Issue 42 - December 24, 2015

PHEW! MADE IT! LAST ISSUE OF THE YEAR!

DEC. 24, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM V.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Dec. 24, 2015 Volume 01 / Issue 42 knoxmercury.com

CONTENTS

“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come / Whispering ‘It will be happier.’”

—Alfred Tennyson

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COVER STORY

de to every This is not a comprehensive gui in the newsworthy event that happened is a Knoxville area in 2015. Rather, it t we curated selection of stories tha is another thought were of interest—which re able way of saying, here’s what we we may not be to tackle since mid-March. This times in the fullest picture of our life and proud to Knoxville 2015, but it’s one we’re d (yet have provided with our micro-size tributors. mighty) team of staffers and con couldn’t These are stories we believe you the have found anywhere else but on your pages of the Knoxville Mercury, every dedicated community paper (in sense of the word).

PLEASE TAKE NOTE: This is our last issue of the year.

See you next on Jan. 7, 2016!

Join Our League of Supporters!

If any of the stories we ran this year were meaningful to you, consider making a donation. Find out more at knoxmercury.com/join.

DEPARTMENTS

OPINION

A&E

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6

24

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Howdy Start Here: Roadside Sketches

by Andrew Gresham, Believe It or Knox!, Public Affairs, Quote Factory ’Bye Finish There: Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely, Spirit of the Staircase

by Matthew Foltz-Gray

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Perspectives Joe Sullivan dissects the fracas between the Knox County law director and the school board.

The Scruffy Citizen Jack Neely remembers the life of a researcher/boutique owner/ community organizer who made a difference, Andie Ray. Architecture Matters George Dodds considers the prevailing trend of turning airports into shopping malls.

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CALENDAR Program Notes: Quentin Tarantino singlehandedly revives a lost film format for The Hateful 8—and you’ve got one week to see it at the Pinnacle.

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Spotlights: New Year’s Eve celebrations

Classical Music: Alan Sherrod picks his favorite performances of the year.

Movies: April Snellings discovers some new science fiction movie called The Force Awakens.

December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3

Illustration by Ben Adams

HOWDY

Believe It or Knox!

BY Z. HERACLITUS KNOX The first retailer to reference Christmas shopping in an advertisement was probably Peter Ricardi, an Italian immigrant who had a shop on Gay Street in 1860, just before the Civil War. The first to feature Santa Claus in a display ad was German immigrant Peter Kern, in the late 1860s. A baker and candy-maker, he later became mayor of Knoxville.

His 1876 building still stands at 1 Market Square, and is home to two restaurants and a bar called the Peter Kern Library.

“Remember Or UT Conference Center Knoxville TN I” by Bart Ross (bartross.com)

QUOTE FACTORY “ Zaevion Dobson died saving three friends from getting shot.

He was a hero at 15. What’s our excuse for not acting?”

— President Obama, tweeting about the 15-year-old Fulton High School student who sacrificed himself to save three teenage girls from gunfire.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS

12/24 CHRISTMAS IN OLD APPALACHIA 12/26 FUNERAL SERVICES FOR ZAEVION 12/27 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS DOBSON THURSDAY

SATURDAY

9 a.m.-5 p.m., Museum of Appalachia (2819 Andersonville Highway, Norris). $6-$18.

Family field trip! This is the last day for observing an authentic old-timey Christmas at the Museum of Appalachia, so you can tuck it in before the mad scramble to tear open gifts and drink lots of egg nog.

Noon, Overcoming Believers Church, 211 Harriet Tubman St.).

Celebrating the life of the 15-year-old Fulton High student who sacrificed himself to protect others in a random, gang-related shooting.

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

SUNDAY

6-8 p.m., The Cove at Concord Park (11808 S. Northshore Drive). Free.

Now that Christmas is behind us, let’s take a moment to recover before New Year’s Eve and look at thousands of pretty lights in the Cove’s 3/4-mile greenway trail.

(There’s also kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, and funnel cakes.) Knox County will be collecting non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. Runs through Dec. 31.

The Christmas week was often the most violent week of the year, especially on the Bowery, Knoxville’s saloon district, along South Central Street. Many of that district’s patrons were young men who had moved to the city to work in the factories, and spent their evenings—and their brief Christmas vacations—in the city’s 100 saloons.

Many carried weapons, and evenings of drinking and card playing often ended in murder. The Knoxville Police Department often doubled its patrol force on Christmas week!

12/31 ALIVE INTO 2016

THURSDAY

8 p.m.-1 a.m., Knoxville Museum of Art. $60.

There are a lot of New Year’s Eve parties around town (see our Calendar section for more), but this is the only one that features the final performance of local blues chanteuse Jenna Jefferson. Admission includes an all-night supper buffet and midnight breakfast buffet by Rocky’s Jamaica Sunrise.

Lights!

Knoxville’s first electric lights were turned on 130 years ago this week. Later, a former Knoxvillian used electric lights to change the way America celebrated New Year’s Eve. For its first 60 years or so, Knoxville depended mainly on candlelight and oil lanterns for illumination. In the 1850s, the city got gaslight, which was then considered a sign of a modern city. The flicker of gaslight characterized Knoxville evenings before, during, and for 20 years after the Civil War. Then electricity arrived.

After Thomas Edison had demonstrated a practical lighting system in 1879, electric lights caught on around the country. Knoxville got its turn when the Schuyler Electric Light Co., based in Hartford, Conn., started a partnership with a 25-year-old Knoxville lawyer named John C. Houk. The son of Knoxville’s Republican Congressman Leonidas Houk, John C. Houk had previously lived in Washington. At some point he made the acquaintance of the Schuyler company, which had previously focused its efforts on cities in the Northeast.

Schuyler was one of several companies being sued for patent infringement by inventor Thomas Edison.

Schuyler set up a generator plant, which required an iron boiler, on Gay Street near Cumberland, probably in the vicinity of what’s now Cook Lofts.

Most of the more than 20 original “subscribers” were on Gay Street, like Staub’s Theatre, Schubert Hotel, and the roller-skating rink, but Peter Kern’s bakery and confectionery on Market Square was also one of the first electrically lit buildings in Knoxville. It’s now home to Tupelo Honey, the Royale, and the hotel known as the Oliver.

Knoxville’s earliest electric lights were apparently searing-bright arc lights. Within a few weeks, incandescent bulbs for interior use were demonstrated at McCampbell’s Drugstore, at the corner of Gay Street and Clinch. “This light can cheaply and substantially be thrown into every room in the house,” wrote an astonished reporter, “and can be turned on or off, at any moment, by means of a button.”

The Knoxville Power & Light Co., as it looked the 1920s, during the holidays. Located on the corner of Gay and Church, the building later served the TVA-era Knoxville Utilities Board. The building is decorated for Christmas, with Santa’s electrically lit sleigh and reindeer. The sign above the ground floor says “Give Useful Electrical Gifts for Xmas.”

Photo courtesy of the Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection cmdc.knoxlib.org

Surely there was some symbolism in it arriving on one of the darkest days of the year. On Tuesday, Dec. 22, 1885–at 5:00, just as it was getting dark–Gay Street and some other spots glowed with electric light.

Although commercially available light bulbs had been available for only about five years, several cities already had electric light. The Knoxville Chronicle heralded the news with the headline “ELECTRIFIED: Knoxville Finally Up With the Times in Illumination.”

It arrived in time for some late Christmas shopping. “The novelty of the new deal in lighting brought out hundreds of people, many of who promenaded up and down the streets just to see where the lights are being used,” reported the Chronicle. “The front of nearly every business house lighted by electricity had a constant throng of callers during the evening.”

At about the same time, Knoxville city government voted to go with electric streetlights to replace the gaslights with electric light bulbs. It was a gradual process. As late as 1892, most of Knoxville’s streets were still gaslit.

Less than five years after electric lights first lit up Gay Street, Knoxville had its first electric trolley. The two processes were so similar in their delivery of electrical currents that Knoxville’s first utility was eventually known as the Knoxville Railway and Light Co. In late 1907, Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the New York Times, came up with a new way to celebrate New Year’s Eve. Ochs had grown up in Knoxville, and began his career in journalism here. After building his career in Chattanooga for almost 20 years, he bought the New York Times, and launched a holiday festival at the New York plaza he called Times Square, and began the tradition of celebrating the new year there, first with fireworks. After his fireworks were banned, Ochs ordered that 100 electric lights be rigged up to a giant ball whose descent would mark the stroke of midnight, and the beginning of a new year. His basic idea is still in use today, and the center of what is probably the most famous New Year’s Eve celebration in the world.

Source: The Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection.

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 December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5

PERSPECTIVES

Legalese Knox County’s lemon of a law director

BY JOE SULLIVAN

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nox County Law Director Bud Armstrong has managed to create doubt about the legality of the school board’s recent renewal of Superintendent Jim McIntyre’s contract where none exists.

Armstrong’s contention that state law is “ambiguous” about the school board’s authority to do so is just the latest example of inept and devious conduct on the law director’s part. Ever since Armstrong suddenly started attending school board meetings last year, he’s been a politicized thorn in the side of McIntyre and a supportive majority of board members.

So much so that board chair Doug Harris didn’t even look to Armstrong for preparation of the new four-year employment contract that extends McIntyre’s term of office for two years until the end of 2019. Harris proceeded on his own, he told the News Sentinel, because, “This situation has caused me to lower my confidence in the law director to the point of hiring and paying for my own counsel in order to perform the job I was elected to do.”

During the Nov. 30 board meeting at which the board approved the contract by a 5-4 vote, Armstrong opined that it could be invalidated because of ambiguity as to whether it represented an extension of McIntyre’s existing contract beyond the four years permissible under state law.

This caviling on Armstrong’s part might have had some legalistic merit if the board had simply approved an extension of the superintendent’s existing four-year contract. But plainly it did not. The new one states that, “This contract shall replace and supersede any earlier employment agreements between KCBOE {Knox County Board of Education] and the

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Superintendent.” And the existing contract also provides that, “This contract may be terminated by mutual agreement of the parties,” which is precisely what the new contract did to the old one.

This very same language has governed several previous extensions of McIntyre’s term, which have occurred upon a favorable board review of his performance that he’s gotten annually ever since he first took office in 2008 with a four-year contract.

Upon board approval of McIntyre’s preceding contract in 2013, Deputy Law Director David Sanders signed an obligatory proviso to the document attesting that it is “approved as to legal form and correctness.” But this time around, without even notifying the school board, Armstrong penned the word “NOT” in front of the attestation before signing the document himself.

The “NOT” set off a two-hour swirl of confusion and consternation when the contract went before County Commission for review at its Dec. 14 work session. Under the terms of a 2003 court settlement agreement between the two bodies, Commission is required to approve school board contracts “if the County Executive has insured that all proper procedures have been followed regarding availability of funds, legal compliance, and bid process compliance.”

In the absence of such assurances, the contract seemed on the verge of foundering over doubts about its legality. But Armstrong may have saved the day when he eventually advised that, “It’s a legal contract. All I’m saying is that certain provisions may not be enforceable. But the contract has a severability clause. So anything that may be unenforceable does not void the

contract.” What went unsaid, in a double entendre on the word sever, is that without the two additional years of severance pay to which McIntyre would be entitled if he is removed from office, the new contract wouldn’t mean much.

In the end, a narrow majority of six on the 11-member Commission voted to approve it.

County Mayor Tim Burchett has remained conspicuously silent in all of this. Until recently, he might well have seized the opportunity to stick it to McIntyre of whom he’s been highly critical in the past. But their relationship has clearly become more amicable since they entered into a wide-ranging memorandum of understanding on school-budget matters last spring.

Burchett looms large in the equation because the 2003 settlement agreement leaves it solely up to him to verify the legality of school contracts and further provides that “failure to verify within ten days [after submission by the school board] shall constitute an automatic verification.” That’s what has happened and pulls one of Armstrong’s legs out from under him.

The State Attorney General’s office pulled the other when it spurned Armstrong’s request for an opinion on his assertedly ambiguous question of whether the school board permissibly renewed or impermissibly extended the superintendent’s contract. Instead, the AG’s office responded that “your question has been addressed and answered by the Tennessee Court of Appeals in Heatherly v. Campbell.” In that 2005 decision, the court ruled that a “renewal requires an affirmative recreation or replacement of the legal relationship.” And that’s exactly what happened in the case of McIntyre’s new contract.

What makes Armstrong seem devious in all his machinations is that he’s known to be beholden to East Knox County’s political boss, Knoxville Focus publisher Steve Hunley, who has long been out to get rid of McIntyre. Cutting short the superintendent’s contract is one means to that end, especially at a time when another McIntyre critic, Tony Norman, is running unopposed to succeed Harris, who is bowing out, in next year’s election. That could swing the school board to a 5-4 anti-McIntyre tilt come September. But a buyout cost of more than three times his $227,000 annual salary would still be a big impediment to his removal. ◆

Delivering Fine Journalism Since 2015

EDITORIAL EDITOR Coury Turczyn coury@knoxmercury.com SENIOR EDITOR Matthew Everett matthew@knoxmercury.com CONTRIBUTING EDITOR Jack Neely jack@knoxhistoryproject.org STAFF 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

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

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

Andie Ray, 1967-2015 A eulogy for a spirit that animated the city

BY JACK NEELY

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his darkest season is darker with an unimagined loss.

Twenty-odd years ago, Andie Ray was a familiar face at the checkout desk at Lawson McGhee Library. Even if you never saw her after that, you’d remember her. Her distinctive features might suggest an Edwardian artist’s fantasy of a sylph or a naiad, a face that might even inspire one to take up painting. In fact she was sometimes a model for artist Cynthia Markert. In her paintings on plywood of moody, elusive flappers, you can sometimes spot Andie Ray among them, knowing something you don’t, enjoying a joke she’s not going to tell right now.

She had grown up in Tallahassee, Fla. When her parents, Rich and Jane, former Knoxvillians, moved back home, Andie came along, and found a place for herself here. When she was in college, back in the ’80s, she found work as a page at the McClung Collection, and maintained a relationship with that research library for decades, on call as a freelance researcher. She was drawn to the past, to stories out of the ordinary, to the styles of former eras—art nouveau, art deco—and to the lore of the Lost Generation, of people who lived their own lives out of step with the

world around them. She often recommended new books about bohemians, expatriates, free spirits.

Equally interested in local history, especially its exotic edges, Andie told me the story of the McGhee-Howard-Jones feud, which was something like the Hatfield-McCoy fracas reinterpreted by Alfred Hitchcock. In that long story, she was kin to the McGhees, and proud to say so.

Later, working for a time as a paralegal for a law firm, she might have seemed destined for a career in quiet research. It surprised her friends when her interest in fashion took her to take a job at one of the trendier women’s stores at the mall.

As we soon learned, she was doing reconnaissance.

Around 1999, she took what seemed a dangerous leap.

She’d reached her early 30s, an age when many young adults consider buying a cute starter home in the suburbs, two bedrooms, two baths, carport. Andie Ray bought an old liquor store on Market Square.

The Square still wore the tattered remnants of failed renovations. Things never seemed to work out for the awkward old place. Market Square did a passable lunch business for commut-

ers, but every afternoon it got quiet fast. Retail shunned it. Watson’s, the offbeat old department store, had just shut down, its management complaining of downtown’s decline.

But Andie Ray bought the old building at Number 27, painted the façade bright yellow, and created an extraordinary 2,000-square-foot living space upstairs, with antique furniture and French doors. From her window, she could watch Market Square undergoing enormous changes. In early 2004, she opened a dress shop she called Vagabondia.

The name was that of an obscure and early novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. The story of a cheerful and creative but disorderly and frugal family is set in London but known to be based on the author’s home, family, and friends in Knoxville as she knew them as a bohemian adolescent, an aspiring writer and sometime piano teacher, around 1870. The Hodgson house here was called “Vagabondia Castle.” Its precise location is elusive.

It was somewhere near Maplehurst.

Andie liked the resonance of all that. Somewhere she found an old worn copy of Vagabondia, the only one I’ve ever seen to this day, and placed the book on her counter as an homage.

She ran Vagabondia for several years. It drew customers of a certain persona, aimed more at an independence of spirit than a size or age group. She also stocked an interesting selection of curiosities, hats, gifts, jewelry, scarves, games. This time of year, Vagabondia was often packed.

She proved to be a serious-minded and successful businesswoman, unafraid of the gritty business of competition and confronting muddy-headed politicians. Andie Ray was one of maybe three new entrepreneurs who proved Market Square retail could work in a new century.

Market Square was often at the center of a furious multi-sided debate.

Andie Ray was often at the center of the fray. Those who took her to be an abstract, wistful sort were startled by her knack for getting realistic quick.

She took leadership roles in Knox Heritage, City People, the Market Square District Association. She was a longtime member of the Historic Zoning Commission, and sometimes the toughest commissioner to please.

She and I sometimes disagreed.

She held her ground, with grace and

dry wit.

Somewhere along there, she married Noel Hudson, a globetrotting consultant and author who shared her fascination with the styles of the early 20th century. They made a perfect pair, and enjoyed a shared life.

She was among the youngest of that first wave of entrepreneur-developers who reimagined Market Square. I always figured she’d be telling that unlikely story after nobody else was around to remember it.

