TAKING ROOT IN KNOXVILLE SINCE ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS AGO
NOV. 26, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM
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V.
NEWS
Bid to Save Hillsides From West Knox Neighborhood Plan Falters
JACK NEELY
Autumn Leaves: A Few Notes About Our Changing Seasons
MUSIC
Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego Make Music With No Borders
FOOD
Hard Knox Pizzeria Launches Youth Program at Austin-East
Earning a master’s degree in public administration opens the doors to a wide range of public service careers, including government administration, community or nonprofit management, and government relations.
Master of Public Administration (MPA)
Designed for working professionals with online and evening classes. Available in Knoxville, classes held at the LMU-Duncan School of Law. www.LMUnet.edu AHSS@LMUnet.edu 1.800.325.0900, ext. 6203 2
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Nov. 26, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 38 knoxmercury.com
CONTENTS
“Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.” —Alex Haley
14 T he Redemption of Alex Haley
COVER STORY
The late Alex Haley, famed author of Roots, became a local celebrity when he moved to Knoxville in his later years. But by that time in the late 1980s, the writer’s reputation was somewhat tarnished with accusations of plagiarism and of fabricating parts of his family’s history. That reputation gets a critical reassessment in University of Tennessee history professor Robert J. Norrell’s Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation. Jack Neely talks with Norrell about Haley’s missteps and his ultimate impact on race relations in America.
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DEPARTMENTS
OPINION
A&E
4 Letters 6 Howdy
8 The Scruffy Citizen
20
Start Here: Roadside Sketches by Andrew Gresham, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory PLUS: Words With … Sarah Brobst
38 ’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
Jack Neely gathers up some odds and ends from the leaf pile.
10 Guest Ed.
Grant A. Mincy is concerned over Gov. Haslam’s privatization plan of state services—and offers a third option.
NEWS
12 Cookie-Cutter Clearing
A bid by neighbors to stop a subdivision development from mass-grading a hilly lot in West Knox County was thwarted by the county’s Board of Zoning and Appeals last week when the board voted 7-1 to back an earlier split decision approving the 36-home buildout, Clay Duda reports.
CALENDAR P rogram Notes: Some canceled metal at Open Chord.
21 Shelf Life: Chris Barrett highlights
some documentary footage on the National Film Registry available at the library.
22 Music: Chris Barrett swings with Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego.
23 Classical Music: Alan Sherrod
reviews KSO director candidate Shizuo “Z” Kuwahara’s audition.
26 Spotlights: Crystal Method FOOD & DRINK
36 Restaurant News
Dennis Perkins talks with Hard Knox Pizzeria co-owner Alexa Sponcia about the restaurant’s new outreach program at Austin-East Magnet High School.
24 Movies: April Snellings admires the
life of Trumbo. November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3
LETTERS Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015
PLAY IT AGAIN
We always read the Mercury and look forward to each issue. We were surprised when we saw a picture of my aunt, Marlene Denton, in the most recent edition. [“A Survey of Knoxville’s Forgotten 45s,” Inside the Vault, Nov. 5, 2015] Please convey our thanks to Eric Dawson for the article. I still have a copy of the record, but no record player. My husband and children have now been able to hear an older song of hers that was special to our family. We have always been told that my great-great aunt was Cherokee, but an uncle informed Marlene that it was actually my great-great grandmother who was Cherokee and the family tried to hide that fact. Marlene wrote the song as a way to remember our family heritage. She has an amazing voice and still sings and writes music. She is also a talented artist with pencil and paint. I called her last night and read the article to her. She was excited to learn that her music is still being enjoyed. Suzanne French Knoxville
INCREASE DONNA’S FREQUENCY
I would like to request that Donna Johnson get a weekly column as I very much look forward to reading her story each week. The sun does not shine as bright during the weeks without them. Thank you for your consideration. Margaret Casteel Knoxville
IMPORTANT ISSUES
Who do you think would win in a fight? A polar bear or a gorilla? Thank you. Ben T O Smith, Host of the Indie Aisle on WUTK Knoxville Ed. Note: Global warming.
RADIO LISTENING TIP
I appreciate your Ed. Note re: 94.3FM. [“The Spirits of Radio,” letter to the editor regarding WNFZ’s format change, Nov. 19, 2015] We agree that 4
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
the old programs are missed. On a typical morning from 3 to 7 a.m. you can find me listening to Coast to Coast radio, but not on coasttocoast.com, as one has to join the Coast Insider to do that, which is a “pay for listen” option. But you can do as I do, and listen online at KFBK 1530 AM, Sacramento, Calif., where it is free, and more convenient, as you can listen until 7 a.m. Glenn Marshall Greenback
SUPPORT THE GIRL SCOUTS
Are you a girl? No? Too broad? Okay, let’s try again. Do you know a girl? Super! That means this is for you. Only 39 percent of girls want to be leaders. Here at the Girl Scouts of Southern Appalachians (read: Knoxville, Johnson City, and Chattanooga) we’re “girl experts” and not “percentage experts,” but we know enough to be ruffled by this number. Especially when you think in the reverse: 61 percent of girls don’t want to be leaders. How come? Because they are afraid they won’t be liked, or that they’ll fail, that’s why. These numbers, recently discovered in a national Girl Scout study, provide an excellent segue to a bigger conversation. Every girl should know she can lead, as in, know it’s an option open to her. Every girl should possess the confidence to dig deep and step up when no one else will. If she chooses not to lead—it should be her decision—and not because she thinks she can’t. Haters gonna hate—we know this, and kids have to be tough and not listen to criticism. Yeah! Sticks and stones and all that. Except confidence doesn’t always come easy. Girls in this community have the eighth worst sense of well-being in the country. That’s her health, emotional stability, education, and economic security… eighth worst. We love where we live, and hope you do, too! We’re not going anywhere—so something’s gotta happen.
Being the eighth worst is NOT OKAY. We know our girls are resilient, and that we have caring and dedicated adults out there. Her courage and confidence is directly impacted by you, grown ups. So, tell her—better yet, SHOW HER she matters. Ask her what she likes, dreams, and thinks, and be present and listen while she’s talking. Don’t check your phone—just be there and make her time feel valuable. Give her choices, and then trust her to make decisions. Join us in kicking off our Girls Matter! Campaign, and show the girls in your community that you think they matter. From now until Dec. 1, our goal is to raise $100,000 to directly impact the lives of our 8,000+ girls. Visit our donation page girlsmatter.networkforgood.com/projects/7069-girls-matter or http://ow.ly/ Ux8q3 to learn more. You can’t chaperone her entire life, but you can lay the foundation for courage and confidence to take root, grow within her, and become part of her. She should know, without a doubt that her voice is worth listening to. Every girl—regardless of who she is, or where she lives—matters. Melissa Trimble Girl Scouts of Southern Appalachians
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR GUIDELINES
• Letter submissions should include a verifiable name, address, and phone number. We do not print anonymous letters. • We much prefer letters that address issues that pertain specifically to Knoxville or to stories we’ve published. • We don’t publish letters about personal disputes or how you didn’t like your waiter at that restaurant. • Letters are usually published in the order that we receive them. Send your letters to: Our Dear Editor, Knoxville Mercury 706 Walnut St., Suite 404 Knoxville, TN 37920 Send an email to: editor@knoxmercury.com Or message us at: facebook.com/knoxmercury
EDITORIAL EDITOR Coury Turczyn coury@knoxmercury.com SENIOR EDITOR Matthew Everett matthew@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Jack Neely jack@knoxhistoryproject.org STAFF WRITERS S. Heather Duncan heather@knoxmercury.com Clay Duda clay@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTORS
Chris Barrett Ian Blackburn Patrice Cole Eric Dawson George Dodds Lee Gardner Mike Gibson Carey Hodges Nick Huinker Donna Johnson
Rose Kennedy Dennis Perkins Stephanie Piper Ryan Reed Eleanor Scott Alan Sherrod April Snellings Joe Sullivan Kim Trevathan Chris Wohlwend
INTERNS
Jordan Achs Marina Waters
DESIGN ART DIRECTOR Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNERS
Charlie Finch Corey McPherson CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS
David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine CONTRIBUTING ILLUSTRATORS
Ben Adams Matthew Foltz-Gray
ADVERTISING PUBLISHER & DIRECTOR OF SALES Charlie Vogel charlie@knoxmercury.com SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Scott Hamstead scott@knoxmercury.com Stacey Pastor stacey@knoxmercury.com
BUSINESS BUSINESS MANAGER Scott Dickey scott.dickey@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
BOARD OF DIRECTORS Terry Hummel Joe Sullivan Jack Neely Coury Turczyn Charlie Vogel 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
速ROBERTOCOIN
NEW BAROCCO & CENTO COLLECTIONS
November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5
Illustration by Ben Adams
HOWDY
Believe It or Knox! BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX
Roadside Sketches by Andrew Gresham (agreshamphoto.com)
QUOTE FACTORY “ Your behavior as a former mayor in harassing and haranguing subsequent administrations is unprecedented—and unprofessional.” —Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero in a letter to former Knoxville Mayor Victor Ashe, published in full at local political blog KnoxViews.com. Rogero was responding partly to Ashe’s criticism, in a Shopper News column, of city greenway coordinator Lori Goerlich, whom he said “has little to show” for her four years on the job.
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
11/27 CHRISTMAS IN THE CITY KICKS OFF 11/28 THANKSFORGIVING DAY 2016 FRIDAY
6 p.m., Market Square, Krutch Park. Free. The city of Knoxville restarts its annual War Against Christmas with events that suspiciously do not include the word “Christmas” in their titles, but are all organized under the umbrella of “Christmas in the City.” Sneaky! Things kick off with the Regal Celebration of Lights and a new 42-foot-tall tree equipped with LED lighting, and then continue at Holidays on Ice in Market Square. Info: knoxvilletn.gov/christmas.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
SATURDAY
2-5 p.m., Market Square. Donations of non-perishable goods. The Secret City Cyphers are launching their first annual Thanksforgiving Day, inviting the community to bring clothing, toys, or non-perishable food donations for local charities. The open-mic group gathers street performers of all sorts: poets, DJs, MCs, singers, dancers, musicians, visual artists, and/or comedians. Info: facebook.com/SecretCityCyphers.
Legendary bluesman Brownie McGhee, who was born in Knoxville 100 years ago this Nov. 30, may be responsible for the phrase “rock ’n’ roll.” In 1948, when he and longtime partner Sonny Terry released a record about the first black professional baseball players, “Robbie-Dobey Boogie,” Savoy Records promoted it with the unusual line, “It jumps, it’s made, it rocks, it rolls!” Coincidentally, his younger brother Stick McGhee is sometimes credited as one of the forefathers of rock, partly for his landmark recording of “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-dee-o-dee.” When Vice President John C. Calhoun resigned in December 1832, Hugh Lawson White, of Knoxville, son of settler James White, became president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate. If President Jackson had been assassinated beween December 1832 and March 1833, when Martin Van Buren was sworn in as the new vice president, White WOULD HAVE BECOME PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES! The 1979 musical revue Sugar Babies, which enjoyed a successful three-year run on Broadway, with several major stars, including Mickey Rooney and Ann Miller, OPENED AS AN ORIGINAL SHOW AT UT’s CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE! The play was conceived and written by CBT artistic director Ralph Allen.
11/29 STARGAZING AT SEVEN ISLANDS 12/1 MEETING: EDUCATIONAL DISPARITIES SUNDAY
8 p.m., Seven Islands State Birding Park (2809 Kelly Lane, Kodak), $5 per adult, Now that we’ve got that Black Friday unpleasantness behind us, let’s recuperate by doing something a bit more fulfilling. Partake the clear skies and lack of city lights out at Seven Islands to view the stars. The stargazing is limited to 12 participants. Register by calling the park office: 865-407-8335; 18 and under can attend for free. Meet at the Bluebird Barn.
TUESDAY
5:30 p.m., Austin-East Magnet High School, Performing Arts Center (2800 Martin L. King Jr. Avenue). Free. Knox County Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre and members of the Disparities in Educational Outcomes Task Force are meeting with the public to discuss how to address achievement gaps at local schools that might be related to income, race, language, and/or disability. The meeting will also be streamed live at knoxschools.org/ kcstv and broadcast on Comcast Cable channel 10.
HOWDY
THINK SMOKING DOESN’T AFFECT YOUR BUSINESS? THINK AGAIN.
WORDS WITH ...
Sarah Brobst BY ROSE KENNEDY Sarah Brobst is the visitor services manager at Ijams Nature Center (2915 Island Home Ave.) and organizer of its second meeting of The Big Kids Coloring Club on Tuesday, Dec. 8 at 6 p.m. Cost is $5 per person, coloring pages and tools supplied, and the event is recommended for ages 12 and up.
There’s already been one very popular coloring event at Ijams?
Our first Big Kids Coloring Club was Nov. 10 and it was amazing! Seventy-eight people came to color and socialize and just enjoy themselves.
How did this all come about?
I loved the idea of people coming together and just being creative—bouncing ideas off one another, chatting about their days. And coloring is accessible to most people. You don’t have to have a major in art—but you can. You don’t have to buy fancy coloring tools—but you can if you want. There is something for everyone: easy to extremely difficult, young to old, men or women.
How long have you personally been “adult coloring”?
I have been coloring and drawing all of my life. I hadn’t really ever thought of it as “adult coloring” until it started popping up everywhere over the last year or so and it officially had a name. I was always incorporating it in part of my classes I taught—and it was part of my art journaling and something I did to relax.
Do you have any favorite books or tools?
I recently found a book called Calming Therapy: An Anti-Stress Coloring Book that is beautiful. And everything that Johanna Basford does, including Secret Garden and Enchanted Forest. As for tools, a really great pack of colored pencils goes a long way in my coloring world. I like to blend colors.
Does coloring have any direct link to Ijams?
Over the past year we have really worked to launch our creative series here—bringing the arts to the park for people to learn new skills and make new creative masterpieces of many different types. Nature can be so inspiring.
Yes, or coloring can be super affordable. It just depends on what you want to spend. There are colored pencils that you can get for a few bucks for a pack or you can spend hundreds of dollars. You can tell a quality difference if you get into the better brands, but you can color with anything. You can also spend lot on coloring books or you can find print-at-home pages from the Internet.
The American Cancer Society estimates that on average, smoking employees cost their employers an additional $5,800 a year compared with non-tobacco users. That all adds up to major losses for businesses of all sizes.
For more information on how to help your employees quit and how to keep all areas around your business smoke-free, contact the Knox County Health Department at 865-215-5170.
Do you struggle with limiting your coloring purchases?
Not really. I have a few books that I enjoy but I am actually working on designing a coloring book, so my mind goes from coloring to designing. Plus, I have other artistic interests too—I own my own jewelry design business—so that keeps my focus moving around so I don’t rack up too many coloring books. But I do love looking at them in the stores.
Do you have a coloring mentor?
I don’t think they are so much coloring mentors as they are artistic inspirations. I have lots of artistic inspirations from artists—M.C. Escher is my favorite—to wonderful teachers I have had over the years. And there’s my mom. She inspires me as a quilter who does amazing things with colors and patterns and puts them together in the perfect way to make the composition all come together.
Stanley’s Greenhouse Our business is growing.
Holiday Open House
Save th Sun. D e date! ec. 6, 1Music5pm. craft & local artist s.
Do you see lots of coloring in Ijams’ future?
I do. We are planning on holding this get-together monthly so we hope this will keep growing and that people will continue to find the joy of coloring with their friends, old and new. We can definitely hold more people than the 78 we had the first time, but if it keeps growing we might have to have to tweak it a bit—and get more chairs. For more info, see the events calendar at ijams.org.
Locally grown, always tax free on plants. Just 5 minutes from downtown. 3029 Davenport Road (South Knoxville) | 865.573.9591 M-F 8-5pm | Sat 9-5pm | Sun 1-5pm www.stanleysgreenhouse.com November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7
SCRUFFY CITIZEN
Autumn Leaves A few notes about our changing seasons BY JACK NEELY
I
t’s been an odd fall, and not just because I still have a yellow flower on my surviving tomato plant. This past weekend its leaves still smelled like July. In the Old City, at the corner of Central and Willow, the old Big Don’s the Costumier building is gone. The business itself, still thriving, moved into a slightly less conspicuous space around the corner on Jackson. When I first encountered the Old City, maybe 40 years ago, when the only restaurants down here sold baloney sandwiches, Big Don’s was the liveliest and most interesting place in the neighborhood. Ramona, daughter of the original “Elegant Junk” man Big Don Buttry, is the only one from that pre “Old City” era who’s still in business there. It’s a rare downtown demolition that draws only polite expressions of regret from the preservationist community. Unlike most of the buildings in the neighborhood, it was just a one-story, without much ornament. Nobody claimed it was handsome or that it was representative of any past era. An architectural inspection turned up only signs of multiple repairs and modifications. One wall collapsed and was rebuilt just a couple of years ago.
