrill and critic Darren Hughes, who have brought free screenings of notable works to Knoxville. But has it garnered enough support to continue? Matthew Everett finds out.
CALENDAR Program Notes The organizers behind KMA’s art film series, the Public Cinema, discuss its future. Shelf Life Chris Barrett surveys new additions to the public library’s AV collection. Music The Black Cadillacs integrate some new influences on a fresh EP. Books David Duchovny’s Holy Cow
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Spotlights: TAUK and Jamey Johnson
OUTDOORS
34
Voice in the Wilderness Kim Trevathan continues his epic quest for walleye, this time at Tellico Lake.
FOOD & DRINK
36
Dirt to Fork Rose Kennedy puts orange behind her in favor of multicolored carrots.
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3
EDITOR’S NOTE Work in Progress, Part 3 VARIOUS HORN-TOOTING
Six weeks into our Accelerated Plan to Resuscitate Print Journalism in Knoxville, what have we accomplished? Now that we’re over the initial hump of creating a new weekly paper from scratch, I think we’re starting to see some early returns on your investment: • Our fine-arts coverage is the smartest and most wide-ranging in town. We’ve already covered the University of Tennessee’s music program, Knoxville Symphony Orchestra, Knoxville Opera, Clarence Brown Theatre, and the Knoxville Museum of Art, as well as smaller organizations. Likewise, our entertainment coverage digs deeper. Did any other media in town cover Big Ears with the same depth and authority? • Our columnists consistently write about issues that don’t get much attention elsewhere. Case in point: Last week’s two-fer examining the history and the future of UT’s University Center (by Jack Neely and George Dodds, respectively) revealed perspectives and a depth of knowledge you won’t find elsewhere. • Our events calendar is already Knoxville’s most accurate and comprehensive guide to arts and entertainment, and multiple other activities. (Yeah, there are several other publications/websites in town that claimed this particular mantle. But we had been working on it for 23 years.) • Our ability to take a deep dive into the institutions and personalities that make Knoxville unique is not duplicated elsewhere, either. Our profiles of Striped Light and Randy Boyd, for instance, went beyond simple mentions or daily headlines to reveal the inner and outer struggles of people trying to make Knoxville a better place, from very different directions. • Our news features ask the right questions. S. Heather Duncan’s story on North Broadway’s historic Howard House being threatened by a big-box development was the first to actually 4
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
interview people directly involved in the situation. Our post on Facebook linking her story reached nearly 60,000 people and caused a social-media storm. The daily paper has yet to show any interest in the story. We’ll be following it up soon. Allow me to also note that we accomplished these advances in our first month and a half of existence without even having a full-time reporter on staff. Hiring an investigative journalist is next on our to-do list.
ON THE SALES FRONT
Meanwhile, I’m very pleased to announce two additions to our sales staff: Stacey Pastor is our new senior account executive. She has over 15 years of experience in marketing and advertising at companies including The Washington Post, Houghton Mifflin, and C-SPAN. Plus, she has international advertising agency experience copywriting, editing, and translating (Spanish-English) in the Mexican tourism industry. And she has seven years of international teaching experience at the undergraduate level. Subjects taught include: advertising, integrated marketing communications, online marketing for journalists, public speaking, critical reading and writing, and EFL at schools including ITESO, the University of Guadalajara, Tecnológico de Monterrey, and the University of San Diego. Christopher Black joins us as an account executive, fresh out of school with a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Tennessee and currently working toward a master’s in public policy. He also interned for Sen. Bob Corker, Rep. David Roe, the Hamblen County Circuit and General
Sessions Courts, and the Morristown Area Chamber of Commerce.
AND SOME NEW INITIATIVES
• Each issue we’ll be introducing the Mercury Question of the Week via our online survey partner, Survature. We’ll also be sharing the results each week. And we have a new Survey of the Month. Answer either one and you’ll be entered to win tickets to local performances. Check out the ads on pages 23 and 39 for more info. • Mercury Meetups are coming soon. The staff of the Mercury will be visiting a different neighborhood around Knoxville once a month to get feedback and hear about community issues. Watch for our announcement. Meanwhile, come visit us at Rossini Fest next Saturday—our booth will be near the Bijou Theatre. • If you want to hear what I’m stressing out over on a weekly basis, start tuning into 90.3 FM. Every Thursday morning at approximately 7:45 a.m., I call into WUTK’s Marble City Radio Company and get grilled by host Damien Messer on what’s in our newest issue and how things are going. At that hour of the morning, I’m generally more candid than I should be. • Want to find out how to find a copy of the Mercury near you? Go to our website at knoxmercury.com and click “locations” in the upper right corner to find a handy Google map. • Next week we’ll be announcing a membership program that not only gives you a new opportunity to support our ongoing endeavor, but also some nice perks too. And if you were a donor to our startup, you can expect a party invitation in your inbox soon. That’s all for now! —Coury Turczyn, ed.
Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015
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
Victor Agreda Jr. Chris Barrett Ian Blackburn Patrice Cole Eric Dawson George Dodds Matthew Foltz-Gray 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 Joe Tarr William Warren Chris Wohlwend
DESIGN ART DIRECTOR
Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Charlie Finch Corey McPherson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATOR
Ben Adams
ADVERTISING PUBLISHER & DIRECTOR OF SALES
Charlie Vogel charlie@knoxmercury.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES
Scott Hamstead scott@knoxmercury.com Stacey Pastor stacey@knoxmercury.com ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE
Christopher Black chris@knoxmercury.com
BUSINESS DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS
Jerry Collins jerry@knoxmercury.com
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 706 Walnut St., Suite 404, Knoxville, Tenn. 37902 knoxmercury.com • 865-313-2059 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR & PRESS RELEASES
editor@knoxmercury.com CALENDAR SUBMISSIONS
calendar@knoxmercury.com SALES QUERIES
sales@knoxmercury.com DISTRIBUTION
distribution@knoxmercury.com The Knoxville Mercury is an independent weekly news magazine devoted to informing and connecting Knoxville’s many different communities. It is a taxable, not-for-profit company governed by the Knoxville History Project, a non-profit organization devoted to exploring, disseminating, and celebrating Knoxville’s unique cultural heritage. It publishes 25,000 copies per week, available free of charge, limited to one copy per reader. © 2015 The Knoxville Mercury
Our Humane Society Turns 130 The Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley is one of the older animal-rights organizations in America. Of the six men who chartered it back in 1885, when Knoxville was a fast-growing factory city, one was Peter Kern, the German immigrant who was a connoisseur of worthwhile things, a well-known baker who also ran a candy factory, one of Knoxville’s fi rst soda fountains, and an ice-cream saloon. The building he built in 1876 to house all those activities is now home to the Oliver Hotel and Tupelo Honey. The hotel’s Peter Kern Library honors him with a large portrait. Other charter members in 1885 were civic leaders L.C. Shepard, H.H. Taylor, M.T. Davis, John M. Brooks, and R.N. Hood. Kern became Knoxville mayor five years later.
Peter Kern 1835 - 1907
It was a progressive era. The HSTV was originally known as the Knox County Humane Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and Animals. They kept that full name for years, but by 1900, there were other advocates for child welfare, and the Humane Society was focused almost entirely on helping animals.
They got a big boost in 1946 from Mrs. G.C. McHarris, the president of the Knox County Humane Society, who re-energized the organization. It established Knoxville’s first animal shelter in 1957, located in the Vestal area, beginning a longtime contract with Knox County to take care of strays.
Almost 20 years ago, the Knox County Humane Society expanded its borders beyond Knox County to become the Humane Society of the Tennessee Valley.
The Humane Society left its Knox County contract in 2001, and at that time opened its first no-kill shelter. Since then, they’ve found homes for about 20,000 dogs and cats. Now located on Bearden Hill, they place about 1,000 animals each month.
In 2004, the society opened a low-cost spay/neuter clinic in Seymour. They also offer a hotline, and classes in dog training, since troublesome behavior is one of the reasons dogs get abandoned. “Our mission is to end the euthanasia of adoptable animals,” says Executive Director Amy Buttry.
In their early days, the Humane Society didn’t have a headquarters, but met once a month in their attorney’s office. They always had an attorney in their organization, because much of their early efforts were based on the enforcement of laws and to “secure by all lawful means the arrest, conviction, and punishment” of people who mistreat animals, either by hurting or neglecting animals of any kind. Horses were often mistreated in those days, and were the focus of much of the Society’s work.
On Thursday, April 30, at noon, the HSTV will host a public commemorative dedication of their Bearden Hill headquarters, the unusual old stone building at 6717 Kingston Pike. Among its several amenities is a pet thrift store called Four Feet Repeat. More fun will follow in June, at HSTV’s annual Bark in the Park festival.
A book called Quality of Mercy, by William Alan Swallow (1963) suggests that the Knox County Humane Society was then the 21st oldest animal-rights organization in America. However, it stated that “its history is shrouded in mist.” Although it was a popular organization, and dues were only $1 a year (that’s maybe $30 in modern dollars) they had trouble growing. According to an 1897 article, “The kindly public interest supporting the movement with strong moral force is large, but active, paying membership is discouragingly small.” But the members kept working toward their goal.
This isn’t the first time the Humane Society has had a big celebration for its birthday. Forty years ago, when they celebrated their 90th birthday, Stan Brock, who was then best known as the dashing young British star of TV’s Wild Kingdom, made a special visit to help them celebrate. In the years since then, he has become a familiar figure in the Knoxville area, as the director of Remote Area Medical. In 1975, Brock surprised visitors by saying he had never acquired a pet that wasn’t adopted.
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 April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5
Illustration by Ben Adams
HOWDY
Believe It or Knox! BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX
GHOST SIGNS BY BUD RIES
Just as cheap LED lights have displaced the warm glow of old neon signs, so too has the switch to plastic and fiberglass panels deprived the landscape of unique metal signs in intriguing shapes like this excellent specimen along Clinton Highway.
QUOTE FACTORY “ I don’t have to tout my second amendment record. I have a record to prove it.” —U.S. Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn, nonsensically welcoming members of the National Rifle Association to their annual meeting in Nashville last Friday.
The dogwood tree, now considered a symbol of the city, WAS RARE IN KNOXVILLE YARDS BEFORE THE 1920s AND ’30s! Although it’s an indigenous tree, it was previously seen mainly in the mountains, though sometimes raised industrially for its hard wood, useful in disposable spindles in textile mills. One of the first celebrations of the dogwood blossom in Knoxville, long before the festival, was the images sculpted in the proscenium of the Tennessee Theatre in 1928! The spring flood of 1867, sometimes known as the FRESHET, was so severe that downtown Knoxville WAS BRIEFLY AN ISLAND! Most of downtown itself, including South Gay Street and Market Square, is at such an elevation it has never flooded. Cedar Bluff isn’t named for cedar trees. Nor is it named for a bluff, at least not in the usual sense of the term. It’s named for the colorful “cedar” marble deposits, and the “bluff” in question was an underground rock formation and the site of a very productive late-19th-century marble quarry.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
4/16 ‘SAY IT LOUD: KNOXVILLE DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA’ THURSDAY
2-3:20 p.m., Community Room, Pellissippi State Community College’s Magnolia Avenue Campus. Free. This documentary produced by the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound uses archival footage to study the African-American community in Knoxville through the Civil Rights era up to the 1970s. Theotis Robinson Jr., one of the first African-American students to desegregate the UT campus in 1961, will make a brief presentation and a question-and-answer session after the screening. 6
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
4/17 DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL FRIDAY
11 a.m.-9 p.m., Market Square. Free. Dogwood Arts may be a month-long celebration of springy artfulness, but for many participants it all comes down to this: the arts and crafts Thunderdome that is the festival’s purest expression on Market Square. More than 60 local and regional juried artists will be exhibiting and selling their work in mixed media, clay, drawing/pastels, glass, jewelry, leather, metal, painting, photography, sculpture, and wood. And let’s not forget the funnel cakes. Runs through Sunday.
4/18 EARTHFEST 2015
SATURDAY
10 a.m.-6 p.m., World’s Fair Park. Free. Celebrate the Earth a little early at Knoxville’s annual EarthFest. There will be over 100 exhibitors and attractions at this zero-waste event for the whole family, including your pets. Plus: an attempt to break the Guinness World Record for most simultaneous cloth diaper changes. That should be an eye-opener.
4/21 ‘LEONA’S SISTER GERRI’ TUESDAY
7 p.m. & 9 p.m., Pilot Light (106 E Jackson Ave.). Donations accepted. The Scruffy City Community Action Team is a new group devoted to increasing awareness and voter participation regarding reproductive rights and other social justice issues in Knoxville. Their first event is a double screening of Leona’s Sister Gerri, a documentary that tells the story of Gerri Santoro, a mother of two who died after undergoing a botched illegal abortion. There will be a legislative update in between screenings.
HOWDY WORDS WITH ...
Charlie Thomas BY ROSE KENNEDY Charlie Thomas will introduce the short documentary Recycled Life for its screening April 20 as part of the Cine HoLa film series. The film tells the story of the life and indomitable spirit of thousands who lived and worked in Guatemala City’s toxic garbage dump. This version includes a tribute to Hanley Denning, who founded a school for children of trash pickers, was featured in the film, and who died in an accident before its release. Thomas worked with Denning for two years, including the time when the film was made.
Why should people see this film?
For one thing, it is exceptionally well done and was nominated for an Oscar as Best Short Documentary in 2007. It contains interwoven themes of ecology, poverty, family, and social justice. It’s difficult to watch this film and not leave with a different perspective on your own existence.
Why were you in Guatemala in 2006, when they made this film??
I knew at some point in my life I wanted to work on issues of poverty and education under Third World conditions. I also wanted to improve my foreign language abilities and have more contact with Native American cultures. I chose Project Safe Passage/ Proyecto Camino Seguro because it had all that. It is mainly a school for kids whose parents were trash pickers at the dump filmed in Recycled Life.
What do you remember about the dump?
It’s surrounded by Guatemala City and is the largest landfill in Central America. It’s easy to know when you are getting close because you can smell it, and buzzards are circling all above. What you see when you get there is a huge ravine with trucks going in and out, unloading tons and tons of garbage. Hundreds of people are in there sorting through the trash, many wearing bandannas over their faces because of the stench, and mostly putting what they want in large plastic bags. The buzzards are right in there with the people, and that’s the image that stays with me. This mass of humanity competing with buzzards to live.
People live in the dump?
There’s a community that’s grown up around the dump, and many live in hovels constructed from whatever they find. Beyond that, they live on what
they can find to eat, use, or sell. The main source of cash, though, is from recyclables they find in the trash. They can sell them on site for cash on to trucks that come by to pick it up. A good day’s work will yield about $6-$8 that way.
Are you able to forget what it was like—would you want to?
No. Working for Safe Passage is one of the most meaningful things I’ve ever done. The spirit of these people was basically unbroken. They worked very, very hard as trash pickers and there was an element of pride they carried with that. They weren’t beggars, or criminals. As for the kids, they didn’t ask for much. If they weren’t hungry, they were happy.
What was it like to be around Hanley?
Hanley showed some of the purest acts of selfless devotion I’ve ever witnessed. What she did initially on her own and with few resources was phenomenal. I know she would take joy and satisfaction knowing her work is now well-established and will outlive her. I think she already knew that before she died.
Do you have any other messages for those who might see the film?
I’d like to emphasize that you don’t have to leave the country to do this type of work. We’ve got homeless and people eating out of garbage cans and literacy problems here. I went to Guatemala to do this, but there’s plenty right here in Tennessee to keep us all busy. Recycled Life screens on Monday, April 20 at the Black Box Theatre in the Emporium (100 S. Gay St.). Doors open at 6:30 p.m., movie starts at 7 p.m. Free for members, donations accepted from non-members. April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7
SCRUFFY CITIZEN
An Enduring Memorial Carolyn P. Brown: The tragic story behind a familiar name BY JACK NEELY
F
or the time being, you can still see where the portraits of John Scruggs Brown and his wife, Carolyn P. Brown, were; they left dark rectangular patches on the paneling in the lobby of the 1954 University Center, which is about to be demolished. The paintings are now in storage, across the street at Hoskins Library. But the big plaque is still there, in the foyer: “THE UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR STUDENTS AND FACULTY IS THE GIFT OF JOHN SCRUGGS BROWN AS AN ENDURING MEMORIAL TO HIS BELOVED WIFE, CAROLYN P. BROWN.”