As was the case with most of the first generation of downtown homesteaders, it was the uncertainty of what they were doing, the frisson of discovering a new way of life—the edge—that was a big part of the attraction. When downtown became successful, even mainstream, I’m afraid it lost some of its appeal to the first-wave pioneers, the dreamers, the risk-takers, the librarians-turned-fashion merchants.

Eventually she and Noel bought an empty lot in Old North. She wanted to do some gardening, she said. About four years ago, working with a local architect, they built what looked like a dream home, a model example of a new house in an old place.

In recent years Andie was more focused on her new neighborhood, recently serving as president of the Old North Knoxville neighborhood association. She completed training to go into the real-estate business. And thanks to her husband Noel’s work, she got to travel a great deal.

Several years ago, I had a dream in which I was racing Andie Ray, on foot, the length of Market Square, after it had been reborn as something new. I ran into her one night at the brewpub, and mentioned it. She was game. She had youth and relative sobriety on her side. I had slightly longer legs. It was a draw. It was a great deal of fun.

Sprint the length of Market Square sometime, late at night, with an interesting friend, and see if it’s not.

Andie Ray made this old place more interesting and worthwhile.

Many lives deserve commemorating, but she left us wondering about the 30 or 40 years Knoxville missed. Her death, unanticipated by anybody a month ago, was apparently the result of a cancer she never knew she had.

It’s a tragedy for her family and friends and a painful setback for the city she loved. ◆ December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7

ARCHITECTURE MATTERS

Sky Mall What do shopping malls and airports have in common?

BY GEORGE DODDS

F

or many, the year-end holidays are a time for celebration, introspection, and (invariably) travel, perhaps to be with one’s family or to steer clear of it. For many of the many, this travel requires the services of a commercial airline.

In the opening narration to Annie Hall (1977), Woody Allen famously deadpans: “Life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. …The horrible are…terminal cases…blind people, [the] crippled. … The miserable is everyone else.” Post-9/11 air travel seems somewhere in between.

Leaving aside the indignities of ubiquitous overbooked, under-serviced airships, much of one’s interstitial travel time is spent in perhaps the most impoverished building types of the last millennium: the airport. What began as a relatively humble affair during the inter-war years, transformed during the late 1950s and early 1960s into an architecture that, at its best, celebrated the experience of flight and the still novel event of air travel.

The original (and historically protected) bits of what once was National Airport (1941), situated in the Commonwealth of Virginia immediately across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C, and Denver’s Stapleton International Airport (1929) close to that city’s downtown, are both excellent examples of the former. When one thinks of the latter, such icons as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at New York’s Idlewild Airport (now JFK), and Dulles International, in Fairfax County, Virginia, both completed in 1962, come to mind.

There was something fundamentally original and exciting even about the early utilitarian buildings. For example, often one could trundle up a

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steel stair attached to the side of one of these simple buildings to a viewing platform, or walk out onto the tarmac, stand behind a fence, feel the force of the propellers, enthralled by the spectacle of flight.

In Saarinen’s terminals, flight itself was evinced through the form, space, and structure of the building.

Unlike the utilitarian Stapleton and National, TWA and Dulles were less concerned with utility than with expression—TWA in particular. In the early 1970s, as modern architecture and the International Style were being reevaluated for the first time, the critic and historian Charles Jencks said of TWA that one of the reasons it failed was that it was little more than architecture-as-sculpture, “and bad sculpture at that.” Yet, today, when architecture-as-sculpture has become almost commonplace, TWA is revered as one of the greatest mid-century-modern buildings on the continent, co-starring in the final season of AMC’s Mad Men and in the Leonardo DiCaprio’s light-hearted, Catch Me if You Can (2002). Things change.

Perhaps the greatest change is in the very nature of the experience of the airport—the Transportation Safety Administration of the post 9/11 world notwithstanding. When Denver’s new International Airport finally opened in 1995 after long delays owing to infamous problems with its state-ofthe-art automated luggage system, as well as César Pelli’s huge expansion of what is now known as Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in 1997, they were both part of a new era in airport programming. Airports were no longer simply a place to catch a plane and, perhaps, buy a chachka at a modest souvenir shop in the process. They were now quasi-desti-

nations for shopping.

This phenomenon is not limited, sadly, to airports. Art museums, university student centers, even historic sites at which one’s entrance is now interrupted by something called a “visitor’s center,” are among the many publicly-funded building programs in this country that looked to the formulaic model of the shopping mall for financial stability.

Federal and state funds that once supported many of these public typologies were steadily withdrawn beginning in the early 1980s, about the same time President Reagan fired over 11,000 air traffic controllers.

One of the unintended consequences of this new funding model is that, today, as one moves through airports in Atlanta, Paris, London, Amsterdam, and particularly throughout Asia where great quantities of infrastructure were built during the past two decades, one walks through shopping malls with airplanes attached. Pleasure pavilions such as TWA and Dulles, designed to heighten one’s experience, are simply no longer possible as an airport’s vertical surfaces now are “branding opportunities” and any horizontal surface not needed for the utility of air travel is potential rentable space.

Those of us flying out of McGhee Tyson Airport know several of these European airports well as they are often required points of connection in one’s itinerary east. In some of the worst-case scenarios, such as Paris’ Charles De Gaulle International (1975), if one is making a connection to a city in Europe, one confronts a shopping mall without planes. Security-screened ticket-holders are funneled higgledy-piggledy into a shuttle bus lumbering one to some remote location on a tarmac that, if it ends at all, must be just south of Calais.

In Amsterdam’s Schiphol, signs are posted overhead informing weary travelers of the walking time between their current location and various terminals and gates in a maze-like mall; these numbers are as soberingly large as they are grossly optimistic.

Recently, a smartphone app was released to help one navigate through this labyrinth of shops selling the unnecessary to the unwitting.

This foregrounds the essential conflict between these two building types. The commercial success of shopping is largely dependent on precisely the opposite organizational

strategy upon which transportation hubs depend. Shopping spaces are organized for extreme inefficiency—to deflect the shopper and extend one’s time in the zone of commerce. Hence, those airports that are the most profitable shopping malls will be, in the main, the lousiest places to catch a plane or make a connecting flight.

The McGhee Tyson Airport that services Knoxville, Oak Ridge, and East Tennessee is largely free of this dilemma. Although it has been marred on the exterior since 9/11, with what seems to be many thousands cubic yards’ worth of concrete barriers, the interior has adapted well to the histrionics of the endless war on terror. The use of local materials and a simple design strategy along with generous honorific spaces helped its managers adapt its interior non-obtrusively to new security requirements. And while one wishes that the first experience a visitor to our area encountered was not the overwhelming scent of chlorinated water from a far-too-busy fountain, things could be far worse.

In the end, while many of us kvetch that we do not live in a “hub city,” requiring us to almost always make connecting flights, there is great merit in the modest-sized regional airport. But few of the small airports I’ve frequented in Baton Rouge, La, Jackson, Miss., Spokane, Wash., Eugene, Ore., Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Allentown, Pa., or Harrisburg, Pa., are as pleasant to use as McGhee Tyson.

Even the TSA screening is more kid gloves than gauntlet.

It may be too small to accommodate the new Boeing 787 on its runways, but it is also not large enough to be mega-malled. By Woody Allen’s standards, while Charles De Gaulle and Schiphol airports fall on the “horrible” side of life’s equation, McGhee Tyson is among the “miserable.” Yet, although I will never comprehend the presence of all of those wooden rocking chairs that are to its interior what Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chairs would be to a Cracker Barrel, much like the chlorinated fountain with its faux rocks and sculpted bears, it could be worse, and it’s a far cry from miserable.

What does a shopping mall have in common with an airport? Not much. In that regard we are, in fact, quite fortunate. Tis the season to count one’s blessings. ◆

LMU Professor Selected for International Workshop On September 10, 2015, the discovery of a new species of human ancestor, Homo naledi, hit every major news outlet worldwide. Zach Throckmorton, PhD, assistant professor of anatomy at LMUDCOM, first heard about the expedition through social media, and applied to participate in the international workshop with the University of the Witwatersrand in conjunction with National Geographic. One of 25 junior scientists that was selected from around the world, Throckmorton had no idea the discovery would be this big.

During the six-week workshop in South Africa, Throckmorton was assigned to work on the feet and ankles due to his background as a physical anthropologist specializing in paleoanthropology.

“It became clear after a few days that we had an entire new species of the genus ‘Homo’,” said Throckmorton. “You don’t find this every day. These are amongst our closest relatives.”

More than 1,550 numbered fossil elements makes this discovery the single largest fossil hominin find made on the continent of Africa. Throckmorton’s group was able to reconstruct the whole foot and he expects the amount of material collected will provide decades of continuing work.

The discovery was the cover story of the October issue of National Geographic (www. natgeo.org/naledi) and was featured in a NOVA/National Geographic Special titled “Dawn of Humanity” that premiered on PBS and is available to watch online at www.pbs.org/ wgbh/nova/evolution/dawn-ofhumanity.html.

Photo by Robert

www.LMUnet.edu

graphic

Clark/National Geo

Throckmorton summed up the experience and said, “It was wonderful to be part of such a collaborative scientific endeavor and be surrounded by people from all over the world.”

Photo by Mark Thiessen/National Geographic

December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9

10

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

T

his is not a comprehensive guide to every newsworthy event that happened in the Knoxville area in 2015.

WE’RE BACK!

How’d we do it?

Explanations inside.

Rather, it is a curated selection of stories that we thought were of interest—which is another way of saying, here’s what we were able to tackle since mid-

March. This may not be the fullest picture of our life and times in Knoxville 2015, but it’s one we’re proud to have provided with our micro-sized (yet mighty) team of staffers and contributors. These are stories we believe you couldn’t have found anywhere else but on the pages of the Knoxville Mercury, your dedicated community paper (in every sense of the word). —Coury Turczyn, ed.

NOT BAD, EH?

1

It’ll get bigger and better. You should advertise.

KNOXVILLE MERCURY March 12, 2015

Also inside: The Official Pullout Guide to Big Ears MARCH 19, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

SO FAR, SO GOOD, SINCE LAST WEEK

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MARCH 26, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

THIRD TIME’S THE CHARM

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Inside Striped Light

BY ELEANOR SCOTT

NEWS

SECRET HISTORY

MUSIC

ART

KUB Pipeline Construction Cuts Down Pollution, Trees

What Market Square Really Needs

Alabama Shakes Stretch Out

Beth Meadows’ Mixed-Media Mashups

APRIL 30, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

WE FINALLY GOT SESQUICENTENNIAL FEVER!

SWAN S

TERRY RILEY

KN SY OXV ORC MPHO ILLE HES NY T RA

KRONOS QUARTET

LAURIE AN DERS

ON

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BILL FRISELL

Knoxville’s newest letterpress shop also aims to become an art-scene catalyst

BEN FROST

RHIANNON GIDDENS

JAMIE XX

TYONDAI BRAXTON

AMEN DUNES

JAM IE

A key part of the Mercury launch is the formation of a new 501(c)(3) nonprofit, an educational organization known as the Knoxville History Project. It’s surprising, when you think about it, that Knoxville, almost 225 years old, has never had its own historical organization, perhaps not even a full-time staffer, to promote the city’s own story.

Educational in purpose, the Knoxville History Project will be a conduit for information about Knoxville’s history and culture. Obviously, to say we’re the only Knoxville history organization is not to say we’re the only historical organization in Knoxville. This city is lucky to be the home of the East Tennessee Historical Society, which has funded and organized the best historical museum in the region. They’re in charge of the East Tennessee History Center, which in the last several years has become a successful gathering place for a wide variety of important events. But the ETHS is a 35-county organization, with board leadership and donor funding from as far away as Chattanooga and Bristol. The focus of the Knoxville History Project, a more modest organization in terms of budget and staffing, will different from theirs—it will be the city of Knoxville itself.

The Knoxville History Project will also be the governing organization, the “sole member,” of a new not-for-profit newspaper called the Mercury.

—Jack Neely

DES BRYC SN E ER

To be honest, I was actually looking forward to taking a vacation.

In my last seven years of editing Metro Pulse, I’d managed to not work on only two or three issues. So when I was informed about my impending unemployment last October, my first thought was, well, that finally happened. And it was soon followed by a subversive glimmer of hope: Now I can finally relax!

But idle repose was not on the immediate agenda. Nor was peace of mind, financial security, or a reliable sense of confidence in what I was doing. That’s because Knoxville wouldn’t take no for an answer. While there were certainly a lot of people who were upset at E.W. Scripps for shutting down Metro Pulse without regard for its legacy—or without even considering the idea that someone might think it’s worth buying—there were others who were immediately asking, “How can we start a new paper?”

We weren’t sure ourselves. Does publishing stories with ink and paper even make sense any more? Do readers want it? Do businesses still need it? Those are questions I can’t really answer for the media industry at large, but in Knoxville the reply was a firm yes. Most everyone we talked to—community leaders, business experts, advertisers, foundation directors, even media types—was emphatic: It can still work here, and we’ll help you do it. That kind of support cannot be ignored, so we went back to work.

—Coury Turczyn

A KNOXVILLE HISTORY PROJECT

SILV APPL ER ES

WELCOME TO OUR STARTOVER

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EXCERPT

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EXCERPT

INAUGURAL ISSUE

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ISSUE #1 : MARCH 12

MARCH 12, 2015

TYONDAI BRAXTO

NEW ADVENTURES IN FUTURE MUSIC NEWS

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

OUTDOORS

FOOD

Are Knoxville Parents Vaccinating Their Kids?

The Knoxville Music Festival We’ve Forgotten

In Search of the Prized Walleye at Cove Creek

Local Bakeries Remake the Toaster Pastry

JUST TRYING TO KEEP THE GOOD THINGS GOING

MAY 28, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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THE LAST DRIVE-IN

The first and biggest memorial to America’s worst maritime disaster is in South Knoxville. And nobody knows about it.

Walmart’s threat to the Parkway Drive-In puts Maryville’s future in the spotlight

BY JACK NEELY

BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN

UPDATE

Starting a weekly print publication in the 21st century is not as easy as everyone said it would be.

NEWS

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

MUSIC

FOOD

Yet More Walmarts On the Way

A Civil War Stroll Downtown

The CrumbSnatchers’ Reckless Abandon

South Knox Gets a Food Co-Op

NEWS

Historic Christenberry House Demolished

JACK NEELY

The Problem With TN—Not the Logo, the Abbreviation

BOOKS

NPR’s Steve Inskeep Talks Andrew Jackson

December 24, 2015

FOOD

Glenwood and Broadway: New Foodie Corner

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11

think that the Clockwork Orange-like intersection of vacant streets it comprises at Walnut and Summer Place need not be a Dante-esque signpost to all who enter here; we need not “abandon all hope.”

—George Dodds

ISSUE #4: APRIL 2 EXCERPT

Illustrations by

Matthew Foltz

-Gray

WHERE’S THE MONEY?

ISSUE #2 : MARCH 19 EXCERPT

INSIDE STRIPED LIGHT Striped Light resides in what was once a long-empty auto detailing shop just off North Central Street. In the lobby, the faux wood paneling and scuffed linoleum remains. A vintage sign, “Customer Ring Bell for Service,” now shares wall space with fine-art prints.

In the corner, a large metal desk with a scattering of papers serves as a bare-bones booking office. On the desk lays a short stack of shrink-wrapped vinyl records by the local band Daddy Don’t—the first release by Knoxville’s newest record label.

Further back, inside a spacious studio with high ceilings, concrete floors, and three roll-up garage doors, sit five vintage flatbed cylinder proof presses: a Korrex, a Challenger, and three Vandercooks. A smaller room serves as an art gallery.

Three longtime friends—Bryan Baker, Sarah Shebaro, and Jason Boardman—dreamed up this unique combination of art, commerce, and heavy machinery brainstorming over beers when they were living in the same town, scheming over Skype when they weren’t. Baker, Boardman, and Shebaro—each a significant figure in Knoxville’s arts and music communities in the past decade—joined forces 12

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

to finally see their dream realized in December: opening a community print shop/record label in their favorite city.

Even more so than business success, the partners hope Striped Light will become a kind of DIY community center, a catalyst for artistic collaboration among Knoxville’s poets, philosophers, artists, and musicians.

—Eleanor Scott EXCERPT

UNCLEAR CUTS The University of Tennessee’s decision to switch its Knoxville power plant from coal to natural gas will roll back East Tennessee’s contribution to global climate change by slashing carbon-dioxide emissions.

But installing 10 miles of gas pipeline through blue-collar neighborhoods and two county parks is no small undertaking. It involves clear-cutting thousands of trees—nature’s original carbon-dioxide scrubbers.

The irony is not lost on Donna Webster, who lives on Legion Drive and is grieving as she watches huge, old trees topple on her road. Trees are also tumbling in Optimist Park and I.C. King Park, which is scheduled to remain closed for the work until the end of May. Last week a large stack of logs sat next to one of the park’s entrances.

The project will tear up parts of

popular bike trails through the park’s woods, says Doug Bataille, senior director of Knox County Parks and Recreation. However, KUB and its contractors have agreed to restore or improve what is damaged, he adds.