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Still, the big brick box at Willow and Central did have some character. Long before it was Big Don’s, it was Corkland’s, named after a man originally known as Gerson Korklan. There are several other spellings of his name, if you don’t like those. A Lithuanian immigrant who arrived in Knoxville around 1890 with nothing, he built a family clothing business that lasted for decades. He first sold potatoes in the street, around 1890, near the train tracks that brought him here, until a mysterious woman took pity on him. Her name was Amelia Burr. She claimed to be kin to Aaron Burr, and maybe she was. She was the widow of an industrialist from Connecticut who also claimed to be Burr’s descendant. The lane behind the building is called Burr’s Alley. Anyway, the Corklands built their own building here, sold in the front, lived in the back. Corkland’s was here even before Willow Street, which punched through a long dense block around 1904. It’s a great story, like an Old World fairy tale. But I gather the building built with Amelia Burr’s money was demolished long ago.
As everybody who lives, works, and plays downtown knows, there’s major infrastructure improvement afoot. One street after another gets closed as men working in trenches fix underground pipes. Backhoes bite down into the ground. Sometimes they strike streetcar tracks. They’re still down there, 68 years after we abandoned our model public transportation system. But of course there’s less trace of them each time they dig. For many years, downtown’s most visible streetcar track was on Clinch Avenue near the History Center. With wear it somehow peeked through the pavement, which is soft by comparison to steel. It emerged just like the ribs of a shipwreck sometimes emerge from a sand dune. This year’s work put an end to that. It’s not there anymore. I’m not complaining. Putting it back as it was would have been an odd thing to do. One reader remarked that a lost bit of streetcar track turned up on lower Cumberland Avenue, and was visible there for a few weeks, though it’s gone now. Usually we just see steel. But as another reader noted, on the 800 block of Gay Street, near the courthouse, the work tore up actual wooden crossties, clearly visible in the trench. Buried wood can last for a century. There’s less rail underfoot than there was last year, but I’m willing to bet there are still miles and miles of it.
A few weeks ago I wrote about the local evolution of some modern terms for streets. After scanning some city directories, I guessed that Knoxville’s first “Boulevard,” as a capitalized proper name, was Emoriland Boulevard in North Knoxville, which was going by that title as early as 1924. I should know better than to overlook neighborhoods that cherish their history. A couple of different readers in the Island Home neighborhood are convinced, and have convinced me, that Island Home Boulevard is older. Although it’s not listed consistently in city directories as “Island Home Boulevard” until 1923—which would make it Knoxville’s oldest “Boulevard” anyway— they’re citing deed research that may
take it back to 1911. By the way, the aforementioned crossties would have carried the streetcar to Island Home Boulevard.
And last week I was privileged to witness the biggest surprise in the East Tennessee Historical Society’s long history of Brown Bag lectures. It was the culmination of a week of celebrating Frances Hodgson Burnett’s youth in East Tennessee. The English novelist of The Secret Garden moved here with her family at age 15, living first in New Market. Much of last week’s celebration was based in Jefferson County, and was basically a 150th anniversary celebration of her arrival in America, and there. Later, she lived for several years in Knoxville, and it was here she began writing short stories and novels. Several members of her family, including her great-granddaughter Penny Deupree, based in Texas and an authority on the author’s life and career, and Burnett’s 96-year-old great niece, Kate Hodgson, who lives in Northern Virginia, were here for a series of events and a wreath laying on Burnett’s mother’s grave at Old Gray. It may have been the most attention Eliza Boond Hodgson has gotten since she was buried there in 1870. Ms. Hodgson, who doesn’t think she ever met the novelist in person, grew up referring to the author as “Aunt Fluffy.” Over a plate of ribs at Calhoun’s, she outlined how Burnett’s nephew, Peter Hodgson, was responsible for the Silly Putty craze of the 1950s and ’60s. After Deupree spoke at the Brown Bag, the resourceful and often astonishing Bradley Reeves, of the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, surprised Deupree and the other 100-odd folks in the room, including me, by playing an old 78 of her cousin, Bert Hodgson—nephew of Frances Hodgson Burnett—who was a Knoxville singer and songwriter in the 1920s. It was a 1930s crooner-style piece, called “Down in Tennessee.” He died in 1965, a century after his family first arrived here. As far as I know, he was her last local relative. And Bert Hodgson lived on Island Home Boulevard. See, everything’s connected. ◆
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November 26, 2015 AA-B2B_2015-BLISS-4.625x5.25_BlackFriday.indd 1
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9 11/18/15 12:17 PM
GUEST ED.
Rebel Governance In defense of the common sector BY GRANT A. MINCY
L
ife is pretty good here in the Volunteer State. As an East Tennessean I am particularly fond of the Great Smoky Mountains, our scruffy little city of Knoxville, a multitude of markets (including a rising craft-beer scene), and an array of state parks. My family and I are fond of camping, especially at Frozen Head State Park. It is our tradition to camp under hemlock, oak, and poplar, cook over embers, and play in the cool waters of Flat Fork. As an instructor of natural and behavioral science at Pellissippi State Community College, it is nice to run into nature, sit, breathe, and enjoy her complexity. It recharges me for the classroom. In the halls of the academy, I work to cultivate the interests of students, to teach them science, describe what we know about how the world operates, to note the mysteries that still need to be solved and to instill a sense of wonder regarding the natural environment. Science is much more than methodology, it is a way to understand our place in the cosmos and thus the human condition. State parks and the halls of higher education are just two examples of spaces that mean a lot to me and many other Tennesseans. Whether it is the solace of the park or the curiosity of the classroom, these institutions reflect a human desire to explore, labor, leisure, wonder, and create. So, I am rather disturbed by the Request for Proposals posted on Aug. 11 to the Tennessee Department of General Services website. In a cost-saving effort, the Haslam
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Administration is looking to outsource management of public institutions (including parks, colleges, prisons, and National Guard armories) to the business sector. Of course, the RFP should not be surprising. Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam is just following modern conservative doctrine. Cutting spending and selling public lands and institutions to the highest bidder is sound economics. The plan is applauded by the political right as a benefit to taxpayers, with little or no reflection on the detriment done to public goods. On the other side of the aisle, Tennessee Democrats and the operating union UCW-CWA (which, full disclosure, I am a member of) are rallying on behalf of public workers. The idea is, the stronger the public sector, the better off is Tennessee labor. The Haslam plan is berated by the political left who have little or no understanding of the destructive nature of the state and its maintenance of public goods. This false duality that says public goods can only be managed by either the state or private business fails to recognize that both approaches are authoritarian and overlook liberty as a praxis. We completely overlook the commons. Yet, the commons build the public arena. It is in this arena that debate, consensus, and adaptation can mold real governance. I write this article in defense of the overlooked common sector. Equally overlooked is common property—land or space in which all members of a given community hold equal rights over said territory. There
is no coercive body delegating property management or use, as in state territory, nor is there exclusive ownership given to an anointed individual or privileged group, as with private property. Common property is liberated from enclosure movements. This is not to say there is no governance of these resources. To the contrary, a highly ordered, decentralized, adaptive governance applies to common property. Commons governance is slowly making a comeback. One poignant example is adaptive management of natural resources. Adaptive Collaborative Management is an increasingly popular method of conflict resolution developed to resolve complex problems requiring collective action. Take the work of famed Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom. Ostrom, an economist and political scientist, challenged the idea that centralized authority, be it through government regulation or private property ownership, was necessary to successfully manage natural resources. In her landmark book, Governing the Commons, she demonstrated, under classical libertarian conditions (power equally distributed among individuals), that common property can be successfully managed by organized community members and user associations. The common sector revisits the idea of (small d) democracy. Imagine a world where individuals, neighborhoods, communities, cities, etc. are engaged in the affairs around them. The common sector presents the idea that there is no need to look to vertical power structures to make decisions, but that we can look horizontally to one another to make decisions. This is our right to the commons. It is the liberty of the individual to cultivate his neighborhood, community, city, region, and so on. Individuals discover their place in the community, and
are empowered to labor free of capital, market, or state restrictions. As far as access to institutions goes, at the societal level, it is my belief that many services will be so sought after that the models that govern them will change. I will use academia as an example. Education is one of the greatest undertakings of our society. Learning is a lifelong pursuit and an endless adventure. Education provides the instruction and tools necessary for people to reach their maximum potential. Education is much more than teaching to a test or preparing individuals for the workforce—it is paramount to the cultivation of society. Education works to enhance the natural capacities of individuals by developing their innate need for intellectual growth. The old motto still rings true: “Learners are not empty vessels waiting to be filled, but instead respond in different ways to the stream of knowledge and its current.” When benefits such as these transcend the community, the community may find the institutions that provide them so critical to the social order that they will be removed from the cash nexus. “Public” institutions would truly be public, a common regime. Commons governance is rebel governance. Liberty is no enemy of human labor. Our enemy is the calculated enclosure of our commons. ◆ Grant A. Mincy is a senior fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS.org) where he holds the Elinor Ostrom Chair in Environmental Studies and Commons Governance. He also blogs at appalachianson. wordpress.com. In addition, Mincy is an associate editor of the Molinari Review and an Energy & Environment Advisory Council Member for the Our America Initiative. Got something to say to Knoxville? Submit your pithy essay to editor@knoxmercury.com.
The common sector presents the idea that there is no need to look to vertical power structures to make decisions, but that we can look horizontally to one another to make decisions.
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Note: This production as staggered start times. Please check the time for your performance so you don’t miss any of the show!
20 ■ 2:30pm ■ 7:00pm ■ 8:00pm ■ 10:00pm Talkback after matinee
SHOP LOCAL. EAT LOCAL. SPEND LOCAL. ENJOY LOCAL.
es only
Open Captioned matinee
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#CBTSantaland
Saturday Nov. 28, 2015 during Small Business Saturday
David Brian Alley as “Crumpet the Elf” • Photo by Elizabeth Aaron November 26, 2015
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Cookie-Cutter Clearing Effort to save hillsides from West Knox neighborhood plan falters WORDS AND PHOTOS BY CLAY DUDA
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bid by neighbors to stop a subdivision development from mass-grading a hilly lot in West Knox County was thwarted by the county’s Board of Zoning and Appeals last week when the board voted 7-1 to back an earlier split decision approving the 36-home buildout. Presenting on behalf of area residents, Michael Wright argued that plans for the property that is to become the Cambridge Shores subdivision off S. Northshore Drive near Bluegrass Road violated provisions in the county’s general plan and also guidelines set by the Hillside and Ridgetop Protection Plan, or HRPP. Asking a neighbor in attendance to hold up a copy of last week’s Mercury, which delved into the intricacies of the HRPP, Wright noted that much of the property consists of slopes greater
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than 15 percent, thus earning it a sort of protected status under the plan and possibly some limits on development. However, an amendment added to the county’s version of the HRPP states that it is only advisory in nature, which means those guidelines can be applied, or not, for each development considered by the Knoxville-Knox County Metropolitan Planning Commission. “While those guidelines may not be binding, we still think they’re relevant,” Wright said. Most of the residents’ concerns centered on alleged violations of the county’s sector plan, which is part of its general plan, and concerns over stormwater runoff and potential flooding. In particular, Wright referenced sections of the general plan that call for minimizing grading
on steep slopes, protecting natural drainage systems, and restricting developments on slopes greater than 15 percent near streams and rivers, among other things. Approval for the subdivision passed the MPC in early October with a narrow 7-6 vote during a use on review hearing, a necessary step for early conceptual development plans. MPC Development Service Manager Dan Kelly told the appeals board last week that he believed the development complied with all county guidelines and recommended approval. “Knox County did not adopt the HRPP, and staff has been struggled for some time on how to deal with property with slopes,” Kelly said. (County Commission did indeed adopt the HRPP, but with an amendment stripping much of its authority.) Knox County Drainage Engineer Leo LaCamera testified that, at this point in the development process, it was too early to address the finer points of runoff and stormwater management, but noted the subdivision would be subject to all related regulations and inspections before earning final approval from the county. Developer Danny Kirby, owner of DK Development, said flattening the majority of the lot at a slight 6 percent grade up toward the center, then taking a 6 percent slant down to the back end of the property approaching the Tennessee River would actually help better control runoff and manage stormwater then constructing houses
Left: West Knox County resident Michael Wright testifies before the county’s Board of Zoning and Appeals in a bid to stop the development of the Cambridge Shores subdivision near his home off S. Northshore Drive. Right: Danny Kirby, president of DK Development, hands out property diagrams during a meeting last week with the BZA. The appeals board upheld a split MPC decision to allow Kirby’s subdivision plans to move forward. on the existing hillsides. Site plans call for two retention ponds to hold influxes of water, aimed at preventing flooding due to a downpour. About 88 percent of the 12-acre property is slated to be clear-cut and graded. Retaining walls will hold up existing hillsides being excavated. “The idea that there are these steep slopes we can’t grade on, I’d probably agree with that above 40 percent slope, and as a developer I wouldn’t want to go above a 40 percent slope,” Kirby says. Knoxville attorney Michael Kelly, representing Kirby in front of the board, questioned the BZA’s authority in hearing appeals to use-on-review cases, but that did not stop the board from casting a ruling after some discussion. Board member Kevin Murphy, who was the lone dissenting vote, said he had some concerns over the layout of homes and didn’t believe the site plan fit the type of development they hoped to see in unincorporated Knox County. Kirby says construction on the neighborhood will likely start this spring. ◆
The Story of a House You still have time to consider an inexpensive and unusual Christmas gift for a close friend or relative who lives in an old house. Surprise them with a history of their home! It’s easier than you may think. You can spend months on a house-history project, but you can also turn up a lot in just a few hours at the library. Here are some basics:
basic information about each resident. Now take those names and ask to see the biographical files for those residents. They’ll give you an envelope with something about many people who had the same last name. Most are just short obituaries, but the biographical files may also include some news stories and long feature profiles. If your person lived here in the last 75 years or so, you’ll probably find something. Before that, chances decline, but it’s still worth checking.
Houses in the city, especially in the older parts of the city, are easier to research, because there are more old records. But there are some things to be careful about, partly because some addresses have changed over the years. There are two main ways to do house research. One is to do property-title research, online via kgis.org, at the Register of Deeds at the City County Building--or for long-ago deeds (before 1930) the Knox County Archives, on the second floor of the History Center at Gay Street and Clinch Avenue. Older deed research is complicated, and requires the assistance of a clerk. It will only tell you who owned the property, not necessarily who lived there.
McClung also keeps vertical subject files on most employers of the last 100 years or more, which can help you learn a great deal about your resident’s trade or profession. At 1201 West Clinch is one old house with a story.
Also, ask a librarian to help find census records (available to the public only through 1940), death certificates, or tax-list documents. They’ll help you know how old your resident was, their cause of death, their survivors, and their date of death. Date of death is important, because it allows you to look up obits that might not have gotten into the biographical files.
IMAGE COURTESY OF KNOX HERITAGE.
Another kind of research, involving city directories, is easier and often more interesting. Start with the house’s current address. Take it to the Calvin M. McClung Collection, on the third floor of the History Center. At McClung are city directories, both in bound form and on microfilm. City directories are not the same thing as phone books. Published occasionally beginning in 1859, and almost annually after 1890, city directories include lists of people by last name, and lists of addresses by street. A tip: To be sure you don’t get tripped up by a house that had its address changed, start with familiar recent years, and work backwards. Write down each name. Before you put the volume away, look up that name in the individual listings. It will usually tell you what that person did for a living. It often mentions their employer’s name, which you can look up in the same list, to find out where their business was, and often other information. As you work backwards in the city directories, if you come to a year when your address is missing and everything seems wrong, you’ve likely found evidence of an address change. (Take special care in the early 1950s and the early 1890s, when some parts of the city were reordered). By looking at cross streets and patterns of where neighbors lived, you can usually figure out what the previous address was. As you go farther back, shift your search to that address. After just an hour or two you should have a list of residents and some
The McClung Collection has most 18th and 19th century newspapers on microfilm, as well as some later ones. Lawson McGhee Library offers an almost complete collection of both daily papers since the 1880s, on the third floor of its own building. Lawson McGhee is a better place to do 20th-century newspaper research. Sanborn Fire Insurance maps offer a surprising degree of detail about houses, with schematic drawings, and coded information about individual houses, especially between 1880 and 1930. They can offer information about construction materials, outbuildings, interior changes, neighboring edifices, etc. Originals are at McClung, but they’re also available through knoxlib.org.
Once you have those basic details, ask a librarian for more ideas. Also consider the neighbors, and what was going on near the home at various times. A full history of a house is often as interesting as a good novel.
Knox Heritage offers free workshops on house research, led by Director of Education Hollie Cook. The next one is Saturday, Jan. 9, at 10 a.m., at Westwood, 3425 Kingston Pike. Check their website at knoxheritage.org.
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 November 26, 2015
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Knoxville’s Alex Haley statue in Haley Heritage Square, at the entrance to Morningside Park, was completed by the late California sculptor Tina Allen in 1998.