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
If the wording is poignant, considering the short shelf life of a memorial, it’s also misleading. Mr. Brown died in 1934, and never heard of any university-center project. And although he was a proud alumnus, he would have been surprised that so much of his fortune went to the university. The bequest that endowed the UC was the denouement of a grim and harrowing tale of family estrangement, premature death, and legal action, a Bronte novel rewritten by Erle Stanley Gardner. Although hers has been one of the most familiar names at UT in the
postwar era, Carolyn P. Brown was not a UT alum. When she was college age, in fact, UT did not accept female students. Some details about her youth are elusive. Sources disagree about her birth date, but she was born around 1866, in Hot Springs, N.C., where her dad ran a resort hotel. She was briefly part of a presidential family: the niece-in-law, perhaps, of an ex-president. Her older sister Bessie married Andrew Johnson Jr., the troubled newspaperman who died at 26. Like her sister, Carolyn Powell Rumbough married a political son: George Marshall, whose father was the former governor of Minnesota. She bore a child, Alice. Either while she was pregnant, as one story has it, or when Alice was a baby, her husband shot himself to death. Carolyn and Alice lived with the Marshall family, who had moved to Pasadena, but as soon as Alice was old enough for school, they moved back to North Carolina. One story has single mother and daughter moving to Knoxville, staying in a rental apartment downtown. Somewhere along the way, Carolyn P. Marshall met one of Knoxville’s most eligible bachelors, 40ish John Scruggs Brown, a graduate of what was then East Tennessee University, one of only 15 men in the Class of 1877—and a successful hardware merchant who ran his dad’s store on Gay Street. They married in 1900. When daughter Alice was about 14, they moved into Bleak House, the antebellum brick home on Kingston Pike. It was a war-scarred, recently neglected wreck of a house, the siege headquarters of Gen. Longstreet, showing a variety of cavities left by bullets and cannonballs, and alleged bloodstains in the tower. The war had nothing to do with its tragic-sounding name, which was apparently builder Robert Armstrong’s droll joke. The Dickens novel of that title was about a court case that lasted for generations and consumed a fortune. Preferring a fresh start, the Browns called it “Casa Modena,” reflecting the house’s Italianate style. During their time there, Casa Modena was a Knoxville showplace. Carolyn’s terraced gardens cascaded down toward the river, adorned with fountains and lily ponds and birdbaths. She became known for her skill and imagination.
Casa Modena would seem hard to leave, but restless Alice didn’t stay there long. Sometimes described as a “famous beauty,” she married Col. Chester P. Mills, who along with his father, helped lead the occupation forces in the Philippines during the era of U.S. occupation of that island nation after the Spanish-American War. Their daughter, Marshall, was born in Manila in 1915. Motherhood didn’t suit Alice. She returned to Knoxville with her baby, introduced Marshall to her grandparents, and went back to Manila alone. John Brown never had a child of his own, but suddenly found himself pushing 60, with a baby in the house. Meanwhile, Brown had made a very lucky friendship with a brilliant young inventor named Weston Fulton, whose “sylphon,” a flexible metal bellows, had proven useful in a wide variety of automatic devices, from air conditioners to depth charges. Fulton needed money to build a factory; Brown had money to invest. Fulton built his factory on Third Creek and was soon churning out sylphons and gauges for a global market. As the story has it, it took only about a dozen years for Brown’s $15,000 investment to turn into well over $2 million. Adjust that for inflation however you like. Though he remained low-profile— even in the 1920s, many Knoxvillians had never heard of John S. Brown—he was one of Knoxville’s wealthiest men. Keeping Casa Modena, the Browns acquired a 200-acre estate at Flat Rock, N.C., and called it Chateau Beaumont. In 1922, Alice divorced Col. Mills, and married sewing-machine heir Nathaniel Wheeler, of Connecticut, where she went to live and bore a second child, who died as an infant. After two years, she’d had enough of Wheeler, and married a Louisville man named Phil McGovern. She was able to abide him for about four years. By then it was obvious that she was alcoholic. Alice’s Knoxville parents raised her Manila-born daughter, Marshall, at Casa Modena. Marshall Mills became known as a beauty, and a golfer, winning a city championship. High-spirited and often described as “colorful,” she loved fast sports cars and even learned to fly. She enjoyed her social debut at her grandparents’ house. Unlike her grandmother, Marshall could have attended UT, but attended private women’s colleges, Mississippi’s Gulf Park and Martha
The bequest that endowed the UC was the denouement of a grim and harrowing tale of family estrangement, premature death, and legal action.
Washington College in Abingdon. In 1934, John Scruggs Brown died in 1934, at age 77. UT got wind of the fact that the university was a conditional beneficiary. But Brown’s fortune, administered through a trust based in New York, was aimed at his family, including Brown’s widow, stepdaughter, and granddaughter. All three appeared to be healthy, and the vigorous granddaughter was of childbearing age. Beyond those beneficiaries, there was a proposal, in his will, to use the bulk of his fortune to establish a new school for girls, preferably in Knox County, to be named for his wife. After all that, if Brown and his wife had no living descendants, and if trustees decided a Carolyn P. Brown School for Girls couldn’t be founded, UT was a prospective beneficiary. UT officials looked at the document and decided the prospects of getting anything from it were so remote, they didn’t think it was worth the cost of a New York lawyer to pursue it. By 1938, errant Alice was on her fourth husband, a North Carolina man named Jack Atkinson. Like a lot of real-estate men, he could pass for pleasant, and had held a public-works position in the city of Asheville. Somehow this family newcomer obtained power of attorney over the Brown estate. In her 70s, Carolyn discovered that her own daughter and new son-inlaw had boxed her out of Chateau Beaumont, and seemed on their way to wresting her fortune away from her. When Carolyn confronted her daughter about it, Alice reportedly pushed her mother down the stairs. In April, 1940, Carolyn P. Brown filed a lawsuit against her daughter, over Brown’s fortune, alleging Alice
and her second husband were conspiring against Carolyn, wresting her inheritance from her by “coercion,” while engaging in “lavish and riotous living.” She charged Jack Atkinson had repeatedly interfered with official audits of their accounts. Carolyn alleged that she feared bodily harm. The Sunday night before the case was to commence, Alice, who had seemed healthy earlier that weekend, suddenly died, at Chateau Beaumont, at age 50. Her husband claimed he had had an autopsy conducted and it was a case of “anemia.” Her body was promptly cremated. The practice was still unusual in those days; he had to send Alice’s body to a crematorium in Cincinnati. Tom DeWitt, the Knoxville lawyer who had helped the elder Browns over the years, found the circumstances suspicious, but it’s not clear that anyone challenged Atkinson’s account. By then, the elderly Carolyn P. Brown had sold Casa Modena and moved to Tryon, N.C., near Flat Rock. Jack Atkinson wasn’t ready to leave that family without a piece of their fortune. He got a settlement equivalent to several years’ worth of real-estate income. With Atkinson out of the way, Carolyn P. Brown was assured that her late husband’s somewhat diminished fortune would flow toward her own welfare and toward her granddaughter, Marshall. Not long after Alice died, Marshall had married. Like her mother— the first time—she married an Army officer who would be stationed in Asia. Maj. Randall W. Barton spent most of their six-year marriage overseas during World War II, finally with the
occupation forces of Japan. The Bartons’ longest time together was their honeymoon, a round-the-world cruise. Afterwards, Marshall herself remained in Knoxville, living alone on Towanda Trail in Sequoyah Hills. As she turned 32, in early 1947, Marshall took ill, and checked into St. Mary’s Hospital. When she improved, she went back home. When she felt bad again, she went to Kingston Pike Hospital, the old brick house known as Oakwood at the corner of Concord Street. There she died. Her husband flew home to see her, but she was already unconscious. The newspapers didn’t name her illness. Carolyn was too ill to attend her granddaughter’s funeral. She was suddenly, in her 80s, alone in the world. Both the men she had married had died, as had her only child and both grandchildren. Her older sister Bessie, who had married a successful Paris banker, grew estranged from her own daughter, apparently over money. Bessie had died in 1930, an apparent suicide. Carolyn P. Brown, who had been born before the telephone and electric light, who had once been part of the extended family of Andrew Johnson, lived into the nuclear age. She had no close relatives when she died on July 4, 1949. She was buried under a stone cross at Highland Memorial in Bearden, alongside her husband and granddaughter, Marshall. Alice’s resting place, if one exists, is unknown. Carolyn P. Brown had never been personally associated with UT. Neither she nor her daughter nor granddaughter attended. Her expectation was that her husband’s fortune would go to establish a new girls’
school in Knoxville. UT President C.E. Brehm argued persuasively that it should go to the university. Tennessee had plenty of girls’ schools, he said, and didn’t need another. Moreover, Brown’s original intent was to leave the money to mature to $25 million before endowing the Carolyn P. Brown School for Girls. Brehm did some calculating, and figured that wouldn’t happen until 2048. He convinced the New York trustees. Some Knoxville trustees insisted that the girls’ school idea had merit. Chattanooga had a private girls’ school; Knoxville didn’t. But starting a new school is hard. Within a few months after Mrs. Brown’s death, the pro-UT trustees prevailed; less than a year after Carolyn’s death, it was announced that the money would go toward a new UT student center. Brown’s fortune had eroded a bit, in allowances and settlements and a wide range of legal and accounting and bank fees, and was now just under $1.5 million. They built what was then UT’s biggest building with almost exactly the amount of money available from the Brown estate. Attorney DeWitt, one of the few people Carolyn P. Brown had reason to trust—he did everything, for years, pro bono—wrote some about his most perplexing case. Going back to his first discussions with John S. Brown in the 1920s, DeWitt remarked, “If I had known what I know at this time, I would have told Mr. Brown to throw his entire fortune into the Tennessee River.” The original source of John Brown’s wealth was that he had capitalized the production of Weston Fulton’s invention. By a crazy coincidence, Brown’s legacy will be torn down along with Fulton’s only remaining residence, the once-stylish old house on Temple Street, later known as Volunteer Boulevard, that he gave to UT in the late 1920s as a memorial to his son, a UT student killed in a Kingston Pike car wreck. Fulton’s home, where the inventor lived with his family before they moved into the more-famously extravagant mansion on Lyons View, has been used as a construction headquarters for the new student-union project. But it will be torn down along with the student center his close friend John Brown never knew he endowed. April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9
PERSPECTIVES
Condo Comeback Knoxville’s downtown market for buyers rather than just renters sees a resurgence BY JOE SULLIVAN
F
or most of the decade prior to the housing- and mortgage-market meltdowns in 2008, condominiums were prime movers in downtown Knoxville’s remarkable residential surge. With the crash, however, financing for condo developers and buyers (which are intertwined) virtually dried up, and hardly any additional units have been built since then. Not that the constraints on condos have put much of a crimp into downtown’s ongoing residential growth, mind you. Resourceful developers with good track records have found fi nancing for apartments more readily available, and the demand for them has seemed almost insatiable. David Dewhirst, to name just one, reckons he’s converted more than four times as many buildings and dwelling units into apartments over the past seven years than the 57 units he renovated as condos in preceding years. And Buzz Goss is well on his way to completing construction of by far the largest new apartment complex that downtown has ever seen, the 255-unit Marble Alley off State Street. Yet the penchant of many wouldbe downtown dwellers to own rather than rent hasn’t gone away. And with the gradual easing of lending constraints and strengthening of borrower confidence as the economy has recovered, the market for more condos is showing signs of a resurgence. Consider: • Developer Jeff rey Nash is well along with the renovation of a former warehouse on Central near Magnolia into 10 condos. Presales of the mostly two-bedroom units are due to begin within a month for occupancy next
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spring. The English native has given a distinctive London touch to the development, as he’s done with most of his others, including the Crown & Goose gastropub. Its name, “The Mews,” connotes carriage houses fronting on an alley, and the greenspace onto which the condos will open has been named Mews Way. • Tim Hill, of Hatcher-Hill Properties, has razed on Vine Avenue atop Summit Hill for the construction of 10 condos, several of which will be priced “north of $650,000 and $850,000” and feature two-car garages. While the project is still in the design phase and there are no presales as yet, Hill insists his fi nancing is fi rm and that he is proceeding toward a spring 2016 completion date. • Both on its website and via the maven of downtown residential Realtors, Kimberly Dixon Hamilton, the somewhat mysterious development firm of Henry & Wallace has been promoting presales of 12 condos on the upper floors of the Century Building in Gay Street’s 300 block. But to judge by the absence of any windows on the north and south exterior walls of the building, that conversion hasn’t proceeded very far. And a Henry & Wallace spokesperson has “no comment” on the status of the project. • Looming on the horizon is a much larger development on the block of North Gay street that was long graced by Regas Restaurant. Realtor/ developer Joe Petre is the general manager of a partnership that’s shaping plans for the block that’s now known as Regas Square. He foresees up to 100 condos going into a new six-story building, plus ground-floor
retail on which Petre says he and his partners hope to start construction by late summer. (The building that housed the landmark restaurant has been sold separately to the Knoxville Leadership Foundation as a haven for not-for-profits.) Petre’s credentials include successful development of just about the only downtown condos undertaken since the 2008 crash: namely, the 19 units in the Southeastern Glass Building at the corner of Jackson and Broadway. The resurgence of the condo may well reflect pent-up demand that’s been awaiting relaxation of the severe constraints on credit imposed by the 2008 debacle of foreclosures and defaults on mortgage-backed securities. Now, according to Nash and Hill, fi nancing is becoming more readily and expansively available to qualified buyers. “Where there used to be a 15 percent deposit requirement, it’s down to 5 percent,” Nash reports. Meanwhile, Hill cautions that “We still have a way to go to get back to where we were before the crash, I think that as long as interest rates stay low we will see a steady increase in demand.” Millennials and empty-nesters are the two prime breeds of prospective downtown condo buyers. “The empty-nesters moving in from the suburbs for the attractions of an urban lifestyle are the component we didn’t see coming,” Hill says. When it comes to renting versus buying, Nash contends there are compelling reasons to buy right now for anyone who plans to stay put for any length of time. He insists that, for a residence of any given size and amenities, the monthly payments on a 95 percent mortgage at 5 percent interest are lower than the monthly rent on a comparable apartment. His comparison takes property taxes and homeowner-association fees on a condo into account as well. Another incentive to buy is, of course, the potential for gain on the investment, albeit coupled with a risk of loss. Dixon Hamilton advises that, of the 26 downtown condo resales she brokered last year, “the overwhelming majority of the sellers experienced double-digit appreciation from their original purchase price.” So even through the worst housing-market debacle in nearly a century, most downtown condo owners have fared well.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11
BAL NCING ACT
Parents weigh child-care concerns against potential benefits of a “balanced calendar” in Knox County BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN
T
ake a two-week vacation for every nine weeks you spend trapped behind a school desk. To your average kid, it probably sounds like heaven. But it could be reality if the Knox County school board votes to shift to a “balanced calendar,” which shortens summer but adds hefty breaks between academic quarters. Many parents like the idea of having more flexible vacation time. But what if you can’t take off work and don’t have Grandma around to watch the kids? Will you be able to find brief, nearby child care you can afford? What about the preschools that set their calendars based on the public schools’? (Try finding three-week child care for a toddler in late winter.) These are the questions parents are posing to Knox County Schools officials and daycare providers. At more than 30 public meetings representing all the schools, school officials listened and answered the questions they could about the proposed calendar. But in many cases, no one knows the answers yet. Elizabeth Alves, chief academic officer for Knox County Schools, says the balanced calendar isn’t a done deal. So far, the most common concern raised by parents is child
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care, she says. The district also invited child-care providers to two public meetings about the balanced calendar last week. “I definitely hear the working parents—they are just scared to death,” says Pam Walker, executive director of Kids Place Inc., a nonprofit organization that operates a preschool in East Knoxville and provides after-school care at 10 elementary schools. This year, about 150 school-age kids attended spring-break camp at Kids Place’s sole campus outside the schools. “But some parents left [their elementary-age kids] latch-key because the drive is too much. I don’t want us to go back to that,” Walker said at one of the district’s public meetings last week. “I am afraid for the single moms and all the people who just don’t have much support.” The change could also send a curveball to families with preschool-age children, since many preschools follow the Knox County Schools calendar. The state requires smaller class sizes for preschoolers, so many camps and school-based programs are closed to children under 5.
HELPING KIDS CATCH UP—FOR A PRICE
Knox County is considering two possibilities for the balanced calendar: At
the end of each 45-day quarter, students would have either a two- or a three-week break. Those extra “intersession” days would be pulled from the traditional summer break, reducing summer to either 43 or 28 days off. The public seems more interested in the model using two-week breaks, Alves said at a public meeting last week. In theory, shorter summer breaks reduce the amount of learning loss between school years, and the intersessions provide extra time to help struggling students. Alves acknowledges that research supporting this is sparse. “But many of the studies do show a positive impact, particularly for students who are struggling or are at risk,” she says. “The research is pretty clear on this:
It does improve student and teacher attendance and morale, improves student behavior, and reduces discipline incidents.” While few districts use the balanced calendar, Knox County would not exactly be a pioneer, even locally. Maryville and Alcoa have used the model for many years. One elementary school and a preschool in Oak Ridge also used a balanced calendar for more than a decade, and that entire school district is switching to a balanced calendar starting this fall. These districts are all much smaller than Knox County’s. But Alves says district leaders have also sought advice from the school district in Reno, Nev., a larger system that has switched successfully to the balanced calendar. There are a few significant
“I am afraid for the single moms and all the people who just don’t have much support.” — PAM WALKER, Kids Place Inc.
differences between what local school districts with balanced calendars do and what Knox County is proposing. Oak Ridge and Maryville are offering classes to students during the intercessions: intervention for those who are struggling, and enrichment for those who are advanced. It’s unclear whether Knoxville will. Alcoa has offered intervention at its middle school during the breaks but will probably stop, says schools director Brian Bell, who prefers getting everyone out of the building to return refreshed. Knox County school leaders would like to offer intervention, Alves says, but the district may not be able to afford it. Parents like Julie Williams, who serves on the Knox County Schools’ district advisory council, question making the change if intervention isn’t offered. “I’m not crazy about it,” she says. “Is it really helping the people it’s supposed to help, or is it just making their lives harder?” Alves says the school board will likely decide in May or June whether to move to a balanced calendar for the 2016-17 school year (or later). But the board won’t be asked to vote until officials “at least conceptually” understand the cost and proposed school locations for intersession classes, Alves says. It’s possible summer school and after-school grants could be redirected to cover the cost of teacher pay and student transportation for intervention, she says.