They also shifted the pipeline route at the county’s request so it hugs the railroad tracks instead of going through the middle of the park.

But homeowners in the path of the pipeline nevertheless question whether this was the best route, or just the easiest one to acquire.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #3: MARCH 26 EXCERPT

AN ART UNTRUE An old friend once quipped, “The half-life of missing the point is forever.” He could have been speaking of the new Walnut Street parking garage in downtown Knoxville.

Just as Knoxville is emerging from its backwater status, it finds itself once again on the cutting edge of the past. It’s difficult to get around what seems a generally held view by several of the new garage’s critics: This is the wrong building type in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet, the garage’s very existence serves an important albeit unintended civic function: smelling salts for those committed to the continued reinvention and reinhabitation of our downtown. It demonstrates unambiguously the kind of thing that ought never to happen again in our urban core. For years to come, it will serve an invaluable civic role when we debate new building projects for downtown or elsewhere. It is encouraging to

Much of the deliberation at the school board’s initial meeting on a budget for the year ahead revolved around allocation of a presumed $10 million in additional funding for teacher compensation.

Superintendent Jim McIntyre recommended applying all of the money to a 4 percent pay raise for all teachers while dispensing with a continuation of the $3.2 million in performance bonuses that have been paid in each of the past two years to teachers with superior evaluations.

What was strangely missing from the discussion was any mention of the fact that the budget as presented didn’t provide a source of funding for anything like $10 million for any combination of the above. Indeed, the only funding identified in the budget for raises was the $4.4 million from the state that represents its share of the 4 percent average teacher salary increase that Gov. Bill Haslam has recommended. But the only mention of this shortfall in McIntyre’s proposed budget was an obscure footnote stating. “Amount of $5,639,000 reflects the remainder needed to grant a 4% average salary increase to certified employees.”

—Joe Sullivan

ISSUE #5: APRIL 9 EXCERPT

SEX WEEK’S NEW GENERATION

It was a compromise of sorts. Last June, the University of Tennessee’s Board of Trustees approved a policy requiring students to “opt-in” to authorize about $20 of fees to go towards student-organized programming—in lieu of having the General Assembly act on threats to reduce UT’s funding after legislators objected strenuously to the second annual Sex Week, an event co-founded by

students Brianna Rader and Jacob Clark in 2013.

The policy’s language says students can opt out of paying for “programming that may be considered by some to be controversial or personally objectionable.”

The fee allocation did reduce student programming money by about $49,000, according to outgoing Student Government Association president Kelsey Keny, whose election automatically made her the chair of the Student Program Allocation Committee when it was created last year.

Sex Week 2015 received funding for just eight of its 35 proposed events. The Legislature would seem to have gotten what it wanted. But not, perhaps, the desired end result.

That’s because Sex Week lives on this week, just as envisioned by its organizers, with all 35 events being offered, from the wildly popular drag show and three presentations by nationally famed sex educator Megan Andelloux to sessions on “Queering Medicine: LGBTQ + Health” and “An Owner’s Guide to Your Package: Vagina Edition.” The sex-ed symposium is treading new ground with 30 new topics among the sessions, such as first-time coverage of disability and sex, the ethics of sex work, and biphobia.

—Rose Kennedy EXCERPT

SO LONG, UC Go drop in on the University Center. It hasn’t been much heralded, but this month is your last chance to visit a local institution.

It’ll be demolished in a few weeks. That’s not news; its demolition was first publicly announced eight years ago. It had been on the drawing board for some years before that.

They’ll build a much-bigger student center, even though the University of Tennessee is hardly bigger. In fact, in total students, UT’s a little smaller than it was when I was in school, 35 years ago. But folks in the university business agree, if you talk to them privately, that it’s about attracting teenagers, and today’s teenagers demand luxury. They demand extraordinary luxury, even beyond what they have any reason to expect when they’re grownup professionals. La Bohème is so 19th century. College is posh now.

The UC has some history. But is

there something about modernist architecture that tends to shed affection? The UC should be a famous and beloved building. I can’t tell that it is. If it were a nominee for the National Register of Historic Places, it would be a slam-dunk. But it’s being torn down, and there’s not a whole lot of demonstrating about that fact. For the last few years it’s been on Knox Heritage’s Fragile Fifteen list, but I’ve met only a few—and there are a few—who regret its loss.

—Jack Neely

ISSUE #6: APRIL 16 EXCERPT

PUBLIC ARTHOUSE CINEMA

In February, Paul Harrill and Darren Hughes launched the Public Cinema, a quietly ambitious series of seven independently produced recent movies shown at the Knoxville Museum of Art’s recently updated ground-floor auditorium—“vital works of contemporary international and American cinema … that might otherwise be unseen or overlooked by Knoxville audiences,” as they describe the films on the Public Cinema website.

It’s been unlike any film series here in recent memory. Even in an age of on-demand streaming, some very good and interesting films remain hard to see. The Public Cinema screenings, mostly on Sunday afternoons, have included a European festival favorite (Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat); an intimate documentary (Gabe Klinger’s Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater) and a postmodern fictional documentary (Mark Peranson and Raya Martin’s La última película); a low-budget 16mm comedy (Whitney Horn and Lev Kalman’s L for Leisure); and a romantic comedy starring Jason Schwartzman and Elizabeth Moss (Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip). None of them are available online, and none have been widely distributed in theaters.

“Right now, basically every film we’ve shown has been through the generosity of the filmmaker,” Hughes says. “We have no budget whatsoever.”

—Matthew Everett UPDATE

This summer, Harrill and Hughes announced a partnership with the streaming service Fandor

that allowed them to expand the Public Cinema’s recently completed fall schedule and announce a spring 2016 lineup of more than a dozen films from around the world, including Laurie Anderson’s acclaimed documentary Heart of a Dog as part of the Big Ears festival.

ISSUE #7: APRIL 23 EXCERPT

SUNSHINE STATE? Tennessee law gives residents a right to see most government records and attend meetings where elected officials and other “deliberative bodies” make decisions. The rules, which are sprinkled throughout many different sections of the state code, are referred to as “sunshine laws” because they shine a light on the workings of government, empowering voters to influence decisions. But the weather seems to be clouding.

In the first four months of this year, Knoxville has seen open meetings violations by its 911 board, including the police chief and sheriff; the state Legislature has acknowledged that most of its committees have been regularly holding secret “pre-meetings”; and legislators floated about 25 bills that either attempted or succeeded in reducing public access to records and meetings. Over the last year, several local governments across the state lost high-profile court cases because they “willfully” withheld documents from the public, and still others got away with illegally charging for people to simply look at public records.

The light is getting dim.

—S. Heather Duncan

KNOXVILLE’S SWEATY GOALKEEPER

MAY 21, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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JAIRO DIAZ

ANGELO SIGNORACCI

VIGHTER IBERI

BROTHERHOOD OF THE TURF Both immigrants and newcomers find a second home on Knoxville’s indoor soccer fields

BY BRIAN CANEVER

JACK NEELY

CLASSICAL

ELEANOR SCOTT

MUSIC

Anti-Preservationist’s Secret Heartbreak

KSO Director Lucas Richman’s Final Call

Tragedy at Fort Dickerson Quarry Lake

The Evil Genius of Zach and Kota’s Sweet Life

KNOXVILLE’S OWN LOST & FOUND MEDIA

JUNE 4, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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Lost Knoxville Harlan Hambright’s photographs of the 1970s document the last remnants of a prior era

JACK NEELY

Uncovering the Regas Building’s Hidden Hotel

MUSIC

GEORGE DODDS

Ancient River Explores the Psychedelic Frontier

Remembering Knoxville’s Red Summer of 1919

ED. NOTE

Join the Knoxville Mercury League of Supporters!

KNOXVILLE’S CLOWNS IN HUELESS AMBER

JUNE 25, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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EXCERPT

THE HOWARD HOUSE On Saturday afternoon, a dozen or so sign-carrying demonstrators stood along Broadway, in front of a pretty old tree-shaded house. For whatever it’s worth, dozens of drivers honked in support. The 1910 Howard House at 2921 Broadway, just this side of Atlantic Avenue, is a rarity. Broadway used to have scores of especially pretty old houses, but over the years we’ve turned it over to parking lots, strip malls, drive-thrus. As of this spring, at least, the Howard House is still there.…

There are lots of reasons to save old houses. One of the best ones is the

JACK NEELY

A Tour of Market Square’s Problematic Plaques

MUSIC

FOOD

Tina Tarmac and the Burns Return to Rock

In the Land of Lavender and Honey

THE VAULT

Pioneering Journalist Carl Warner Opens His Archive

WORKING UP A SWEAT JUST WRITING ABOUT IT

JULY 9, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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a lot Bike Club has an Mountain ng started.

The Appalachi it’s just getti Knoxville. And

of plans for

BY S. HEATH ER

DUNCA N

From left: Matthew Kellogg, Brian Hann, Randy Conner

NEWS

Will New Rules Help Reduce Dangers of Train Fires Like Maryville’s?

JACK NEELY

Knoxville’s Newfound Appreciation of Festivity

THE VAULT

Unearthed Tapes of the First Great Bluegrass Festival

December 24, 2015

OUTDOORS

A Day of Tailwater Fishing at Douglas Dam

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 13

JULY 2, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

NOT A BAD WEEK, EH?

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

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

NEWS

Knoxvillians Celebrate Marriage Equality

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

Was the South Ever Confederate, Anyway?

ELEANOR SCOTT

Frog & Toad Cover the Outskirts of Jazz

Checking in on the Labor Day Sunflower Project

FEELING NEIGHBORLY, EVERY WEEK

JULY 16, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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one that’s chillingly practical. It’s that every time—and in my lifetime, it’s been every single time—we tear down an old building, what we replace it with is worse.

I’ll define my terms, here. By “old,” I mean a building 75 years old or more. And by “worse,” I don’t just mean something I personally like less, from some sentimental, nostalgic, past-worshipping point of view.

I mean categorically worse.

Cheaper, flimsier, uglier, less sustainable, less versatile, more dysfunctional. Every time we tear down an old building, our city gets crappier.

Here’s a challenge: Can you think of an exception?

—Jack Neely SUMMARY

KNOXVILLE COLLEGE’S FATE REMAINS UNCLEAR

NEWS

Ex-MPC Exec Claims Discrimination in Lawsuit

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

A Eulogy for Three Lost Houses in Fort Sanders

Getting the Real Folk Blues With Guy Marshall

PROGRAM NOTES

A New Series of “Secret” Local Concerts

JUNE 18, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

COLD BEER HELLO—A LOT!

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GET HOPPY With almost a dozen new microbreweries on tap, can Knoxville become a true beer destination?

BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN

NEWS

Knoxville’s Connection to the Supreme Court’s Same-Sex Marriage Case

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

The Continuing New Adventures of Downtown Parking

COMING AUG. 13 TH :

FOOD

Folk Duo Count This Penny’s Soaring Appalachian Noir

Mama Mia, Now That’s Some Middle Eastern Cuisine!

Top Knox Readers’ Poll of Local Favorites

AUG. 6, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

DAMN THE GLUTEN, FULL STEAM AHEAD

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A GOOD LOAF OF It’s a whole lot easier to find these days as Knoxville’s artisan bakery scene heats up

BY DENNIS PERKINS

NEWS

The Beck Center Brings Back Emancipation Day

14

JACK NEELY

A Memory of Our Most Famous Neighborhood

MUSIC

The Black Lillies Introduce Their Upcoming Album

JOE SULLIVAN

A New Farragut Hotel Is in the Works

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Officials with the historically black college were close to a quiet deal this spring with Knoxville developer Southeast Commercial that would have turned all or part of the campus into something else—although exactly what was unclear. At about the same time, trustees voted to suspend classes until they could raise enough money for the crumbling, indebted Mechanicsville college to operate.

When the Southeast Commercial offer was leaked to the Mercury in April and met with some local skepticism, the college board of trustees delayed voting on it. In early summer they appointed an advisory committee of development and real estate professionals and invited proposals from selected developers. Three responses are being considered, although the college is not revealing anything publicly about what the proposals are and who made them.

Board chairman James Reese has said he hopes the board will choose a partner by the end of the year to redevelop the 39-acre campus. Calls to Reese in the last week were not returned.

—S. Heather Duncan

them. In Knoxville, there were plans for three new “neighborhood markets”: One on North Broadway, another on the corner of Ball Camp and Middlebrook pikes, and one at the corner of Western Avenue and McKamey Road.

The first two projects, which both would have required zoning changes, seem to be dead.

The parking lot for the North Broadway store would have required the demolition of a century-old craftsman home, the Howard House, a move fought by local preservationists. Although Walmart bowed out, the house must still be sold due to the terms of a will. Kim Trent, executive director of Knox Heritage, says she has been approached by other interested developers and is referring inquiries to the Howard family.

In Ball Camp, the neighborhood market would have taken 7.5 acres of Knox County’s small Nicholas Ball Park in exchange for a 103 acres that could have been used for a park in Hardin Valley. The county backed away in response to backlash from residents.

In Maryville, a much larger Walmart Supercenter continues through the early stages of the development process. The store will be located on Lamar Alexander Parkway next to the historic Parkway Drive-in, whose owner has said will have to close because the megastore’s parking lot lights will wash out the movie screen.

Some longtime residents were outraged when those plans became public, arguing that local leaders allowed Walmart’s involvement to remain cloaked in secrecy until it was too late for the public to influence the process.

John Jagger, Maryville development services director, says the developer for Walmart closed on the purchase of the property in mid-November and engineers have indicated it will probably be late winter or early spring before they submit a formal site plan for early review.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #10: MAY 14

SUMMARY

EXCERPT

THE WALMART ONSLAUGHT GETS STYMIED, MOSTLY

THE DIRTY GUV’NAHS’ LAST WALTZ

Developers for Walmart attempted to roll out a bevy of new stores in East Tennessee, but public opposition seems to have nixed at least two of

Last month, just before the Dirty Guv’nahs’ headlining appearance at the Rhythm N’ Blooms festival, James Trimble sounded philosophical about the band’s future. The Guv’nahs were

winding up nearly a year’s worth of tour dates in support of their fourth album, 2014’s Hearts on Fire, and considering their options for the future.

“We’re trying to figure out our direction—like every band, you’re always writing music and always trying to stay busy,” Trimble said. “We’ve got this certain genre and this certain thing we’ve developed, and it’s our career, but we’re trying to always ask the question, do you just keep doing more of the same or do you try to expand?”

The answer to Trimble’s question turned out to be neither. Earlier this week, the Guv’nahs—Trimble, bassist Justin Hoskins, drummer Aaron Hoskins, guitarist Cozmo Holloway, keyboardist Kevin Hyfantis, and guitarist Michael Jenkins—announced online that they’re breaking up.

—Matthew Everett

ISSUE #11: MAY 21 EXCERPT

LUCAS RICHMAN’S FINAL CALL

“Where words fail, music speaks” was Maestro Lucas Richman’s simple introduction to the encore selection— the poignant and wistful Variation IX (“Nimrod”) from Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations—on his final concert as music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra last weekend. While that quote from Hans Christian Andersen is often used a bit too generically, its tearfully succinct use on this occasion was befitting the moment. It followed round after round of tumultuous applause and ovation for Richman and the orchestra—a demonstration of appreciation for his 12 seasons of accomplishments that rendered any more words quite meaningless, and probably, impossible.

—Alan Sherrod

ISSUE #12: MAY 28 EXCERPT

CHRISTENBERRY HOUSE DEMOLISHED

The century-old Christenberry house at 3222 Kingston Pike, near Sequoyah Hills, the subject of several varieties of contention over the last couple of years, no longer exists. It was demolished early Tuesday afternoon, hours before City Council’s expected passage of the city’s new

ISSUE #13: JUNE 4 EXCERPT

OUR SHORTSIGHTED COUNTY MAYOR

County Mayor Tim Burchett’s contention that Knox County Schools can’t afford the two new schools provided for in its budget is full of baloney. And even if it had any merit, Burchett has no authority to tell the school board how to use its money.

At issue are school board-approved plans to build a $33 million Hardin Valley Middle School and a $22 million elementary school in what’s called the north central section of the county. The board also recommended construction

Four days later, Burchett and schools superintendent James McIntyre announced a Memorandum of Understanding (that was later approved by County Commission and the school board), which allowed for $3 million from the county’s general fund to pay for one year of teacher bonuses. New middle schools in the Gibbs and Hardin Valley communities were also added to the capital improvement plan. In September, Sullivan publicly made amends to Burchett.

ISSUE #14: JUNE 11 EXCERPT

UT OVERRIDES NC-1 CONSERVATION ZONING Three 1890s Victorian houses are likely to fall due to the University of Tennessee’s plans to build a classroom and laboratory building on White Avenue in Fort Sanders. The houses are in relatively good shape, for 120-year-old wooden houses, and pretty. All have been recently lived in; one was owner-occupied and recently renovated.

Each was once the home of someone famous and influential, whose impact on the city, and the university, is still felt more than a century later.

The houses are within a boundary of the NC-1 conservation district established by City Council and the Metropolitan Planning Commission 15 years ago, intended to provide a layer of oversight to protect the neighborhood’s best historic architecture. By NC-1 zoning, before a contributing historic building can be demolished, a developer would have to state the case for demolition before public boards, the Historic Zoning Commission and the MPC. However, UT, being a state institution, can override city wishes and policies, and is doing so in this case.