Photos by Tricia Bateman
n a rainy night in a crowded restaurant in the Old City, University of Tennessee Professor Robert J. Norrell and I may be the only middle-aged people in the whole room who didn’t watch a single episode of Roots on primetime TV in 1977. He was in grad school, and distracted. I was an undergraduate, and didn’t have a TV, or much want one. Still, somehow here we are, at prime time almost 40 years later, and what we’re talking about is Alex Haley and his genealogical odyssey Roots. Norrell is the author of the first-ever scholarly biography of Haley, released just this month by St. Martin’s Press. Even if he didn’t pay much attention to it when Roots came out, as a teacher and author who has devoted his career to the study of civil rights, Norrell believes Roots was little short of earthshaking. His book is called Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation. The other book that makes that noun a plural is Haley’s earlier work, a book that began as an assignment for Playboy: The Autobiography of Malcolm X. With his own book, Norrell has a particular intent. He wants to rehabilitate Haley’s reputation. Since Haley was, for a while, the most celebrated black author in the world, his reputation has plummeted. Roots has been dropped from recommended reading, left out of anthologies. At least one scholarly critic has insisted that his sins are so profound, his Pulitzer Prize should be posthumously revoked. Accusations of misrepresentation, fabrication, and, worst of all, plagiarism left the author’s reputation in tatters. While not overlooking any of that—and Norrell admits some of Haley’s actions are hard to defend—he believes they’re small compared to the stature of the book and what it accomplished in America. Anything about Alex Haley is likely to be of special interest in Knoxville. It’s 355 miles from his childhood home in Henning—and a couple thousand miles from his home in Los Angeles, where he lived during his greatest celebrity. But, for reasons hard to explain, it was here Alex Haley chose to spend the last several years of his life. A quarter-century ago, he was a familiar figure in Knoxville, speaking at UT, participating in local media projects, throwing
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parties in his mansion on Cherokee Boulevard or at his capacious log home in Norris. Alex Haley died in 1992. Norrell, who had been a professor at the University of Alabama, best known for his books about civil rights in that state, didn’t move to Knoxville until 1998, when he accepted the Bernadotte Schmitt Chair of Excellence at UT. He now lives near Asheville, but is still a UT professor, on campus at least once a week. Norrell grew up on a farm outside of Huntsville, Ala. The time and place left him with an interest in civil rights, which developed into a career when Norrell attended the University of
don’t have many blacks.’ That seemed to be the common refrain.” He didn’t hear much about Haley right away. “The Haley presence had largely passed from the consciousness of most people I came to know in Knoxville, and I never had much consciousness of him, though I knew his books.” His understanding of Haley’s importance came slowly, through a circuitous route that would seem natural only to a history scholar. His study of a civil-rights leader who died before Haley was born suggested a connection. In Up from History, which earned considerable respect in the academic community in 2009, Norrell attempted
“The thing that really reversed that was not all these academic books that I’ve been reading for 30 years. The thing that really reversed it, in the popular understanding, was Roots ! —ROBERT J. NORRELL
Virginia in Charlottesville. His first book, Reaping the Whirlwind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee, earned the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award in 1986. Since then, he has published several histories, including Up from History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (2009), as well as several novels, including Eden Rise (2012). Almost all of his work to date concerns race relations and the struggle for justice. He wasn’t much impressed with Knoxville upon his arrival. “The upper- and middle-class Knoxvillians I met were more absorbed with UT football and NASCAR, and had traveled outside the city less, than comparably situated folks I had known in Alabama and Virginia,” he says. “Plus, it seemed to me they failed to see that the university and downtown just looked shabby compared especially to Southern university towns. That, of course, has changed in the past 10 years.” He adds, “Knoxvillians seemed naïve, even disingenuous, about the impact of race on their community. ‘We don’t have a race problem because we 16
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to redeem the pragmatic reformer’s efforts, overshadowed in recent years by contemporaries who seem more modern, like W.E.B. Dubois. “One of the things I realized was that Washington’s really greatest effort, the thing he spent the most time on, was trying to re-orient the way whites thought about black people,” Norrell says. “This is starting in the 1890s, when whites had all these really ugly images of black people. Washington believed, and he was right about this, that it was going to be very hard for black people to make progress until we had addressed all these really pernicious images of blacks as lazy and immoral. Washington didn’t really succeed in that endeavor—although he worked on it his whole life. “But one who did make a big impact on that was Haley.” His first blow was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, based on extensive interviews with the doomed militant. The book introduced a major figure to the American mainstream, and even for those unconvinced by Malcolm’s severe philosophy, intro-
duced a new image of a black masculine intellect. It was a remarkable accomplishment for a writer who had begun his career so modestly, as a press guy in the Coast Guard. Haley was in the service for almost 20 years, including World War II, when he served across the Pacific. (Norrell thinks Haley stayed in the Coast Guard so long in part to escape his academic father’s demand that he finish college; he didn’t.) He began writing light bits for black magazines and Reader’s Digest. Ironically, work for that magazine, which some of us associate with retirees’ bathrooms, made Haley mainstream America’s authority on the Nation of Islam, and especially its charismatic spokesman, Malcolm X. Meanwhile, Haley was cultivating a relationship with a very different magazine, Playboy, which was cultivating a pro-civil-rights persona. “Haley was a favorite of Hugh Hefner’s, and he made the Playboy interviews,” says Norrell. Haley’s 1962 interview with sometimes-inflammatory jazz icon Miles Davis was the first in the magazine’s trademark series of provocative Q&A interviews. “If you read those interviews, they’re terrific, in terms of just getting out all kinds of interesting things,” Norrell says. “They had a real commitment to civil rights before any other American magazine did.” Other Haley interview subjects for Playboy ranged from Sammy Davis Jr. to American Nazi agitator George Lincoln Rockwell. Even if he never wrote a book, Haley might be famous just for those. Eventually he conducted a series of interviews with Malcolm X, who trusted Haley more than any other journalist. “Betty Shabazz, Malcolm’s wife, said everybody liked Alex,” Norrell says. The Autobiography evolved from Haley’s interviews with Malcolm, and remains the primarily source material for the life of that incendiary figure.
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everal years later came another even more popular book. “Roots was really important, I thought, for changing how both blacks and whites understood black history,” Norrell says. “And I thought well, just on that basis, and the fact that he’d sold so many books, and 130 million people saw Roots, it had a huge impact. I connected it to the antecedent cultural
phenomena: first Uncle Tom’s Cabin; Birth of a Nation and the Thomas Dixon novels; then Gone With the Wind, the novel and the movie, and how that really shaped America’s popular understanding of slavery”— especially, in the first half of the 20th century, that slavery was an old-fashioned but benign institution. The image of kind, paternalistic masters was an image that the majority white culture obviously preferred. But the end of legal segregation in the civil-rights era, Norrell says, opened the nation to a new and more authentic picture of their past. “The thing that really reversed that was not all these academic books that I’ve been reading for 30 years,” Norrell says. “The thing that really reversed it, in the popular understanding, was Roots! “And then of course his papers were over there at the library,” in UT’s special collections, near Norrell’s own office. Haley left some of his papers to the university where he often lectured in his final years; UT later purchased more. “And there were also the papers of this woman Anne Romaine.” She’s one of several unexpected wild cards in the Haley story. Romaine was a free-spirited white folk singer and recording artist, political activist, scholar, and psychic from North Carolina who was thickly involved with the ’60s counterculture and with the Highlander Folk School. Sometimes describing herself as Haley’s biographer, she spent many hours with Haley during his East Tennessee years, so much that some were convinced the two were emotionally involved. Norrell had met her through connections at the University of Virginia, where she had attended graduate school. She died suddenly at age 53, of appendicitis, without ever finishing her biography, but left behind extensive if disorganized interviews for Norrell to puzzle over. “She wasn’t much of a historian, I’ll tell you that,” he says. “But she was a very interesting person, very hard-working. And she was very aggressive in discovering his life and interviewing lots and lots of people. The interviews weren’t on the whole that good, but even a bad interview will provide you with interesting information.” She left an imperfect but useful legacy. By the time Norrell began his
research, many of Haley’s closest associates, including his longtime companion George Sims, who lived with Haley during his later years in Knoxville, had died. “So it was just too good an opportunity to pass up, it was all over there in the library. And I thought well, you know, this guy deserves a biography. And he deserves, in a sense, to be rehabilitated. The things that happened to him in the last decade of his life, and then, unfortunately, that happened in the first decade after he died, this disparagement of his work--I thought that was an injustice.” The disparagement began soon after Roots was published, when other journalists and authors began questioning the book’s veracity and accusing Haley of copying their own work. Some of these charges, Norrell believes, are unsupportable, and motivated by authors of books with similar themes who were envious of Haley’s popularity and success. He discredits the allegation that Roots was based on the 1966 novel Jubilee. However, one particular case was impossible to overlook. In 1967, white folklorist Harold Courlander released a novel called The African, about the enslavement and transportation to America of the title character. It was no bestseller, but Courlander’s work was known to scholars of civil rights; Norrell had studied Courlander at UVA in the early ’70s. With evidence that several passages in Roots were swiped directly from The African, Courlander sued Haley for copyright infringement. Courlander claimed 81 passages in Roots came directly from his book, and that Roots couldn’t have been written without The African. Norrell has been over all of them, and says some copying is blatant but most obvious in only a few short passages. “Haley did copy,” Norrell says. “There are four or five passages out of Courlander’s novel that appear more or less verbatim in Roots. And Haley said he didn’t know how it happened. His explanation was that he made his living for years and years as a lecturer. And he said after people would come up and give him cards, say ‘You should look at this, it’ll help your research.’ And he said he thought that was how he got that information. He said he never had read Courlander’s novel, never owned it, never had it
in his hands. He was lying. And I explain how we know that. Maybe he forgot, I don’t know, but most likely not.” Norrell corresponded extensively with a scholar who described giving Haley a copy of Courlander’s book. Why Haley imitated Courlander’s prose so closely remains a puzzle. Any competent writer could have rewritten the questionable passages in a weekend and avoided the crisis. In any case, Norrell says, the Courlander passages were not what made Roots a success. He says the alleged Courlander passages account for less than one percent of the text of Haley’s 800-page saga. “There are various theories,” Norrell says. “His detractors don’t think he wrote a lot of it.” Although often hard-working and resourceful, Haley had never been considered a writer of extraordinary talent. “He had some difficulty writing,” Norrell observes. “And he occasionally said I’m not a very gifted writer. Other people said that, people who really liked him. And he did benefit a lot from good editors.” Some claimed his Playboy editor, Murray Fisher, wrote parts of Roots, Norrell says. Another idea was that George Sims, who later lived with Haley in Knoxville, was the ghostwriter. “He died not long before I started on it,” Norrell says. “He was of course one of the people I would like to have talked to.” “So I don’t know. He wouldn’t be the first guy, as we know, who borrowed passages one way or the other. You know, he was a smart guy.
He was careless, but he wouldn’t have done it with evil intent.” Haley eventually settled the case for an undisclosed sum, which Norrell believes was about $600,000. Norrell thinks he got legal advice to do so just to get the embarrassment behind him. Plagiarism was just part of the problem with Roots. Other writers, as early as 1977, charged that much of Roots, hardly the work of sincere genealogy it was presented to be, was fabricated. “The other mistake that he made, and I go into this in the book,” Norrell says, “is his and Doubleday’s insistence that it was nonfiction. And that it was true.... “If you read it, and recently, as I have, you wouldn’t be 10 pages into the book and you’d know it was fiction, because you just can’t know these
things. Especially in the early part of the book.” Roots opens with a detailed description of the smells and sounds of a meal of ground couscous prepared on three rocks in Africa in 1750. An early article in The Times of London claims Haley made up all the African scenes. “Certainly there was a lot of it that was not true, unsubstantiated, and it was a mess from then on,” Norrell says. “I argued that it was a mistake to even claim that it was more than fact-based fiction. And that by the time that Roots came out in ’77, there were already a lot of American journalists who had made vigorous arguments that you didn’t have to write pure fact to write the truth. Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe. That ‘New Journalism.’ And I said, they should have just gone with that position: ‘I
UT Prof. Robert J. “Jeff” Norrell is author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, most of it pertaining to civil rights issues. His new book, Alex Haley, is the first-ever biography of the controversial author.
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believe it’s the truth, even though it’s fictional in that I made up some characters and made up dialogue.’ That’s the best part of the book, really, that early Africa part. The best-written part. And that had a huge impact. And he finally fell back on saying well, he was trying to create a mythic past for African-Americans. And he did. He just should have said all along that he did. I think he could have fudged that some. If he had said, ‘As far as I know this is what my family probably experienced. Or close to what my family experienced.’ “And after all, what he’s really challenging are all fictional works. He’s challenging Gone with the Wind
intellect and their emotions. And it certainly did that.” In his book, Norrell notes statistics about the impact of Roots on both black and white audiences. “He had this really powerful impact,” Norrell says of Haley. “And then the guy gets reduced to oblivion because a journalist and then some academics got after him. And then Skip Gates [Henry Louis Gates, the prominent black author] kept him out of the Norton Anthology of African-American Literature in ’97.” Haley had been under fire for years when he visited Knoxville during the 1982 World’s Fair. Later, then-Gov. Lamar Alexander invited
“Certainly there was a lot of it that was not true, unsubstantiated, and it was a mess from then on. I argued that it was a mistake to even claim that it was more than fact-based fiction.” —ROBERT J. NORRELL
and Birth of a Nation”—massively popular fictional works that have influenced America’s perceptions of their history even though they don’t even pretend to be based on specific facts. “There’s some really good literary criticism that came out about ’79 that make the argument about how Roots is really in the line of those books in creating this popular epic of American history. People who had denounced Gone with the Wind and even Uncle Tom’s Cabin were saying, okay, maybe we had that wrong.” If Roots is fictional, says Norrell the historian, it may be closer to history than any of the other epics that have formed America’s impressions of their racial past. “We need to understand what it is Americans think about their past,” he says. “And now we have this terrific, powerful explanation of the black [experience]. And the average person watching, they don’t care if it’s true or not. They don’t care if it’s purely factual. They’re going to believe it’s true if it appeals at some level to their 18
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Haley to co-chair—along with Opry star Minnie Pearl!—the 1986 Tennessee Homecoming, a statewide celebration of regional culture. Haley startled his Los Angeles friends as well as Knoxvillians by moving here. He was turning 65 at the time, and had spent most of his adult life in big cities. But he bought a cabin near Norris, lived for a time in a townhouse on Cherokee Bluffs, and for a couple of years lived in a large old house on Cherokee Boulevard. Along with him was his childhood friend from Henning, George Sims. Haley never seemed to appear in family context, and some Knoxvillians assumed he was a lifelong bachelor. In fact, his third marriage had just ended and he had three grown children. “I didn’t want to write a tell-all,” Norrell says, but Haley’s personal life was problematic. “Lamar brought him back and he was a huge celebrity in Tennessee. For good reason,” Norrell says. “But, you know, he was living in Los Angeles in
early and mid-’80s. His television stuff was kind of come to an end, and he was, I think, basically supporting himself on lecture fees. And Knoxville was a real pleasant thing. And he was genuinely a Tennessee loyalist. He was romantic about it. He presents small-town race relations in a very romantic light. So he had a real kindly feeling, and people here were really nice to him. They were proud of him, and rightly so.” He became close friends with the Knoxville area’s white and predominantly Republican power elite: Lamar Alexander, Jim Clayton, and the Museum of Appalachia founder John Rice Irwin. Haley and various combinations of wealthy white men would while away a Sunday afternoon in rocking chairs on the porch of his Norris cabin. He seemed retired, and maybe he was. He published very little while he was here. In 1988, he did finish a sentimental novella, “A Different Kind of Christmas,” but he never finished a full-length book after Roots, and his occasional journalism was mostly lightweight. He lived to hear about the production of Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, which was based heavily on Haley’s 1965 book. Haley died suddenly, at age 70, in early 1992, while visiting Seattle for a speaking engagement. His funeral was in Memphis, not far from his hometown of Henning, where he was buried. But his will was probated in Knoxville. If he ever wrote the Appalachia-based epic he frequently told people he was working on, he left little trace of it. When Malcolm X was released, and Haley got a memorial appreciation, and a credit for the source material, but Norrell notes Haley, who wasn’t much like Malcolm X, Spike Lee, or for that matter Denzel Washington, wasn’t otherwise part of the revival of interest. Queen, ostensibly his last book about his grandmother’s side of the family, was finished in 1993 by another writer. Norrell is not certain Haley’s contribution to the book was major. Meanwhile, one year after Haley’s death, idiosyncratic journalist Philip Nobile wrote a bitter expose of Haley and especially Roots in the Village Voice, calling Haley a liar and a “hack,” and Roots a “scam” and “a hoax, a literary painted mouse, a Piltdown of genealogy, a pyramid of
bogus research.” Norrell’s book is in part an expose of Nobile’s article. He examined Nobile’s accusations and found several of them “misleading or simply incorrect.” Norrell’s study concludes that Haley was a flawed character, not much of an idealist, and maybe not even much of a writer, but still a pivotally important figure in American history. “Even though he himself was a pretty self-serving guy, I think he achieved a high ideal,” Norrell says. A few years after Haley’s death, Knoxville came together to erect a huge bronze statue to him at a new site on Dandridge Avenue called Haley Heritage Square. One of the most famous works by the late Los Angeles sculptor Tina Allen, the Haley statue, seated as if reading aloud, was for years after its completion in 1998 the largest statue of an African-American in the world. A picture of it appears on Norrell’s website. “My daughter took me over there and took me a picture in front of it. It’s as big as the Lincoln Memorial!” Norrell says. He compares it to old statues of Bismarck in Germany. Despite Haley’s many flaws, Norrell likes the statue, and used it as an appropriate setting for his current publicity photo. “I think it’s nice he’s memorialized. It captures his storytelling essence.” ◆
WHO
Robert J. Norrell, author and UT professor
WHAT
Alex Haley and the Books that Changed a Nation
WHEN
Wednesday, Dec. 2. at 6 p.m.