NO CHILD LEFT ALONE
The availability of child care is another key difference between Knox County Schools and other local
COMMUNITY SURVEY Knox County parents, teachers, students, and community members will have a chance to sound off about the perks and pitfalls the balanced calendar through a community survey in the next few weeks. The Knoxville Chamber will help distribute the survey to its contacts. The survey will also be available directly on the school system’s website: knoxschoolsorg. Comments on the proposal may be emailed to balancedcalendar@knoxschools.org.
“If you do this, it affects your whole community: when college starts, when summer jobs start, even access to healthy meals for kids on free and reduced lunch.” — MARTY TROUTMAN, director of the West Hills Baptist Preschool and Kindergarten districts using the balanced calendar. The others all offer low-cost, full-day child care at the schools during intersession breaks, including summer break. Knox County Schools contracts with nonprofit child-care organizations to provide after-school care at many elementary schools, but for the last two years those programs have not been allowed to operate at schools during breaks. That has been a problem for families, say Walker (with Kids Place) and Sindy Dawkins-Schade, executive director of Shades of Development, which provides after-school care at four rural elementary schools. Dawkins-Schade says she surveyed parents who use her program and found many were fearful about where their children would go during the intersessions. Although programs like Kids Place and the YMCA offer camps at locations outside school during breaks, for parents who work several jobs or rely on public transportation, a longer drive can be tricky. At a public meeting last week, Knox County Schools chief of staff Russ Oaks said schools use breaks to do maintenance such as painting and floor-buffing that can’t be done with students nearby. But Kids Place officials suggested that day care be allowed at certain geographically chosen schools that could serve children from several nearby school zones while maintenance happens at other schools. Oaks said the district would consider the idea. The YMCA provides after-school care at many West Knoxville schools
and off-site camps during summer and spring break. Lori Humphreys, YMCA district director of child care services, says the program whic would probably expand that model to cover intersessions. Helen Wimbley, who owns ABC Kiddie Academy and East Knoxville Learning Center, said although she was unfamiliar with the proposed calendar change she’d like to serve school kids during the breaks if she can get trained teachers to step in. She notes that day-care teachers must generally have background checks, a physical, and 18 months of training. But, she says, “It’s a matter of day-care providers sitting down together and deciding how to do this and meet with DHS licensing counselors.” Kids Place also expects challenges finding teachers for two-week periods. Many of their staffers are college students who would probably couldn’t teach during the middle of a semester, says program manager Josh Allis. Some teachers, particularly at part-day preschool programs, also have children in public school and might be unable to work during breaks. Unlike their older counterparts, preschool students get little benefit from changes in routine. “We need to see how it fits in with our younger students who are going to be coming to you very soon,” said one preschool representative at a recent public meeting. Marty Troutman, director of the West Hills Baptist Preschool and Kindergarten, says her program generally follows the Knox Schools calendar, but she doubts parents would want that to continue with a balanced calendar.
“They can’t afford a two-week vacation three times a year,” she says. Plus, “with little kids, routine is really important. Starting and stopping is really hard for them.” The change would raise other questions. Would a longer school year lead to increased preschool tuition? Would some camps be eliminated? “If you do this, it affects your whole community: when college starts, when summer jobs start, even access to healthy meals for kids on free and reduced lunch,” Troutman says. Tate’s Day Camp, a popular summer-long camp in West Knoxville, sent an email to parents in February strafing the balanced calendar and questioning the quality of child care during the breaks. “We can’t imagine finding qualified people that could work that crazy schedule unless the teachers step up to fill the gap, and if we’re using teachers, why don’t we just let them teach and call it school?” stated the letter, which was signed by camp director Chris Strevel. But some parents are enthusiastic about the balanced calendar. “I am 100 percent in favor of it,” says attorney Sara Compher-Rice, who would like to be able to take family vacations during cheaper, off-peak times and to send her son to specialty camps during the breaks. She says she’d prefer her 8-year-old didn’t waste up to a month every fall on review because of summer learning loss. Alex Goldman, who teaches middle school in Oak Ridge but whose sons attend Bluegrass Elementary School in Knox County, says he supports the change but wishes both school districts would go even further: Adopt a “real” year-round calendar. “To me, that’s the one that makes the most sense in terms of bridging the achievement gap,” Goldman says. “If we’re going to change it, let’s go all-in.” He expresses surprise that some parents are concerned about child care, saying that if they manage over the current breaks, the same solutions should work for the same costs during intersessions. “My feeling is child caregivers and camps are going to be clamoring for everyone’s business,” he says.
@knoxmercury.com
Online Sidebar: Nearby school systems share some lessons learned about their own balanced-calendar school schedules. April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 13
John Coykendall’s efforts to preserve heirloom seeds may be homespun, but they have global consequences BY ROSE KENNEDY PHOTOS BY DAVID LUTTRELL
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
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ven his dog. John Coykendall seeks heirloom seeds to preserve from many different sources: childhood friends and seed-saving pen pals, visitors to the Walland, Tenn. Blackberry Farm luxury hotel and restaurant where he works as master gardener, and gardeners from his travels to Austria and Hungary and Romania. But this time the colorful mix of dried heirloom beans came to him in a paper sack. In his dog’s mouth. “We were at the farm I own in Bybee, Tenn., about 200 acres near Newport, and I was planting potatoes one March. I looked up and here comes my dog Socks with that bag, trotting down the farm road. It had all different color of cornfield beans—a neighbor probably left them out to plant. Socks never did say where she found them.” Coykendall planted the beans—of course he did—and still has a large enough supply of Socks Beans to assure their continuation as a bean variety 17 years later. But that is a mere footnote in his seed-saving career. He has preserved or “grown out” some 500 varieties of heirlooms, the seeds from old-time and open-pollinated varieties that are able to regenerate from their own seeds with each new planting. His focus is Appalachian-region beans,
which account for 275 of his saved seed varieties. He is part of a circle of 13,000 international members of the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a group celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. He’s one of the group’s—and the nation’s—most prolific seed savers, yet he’s much more than that in the seed-saving community, says SSE Executive Director John Torgrimson. “He has often gone in search of the rare varieties that a small group might be saving or sharing—he’s a great proponent of making sure those varieties are not lost,” Torgrimson says. “He understands these varieties were important to someone—or a family, or a clan—as part of their heritage. He has a tremendous reservoir of knowledge, and he’ll share it willingly with anyone. That’s what makes John special. How to save seeds, why to save seeds—he understands it all.” And though he may look like an ordinary East Tennessee country fellow in his overalls and work boots, Coykendall and his seed-saving peers may have the preservation of the world’s food supply in their dirtstained, gardening hands. Their home-dried bean pods and envelopes mailed to fellow gardeners with, say, Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry seeds inside are counterbalancing the
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 15
almost entirely to a new fungus. SSE, the largest non-government seed preserver in the U.S., maintains a collection of more than 20,000 heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable and herb seeds, with three vaults that the group describes as “sort of a museum for varieties that haven’t changed with their environment.” But the efforts of seed-saving home gardeners are even more critical. They grow in isolation gardens and select seeds from the strongest plants and most desirable produce—saving those that have best adapted to changing conditions. “These seeds have the collective power to withstand unforeseen pestilence and plant disease, climate change, and limited habitat,” says Torgrimson.
C
“Once a variety is genetically polluted, it’s just in there. You can’t ever go back.” — JOHN COYKENDALL
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
precarious situation created with industrial farming in the past century. As of 2013, about half of American cropland was covered by genetically-modified crops, says the SSE. No matter whether feelings about their safety are borne out, the reality is that those seeds are all patented and cannot be saved or grown the following year. Even the remaining farmland is becoming more and more generic; in the past century or so, 75 percent of edible plants worldwide have gone by the wayside—and the U.S. has lost more than 95 percent, giving it just 5 percent of the options it once had for plant foods, according to SSE. Just five cereals make up 60 percent of our caloric intake, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. This makes the American food system, in a word, fragile—somewhat akin to how the Irish potato famine came about, relying on one variety of potato for sustenance and losing it
oykendall is doing his part—most of the heirlooms he’s preserved are Appalachian by origin or adaptation, the majority beans and cowpeas. It’s almost as if he can’t help himself; he’s drawn to the heirlooms and can always fi nd room for one more in a corner at Blackberry or isolated in its own acre at his farm. The Tennessee Sweet Potato Pumpkin was the fi rst to draw his interest, his fi rst heirloom obsession. He saw it in 1959. That March he came across a seed catalog in the untouched detritus of the long-abandoned Ebenezer Railroad Station in West Knoxville. The William Henry Maule 1913 seed company caught his eye, then held him spellbound for the next 56 years. He was fascinated by the world of heirloom crops it described, along with illustrations, and vowed to grow as many as he could, little realizing the search for those varieties would consume another 30 years. The sweet potato pumpkin was like a fi rst-edition Superman comic, or Citizen Kane’s Redbud. “I’d looked for it for years and nobody knew anything about it,” he says. The variety is known for its bell shape, runners that grow up to 20 feet, cream color with green stripes—and for its massive productivity of fruits that can be baked or fried. He joined Seed Savers Exchange in 1990, and found four fellow members offering just that seed. From there, the race was on. He remembers pretty much every variety he’s ever grown. The Socks Beans are one of the very few without meticulous records of their origins, usually noted
in strong, spare handwriting in moleskin notebooks Coykendall carries everywhere. One example is Mississippi Brown Cotton, pre-1860, grown by slaves and brought to the Virginia-based Southern Exposure seed catalog by Coykendall via a plantation near Natchez, Miss. The 90 varieties he offers to other seed savers/home gardeners through the SSE yearbook have evocative names, like the Cream and Calico Cowpea or the Civil War Lima Bean, “white, maroon-black, and two-toned maroon white brought home to Kentucky by veterans returning from the war.” Sometimes his notes get personal, like the October pea he describes as having round off-white seed with a tan hilum. “It is said this pea will not bear until October. I have grown it for two years and it starts bearing in August.” This was a big deal for him starting many years before Monsanto created a furor over the potential hazards of GMOs. “I don’t in any way condemn it wholesale,” he says. “Just when it tries to replace everything else. To put it in an artistic sense, imagine going to the Riijksmuseum in Amsterdam and they’ve thrown away the Rembrandts and the Masters because they got the new artists’ latest modern things.” He frets about genetic pollution: “A lot of our original corns, for example, have been contaminated with genetically-modified corns in South America,” he says. “Because of cross pollination, they now have GMO genes in them. That’s happening all over, but it’s particularly worrisome in Mexico and South America, because that’s corn’s genetic homeland. It’s their ‘center of origin.’ “Once a variety is genetically polluted, it’s just in there. You can’t ever go back.” Coykendall, though, tries to stay one step ahead, and did long before heirloom veggies became the darlings of farmers’ market shoppers and farm-to-table chefs. He bought his fi rst farm in 1978, and the adjoining one in 1985. “At that time, I grew what I liked and I saved it because I knew if I was going to have it I had to be the caretaker of it.” He remembers hybrids cutting a swathe through home gardens and farms. “The latest hybrids touted producing more, and farmers and gardeners found that very attractive,”
he recalls. “They would put in the new stuff and didn’t bother saving the seed from the older varieties. They didn’t realize the value of what they had.” He’s an avid foodie, but when pressed to name a wonderful bean variety, or a couple, he can’t think of a favorite. “It’s kind of like having grandchildren, you wouldn’t want to rate one above the other,” he says with a smile. But he favors the “old-time” varieties, because they’ll keep past when the pods mature and still be tender. “Plus they have that nice shell bean in them, and you can cook the pods and the shellies all in one big mess.” As for other beans, other vegetables, he doesn’t judge, or tries not to. Blue lake green beans try his patience, though. “I heard a woman recommend them as ‘the’ heirloom variety to grow,” he says, his voice dripping with the disdain usually reserved for bore worms and rats that harvest rare
cowpeas at his Tennessee farm. “Blue Lake 274! They’re gonna be tough; they introduced the tough trait when they wanted them to be easier to harvest and to have a long shelf life. Blue lake beans, why, I wouldn’t have them on my place—or on my plate, either.”
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owadays, the specter of Svalbard looms. First opened in 2008, 600 miles from the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault plunges 500 feet into an icy mountain in the Norwegian Arctic. It houses almost three-quarters of a million seed samples, with the idea that its climate and design will allow it to survive climate change, nuclear war, an asteroid strike. It’s fascinating, but it’s not what John Coykendall’s work is about. “Not global,” he says. Rather, he reveres the heirloom’s adaptability to growing conditions in a micro-climate such as Tennessee or Appalachia.
Who knows what trial might be thrown at the food supply in coming growing seasons, which varietal might be able to resist a disease or pestilence? It may just be one that Coykendall has “grown out,” one of those beans he discovered in Hungary or Louisiana and grew long enough to assure its survival. He’s careful to note that this is a borrowed quote, and he’s not sure
where it came from. “Any one bean, any one vegetable. It would be like if you had keys to 1,000 rooms, which one could you afford to throw away?” And it’s not just calories, or sustenance, he’s working to preserve. “We have so many unique things here, so much diversity. Some of these stocks I save, if we lost them, we’d lose that history, and heritage, and the culinary values.”
Try This at Home!
While John Coykendall has 90 different varieties of seed listed for sale in the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange yearbook for 2015, he encourages any home gardener to start saving seeds on whatever scale possible. The start, of course, is growing an heirloom variety worthy of saving seeds from, keeping in mind that beans and peas are the easiest to save, and tomatoes the most complicated. Unlike commercial seed packets, most of the tiny batch seeds you can purchase from listed members at SSE (seedsavers.org), or from other reputable heirloom seed sources like his buddy Bill Best at the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center in Berea, Ky. (heirlooms.org), involve enough seed for a home gardener to “grow out” enough seeds for a reasonable crop the second year, says Coykendall. “You may grow only enough to save the first season, or a little more.” Once you’ve grown something worth the trouble, here is a synopsis of how to save seeds drawn from Coykendall and other gardening staff as part of the cookbook The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm by Sam Beall: “For cowpeas, English peas, beans, and okra, simply allow a few of each pod to dry on the vine. Collect the dried pods in the fall and release the seeds from the pods. Store the seeds in a tightly sealed, dry jar away from light until next season. “For ‘wet’ seeds from eggplants, peppers, squash, pumpkin, watermelon, and cucumber, cut or squeeze open a ripe fruit and remove the seeds. Place them in a fine sieve and rinse thoroughly under cold water. Spread the rinsed seeds out on waxed paper and place in a cool area away from direct sunlight to dry completely, about 1 week. Store the seeds in a paper envelope placed inside a tightly sealed jar. “Heirloom tomato seeds must first be fermented to remove their gelatinous membrane. Once the seeds have been removed from the fruits, place them in a bowl and let stand at room temperature for three to four days. Rinse them thoroughly in a fine sieve to remove all the goo, and then follow the directions for drying and storing wet seeds.”
SAVE THE DATE
Skillshare and Plant Sale
CAC Beardsley Community Farm, 1719 Reynolds St. Saturday, April 25, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Workshops on growing oyster mushrooms and organic disease management are on the roster for the skillshare, along with the much-anticipated annual plant sale featuring herbs, flowers, and heirloom peppers, and tomatoes. Children’s activities will be available all day. At 3 p.m., they’ll host “Saving Seeds: Preserving the Past, Securing the Future,” with Steve Todd of Neubert Springs Gardens, who also grows seed for Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. He’ll cover basics, along with how to grow plants specifically for seed saving and how to avoid unwanted genetics. Price for this session is $10 for walk-ins and $7 pre-event from brownpapertickets. com/event/1409307.
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17
“My dad’s attitude was, ‘Do anything but be a banker like I was.’” — JOHN COYKENDALL
SKETCH ARTIST Never far from one of the moleskin notebooks he uses as journals, John Coykendall’s botanical drawings grace some of the plates at Blackberry Farm. He also takes notes on his annual trips to Washington Parish, La. “I have buddies named Arlio Bryant and Homer Graves, and we sit on the porch and whatever come out goes in my book,” he says. “Old ways of farming, picking cotton by hand, anything at all to with the old ways—any of it’s worth recording.”