—Jack Neely UPDATE

After paying nearly $3 million for the houses, UT demolished two of them. Under a tight deadline (literally), one house avoided the wrecking ball by being moved to Clinch Avenue.

CRAFT-BREWERY MANIA REACHES KNOXVILLE With almost a dozen new microbreweries on tap, can Knoxville become a true beer destination?

At least 11 different breweries had plans to open by the end of 2016. And although they cross the map, many are clustered in the Old City and around North Central Avenue, which raises hopes for boosting tourism with an ale trail. Why so many new breweries on tap all at once? Industry insiders say it’s due to a growing thirst for craft beer combined with favorable changes in Tennessee laws and Knoxville zoning.

Blount County economic-development officials have been working for several years to woo a major brewer. Rachel Buchanan, director of economic development for Blount Partnership, says at least one brewer is still considering the Pellissippi Place location; in case that doesn’t work out, the partnership started changes to its marketing website last week in an effort to pursue others. But smaller would-be breweries in Knoxville struggled to find locations that weren’t barred by a city sin ordinance. The beertopia dream has gotten a boost from a burgeoning roster of local beer festivals as well as the South College brewing-science program, which

pours forth new brewers being hired to develop the local beers.

Rather than competing, the new breweries have mostly been helping each other out and have now formed a Knoxville Area Brewers’ Association, says Zack Roskop, secretary of the group and owner of Knox Brew Tours.

The association, which aims to promote the economic and tax benefits of breweries to local governments, has scheduled its first meeting for Jan. 25. He says the group also plans to launch a website by Feb. 1 with a map of the “Knoxville Ale Trail” and a passport quaffers can get stamped at each brewery in order to receive a free ale-trail T-shirt.

Although many new breweries had aimed to start pouring or distributing by the end of this year, some

-Gray

The 60-day “cooling off” ordinance was passed

by City Council on May 26, the same day as the demolition by the Chesworths.

UPDATE

SUMMARY

Matthew Foltz

UPDATE

of a Gibbs Middle School, but only if the county pay for it out of general funds and not funds allotted to the school system. So in trying to sweep away plans for all three schools with one brush, Burchett is making Gibbs a straw man for the others.

—Joe Sullivan

Illustrations by

60-day demolition-delay ordinance.

In April, John Chesworth and his wife Paula purchased the property for a reported $835,000, a sale that reportedly preempted an announced auction. Included was the century-old house, almost 6,000 square feet of it, and a sloping lawn of 4.8 acres.… The Chesworths, who live in West Knox County, reportedly have plans to build a new house on the property closer to the waterfront.

Knox Heritage executive director Kim Trent says she met Chesworth about two weeks ago. She reports that Chesworth told her he had no plans concerning the house, and seemed interested in the prospect of preserving it. He agreed to meet with Knox Heritage to consider preservation options.

Records indicate the Chesworths took out a $30 demolition permit last Wednesday. The city building inspections department, which had for many years made a practice of notifying the Metropolitan Planning Commission of demolition-permit applications, did not do so in this case. Kaye Graybeal, MPC historic-preservation planner, says she’s been told the city has ceased the practice because it unduly delays demolitions under current guidelines.

On Tuesday afternoon, Graybeal noted that this week’s events demonstrate the need of the new resolution.

“Perhaps if we had had the 60 days, something could have been worked out,” she says.

—Jack Neely

December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 15

-Gray Matthew Foltz Illustrations by

have met delays, and spring seems to be the new goal. Alliance and Crafty Bastard breweries both opened in late summer, and Cold Fusion started self-distributing its beer to local beer markets and pubs.

Roskop gave the rundown on further upcoming brewery openings: Scruffy City brewery should be open “any day.” Last Days of Autumn, which found a location near the Old City, is shooting to open Jan. 18. Balter Beerworks has been hiring a large staff and plans a grand opening for early February. Fanatic, which has been distributing since spring, plans to open a tasting room in February or March. Hexagon hopes to open in March or April; Shultz Brau, which had intended to open in October, looks more likely for around March. Pretentious Beer & Glassware Co. will likely be pouring other people’s beer in three months and start brewing its own in six, Roskop says. The number of tours offered by his company has expanded and he says he expects to be working with 10 breweries by March.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #17: JULY 2 EXCERPT

MARRIAGE EQUALITY LEGALIZED

“I’d like to introduce my husband,” said 16

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Jon Coffee, as his new spouse, Keith Swafford, swung his hands up in the air.

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

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

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

Jesty and Tanco were plaintiffs in the Tanco v. Haslam court case that challenged Tennessee to recognize their marriage. The case was later consolidated with three similar cases and argued before the Supreme Court.

On Monday, Mayor Madeline Rogero announced on her official Facebook page that the city would be giving the Henley Street Bridge a rainbow lighting effect through Tuesday night. (On Wednesday, it was reconfigured red, white, and blue for the Fourth

of July. The bridge’s lighting often changes, and specific requests can be made to the Office of Special Events.)

The post gathered more than 1,600 likes and more than 500 shares (at presstime), and has more than 80,000 views—the highest numbers of any Facebook post since Rogero took office.

—McCord Pagan EXCERPT

WAS THE SOUTH EVER CONFEDERATE, ANYWAY?

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

The South is everybody who lives here. And considering its African-American population, it may be a more cosmopolitan region than any other.

African-American culture has pervaded and energized and inspired the South, its music, its cuisine, its literature, more thoroughly than that of any other region on the continent. Blacks may be the largest part of what makes the South the South, and different from all other places. Any symbol that does not acknowledge that fact can’t say much about the South that’s true.

—Jack Neely

ISSUE #18: JULY 9 EXCERPT

TRAILBLAZERS Mountain bikers have a rich and diverse relationship with gravity. The adrenaline surge of a downhill plunge,

even with the risk of a fall (called a “gravity check”), is all the reason they need to do it again.

In Knoxville, that’s what the Appalachian Mountain Bike Club does: It hurtles forward to expand Knoxville’s trail system and its horizon. And then it does it again. And again.

Most recently, the club won a coveted grant to build a downhill trail so tough even most local bikers would never try it. In some ways, it was a strange goal to motivate a community.

But for two weeks this spring, the Downtown Downhill campaign was all anybody in Knoxville could talk about.

The trail project was competing online with two others, the winner claiming a $100,000 Bell Helmets grant.

To put it in mountain biking terms, Knoxville stomped it. The gravity trail received 26,619 votes from 25 countries, beating out its closest competitor by more than 10,000 votes.

But this is just the latest step in the club’s transformation of South Knoxville. The club and Legacy Parks were the masterminds behind creating 42 miles of South Loop biking trails and the surrounding Urban Wilderness. Just since 2008, the club of around 250 members has built (and continues to maintain) about 30 miles of trail. Its ability to partner effectively with other user groups, local governments, and the nimble nonprofit Legacy Parks has amplified its trail-building skills into a broader influence on the local culture, economy, and land use.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #19: JULY 16 EXCERPT

MPC’S SEX-DISCRIMINATION BROUHAHA

A former employee of the Knoxville Metropolitan Planning Commission has filed a lawsuit against the commission, Knox County, and the city of Knoxville, alleging that she was fired last year in retaliation for helping a co-worker pursue a sex-discrimination complaint.

Dee Anne Reynolds, the only woman in management at the commission, was fired by former MPC executive director Mark Donaldson for insubordination in June 2014, after almost 12 years at the agency. The decision came three weeks before Donaldson announced his own

retirement from the office, which handles countywide land-use planning and administers zoning rules.

As reported by former Metro Pulse writer Cari Wade Gervin on her Tumblr on July 9, Reynolds’ lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court almost exactly a year later, demands compensation in the form of lost pay or reinstatement to her former job as finance manager, plus attorney’s fees and interest.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #24: AUG. 20 EXCERPT

WILL IT PAY OFF? The Cumberland Avenue Corridor Project’s constant lane shifts and ever-evolving construction patterns are now part of daily life for the thousands of people that live, work, study, and play around Fort Sanders, and it’ll continue for at least the next two years as crews upgrade utility lines, pour new sidewalks, put in landscaping, and ultimately cut the four-lane thoroughfare down to just two lanes of travel.

It’s all part of an ambitious attempt to add some more character to this chunk of asphalt many have long treated as a cut-through to somewhere else, and it’s a plan that has drawn more than a few complaints voiced in media coverage of the construction.

Business owners hate the traffic snarls that may be costing them customers, nearby residents ache over the added struggle to get home, and commuters moan about anything that delays their forward progress. If you’ve been anywhere near this vehicular mess, you likely know the headaches.

But the city administration has a dream, and that dream is to foster the sort of college strip other cities enjoy—a pedestrian-friendly boulevard that attracts quirky shops and unique restaurants, that serves as a lifeblood for students and families alike, and that draws out visitors to what could become a vibrant extension of Knoxville’s blossoming downtown.

It’s a dream even those most affected by the construction say they believe in, too. The question is, can it become a reality?

—Clay Duda UPDATE

The city also has plans to start work on redoing the streetscape along N. Central Street from the

Old City north through Happy Holler in the coming year, and ultimately give a similar facelift to Magnolia Street east of downtown.

Plus there’s all that public/private work happening along the South Waterfront. It’s all a bid to capitalize on the urban resurgence that has catalyzed downtown and keep the city’s path of more density and walkability.

EXCERPT

BLACK LIVES MATTER IN KNOXVILLE Drawing inspiration from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, a local group of activists is aiming to reignite dialogue in Knoxville’s black community over issues of race, economics, and other factors impacting African-Americans.

“We want to take the reigns and carry on the work of our forefathers before us in the civil rights movement,” says Andre Canty, one of the more than half-dozen organizers behind Black Lives Matter Knoxville, a local rendition of the national Black Lives Matter movement.

Canty and others are aiming to latch on to that national movement to ferment change locally. Many involved have traveled to other cities to take part in demonstrations, workshops on social organizing, and to network with other activists following fatal police encounters that claimed the lives of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Mo. and Baltimore, among other cities.

“These places are our Birmingham and our Selma (Ala.) of the ’60s and ’70s, so we like to go out to places and report back to people about what they’re experiencing (there),” Canty says. “It really gives a sense of how urgent things are and what we should do here, though it’s less about responding and more about being proactive.”

—Clay Duda

ISSUE #26: SEPT. 3 EXCERPT

AVOID PHYSICAL CONTACT

W here Third Creek Greenway winds between the playground and the creek in Tyson Park, a picturesque bridge spans the water. It arches over the grayish stream, swollen with rain, beckoning to the lush green meadow beyond.

A little girl runs toward the bridge, arms outstretched, and peers down at the burbling water. Next to her is a sign that reads, “Notice: Avoid

Physical Contact. Stream Fails State Bacteriological Standards. Possible Sources of Contamination: Sanitary Sewer Leaks/Overflows, Failing Septic Tanks, Animal Waste.”

Until about 30 years ago, urban creeks were mostly a dumping ground that few people saw as an asset. For much of the 19th century, the city was growing so much that nobody saw them at all. Streams were routed into pipes under neighborhoods and parks, in concrete canals behind factories and strip malls, and in straight ditches next to roads. Greenways have reminded us not only of the creeks’ presence, but also their potential to be something beautiful and natural.

The city has budgeted $1 million for developing new greenways this fiscal year, as it did last year. It will spend about half as much on creek cleanup. But that investment has risen about 16 percent over the last five budget years. The city is also spending $3.3 million on its entire stormwater program, which is aimed at reducing runoff for both flood control and pollution prevention. That is up from $2.7 million in fiscal 2011/12, a 22 percent bump.

—S. Heather Duncan

ISSUE #27: SEPT. 10

Full ballot on p27!

LAST WEEK TO VOTE IN TOP KNOX 2015!

Voting ends 9/10!

KNOXVILLE’S WEEKLY DIP INTO THE DEEP END

SEPT. 3, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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Knoxville’s creeks are a polluted mess, and have been for a century. Will they ever be clean enough to enjoy?

by S. Heather Duncan

JACK NEELY

THE VAULT

Meet Michael Kearney, the Child Actor of All the Way Home

FOOD

Jack Haynes Recalls Knoxville’s Mid-Century Jazz Scene

Trust Fall Knox Unleashes Local Chefs to Pursue Their Passions

OUTDOORS

A Secret Fishing Spot With Lots of Bites— But Few From Fish

TO P KN OX 2015 : Th e O ffi cial Ballot (page 27)

AUG. 13, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

PLEASE REMAIN CALM

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THE CUMBERLAND AVENUE

WILL IT PAY OFF? CORRIDOR PROJECT IS A BIG

PAIN IN EVERYONE’S @%$.

BY CLAY DUDA

NEWS

Activists Form Black Lives Matter Knoxville

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

WNOX’s Forgotten Auditorium Is Up for Sale

Ry Cooder Rediscovers His Roots and Goes Country

JOE SULLIVAN

Knoxville Makes Big Gains in Tourism

CULTIVATING DIALOGUE SINCE EARLIER THIS YEAR

JULY 30, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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EXCERPT

PRIVATE-SECTOR INSECURITY

Clutching a sign that reads “TN is not for sale!”, India McAfee stepped into a line with 150 or so other people picketing along Cumberland Avenue Thursday afternoon. He joined chants directed at passing motorists—“Hey Haslam, step off it! Put people over profit!”—fishing for a few honks in support of people like himself, University of Tennessee employees who fear they will lose their jobs under a new proposal from Gov. Bill Haslam looking to outsource building operations and maintenance for many state agencies, including the university system.

UT workers and supporters took up positions at both ends of the Strip, one group in front of the College of Law and another by the Pilot gas station, voicing opposition to changes organizers say could affect more than 1,000 jobs at UT Knoxville alone—and that’s not including other state offices with local operations that may be handed over to a contractor with the lowest bid.

Knoxville’s Urban Agriculture Initiative

aims to bring farming to the center city

BY ELEANOR SCOTT

NEWS

Can the City Save the Old South High School Building?

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

The Night the FBI Collared a Nazi Spy at the YMCA

Kelsey’s Woods’ Breakthrough Sophomore Album

GEORGE DODDS

Hating Modern Architecture— and Loving It

USE FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY

SEPT. 24, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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NEWS

New iPads in Schools Cause I.D. Concerns

JACK NEELY

Paper vs. the Internet: Which Will Last Longer?

MUSIC

FOOD

Local Folk Duo Pale Root Finds Harmony

December 24, 2015

Knoxville UnCorked Goes All-In Authentic Italian

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17

CELEBRATING OUR 30TH (ISSUE) ANNIVERSARY!

OCT. 1, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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Two guys still wearing their gray maintenance uniforms held up a banner that has Haslam’s head superimposed on the body of Miley Cyrus, riding a wrecking ball. It read: “Haslam - tearing UT down brick by brick.”

—Clay Duda

ISSUE #29: SEPT. 24 EXCERPT

Mayor

the

Q&A

HEMP PIONEERS

Madeline Rogero discusses her first four years in office, the next four years, and what comes after that BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN

JACK NEELY

In Search of King’s Alley and its Lost Marker

MUSIC

ELEANOR SCOTT

12-String Guitarist Joseph Allred’s Primitive Sound

Rediscovering the Pawpaw, “America’s Forgotten Fruit”

THE VAULT

Community TV’s Alternate Video History of Knoxville

EXACTLY ONE YEAR LATER… KAPOW!

OCT. 15, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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2015 READERS’ POLL the ultimate guide to everything that Knoxvillians love most about Knoxville FOOD • DRINK • ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT HEALTH & BEAUTY • SHOPPING • SERVICES • HOME & GARDEN EDUCATION & MEDIA • KNOX ONLINE• KNOX LIFE

NOV. 12, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

KNOXVILLE’S WEEKLY BIG DIG

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moving mountains How Knox’s controversial guidelines for ridgetop development are being put to use—and when they’re not.

NEWS

How the City’s $9 Million Deal With Regal Came Together

JACK NEELY

WORDS AND PHOTOS BY CLAY DUDA

COMEDY

Tracking the Evolution of Our Streets, Avenues, and Drives

Chris Trew’s Weird Wit Highlights the Scruffy City Comedy Festival

FOOD

A Tour of Babalu Tacos & Tapas’ Build-Out at the J.C. Penney Building

TAKING ROOT IN KNOXVILLE SINCE ABOUT EIGHT MONTHS AGO

NOV. 26, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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NEWS

Bid to Save Hillsides From West Knox Neighborhood Plan Falters

18

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

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Tucked in the hollows of Cocke County about an hour east of Knoxville, where rolling Tennessee hills meet the peaks of the Great Smoky Mountains, Charles Mason has turned his lushgreen farmland into a testing ground.

The 67-year-old cattle rancher, real estate investor, and sometimes-farmer took a chance this year planting a new, experimental crop he hopes will bring a big return when harvest rolls around this fall—and in the years to come—but it’s a gamble that may net him little more than headache.

“When I first heard about it, well, I guess I just looked at dollar signs,” Mason says with a smooth, Southern drawl. “If it yields what it’s supposed to, I feel it could be a good cash crop for a lot of people, and maybe it’s something that can help my son maintain the farm.”