WHERE
East Tennessee History Center (601 S. Gay St.)
HOW MUCH Free
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November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19
A&E
P rogram Notes
CASTLE
Night Owl Vs. Open Chord Brew-haha K
noxville metalheads got a surprise earlier this week when the Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage on Kingston Pike suddenly canceled most of its scheduled heavy and hard-rock shows for the rest of the year, including this weekend’s stoner/doom/prog fest with San Francisco power trio Castle and locals O’Possum, Split Tusk, and White Stag. All four canceled shows had been booked by Night Owl Music, a local promoter of heavy-music concerts and bands. The Monday cancellations were followed by dueling Facebook posts on Tuesday by the two businesses over their relationship and the future
of heavy metal at Open Chord. (Night Owl owner Chris Casteel: “As of yesterday, The Open Chord decided that they no longer want the reputation of being a rock / metal venue anymore. In doing so, the owner also abruptly canceled all of our remaining shows for this year.” Open Chord general manager Chris Cook: “We are looking forward to continuing to host shows of ALL genres throughout the rest of this year & 2016!!! Unfortunately at this time we will not be hosting any Night Owl Music shows going forward. An arrangment [sic] that worked for both parties was simply unable to be worked out.”) In a phone interview, Cook says
the conflict is just business. “We weren’t able to come to an agreement on how to do shows together going forward, so we ended our partnership
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Shelf Life: Video
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Music: Kukly and the Gypsy Fuego
together,” Cook says. But he won’t discuss the details. “Really, that’s between us and Night Owl,” he says. The online dispute caused some confusion about whether the club would continue to host hard-rock and metal shows. The Night Owl shows that were canceled—at least two of which had been confirmed for several months—were the only metal shows on the club’s calendar, and Night Owl controls a large share of the local market for metal and hard rock. “I was told that they wanted to go away from the image of a rock and metal club and wanted to appeal to a different clientele, especially on Friday nights,” Casteel says. But Cook maintains that the Open Chord will continue to book hard-rock and metal shows—those just won’t be booked by Night Owl in the future. “We plan to continue to book all kinds of music,” he says. “We don’t plan to exclude rock or metal. We never intended that.” In addition to the Castle show, initially set for Sunday, Nov. 22, the Open Chord canceled a Dec. 4 CD release show by Harriman hard-rock quartet Shadowed Self and a Dec. 5 concert with underground touring bands Maruta and Vattnet Viskar and three local opening acts. Casteel says he’s trying to move the Shadowed Self and Maruta/Vattnet Viskar shows to other venues. The Nov. 27 Season’s Beatings local holiday showcase has already been moved to the Concourse. (Matthew Everett)
We weren’t able to come to an agreement on how to do shows together going forward, so we ended our partnership together. —CHRIS COOK, Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage general manager
Classical Music: Stewart Goodyear
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Movie: Trumbo
Shelf Life
A&E
Time Travel Documentary footage from the National Film Registry, available at the library BY CHRIS BARRETT
T
he National Film Registry was created in 1989 as a tool for the Library of Congress to preserve and increase awareness of America’s rich legacy of moving images. Currently, prints of more than 650 fi lms are being conserved—from Citizen Kane and Night of the Hunter to a silent home movie of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge buckling before it collapsed. Next time you’re in Washington, D.C., you can make an appointment to screen any fi lm from the registry. Or, if you have a Knox County Public Library card, you can view most of them in the comfort of your own home. Here are a few titles newly available on DVD.
consumers. Steve Sabol wrote and produced the fi lm in 1966, and it took him two years to persuade a network to give him a time slot. It was the fi rst time many football fans had seen close-ups of their idols on the field or their peers in the stands, and it was the fi rst time they could hear and understand what coaches, referees, and players were saying to each other. It defi ned the aesthetic for all video sports coverage that followed it. Curiously, it’s surprising how the 4-by3 aspect ratio favors this action. Your brain doesn’t want to see the entire HD panorama. It wants to see the play, and only the two or three people executing it.
FROM STUMP TO SHIP
D-DAY TO BERLIN
Lumberman Alfred Ames shot this footage in 1930. He would present it to customers and interested others while he held forth fi rst-hand insights of these scenes from Maine logging camps. (Originally silent, the DVD version features Maine humorist Tim Samples reading from Ames’ script.) Ames’ photography is surprisingly good—well-composed and steady—as he captures this bygone way of life. These men swung steadily back and forth between daredevilry, running over pell-mell logs that are both spinning and speeding toward rapids, and the comfort of one of the four quite impressive home-cooked meals served daily.
THEY CALL IT PRO FOOTBALL
Speaking of a bygone way of life, this brilliant time capsule—the fi rst production from NFL Films—presents pro football as innocent competition, the players as human instead of superhuman, and fans as invested participants instead of passive
George Stevens directed Shane, Giant, and dozens of other Hollywood blockbusters. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps, under Eisenhower, and directed a fi lm unit. That unit returned to the States with the only color footage of the war shot by the Allies. His scenes from the Duben and Dachau camps were presented as evidence during the Nuremberg trials. The pained, posed smiles of the liberated French are heartbreaking. It’s clear to them that a world has been lost. Even the daily tedium of the Allied soldiers is gripping, and exhausting to watch. Taking off from or landing on a pasture airstrip, improvised in the gorgeous French countryside, was apparently as likely to end a pilot’s life as the dogfighting in between.
A Christmas Carol Adapted for the stage by Dennis Elkins Directed by
Micah-Shane Brewer
clarencebrowntheatre.com
865.974.5161
#CBTChristmas Carol
November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21
A&E
Music
Somos Uno Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego make music with no borders BY CHRIS BARRETT
K
ukuly Uriarte hails from Peru, by way of Argentina. In the Quechua language spoken in the Lima household where she grew up, her name means dove. “That’s the way they sing there,” she demonstrates, imitating her namesake, “Coo-coo-lee-o! There are a lot of indigenous names that are onomatopoeias like that.” Uriarte’s mother preceded her to the United States and summoned her from Buenos Aires in the late 1990s as Argentina’s government shifted from chaos to collapse. “I was there protesting,” Uriarte recalls. “I was raised on folk music related to civil rights. Chanting against the president was what I was supposed to do.” Uriarte sings in multiple languages, plays guitar in many styles, and, since 2011, leads the multifaceted jazz ensemble Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego. Her dramatic journey to Knoxville has influenced both her style of making music and the music she chooses to interpret. Uriarte’s
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
inclination toward activism has not been diminished by access to democracy—this conversation was postponed so she could rally with others concerned about immigration reform at Donald Trump’s recent Knoxville appearance. “People were taking their kids,” she says of Trump’s stump event. “I was shouting, ‘Don’t teach your kids racism!’ We were all chanting ‘Somos uno’—‘We are one.’” Numerous titles from the Fuego’s long and varied set list are associated with—or performed in the style of— the late Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt. In Paris between the World Wars, Reinhardt, with violinist Stephane Grappelli and others, invented the radical music still referred to as hot jazz. (Grappelli and Reinhardt co-led a quintet that became emblematic of the jazz appreciation society, Hot Club de France.) The instrumentation of the Hot Club Quintet was revolutionary for its time. Reinhardt—who had the full use of only two fingers on his left
hand—was playing frenetic solos on an instrument that previously had only provided rhythm to jazz. Alternating with Reinhardt was Grappelli on violin, an instrument from the symphony. It was a rich and decadent sound that has only become more popular during the century since. “It was the act of surpassing those limitations, the intensity that creates something within the individual that’s transmitted from the artist,” says Uriarte of her idol’s disabled hand. “You can see how he was an immense and beautiful inspiration to me as an immigrant. I have all my fingers, but I definitely felt like I was without some part of me. His story touched me profoundly, and to be able to relate to him musically makes it even better. We play all these different kinds of music and wonder, will they get it? “Be like Django,” she says to herself. “Just do it.” The Gypsy Fuego head count ebbs and flows as necessary, depending on the engagement, the audience,
and the availability of members, ranging from trio to septet. The core is Uriarte, violinist Seth Hopper, and often guitarist David Bivens and/or cellist Andy Bryenton, who is also principal cellist for the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Uriarte speaks perfect English, with some charming and exotic mannerisms. Her singing voice, however, whether she’s singing Portuguese, Spanish, or English, is like her guitar-playing and superior to such trifling distinctions as nationality. Her voice becomes an instrument, joining those of her talented collaborators in making this terrifically festive and romantic music. “That’s one of the reasons I do the music, is to embrace the diversity,” Uriarte says. “I do Gypsy jazz. It is jazz, and it is a language that can be fully understood here. But I still like the idea that it’s not entirely from here. For me, it’s perfect. It helps me unify those things. “It’s so rhythmic and arrhythmic. Gypsy jazz has that velocity and virtuosity which makes it more exciting. I think it was the closest thing to metal and rock ’n’ roll that there was back then. In general, I think that if music doesn’t move something inside someone, then you’re doing it wrong.” ◆
WHO
Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego
WHERE
Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (200 E. Jackson Ave.)
WHEN
Tuesday, Dec. 1, at 10 p.m.
INFO
barleysknoxville.com
Classical
Photo by Andrew Garn
A Very Goodyear KSO guest pianist Stewart Goodyear delivers an explosive Tchaikovsky performance BY ALAN SHERROD
A
nd the plot thickens. The appearance of guest conductor Shizuo “Z” Kuwahara last weekend marked the second of six monthly Masterworks Series pairs by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra that are serving as auditions for the position of music director of the orchestra. With the orchestra currently performing at historic top form, it is becoming apparent to KSO audiences that differentiating between candidates will involve progressively finer and finer shades of musical discernment. It is also becoming apparent that the selection of the next music director may be as much about the psychology of communication as about strict musicality—how fluidly the conductor and orchestra arrive at ensemble excellence, and how the personality of the music is communicated to the audience. Kuwahara does deserve top marks for selecting an intriguing program—in this case, all Russian
composers—that ran the gamut of style, texture, and familiarity. The opening selection was a 1963 work by Rodion Shchedrin, probably never heard before in Knoxville: the Concerto No. 1 for Orchestra, known as “Naughty Limericks.” This amusingly addictive piece mixed folk music textures with jazz flavors and rhythms, with a hint of mid-century expressionism. Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, a work less familiar to audiences than his Symphony No. 2 but one of inventive melodies and gorgeous orchestration, wrapped up the evening. Despite the jazzy excitement of the Shchedrin and the satisfying musical journey of the Rachmaninoff, the headline of the evening belonged to guest pianist Stewart Goodyear performing Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No.1 for Piano and Orchestra in B-flat minor. Goodyear is certainly not a conservative performer; listeners used to traditionally staid performances of
this familiar concerto may have been startled by his jackhammer-like tempo and explosiveness in fortissimo moments. Goodyear, however, knows the concerto intimately well (he has recorded it along with the Grieg piano concerto on the Steinway label); he knows how to wring top volume from the piano with brilliant clarity; and he excels at juxtaposing luscious intimacy with that power, such as in Tchaikovsky’s sparkling, bell-like runs. And apparently he also realized that a Knoxville audience would not only luxuriate in the consummately phrased passagework, but also be receptive to a boldly entertaining and charmingly different dramatic performance. Unfortunately, Kuwahara may not have been as big a fan of Goodyear as the audience. The conductor and pianist lost togetherness in several places in both the Thursday and Friday evening performances, indicating some degree of unresolved struggle over interpretation. Similarly, Kuwahara was less than precise in some orchestral entrances, although one might graciously file that issue under lack of familiarity between guest conductor and orchestra. Goodyear rewarded the audience with an encore from a recently released CD of his own piano transcriptions of Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker—in this case, the Russian dance “Trepak.” The opening Shchedrin, with its rhythmic complexity, driving tempo, and smörgåsbord of instrumental flavors, was strikingly rendered by Kuwahara and orchestra. A rapid accelerando at the end of the piece was cleanly executed, revving the audience toward that humorous final chord, and practically guaranteeing a chortle or two. The Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 3, from 1936, which closed the program, owes much to the heritage of Tchaikovsky, yet also reflects in themes and textures his then 19 years of absence from Russia. This performance was superb in revealing those textures from KSO players, including gorgeously warm bassoons in harmony, muted horns, harp and flute assertions, chattering trumpets, tang
A&E
and mellowness of oboe and English horn, and delicious string statements. Possibly hoping to one-up Goodyear’s encore, Kuwahara offered an extra as well, the orchestral version of the same “Trepak” dance from The Nutcracker.
It has always seemed a bit odd, but Knoxville’s classical music scene has generally gone on hiatus after Thanksgiving in the assumption that audiences and local musicians were just too busy with other December doings. In truth, listeners have been wanting more, and KSO heard them. New this season to the KSO schedule is a Sunday-after-Thanksgiving offering in its Chamber Classics Series at the Bijou titled Classical Christmas. KSO resident conductor James Fellenbaum has chosen a range of Christmas/winter music, ranging from the 18th century of Corelli, Handel, Bach, and Mozart to the contemporary world of John Rutter and a host of modern arrangers. The Knoxville Chamber Chorale will be joining the KSO Chamber Orchestra. ◆
WHAT
KSO Chamber Classics: Classical Christmas
WHERE
Bijou Theatre (803 S. Gay St.)
WHEN
Sunday, Nov. 29, at 2:30 p.m.
HOW MUCH
$13.50-$31.50
INFO
knoxvillesymphony.com
November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23
A&E
Movie
The Write Stuff Bryan Cranston delivers a towering performance as a blacklisted screenwriter in Trumbo NOW LEASING
BY APRIL SNELLINGS
FOR JANUARY 2016
UPSCALE DOWNTOWN LIVING
COMMERCIAL SPACE
264-0699 thedanielonjackson.com
24
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
I
don’t envy anyone the task of dramatizing the life of blacklisted screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, widely regarded as one of the finest screenwriters ever. There’s certainly enough material in his tumultuous life, but Trumbo’s shadow is a long one, and you can’t help wondering if any movie written about him could measure up to any film written by him. Sure enough, Jay Roach’s biopic Trumbo, which casts Bryan Cranston as the eponymous writer, could probably have benefited from some script-doctoring by the man himself, particularly in its loose and formulaic first half. But thanks to a gangbusters performance by Cranston and a riveting, stirring second half, Trumbo finishes as an earnest, carefully considered, and thoroughly entertaining valentine to its subject and his fellow Hollywood exiles.