Coykendall turns 72 on April 17, but he still works full time as a master gardener at Blackberry Farm, part of a team of aptly named artisans of the FarmStead who keep Forbes Travel Guide four-star-rated restaurant chefs swimming in heirloom and regional produce, meats, eggs, and cheese. He says he just doesn’t identify with being 72, and would like to go on working forever. He’s at ease there, in an outbuilding called simply the “Garden Shed,” near the acreage with its sandy loam. “A few million years ago, this would have been beach-front property,” he says. Here, he and head gardener Jeff Ross, among others, tend to all manner of produce: radish sprouts, Red Russian kale, potato onions, garlic scapes, and more on a March afternoon. Later in the year, they’ll average 25 varieties of heirloom tomatoes. “Gosh, that’s just my favorite time of year,” says Coykendall. Most days, he wears overalls, purchased with blue-checked shirts from the Newport Dry Goods store near his own farm. “They have a lot of that stuff. It looks like the 1930s. I love the place,” he says. 18
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
Coykendall uses a good sharp hoe in early spring, constantly treading the rows in Blackberry Farm’s gardens to clip off the top of young weeds before they get larger and become a real problem. He whittles, shells bean, and strings short lengths of beans to make “leather britches” that can dry by the fi re, which imparts a smoky flavor when they’re eaten in late winter, Appalachian style. He sits in a giant white rocker when he takes his ease at the garden shed at Blackberry, and jokes, “I can’t sit long, or I’ll snore.” His business info is in a small box labeled “Johnny’s callin’ cards,” and while he owns a cell phone, well, “I used it one time and threw it in a drawer,” he says. He has Facebook, but only signs on once a month or so, max, with a friend’s help. No email. But this picture does not point back to the expected origins. He tells guests to Blackberry that it certainly would make it more romantic if he could say he was born in a shack on the hillside and was plowing with a mule by the time he was 10 years old. But that’s not how it was, not at all. He
is, in fact, a city boy. He attended Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Fl., then went to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for grad school in graphic arts, etching, and lithography, and lived in Holland and Austria for two years after that. He lived and worked as an artist and printmaking instructor in Boston for 12 years, before returning to his boyhood home in Knoxville in the mid-’80s. This was in Sequoyah Hills, where his family first lived in 1949, into a house his grandfather built in 1927. He is an alumnus of West High School and of Second Presbyterian Church’s Boy Scout Troop 6. His father was a founding member in 1915. “We had no farming whatsoever in the family,” he says. “Dad was a banker. Believe it or not he started in the Depression years, with Morris Plan Bank.” Grandfather Samuel Decker Coykendall owned Regal Manufacturing Company on State Street. “It would have been the equivalent of Levi Strauss, manufacturing blue jean overalls, and jumper coats—the blue denim with lining inside.”
His mother’s father, John Jennings Jr., did have a 700-acre farm in upper Knox County on the Grainger County line, but he didn’t work it. “He was in Congress in Washington all the time, 1939 to 1951.” Still, somehow, farming came to Coykendall, much like those Socks Beans. Like in 1961, when he earned his spending money working the farm for Ambrose Holford, then head of the University of Tennessee music department. Holford took Coykendall as “extra baggage” when the UT singers went to Vienna for a couple weeks. He stayed in the little village of Seeham, and met people who are still his friends today. After his undergrad years at Ringling, he went to Europe again, fi rst visiting his family’s home city in Holland and then taking his second visit to Austria. Since then, Austria and nearby Hungary have been “a huge part of my life,” he says. It’s no coincidence that among the hand-turned wood bowls of dried seed in the Blackberry Farm garden shed are Austrian winter peas for a cover crop and mottled black and maroon scarlet runner beans, or that
he grows all manner of Hungarian peppers for the chefs. His parents were supportive, especially of the art career, he says. “My dad’s attitude was, ‘Do anything but be a banker like I was.” He may be from an old family— two old families, both arriving in America in the 1600s—and have inherited his house and a bit more when his parents died, but for the rest he’s “old-time self-made” Coykendall says. He still works full time at Blackberry, and works his own farm, too: tills his own soil, reaps what he sows, works to pay for his travels. “What’s that old saying? ‘I made my money the old-fashioned way, I inherited it?’” he jokes. “That’s not me.” Dollars and cents, worldly possessions, that’s not how Coykendall defines riches in any case. He revels in the theme garden he grew at Blackberry in 2013, for the 100-year anniversary of the Maule catalog he discovered all those years ago. “I sourced 127 different varieties from the catalog, and grew 45 of them,” he says proudly. Just as quickly, he’s off to show a visitor what’s done with the turnips going to seed in a bevy of yellow flowers across from the shed. One cuts the tender little side stems— bolts—with their closed seeds on the tops, and pops them in the mouth fresh or maybe steams them or adds them to a salad. At just the right point, they are wonderfully sweet. “These,” says Coykendall, “We prize them very much.”
Cooking Corn on a Hoe A connoisseur of corn, that’s John Coykendall—and he’s a corn historian and cook, as well. Though his employer, Blackberry Farm inn and resort in Walland, Tenn., doesn’t grow sweet corn due to space restraints, a favorite they do grow for drying and milling is Hickory King. The heirloom variety has two large, well-filled ears per stalk and, as the story goes, used to be called Bingo Corn in its Appalachian homeland because the dried kernels were large enough to use as bingo markers. Coykendall recommends Hickory King for a home gardener. “You don’t have to have a huge patch, and you can grind out a good bit of it with a hand grinder to make your own grits or cornmeal,” he says. Dried
and milled Hickory King yields a “real old-fashioned taste,” he adds. “Some of the store-bought corn meal you get today is almost powdery. This has a good bite to it.” Both the Blackberry chefs and Coykendall the home cook favor Anson Mills corn meal when they purchase. The Columbia, S.C.-based mill and its owner Glenn Roberts preserve native heirloom grains as a life’s work. Coykendall loves to cook up a “mess” of beans and a pone of cornbread, or hoecakes, using this recipe from Blackberry Farm’s second standout cookbook, The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm by Sam Beall, published in 2012.
HOECAKES 1 cup fine stone-ground yellow cornmeal 1 tsp. kosher salt 1 large egg 1/3 cup buttermilk plus more if needed 2 Tbs. lard, divided In a medium bowl, whisk together the cornmeal and salt. In another bowl, whisk together the egg and buttermilk, then pour into the cornmeal mixture. Stir only until moistened, adding a splash more buttermilk if needed to make the batter smooth. Line a wire rack with paper towels and place it next to the stove. Heat a large cast-iron skillet over high heat and add 1/2 tablespoon of the lard. When the lard begins to sizzle, spoon in enough batter to make four 3-inch hoecakes, spacing them evenly in the skillet. Cook until the cakes are golden brown and set on the bottom, 1 1/2-2 minutes. Flip the cakes and cook the other side until golden, about 1 minute. Transfer to the wire rack. Repeat with the remaining batter and lard. Serve warm. TRUE VITTLES: TRADITIONAL HOECAKES “Our master gardener John Coykendall still enjoys making true hoecakes when he has the chance. If you, too, want to experience the real thing, let a pit or grill fire die down until the coals are blowing orange on the bottom and covered in gray ash on top. Hold the cleaned blade of a hoe over the heat for 2 to 3 minutes and then grease it lightly with lard; the blade should be hot enough for the fat to sizzle. Ladle on enough batter to make one or two 3-inch cakes, depending on the size of the hoe blade. Hold the hoe about 4 inches over the coals and cook the cake until golden brown and set on the bottom, 1 1/2 to 2 minutes. Flip it with the edge of a knife and cook the other side for about 1 minute. Transfer to a tin camp plate and repeat with the remaining batter.” Recipe courtesy The Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm (Clarkson Potter, 2012) by Sam Beall
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19
P rogram Notes
Public Arthouse The Public Cinema film series winds down and looks ahead
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Photo by Mar Peckmezian
n February, Paul Harrill and Darren Hughes launched the Public Cinema, a quietly ambitious series of seven independently produced recent movies shown at the Knoxville Museum of Art’s recently updated ground-floor auditorium—“vital works of contemporary international and American cinema … that might otherwise be unseen or overlooked by Knoxville audiences,” as they describe the films on the Public Cinema website. It’s been unlike any film series here in recent memory. Even in an age of on-demand streaming, some very good and interesting films remain hard to see. The Public Cinema screenings, mostly on Sunday afternoons, have included a European festival favorite (Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat); an intimate documentary (Gabe Klinger’s Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater) and a postmodern fictional documentary (Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s La última película); a low-budget 16mm comedy (Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s L for Leisure); and a romantic comedy starring Jason Schwartzman and Elizabeth Moss (Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip). None of them are available online, and none have
been widely distributed in theaters. Harrill, a filmmaker and instructor at the University of Tennessee (his debut feature, Something, Anything, premiered this year), and Hughes, a critic and communications professional, had been interested in showing contemporary arthouse movies here for a while. When KMA offered the space last fall, it took just a few months for them to get it off the ground. Now, as the first phase of the series starts winding down, Harrell and Hughes are considering what will come next. The series will take a summer break before resuming. The organizers don’t know exactly what will come after that—or how they’ll pay for it. “Right now, basically every film we’ve shown has been through the generosity of the filmmaker,” Hughes says. “We have no budget whatsoever. I happen to do marketing and communications and design for a living, so that’s how we’ve gotten that stuff taken care of. We have a couple of different ideas for how we’ll get that taken care of, but we haven’t quite solved it yet.” Hughes says Nashville’s nonprofit Belcourt theater offers an ideal model. The Belcourt, funded by grants, ticket sales, and public money, showcases a sizable program of contemporary arthouse and foreign films alongside retrospectives. “Ideally, we would love to keep everything free, so that means either private gift support, foundation support, or support through maybe strengthening the relationship with UT. … We need to make some decisions about our three-month plan, but what could this become in three years, what could it become in five years?” —Matthew Everett
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Shelf Life: Something Else!!!!
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
Music: The Black Cadillacs
Homecoming Queen EX-PLAINCLOTHES TRACY SINGER RETURNS TO TOWN WITH HER NEW BAND FROM NYC Two and a half years ago, Kym Hawkins, the lead singer for the now-defunct local pop-rock band Plainclothes Tracy, moved from Knoxville to New York to study creative writing at Sarah Lawrence College. She thought she was leaving music behind, at least until she finished her master’s degree. “But after about six months, I felt like I’d lost a huge part of my identity,” Hawkins writes in a recent email interview. “I started looking on Craigslist for a new band, but that wasn’t going far, so I started working as a luthier’s apprentice twice a week. I figured it would be a good skill to have, and it would be a place to meet musicians who are serious enough to get their instruments maintenanced.” While working at the music shop, Hawkins met Geoff Bennington and Paul Demyanovich, who had just started writing songs together. The trio recruited a rhythm section and have been performing around New York since early 2013 as Gillian.
thought I would wait until after I got the master’s degree,” Hawkins says. “I guess I got impatient.” Gillian is performing on Friday, April 17, at Scruffy City Hall with local madcap rockers the Crumbsnatchers and the Athens, Ga., dream-pop duo Powerkompany. They’re promoting their second EP, Colorize, which will be available at the show. (The EP’s title track was recently promoted by Spin.com.) The band is currently working on new songs based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, which could turn into the band’s first full-length album. Friday’s performance will be the band’s second Knoxville show, following a set at Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria last year with Johnny Astro and the Big Bang and Hudson K.
“I knew eventually I’d get back into music, but I
“It was nostalgic, for sure,” Hawkins says of that performance. “We had a blast, though—everyone hit it off well, and now we try to play with Hudson K every time they come through Brooklyn. Love those guys. We expect an even better turnout at this show, and I’m really looking forward to seeing some old friends.” —M.E.
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Video Review: Goodbye to Language
Book Review: Holy Cow
Shelf Life
Something Else!!!! New additions to Knox County Public Library’s AV collection BY CHRIS BARRETT AVISHAI COHEN
Dark Days (Anzic Records)
This is a pretty perfect record, with highly improvised trio, quartet, and quintet arrangements led by young trumpeter/composer Avishai Cohen. Bassist Omer Avital and drummer Naishee Waits, like Cohen, have minds as open to undefined structure as they do to polyharmony and shifting tempos. On “Dark Days, Darker Nights,” Cohen’s trumpet is often accompanied by a trippy twin that’s being processed electronically. It’s a splendid effect that allows listener—and maybe band—to feel both adventurous and safe. A fine outing, full of fresh and interesting sounds, including a few well-chosen standards treated neither irreverently nor sycophantically.
DARIUS JONES AND MATTHEW SHIPP Cosmic Lieder (AUM Fidelity)
This 2011 set of duets forms a conversation that’s a treat to overhear. Shipp’s piano is bright as ever, and he favors the right-hand side of the keyboard. Alto saxophonist Jones is both nimble and unpredictable. The sax asks questions of the piano. The piano ponders and occasionally retorts. “Jonesy” is a sweet change-up, and a seldom-heard side of Shipp’s thinking, evoking shades of Ellington.
NELS CLINE AND JULIAN LAGE Room (Mack Avenue)
Instrumental virtuosity with nowhere to go gets old fast. This record of guitar duets goes many places, all of them interesting, some surprising. More than a particular sound, Cline’s indie-rock pedigree seems to give him great confidence in and awareness of the power of quietness. Lage alternates between hushing himself to match and filling the space that Cline allows him. There’s a lot of pointillistic pizzicato, so when both players somehow find
themselves strumming complementary major chords in unison on “The Scent of Light,” there is an air of stumbled-upon jubilation.
THE BUDOS BAND
Burnt Offering (Daptone Records)
This record was made for the teenager who wants to play metal but whose parents insist that he join the marching band. The two musics need not be mutually exclusive, and, when thoughtfully combined, can kick some serious butt. Behold the evolution of afrobeat.
HILL STREET BLUES Seasons 1-7
In the era of CGI, it’s a challenge to recall a time when innovation relied upon content and presentation. Hill Street Blues aired from 1981 through ’87. It was among the first prime-time dramas to shoot documentary-style, using handheld cameras. It was among the first mainstream media to make reference to urban squalor, homelessness, and AIDS. And it was among the first TV shows to present the same characters both at work and at home. Hair and wardrobe notwithstanding, it has aged well—primarily thanks to the way above-average writing and acting.
THE WOODWRIGHT’S SHOP Seasons 1-6
Carolina carpenter Roy Underhill has been hosting this show since 1979. A likely explanation for its longevity is that people don’t tune in to see what’s new; they tune in to see what’s not. Underhill whips out functional furniture using awesome-looking antique adzes and drawknives and mallets and handsaws that he sharpens himself. A lot of current how-to TV is engineered more to dazzle than instruct. With some practice and patience, most people can do what Underhill demonstrates.
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April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21
Music
Sonic Twists The Black Cadillacs update their classic Southern-rock sound on a new EP BY MIKE GIBSON
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hen Knoxville’s Black Cadillacs sought to reimagine their sturdy brand of nouveau Southern rock with Pixies-esque guitars and other alt-rock flourishes, they found a willing—and very able—partner in Nashville producer Ken Coomer. With a sterling resume as drummer for Uncle Tupelo and then Wilco, Coomer not only had the chops but the vision to see where the band wanted to go and how to get them there. With Coomer at the helm, the Cadillacs released their new five-song self-titled EP in February.
“We wanted to be a little heavier, a little grungier. We had always been fans of the Pixies, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age. But it had never found its way into the writing until the last two years.” — WILL HORTON
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“When we were considering producers, he was one of the first people that wanted to work with us,” says Cadillacs frontman Will Horton. “He saw what we wanted from the songs and really enabled us to make that a reality in the studio. The musical ideas all originated from us rehearsing. But pulling it off on a recording was a whole other task. And he just got it.” After two strong albums of alternately winsome and potent traditional Southern rock—think Rolling Stones- and Faces-style blues rock filtered through a below-the-Ma-
son-Dixon aesthetic a la the Drive-By Truckers or early Kings of Leon—Horton says the Cadillacs had a collective instinct to bring to the fore some of the college-radio sounds of their youth. It was music they all loved that had never really found a place to reside alongside the band’s bucolic brand of blues and dusky, blue-eyed R&B. “These were things we had been wanting to do for a while,” Horton says. “We wanted to be a little heavier, a little grungier. We had always been fans of the Pixies, Nirvana, Queens of the Stone Age. But it had never found its way into the writing until the last two years.” A catalyst, says Horton, was a retreat the band took last spring. Holed up for a week in a cabin on a mountain, not far from Norris Lake, the band wrote most of the songs on the new EP, plus a few others, too. Horton says there are another 10 new Cadillacs songs—about an album’s worth—sitting around in various stages of the recording process. But with songs in hand, the band needed a producer. Some friends in Nashville introduced them to Coomer; Horton says the rest was easy. “He had already heard our music and had been a fan,” Horton says. “Then we came out to one of his shows
and visited his studio in East Nashville. And it just worked. From there, we knew he would be the guy.” Credit Coomer, then, because the new EP hits all the right notes. The Black Cadillacs still sound of a piece with All Them Witches and Run—the band’s first two offerings—but introduce fresh ideas and new sonic twists without compromising their core sound. In the meantime, the band is hoping to build on the momentum of a strong 2014. They played a slew of festivals last year—including Hangout, in Gulf Shores, Ala.—and toured Europe last spring. They’ve also seen a handful of songs picked up as background music for video games and television shows— including “Find My Own Way,” off Run. Now, says Horton, it’s gratifying to roll into college towns along the East Coast and hear Black Cadillacs songs playing on local college radio. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell how well you’re doing,” Horton says. “There’s so many things that are just out of your control. We have had some luck, with the festivals, and with having people put our songs on TV. Now we’re just taking things as they come. Our goal is to get out more music as soon as we can. And to keep on touring.”