Mason is growing one of the state’s first legal industrial hemp crops in more than 70 years. That’s right, weed’s cousin is now legal in Tennessee—at least for industrial farming and use in manufactured goods, with plenty of restrictions attached. He signed up this spring, along with nearly 50 others across the state, for a tightly-regulated Tennessee Department of Agriculture pilot program to try a hand at growing the state’s inaugural crop. Out of 12 people growing in East Tennessee, Mason’s spread is by far the largest at 60 acres, and he’s the only local growing on a commercial scale.

Yet, the plant is still technically illegal, and experts say the industry still has a ways to go before hemp transforms into a viable cash crop.

Can these early pioneers survive this start-up environment and give rise to a new industry in Tennessee, or will their struggles be for naught as the cannabis plant continues its tango with the federal government and the realities of farming economics set in?

—Clay Duda

UPDATE

One of the biggest complications in year one was timing. Seeds were delayed getting in from Canada and didn’t get into the ground until late in the season—too late, it turns out. Like many other hemp pioneers in the state, Mason declared this year’s crop a total loss, turning his stock of cattle loose on it in October to save money on feed. How extensive those losses are across the state is still unknown as the Tennessee Department of Agriculture works to round up outstanding field reports before year’s end, but it also expects an even bigger pool of applicants come spring thaw 2016.

ISSUE #31: OCT. 8 EXCERPT

UT’S BILLION-DOLLAR BUILDING BOOM

On the UT campus, (mostly) men, (some) with doctorates, appointed (not elected) to envision and manage its 560 acres, are in charge of what currently amounts to $1 billion in construction.

The perception of the current decision-makers in the Office of the Chancellor, and many in UTK’s Office of Facilities Services, which reports to the chancellor, is that the university is landlocked by Cumberland Avenue, Neyland Drive, and the east/west boundaries of the campus; they kvetch that there is no room in which to build on campus. They seem to long for a meat ax. Fortunately, there is still time for the university to find a scalpel in its tool kit and see the same thing that many who teach urban design see when we look around the Knoxville campus: potential building sites and plenty of dross space that, through a well-considered building campaign, can be transformed into identifiable places.

If the campus is to lose its 1970s office-park status and become the kind of fine quasi-urban land-grant campus it aspires to be, the university must stop spreading out like a gas filling its container, and contract to better define its open spaces—thinking of buildings less as stand-alone objects and more as walls to exterior rooms.

—George Dodds

ISSUE #32: OCT. 15 EXCERPT

E.W. SCRIPPS PREPARES TO EXIT

In the one year since we were laid off, the ownership of the News Sentinel

has shifted to the Journal Media Group, which is based in Milwaukee, Wisc. JMG has owned the News Sentinel since early this year. But last week, we heard that Gannett, which is based in Tysons Corner, Va., will purchase the Journal Media Group, including the News Sentinel.

So in the space of little over a year, the News Sentinel will have been owned by three different national corporations based in three different states.

It’s Gannett’s second time in town. They were the primary owners of the old daily Knoxville Journal, the News Sentinel’s rival, from 1981 to 1986, but gave it up, according to their honchos du jour, because they didn’t like the Journal’s submissive relationship to the News Sentinel. Now they own the News Sentinel. Will they keep it longer than they kept the Journal? Who knows.

Today, Knoxville’s only daily paper, and all its commercial television and radio stations, the folks most of us depend on for local news, are owned by out-of-state corporations.

Corporations exist just for their shareholders, and their shareholders aren’t necessarily interested in promoting quality journalism in some middle-market place like Knoxville.

They’re interested in making money to take that cruise or send junior to college. Shareholders aren’t evil, corporations aren’t evil. They’ll keep Knoxville’s best interests in mind as long as there’s money to be made in it.

—Jack Neely

ISSUE #34: OCT. 29 EXCERPT

MIND THE GAP There is a hole at the southeastern corner of Knoxville’s Western Plaza.

On the morning of Wednesday, Oct. 14, 2015, another building by of one of Tennessee’s finest 20th-century architects was lost in the gap between no-longer-new and not-quite-oldenough. The former Hamilton National Bank building was not the largest of Robert B. Church III’s buildings, nor was it his most elaborate. It was, however, the most distinguished of his extant buildings (particularly before its several “renovations,” first by United American Bank and later by First Tennessee) and easily the finest example of mid-century modern

VEGGIES ON WHEELS Not so many years ago, a restaurant aptly known as Veg-O-Rama came and went in Happy Holler.

Not so many months ago, a new produce and vegetarian baked goods market in South Knoxville had a grand opening and a quiet closing within months of each other.

Many local restaurants—Sunspot, the Holly Hambright enterprises, the Three Rivers Market food bar all spring to mind—do a brisk trade with the local vegetarian foodies, but as for establishments that are vegetarian all the way?

Is Knoxville really ready for that?

“We wonder that every single day,” quips Whitney Ross, the co-owner with Rebecca Clayman of the Dinner Bell Fresh food truck, open since August and utterly, completely, vegetarian—often vegan, to boot.

He’s only half serious, and any doubts are not keeping the pair from plowing right into action.

“We have a simple mission: Healthy, happy Tennessee,” he says.

—Rose Kennedy

ISSUE #36: NOV. 12 EXCERPT

MOVING MOUNTAINS Dust has been swirling along a cavernous stretch of Cherokee Trail in South Knoxville since April when excavation work started on Knox Ridge, an ambitious cluster of high-end student dwellings being tiered into existence on the steep terrain. It’s just the sort of prominent section of the crown that could have potentially been protected under development guidelines that took effect in 2012 as the Hillside and Ridgetop Protection Plan. But it wasn’t.

Even after local governments spent nearly $400,000 and thousands of hours in staff time to develop those guidelines, in many parts of the county

EXCERPT

PROJECT HOLLYWOOD It’s impossible to decipher some motivations from a trove of Knoxville city officials’ emails detailing months of negotiations with Regal Entertainment Group to move its corporate headquarters to the South Waterfront, but one thing is clear: Both Regal and property owner Southeastern Development Associates earned a much sweeter deal after tax dollars became involved.

The negotiations, code-named “Project Hollywood,” kicked off in earnest this past February after city officials, including Mayor Madeline Rogero, pitched the basis for an incentives package to Regal executives—this just a few months after separate negotiations stalled between Regal and property owner SEDA, then called Blanchard & Calhoun Commercial. The city’s proposal—ironed out over nine months of back-and-forth between city staff, the Knoxville Chamber, and top SEDA and Regal officials—includes several millions more in incentives for Regal to stay in Knoxville, according to more than 400 pages of emails released Monday in response to a public records request from the Mercury.

SEDA and Regal had been working on a similar deal, records show. A draft letter of intent in

ISSUE #39: DEC. 3 EXCERPT

end. And if the new Bearden Zone is adopted by Council, he believes it can serve as a template for mixed-use zoning extending out the city’s other commercial corridors, including Broadway, North Central, Magnolia, and Chapman Highway.

The mixed-use concept would only apply to areas presently zoned commercial, not to residential zones.

And given the immense popularity of downtown as a place to live, shop, dine, and be entertained while walking rather than driving to their destinations, it seems compelling to extend these lifestyle amenities to other sections of the city.

—Joe Sullivan

THE BEARDEN ZONE As voguish as mixed-use development has become in many places, it’s surprising that Knoxville’s zoning ordinance prohibits it except for downtown. But that may belatedly be about to change.

At the request of City Council, the staff of the Metropolitan Planning Commission is crafting a mixed-use zone for Bearden that would permit residential and other uses along what’s a strictly commercial stretch of Kingston Pike from Western Plaza to Northshore Drive.

MPC’s executive director, Gerald Green, envisions promulgating a draft for public comment before year

-Gray

EXCERPT

December 2014 outlined a potential sale price as low as $4 million for the building, with SEDA contributing $2 million towards renovations, but the companies never reached an agreement. The city later agreed to purchase the building for $6 million, a figure hammered out during negotiations and not based on an appraised value, says Bill Lyons, Knoxville’s chief policy officer. SEDA had purchased the entire 23-acre former Baptist Hospital property in 2013 for $6.25 million.

—Clay Duda

Matthew Foltz

ISSUE #35: NOV. 5

they are routinely overruled, discarded, or not cited at all. In unincorporated Knox County, it’s not a requirement that they are put to use despite the HRPP being adopted as part of the county’s general plan, and Knox Ridge just makes it into the county line.

Knoxville Mayor Madeline Rogero says these natural environs are critical for the region to develop into a destination for outdoor enthusiasts. But there’s more than just outdoor sports and tourism at stake.

There’s the intrinsic value of unspoiled land and our quality of life, issues of pollution from runoff and erosion, deforestation and the potential implications of climate change, the delicate balance between property rights and government regulations, the influence of the local business community on politics, and fundamental differences between Rogero’s activist vision of government and Knox County Mayor Tim Burchett’s anti-government philosophy.

—Clay Duda

Illustrations by

architecture along all of Kingston Pike.

Kem Hinton, of Tuck-Hinton Architects of Nashville (who knew the building well as a student of architecture in Knoxville) characterized the demolition as a “tragic loss.” Hinton elaborated: “It was perhaps the finest statement of its kind in our entire state.”

—George Dodds

December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19

ISSUE #41: DEC. 17 EXCERPT

KPD’S CHECKS AND BALANCES

Illustrations by

Matthew Foltz

-Gray

In 2015, the Knoxville Police Department and the city faced lawsuits over police brutality related to the shooting death of a fleeing man and the alleged beating of a Hispanic man, several officers have been accused of racial profiling in efforts to make drug arrests, dashcam recordings of altercations with police (including the K-9 mauling of a suspect) have been missing at trial, and a judge has said KPD needs to provide more training on citizens’ rights.

The Mercury examined the personnel files of more than 20 officers who have either recently been the subject of lawsuits related to use of force, had repeated misbehavior problems or high-profile errors, or who have been flagged for recurring problems by the department itself. In these officers’ cases, reprimands, “counseling forms,” and even suspensions often appear to have had little to no effect on officers’ annual reviews, pay raises, or promotions. The department itself investigates potential criminal allegations against its officers, even in cases that involve deadly use of force or shooting deaths.

Although more than 100 officers have been flagged in the 14 years since

20

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

an early intervention system was instituted to nip problem behaviors in the bud, only one of those officers has actually been enrolled in the correctional part of the program. In all other cases, supervisors decided the officers’ activities weren’t a problem.

KPD Chief David Rausch is making some policy changes aimed at recruiting more responsible officers, reducing the use of force, and more accurately identifying problem officers early. But with KPD solely conducting investigations of its own officers, questions still linger about accountability, checks and balances, and conflicts of interest, as investigators are tasked with casting a critical eye on the conduct of colleagues who are, in some cases, friends.

—S. Heather Duncan

5

REALLY INTERESTING KNOXVILLIANS

Here are some of the most colorful personalties we met this year KNOXVILLE’S VERY OWN PHILANTHROPIC ENDEAVOR

APRIL 2, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

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EARTH DAY SPECIAL!

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He’s Knoxvville’s animal-loving multi-millionaire business magnate philanthropist sports-team owner and state economic development czar.

And future politician? Maybe.

BY MIKE GIBSON

John Coykendall’s efforts to preserve heirloom seeds may be homespun, but they have global consequences

BY ROSE KENNEDY

* PHOTOS BY DAVID LUTTRELL

NEWS

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

MUSIC

THEATER

NEWS

PERSPECTIVES

MUSIC

OUTDOORS

Downtown Sign Project Includes a Few Wrong Turns

Surveying Fifth Avenue’s Greek Classicism

White Stag’s Full-On (and Evolving) Prog Rock

The Sisterly Drama of Clarence Brown’s A Shayna Maidel

Assessing Knox County Schools’ Proposed Balanced Calendar

Downtown’s Condo Market Sees a Resurgence

The Black Cadillacs Update Their Southern Rock Sound

A New Quest for Walleye at Tellico Lake

RANDY BOYD

JOHN COYKENDALL

Consider the life of Knoxville business man Randy Boyd. But do so carefully, because there’s an awful lot to assimilate.

Boyd is an animal-loving multi-millionaire business magnate philanthropist who, by the way, owns a minor league baseball team, climbs mountains, runs marathons, and works for the governor. In discussing Boyd’s multi-faceted career, it’s easy to start off on one track, switch back onto another, only to wind up smack dab in the middle of some-place-else.

And that’s it, in a nutshell; or at least, as close to a nutshell as one can get in describing something as voluminous and unwieldy as Randy Boyd’s life—the life of a family man, pet parent, amateur athlete, team owner, business mogul, and burgeoning politico.

Did someone say politics? That discussion is unavoidable, given what is now his second role in the Bill Haslam gubernatorial administration. It’s led to speculation that Boyd might harbor political aspirations of his own, that maybe he has an eye on running for governor himself one day.

Boyd rejects the notion that he has any larger political aspirations.

Mostly. “First, I’d need one vote, and I would not be able to get it,” he says, chuckling. “My wife would not support me.”

—Mike Gibson, April 2, Vol. 1, #4,

John Coykendall seeks heirloom seeds to preserve from many different sources: childhood friends and seed-saving pen pals, visitors to the Walland, Tenn. Blackberry Farm luxury hotel and restaurant where he works as master gardener, and gardeners from his travels to Austria and Hungary and Romania.

But this time the colorful mix of dried heirloom beans came to him in a paper sack. In his dog’s mouth.

“We were at the farm I own in Bybee, Tenn., about 200 acres near Newport, and I was planting potatoes one March. I looked up and here comes my dog Socks with that bag, trotting down the farm road. It had all different color of cornfield beans—a neighbor probably left them out to plant. Socks never did say where she found them.”

Coykendall planted the beans— of course he did—and still has a large enough supply of Socks Beans to assure their continuation as a bean variety 17 years later.

But that is a mere footnote in his seed-saving career. He has preserved or “grown out” some 500 varieties of heirlooms, the seeds from old-time and open-pollinated varieties that are able to regenerate from their own seeds with each new planting. His focus is Appalachian-region beans, which account for 275 of his saved seed varieties.

He is part of a circle of 13,000 international members of the Iowa-based Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), a group celebrating its 40th anniversary this year. He’s one of the group’s—and the nation’s—most prolific seed savers, yet he’s much

more than that in the seed-saving community, says SSE Executive Director John Torgrimson.

“He has often gone in search of the rare varieties that a small group might be saving or sharing—he’s a great proponent of making sure those varieties are not lost,” Torgrimson says. “He understands these varieties were important to someone—or a family, or a clan—as part of their heritage. He has a tremendous reservoir of knowledge, and he’ll share it willingly with anyone. That’s what makes John special. How to save seeds, why to save seeds—he understands it all.”

And though he may look like an ordinary East Tennessee country fellow in his overalls and work boots, Coykendall and his seed-saving peers may have the preservation of the world’s food supply in their dirt-stained, gardening hands.

—Rose Kennedy, April 16, Vol. 1, #4 APRIL 9, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

IS IT SPRING YET?

1 / N.5

V.

Chyna Brackeen has cultivated the Rhythm N’ Blooms Music Festival into Knoxville’s most popular musical event

NEWS

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

MUSIC

INSIDE THE VAULT

This Year’s Sex Week is Outrage-Free

UT’s Amazing, Unloved University Center

Dweezil Zappa on Frank Zappa

Guy Carawan’s Journey Across the South

hold that year and has grown exponentially since, spreading across downtown with an increasingly impressive range of local, regional, and national Americana performers (and rock, pop, soul, R&B, and otherwise uncategorizable acts).

The roots of Rhythm N’ Blooms go back to 2009. After a brief career as an opera singer and a stint at AC Entertainment, Brackeen found herself working at the Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum in East Knoxville. As soon as she saw the site, she knew she wanted to stage a concert series there.

“The first show I promoted there was Dar Williams,” Brackeen says.

“She said to me, ‘You can’t name one plant on this property. I do shows at zoos and gardens and these sorts of places all the time, and usually they’re a total cluster—really nice people, but they don’t know how to produce a concert. You know how to produce a concert, but you don’t know anything about botany. What are you doing? You’re in the wrong line of work.’”

Brackeen followed Williams’ advice—and her own instincts.

—Matthew Everett, April 23, Vol. 1, #5

KNOXVILLE’S WEEKLY MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS

MAY 14, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

1 / N.10

V.

CHYNA BRACKEEN The history of the Rhythm N’ Blooms Music Festival—Knoxville’s biggest music fest, and now an unofficial civic marker of the arrival of spring—is dotted with happenstance and luck, both good and bad. In fact, its evolution over the course of six years, from a well-intended roots-music complement to the Dogwood Arts Festival to a stand-alone event expected this year to draw 20,000 people from around the country, parallels pretty closely the career of its creator, Chyna Brackeen—a series of gambles that paid off and bad fortune turned to good, all inspired by unerring instincts and a passion for music.