Trumbo opens in 1947 with the screenwriter—also a National Book Award winner for his 1939 anti-war novel Johnny Got His Gun—at the top of his game. He’s one of the most highly regarded, not to mention highly paid, screenwriters in Hollywood, but he’s also being watched by the federal government; Trumbo is a communist sympathizer and something of a left-wing activist, which doesn’t sit well with the Cold War ramping up. He and his friends, who will come to be known as the Hollywood Ten, find themselves hauled in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee; when they refuse to testify, Trumbo and his colleagues are sent to prison. Until this point, Trumbo is a pretty by-the-book affair. Roach— who’s switched his ticket in recent years from broad comedies (the
Austin Powers movies, Meet the Parents) to made-for-TV political dramas (Game Change, Recount)—is a capable if less than ambitious director; he seems mostly concerned with hitting the requisite man-againstthe-system story beats and staying out of Cranston’s way while the actor hams it up as the verbose, bombastic Trumbo. Even at its most prosaic, though, Trumbo slides in a few clever notes, like questioning the writer’s commitment to his politics; it’s often pointed out in the film that Trumbo espouses well-meaning communist rhetoric from his posh lakefront estate. But it’s not until its hero is released from prison that Trumbo turns into something really special. Barred from the studio gigs that were supporting his wife and children, the beleaguered writer turns to notorious B-movie producer Frank King ( John Goodman) and his brother, Hymie (Stephen Root), for employment. As luck would have it, the brothers have just purchased a gorilla suit, and they need a gorilla script to go with it. The rest of Trumbo is devoted to the elaborate scheme that he devises to get himself and his fellow blacklisters back onto Hollywood payrolls. It’s also a great deal of fun for classic film buffs. The costumes and sets are as lovely as you’d expect, and much scenery is chewed by the actors who populate Trumbo’s roll call of Hollywood heavyweights. Some render their characters in broad, impressionistic strokes—John Wayne’s swagger! Kirk Douglas’s dimple!—while others really get to dig in. Michael Stuhlbarg nails it with a low-key take on Edward G. Robinson, and Helen Mirren oozes malice as gossip columnist and all-around pot-stirrer Hedda Hopper. Of course, they’re all overshadowed in the best possible way by Cranston himself, whose performance is every bit as over-the-top as the man he’s playing. His performance is a grace note in a film that sets itself apart by focusing not on the ones who created the blacklist or those who were destroyed by it but on the ones who ultimately dismantled it. ◆
www.TennesseeTheatre.com November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25
CALENDAR MUSIC
Thursday, Nov. 26 NO LISTINGS! ENJOY THANKSGIVING! Friday, Nov. 27 THE BARSTOOL ROMEOS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM BIG COUNTRY’S EMPTY BOTTLE WITH MENDING WALL • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. BIG SMO • Cotton Eyed Joe • 9PM • The big bald-headed nadir of bro country. 18 and up. • $10 CRAWDADDY WITH EXIT GLACIERS • 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 DANKSGIVING VI: THE CRYSTAL METHOD • The International • 10PM • With twenty years under their belts, the iconic platinum-selling debut 1997’s Vegas, a 2009 Grammy Award nomination in the category of “Best Dance/ Electronic Album” for Divided By Night, as well as compositions for film and television including Bones and Real Steel, among other accolades, Ken Jordan and Scott Kirkland decided to up the ante yet again. That’s one reason why they named their fifth offering The Crystal Method. “It’s been two decades since this started, and electronic music has enjoyed a huge resurgence,” says Ken.” We wanted to reintroduce ourselves to the world here.” The Crystal Method headlines Danksgiving VI, an annual EDM Thanksgiving party hosted by Midnight Voyage Productions. Le Castle Vania, DubLoadz, and Liquid Metal are also on the bill. 18 and up. • $20-$25 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE HARMONICA HOWL • Relix Variety Theatre • 7PM • Featuring Michael “Crawdaddy” Crawley, “Blue” Barry Faust, Henry Perry, Doug Harris, Paul McQuade, “Catfish” Vessar, and more in a showcase of Knoxville’s harmonica aces. • $10 JACK’D UP • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM J. LUKE • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM MATT NELSON TRIO • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM SEASON’S BEATINGS: THE CREATURES IN SECRET WITH VIA VERA, A MARCH THROUGH MAY, MY CRIMSON WISH, AND REIGN LIKE RAIN • The Concourse • 7PM • Holiday hard rock and metal. All ages. • $10 DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards. SPECTRUM • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE WOODY PINES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Ragtime, Boogie, Viper Jazz, Lighting Speed Folk. Full of stomp and swing, and jump and jive. It’s old-time feel-good music done by a young master who clearly understands that this kind of music was always about having a great time. Saturday, Nov. 28 ANNANDALE WITH KILLING ABRAHAM, INWARD OF EDEN, AND FALLING AWAKE • The Bowery • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5-$9 BLUE MOTHER TUPELO • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE ENIGMATIC FOE WITH YAK STRANGLER AND STRYPLEPOP • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Knoxville’s The Enigmatic Foe will be playing their entire set with a string quartet. Yak Strangler and StryplePop to 26
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
open. All ages. THE TEMPER EVANS BAND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM FAUX FEROCIOUS WITH EBONY EYES AND ZACH AND KOTA’S SWEET LIFE • Pilot Light • 10PM • 18 and up. • $5 GRAVEL ROAD WITH KATIE LOTT • 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 INDIGHOST • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. STONE JACK JONES WITH IDLE BLOOM • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE THE LONESOME COYOTES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM THE JASON LEE MCKINNEY BAND • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM JAMEL MITCHELL • Red Piano Lounge • 9PM HAROLD NAGGE AND ALAN WYATT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE PINK FLOYD TRIBUTE BAND WITH THE WHAM BAM BOWIE BAND • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes. BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE VAL AND YO MAMA • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM Sunday, Nov. 29 THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM KEYBOARDS FOR CHRISTMAS • Tennessee Theatre • 6:30PM • Nine accomplished musicians will present music for the whole family and there will also be a time for the audience to sing along. This event is a benefit for “Mission of Hope”. The goal for Christmas is to provide food, hygiene, new clothing and new toys for over 17,000 children and their families. All Keyboards ticket sales will go to Mission of Hope and your support of this event will not only be enjoyable, you will be a part of helping thousands of people have a wonderful Christmas. • $15 SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz. STUDEBAKER JOHN • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 6PM SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE THE ANDREW TUFANO BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM Monday, Nov. 30 THE BLUEPRINT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM CYGNE • 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. F REE OPEN CHORD BATTLE OF THE BANDS • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Each band will be playing full original sets, with one cover song, with a new artist chosen to cover each week. Winner will advance to the finale night on Dec. 14. • $5 UT JAZZ FOR TOTS CONCERT • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 7PM • Jazz ensembles performing holiday music. Admission is a new, unwrapped toy to donate to the U.S. Marine Corps Toys for Tots campaign, or a donation. Tuesday, Dec. 1 SAMUEL GLEAVES WITH SARA SYMS • 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 JUANJOHN DE HOYOS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Homegrown hot jazz inspired by Django Reinhardt, Les Paul, and Antonio Carlos Jobim. • See music story on page 22. TRAITORS WITH BODY SNATCHER • Longbranch Saloon • 6PM UT BALINESE GAMELAN ENSEMBLE • University of Tennessee Natalie L. Haslam Music Center • 6PM • Among the world richest, Balinese performing arts have develop over several hundred years into traditions of music, dance, and theatre of enormous important that continue today. The Gamelan remains central to these traditions. Our Gamelan at the University of Tennessee features students performing traditional and contemporary music in an ensemble that consists of about 20 instruments, mostly tuned xylophones and gongs. FREE
Wednesday, Dec. 2 PETE CLARK AND GREGOR LOWREY • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • Fiddler Pete Clark and accordion player Gregor Lowrey come to us straight from their native Scotland for a night of traditional and whimsical tunes. • $10 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. F REE INTERPLAY WITH HADLEY KENNARY • 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 KJO JAZZ LUNCH • The Square Room • 12PM • The Jazz Lunch performance will feature “Tribute to Woody Shaw with Trumpeter Alex Norris”. Alex Norris is a native of Columbia, Maryland. After graduating from the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Norris relocated to New York City in 1992 to pursue a career as a professional jazz trumpet artist. He has since earned an international reputation working in the bands of Betty
THE CRYSTAL METHOD The International (940 Blackstock Ave.) • Friday, Nov. 27 • 10 p.m. • $20 • 18 and up • internationalknox.com
The Crystal Method has never been subtle—the Las Vegas duo of Scott Kirkland and Ken Jordan early on perfected a particularly American take on electronic dance music that patched arena-rock dynamics on top of big techno beats, and they have spent more than 20 years refining that principle. The group’s masterpiece is still the 1997 album Vegas, a booming cocktail of rave music, techno, rock, and hip-hop beats that was central to the electronica revolution at the turn of the millennium and a major influence on a generation of bass-addled dubstep festival acts that have followed—Skrillex, Excision, David Guetta, Deadmau5. But on their subsequent albums, up to last year’s The Crystal Method, Kirkland and Jordan make only the most cursory acknowledgments to the 21st-century phenomenon they inspired; aside from a few well-timed and precipitous bass drops courtesy of a handful of guest artists, The Crystal Method is vintage Crystal Method, hurtling, sweaty, musclebound video-game music with few pretensions. The group headlines Midnight Voyage Productions’ annual Danksgiving after-Thanksgiving dance party at the International, with support from Le Castle Vania, DubLoadz, James Scott, and BoltAction. (Matthew Everett)
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
Carter, Slide Hampton, Joshua Redman, Brad Mehldau, Chris Potter, Brian Blade, Carl Allen, John Patitucci, Mulgrew Miller, Greg Tardy and many others.Trumpeter Woody Shaw is widely considered to be one of the great innovators in jazz in the late 20th century. He forged a style that is as exciting to hear as it is difficult to master. The band will feature Alex Norris (trumpet), Greg Tardy (tenor saxophone), Keith Brown (piano), Jon Hamar (bass), and Keith Brown (drums). • $15 MAGNOLIA MOTEL WITH FALLIOR AND THE VALLEY OPERA • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Join Magnolia Motel for the official release of their first studio album “Big Big World.” All ages. • $5 TANTRIC WITH SHALLOWPOINT AND INDIE LAGONE • The Bowery • 6PM • $10-$12 Thursday, Dec. 3 BRILLZ TWONK DI NATION TOUR • The Concourse • 9PM • Featuring EDM producers and DJs Brillz, Party Favors, Aryay, and Ghastly. 18 and up. • $15 THE CONGRESS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • With their noses to the grindstone for the past few years, The Congress hasn’t had a moment to notice their ever changing surroundings. They have been on headlining tours from California to Virginia, on support tours opening multiple nights for the likes of Tedeschi Trucks Band, Lake Street Dive, and Hard Working Americans, and have been incessantly playing their home turf in the Rocky Mountains when in between coasts. The Congress has also succumbed to a growing writing habit that will culminate in the band’s second full length album in 2016. DOWNRIGHT • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. • $3 GAITHER CHRISTMAS HOMECOMING • Thompson-Boling Arena • 8AM • The award-winning Gaither Vocal Band, featuring multi-Grammy winner Bill Gaither with Wes Hampton, David Phelps, Adam Crabb and Todd Suttles. • $28.50-$72.50 JOSIAH AND THE GREATER GOOD WITH THE LOST DOG STREET 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 MARYVILLE COLLEGE CHOIR CELTIC CHRISTMAS • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • $5 ANDREW PETERSON PRESENTS BEHOLD THE LAMB OF GOD • Bijou Theatre • 7PM • Since 2009, Andrew and his friends have told the story of the coming of Christ through story and music in a way that draws audiences back year after year. The story may be the same but the telling and how it hits your heart and senses changes every time. One fan describes it like, “In the movie version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Mr. Tumnus recalls the times in Narnia before the winter. His words with passion were ‘Music, such music!’ Those are the words that hit me every time I go to this concert. You’re getting more than a concert - you’re getting the greatest story ever told, the story of the great Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.” • $30-$40 THE THIRST QUENCHERS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM • The Ps and Qs house band. Friday, Dec. 4 THE AVETT BROTHERS LEGENDARY GIVEBACK • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • For the fourth year, two Southern legends from the Carolinas are teaming up for a high-profile concert where all proceeds go to three nonprofits that support families and children. The Avett Brothers and Cheerwine’s “Legendary Giveback” events have raised more than $175,000 for charities to date, and this year’s new beneficiaries are The Love Kitchen, The Empty Stocking Fund and Caps for Kids. The Avett Brothers’
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“Legendary Giveback IV” concert will take place at The Tennessee Theatre in Knoxville, TN on Dec. 4, 2015, and will also be live streamed across the country. “With three legendary concerts under our belts that have helped nearly 10 local and national charities, we know the 2015 event is going to be bigger and better than ever,” says Scott Avett, lead singer and co-founder of The Avett Brothers. “We can’t wait to bring the not-to-be-missed experience to Knoxville and attention to three new deserving charities.” For information and to enter Cheerwine’s “Capture the Kindness” movement, visit www.cheerwinegiveback.com. • $57 BACKUP PLANET • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM BOSLEY • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM FREE BOSTON BRASS ALL STARS BIG BRASS BAND: CHRISTMAS BELLS ARE SWINGIN’ • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Delighting audiences with an evening of great music and boisterous fun, the Boston Brass brings its exciting Christmas Show to the Clayton Center. MATT BROWN AND GREG REISH • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Matt Brown (fiddle) and Greg Reish (guitar) join forces to perform a variety of old-time instrumentals from rural America collaborating on a new recording Speed of the Plow. Their music features square dance tunes, rags, blues, and haunting melodies reinterpreted from the solo fiddle repertory. Matt Brown has toured as a soloist, performed with Tim O’Brien, Uncle Earl, Dirk Powell & Riley Baugus, and with Mike Snider on the Grand Ole Opry. Greg Reish is a recognized authority on old-time and bluegrass guitar styles, and serves as director of the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University. • $14 CYPHER: A HIP-HOP SHOW • The Birdhouse • 9PM • Open mic for the first half of the night, then two featured artists to close out the night. 18 and up. • $5 THE DUGGER BAND • Niswonger Performing Arts Center (Greeneville) • 7PM • Nashville recording artists, Jordan and Seth Dugger, are hometown boys from Greeneville, Tennessee. The Dugger Band has a steadily increasing fan base as their unique, country/rock sound grabs the attention of their audience.These talented brothers bring their “Sleigh Ride Tour” to the NPAC stage. Join us for an evening filled with sounds of the season that will get you in the holiday spirit. The Dugger Band will delight your senses as they perform their renditions of your favorite Christmas classics along with some original music from their latest album Fly. • $10-$20 THE TEMPER EVANS BAND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. FREE MARYVILLE COLLEGE CHOIR CELTIC CHRISTMAS • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7PM • $5 DELBERT MCCLINTON • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • “I’m an acquired taste in that my kind of music’s not for little kids,” Texas singer- songwriter Delbert McClinton says. “It’s adult rock ‘n’ roll. I write from the sensibility of the people I knew growing up, and I grew up with all the heathens, the people who went too far before they changed and tried to make something out of their lives.” • $37 SKRIBE AND GINGERWOLF • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Skribe travels from town to town in a blue hearse spreading his own blend of garage folk: An unpretentious soulful sub-genre that draws from roots Americana & the 60’s garage rock spirit. You may have seen skribe at Rhythm n Blooms Fest 2015 (Knoxville, TN)
or the mainstage at FloydFest 2015. This time through we’re fortunate to see slide artist Gingerwolf in the mix (picture Santo & Johnny at a pool party on the moon with Radiohead.) FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Instrumental and vocal jazz standards. TALL PAUL • Bearden Field House • 9PM FREE TIME SAWYER WITH BILL MIZE • 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 TIME SAWYER WITH ANCIENT CITIES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Time Sawyer is interested in “real people and real songs” and that’s just what the listener finds in their music – a sense of realness. Time Sawyer blends a grassroots feel with heart-felt lyrics to put on a high-energy, entertaining show. WUTK EXAM JAM XI • The Concourse • 8PM • All proceeds from this fundraiser concert will go directly to the non-profit WUTK Gift Fund, helping to keep the self-supporting broadcast lab and station on the air. Entertainment will be provided by local Americana rockers Handsome & The Humbles, the very hot 3-piece pop-punk band Hellaphant, genre flipping giants Senryu, and the electro-indie rock sounds of The Enigmatic Foe. The variety of music scheduled for the night reflects the diverse local scene, as well as the broad scope of music heard on WUTK, who has been promoting, supporting, and playing local musicians since the early 1980’s. More info is at wutkradio.com. • $5 SAUL ZONANA • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up. Saturday, Dec. 5 AVENUE C • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM BIG PINK WITH ELECTRIC DARLING • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM • The dissolution of long-running local blues-rock outfit the Dirty Guv’nahs boded that a handful of very talented free agents would soon be set loose on the local music scene. And now two of the band’s standout sidemen— guitarist Cozmo Holloway and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Hyfantis—have already debuted a new project, in the form of female-fronted outfit Electric Darling.Electric Darling played its first show, on July 25, at Scruffy City Hall, to a full house and rave reviews, opening for classic Americana cover outfit Big Pink. What is arguably most impressive about the Saturday night performance is that neither Holloway nor Hyfantis—both of whom rank among the city’s best-traveled and most accomplished players—was the talk of the show.That honor belonged to 25-year-old newbie frontwoman Yasameen Hoffman-Shahin. With her powerful vocals and an insouciant charisma that belied her youth, Hoffman-Shahin led the band through an hour-long set of groovy neo-soul punctuated by a handful of showcase six-string moments from Holloway, the prodigal—and prodigiously talented—son of University of Tennessee faculty jazz bass virtuoso Rusty Holloway. RYAN BINGHAM WITH JAMESTOWN REVIVAL • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • Ryan Bingham needed some peace and quiet. Free of the burdens that had saddled him during the writing and recording of his recent albums, he relocated to an old airstream trailer tucked away in the mountains of California, camping out for several weeks and embracing the solitude to dig down deep and craft his most powerful album yet, ‘Fear and Saturday Night.’ ‘It gave me the space and time to tap into myself,’ Bingham says of the experience. ‘Up there, it was totally isolated. No phones, no noise, no lights. At night the only thing you’d hear is the bugs and the coyotes. It’s lonely when you get back up in there and there’s nobody around, but
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CALENDAR for me, I kind of grew up that way in the middle of nowhere. Since I’ve started touring, I’m surrounded by people all the time, so getting back to the roots of everything, that’s really where I seem to find stuff that’s meaningful when I’m writing songs. • $27 FOUR LEAF PEAT • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • Knoxville’s finest purveyors of traditional Irish music. FREE JOHN MYERS 80TH BIRTHDAY FEST • Scruffy City Hall • 5PM • Featuring the John Myers Band, the Lonetones, and Exit 65. • 5PM POSSESSED BY PAUL JAMES • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes. BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM FREE SOUL MECHANIC WITH FRAUG • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up. SUPERFLY SOUNDTRIP • Sweet P’s Barbecue and Soul House • 6:30PM • 90s Knoxville jazz/funk band Superfly Soundtrip, an offshoot of Gran Torino, plays its first show in three years. FREE CALEB SWEAZY WITH GREGORY REISH AND MATT BROWN • 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 TENNESSEE SCHMALTZ • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Originating mainly in Eastern Europe, klezmer music is documented in early recordings of Jewish immigrants to America as far back as 1895. After a period of decline, an energetic revival of this music beginning in the 1970s spread from
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Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
New York, Boston and San Francisco to many other parts of the country, including the Knoxville area. Tennessee Schmaltz develops the tradition of Jewish klezmer in America, adding country and bluegrass sounds to the mix of East European wedding tunes, Yiddish theater and music hall, cantorial singing, and popular traditions of the old and new worlds. Their claim to be the only klezmer group in the entire world with a washtub bass remains unchallenged. • $14 CHRIS TOMLIN ADORE CHRISTMAS TOUR WITH CROWDER AND LAUREN DAIGLE • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Some artists enter the studio determined to make a radical departure from who and what they are, or indulge some musical flavor of the month in a bid to expand the fan base. In either event, those strategies often backfire — though in staying true to his calling, Grammy winner Chris Tomlin thinks not of popularity, but rather the populace his music can touch and encourage.“I’m not trying to make a different kind of record,” says Tomlin of his latest effort, Love Ran Red “It’s still the same path I started down: writing songs for the church, songs people can sing, songs that connect with people in their heart and move them in a way only songs can. That’s not changed — and yet this collection I feel is the strongest I’ve ever done.” • $35.50-$76 URBAN PIONEERS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Mix one part Texas fiddle and one part Tennessee banjo, add doghouse bass and a splash of guitar and you have one heck of a powerful punch called The Urban Pioneers. This string band hammers out a variety of original songs that encompass old time hillbilly music,
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
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western swing, rockabilly, and even a few gypsy type songs for good measure. They spend about 75% of the year on tour all over the world delivering their brand of high energy hillbilly folk music. FREE Sunday, Dec. 6 JOHN ANDERSON WITH BRETT KISSELL • Knoxville Civic Coliseum • 6:30PM • The Knoxville Fire Fighters Association would like to invite you out for a night of family fun. Join us Sunday December 6th at 6:30 pm as we host Country music legend John Anderson with songs like “Seminole Wind” “Straight Tequila Night” and “Swingin”. • $27.50 PALE ROOT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Aaron Freeman’s taste for contemporary songwriters like Ryan Adams and Darrel Scott provides a balance to Jordan Burris’ penchant for bluegrass and traditional folk. As Pale Root, they’ve quietly settled into their own spot in Knoxville’s crowded Americana scene—intimate, confessional music grounded in tradition. At various times, the duo’s music recalls Neil Young, Jackson Browne, the Everly Brothers, and the Avett Brothers. It’s a surprisingly full and mature sound from just two people. • 8PM SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz. SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. FREE TREY WILLIAMS • Longbranch Saloon • 4PM
O PEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS
Tuesday, Nov. 24 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • A weekly open mic. OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Hosted by Sarah Pickle. • FREE Wednesday, Nov. 25 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday. All instruments and skill levels welcome. BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. • FREE LONGBRANCH ACOUSTIC OPEN MIC NIGHT • Longbranch Saloon • 9PM Friday, Nov. 27 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 Saturday, Nov. 28 MUMBILLY OLD TIME SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 4PM • Bring an instrument, but definitely watch out in case there’s some Mumbillies there. • FREE
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
Tuesday, Dec. 1 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM • A weekly open mic. OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Hosted by Sarah Pickle. F REE Wednesday, Dec. 2 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday from 7-9 p.m. at the Time Warp Tea Room. All instruments and skill levels welcome. BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. FREE Thursday, Dec. 3 BREWHOUSE BLUES JAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Join Robert Higginbotham and the Smoking Section at the Open Chord for the Brewhouse Blues Jam. Bring your instrument, sign up and join the jammers. We supply drums and a full backline of amps. • 8PM Sunday, Dec. 6 NATIVE AMERICAN FLUTE CIRCLE • Ijams Nature Center • 4PM • Meets the first Sunday of the month. All levels welcome. Call Ijams to register 865-577-4717 ext.110.
DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS Friday, Nov. 27 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk. Saturday, Nov. 28 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk. Sunday, Nov. 29 LAYOVER BRUNCH • The Concourse • 12PM • Brunch food by Localmotive. Music on the patio. Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. All ages. • FREE Friday, Dec. 4 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk. Saturday, Dec. 5 RETRO DANCE NIGHT • Hanna’s Old City • 9PM • 80s and Top 40 hits with DJ Ray Funk. TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Knoxville’s long-running alternative dance night. 18 and up. KNOX FLOW HOLIDAY FLOWCASE AND JAM • Champion Ballroom Center • 6PM • A flow jam is a dance party in which flow artists come together to practice their flow to live DJ or a carefully crafted playlist of the latest club, house, trance, down tempo, jazz, funk, disco, electro-swing (heck, all the genres) music. All those who appreciate the flow are welcome. Flow props available to borrow. • $10-$15
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Sunday, Nov. 29 KSO CHAMBER CLASSICS: CLASSICAL CHRISTMAS • Bijou Theatre • 2:30PM • This festive Chamber concert includes holiday highlights such as Mozart’s arrangement of Sleigh Ride, Greensleeves, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring and many recognizable carols. This concert will feature the Chamber Orchestra and Knoxville Chamber Chorale, conducted by KSO Resident
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conductor James Fellenbaum. Tuesday, Dec. 1 UT WINTER CHORAL CONCERT • University of Tennessee Alumni Memorial Building • 8PM • FREE Thursday, Dec. 3 TENNESSEE WIND SYMPHONY • Central High School • 7PM • The Tennessee Wind Symphony and the Central High School Band will perform a Christmas concert at Central High School at 7 p.m. Free. Friday, Dec. 4 MARBLE CITY OPERA: AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS • St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral • 7:30 p.m. • A seasonal production of Menotti’s mid-century holiday classic. • FREE Sunday, Dec. 6 KNOXVILLE GUITAR SOCIETY HOLIDAY CONCERT • Episcopal Church of the Good Samaritan • 7PM • Join the Knoxville Guitar Society for its annual Holiday concert. This concert will feature students of local guitar teachers such as Larry Long, Andy LeGrand, Jeff Comas, Ed Roberson, and Chris Lee, as well as local professionals. Visit www. knoxvilleguitar.org. • $20 MARBLE CITY OPERA: AMAHL AND THE NIGHT VISITORS • St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral • 3 p.m. • A seasonal production of Menotti’s mid-century holiday classic. • FREE
THEATER AND DANCE
Thursday, Nov. 26 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Whether you are continuing your annual family tradition or beginning a new one…join us as we tell the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, the miserly businessman who needs the intervention of a few spectral guides to show him the true meaning of Christmas. Featuring beautiful live music, wonderful costumes, and exciting stage effects, Dickens’ tale of hope and redemption reminds us all what’s really worth celebrating. Nov. 25-Dec. 20. OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Based on the movie classic, the musical follows 9-year-old Ralphie and his quest for the Holy Grail of Christmas gifts—an Official Red Ryder carbine-action air rifle. Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. Friday, Nov. 27 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • In this hilarious sequel to Greater Tuna, it’s Christmas in the third smallest town in Texas. Radio station OKKK news personalities Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie report on various Yuletide activities, including hot competition in the annual lawn display contest. In other news, voracious Joe Bob Lipsey’s production of “A Christmas Carol” is jeopardized by unpaid electric bills. Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Saturday, Nov. 28 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20.
OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Sunday, Nov. 29 OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 2PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $13 Thursday, Dec. 3 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE SANTALAND DIARIES’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • An unemployed, chemically dependent writer takes a job as a “helper elf” at Macy’s Santaland. Hear his tale of drunken Santas, screaming kids, and the un-wonderful insanity of the holidays. Sedaris’ cutting, sardonic wit is on full display in this one man show that is crazy funny! For mature elves only. Dec. 3-20. OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Friday, Dec. 4 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: CINDERELLA AND EBENEZER • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • Knoxville Children’s Theatre will present Cinderella And Ebenezer, a new holiday play, based on the timeless tales of “Cinderella” and “A Christmas Carol.” Dec. 4-20. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www. orplayhouse.com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE SANTALAND DIARIES’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • For mature elves only. Dec. 3-20. FOOTHILLS COMMUNITY PLAYERS: “A LITTLE MURDER NEVER HURT ANYBODY” • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • A spoof and a love letter to the screwball comedies of the 1930s and to stage mysteries in general. Dec. 4-6. Visit foothillscommunityplayers.com. • $12 Saturday, Dec. 5 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: “CINDERELLA AND EBENEZER” • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 1PM and 5PM • Dec. 4-20. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 FOOTHILLS COMMUNITY PLAYERS: “A LITTLE MURDER NEVER HURT ANYBODY” • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 2PM and 7:30PM • Dec. 4-6. Visit foothillscommunityplayers.com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 7:30PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29
CALENDAR Playhouse • 8PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www.orplayhouse. com. THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE SANTALAND DIARIES’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • For mature elves only. Dec. 3-20. APPALACHIAN BALLET COMPANY: THE NUTCRACKER • Knoxville Civic Auditorium • 7:30PM • Everyone’s holiday season should include the Appalachian Ballet Company’s 44th performance of the world’s most loved ballet, The Nutcracker. Plan to see this classical ballet come to life with lavish sets and scenery, beautiful costumes, exciting choreography, and live music performed by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Australian guest artist Aaron Smyth, most recently seen on America’s Got Talent, will dance the role of the Prince. • $28-$43 Sunday, Dec. 6 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: “CINDERELLA AND EBENEZER” • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 3PM • Dec. 4-20. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: A CHRISTMAS STORY • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 2PM • Nov. 20-Dec. 6. Visit www.orplayhouse. com. APPALACHIAN BALLET COMPANY: THE NUTCRACKER • Knoxville Civic Auditorium • 2PM • Everyone’s holiday season should include the Appalachian Ballet Company’s 44th performance of the world’s most loved ballet, The Nutcracker. Plan to see this classical ballet come to life
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
with lavish sets and scenery, beautiful costumes, exciting choreography, and live music performed by the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra. Australian guest artist Aaron Smyth, most recently seen on America’s Got Talent, will dance the role of the Prince. • $28-$43 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: A CHRISTMAS CAROL • Clarence Brown Theatre • 2PM • Nov. 25-Dec. 20. Clarence Brown Theatre: ‘The Santaland Diaries’ • Carousel Theatre • 2PM • For mature elves only. Dec. 3-20 FOOTHILLS COMMUNITY PLAYERS: “A LITTLE MURDER NEVER HURT ANYBODY” • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 2PM • Dec. 4-6. Visit foothillscommunityplayers.com. • $12 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: A TUNA CHRISTMAS • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Nov. 27-Dec. 13. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15
COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD
Sunday, Nov. 29 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic. Monday, Nov. 30 QED COMEDY LABORATORY • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • QED ComedyLaboratory is a weekly show with different theme every week that combines stand-up, improv, sketch, music and other types of performance and features some
s y ! a d i l o h e h t r o f e m i t n i just
long sleeve: orange.
of the funniest people in Knoxville and parts unknown. It’s weird and experimental. There is no comedy experience in town that is anything like this and it’s also a ton of fun. Pay what you want. Free, but donations are accepted. • FREE
show.
Tuesday, Dec. 1 CASUAL COMEDY • Casual Pint (Hardin Valley) • 7PM • A monthly comedy showcase at Casual Pint-Hardin Valley featuring a mixture of local and touring comedians. November performers are Shane Rhyne, Matt Chadourne, Sean Simoneau, and Tyler Sonnichsen. OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8, first comic at 8:30. No cover charge, all are welcome. Aspiring or experienced comics interested in joining in the fun email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply come to the show a few minutes early. FREE EINSTEIN SIMPLIFIED • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Einstein Simplified Comedy performs live comedy improv at Scruffy City Hall. It’s just like Whose Line Is It Anyway, but you get to make the suggestions. Show starts at 8:15, get there early for the best seats. No cover. FREE
FESTIVALS
Friday, Dec. 4 FIRST FRIDAY COMEDY SHOW • Saw Works Brewing Company • 7PM • Atlanta comedian Ian Aber is the headliner this month at the Saw Works Brewing comedy showcase. Knoxville comedian Jay Kendrick is also scheduled to perform, along with local host Sean Simoneau. A local food truck will also be on site for the
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Sunday, Dec. 6 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.
Thursday, Nov. 26 THE FANTASY OF TREES • Knoxville Convention Center • 3PM • The Fantasy of Trees is an annual fundraising event that takes place at the Knoxville Convention Center. The proceeds from Fantasy of Trees benefit East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, Knoxville’s only not-for-profit Comprehensive Regional Pediatric Center. In 30 years, the Fantasy of Trees has raised more than $7 million to provide much-needed medical equipment for children served by East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Since the first Fantasy of Trees in 1985 that welcomed 13,125 visitors, the Fantasy of Trees has hosted well over one million people. The Fantasy of Trees is designed, created and staffed by thousands of volunteers who give more than 180,000 hours annually to make the Fantasy of Trees the premier holiday event in East Tennessee. • $8 Friday, Nov. 27 THE FANTASY OF TREES • Knoxville Convention Center • 9AM • The Fantasy of Trees is an annual fundraising event that takes place at the Knoxville Convention Center. The proceeds from Fantasy of Trees benefit East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, Knoxville’s only not-for-profit
THE UT DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY PRESENTS
A CONVERSATION WITH UT HISTORIAN JEFF NORRELL ABOUT HIS NEW BOOK
short sleeve: grey, black, and white.
For the WUTK Fan on your list!
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
2543 SUTHERLAND AVE. 865-523-9177 • dive@skiscuba.com
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
Comprehensive Regional Pediatric Center. In 30 years, the Fantasy of Trees has raised more than $7 million to provide much-needed medical equipment for children served by East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Since the first Fantasy of Trees in 1985 that welcomed 13,125 visitors, the Fantasy of Trees has hosted well over one million people. The Fantasy of Trees is designed, created and staffed by thousands of volunteers who give more than 180,000 hours annually to make the Fantasy of Trees the premier holiday event in East Tennessee. • $8 REGAL CELEBRATION OF LIGHTS • Krutch Park • 6PM • Join us for the lighting of our new 38’ tree in Krutch Park Ext. Enjoy live music, carolers, train rides, pictures with Santa, face painting, marshmallow roasting and more. WDVX Holiday Ho Ho Ho Down will be on Bill Lyons Pavilion from 6:30pm – 9:00pm. Market Street will have local businesses doing crafts with children, stop by Home Depot’s Little Elves Workshop, and make a card to be sent to our soldiers with American Red Cross ‘Cards for Heroes’. And don’t forget to stop by and see the miniature train set! The lighting of the tree ceremony begins at 6pm, other activities will begin after. • FREE Saturday, Nov. 28 THE FANTASY OF TREES • Knoxville Convention Center • 9AM • The Fantasy of Trees is an annual fundraising event that takes place at the Knoxville Convention Center. The proceeds from Fantasy of Trees benefit East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, Knoxville’s only not-for-profit Comprehensive Regional Pediatric Center. In 30 years, the Fantasy of Trees has raised more than $7 million to provide much-needed medical equipment for children served by East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Since the first Fantasy of Trees in 1985 that welcomed 13,125 visitors, the Fantasy of Trees has hosted well over one million people. The Fantasy of Trees is designed, created and staffed by thousands of volunteers who give more than 180,000 hours annually to make the Fantasy of Trees the premier holiday event in East Tennessee. • $8 Sunday, Nov. 29 DANCING SPIDER YOGA HOEDOWN AND HOOTENANNY FAMILY FUNDRAISER AND YOGA CLASS • Ijams Nature Center • 3:30PM • Dancing Spider Yoga will be at Ijams for a family-friendly yoga class with live music, featuring Cornelia Overton on fiddle and James Bassinger III on percussion. Join us for a fun time and bid in our silent auction with items from Nicole Fey Wellness, Organ Tech, Fountain City Animal Hospital, and more.. Help us to get us on our way in raising funds to create a Yoga for the Family CD. Admission is free, and at the door, we’ll ask each family to donate whatever they can to our Dancing Spider Yoga for Family Album. • FREE THE FANTASY OF TREES • Knoxville Convention Center • 12PM • The Fantasy of Trees is an annual fundraising event that takes place at the Knoxville Convention Center. The proceeds from Fantasy of Trees benefit East Tennessee Children’s Hospital, Knoxville’s only not-for-profit Comprehensive Regional Pediatric Center. In 30 years, the Fantasy of Trees has raised more than $7 million to provide much-needed medical equipment for children served by East Tennessee Children’s Hospital. Since the first Fantasy of Trees in 1985 that welcomed 13,125 visitors, the Fantasy of Trees has hosted well over one million people. The Fantasy of Trees is designed, created and staffed by thousands of volunteers who give more than 180,000 hours annually to make the Fantasy of Trees the premier holiday event in East Tennessee. • $8 Friday, Dec. 4
CALENDAR
CHILDREN’S MUSEUM OF OAK RIDGE ANNUAL GALA • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 6PM • Now in its 42nd year, Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge is the place in East Tennessee where families play, learn, and grow together. Through exhibits, classes, camps, and special programs and events we offer unique opportunities for education and for creativity through hands-on play. In 2014 we served 45,000 visitors. The annual gala helps to support this vital educational resource.This year’s gala celebrates the culture, food, and traditions of our great state of Tennessee. Dinner will be by All Occasion Catering, and entertainment will be provided by Oak Ridge’s own Ridge City Ramblers and the Knoxville Contra Dancers. A silent auction and a live auction with auctioneer Bear Stephenson will round out the evening. All proceeds from the gala go to Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge. Saturday, Dec. 5 CHRISTMAS IN OLD APPALACHIA • Museum of Appalachia • 8:30AM • The simple joys of an old-fashioned Christmas await Museum of Appalachia visitors during December. For more information, contact the museum at 865-494-7680 or visit www.museumofappalachia.org. HISTORIC BLEAK HOUSE CHRISTMAS TOURS • Bleak House • 2PM • Start off the Christmas holidays at one of Knoxville’s treasures. Built in 1858 and home to Knoxville Robert and Louise Armstrong, the house was named for Charles Dickens’ novel. Festivities include a yule fire, hot cider, carolers, and storyteller. Proceeds go to the house’s restoration and maintenance fund. For more information contact Diane Green at (865) 993-3397. Sunday, Dec. 6 UT SCHOOL OF MUSIC HOLIDAY MUSICALE • The Paris Apartment • 5PM • Featuring traditional holiday music favorites. Heavy hors d’oeuvres, casual, festive attire. $75 donation per person suggested, additional scholarship donations accepted. Hosted by the UT School of Music Board of Advisors and benefitting the School of Music Scholarship Fund. RSVP by Monday, November 30 to 865-974-7547. WINTER SOLSTICE SACRED CIRCLE DANCE • The Square Dance Center • 7PM • Sponsored by East Tennessee Sacred Circle Dance. The Winter Solstice has been celebrated by cultures around the world for thousands of years. Sacred Circle Dances are traditional, seasonal dances from a wide variety of cultures and peoples. They range in mood from light and silly to deep and powerful. All dances are taught and no partner or experience are necessary. You are invited to wear white and bring a candle for the center of the circle. Medieval refreshments will be served at the intermission. Cost: $5/person or $10/ family. For more information, contact Kevin Meyer at (865) 406-6452 or kmeyer1423@aol.com. Website: www. InTheDance.com. • $5-$10 CHRISTMAS IN OLD APPALACHIA • Museum of Appalachia • 8:30AM • The simple joys of an old-fashioned Christmas await Museum of Appalachia visitors during December. For more information, contact the museum at 865-494-7680 or visit www.museumofappalachia.org. HISTORIC BLEAK HOUSE CHRISTMAS TOURS • Bleak House • 1PM • Start off the Christmas holidays at one of Knoxville’s treasures. Built in 1858 and home to Knoxville Robert and Louise Armstrong, the house was named for Charles Dickens’ novel. Festivities include a yule fire, hot cider, carolers, and storyteller. Proceeds go to the house’s restoration and maintenance fund. For more information contact Diane Green at (865) 993-3397.