WHO The Black Cadillacs with Sol Cat and Johnny Astro and the Big Bang WHERE Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.) WHEN Friday, April 17, at 8 p.m. HOW MUCH $15/$17 day of the show MORE INFO knoxbijou.com
Video
Added Dimension Jean-Luc Godard shifts his cultural provocation into 3D with Goodbye to Language BY LEE GARDNER
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inephiles love to condemn 3D as gaudy spectacle for philistines. So leave it to Jean-Luc Godard, the octogenarian enfant terrible of the arthouse pantheon, to take up the technology and prove how shallow—literally—most conceptions of it are. And as a bonus, the home-video release of 2014’s Goodbye to Language, on Blu-ray and streaming by Kino Lorber, embodies the limits of home-video technology and offers a tacit argument for the true cinema experience. What does all that mean? Foremost, it means that Godard retains his heavyweight-champion belt as a provocateur. The film itself stays in keeping with his late-period approach: shot on digital video (often tweaked for maximum visual overload), elliptical to
the point of opacity, visually arresting and thematically enigmatic. There’s a couple whose relationship seems to be coming apart (a JLG staple). The lithe distaff half spends a good deal of her screen time nude (ditto). There are intimations of cultural critique and disapproval. And, for what it’s worth, Godard spends a lot of time following around a cute dog. But while most filmmakers really only use 3D to give their ordinary images a slight bulge and the occasional intrusive pop, Godard uses it to create a palpable, almost unnerving sense of space onscreen. He often foregrounds a table or a dock piling to give extra depth and a hyper-real feel to his frames. In a couple of scenes, he even decouples the twinned 3D
cameras, sending one after a character walking out of the other’s frame, for an effect that literally warps the mind’s perceptive power (and, personally speaking, gave me a wicked headache). But you only get the true power of Goodbye to Language if you see it in 3D, as I did in a theater late last year. Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray offers the 3D version, but it will only play if you have a 3D television. Fortunately, the Blu-ray includes a bonus DVD with a 2D version of the fi lm, which is what I rewatched; presumably, that’s what will be streaming at Netfl ix and elsewhere, too. Without 3D, the film still works. In fact, the themes of communication failure and coarsening of expression and thought may come through stronger without every other sequence playing with your senses in an extreme way. (A bit at a sidewalk book sale where one set of hands browses Western classics while two other sets play with their phones strikes home either way.) But those who see Goodbye to Language through the most accessible and increasingly popular option for moviegoers these days—home video, on the couch—will experience it knowing that its literal depths are denied them.
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April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23
Books
Out to Pasture David Duchovny sort of satirizes a decade of foodies in his debut novel BY TRACY JONES
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all her Elsie, call her “old girl,” call her some kind of symbolic “every cow.” Just don’t ever refer to her as “the protein.” Elsie Bovary, the bovine heroine of actor David Duchovny’s snappy novel/ fable Holy Cow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), is leading the sweet life, literally, on a small farm in upstate New York. Eat grass, get milked, nuzzle other cows, sleep. Repeat 24/7. Her only nagging worry is the absence of her mom, who, like all cow moms, disappeared one day. You can see where this is going. The same place it was headed when Fern asked “Where is Father going with that ax?” in Charlotte’s Web, a classic that Duchovny cheerfully name-checks—along with Animal Farm, Babe, and Homer’s Odyssey— throughout Holy Cow, . Yes, his Elsie is one well-read, well-informed cow. (She also makes obligatory Star Wars references and knows the lyrics to Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.”) Somehow, though, while simmering in that literary and pop-culture stew, she’s never learned the ultimate fate of her species. She can pick Jerry Garcia out of a lineup, but she can’t tell you where hamburger comes from. When she finds out, by spying a documentary on industrial meat production through the farmer’s living-room window, she wrestles with depression and anger before formulating a madcap scheme to get to India, where she’ll be considered sacred. She’s joined by a fast-talking pig trying to get to Israel and a twitchy turkey on his way to Turkey. After outsmarting a self-hating lone wolf, an urban rat pack (the vermin kind, not the Vegas kind), and a smelling-impaired German
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shepherd at the airport, the trio careens through Turkey, the Middle East, and India before deciding there’s no place like home. Except if home is where they’re going to eat you. Maybe even then. Ultimately, the novel is not about animal rights, but about respect: Respect for one’s self, respect for others, respect for all our places in the great “circle of life.” (Name-check The Lion King? Check.) Left to their own instincts, Duchovny and his narrator argue, animals will happily live in a system where well-treated cows eat grass, well-fed humans eat steak, and everyone poops, sleeps, and procreates in the way the creator intended. By trying to impose their will on the system—depleting the water supply for large-scale farming, force-feeding farm animals antibiotics—humans are thumbing their noses at the food chain, “wearing it like it was a bauble.” “A spoonful of sugar helps the globe-warming, drought-inducing, superresistant-bacteria-creating medicine go down,” warns Elsie’s
cranky editor, and Duchovny—and Elsie—seem to have taken the point, with a light-as-air satire that doesn’t delve too far beyond the lessons we’ve all had drilled into us from nearly a decade of the “eat local,” “farm to table” enthusiasts who have captured the foodie dialogue. Meat can be murder, except when you know the cow’s name and are assured that someone scratched her behind the ears from time to time. Once Elsie remembers that she wasn’t part of the global industrial meat complex, but lived on a small farm with a nice old farmer who did just that, she’s suspiciously content to think about making her way back there. That’s convenient for Duchovny, who doesn’t seem to want to come to any definitive answers on the question of sustainable food practice. And who’s to say he has to? He’s David Duchovny, known for his über-smart—and often smart-aleck—characters on screens big and small, now officially a novelist. Holy Cow is ostensibly for adults, but it reads in many ways like a book for young readers, although there may be too many sex jokes and hymns to the pleasures of psilocybin mushrooms for some parents. It’s almost certain that a writer who was not David Duchovny would have been asked to impose a little more narrative consistency: There are pages devoted to the mechanics of getting the pasture gate open, but Elsie and her merry band don’t encounter a single TSA agent at the airport. (Maybe it’s been a while since Duchovny flew commercial.)
Left to their own instincts, Duchovny and his narrator argue, animals will happily live in a system where well-treated cows eat grass, well-fed humans eat steak, and everyone poops, sleeps, and procreates in the way the creator intended.
Also, as Elsie’s “cow-writer” (his pun, not mine) admits in an afterword, the book was finished before anyone realized that, in the real world, the virginal Elsie wouldn’t be able to produce milk. Whoops. In some ways, though, the gaffes add to the feeling that there is a real voice behind the book. Unlike many celebrity ventures into fiction, this book doesn’t have the lockstep narrative structure that a ghostwriter would have imposed—like Elsie and her friends, it’s a little loopy. There are a lot of puns, insider Hollywood jokes, and frenetic page-to-page activity. There’s also a cameo appearance by Joe Camel, as the cartoon tobacco purveyor gets a valuable lesson from Elsie and friends on personal reinvention. (“You’re saying that being good at something bad is bad, and when you stop being good at the bad thing, that’s good?”) Like that lesson, the one Elsie learns would be familiar to the heroines of many coming-of-age stories, from Harper Lee’s Scout to L. Frank Baum’s Dorothy: “though the knowledge was painful, it led to forgiveness and understanding, and I wouldn’t trade that for anything. … You can’t stay a calf forever.” Robert Frost wrote, “Home is where, when you get there, they have to take you in.” And, in Elsie’s case, maybe have you for dinner. But that’s okay. Circle of life, baby, circle of life.
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25
CALENDAR MUSIC
Thursday, April 16 10 STRING SYMPHONY • The Harmony House • 9PM • 10 String Symphony is an arena for mesmerizing acoustic innovation. Although difficult to categorize, their music is instantly recognizable as a blend of two distinct but equally vivacious musical voices, encompassing “aggressive, almost discordant, celtic and dare I say punky string-chording experimentations.” • $10 SIR RICHARD BISHOP • Pilot Light • 10PM • Recorded in a week of sessions on a rooftop in Morocco, Bishop’s most recent album, Tangier Sessions, is entirely improvised, and Bishop’s most effortlessly enjoyable album yet. That’s saying something for a catalog that runs 30-plus albums, from harsh electric efforts (2006’s While My Guitar Violently Bleeds) to more lyrical pursuits (check out “Tennessee Porch Swing,” from 2007’s Polytheistic Fragments), and 2009’s tribute to Egyptian guitarist Omar Khorshid, The Freak of Araby. (That’s not counting the five dozen or so albums he recorded as a member of Sun City Girls.) • $10 BLACKFOOT GYPSIES • Preservation Pub • 10PM THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM THE BROTHERS BURN MOUNTAIN • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM LOTUS • The International • 8PM • Equal parts instrumental post-rock and electronic dance, the band’s distinguishing feature is the ability to maintain a decidedly unique musical voice and remain current while bucking passing trends. • $19.50-$30 MANDO SAENZ WITH OH JEREMIAH • Scruffy City Hall • 7PM THE WILHELM BROTHERS WITH THE EMILY MUSILINO 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 Friday, April 17 BELLUSIRA WITH THE BILLY WIDGETS AND THE VILLAGE GREEN PEOPLE • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8 p.m. • $8 THE BIG PINK • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • The music of The Band, Bob Dylan, Joe Cocker and several other Americana/Rock and Roll groups from the 1960’s to present day. THE BLACK CADILLACS • Disc Exchange • 2PM • The Black Cadillacs will perform for Record Store Day at the Disc Exchange in support of their new self titled EP. Fans who purchase their new EP will be eligible to win a pair of tickets to their show later that night at the Bijou Theater and will also have a chance to be the first person allowed into the Disc Exchange on Record Store Day 10 minutes before anyone else. • FREE • See music story on page 22 THE BLACK CADILLACS WITH SOL CAT AND JOHNNY ASTRO AND THE BIG BANG • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • The Black Cadillacs are a 5-piece rock band from Tennessee with an original sound that includes influences from 60’s era rock and roll to more modern grunge and indie rock. • $15-$17 • See music story on page 22 THE BREAKFAST CLUB • The International • 8PM • The popular regional ‘80s cover band. • $10-$20 CLYDE’S ON FIRE • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE DJ DRAMA • NV Nightclub • 9PM • $5 WILL DORAN • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE BRADFORD LEE FOLK AND THE BLUEGRASS PLAYBOYS WITH THE GHOST OF PAUL REVERE • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, 26
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
Thursday, April 16 - Sunday, April 26
folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE FREEQUENCY • Mulligan’s Restaurant • 7:30PM • Folk-pop and covers with three-part harmony. MAX GARCIA WITH THE GHOST OF PAUL REVERE • Preservation Pub • 8PM MIC HARRISON AND THE HIGH SCORE WITH GUY MARSHALL • Preservation Pub • 10PM JAMEY JOHNSON • Cotton Eyed Joe • 10PM • $25 • See Spotlight on page 29 KITTY WAMPUS • Roger’s Place • 9PM • Rock, R&B, blues, and soul. LEFTFOOT DAVE AND THE MAGIC HATS • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • Originally formed in 1966 under the name Soul Sanction, this fabulous 9-member band became one of the legendary bands of East Tennessee, and they are one of the all-time favorites at Alive After 5. • $10 RICHARD MILLER • Sequoyah Square Condo Clubhouse • 6PM • Brazilian-born guitarist Richard Miller, whose mother is Brazilian and whose father East Tennessean, played several successful concerts in Knoxville last year with his group Choro de Manhã. This year he is on tour throughout the Southeast with two well-known Bossa Nova singers, Kay Lyra and Mauricio Maestro, and clarinetist Andy Connell. • FREE POWERKOMPANY WITH GILLIAN AND THE CRUMBSNATCHERS • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM • See Program Notes on page 20 BEN SCHUSTER • Kristtopher’s • 9PM • $5 TAUK WITH BACKUP PLANET • The International • 9PM • $7-$10 • See Spotlight on page 26 THE WILHELM BROTHERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM Saturday, April 18 3 MILE SMILE • Disc Exchange • 3PM • FREE ERICK BAKER • Disc Exchange • 1PM • Erick Baker will perform for Record Store Day at the Disc Exchange before performing later at the Bijou Theatre later that night. Erick will also be producing an episode about Record Store Day and the Disc Exchange for “Tennessee Uncharted”, a local show he hosts on PBS. • FREE ERICK BAKER • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Erick Baker is an American singer-songwriter from Knoxville, Tennessee. He has performed with national acts, including rock musician James Blunt, alternative country musician Brandi Carlile, pop-rock musician Gavin DeGraw, the rock band Goo Goo Dolls, the rock band Heart, R&B artist John Legend, indie-rock musician Edwin McCain and rock musician Grace Potter. • $25 BEATCLUB • Mulligan’s Restaurant • 7:30PM BLACK ATTICUS • Lost and Found Records • 5:45 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. THE BLAINE BAND • Lost and Found Records • 1:45 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. THE BROADCAST • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM HUSKY BURNETTE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM KELSEY RAE COPELAND • Lost and Found Records • 12:45 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. THE DEER RUN DRIFTERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE DENDERA BLOODBATH WITH POLLY PANIC • Pilot Light • 10PM • $5 NICK DITTMEIER AND THE SAWDUSTERS WITH MAX GARCIA CONOVER • 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 NICK DITTMEIER AND THE SAWDUSTERS • Preservation Pub • 8PM FREEQUENCY • The Casual Pint (Farragut) • 7PM • Local
folk, country, pop, and rock trio. THE GOLDWATER FESTIVAL AUDIAL ART COLLECTIVE • Disc Exchange • 12PM • FREE JELLY ROLL • The International • 8PM • Checking in at six feet one inches and over 350 pounds, not to mention covered in tattoos, it’s impossible to ignore Nashville rapper Jason “Jelly Roll” DeFord in a room. His unique combination of introspection, melody, and punchlines has struck a chord with an ever-growing nationwide fan base and continues to impress. • $10 KELLE JOLLY • Lost and Found Records • 11:45 a.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. KELSEY’S WOODS • Disc Exchange • 5PM • FREE KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego is a Knoxville based band performing originals and swing jazz standards like “After
You’ve Gone” and “Minor Swing.” They are influenced by Kukuly’s Latin roots adding Argentine tangos and Brazilian bossa novas as well as European and American jazz traditions. • $12 THE TIM LEE 3 • Lost and Found Records • 4:45 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. HAROLD NAGGE AND ALAN WYATT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE JOSH OLIVER • Disc Exchange • 4PM • Having toured with the everybodyfields, Jill Andrews, Mandolin Orange, and Sam Quinn + Japan 10, Josh Oliver has carved out a name for himself as a solo artist as well with his distinctive, tear-soaked vocals and cinematic, decisively southern, acoustic landscapes. • FREE PREACHER STONE WITH OTIS • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 8PM • $15
TAUK WITH BACKUP PLANET AND J MO The Concourse (940 Blackstock Ave.) • Friday, April 17 • 9 p.m. • $7-$10 • 18 and up • internationalknox.com
The members of TAUK label themselves “heavy instrumental rock fusion,” a fairly generic descriptor. But the New York quartet can’t be boxed into a specific genre anyway. The band has risen to prominence on the jam-band circuit throughout the last few years, playing expansive epics that span funk, jazz, prog rock, Southern rock, and hip-hop. Fittingly, they’ve earned their reputation for dynamic concerts, stretching out their songs with nimble improv sections. TAUK often draws comparisons to jam favorites like Phish and Lotus, but the group’s expressive, carefully structured melodies, courtesy of A.C. Carter’s soulful Hammond organ and Matt Jalbert’s liquid electric guitar, separate them from their noodly peers. Bassist Charlie Dolan and drummer Isaac Teel form a formidable backline, their thunderous grooves grounding the sound. The band translated that magic into the studio for 2014’s Collisions, its latest album, and sharpest to date. But TAUK built its career on stage, and it’s still the best showcase for the band’s skills. (Ryan Reed)
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Spotlight: Jamey Johnson
CALENDAR BRAD PUCKETT • Wagon Wheel • 10PM • $5 SILENT HORROR WITH LA BASURA DEL DIABLO, THE CASKET CREATURES, AND THE CRYPTOIDS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • A spring break horror-rock showcase. All ages. • $10 SOMEBODY’S DARLING • Disc Exchange • 2PM • A little bit Gary Clark Jr. with a hint of ZZ Ward, the talented five piece jam bluesy rock ‘n’ roll tunes that are big and commanding in every possible way. • FREE SUBTLE CLUTCH • Disc Exchange • 6PM • Subtle Clutch will perform for Record Store Day at the Disc Exchange in support of their new album “Southern Wind.” • FREE TINA TARMAC AND THE BURNS • Lost and Found Records • 2:30 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. UT BATTLE OF THE BANDS • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM WEBB WILDER • Lost and Found Records • 3:30 p.m. • Part of Lost and Found’s Record Store Day celebration. Sunday, April 19 BRADFORD LEE FOLK AND THE BLUEGRASS PLAYBOYS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM ALVIN YOUNGBLOOD HART • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 7PM • A devout follower of the “no barriers” approach carved out by veteran performers like Gatemouth Brown and the late/great Doug Sahm, Hart aims to delight the masses and points to challenge the so-called blues purists. • $6-$20 PRESTON LEATHERMAN • Preservation Pub • 10PM SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE UT SMALL JAZZ ENSEMBLE • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 6PM • FREE Monday, April 20 6IX MILE EXPRESS • Suttree’s High Gravity Tavern • 9PM • FREE 10 YEARS LISTENING PARTY • The Concourse • 6PM • Listen to local hard-rock veteran band 10 Years’ new album, From Birth to Burial, in its entirety. Also featuring a Q&A with the band. • FREE AER • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Boston duo Aer, formed by David von Mering & Carter Schultz, have created their own brand of music comprised of rap, reggae, pop & indie rock. • $15-$18 THE DAWN DRAPES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE MUTATIONS WITH TERROR PIGEON • Pilot Light • 10PM • $5 UP THE CHAIN WITH OLD MAN KELLY • 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 Tuesday, April 21 NEW COUNTRY REHAB WITH SMITH AND WEEDEN • 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 NEW COUNTRY REHAB • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM Wednesday, April 22 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE BILL MIZE WITH CUZ ‘N’ JAN HEADRICK • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • Grammy-winning guitarist Bill Mize is a son of Tennessee, and a more fitting representative of his state’s rich musical heritage would be hard to find. Part of WDVX’s Tennessee Shines series of weekly