Brackeen, the owner of Attack Monkey Productions, started Rhythm N’ Blooms in 2010 on a shoestring budget. It was a rocky beginning, with sparse attendance and a headliner stranded across the Atlantic Ocean. But the festival took

the

Charlotte Tolley has made the Market Square Farmers’ Market — and local food — wildly popular again

BY CHRIS BARRETT PHOTOS BY SHAWN POYNTER

NEWS

JACK NEELY

MUSIC

FOOD

Knoxville College Decides Its Future

Revealing Recipes in The Knoxville Cookbook

The Dirty Guv’nahs Announce Their Last Waltz

Café du Soleil’s No-Nonsense Approach

CHARLOTTE TOLLEY It’s the first Saturday of May at Market Square, not quite 8:30 a.m.

The sunlight is still horizontal and shadows are long. There is an air of not-unpleasant chaos as farmers and food vendors and sundry volunteers hustle to prepare for day one of the 12th year of the Market Square Farmers’ Market. You can smell coffee and breakfast offered by both food trucks and resident restaurants, as well as cut flowers and the tang of fecund dirt and clay still clinging to roots unearthed maybe an hour or two earlier. The market is not even open yet and Market Square and adjacent environs already contain

more people than most farm-dwellers are able to be comfortable around.

Welcome to Crazy Town.

“The farmers’ market has just exploded in the last couple years,” says Charlotte Tolley, who along with others helped to conceive the market in 2003. “For the first five years we were begging people to come. The next five years were good, manageable growth. Now it’s just crazy town.

We have waiting lists for all of our vendors. We have to be more stringent about everything that we do. And downtown, when we started 12 years ago, no one gave a crap what we did. Most of the buildings were empty.”

Tolley is soft-spoken, thoughtful and articulate, slim and tall yet somehow still diminutive. If she is on the bus or among those in the elevator with you now, you might not notice her.

But she gets things done and makes things happen, most often as an orchestrator and collaborator or person who makes sensible suggestions.

Thank or blame her for this mob scene.

The MSFM has become so successful today that it’s experiencing the sort of growing pains its originators may have only dreamed of at the market’s start. It now typically hosts over 120 vendors on any given Saturday (plus a smaller number on Wednesdays), drawing thousands of shoppers to the Square and its adjoining streets for a festival of tamales, gourmet dog biscuits, gluten-free baked goods, and homemade ice pops, not to mention street performers, potters, and jewelry designers. But it’s also spurred a mini-industry of local growers and food providers that hearkens to an earlier era in Knoxville’s food history.

—Chris Barrett, May 14, Vol. 1, #10

“ Right now, people keep telling me I’m living the dream. And to be quite honest, I am.”

—OVINCE SAINT PREUX

JULY 23, 2015 KNOXMERCURY.COM

BACK IN THE RING

1 / N. 20

V.

After seven years as a professional mixed martial artist,

OVINCE SAINT PREUX prepares for his biggest battle yet.

BY BRIAN CANEVER PHOTOS BY TYLER OXENDINE

NEWS

Goats Rampage in Williams Creek Urban Forest!

JACK NEELY

William Blount’s Lost City of Palmyra

THE VAULT

Archie Campbell’s Archives Reveal His True Legacy

OUTDOORS

Traversing Whitewater at Obed Wild and Scenic River

OVINCE SAINT PREUX On the front lawn of the old Sevier Heights Baptist Church recreation building, nestled off a side road near a Marathon gas station in South Knoxville, is a small black sign for Knoxville Martial Arts Academy.

Through the front doors, tagged with pages advertising fights and a KMAA class schedule, a foyer-like room with booths and tables resembling those of a TV-show diner fuses into a basketball court used on the last weekend of every month by an independent church that ministers to the homeless.

The stairwell just before the basketball court leads down to the gym where Ovince Saint Preux, the first Knoxville fighter to compete in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and a dozen professional and amateur fighters train five to six days a week, surrounded by motivational quotes pasted on walls and in picture frames. One sign, a 9-foot tall banner with a superimposed picture of Saint Preux staring blankly forward, hovers over the entrance to the gym: “UFC Superstar Ovince Saint Preux trains at KMAA. Why don’t you?”

“Sometimes I forget about that sign,” Saint Preux says with a laugh.

“I’ll be walking around the gym and one or two of the new guys are staring and I’m like, do I know you?

And they look at me like I’m crazy.”

Saint Preux, 18-6 as a professional, with a 6-1 UFC record, doesn’t like to think of himself as famous. In fact, the No. 6-ranked light heavyweight fighter in the world, who meets No. 5-ranked Glover Teixeira in Nashville on Aug. 8, chuckles at the word “fame” when it’s used to refer to him.

Still, the upcoming match against Teixeira will be the third time in his last four fights that the 32-year-old Saint Preux headlines a UFC card.

“Right now, people keep telling me I’m living the dream,” Saint Preux says. “And to be quite honest, I am.”

—Brian Canever, July 23, Vol. 1, #20 December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21

from the

MERCURY

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

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West Knoxville Rotary Club Westwood Antique & Design Market Which Way Out White Fox Beads Whittington Creek Art Show Winston Eye & Vision Center WKCE Wood Realtors WUOT WUTK Yassin’s Falafel House Ye Olde Steak House Yee Haw Brewing Company YMCA Young-Williams Animal Center Zipcar

December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 23

A&E

P rogram Notes

8x70 Quentin Tarantino resurrects a forgotten format for The Hateful Eight

F

ilmmaker Quentin Tarantino is known for many things: sharp and unforgettable dialogue, extreme violence, and an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema. His passion for film is quite literally a passion for film— Tarantino is an outspoken critic of digital filmmaking and projection, famously calling it “the death of cinema” and “TV in public.”

With his latest release, the Kurt Russell­-led epic Western The Hateful Eight, the filmmaker is taking his love of old­- school cinema to the next level: a limited­- engagement “roadshow” featuring an exclusive version of the movie, projected in 70mm. Though the initial goal was 100 theaters, logistical difficulties brought the number down to around 44 installations, with the remaining theaters compromising with a DCP version of the longer cut.

The rollout is limited to one week, and Knoxville has one of the few theaters that will be projecting the film.

Starting on Christmas Eve, Regal

Cinemas Pinnacle Stadium 18 in Turkey Creek will screen a 70mm print of the hotly anticipated ensemble oater, complete with an overture, an intermission, and 12 minutes of footage that won’t be included in the movie’s Dec. 31 wide release. A 70mm projector has been installed at Pinnacle just for the roadshow’s brief run, and the company is bringing in a special projectionist to oversee the screenings. Tarantino has said that the roadshow edition of the film— which was shot in Ultra Panavision 70 with the very lenses used to film Ben-Hur—will even be edited differently, playing in “big, long, cool, unblinking takes” that can only be seen in the 70mm release.

Seeing Tarantino’s preferred cut will be enough to get diehards in the theater, but the real draw is the 70mm projection itself. The Hateful Eight is only the 11th film shot in Ultra Panavision 70, placing it on a short list that includes How the West Was Won and

The real triumph of The Hateful Eight is the lengths to which Tarantino has gone to conjure the magic of an old­-fashioned motion-picture event.

the 1962 version of Mutiny on the Bounty. It’s the largest format available for film, and hasn’t seen a wide release since Khartoum in 1966. Recent 70mm Imax releases are most often 35mm blown up for the format, sometimes with a few scenes shot on true 70mm, i.e. Christopher Nolan and the last two Dark Knight films. Simply put, actually shooting on true 70 results in bigger pictures, higher resolution, and a much more expansive frame.

The real triumph of The Hateful Eight, then, is the lengths to which Tarantino and distributors the Weinstein Company have gone to conjure the magic of an old­-fashioned motion-picture event. Since only a handful of theaters in the country are still equipped to project 70mm film, the Weinsteins have hunted down every 70mm projector and projectionist they could find. It’s an unprece-

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Classical Music: Memorable Performances

dented rollout for a generation of filmgoers raised on digital cinema, and an event we might never see again. So while everyone has their eyes on J.J. Abrams’ high-­tech Star Wars reboot, Tarantino’s old­- school Western might be the most remarkable cinematic event of the season.

—William Mahaffey

26

Movie: Star Wars: The Force Awakens

Classical

A&E

and pianist Kevin Class offered a winning performance of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata.

Encore Our classical-music writer picks the most memorable performances of 2015

BY ALAN SHERROD

I

n the several years since I first started compiling my list of Most Memorable Classical Music Performances of the Year, a lot has changed for Knoxville’s classical-music scene.

While putting together those early lists may have presented a few vexing decisions, in retrospect, many of the choices were fairly obvious, even inevitable, due to limitations of quantity and quality. Jump ahead to 2015 and one is confronted with an explosion in the variety of classical-music performances as well as the emergence of new performers and ensembles. It’s been a struggle, but here are my picks for 2015.

MOST MEMORABLE ORCHESTRAL PERFORMANCES

What had usually been an easy category in years past proved difficult to even narrow down to three picks. I was excited by Knoxville Symphony Orchestra’s September season opener of music by American composers, conducted by resident conductor James Fellenbaum. Of the performance of Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story, I said in my review: “As in the other pieces on the program, Fellenbaum’s control of the spicy flavor and pace was impressive, setting a high bar for the conductors in the remainder of the season.”

Sharing equally in this category were KSO performances by two guest conductors—Marcelo Lehninger (Respighi’s Pines of Rome, in Octo-

ber) and Vladimir Kulenovic (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 in April). A close honorable mention goes to KSO’s guest conductor for March, James Feddeck, who led the orchestra in Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

MOST MEMORABLE CONCERTO SOLOISTS

Pianist Conrad Tao is my choice here for his performance of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25 in March with the KSO. In my review, I called out Tao’s “seemingly innate storytelling ability, which invested each Mozartian phrase with a refreshing twist and a perfect reason for existing.”

January’s KSO Chamber Classics concert featured two KSO principals in great solo roles: Phillip Chase Hawkins in Stamitz’s Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra and Aaron Apaza in Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto.

MOST MEMORABLE CHAMBER-MUSIC PERFORMANCE

From a category that barely existed five years ago, the quantity and quality of chamber music in Knoxville has happily grown exponentially. With difficulty, I’ll single out a performance of Dvorak’s String Quintet in G Major in the KSO’s Concertmaster Series at the Knoxville Museum of Art last March. Performers were Lefkowitz and Gordon Tsai (violins), Kathryn Gawne (viola), Andy Bryenton (cello), and Steve Benne (bass).

Also, in October’s installment of the Concertmaster series, Lefkowitz

MOST MEMORABLE OPERATIC PERFORMANCE

This year’s pick goes to Audrey Babcock for the title role in Knoxville Opera’s production of Carmen. From my review: “Vocally, her mezzo-soprano was everything one could want in a Carmen—smooth, velvety, and sensually rich, but with an edge of power and heat.”

Generally, local student singers have not been considered for this category, for fairly obvious reasons.

However, this year I am compelled to mention University of Tennessee graduate student Alexandria Shiner.

The soprano electrified audiences in two roles with UT Opera Theatre—as the Queen of the Night in The Magic Flute in April and as Magda Sorel in Menotti’s The Consul this fall.

NOTABLE DEVELOPMENTS IN THE CLASSICAL-MUSIC SCENE

I am now forced to admit that nothing surprises me any more in Knoxville’s growing classical-music scene. Here are a few developments that are not only notable, but possibly seminal in the how the scene grows in the future.

• Marble City Opera, with four productions in 2015, including December’s Amahl and the Night Visitors, is defining the niche of chamber opera for Knoxville audiences.

• AC Entertainment’s Big Ears festival is opening eyes and ears and breaking down the barriers between musical genres.

• New ensembles, such as the string quartet Inner Voices, are expanding the scope and variety of the chamber-music scene.

• Kudos to UT faculty pianist Kevin Class and his collaborative series of recitals that featured Brahms chamber music with piano.

• KSO’s concerts featuring the conductor candidates auditioning for the position of music director are exciting audiences and setting the stage for the organization’s future. ◆

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December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25

A&E

Movies

Force Majeure It may be a greatest hits collection of Star Wars tropes, but The Force Awakens marks a return to fun

BY APRIL SNELLINGS

T

he new Star Wars film opens with a bold promise: “This will begin to make things right.” It’s a line spoken by a robed and bearded Max von Sydow, who’s talking about a map that will hopefully lead the good guys to a certain missing Jedi. But he could just as well be announcing director and co-writer J.J. Abrams’ determination to get the franchise back on track after George Lucas’ famously disappointing prequels.

It was an ambitious goal, but Abrams has succeeded. At its best, The Force Awakens is a rapturous, soaring adventure movie that almost perfectly mimics the tone of the 1977 original and its first two sequels. At its worst, it still coasts along nicely on the considerable charms of its cast, both old and new, and the sheer power of the nostalgia it so effectively evokes. Best of all—and unlike the last three

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

installments—it’s a lot of fun.

Abrams, who has made a career of minding franchises, directs the film like the superfan he is, and it often feels more like a mixtape than a sequel. It’s best not to go into much detail about the plot—which is ironic, since Abrams and his co-writers (including The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi scribe Lawrence Kasdan) have approached The Force Awakens as a greatest-hits compilation of Star Wars plot devices.

There’s a son estranged from his father, both men on opposite sides of a war that pits scrappy rebels against a planet-destroying regime; there’s a restless youth who regards the stars from a dusty desert planet; there’s a hotshot pilot (two of them, actually); a grungy little droid that carries vital information; a helmeted and blackclad villain who takes orders from a

mysterious despot; and more outer-space dogfights and funky aliens than you can shake a lightsaber at.

What’s really remarkable is that Force takes these hand-me-down elements and weaves them into something that’s both familiar enough to satisfy longtime fans and fresh enough to earn legions of new ones. It smartly turns that balancing act into a plot point. It’s not a spoiler to say that the trio of characters at the center of the original films—Mark Hamill’s Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher’s Leia Organa, and Harrison Ford’s Han Solo—are the stuff of legend to the three young heroes of Force. It’s as much a movie about fans of the franchise as a movie for them; the new stars echo the classic characters, but they also revere them and, like so many Star Wars fans, have grown up on stories of their exploits.

And if the torch must be passed, it’s hard to imagine a more likeable cast to take it on. The prequels never managed to cough up a single truly memorable character (unless you count Jar Jar Binks, who stood out for all the wrong reasons), but Force gives us several. There’s Finn (John Boyega), a turncoat stormtrooper whose crisis of conscience puts him smack-dab in the middle of an intergalactic war; Poe

Dameron (Oscar Isaac), a daring flyboy running missions for a group of rebels known as the Alliance; and, best of all, Rey (Daisy Ridley), a tough-as-nails desert scavenger with a knack for all things mechanical. How they come together, and how their paths intersect with those of the series’ most beloved characters, is best left unspoiled.

Heroes are nothing without villains, of course, and Force has a heavy lurking in every shadow, from a Darth Vader heir apparent called Kylo Ren (Adam Driver) to a towering being known only as Supreme Leader Snoke (a motion-capture role filled by Andy Serkis).

By its very nature, The Force Awakens doesn’t quite land with the impact of the original Star Wars.

When that film hit theaters, there hadn’t been anything like it; Force, in contrast, succeeds because of how firmly it’s anchored in a beloved franchise and familiar mythology. It trades a sense of discovery for a sense of return—different pleasures for sure, but both have their advantages. It’s impossible to truly duplicate the experience of seeing Star Wars on the big screen for the first time. But I suspect that, 30 years from now, someone will be saying the very same thing about The Force Awakens. ◆

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

CALENDAR MUSIC

Thursday, Dec. 31

HOLIDAY INN NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY

Holiday Inn (World’s Fair Park) • 7 p.m.

Ring in 2016 with overnight accommodations, a live band, DJ and dancing. Dinner, drink tickets, party favors, midnight champagne toast, Times Square coverage on TV, and a balloon drop.

NYE2016

The International (940 Blackstock Ave.) • 8 p.m. • $7-$30 • 18 and up • internationalknox.com Ring in the New Year with two stages of bass-heavy EDM from YOOKie, Paerbaer, Moniker, Ede Gee, Fishermen, DJ Darkness, Z Is Not a DJ, and DJ Caliban.

OLD CITY NEW YEAR’S EVE PUB CRAWL

The Old City • 8 p.m. • $10-$15 • 21 and up • carleoentertainment.com Get admission to Carleo Entertainment’s array of Old City nightclubs—Southbound, Hanna’s, Carleo’s, Wagon Wheel, NV Nightclub, 90 Proof, and the Bowery—with the purchase of a $10 wristband. (That’s in advance—it’s $15 on Dec. 31.)

BETHANY HANKINS

The Bistro at the Bijou (807 S. Gay St.) • 9 p.m. • FREE • thebistroatthebijou.com The Bistro at the Bijou adds a New Year’s Eve set by string jazz violinist/singer Bethany Hankins and her backing band, the Swing Serenade, to its weekly Wednesday/Friday/Saturday lineup of local jazz performances

JENNA AND HER COOL FRIENDS

Alive After Five at Knoxville Museum of Art (1050 World’s Fair Park Drive) • 9 p.m. • $40-$60 • knoxart. org Say goodbye to 2015 with local blues/R&B outfit Jenna and Her Cool Friends. But it’s also farewell to the band, too—frontwoman Jenna Jefferson announced in the fall that she’s retiring from music after nearly 30 years in the Knoxville scene.