FILM SCREENINGS
Monday, Nov. 30 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. • FREE Tuesday, Dec. 1 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: EXPERIMENTAL SHORTS 2 • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • The December 1 edition of Flicker and Wow will be a program of experimental short films culled from the festival circuit. FREE Wednesday, Dec. 2 KNOXVILLE HORROR FILM FESTIVAL X-MAS SPECIAL • Scruffy City Hall • 7:30PM • Once again it’s time for our annual X-Mas celebration. Besides Halloween, Christmas is the best holiday for horror films and we’re excited to show a film that we haven’t screened at past Christmas events and maybe some other holiday treats. Our good friend Slasher Santa will be on hand for photo opportunities and to give out presents to all of the nice AND naughty children. Come join us for a night of yuletide carnage. This event is free and so are all of the awesome presents we’ll be giving out. FREE Friday, Dec. 4 CRESTHILL CINEMA CLUB: “CAREER” • Windover Apartments • 7:30PM • CCC will be welcoming in the holidays in a most provocative way – as we explore the dark side of the showbiz world. Our feature will be Career, a 1959 drama that charts the turbulent rise of a handsome, super-driven young actor named Sam Lawson. Career will be preceded by a similarly dramatic tale from 1959, “Stand-In for Murder.” Our location: The spacious clubhouse of the Windover Apartments. The journey there will take you to Cheshire Drive (off Kingston Pike, near the Olive Garden); going down Cheshire, turn right at the Windover Apartments sign, then go to the third parking lot on your right, next to the pool. There, the building that houses the clubhouse and offices of the Windover will be just a few steps away.
SPORTS AND RECREATION
Friday, Nov. 27 SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB 10TH ANNIVERSARY JIM/ BOB HIKE • 8AM • The tenth and final Jim/Bob hike will begin at the Greenbrier Ranger Station. There will be several small creek crossings. Hike: 7 miles, rated moderate. Meet at Alcoa Food City, 121 North Hall Road, at 8:00 AM or the Greenbrier Ranger Station 9:15 AM. Leaders: Jim Quick, jqhiker37@aol.com and Bobby Trotter, whiteblazing@yahoo.com. • FREE Sunday, Nov. 29 SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: BENTON MACKAYE TRAIL • 8AM • The hike will begin behind Fontana Village after stationing shuttle vehicles on US-129 across from Tapoco Lodge. The trail traverses most of the high points via a series of ups and downs; very few switchbacks except on the descent at the end of the hike. The leaves should be off the trees allowing for great views of the Smoky Mountains and Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness. Hike: 9 miles, rated strenuous. Meet at Maryville Walmart (NOT Alcoa Walmart), 2410 US Highway 411, across from fuel pumps, ready to leave at 8 AM. Leaders: Keith Mertz, keithmertz@hotmail.com and Cindy Spangler, spangler@ November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31
CALENDAR utk.edu. • FREE Tuesday, Dec. 1 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Join us for everything from Candy Land to chess, and feel free to add a pint and a pizza. • FREE Thursday, Dec. 3 WHOLE FOODS GAME NIGHT • Whole Foods • 6PM • Join us for everything from Candy Land to chess, and feel free to add a pint and a pizza. • FREE
ART
Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. NOV. 3-29: Artwork by Nelson Ziegler and jewelers of the Art Market Gallery. DEC. 4-31: Artwork by Fran Thie and Robert Conliffe. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Dec. 4, from 5:30-9 p.m. Bennett Galleries 5308 Kingston Pike THROUGH NOVEMBER: Artwork by Scott Duce, Charles Kieger, Ann Mallory, Robine Surber, and John Taylor. Bliss Home 24 Market Square NOV. 6-30: Local Nostalgia, mixed-media artwork by Christi Shields. Broadway Studios and Gallery
32
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
1127 N. Broadway DEC. 4-31: Feast Your Eyes on This, an exhibit all about food. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Dec. 4, from 5-9 p.m. Central Collective 923 N. Central St. DEC. 4: Artwork by Heather Hartman. The District Gallery 5113 Kingston Pike NOV. 6-28: Paintings by Brad Robertson. DEC. 5-30: From Knoxville to the Mediterranean, paintings by Joe Parrott. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Dec. 4, from 5-8 p.m. Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. NOV. 6-28: Mixed-media art by John Messinger. Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. DEC. 4-JAN. 29: Arts and Culture Alliance Members Show. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Dec. 4, from 5-9 p.m. Envision Art Gallery 4050 Sutherland Ave. NOV. 20-DEC. 19: Art for the Holidays, featuring work by Derrick Freeman, Inna Nasonova, and Kay List. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Nov. 20, from 5-8 p.m. Ewing Gallery
1715 Volunteer Blvd. NOV. 11-DEC. 13: Distilled: The Narrative Transformed, a 30-year survey of the art of Pinkney Herbert. Fountain City Art Center 213 Hotel Road OCT. 30-NOV. 30: Fountain City Art Guild Annual Holiday Show and Sale. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 30, from 6:30-8 p.m. Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive NOV. 27-JAN. 10: East Tennessee Regional Student Art Exhibition. ONGOING: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in Tennessee; Currents: Recent Art From East Tennessee and Beyond; and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass. Liz-Beth and Co. 7240 Kingston Pike NOV. 28-DEC. 31: New exhibits from recognized local and regional artists, featuring pottery, jewelry and wearable art, art glass, sculpture, and wall art. A holiday reception will be held on Friday, Dec. 11, from 5-8 p.m. Marc Nelson Denim 700 Depot Ave. THROUGH NOVEMBER: Photographs by Lindsey Teague. McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 1327 Circle Park Drive
SEPT. 11-JAN. 3: Embodying Enlightenment: Buddhist Art of the Himalayas. ONGOING: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier. Pioneer House 413 S. Gay St. THROUGH DECEMBER: Knox County Warriors, portraits of UT football legends by Will Johnson. Zach Searcy Projects 317 N. Gay St. THROUGH NOVEMBER : Merciful Heavens, new paintings by Zach Searcy. Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church 2931 Kingston Pike SEPT. 11-DEC. 3: An exhibit of artwork by TVUUC members. University of Tennessee John C. Hodges Library 1015 Volunteer Blvd. THROUGH DEC. 11: Marginalia in Rare Books, a display of centuries-old books with notes, ownership marks, and inscriptions.
LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS Saturday, Nov. 28
CALENDAR UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PREGAME SHOWCASE LECTURE SERIES • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 2PM • Wide-awake and raring-to-go Vol fans can learn all about sleep from psychology professor Ralph Lydic during the final Pregame Showcase of the season at the University of Tennessee. Lydic will present “The Brain Basis of Sleep Health” at 2 p.m., prior to the Vols’ game against Vanderbilt. For more about the Pregame Showcase, visit http://pregameshowcase.utk.edu. FREE Wednesday, Dec. 2 JEFF NORRELL: “ALEX HALEY AND THE BOOKS THAT CHANGED A NATION” • East Tennessee History Center • 6PM • A historian at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, will present his new biography of Alex Haley, an acclaimed American author, Wednesday, Dec. 2. Jeff Norrell will discuss his biography “Alex Haley and the Books That Changed a Nation,” at a 6 p.m. presentation at the East Tennessee Historical Society, 601 S. Gay St. The event is free and open to the public, and a book signing will follow the talk. The evening will include rare film footage of Alex Haley being interviewed on a Knoxville television program, courtesy of the Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound. F REE • See cover story on page 14.
FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS
Friday, Nov. 27 SMART TOYS AND BOOKS ART CLASS • Smart Toys and Books • 10AM • Mommy, Daddy & Me Art Classes are every Friday at 10:00am & 11:00am. Reservations and payment are required in advance. Class fees are non-refundable. Ages 2+. • $10 Saturday, Nov. 28 CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. FREE SATURDAY STORIES AND SONGS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • A weekly music and storytelling session for kids. F REE • 11AM • 11/28/2015 11AM • Saturday Stories and Songs • 2084 • A weekly music and storytelling session for kids. FREE Monday, Nov. 30 MUSICAL MORNINGS • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 10AM • This activity is designed for toddlers and their caregivers. Children can explore tone, melody, and rhythm in an age-appropriate environment. Singing and dancing are encouraged. Musical Mornings also are free with paid admission or museum membership. http:// childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/musical-mornings/ SMART TOYS AND BOOKS STORYTIME • Smart Toys and Books • 11AM • Storytime with Miss Helen is every Monday at 11:00am. No charge. No reservations required. FREE Tuesday, Dec. 1 TODDLERS’ PLAYTIME • Children’s Museum of Oak Ridge • 10AM • Toddlers’ Playtime is designed for children aged 4 and younger, accompanied by their parents, grandparents, or caregivers. Little ones have an opportunity to play with blocks, toy trains, and puppets; they can “cook” in the pretend kitchen, dig for dinosaurs, and look at books. The adults can socialize while the children play.
Free with paid admission or museum membership. http:// childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/toddlers-playtime/ PRE-K READ AND PLAY • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • Pre-K Read and Play is a pilot program specifically designed to prepare children to enter kindergarten. While the format of the program will still feel like a traditional storytime with books, music, and other educational activities, each weekly session will focus on a different standard from the Tennessee Department of Education’s Early Childhood/Early Learning Developmental Standards. FREE EVENING STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 6:30PM • An evening storytime at Lawson McGhee Children’s Room to include stories, music, and crafts. For toddlers and up. FREE
THE SANTALAND DIARIES
TICKET GIVEAWAY
Congratulations to Addison, this week’s winner!
Wednesday, Dec. 2 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 10:20AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. F REE • 10:20:00 • 12/2/2015 10:20:00 • Baby Bookworms • 2084 • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. F REE PRESCHOOL STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For ages 3 to 5, must be accompanied by an adult. FREE Thursday, Dec. 3 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. F REE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 1PM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. FREE Friday, Dec. 4 SMART TOYS AND BOOKS ART CLASS • Smart Toys and Books • 10AM • Mommy, Daddy & Me Art Classes are every Friday at 10:00am & 11:00am. Reservations and payment are required in advance. Class fees are non-refundable. Ages 2+. • $10 Saturday, Dec. 5 CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • Middle and high school students (or any age) are invited to play chess. Tom Jobe coaches most Saturdays in the Teen Central area of the library. On one Saturday of every month, there will be a rated tournament at the Blount County Public Library. FREE SATURDAY STORIES AND SONGS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • A weekly music and storytelling session for kids. F REE
CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS
Saturday, Nov. 28 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE Monday, Nov. 30 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-5772021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. Tuesday, Dec. 1
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The SantaLand Diaries (Mature Audiences)
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November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33
CALENDAR
Thursday, Nov. 26 - Sunday, Dec. 6
AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • GFWC Ossoli Circle • 8:30AM • Call (865) 382-5822. GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. YOGA WITH SUBAGHJI • The Birdhouse • 5:15PM
information call (865)573-5508, email info@ marblesprings.net, or visit our website at www. marblesprings.net. • $200
Wednesday, Dec. 2 FLOW AND GO YOGA • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 12:15PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $10 SPIRIT CLASS WITH VICTORIA LEIGH: MANIFESTING LIFE • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 6:30PM • Victoria Leigh channels information from her guides and Melchizedek and Lady Nada. Prepay at illuminationsknoxville.com • $22 BELLY DANCING CLASS • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 7PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $15
Saturday, Nov. 28 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Al-Anon’s purpose is to help families and friends of alcoholics recover from the effects of living with the problem drinking of a relative or friend. Visit our local website at farragutalanon.org or email us at FindHope@ Farragutalanon.org. • FREE
Thursday, Dec. 3 PLANET MOTION WORLD DANCE FITNESS • Champion Ballroom Center • 10AM • All levels fun dance workout incorporating dance and music styles from around the world. GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted. SAFTA CRAFTING FOR THE HOLIDAYS WORKSHOP • University of Tennessee • 5PM • This year’s event will include jewelry-making, cross-stitch, and Zen drawings and will be taught by three university lecturers on December 3, 2015 from 5PM-7PM at 1210 McClung Tower on the University of Tennessee campus. All participants will be able to take home what they make. The workshop cost is $25 for community members and $15 for students. All proceeds go to support the Sundress Academy for the Arts, a 501(c)3 nonprofit supporting the arts here in Knoxville. Tickets can be purchased online at: squareup. com/market/sundress-publications/. • $15-$25 CENTRAL COLLECTIVE WORKSHOPS: LAVENDER RECIPES FOR BODY AND SOUL • Central Collective • 6PM • The Central Collective Workshops presents Lavender Recipes for Body and Soul. Sooth your spirit and rejuvenate your skin with recipes made with ancient and beloved herb lavender. These botanical health and beauty formulas draw from Mother Earth’s wisdom in our quest for tranquility, beauty and health, and are wonderful for gift giving. Students will enjoy demonstrations, sampling, and take home lavender health and body care recipes. BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 • 8PM • 12/3/2015 8PM • Belly Dance Levels 1 and 2 • 3187 • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance. com. • $12 Saturday, Dec. 5 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. F REE CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS • December 5 • Marble Springs Candle-Making Workshop • Marble Springs State Historic Site • 11AM • Marble Springs State Historic Site will host a Candle Making Workshop on Saturday, December 5 starting at 11am. This hands-on workshop will teach visitors about lighting sources of the 18th century. Visitors will learn how to make beeswax candles by the open hearth. Guests will need to pack a lunch. Reservations are required and space is limited to twenty participants. The enrollment fee is $20 for the cost of materials. Details are subject to change. For more 34
KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
MEETINGS
Sunday, Nov. 29 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • The gatherings are intended to be inclusive of people of all faiths as well as those who do not align themselves with a particular religious denomination. For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@ narrowridge.org. • FREE Monday, Nov. 30 GAY MEN’S DISCUSSION GROUP • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • We hold facilitated discussions on topics and issues relevant to local gay men in a safe and open environment. Visit gaygroupknoxville.org. ASPERGER’S SUPPORT GROUP • Remedy Coffee • 6PM • Are you an adult with asperger’s and looking for others who have the same strengths and challenges in life? Come join us for a casual meetup every other Monday. Contact Saskia at (865) 247-0065 ext. 23. • FREE Wednesday, Dec. 2 COMITE POPULAR DE KNOXVILLE • The Birdhouse • 7PM • A weekly meeting of the local immigrant advocacy organization. THE BOOKAHOLICS BOOK GROUP • Union Ave Books • 12PM • Union Ave Books’ monthly book discussion group. F REE Thursday, Dec. 3 OVEREATERS ANONYMOUS • Recovery at Cokesbury • 5:30PM • This is an OA Literature Meeting. After a short reading from a book, members may share their experience, strength and hope. Listening will help you find others who have what you want, whether it be weight loss, clarity, joy in achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight, or freedom from the obsession of self-destructive eating behaviors. • FREE ATHEISTS SOCIETY OF KNOXVILLE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 5:30PM • Weekly atheists meetup and happy hour. Come join us for food, drink and great conversation. Everyone welcome. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY FAMILY BEREAVEMENT GROUP • Cancer Support Community • 6PM • CSC is committed to providing bereavement services to those who have lost a loved one to cancer. Please contact our clinical staff before attending. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer. Saturday, Dec. 5 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Al-Anon’s purpose is to help families and friends of alcoholics recover from the effects of living with the problem drinking of a relative or friend. Visit our local website at farragutalanon.org or email us at FindHope@ Farragutalanon.org. • FREE
SEEKERS OF SILENCE • Church of the Savior United Church of Christ • 8:30AM • The Dec. 5 meeting of Seekers of Silence will feature a Christmas carol sing-along and personal Christmas stories. The meeting, 8:30 a.m.-noon, will be held in the office area adjacent to the Church of the Savior, 934 North Weisgarber Road. All are welcome. SOS is an ecumenical and interfaith group seeking closer communion with God through silent prayer. Website: sosknoxville.org. FREE Sunday, Dec. 6 SILENT MEDITATION SUNDAYS • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • Narrow Ridge invites you to join us for our Silent Meditation Gathering on Sundays at Narrow Ridge. The gatherings are intended to be inclusive of people of all faiths as well as those who do not align themselves with a particular religious denomination. For more information contact Mitzi Wood-Von Mizener at 865-497-3603 or community@narrowridge.org. F REE
ETC.