live-broadcast concerts. • $10 MOTIONLESS IN WHITE • The Concourse • 6PM • Since 2005 this Scranton, Pennsylvania based metalcore act have cultivated a hardcore following via their Gothic-inspired aggression and imagery and that buzz is set to reach a fever’s pitch with the release of their third full-length Reincarnate. • $18-$20 MATT PRATER WITH FRONT COUNTRY • 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 BARRY ROSEMAN • The Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. • FREE Thursday, April 23 CHARLIE AND THE FOX TROTS WITH THE RADIO BIRDS • Preservation Pub • 10PM FIREKID WITH THE RAGBIRDS • Scruffy City Hall • 7PM FRONT COUNTRY • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM TIM GRIMM WITH ANDREW SCOTCHIE AND THE RIVER RATS • 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 HOME FREE • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • When country a cappella band Home Free was crowned Season 4 Champions of NBC’s The Sing-Off this past December, their victory was by no means the beginnings of a career for the five country stars from Minnesota’ rather it was a satisfying culmination of nearly a decade of hard work and commitment to a vocal craft growing in popularity. They arrive to town on the heels of their debut release on Columbia Records, Crazy Life. • $30-$103 KNOXVILLE JAZZ YOUTH ORCHESTRA • Redeemer Church of Knoxville • 7:30PM • The Knoxville Jazz Youth Orchestra will present a concert with guest artists Joe Gross, trumpet, and Bill Huber, trombone. • FREE DENNY LAINE WITH THE CRYERS AND JOHN SALAWAY • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 7PM • Denny Laine got his start in the Moody Blues and he sang the band’s first major hit single “Go Now” in 1964. After a few years, he left the Moody Blues to pursue his solo career managed by the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein. In 1967 Denny Laine’s Electric String Band opened for Jimi Hendrix at the famous Saville theater concert that launched Jimi’s career. For the next few years Denny shared concert bills with Fleetwood Mac & Robert Plant and joined the super group Ginger Baker’s ‘Air Force’ until 1971 when he formed Wings with Paul McCartney. NAKED BLUE WITH BROOKS WEST • The Grove Theater • 7:30PM • The Maryland duo Jennifer and Scott Smith have been making beautiful music together for over two decades under the moniker Naked Blue. Friday, April 24 CITY HOTEL • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE FREEQUENCY • Cru Bistro and Wine Bar • 8PM • Folk-pop and covers with three-part harmony. THE GEE BEES • Preservation Pub • 10PM THE GET RIGHT BAND WITH JOSIAH ATCHLEY AND THE GREATER GOOD • Preservation Pub • 10PM MIC HARRISON AND THE HIGH SCORE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM KING SUPER AND THE EXCELLENTS WITH THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM LEE AND THE FEDERATION WITH THE GET RIGHT 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 STEFF MAHAN AND JESSI LYN • Kristtopher’s • 9PM • $10 THE MONDAY MOVEMENT • The Square Room • 8PM • $12 NORWEGIAN WOOD • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • FREE RANDOM RAB WITH SAQI • The Concourse • 9PM • Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. • $8-$12 THE RIVER RATS WITH BASEBALL • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM ROCKY TOP BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL • George Templin Memorial Athletic Field (Rocky Top) • 5:30PM • Bobby Osborne and his band Rocky Top X-Press will be joined by other well known groups including Lonesome River Band, Blue Highway, Junior Sisk and Rambler’s Choice, The Boxcars, and Flatt Lonesome. • $25-$50 SOULFULSOUNDS REVUE • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • $10 TESTAMENT WITH EXODUS AND SHATTERED SUN • The International • 6PM • Two titans of ‘80s Bay Area thrash bring the noise to Knoxville. • $22-$25 LEROY TROY • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Leroy Troy delivers a strong solo old-time banjo performance in the tradition of Uncle Dave Macon, Grandpa Jones and Stringbean. • $14 VOLAPALOOZA 2015 • World’s Fair Park • 5PM • The University of Tennessee’s end-of-the-academic-year concert features Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, SoCal indie rockers the Cold War Kids, the Bad Suns, Kansas Bible Co., and a surprise musical guest. • $35-$100 Saturday, April 25 MARK BOLING • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE JAY CLARK AND JEFF BARBRA • Laurel Theater • 8PM • With a style best described as a mixture of folk and bluegrass, Jay Clark’s handcrafted lyrics run the gamut of hard living, hard drinking, civil disobedience, and old-time religion. Jeff Barbra, along with his wife, Sarah Pirkle, were the hosts and producers of the popular WDVX Behind The Barn radio program for almost five years and now produce Behind the Barn at Barley’s Maryville broadcast live on WFIV i105 as well as Sunday morning’s In the Spirit. • $12 ELIZABETH COOK WITH DEREK HOKE • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 8PM • $20 JACKSON EDWARDS WITH THE STAGGER MOON BAND AND ROMAN REESE AND THE CARDINAL SINS • Preservation Pub • 10PM FIVE40 WITH TREEHOUSE, SUN-DRIED VIBES, AND ROOTS OF A REBELLION • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • A mix of ska, reggae, and rock from across the Southeast. FOSSIL CREEK WITH JOHN D’AMATO • 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 HEYDAY REVIVAL • Preservation Pub • 8PM • Local “cabaret bluegrass.” KITTY WAMPUS • Whiskey River Wild • 9PM • Rock, R&B, blues, and soul. LIARS DICE WITH SAM KILLED THE BEAR • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • All ages. • $7 JENNIFER NICELEY • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE ROCKY TOP BLUEGRASS FESTIVAL • George Templin Memorial Athletic Field (Rocky Top) • 11AM • Bobby Osborne and his band Rocky Top X-Press will be joined by other well known groups including Lonesome River Band, Blue Highway, Junior Sisk and Rambler’s Choice, The Boxcars, and Flatt Lonesome. • $25-$50 EDDIE SPAGHETTI • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Eddie Spaghetti, front man for those Seattle-based pleasure barons of arena garage punk The Supersuckers, distills everything he’s learned in his career-long, over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek adoration of all things April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27
CALENDAR rock and roll into a genre-scoffing dose of snarling country rock, full of pop hooks and wiseguy humor delivered with a brain, a heart, & a beer. Sunday, April 26 THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM THE EMPTY POCKETS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • Chicago indie country and rock ‘n’ roll. SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE
OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS
Thursday, April 16 BREWHOUSE BLUES JAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8 p.m.• Free Monday, April 20 BLUEGRASS AND BREWS OPEN JAM • Suttree’s High Gravity Tavern • 7PM • A weekly jam session followed by a band performance. • FREE Tuesday, April 21 BARLEY’S OPEN MIC NIGHT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM OLD-TIME JAM • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15 p.m. • Hosted by Sarah Pirkle. • Free
Thursday, April 16 - Sunday, April 26
Friday, April 24 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
DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS
Friday, April 17 THE ART OF HOUSE WEEKENDER DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 11 p.m. • Featuring resident DJs Rick Styles, Mark B, and Kevin Nowell. 21 and up. Saturday, April 18 THE ART OF HOUSE WEEKENDER DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 11 p.m. • Featuring resident DJs Rick Styles, Mark B, and Kevin Nowell. 21 and up. Sunday, April 19 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
Friday, April 24 THE ART OF HOUSE WEEKENDER DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 11 p.m. • Featuring resident DJs Rick Styles, Mark B, and Kevin Nowell. 21 and up. Saturday, April 25 THE ART OF HOUSE WEEKENDER DANCE PARTY • Southbound Bar and Grill • 11 p.m. • Featuring resident DJs Rick Styles, Mark B, and Kevin Nowell. 21 and up. TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Visit templeknox.com. 18 and up. • $5 Sunday, April 26 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
Thursday, April 16 KSO MASTERWORKS SERIES: BEETHOVEN’S ‘PASTORALE’ • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • Guest conductor Vladimir Kulenovic leads the KSO in this spirited program featuring music by Smetana, Rachmaninoff and Beethoven. • $13-$83 UT WIND ENSEMBLE, SYMPHONIC BAND, AND CONCERT BAND • University of Tennessee Alumni Memorial Building • 8PM • FREE
Friday, April 17 KSO MASTERWORKS SERIES: BEETHOVEN’S ‘PASTORALE’ • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • $13-$83 SPRING UT PERCUSSION ENSEMBLE • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 8PM • FREE Saturday, April 18 OAK RIDGE SYMPHONY: “INTERNATIONAL FLAVORS” • Oak Ridge High School • 7:30PM • Featuring Felix Mendelssohn’s Symphony No. 4 (“Italian”), Camille Saint-Saens’ Danse Bacchanal, from Samson and Delilah, Dmitri Shostakovich’s Tahiti Trot, from the Golden Age, and Nicolia Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capricio Espagnol. Tickets and additional information may be found at www. oakridgesymphony.org, or by calling the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association office at 865-483-5569. • $25 Sunday, April 19 MARBLE CITY OPERA • Market Square • 12PM • MCO will be presenting music from local Knoxville composers: Trey Daugherty’s “A Death in the Family,” based on a novel by James Agee; and Songs for soprano by Wendel Werner. • FREE READY FOR THE WORLD MUSIC SERIES: EAST ASIA • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 2PM • Guest artists (TBA) are prominent scholars and artists who champion the exotic and illustrative world of East Asian chamber music. • FREE OAK RIDGE WIND ENSEMBLE/COMMUNITY BAND SPRING CONCERT • Oak Ridge High School • 3:30PM • Featuring
DENNY LAINE
(from paul mccartney & wings / the moody blues)
live in concert also featuring the cryers • john salaway
FEATURING MUSIC BY
KIRK FLETA | DIXIEGHOST | BASEBALL THE BAND WWW.KNOX-EARTHFEST.ORG 28
KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
thursday april 23, 2015 show starts at 7:00 pm
presented by local music bookings get your tickets now! • Available at openchord and openchordmusic.com! 8502 kingston pike • 865.281.5874
CALENDAR guest director Walter McDaniel, former UT assistant band conductor. Visit www.orcb.org. KNOXVILLE CHORAL SOCIETY: BRAHMS’ REQUIEM • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 6PM • $20 Friday, April 24 KNOXVILLE OPERA: IL TROVATORE • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • A powerhouse cast delivers Verdi’s thrilling score, led by internationally lauded Joyce El-Khoury, and Nelson Martinez, who gave a brilliant, heartbreaking performance as Knoxville Opera’s Rigoletto. Performed in Italian with projected English translations. • $18-$95 Sunday, April 26 KNOXVILLE OPERA: IL TROVATORE • Tennessee Theatre • 2:30PM • $18-$95
COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD
Tuesday, April 14 THE ASIA PROJECT • University of Tennessee • 7PM • As an aspiring novelist/astronaut/oil painter/brain surgeon/ ninja, Asia never thought spoken word poetry would be
his calling. But as with everything else we encounter in life while dealing with the illusive astrological joke we’ve come to know as destiny, here Asia stands: a cancer survivor who was won audiences throughout the country with a spoken word show that has been nothing less than an honest and genuine testimony of his life- a spoken word show that is always inspiring, sometimes gut-wrenching, and most often times comical buffoonery. At the UT University Center. Thursday, April 16 ALIX OLSON • University of Tennessee • 7PM • Alix Olson is an internationally touring folk poet and spoken word performer. At the UT University Center. Sunday, April 19 BILL BURR: THE BILLY BIBLE BELT TOUR • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Bill Burr is an American comedian or a comedian from the North American Union, depending on when you read this. He grew up outside of Boston, Massachusetts and did fairly poorly in school, despite the fact that he applied himself. Having first gained notoriety for his recurring role on the second season of Chappelle’s Show, Bill developed a comedic style of uninformed logic that has made him a regular with Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon. • $37.50-$45.50
Monday, April 20 QED COMEDY LABORATORY • Pilot Light • 7:30 p.m. • QED ComedyLaboratory is a weekly show with different theme every week that combines stand-up, improv, sketch, music and other types of performance. Saturday, April 25 COMEDY BOOZE CRUISE • Star of Knoxville Riverboat • 7PM • The Comedy Booze Cruise is back—a special early show featuring Ahmed Bharoocha from Los Angeles. This show features JC Ratliff, Evan Brooks, Trae Crowder and possibly the final Knoxville performance of Jeff Blank before he moves away. • $10-$15 CHRISTOPHER TITUS • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Fresh off of his sixth comedy special release, Christopher Titus brings his dark, yet outrageously funny style of comedy to the Bijou Theatre. Titus is known for his TV show “Titus,” ABC’s “Big Shots,” and currently, “Pawnography” on the History Channel. He has released six ninety-minute, televised comedy specials since 2004. • $27-$37 Sunday, April 26 AHMED BHAROOCHA • Preservation Pub • 8PM • Knox Comedy presents the Comedy Central personality.
THEATER AND DANCE
Thursday, April 16 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • With a haunting jazz score and biting lyrics, Brecht’s masterpiece of epic theater originated the popular songs The Ballad of Mack the Knife, Soloman Song and Pirate Jenny. For mature audiences. Contains adult content and language, and gunshots. April 16-May 3. • $22-$42
JAMEY JOHNSON Cotton Eyed Joe (11220 Outlet Drive) • Friday, April 17 • 10 p.m. • $25 • cottoneyedjoe.com
Jamey Johnson’s response to success was almost predictably contrary—after his 2008 self-released album, That Lonesome Song, landed the burly Nashville singer/songwriter a major-label deal, he followed up with The Guitar Song, an expansive but resolutely noncommercial double album, and Living for a Song, an old-fashioned tribute to the songwriting legend Harlan Howard. Excellent records, but not exactly the kind of thing Mercury executives knew how to market. Johnson had been introduced to Nashville as a new outlaw; he lived up to that reputation, quickly demonstrating that his creative instincts would override his label’s sales plans. Johnson released a surprise EP of Christmas songs in November, almost three years after Living for a Song. Johnson’s out of his Mercury deal and has set up his own label, Big Gassed Records, and has hinted that new music might be on the way soon. Knowing his taste for defying expectations, there’s no way to tell exactly what he’ll deliver. Considering how iconoclastic he was while he was on a big label, though, you can be sure it won’t be like anything else coming from Nashville. (Matthew Everett)
Friday, April 17 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 6:30PM • A magical storm. A shipwreck. Monsters and magic. Revenge, forgiveness and true love. Playgoers will find these and more in Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” April 17-26. • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8 p.m. • J.B. Priestley’s supernatural absurdist mystery about guilt, money, power, and sex. April 17-May 3. • $15 Saturday, April 18 FOOTHILLS COMMUNITY PLAYERS: AUDITIONS FOR THE SOUND OF MUSIC • Chilhowee Club (Maryville) • 2PM • Auditionees are asked to prepare a song to sing a cappella, unrelated to the show, no longer than 32 bars or 1 ½ minutes, and to prepare to sing a pre-arranged portion of a song from the show, which can be found on FCP’s website. Performances will be August 7 – 9, 2015 at the Clayton Center for the Arts. • Free PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 6:30PM • April 17-26. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $15
April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29
CALENDAR Sunday, April 19 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 2PM • April 17-26. • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $13 Wednesday, April 22 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 Thursday, April 23 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $15 Friday, April 24 PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 6:30PM • April 17-26. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 FOOTLIGHTS PRODUCTIONS: THE CURIOUS SAVAGE • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 7:30PM • “A
Thursday, April 16 - Sunday, April 26
comedy about money, family—and the insane.” April 24-26. • $15 WESTMINSTER PLAYERS: ALL IN THE TIMING • Westminster Presbyterian Church • 7:30PM • Six short one-act plays by David Ives. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $15 Saturday, April 25 PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 6:30PM • April 17-26. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 FOOTLIGHTS PRODUCTIONS: THE CURIOUS SAVAGE • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 7:30PM • “A comedy about money, family—and the insane.” April 24-26. • $15 WESTMINSTER PLAYERS: ALL IN THE TIMING • Westminster Presbyterian Church • 7:30PM • Six short one-act plays by David Ives. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $15 Sunday, April 26 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: THE THREEPENNY OPERA • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • April 16-May 3. • $22-$42 PELLISSIPPI STATE AND DUCK EARS THEATRE COMPANY: THE TEMPEST • Pellissippi State Community College • 2PM
THE DEPARTMENT OF MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGES THE DEPARTMENT OF MODERN FOREIGN LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES PRESENTS AND LITERATURES PRESENTS
LEOTOLSTOY F
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APRIL 23-24, 2015 TOLSTOY & CELEBRITY... or: How They Stole Tolstoy’s Pants MICHAEL DENNER, STETSON UNIVERSITY
APRIL 23, 5 PM, ART & ARCHITECTURE BUILDING, ROOM 113 Lectures, Presentations, Readings, Performances throughout both days FOR COMPLETE SCHEDULE VISIT
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mfll.utk.edu/tolstoy
THURSDAY, APRIL 23, 2015 5 PM
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 16,R2015 A R T April & A CHITECTURE BUILDING, ROOM 113 Keynote Lecture:
TOLSTOY & CELEBRITY... or: How They Stole Tolstoy’s Pants
• April 17-26. • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: AN INSPECTOR CALLS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3 p.m. • April 17-May 3. • $13 FOOTLIGHTS PRODUCTIONS: THE CURIOUS SAVAGE • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 2PM • “A comedy about money, family—and the insane.” April 24-26. • $15 WESTMINSTER PLAYERS: ALL IN THE TIMING • Westminster Presbyterian Church • 2PM • Six short one-act plays by David Ives.