LIL IFFY WITH THE CRUMBSNATCHERS

Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square) • 9 p.m. • $15-$50 • scruffycity.com Another farewell performance—as 2015 winds down, so does the career of Wil Wright’s rapper persona, LiL iFFy, which began as a Harry Potter-themed hip-hop project in 2011 but has long since graduated from Hogwarts. Wright has announced that he’s hanging up his wand at the end of this year.

KNOX FOODIE NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY

Holly’s 135 (135 S. Gay St.) • 9 p.m. • Free The Knox Foodie bloggers host a party upstairs at Holly’s 135, with free appetizers and a cash bar.

ROYAL BANGS WITH GUY MARSHALL AND ZACH AND KOTA’S SWEET LIFE

Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (200 E. Jackson Ave.) • 10 p.m. • $5 • barleysknoxville.com Knoxville indie all-stars the Royal Bangs headline the evening’s biggest rock show, with help from the country-folk-rockers in Guy Marshall and the kinetic punk duo Zach and Kota’s Sweet Life.

GRANDPA’S STASH WITH JUST SAY MAYBE

Preservation Pub (28 Market Square) • 10 p.m. • 21 and up • scruffycity.com Boogie into the new year with some funky jams from these Market Square favorites.

BANDITOS

Boyd’s Jig & Reel (101 S. Central St.) • 10 p.m. • $5 • jigandreel.com Get down with some throwback Southern/garage/psych rock from Nashville.

Friday, Jan. 1

KTC CALHOUN’S NEW YEAR’S DAY 5K

Volunteer Landing • 9 a.m. • $30 • ktc.org Start 2016 off on the right running shoe with this morning trot along the river.

UT ARBORETUM SOCIETY NEW YEAR’S DAY WALK

University of Tennessee Arboretum (Oak Ridge) • 9 a.m.

• Free Guided tours of varying difficulty and length through the University of Tennessee’s tree sanctuary.

DAMN CREEPS

Nurse your hangover with some indie folk music and a community potluck—an annual Pilot Light tradition.

Pilot Light (106 S. Gay St.) • 7 p.m. • 18 and up • Free

Thursday, Dec. 24 TODD STEED AND THE CHRISTMAS SUNS • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE THE THIRST QUENCHERS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM • The Ps and Qs house band.

Friday, Dec. 25 BETTER DAZE • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM SAM QUINN’S X-MAS DEBACLE • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Saturday, Dec. 26 DAVID BAVAS WITH WILLOW AND WOOD • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE THE RERUNS • Pero’s on the Hill • 7PM • Knoxville’s premier TV band plays your favorite television themes.

CAPTAIN SUCK AND THE MEDIOCRE BAND • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM MARK BOLING • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE BEN SHUSTER • Bearden Field House • 9PM • FREE KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • Kukuly 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.

Uriarte sings in multiple languages, plays guitar in many styles, and, since 2011, leads the multifaceted jazz ensemble Kukuly and the Gypsy Fuego. 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. 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.

• FREE THE JOJAX WITH GANASITA • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

JACK’D UP • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM THE COVERALLS • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM • Knoxville’s long-running bar/wedding/special event favorites are masters of mood—they know what an audience wants, whether it’s Top 40 hits, Motown, classic rock, or jazz standards, and they deliver, on time, every time. 21 and up.

LAUREL WRIGHT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM Sunday, Dec. 27 SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27

CALENDAR

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE JERICHO WOODS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Kentucky has always been known for Bluegrass & Bourbon... but the roots of Jericho Woods run deeper than that... deeper than a mine shaft! Jericho Woods is one part Grand Ole Opry, one part Muscle Shoals. A musical experience that only boys brought up in this diverse Commonwealth could produce. With influences ranging from Outlaw country,jam bands, and roots rock, to folk and bluegrass, Jericho Woods takes the best of all of those and craft great music, plain and simple. * FREE THE BLUEPRINT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM ANDREW TUFANO • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Tuesday, Dec. 29 KUKULY AND THE GYPSY FUEGO • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. * FREE THE BEARDED • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 5:30PM • The Bearded is an old-time style band with new songs, based in Knoxville TN. * FREE HOLLOW TREE • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 8PM BATH SALT ZOMBIES • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM THE VONNEGUTS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

THE PAPER CROWNS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • The Paper Crowns are ambitious. They are a husband and wife who make music together. At first glance you may think you could pigeon hole them into expectations. They might surprise you. They improvise heavily on acoustic and electric guitar, banjo, and drums…often while singing harmonies. They’re sound lives somewhere between Shovels and Rope and an acoustic Jerry Garcia jam.

JENNA AND HER COOL FRIENDS

ROYAL BANGS See page 27 for details on these and other NYE shows.

12PM • Live jazz. • FREE SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE DAVE SLACK TRIO • Pero’s on the Hill • 1PM • Live jazz.

THE BROCKEFELLERS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM THELMA AND THE SLEAZE • Pilot Light • 10PM • 18 and up. • $5

LIL IFFY 28

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Monday, Dec. 28 JERICHO WOODS WITH JOSIAH ATCHLEY • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and

Wednesday, Dec. 30 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 6:30PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE PEE WEE MOORE WITH SPARKLE MOTION • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. * FREE THE CHUCK MULLICAN JAZZ BONANZA • The Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. * FREE JOSIAH AND THE GREATER GOOD • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

SCOTT LOW AND THE SOUTHERN BOUILLON • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Scott Low comes from Athens, GA; which is the home of intense creativity and true American art and music. Scott has returned to writing and singing. He lives to play the guitar and listen to Townes, Dylan, Ben Nichols, Hank, Cash, Tweedy and Willie. Divorce and children mixed with dirt roads, friends and Georgia hills are all blended in to create his sound… oh, and maybe a hint of sour mash on his breath. * FREE Thursday, Dec. 31 JASON ELLIS WITH THE URBAN PIONEERS • 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 BETHANY HANKINS • The Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. * FREE

PEE WEE MOORE • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • As an award winning and highly acclaimed Outlaw Country Singer/Songwriter Peewee Moore tours around on an average or 45,000 miles a year doing an endless string of one night stands at honky tonks, dance halls, festivals, and theaters. Born and raised in the foothills of the Appalachian Rainforest just across the TN border in Fort Oglethorpe, GA, Peewee spent most of his time haunting the streets of Chattanooga TN playing many of his first shows in, and around the “Choo Choo” city. Peewee spent the consecutive years making a name for himself as an accomplished picker, and songwriter throughout the Southeast. In 2010 he moved to Austin Texas the “Live Music Capitol Of The World” long enough to make the contacts necessary to be a staple and gain a foothold in the Austin Scene then decided to move back to Tennessee landing in the mountains between Chattanooga and Nashville. * FREE ALIVE INTO 2016 NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY • Knoxville Museum of Art • 9PM • KMA’s Alive After Five series concludes 2015—and kicks off 2016—with the final performance by local blues/soul/R&B favorites Jenna and Her Cool Friends. • $40-$60 THE DIRTY DOUGS • Brackins Blues Club (Maryville) • 9PM LIL IFFY WITH THE CRUMBSNATCHERS • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM • As 2015 winds down, so does the career of Wil Wright’s rapper persona, LiL iFFy, which began as a Harry Potter-themed hip-hop project in 2011 but has long since graduated from Hogwarts. Wright has announced that he’s hanging up his wand at the end of this year. • $15-$50 SOUTHBOUND • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 10PM ROYAL BANGS WITH GUY MARSHALL AND ZACH AND KOTA’S SWEET LIFE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Royal Bangs, Guy Marshall and Zack & Kotas Sweet Life will be coming together to present a night of top notch entertainment to help bring in the new year. • $5 GRANDPA’S STASH WITH JUST SAY MAYBE • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

BANDITOS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • $5 Friday, Jan. 1 CAROLINE COTTER WITH HANDSOME AND THE HUMBLES • 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 DAMN CREEPS • Pilot Light • 7PM • Pilot Light’s annual New Year’s Day potluck concert. 18 and up. * FREE ALEX SNODGRASS • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM SPACETRAIN • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

THE COSMIC SITUATION • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM THE JOSH DANIEL-MARK SCHIMICK PROJECT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Formed in early 2014, The Josh Daniel/Mark Schimick Project is a fiery string band blending bluegrass, soul, reggae and rock n’ roll into a style uniquely their own. Respecting their Appalachian roots, these passionate multi-instrumentalists have a way of blending their harmonies and intricate string work in to something that appeals to a wide variety of listeners.

Saturday, Jan. 2 MARK KILIANSKI WITH TIM AND JODI HARBIN • 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 MARK KILIANSKI WITH THE TENNESSEE STIFFLEGS •

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Mark Kilianski is a versatile guitar player, singer and composer from Boston. He tours regularly with Bluegrass and Old-Time acts Hoot and Holler, The Moonlight Ramblers, and as a solo artist. He plays blues-rock, jazz, and country music with The Country Shuffle. He writes songs about real life and imagination, and composes music for horns, strings, and anything else. Originally a Jersey boy, he picked up the guitar at age 13 to play angsty heavy metal, but quickly discovered a passion for classic rock and blues.

Mark set out to learn his craft by taking lessons at the local music shop, learning his favorite songs by ear at home, and playing in rock bands with his high school friends. * FREE MOJO FLOW • Mind Yer Ps and Qs Craft Beer and Wine Lounge • 8PM THE APPLESEED COLLECTIVE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • The Appleseed Collective is not a bluegrass band. It’s not The Hot Club of Paris. It’s not a ragtime cover band. The Appleseed Collective represents Americana music rooted in traditions from all over the world and from every decade, creating a live experience that welcomes every soul and is impossible to replicate. * FREE PROJECT WOLFPACK • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 10PM • Classic rock covers. * FREE CHALWA AND C.J. BOYD • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Sunday, Jan. 3 ROBINELLA • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 7PM WILDERUN WITH AETHER REALM AND WHITE STAG • Pilot Light • 9PM • A night of folk metal. 18 and up. • $6 SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE Monday, Jan. 4 MIGHTY MUSICAL MONDAY • Tennessee Theatre • 12PM • Wurlitzer meister Bill Snyder is joined by a special guest on the first Monday of each month for a music showcase inside Knoxville’s historic Tennessee Theatre. * FREE SYDNI STINNETT • 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 FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Asheville, NC based newgrass band Fireside Collective is a group of folk music enthusiasts who blend elements of traditional bluegrass and American roots music with modern acoustic arrangements. With an energetic live show, the band presents finely crafted original music infused with impeccable solos and tight harmonies.

Tuesday, Jan. 5 COURTNEY HOLDER • 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 TRAE PIERCE AND THE T-STONE BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

THE PO’ RAMBLIN’ BOYS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM Wednesday, Jan. 6

CALENDAR

KJO JAZZ LUNCH • The Square Room • 12PM • On the first Wednesday of every month, Knoxville Jazz Orchestra presents Jazz Lunch. Every month we will bring you a new performance to serenade you with a mix of classical and modern Jazz music. The schedule includes a tribute to Gene Harris with pianist Keith Brown (Oct. 7); Spirko & Boyd play the music of the Adderley Brother(Nov. 4); a tribute to Woody Shaw with Alex Norris (Dec. 2); Kayley Farmer sings the Rodgers and Hart songbook (Jan. 6); a tribute to Ethel Waters with Tamara Brown (Feb. 3); a tribute to Ahmad Jamal with Justin Haynes (March 2); and Mike Baggetta plays Patsy Cline (April 6). • $15 DANIKA HOLMES AND JEB HART WITH THE STEEL CITY JUG SLAMMERS • 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 KNOX COUNTY JUG STOMPERS • Fourth United Presbyterian Church • 6PM • Come and hear this great local folk music group in an intimate setting. Enjoy a meal, community, and sing-along led by our hosts Maggie Longmire and Jim Myers. Bring the family: kids 12 and under eat and enjoy free. • $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. * FREE TENNESSEE SHINES: THE BEARDED WITH THE KNOXVILLE BANJO ORCHESTRA FLASH MOB • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7PM • The old-time Appalachian music tradition trickles through The Bearded’s original songs like a clear mountain stream. Fierce pickin’ and three-part harmonies from Kyle Campbell, Chris Zuhr and Greg Horne result in a uniquely East Tennessee sound and spirit. And on this day of Epiphany, the KBO Flash Mob will take the stage for a full-on banjo revelation. • 10 PAUL EDELMAN • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Thursday, Jan. 7 MADDISON GRIGSBY WITH TRAE PIERCE AND THE T-STONE 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 THE GRANT GARLAND TRIO • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM THE CHARLES WALKER BAND • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

AL SCORCH • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Grafting literate, character-driven song craft and Mid-American roots with a post-punk DIY attitude, Chicago-based songwriter, performer and instrumentalist Al Scorch charts a new musical topography with a five-string banjo.

Friday, Jan. 8 BEN STALETS WITH THE JANK • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. * FREE THE HOOTEN HALLERS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg)• 4PM • The Hooten Hallers are a blues, soul, and rock n’ roll band from Columbia, MO. Known for their raucous live shows and influenced heavily by the canon of American roots music, this hard touring band does everything in their power to bring that music to you. They have produced a number of self-releases since forming in 2007, but most recently released Greetings from Welp City(2012) and Chillicothe Fireball(2014) on Big Muddy Records. With another

release brewing for 2015, The Hooten Hallers have every intention of driving ‘til the wheels fall off. * FREE AFTAH PARTY • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • The winter series of “Alive After Five” premieres with the R&B, Soul, and Funk of smokin’ hot, 8-member Aftah Party. • $10 KENT EUGENE GOOLSBY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up.

FUJIWARA WITH ADRENALINE KID, BELLEVILLE, AND THE PARAGON PROJECT • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Fujiwara is a high energy, crowd engaging three piece punk rock band based out of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Both their performances and off stage personalities have earned them legendary status in the east coast surf and skate community. Fujiwara has opened shows for Agent Orange, The Misfits, The Angry Samoans, The Candysnatchers, ASG, Guttermouth, Unwritten Law, FFU, The Supersuckers, and more. All ages. • $5 THE DEAD RINGERS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

KYLE MEGNA AND THE MONSOONS WITH THE DEADBEAT SCOUNDRELS • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM THE AFRO-DISIACS • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • The Afro–disiacs are a 10 piece Disco/Funk band playing music by James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, Michael Jackson and many more classic artists.

They have a 5 piece horn section with members of the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, Shifty and the Headmasters, Baseball (The Band) and Big Pink. Their rhythm section includes members of Big Pink, Bearfight, and Shifty and The Headmasters. • $5 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 9PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. * FREE Saturday, Jan. 9 RYE BABY WITH HOPE GRIFFIN • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. * FREE THE MOTOWN EXPERIENCE • Niswonger Performing Arts Center (Greeneville) • 7:30PM • The Motown Experience is an all-star lineup of world class vocalists drawn from the ranks of the legendary The Motown Experience is an all-star lineup of world class vocalists drawn from the ranks of the legendary groups that made these hits timeless classics. This dynamic vocal group is assembled from members of The Capitols, The Miracles, and from former members of The Temptations. The show is jam-packed with impeccable harmonies, dazzling choreography, and those timeless Motown grooves that everyone knows and loves. You can choose to dance, sing along, or just sit back (if you can) and watch the show as they perform all of their greatest hits from the likes of The Temptations, The Miracles, The Four Tops, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder. Every performance contains that unmistakable Motown stamp, including flashy suits, great singing and dancing, and a polished show that has set the bar for every vocal artist since the late 1950’s. The backup band is made up of seasoned performers who have been the musicians of choice for hundreds of Motown, Nostalgia, Classic Rock and Doo Wop shows around the country. They have both live performance and recording credits with a veritable who’s who of popular music artists from the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s.groups that made these hits timeless classics. This dynamic vocal group is assembled from members of The Capitols, The December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29

CALENDAR Miracles, and from former members of The Temptations.

• $20-$30 REALM WITH O’POSSUM, SUMMONER’S CIRCLE, AND MOUNTAIN KING • The Concourse • 8PM • Local doom metal band Realm celebrates the release of its first album by headlining a stoner/doom showcase. 18 and up. • $10 CHRIS STAPLETON • Cotton Eyed Joe • 9PM • Chris Stapleton’s been aiming for this moment for a while—it seemed clear all the way back when he was fronting the Grammy-nominated Nashville bluegrass band the SteelDrivers, from 2008 to 2010, that he was headed for a solo career. It’s taken him a while to get there, but the wait has been worth it. Stapleton’s debut album, Traveller, released in early May, is a ragged but fully realized collection of traditional country, classic rock, and bluesy blue-eyed soul that recalls early Waylon Jennings, Otis Redding, Delbert McClinton, and Bob Seger. And it’s made Stapleton the toast of Nashville—he won Best Male Vocalist, New Artist of the Year, and Album of the Year at this year’s Country Music Association Awards. In the last few years, leading up to Traveller, Stapleton wrote or co-wrote hits for Luke Bryan, Kenny Chesney, Darius Rucker, and Josh Turner, but Stapleton’s very obviously not following their paths. This is country music for the long haul. It may have taken Stapleton 37 years to get this far, but expect him to stick around.