Friday, Nov. 27 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS’ MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FREE Saturday, Nov. 28 OAK RIDGE FARMERS’ MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM Sunday, Nov. 29 LARK IN THE MORN ENGLISH COUNTRY DANCERS • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Call 546-8442. 17th-18th Century Social Dancing with live music. Beginners welcome, no partner is required. Also Rapper Sword dance group meets most Sundays at 7:00. Free. Monday, Nov. 30 KNOXVILLE CONTRA DANCERS • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Call 599-9621. Contra dancing to live acoustic music. No experience or partner required. • $7 Wednesday, Dec. 2 KNOXVILLE SWING DANCE ASSOCIATION • Laurel Theater • 7PM • Call 224-6830. Dedicated to the purpose of promoting swing dance. Lessons at 7 p.m., open dance at 8 p.m. KNOX HERITAGE SALVAGE SHOP HOLIDAY MARKET • Knox Heritage Salvage Shop • 12PM • Come shop in warmth at The Knox Heritage Salvage Shop this December and enjoy handmade gifts, artwork, antiques and more from local vendors during our regular retail hours. Proceeds benefit the vendors and Knox Heritage which advocates for historic preservation in East Tennessee. Visit knoxheritage.org/salvage for more information. Dec. 2-19. FREE Thursday, Dec. 3 KNOX HERITAGE SALVAGE SHOP HOLIDAY MARKET • Knox Heritage Salvage Shop • 12PM • Visit knoxheritage.org/ salvage for more information. Dec. 2-19. F REE Friday, Dec. 4 IRONWOOD STUDIOS HOLIDAY MARKET • Ironwood Studios • 6PM • Ironwood Studios presents a holiday shopping event featuring original art & craft made by Ironwood artists and local guests. The two-day market will include woodwork, functional and sculptural ironwork, leather goods, printmaking, painting, blown glass and more. • FREE KNOX HERITAGE SALVAGE SHOP HOLIDAY MARKET • Knox Heritage Salvage Shop • 12PM • Visit knoxheritage.org/
salvage for more information. Dec. 2-19. F REE Saturday, Dec. 5 IRONWOOD STUDIOS HOLIDAY MARKET • Ironwood Studios • 10AM • Ironwood Studios presents a holiday shopping event featuring original art & craft made by Ironwood artists and local guests. The two-day market will include woodwork, functional and sculptural ironwork, leather goods, printmaking, painting, blown glass and more. • FREE KNOX HERITAGE SALVAGE SHOP HOLIDAY MARKET • Knox Heritage Salvage Shop • 10AM • Visit knoxheritage.org/ salvage for more information. Dec. 2-19. F REE JACKSON SQUARE HOLIDAY FESTIVAL AND MARKET • Historic Jackson Square (Oak Ridge) • 11AM • Buying local could help neighborhood families this holiday season. The Jackson Square Holiday Festival and Market will take place from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 5 in Oak Ridge. Visitors can buy artisan and handmade gifts, sample local cuisine, see live entertainment and even snap photos with Santa. Best of all, this family-friendly event will raise funds for Aid to Distressed Families of Appalachian Counties (ADFAC). F REE YULETIDE CRAFT FAIR • Westside Unitarian Universalist Church • 11AM • Over 15 vendors with items including jewelry, candles, bath & beauty, woodworking, leatherwork, chainmail, metaphysical supplies and much more. All proceeds support Pagan Pride of East Tennessee. MARKET SQUARE HOLIDAY MARKET • Market Square • 12PM • Nourish Knoxville continues the holiday tradition of shopping local this year with its festive Market Square Holiday Market, to be held Saturdays, December 5, 12 and 19. The Market Square Holiday Market is open 12 to 6 p.m. with farm vendors selling until 3 p.m. near the Market Square stage, and craft vendors and food trucks open until 6 p.m. on Union Avenue adjacent to Market Square and along Market Street. Like the Market Square Farmers’ Market, the Holiday Market is a producer-only market, which means everything for sale is either made, grown or raised by vendors within a 150-mile radius of downtown Knoxville. For more information, visit MarketSquareFarmersMarket.org or NourishKnoxville.org. FREE
Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 35
FOOD
R estaurant News
School of Hard Knox Hard Knox Pizzeria launches Young Entrepreneur Program at Austin-East Magnet High School BY DENNIS PERKINS
A
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
started a program called YEP—Young Entrepreneur Program—and we’re working with Project Grad at Fulton and Austin East.” The YEP effort brings local entrepreneurs and business leaders into the participating schools to help students understand the process of envisioning and creating business opportunities. As she developed the YEP idea, Alexa visited Austin-East where she talked with the school’s Project Grad overseer, Tanisha Fitzgerald-Baker, about the culinary program there. “I left there thinking about ‘How do I help these kids?’” she says. “How do I help them get connected into the Knoxville restaurants and food-service community? How do we get local chefs to come in to teach their specialties? So I called some friends, some chefs, and they said absolutely, tell me when I need to be there.” She informally calls this initial program the School of Hard Knox, and Alexa’s goals for it aren’t specifically related to recipes. “Really, it’s not always about the food—it’s about relationships with the kids,” she says. “Some may want to
Photos courtesy of Hard Knox Pizzeria
restaurateur lives amid chaos—if you’ve ever peeked into a busy kitchen at prime service times, you’ll understand. Nowadays, in addition to the time-honored food-service trials of endless personnel turnover, ever-shifting food trends, and mountains of dirty dishes, the modern restaurateur shoulders yet another series of challenges. In this era of increasing awareness of nutrition and the food supply chain, many restaurants and chefs have also become shepherds of social consciousness. On the global level, British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has made waves with his campaign for better food in schools and is well known for his charity restaurant Fifteen, in which he trains the young and disadvantaged to work in the service industry. Locally, when Tupelo Honey came to Market Square in 2012, among their first announcements was a collaboration with Beardsley Community Farm to help educate students about good food and how it comes to table. This fall, another notable restaurant couple jumped into the business of good works with both feet. Alexa and Paul Sponcia, owners of Hard Knox Pizzeria, inaugurated an effort to supplement the Culinary Arts Program at Austin-East Magnet High School to bring local chefs into the school’s kitchen. The genesis of the program is rooted in the Sponcias’ passion about contributing to their community and lending a helping hand to urban youth. “My husband and I are very involved with Austin East and Fulton. I have a big heart for that side of town, I could live over there, do everything over there,” Alexa says. “So we
work, some may not want college, so how do we educate them in a different way? Most restaurant owners are super creative, all over the place, and most of the time entrepreneurs aren’t A students. I love the idea of giving hope, that we care where they are— how can we connect?” Part of what drives the Sponcias arises from what they perceive as a cultural and geographic division in Knoxville that they hope to bridge. “[This program] is a connection from West Knoxville and Bearden to past Hall of Fame Drive. We could look it as a good funnel—these kids want to be in the culinary program and every year these chefs are coming in and meeting them. It’s [a way] to break the gap… “We’re getting local entrepreneurs and business leaders from this side to go and teach these kids. And create relationships. That’s really our heart— it’s not about a job or if we can show them to toss dough. It about how can we love them really well and give them hope.” For now, Alexa is keeping the
program simple with two classes per month. And it’s not just a Hard Knox project, either; Holly Hambright of Holly’s Gourmet’s Market (among other businesses), Plaid Apron’s Drew McDonald, and Hope Coslet-Ellard from Simply Southern Catering have all agreed to participate. Alexa hopes that next year more chefs and restaurants will volunteer for what she describes as “an easy commitment. We’ve started slow on purpose. I’m a big believer in that it needs to happen organically. I want to get feedback from the other participants and see what we can do better. We’ll take all that [feedback], and maybe next year will be a little more structured.” Even as she envisions a more structured program, Alexa’s conversation returns to an idea that owes a lot to the work of Mother Teresa and her insistence on helping people as individuals instead of building institutions to deal with masses. More than once she says, echoing the words of the soon-to-besaint, “If we could change one life, it would be worth it.” ◆
& presents
Beer Brinner SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5TH 6:30PM AT PETE’S COFFEE SHOP & RESTAURANT TICKETS ARE $35 / ADVANCE $40 AT THE DOOR
BRING IN THIS AD AND THE FIRST TACO’S ON US!
100% OF THE PROCEEDS ARE GOING TO KRISTEN MCALLISTER & HER FAMILY.
Kristen McAllister is a Knoxville native who has spent most of 2015 hospitalized due to complications from Juvenile Arthritis. She is the National Young Adult Honoree for the Jingle Bell Run/Walk for Arthritis. Kmac is dedicated to raising funds for arthritis research and spreading the word that kids get arthritis, too. She has raised over $50,000 for the Arthritis Foundation to date, and we thought it would be nice to give a little back to her. Donations will be accepted at the event, and all money raised will go to her family for medical and travel expenses as she undergoes extensive inpatient rehabilitation in Birmingham, Alabama this holiday season.
Learn more about Kristen here: www.kmacscrew.com
For tickets visit http://downtown.thecasualpint.com/events
540 Union Ave. Knoxville, TN 37902 • (865) 523-2860 www.petescoffeeshop.com Monday-Friday: 6:30 am-2:30pm Saturday: 7 am-2 pm
Top Breakfast Top Meal That’s A Steal
Top Comfort Food
We are grateful for our loyal customers who voted us the Top breakfast in Knoxville, where you can have a meal that’s a steal and nd your comfort in our food.
We buy local: Ground beef, Eggs, Bacon, Sausage, Cheese & Orange Juice.
specia l introd uctory offer : b r i n g i n t hi s ad t o r e ce i ve
CATERING AVAILABLE 865-387-8275
Cheeseburger with fries $6.48
540 Union Ave. Knoxville, TN 37902 (865) 523-2860
LUNCH & DINNER Mon-Fri 11am-9pm
706 Walnut St, Knoxville, TN
www.petescoffeeshop.com Monday-Friday: 6:30 am-2:30pm Saturday: 7 am-2 pm
We Accept Debit and All Major Credit Cards.
B AR R EB ELLEYO GA.C O M C ALL T O D AY T O R ES ER VE YO UR S PA C E (8 6 5 ) 5 2 1 - 1 8 7 9
yassin’s falafel house
November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37
’BYE
R estless Nat ive
Chronicles of Delinquency An education at Park Junior High BY CHRIS WOHLWEND
M
y move to junior high school was, in many ways, more than a mere move. It was a leap. I went from the neighborhood atmosphere of Fair Garden—on Fern Street a couple of blocks away from the Burlington business district and within walking distance of home—to Park Junior High School, several miles away toward downtown. That meant a ride on the city bus to and from school, either via Magnolia or McCalla avenues. True, most of the kids who were my classmates in grades one through six were still with me. But there were new faces, too, from different parts of town, primarily Park City and the area along the river just east of downtown. And there were more technical offerings such as wood shop and mechanical drawing—even a plastics class. The grades were seventh, eighth, and for some, ninth. I noticed fairly early that a few of the students were much older. A couple even drove cars to school. The primer-gray
early-‘50s Mercury that a kid named Julian drove was particularly cool. But the real eye-opener came about the third week of my seventh-grade year. I had noticed that the boy who sat behind me in homeroom was older. His surname was Young, and he told me he lived on Hill Avenue above the river. That neighborhood consisted of run-down Victorian houses; a couple of years later it was bulldozed out of existence in an urban-renewal effort. One morning about 8:40, just after the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag, two policemen entered, had a quick conversation with the teacher, came down my aisle, and led Mr. Young out. We never saw him again. A couple of weeks later, the south end of the school was shaken during third period by an explosion. A quick trip into the hall revealed water streaming from the boys’ bathroom. Later, we learned that someone had dropped a cherry bomb (waterproof fuse) down one of the toilets.
BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY
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KNOXVILLE MERCURY November 26, 2015
www.thespiritofthestaircase.com
The result proved popular—exploding toilets became a regular occurrence, finally leading to a patrolling policeman. Uniformed officers also joined us on the Magnolia Avenue bus after school. Their presence became necessary after a game developed among those occupying the back bench seat, which went all the way across the vehicle. A handful of the boys discovered that they could push on the bus sides and squeeze the kids who were in the middle. After the second time that a bus window was popped out by the pushing, the cops became regular riders. When I took wood shop, I noticed that some of the boys were making Y-shaped sling shots. Then one of the older students shaped a wooden pistol, rigging it up for rubber bands. The weaponry development soon escalated with technical advice from an older brother. The result was a zip gun capable of firing a .22 bullet. The gunsmith, too, was escorted out by policemen and not seen in the hallways again. In the eighth grade, I became involved in the Black & Gold, a mimeographed newsletter that appeared sporadically and was shepherded by my homeroom teacher. In hindsight, a crime column would have been popular, but I doubt if the idea would have met with the principal’s approval. Eventually, some of the trouble-
makers started answering to a skinny kid named Harrison, who had seen a few James Cagney-George Raft features and adopted their movie characters as role models. He had leadership ability (he was probably at least three years older than most of us) and soon had a half-dozen followers. Harrison and a couple of his lieutenants began stopping seventh-graders in the hall, guiding them to a quiet corner and asking “What would you do if someone just walked up and slugged you in the jaw?” The wide-eyed response was usually along the lines of “I don’t know.” Then the “insurance” racket would be explained. “We can protect you from that kind of thing, and all you have to do is pay us a quarter a week.” (This was the late 1950s, when the school lunch was only 50 cents.) The business started off well and soon became the subject of lunchroom whispers and nervous glances in Harrison’s direction. But then Harrison made a serious mistake. During the mid-day break, while the lunchroom was crowded, he approached Slack, one of my Burlington buddies, with his proposition. Slack had an immediate response—he cold-cocked Harrison. The episode was witnessed by enough kids that Harrison became a laughing stock, his entrepreneurial attempt at an end. ◆
’BYE
CLASSIFIEDS
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Support the Knoxville Mercury and sell your stuff by purchasing an ad in our classifieds section.
BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY
FOR SALE BLUE VINTAGE NORTHFACE HIKING BACKPACK, aluminum external frame. Early 1980's or so, about 90 liters. Great condition for its age, but some wear. $100 OBO. 678-313-7077
FUN AND FESTIVE JEWELRY , local and handmade, unique felted or modern faceted beads, hand-painted geometric necklaces, and more. etsy.com/shop/triciabee
HOUSING 1BR APARTMENT IN PARKRIDGE - $425. 2BR $465. Take half off rent for first month, for December or January leasing. 865-438-4870
WANT TO FIND A COPY OF THE KNOXVILLE MERCURY?
We’ve got a map for that! It’ll be updated as we add more locations. If you’ve got suggestions, let us know. knoxmercury.com/find-us
SERVICES J. DAVID REECE, M aster Electrician. State of Tn. and City of Knoxville licensed. Insurance and references. Over 25 years experience. Commercial and residential service and repair, remodeling, and new construction. CCTV, home theater, generators. Residential and commercial electrical design, inspections and consulting. 865-228-8966.
GIVE A PET A FOREVER HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS Black Friday adoption special: All adult pets (5 months and up) available for only $10 at both Young-Williams Animal Center locations (Division St. and Kingston Pike), which will be open noon to 6 p.m. on Friday Nov. 27. HANS SOLO IS A BALL OF ENERGY and needs a home where he can run and play. The 2-month-old boy is available for adoption from Young-Williams Animal Center. For more information, please call 865-215-6599.
COMMUNITY TRADEWINDS, M aryville’s Fair Trade Shop Unique gifts from around the globe! Christmas Shop December 6 8:30 am-12:30 pm and 4:00 pm-7:00 pm Monte Vista Baptist Church 1735 Old Niles Ferry Road PLACE YOUR AD AT STORE.KNOXMERCURY.COM
GIDGET'S EYES a re almost as big as her heart. The sweet 11-year-old Jack Russell Terrier/Chihuahua mix is looking for a forever home to live out the rest of her days happily. For information about adopting her, call YoungWilliams Animal Center at 865-215-6599.
THE JOY OF MUSIC. Free music lessons and instruments for disadvantaged kids. All volunteer teachers. Because inspiration should be free. Join us! For more information call 865-525-6806 or visit www.joyofmusicschool.org
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November 26, 2015
KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39
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