FESTIVALS
Friday, April 17 DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL • Market Square • 11AM • With quality arts and crafts booths, arts in action, performing arts, culinary arts demonstrations and tastings, and an expanded children’s creation station, several blocks of downtown Knoxville are transformed into a lively street fair for the Dogwood Arts Festival. There will be more than 60 local and regional juried artists exhibiting and selling their original work in mixed media, clay, drawing/pastels, glass, jewelry, leather, metal, painting, photography, sculpture, and wood. • FREE Saturday, April 18 EARTHFEST 2015 • World’s Fair Park • 10AM • There will be over 100 exhibitors and attractions, and as always, it’s a free, zero-waste event for the whole family, including your pets. Over the past 16 years, EarthFest has become
East Tennessee’s premier Earth Day event. And it’s not simply a celebration of the planet. From an interactive educational scavenger hunt and vintage pop-up clothing shop, to kid-friendly activities and a fuel-efficient car showcase, EarthFest has something for everyone. • FREE DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL • Market Square • 10AM • FREE Sunday, April 19 DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL • Market Square • 11AM • FREE Saturday, April 25 EARTH DAY IN OAK RIDGE • Arthur K. Russell Park • 11AM • Join us on Saturday, April 25, a free, family-friendly celebration of Earth Day. 11 am - 4 pm in A.K. Bissell Park. Visit orearthday.org. • FREE
SPORTS AND RECREATION
Thursday, April 16 WINDROCK PARK SPRING JAMBOREE • Windrock Park • Guided rides, ATV Rodeo, rock crawl, poker run, Windrock Wide Open, Windrock Challenge, Drag Race, Mud Bog and Dash for Cash are just a few of the activities at the Jamboree. For more information, call 865-435-3492 or visit www.windrockpark.com. Friday, April 17 WINDROCK PARK SPRING JAMBOREE • Windrock Park • For
CALENDAR more information call 865-435-3492 or visit www. windrockpark.com. Saturday, April 18 WINDROCK PARK SPRING JAMBOREE • Windrock Park • For more information, call 865-435-3492 or visit windrockpark.com. Sunday, April 19 TIME TURNERS QUIDDITCH OPEN PRACTICE • University of Tennessee • 3PM • Knoxville’s most unique sports group wants to teach you how to play! Quidditch, adapted in 2005 for real-world play from J.K. Rowling’s Potter novels, is a gender-integrated contact sport played on every continent (except Antarctica!). This event is open to all ages (we love kids!), and we’ll be taking information from interested university age individuals for possible recruitment in the fall. Please wear sneakers and bring a water bottle and sunscreen! • FREE Saturday, April 25 OUTDOOR KNOXFEST • Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center • The ultimate outdoor recreation event, Outdoor KnoxFest offers a weekend of biking, hiking, paddling, fishing, and other activities for people of all ages and skill levels. If you have ever wanted to try a new adventure or join an outdoor activities club, this is your chance. An initiative of Legacy Parks Foundation, Outdoor KnoxFest brings together many of the area’s top outdoor organizations, outfitters, event sponsors, and retailers to promote their activities and products. Visit outdoorknoxville.com/ outdoorknoxfest. DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL BIKE AND BLOOMS SCENIC RIDES • Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center • 3PM • Observe the beauty of the Dogwood Trails from the seat of a bicycle as you ride to the colorful gardens that frame Island Home Boulevard. Riders will enjoy river views and tranquil forests as they continue on the greenway to Ijams Nature Center before returning. Sunday, April 26 OUTDOOR KNOXFEST • Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center • Visit outdoorknoxville.com/outdoorknoxfest. DOGWOOD ARTS FESTIVAL BIKE AND BLOOMS SCENIC RIDES • Outdoor Knoxville Adventure Center • 3PM • Behold the colorful displays of our native dogwood trees that fringe our boulevards and gardens. Bikers will ride through downtown and loop through historic neighborhoods in North Knoxville.
FILM SCREENINGS
Thursday, April 16 SAY IT LOUD: KNOXVILLE DURING THE CIVIL RIGHTS ERA • Pellissippi State Community College (Magnolia Avenue Campus) • 2PM • A documentary chronicling local events that were part of the Civil Rights Movement. Say It Loud uses archival footage, recently rediscovered, to study the African-American community in Knoxville and Civil Rights up to the 1970s. Friday, April 17 UT FILM COMMITTEE: INHERENT VICE • University of Tennessee • 7PM • In 1970, drug-fueled Los Angeles detective Larry “Doc” Sportello investigates the disappearance of a former girlfriend in Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 movie. At the University of Tennessee University Center. Saturday, April 18 UT FILM COMMITTEE: THE ROOM • University of Tennessee
• 8PM • Johnny is a successful banker who lives happily in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée, Lisa. One day, inexplicably, she gets bored of him and decides to seduce Johnny’s best friend, Mark. From there, nothing will be the same again in Tommy Wiseau’s 2003 cult classic. At the University of Tennessee University Center. Sunday, April 19 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: TOWER • Knoxville Museum of Art • 2PM • The feature-length debut from Kazik Radwanski, this off-kilter and slyly funny character study retains a humanness despite its awkward protagonist. Tower asks what role happiness plays in our lives and how social pressure or its absence can sculpt who we are. • FREE • See Program Notes on page 20 Monday, April 20 SCRUFFY CINEPUB MOVIE NIGHT • Scruffy City Hall • 5PM • Celebrate 4/20 with a lineup of smoke-friendly movies: Reefer Madness, Cheech and Chong’s Up in Smoke, Pineapple Express, and The Wizard of Oz synced with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. CINE HOLA: RECYCLED LIFE • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 7PM • The dramatic and touching story of thousands of adults, children, and generations of families who have been living and working in the largest and most toxic landfill in Central America, the Guatemala City Garbage Dump, over the last sixty years.
ART
A1 Lab Arts 23 Emory Place APRIL 9-10: Loopy, a BFA capstone exhibition by Allan Namiotkiewicz. Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts 556 Parkway, Gatlinburg MARCH 30-MAY 9: A Naturally Picked Stacked Attraction of Glitz, the 2015 artists-in-residence exhibition. Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. APRIL 3-30: Artwork by Marilyn Avery Turner and Gray Bearden. Central Flats and Taps 1204 N. Central St. APRIL 3-29: New artwork by Beth Meadows and Matthew Higginbotham. Clayton Center for the Arts 502 E. Lamar Alexander Parkway (Maryville) APRIL 2-30: Dogwood Arts Festival Synergy Student and East Tennessee Educator Art Exhibition. The District Gallery 5113 Kingston Pike APRIL 24-MAY 30: Automata: Art Cars by Clark Stewart Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St.
APRIL 3-17: Art Source 2015, an exhibition of work by Knox County art educators
Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St.
APRIL 3-25: Dogwood Arts Regional Fine Arts Exhibition APRIL 3-30: I Wish I Could Fly, paintings by Angel Blanco. Ewing Gallery 1715 Volunteer Blvd. APRIL 10-17: MFA Thesis Exhibition featuring James Boychuk-Hunter, David Harman, Tamra Hunt, and Kevin Varney Knoxville Convention Center 701 Henley St. APRIL 3-19: The Art of Recycling, a sculpture exhibition celebrating National Recycling Month. Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive JAN. 30-APRIL 19: • LIFT: Contemporary Printmaking in the Third Dimension and Contemporary Focus 2015. 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. McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 1327 Circle Park Drive JAN. 22-MAY 24: Drawn From the McClung Museum, an exhibition of work by 27 artists inspired by the McClung Museum collection. Ongoing: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier. Urban Bar 109 N. Central St. APRIL 3-MAY 30: Paintings and drawings by Charlie Pogue. Westminster Presbyterian Church Schilling Gallery 6500 Northshore Drive THROUGH APRIL 26: Monoprints by Marilyn Avery Turner and needlepoint pillows by Coral Grace Turner.
LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS
Thursday, April 16 KATHRYN HOLMES AND LAUREN MORRILL • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Young adult authors Kathryn Holmes and Lauren Morrill will read from their new and forthcoming books, The Distance Between Lost and Found and Trouble with Destiny. • FREE Sunday, April 19 DAWN COPPOCK: ‘AS SWEET AS IT’S GOING TO GET’ • Union Ave Books • 2PM • Knoxville poet Dawn Coppock will read from her new book. • FREE POETRY IN OLD GRAY CEMETERY • Old Gray Cemetery • 2PM • Poetry reading in Old Gray by winners of OGC’s 5th annual poetry contest and judge Brian Griffin. • FREE Tuesday, April 21 “HERD … HOME … REST … REFUGE: THE ELEPHANT SANCTUARY IN TENNESSEE” • Bearden Branch Public Library • 6:30PM • Founded in 1995, The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee is the nation’s largest natural-habitat refuge developed specifically for elephants. Sanctuary Education Manager Todd Montgomery will share information about his organization and the animals that call Sanctuary home. • FREE Thursday, April 23 April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31
CALENDAR GIL PENALOSA: “CREATING VIBRANT CITIES FOR ALL” • The Standard • 6PM • How can we create vibrant and healthy cities for everyone, regardless of age or social status? What is the role of the streets, which are the largest public space in any city? Gil Penalosa answers these questions while also explaining a simple and effective principle for inclusive city building: ensuring the safety and joy of children and older adults (from 8-year-olds to 80-year-olds) are at the forefront of every decision we make in our cities. Gil Penalosa is founder and chair of the board of 8-80 Cities. As former Commissioner of Parks, Sport and Recreation for the City of Bogota, Colombia, Gil and his staff initiated the “new Ciclovia”— a program that sees over 1 million people walk, run, skate and bike along 75 miles of roads every Sunday, and is internationally recognized and emulated. • FREE
Thursday, April 16 - Sunday, April 26
and Culture • 2PM • The McClung Museum’s 5th annual Civil War Lecture series concludes with “Four Years of War, Four Years of Commemoration: a recap of events 150 years ago in Knoxville and the accomplishments of the Sesquicentennial Commemoration Effort.” • FREE
FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS
Saturday, April 25 CIVIL WAR HISTORY HIKE • Fort Dickerson Park Greenway • 10AM • Join the McClung Museum’s Civil War Curator, Joan Markel, for a History Hike at Fort Dickerson Park as a part of Outdoor Knoxfest 2015.Participants are invited to join this free guided walk on trails within the Battlefield Loop of the Urban Wilderness with our curator and a representative from TrekSouth. • FREE
Friday, April 17 CELEBRATION OF THE YOUNG CHILD • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 9AM • The Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge will host the Celebration of the Young Child from 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Friday, April 17, at the museum, 461 W. Outer Dr. Featured performer Ron Anglin will entertain young and old with his juggling and comedy program, “Quite a Catch,” at 10 a.m. Children may also make and take crafts, join in fun exercises, taste healthy snacks, hear stories with children’s book author Adele Roberts, and learn about safety from puppets. Firefighters will be there to teach children fire safety. Admission is $6 per person, and scholarships are available upon request. For more information call 865-482-1074, extension 105. • $6
Sunday, April 26 JOAN MARKEL: “FOUR YEARS OF WAR, FOUR YEARS OF COMMEMORATION” • McClung Museum of Natural History
Saturday, April 18 BIG ORANGE STEM SYMPOSIUM • University of Tennessee • 9:30AM • Students interested in careers in science,
technology, engineering and mathematics are invited to attend the event. The symposium is free, but participants should preregister online at https://tiny.utk.edu/boss. Students will begin the day with a cornerstone activity called “Everyday Science: No Junk in my DNA!” Afternoon breakout sessions will feature hands-on activities relating to food science, the science behind tree planting, and the nuts and bolts of engineering. For more information, visit tiny.utk.edu/boss. • FREE MCCLUNG MUSEUM FAMILY FUN DAY • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 1PM • On Saturday, April 18, the museum will offer a free family fun day in the new exhibit, “Drawn from the McClung Museum.” The 1-4 p.m. event will feature activities, tours and a craft for children to take home. All materials will be provided. The program is free and open to the public, and reservations are not necessary. • FREE
CLASSES
Thursday, April 16 GARDENING TRENDS WORKSHOP • Roane State Community College (Oak Ridge) • 6:30PM • Just in time for the Arboretum’s Spring Plant Sale on April 16, Dr. Sue Hamilton will talk about new plants we should add to our gardens and trends in the gardening world. The program is open and free to the public. Dr. Hamilton is Director of the UT Gardens, Plant Sciences Department. Call 483-3571.
GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Monday, April 20 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-5772021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Tuesday, April 21 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Thursday, April 23 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 Saturday, April 25 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • Westminster Presbyterian Church • 9AM • Call Carolyn Rambo at (865) 382-5822. LEARN TO MEDITATE WORKSHOP • Lawson McGee Public Library • 2PM • Led by Mike Wright, author of 800 Stepping Stones to Complete Relaxation. Call (865) 851-9535 or email mikewright102348@gmail. com. • FREE
Bonnaroo or Bust! WUTK WANTS TO SEND YOU TO
www.bonnaroo.com
Register now until April 29 to be one of our 90 finalists for our Bonnaroo or Bust reverse drawing to win a pair of Guest Access passes to Bonnaroo 2015!
Registration boxes are at:
Central Flats & Taps, 1204 N. Central St., Happy Holler Ft. Sanders Yacht Club Barcade, 17th Street near The Strip
The Bonnaroo or Bust Reverse Drawing Party happens May 5 at Central Flats & Taps. Tune in to WUTK and follow our social media for more chances to qualify! From your festival hook-up in knoxville...
On the Air and Streaming 24.7.365 WUTKRADIO.COM or listen on your
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
CALENDAR MEETINGS
Thursday, April 16 THE SOUTHERN LITERATURE BOOK CLUB • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Union Ave Books’ monthly discussion group about Southern books and writers. • FREE Monday, April 20 GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30 p.m.-9 p.m. • Facilitated discussions on topics and issues relevant to local gay men in a safe and open environment. Visit gaygroupknoxville.org. Tuesday, April 21 TUESDAYS WITH TOLSTOY • Lawson McGee Public Library • 6PM • Knox County Public Library is pleased to partner with the University of Tennessee’s Department of Modern Languages to present Tuesdays with Tolstoy throughout April to encourage readers to try Tolstoy’s classic story of passion. Registration is encouraged at knoxlib.org/Tolstoy. • FREE Wednesday, April 22 KNOXVILLE WRITERS’ GROUP • Naples Italian Restaurant • 11AM • Local award-winning poet and University of Tennessee Professor of English, Arthur Smith, will talk about his poetry and latest book, The Fortunate Era, published in 2013. All-inclusive lunch. RSVP by Monday, April 20. (865) 983-3740. • $12 VETERANS FOR PEACE BOOK DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 6PM • Jerry Bone and Doug Cox, member of Veterans For Peace Chapter 166, will lead a discussion of the book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges. FREE
ETC.
Thursday, April 16 NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • FREE Friday, April 17 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FREE Saturday, April 18 UT ARBORETUM SOCIETY SPRING PLANT SALE • University of Tennessee Arboretum (Oak Ridge) • 9AM • Proceeds from this sale and other Society fund-raising events go toward the operating expenses and endowment fund for the UT Arboretum. For more information on the program, call 483-3571. • FREE RIVER AND RAIL THEATRE COMPANY INAUGURAL FUNDRAISER • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 7:30PM • River & Rail will produce nuanced, character-, and story-driven theatre that touches on topics that different socio-economic, religious, ethnic, and racial groups in Knoxville encounter distinctively, but rarely discuss collectively. Theatre has long been a diverse art form, incorporating fine art, dance, composition, music, and various other multimedia arts into a single performance. River and Rail will seek to establish a precedent of inter-art collaboration, inviting the distinct artistic talents present in Knoxville to come together. OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • FREE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT INFORMATION • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Professionals and trained volunteers with the Tennessee Health Care Campaign will
provide information about the Affordable Care Act. For more information, go to healthcare.gov website or call 1-844-644-5443. • FREE ART SLAM! LIVE ART COMPETITION • Market Square • 3PM • Experience a live art competition among Knoxville’s up and coming artists as part of the Dogwood Arts Festival at Market Square in downtown Knoxville. All pieces created at the event will be auctioned to benefit The Muse Knoxville at a reception on April 25th, 6pm at Paulk+Co 510 Williams Street. Contact Ellie Kittrell at ellie@themuseknoxville.org. Tuesday, April 21 EBENEZER ROAD FARMERS’ MARKET • Ebenezer United Methodist Church • 3PM • FREE Wednesday, April 22 VINE STREET RAG: A MUSICAL AND MULTIMEDIA STORY OF HOWARD “LOUIE BLUIE” ARMSTRONG • Remedy Coffee • 7PM • This inaugural event, arranged by organizers of the annual Louie Bluie Music & Arts Festival in Campbell County, includes live music by the Tennessee Sheiks, multimedia storytelling by special guests Jack Neely of the Knoxville History Project and Knoxville Mercury, longtime musician Chris Durman, and The Carpetbag Theatre, Inc., plus heavy hors d’oeuvres, beverages, and a silent auction. You’ll also learn how you can support this year’s Louie Bluie Festival, Saturday, September 26, at Cove Lake State Park, in Caryville, Tenn. Tickets are available in advance online: squareup.com/market/campbell-culture-coalition-c3/ vine-street-rag-ticket. Seating is limited, so advanced tickets are encouraged. All funds raised at the event go to support the non-profit Campbell Culture Coalition, which plans and puts on the festival, now in its ninth year. • $20 Thursday, April 23 TENNESSEE BIKE SUMMIT • Knoxville Convention Center • Bicycling and sustainable transportation advocates, traffic engineers, planners, public health officials, landscape architects, researchers, cycling retailers, and elected officials are gathering for the 2015 TN Bike Summit to share knowledge, create common understanding, and challenge each other to build safe roads, strong communities, and a Tennessee where everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of bicycling and walking. Visit tnbikesummit.org. • $45-$85 UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LEO TOLSTOY FESTIVAL • University of Tennessee • Two days of lectures, seminars, public readings, and film screenings about the life and work of Leo Tolstoy. • FREE NEW HARVEST PARK FARMERS MARKET • New Harvest Park • 3PM • FREE LITTLE RIVER TRADING CO. PINT NIGHT • Little River Trading Co. (Maryville) • 5PM • A benefit for the Boys and Girls Club of Blount County.
LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FREE Saturday, April 25 OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • FREE ADMIRAL VETERINARY HOSPITAL OPEN HOUSE AND PET FAIR • Admiral Veterinary Hospital • 10AM • Free food, dogs and cats for adoption/rescue groups, bounce house, face painting, reptile/amphibian exhibits, hospital tours, vendors, door prizes. Free and Open to the Public! • FREE JDRF ONE WALK • World’s Fair Park • 10AM • The JDRF East Tennessee Chapter will be holding the 25th Annual JDRF One Walk (formerly the Walk to Cure Diabetes). Check-in will begin at 8:30 a.m. and the 5k event will step off at 10 a.m. Register your team at walk.jdrf.org. JDRF’s mission is to find a cure for type 1 diabetes and its complications through the support of research. EAST TENNESSEE VINYL AND CD COLLECTORS SHOW • Days Inn North • 10AM • This event features music dealers from all over the Southeast, selling vintage vinyl LPs and 45s, bargain records, CDs, DVDs, memorabilia, and more at a variety of price ranges. • $2 AFFORDABLE CARE ACT INFORMATION • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Professionals and trained volunteers with the Tennessee Health Care Campaign will provide information about the Affordable Care Act. For more information, go to healthcare.gov website or call 1-844-644-5443. • FREE MARBLE CITY COMICON • Knoxville Expo Center • The convention has exhibitors that cater to a wide-spectrum of interests including comic books, magazines, toys, games, movies, television, anime, manga, cosplay, artwork, sketches and apparel plus much more. In addition, a roster of comic industry professionals and fandom-related celebrities are in attendance for attendees to meet and greet. • $20-$75 Sunday, April 26 MARBLE CITY COMICON • Knoxville Expo Center • The convention has exhibitors that cater to a wide-spectrum of interests including comic books, magazines, toys, games, movies, television, anime, manga, cosplay, artwork, sketches and apparel plus much more. • $20-$75
Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com
Friday, April 24 TENNESSEE BIKE SUMMIT • Knoxville Convention Center • We invite bicycling and sustainable transportation advocates, traffic engineers, planners, public health officials, landscape architects, researchers, cycling retailers, and elected officials to join us for the 2015 TN Bike Summit to share knowledge, create common understanding, and challenge each other to build safe roads, strong communities, and a Tennessee where everyone is able to enjoy the benefits of bicycling and walking. Visit tnbikesummit.org. • $45-$85 UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE LEO TOLSTOY FESTIVAL • University of Tennessee • Two days of lectures, seminars, public readings, and film screenings about the life and work of Leo Tolstoy. • FREE April 16, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33
Voice in the Wilder ness
Walleye Quest, Part 2 Wherein our adventurer reels in another wrong fish, this time at Tellico Lake BY KIM TREVATHAN
O
n April Fools’ Day, a series of omens convinced me that I would have the best odds of fulfilling my quest of catching my first walleye, a sport fish commonly caught in the upper Midwest but also dwelling, according to multiple sources, in East Tennessee lakes. I had a two-hour window of time between afternoon meetings with Maryville College students and evening senior thesis presentations, so I sped off toward a put-in at Fort Loudoun State Historic Area on Tellico Lake. As a fisherman deficient in skill, patience, gear and knowledge, I depend heavily on luck. Good Omen #1 occurred to me as I sped down Highway 411 South and got my first look at sun-spangled Tellico Lake, thinking what a great photo I might take. If I’d had my camera, that is. Without the camera, it made sense that I would catch the toothy golden walleye and have no evidence of it
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY April 16, 2015
unless I brought him back with me. Good Omen #2: The guy who sold me a dozen minnows at Sloan’s in Vonore said he’d caught walleye on Tellico, and he was specific about locations, upriver of the 411 bridge, he said, on the Little T. arm of the lake, about where I planned to put in. Good Omen #3: Some wiseacres were speculating about my kayak in the parking lot of Sloan’s. “Is that a canoe?” one asked the other, more than loud enough for me to hear. “It’s a kayak,” I said helpfully. “Well, he said it wasn’t neither one,” said the wiseacre, nodding at the driver of the crew cab pickup. I didn’t wait around to find out their name for my humble and motorless craft, sensitive and prickly as I am about it. Good Omen #4: Since I was speed fishing and had to be back at the college by 7 p.m., I wore business casual, my office clothes, and good
shoes. Final good omen: A guy sitting up beside the fort’s gift shop said “good luck” as I scooted myself off the shore rocks toward the open water. I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I’d take it. He might have meant “good luck not drowning, office guy.” I paddled fast to get beyond sprawling Tellico Marina and up Ninemile Creek where I thought the walleye might be spawning, despite the advice of the marina sage who said they had finished their business in the creeks and had departed for deeper water. I hadn’t been up Ninemile for the full nine miles, but one Memorial Day a couple of years previous, my German shepherd Norm and I had canoed as far as we cared to, 5 or 6 miles away from the sprawling marina and big brick houses at the broad mouth of the creek. As the creek narrowed, the homes got older and more sparse until finally there was nothing but cow pasture and swampy forest. I didn’t have time to go
that far today, but I wanted to get past the threshold between lake and creek, through the tunnel that ran under Highway 72, where the water turned shallow, mud-yellow, and twisty like a creek was supposed to look. Something told me a fat walleye was waiting there for one of my minnows. A man and two kids were casting on the far side of the bridge, where the dead arms of trees reached up among stumps lurking just below the surface. They stared, a little startled, when I emerged from the passageway, and we wished each other luck. You could smell it here: a fishy place. As I skewered a minnow and let the lead weight drop him to the bottom of the creek, it occurred to me that the ¾-ounce dropshot might be a bit heavy for my tackle. Nevertheless, I had 30 minutes to catch a walleye, hold him out at arm’s length, and attempt a passable photo with my phone, a device I rarely use for such
purposes. Little did I know that I was in for an epic battle. I hadn’t been fishing five minutes when it struck, and I knew right away I was in trouble when I set the hook and my reel started whining, the drag set so low that I made no progress in pulling the creature from the depths, about 15 feet of water. I twisted the “more” button on my drag, and the whining stopped, but the pulling intensified. It was a tug of war. I’d make a couple of turns on the reel and think the thing had given up and then he would make a hard dive toward the bottom, a surprise tactic. My “prey” had veered under the boat and was pulling my bow toward a collision with a snaky looking brush pile only a few feet away. Tightened drag more. Five minutes had passed. This had to be the walleye I was seeking. What else would fight so hard? I’d already caught a lethargic smallmouth bass on Norris right where a TWRA biologist said stocked walleye should be tempted by minnows. And I’d heard from a few people, not just the minnow salesman, that there were walleye in Tellico. This had to be the energetic northern fish that was trying to pull me to the bottom of Ninemile
After 10 minutes, the war finally ended. As I held the catfish out at arm’s length to take a portrait with my phone, I commended his fight and apologized for catching him by accident.
Creek. A line from The Godfather occurred to me: “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.” After 10 minutes, the war finally ended. As I held the catfish out at arm’s length to take a portrait with my phone, I commended his fight and apologized for catching him by accident. He started the croaky talk that they are known for, a defiant grunting—guttural and dark and alien. I’m not sure I got the translation exactly right because it had been a while since I’d caught a catfish (first time with a minnow), but here’s what I thought he said: “You have a better chance of winning the lottery than catching a walleye, and you don’t even play the lottery. I took your silly minnow so that I could come up and tell you so. Paddle back to the ramp now so you won’t be late for the thesis presentations and set a bad example.” Careful of the spiny dorsal fin, I released him and made my exit, convinced that he was April Fooling me, that it was only a matter of time and strategy before I caught the walleye. Thanks to the catfish’s advice, though, I made it back to the college on time, one foot soaked from a hurried and blundered exit from the boat.
www.TennesseeTheatre.com
April 16, 2015
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FOOD
D ir t to Fork
Carrots, in Living Color In praise of multicolored root vegetables BY ROSE KENNEDY
M
aybe this winter of our discontent gets the credit for reintroducing me to carrots. For it was mere weeks before the area’s frosty tundra/ snow globe imitation that my daughter plunked a bag of carrots into our cart at Trader Joe’s. I’d probably overlooked them on 100 previous shopping trips, but this time—perhaps like a prescient squirrel feeding up hard on the birds’ food because it senses a winter storm—I latched on. They were gorgeous. I had to have them. They were different colors! Some were burgundy, some candied lemon-peel yellow, some a sort of subdued salmon orange. And, even more delightful, the burgundy ones, freed from the bag and slit open, had a dashing yellow stripe down the middle, known to the pros as a core. Now, I didn’t really need the colors, nope. My grandfather Red Scott refused to eat carrots as a boy because he’d heard they made hair curly and he already had a head full of despised strawberry blond ringlets. But I’d taken after the carrot-loving side of the family. I don’t need to be duped into eating carrots, just alerted to their loveliness. (Oh, wait, it was bread crusts my granddad wouldn’t eat, sorry. This coming into spring weather is slowing me down, like the proverbial molasses.) Maybe it was kind of childish that I ate all the purple/yellow carrot sticks so no one else could have them on our trek to Seattle by car. But they were all good, and stayed crunchy through Idaho, Wyoming, Utah. Which brings me to a surly remark independent of the winter. Who needs so-called baby carrots, now labeled
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“baby-cut” for honesty’s sake? They have been parted from their skins and cut from the inside of real carrots. They can be watery. They’re not real and now I can add that they only come in orange. But back to Tennessee, humming Dolly’s “Coat of Many Colors,” there to buy another bag of multicolor carrots— organic, to boot, this time from Three Rivers Market. I also do a bit of research. From no less than the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalog, I find out that “carrots are originally from central Asia” and “purple and red types are actually the original ones!” The lead gardener at that venerable rare- and heirloom-seed company, Jere Gettle, also flat-out states “yellow carrots always taste the best … they are so crunchy and full of juice.” Who am I to argue? (Now that spring beckons and I am no longer in the season of sub-par contentment, that is.) I learn that long-rooted carrots need deep, loose soil. Too-heavy soil can make them “fork.” In East Tennessee’s clay soil, it’s much easier to grow half-long or round types, like Atlas. Which tend to be orange. Only. At this, I feel the grumpiness surge again—am I to be deprived of locally grown carrots in many hues? The grocery ones both came in from California. But then I remember Jessica Hammonds, who I first met back in April 2009, peddling home-grown carrots for Organicism Farms at the then-fledgling Market Square Farmer’s Market. I call up her business Facebook page (it’s now Organicism Farms and Foods and she’s chef and sole
owner). Boom! The whole background photo is carrots—carrots of every color! Turns out she is a big fan. “They are so fun!” she tells me, and I wager the winter left her cheeriness completely untouched. “The different colors have different flavors. I’ve grown some really nice white carrots—so sweet and buttery tasting. My favorite is probably Purple Haze, which is this really dark purple outside and the middle this bright orange—they are the coolest thing ever.” We concur that washing these beauties is sufficient—no peeling—and that the experts who say to blanch carrots before roasting are wasting our
precious time. “I just cut the tops low without cutting them off and roast the whole carrots with herbs and oil,” she says. Hammonds will mostly be cooking this year, while her mother, Jeanne LeDoux-Hickman, runs the Mockingbird Farm CSA from their land. But she’ll grow some, too, for the catering, and she’s captivated by this new thing where people grow carrots (including long-root color carrots) in plastic kiddie pools, which they can fill with sandy, deep, nutritious soil. I’m captivated, too. “Wow,” I think. “I bet those kiddie pools come in some really cool colors.”
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37
’BYE
R estless Nat ive
Doc and the Cowboy A slice of life in Knoxville before Roe v. Wade BY CHRIS WOHLWEND
I
n the mid-1960s, I was neighbors with a University of Tennessee animal-science senior in a two-story building that had been built as a motel. It was on Laurel Avenue a half block east of Fort Sanders Hospital and had been designed for guests who needed a place to stay while relatives were hospitalized. I was on the ground floor, Roy lived upstairs. He was from rural Virginia. Though southern Appalachia is far removed from the cattle-raising plains of the West, Roy was a true cowboy. In his early 20s, he already was a successful rancher, leasing pasturage in a nearby county for his beef cattle. Roy exhibited Hollywood-cowboy traits, too. He was taciturn when sober and rowdy when drunk. And he was known to sometimes carry a .38 revolver. A behest from Roy led to my discovery of the Doc. The Doc was a general practitioner whose office hours were 5 to 9 p.m. three days a week. The unusual hours were suited to his specialty, abortion, at the time a shadowy, illegal practice. His office was on the fringe of downtown, less than a mile from our apartments. (In this
BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY
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story, he will be called the Doc; the other names have been changed.) Roy had come to me in an uncharacteristic panic. He had gotten a girl pregnant and he asked if I knew where she could get an abortion. I asked my cohorts at the newspaper and obtained the Doc’s name. I didn’t see Roy for a couple of weeks, and I assumed that he and his girlfriend had visited the Doc. But the Doc’s name came up again later when my friend Stanley came to me when his girlfriend Jeannie got pregnant. Jeannie had decided not to have the baby. Stanley wasn’t mature enough for fatherhood and Jeannie was well aware of that. Indeed, a couple of months later, Stanley would be making another trip to the Doc’s—with another girlfriend. In 1967, the options available to those confronted with an unwanted pregnancy were limited. The Pill had been available for a few years, but to most it was still a novelty, controversial. Roe v. Wade was five years away. Knoxville had a home run by the Florence Crittenton Agency, a discreet place where unwed mothers-to-be could stay during their last three
months of pregnancy—if they could take time off from school or work. The Doc provided another option. Stanley cadged the money for his fee from a fraternity brother. Immediately after the procedure, Jeannie, pale and shaken, rested in my apartment; the Doc had no recovery facilities and Stanley lived in the frat house. Later, through my job, I became friends with an emergency-room nurse. She knew about the Doc. But she was more familiar with the girls who were brought to the hospital after amateur attempts at abortion, often of the coat-hanger variety. But that all came later, after Roy’s situation resulted in a first-hand encounter with a time-tested solution to unexpected pregnancy. One night shortly after I had sent Stanley to the Doc, I was awakened by yelling outside my window. The father of Roy’s girlfriend, flanked by his two sons, was facing the building’s second-floor balcony, where Roy was standing, shirtless, revolver in hand. The girl was behind her dad, at
the rear of a mud-spattered car that I took to be the family sedan. The yelling was mostly from Roy and mostly along the lines of “I’m not the one knocked her up.” The father’s arguments were measured, spoken quietly and determinedly. It was evident that the pistol in Roy’s hand was the reason he and his sons had not bounded up the stairs for a more physical confrontation. As other lights came on, the girl and her family climbed into the car and retreated. The next day I asked Roy what all the yelling was about. He didn’t say much—just that he didn’t think he would need the abortionist’s services. I don’t know whether his girlfriend had the baby. If Roy knew, he wasn’t saying. But he did ask me to help him move his cows to another farm, on the other side of Knoxville about 70 miles from the girl’s home county. A few months later, Roy graduated and moved back to Virginia. After Roe v. Wade, the Doc retired, his services no longer needed.
The father of Roy’s girlfriend, flanked by his two sons, was facing the building’s second-floor balcony, where Roy was standing, shirtless, revolver in hand.
Crooked Street Crossword
’BYE
BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY
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