X_X WITH OBNOX • Pilot Light • 9:30PM • X__X has shared the stage with artists like Plastic Crimewave, Timmy’s Organism, Home and Garden, Major Stars, Corn Mo, Gondoliers, Estrogen Highs, Stark Raving Lu Lu, The Gizmos, Cellular Chaos, Anderson/Hoffman/Chase, Blues Control and Silk Purse. CMJ New Music Monthly reviewed the band’s live performance in New York last Fall and wrote “A reprise of No Non ¢s had the crowd howling for more. And during the set-ending anti-anthem Cleveland Sucks, even Morton, high priest of fuck you, couldn’t suppress a smile.”X__X was formed by John D Morton (electric eels, Johnny and the Dicks) in Cleveland, Ohio in 1978. The New York Times recently featured the band explaining “back in the early 1970s, with only the Stooges and the Velvet Underground as role models, [Morton] and his colleagues turned their youthful alienation into a brazenly experimental, loudly confrontational and proudly antisocial roar that forged a new and distinct style.”The band is John D Morton on guitar, vocals, Theremin, didgeridoo and electric sitar; Andrew Klimeyk on guitar and vocals; Craig Willis Bell (Rocket From The Tombs) on bass; multi-instrumentalist Lamont “Bim” Thomas on percussion.18 and up. • $10 KATE AND COREY • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM * FREE CHARGE THE ATLANTIC WITH MASSEUSE • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

TIME SAWYER • 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.

Sunday, Jan. 10 EPWORTH OLD HARP SINGERS • Laurel Theater • 6:30PM • Call 673-5822. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate in this East Tennessee singing tradition. * FREE SING OUT KNOXVILLE • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • A folk singing circle open to everyone. * FREE ERNIE HALTER WITH MOJO: FLOW AND EVAN STONE • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Influenced 30

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

by some of the legendary names of pop and soul, such as the Beatles, Elton John, Otis Redding, and Stevie Wonder, Californian Ernie Halter first began to make waves for himself with the release of his 2005 collection, Lo-Fidelity. By 2007 -- and his next release, Congress Hotel (on Rock Ridge Music) -- he had built up quite a buzz, and the staunchly indie Halter could be seen touring throughout much of the United States. All ages. • $12-$15 KOTTONMOUTH KINGS WITH MARLON ASHER, WHITNEY PEYTON, AND CHUCKY CHUCK • The Concourse • 9PM • 18 and up. • $15-$20 GAS HOUSE GORILLAS WITH JAKOB’S FERRY STRAGGLERS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

SHIFFLETT AND HANNAH • The Bistro at the Bijou • 12PM • Live jazz. • FREE SUNDAY JAZZ BRUNCH • Downtown Grill and Brewery • 12:45PM • Knoxville’s coolest jazz artists perform every Sunday. • FREE

OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS

Thursday, Dec. 24 SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month. • FREE Tuesday, Dec. 29 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 KNOXVILLE POETRY SLAM SINGER/SONGWRITER SLAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Bring one musical instrument. 3 original songs under 4 minutes in length. (We will allow you to bring a musician to accompany you, but they can not provide backing vocals.) You will perform your song, and 5 random judges from the audience will give you a score between 1 and 10. Highest scoring musicians will move on. Highest at the end of the night, wins prizes. We will have an open mic for poetry, comedy, and music at the beginning of the show.

Wednesday, Dec. 30 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 Tuesday, Jan. 5 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 KNOXVILLE POETRY SLAM SINGER/SONGWRITER SLAM • Open Chord Brewhouse and Stage • 8PM • Bring one musical instrument. 3 original songs under 4 minutes in length. (We will allow you to bring a musician to accompany you, but they can not provide backing vocals.) You will perform your song, and 5 random judges from the audience will give you a score between 1 and 10. Highest scoring musicians will move on. Highest at the end of the night, wins prizes. We will

have an open mic for poetry, comedy, and music at the beginning of the show.

Wednesday, Jan. 6 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, Jan. 7 IRISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the first and third Thursdays of each month.

FREE Sunday, Jan. 10 EPWORTH OLD HARP SINGERS • Laurel Theater • 6:30PM • Call 673-5822. Everyone is welcome and encouraged to participate in this East Tennessee singing tradition. * FREE SING OUT KNOXVILLE • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • A folk singing circle open to everyone. * FREE

DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS

Sunday, Dec. 27 LAYOVER BRUNCH • The Concourse • 12PM • Brunch food By Localmotive. Music on the patio. Presented by Midnight Voyage Productions. All ages. * FREE Friday, Dec. 31 NYE2016 • The International • 8PM • Ring in the New Year with two stages of bass-heavy EDM from YOOKie, Paerbaer, Moniker, Ede Gee, Fishermen, DJ Darkness, Z Is Not a DJ, and DJ Caliban. 18 and up. • $7-$30 OLD CITY NEW YEAR’S EVE • The Old City • 8PM • Come ring in New Years Eve in Knoxville’s Old City. Purchase one wristband and gain access to seven different venues to party the night away: Southbound, Hanna’s, Carleo’s, Wagon Wheel, NV Nightclub, 90 Proof and The Bowery. Wristbands can be purchased in advance for $10 and will be sold for $15 the day of the event.

Wristbands that have been purchased in advance can be picked up at Davinci’s Pizzeria or NV Nightclub starting at 9pm. VIP sections are available at NV Nightclub, Southbound & Hanna’s. Each VIP section purchased comes with 10 wristbands for your guests, a bottle of champagne, a small food tray and a server for the evening. We have also partnered with the Downtown Hilton of Knoxville to offer guests a special hotel package which includes two wristbands, shuttle service to and from the Old City and a standard room.

All venues are 21 and up on New Years Eve.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Sunday, Jan. 10 KSO CHAMBER CLASSICS: PRINCIPAL QUARTET • Bijou Theatre • 2:30PM • The KSO Principal Quartet will perform the following musical selections: Schubert’s Quartettsatz in C minor; Prokofiev’s String Quartet No. 2 in F; and Brahms’ String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat.

THEATER AND DANCE

Monday, Jan. 4 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY NEW PLAY FESTIVAL AUDITIONS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 7PM • The Tennessee Stage Company will hold auditions for the Tennessee Stage New Play Festival on Monday, January 4, from 7:00 – 10:00 pm and Tuesday, January 5, from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm in the Emporium Center at 100 S. Gay Street.The New Play Festival will consist of a fully staged world premiere presentation of The Cast List by local playwright Gayle Greene; and staged readings of The Third Proposal by Sevierville playwright Dennis Duff, and The Nearly Final Almost Posthumous Play Of The Not-Quite-Dead Sutton Mcallister by Kris Bauske from Florida. Table readings will be Caves by West Virginia playwright Jean Battlo, Four Old Broads by Georgia playwright Leslie Kimbell, and Under The Esso Moon by Knoxville playwright Linda P. Marion. Roles are available for a wide variety of ages and types.Dates for the New Play Festival begin with table readings in early February and the full production of I Am The Way will run from March 4 - 20. Auditions will consist of cold readings. No appointments are necessary. For further information please contact the Tennessee Stage Company at 546-4280.

TUESDAY, JAN. 5 TENNESSEE STAGE COMPANY NEW PLAY FESTIVAL AUDITIONS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 7PM • The Tennessee Stage Company will hold auditions for the Tennessee Stage New Play Festival on Monday, January 4, from 7:00 – 10:00 pm and Tuesday, January 5, from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm in the Emporium Center at 100 S. Gay Street.The New Play Festival will consist of a fully staged world premiere presentation of The Cast List by local playwright Gayle Greene; and staged readings of The Third Proposal by Sevierville playwright Dennis Duff, and The Nearly Final Almost Posthumous Play Of The Not-Quite-Dead Sutton Mcallister by Kris Bauske from Florida. Table readings will be Caves by West Virginia playwright Jean Battlo, Four Old Broads by Georgia playwright Leslie Kimbell, and Under The Esso Moon by Knoxville playwright Linda P. Marion. Roles are available for a wide variety of ages and types.Dates for the New Play Festival begin with table readings in early February and the full production of I Am The Way will run from March 4 - 20. Auditions will consist of cold readings. No appointments are necessary. For further information please contact the Tennessee Stage Company at 546-4280.

Friday, Jan. 8 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: RABBIT HOLE • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Becca and Howie Corbett have everything a family could want, until a life-shattering accident turns their world upside down and leaves the couple drifting perilously apart. Rabbit Hole charts their bittersweet search for comfort in the darkest of places and for a path that will lead them back into the light of day. Jan. 8-24. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Saturday, Jan. 9 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: RABBIT HOLE • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Becca and Howie Corbett have everything a family could want, until a life-shattering accident turns their world upside down and leaves the couple drifting perilously apart. Rabbit Hole charts their bittersweet search for comfort in the darkest of places and for a path that will lead them back into the light of day. Jan. 8-24. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15

CALENDAR Sunday, Jan. 10 THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: RABBIT HOLE• Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Becca and Howie Corbett have everything a family could want, until a life-shattering accident turns their world upside down and leaves the couple drifting perilously apart. Rabbit Hole charts their bittersweet search for comfort in the darkest of places and for a path that will lead them back into the light of day. Jan. 8-24. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $13

COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD

Sunday, Dec. 27 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

Monday, Dec. 28 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 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 Tuesday, Dec. 29 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8:30, first comic at 9. 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 Sunday, Jan. 3 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

Monday, Jan. 4 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 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 Tuesday, Jan. 5 OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8:30, first comic at 9. 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 CASUAL COMEDY • Casual Pint (Hardin Valley) • 7PM • Atlanta’s Mo Arora is the headliner at this month’s edition

of Casual Comedy, a no cover comedy show held on the first Tuesday of each month at Casual Pint-Hardin Valley.

Local comedians, including Aaron Chasteen and Matt Chadourne, will also be performing.* FREE OPEN MIC STAND-UP COMEDY • Longbranch Saloon • 8PM • Come laugh until you cry at the Longbranch every Tuesday night. Doors open at 8:30, first comic at 9. 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 Friday, Jan. 8 FIRST FRIDAY COMEDY • Saw Works Brewing Company • 7PM • First Friday Comedy moves to the Second Friday for January, giving you plenty of time to get over your New Year’s Day hangover. Our headliner and feature this month are Greenville, SC’s Craig Holcombe and Carrie Adams. Knoxville Mercury’s Top Knox comic Jeff Blank is also performing, along with Matt Chadourne and Shane Rhyne. There will be food from Willy’s Butcher Shop available, also.* FREE

Business

Product awareness

Company goodwill

There’s never been a better time to “go public.”

Sunday, Jan. 10 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic.

FESTIVALS

WUOT_Ad_5.5x4.25_WhyWUOT_KnoxMerc.indd 1

Thursday, Dec. 24 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Knox County’s 17th annual Holiday Festival of Lights at The Cove at Concord Park will kick off Thursday, Dec. 17 and be open nightly from 6 to 8 p.m. through Thursday, Dec. 31, excluding Christmas Day. Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE 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.

Saturday, Dec. 26 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Knox County’s 17th annual Holiday Festival of Lights at The Cove at Concord Park will kick off Thursday, Dec. 17 and be open nightly from 6 to 8 p.m. through Thursday, Dec. 31, excluding Christmas Day. Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE

9/7/15 9:52 AM

Christmas Eve at Church Street

Noon 3 p.m.

5 p.m.

10:30 p.m.

All services include candlelight and Holy Communion.

900 Henley at Main Across from the Knoxville Convention Center www.churchstreetumc.org

Sunday, Dec. 27 December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31

CALENDAR HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE Monday, Dec. 28 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE Tuesday, Dec. 29 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE Wednesday, Dec. 30 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE Thursday, Dec. 31 HOLIDAY FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS • Concord Park • 6PM • Visitors can walk the 3/4 mile greenway trail to view illuminated holiday displays and thousands of lights. Pets on leashes welcome. A food vendor will be onsite with kettle corn, hot apple cider, hot chocolate, cotton candy, ribbon fries, funnel cakes and other refreshments for sale. The event is free, but Knox County will collect non-perishable food items for The Love Kitchen. • FREE

FILM SCREENINGS

Monday, Dec. 28 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. FREE Sunday, Jan. 3 EAST TENNESSEE PBS ADVANCE DOWNTON ABBEY SCREENING • Tennessee Theatre • 2PM • You are cordially invited to an advance screening of Downton Abbey’s final season, Season 6, Episode 1. Downton Abbey attire suggested. For additional information, visit us online: easttennesseepbs.org or tennesseetheatre. com.

s y ! a d i l o h e h t r o f e m i t n i just

long sleeve: orange.

short sleeve: grey, black, and white.

For the WUTK Fan on your list!

Available at Disc Exchange, Fizz, and Open Chord.

All sAlEs hElp suppOrt WutK.

Streaming 24.7.365 at WUTKRADIO.COM 32

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Tuesday, Jan. 5 TWIN PEAKS VIEWING PARTY • The Birdhouse • 7PM • Bi-weekly viewing parties for every single episode of the cult TV series. Attendees encouraged to dress as their favorite characters. Trivia, Twin Peaks-themed giveaways, donuts and coffee, plus some surprises.

Trivia begins at 7:00pm with viewing to follow at 8:00pm. • FREE

The Untouchables, “Man Killer” stars sultry Ruth Roman in one of her deadliest roles: the conniving Georgiana Drake, manager of a cab company that works as a front for a major Chicago heroin-trafficking operation.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.* FREE

Wednesday, Jan. 6 SCRUFFY CINEPUB • Scruffy City Hall • 10PM • A weekly program of movie screenings from the Scruffy City Film and Music Festival, Knoxville Horror Film Festival, and more.

SPORTS AND RECREATION

Monday, Jan. 4 THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. FREE

Friday, Jan. 8 CRESTHILL CINEMA CLUB: ‘FLESH AND FURY’ • Windover Apartments • 7:30PM • This New Year’s program will be paying homage to mean, evil and all-around despicable women. Our feature: Flesh and Fury (1952), starring Tony Curtis, Jan Sterling and Mona Freeman. A blistering boxing exposé, Flesh and Fury presents the alluring Sterling at her rottenest; she plays a heartless, gold-digging tramp who exploits rising, deaf-mute prizefighter Curtis for all he’s worth.Violence will also be evidencing itself in “Man Killer,” the opening segment of our January wicked-woman tribute. A December 1961 episode of ABC-TV’s iconic crime series

Thursday, Dec. 24 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10AM • Join Cycology Bicycles every Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. for a road ride with two group options. A Group does a 2 to 3 hour ride at 20+ pace; B group does an intermediate ride at 15/18 mph average. Weather permitting. • FREE RIVER SPORTS THURSDAY EVENING GREENWAY BIKE RIDE • River Sports Outfitters • 6PM • Every Thursday night from 6 to 7:30 join River Sports Outfitters on an easy paced, beginner friendly Greenway Ride. Bring your own bike or rent one for $15. Lights are mandatory on your bikes from September through March. After ride

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

join us at the store for $2 pints. • FREE FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 6PM • Sometimes, a group of workout buddies is just what you need to get out there run! Join us every Thursday night at our store for a fun group run/ walk. We have all levels come out, so no matter what your speed you’ll have someone to keep you company.

Our 30 - 60 minute route varies week by week in the various neighborhoods and greenways around the store, so be sure to show up on time so you can join up with the group. All levels welcome. http://www.fleetfeetknoxville.com/events/runwalk-groups • FREE NORTH KNOXVILLE BEER RUNNERS • Central Flats and Taps • 6PM • Meet us at Central Flats and Taps every Thursday night for a fun and easy run leading us right through Saw Works for a midway beer! • FREE CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES THURSDAY GREENWAY RIDE • Cedar Bluff Cycles • 6:30PM • Join us every Thursday evening for a greenway ride at an intermediate pace of 14-15 mph. Must have lights. Weather permitting. http:// cedarbluffcycles.net/ • FREE KNOXVILLE BICYCLE COMPANY THURSDAY GRAVEL GRINDER • North Boundary Trails • 6:30PM • Join Knoxville Bicycle Company every Thursday evening for their gravel grinder. Meets at 6:30 pm at North Boundary in Oak Ridge, park at the guard shack. Cross bikes and hardtails are perfect. Bring lights! Regroups as necessary. Call shop for more details. Weather permitting - call the store if weather is questionable. http://www.knoxvillebicycleco.com/ Sunday, Dec. 27

SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: MOUNT DAVIS • Smoky Mountain Hiking Club • 7AM • This hike will take us to (or near) the summit of Mt Davis, named for Anne Davis---- Mother of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Our hike will start in Tremont where we will follow Middle Prong 4 miles till we turn onto the Greenbrier Ridge trail. After another 4 miles we intersect with the AT and turn north a short distance before we head off-trail to the Mt Davis summit (or ridge crest depending on weather and terrain). We will return via the same route. Hike: Roughly 17 miles round trip, rated difficult. Dress for winter weather. Meet at Alcoa Food City ready to depart at 7:00 AM. Leaders: Cindy Spangler, spangler@utk.edu and Ed Fleming, edwrdflm@aol.com • FREE KNOXVILLE HARDCOURT BIKE POLO • Sam Duff Memorial Park • 1PM • Don’t know how to play? Just bring your bike — we have mallets to share and will teach you the game. https://www.facebook.com/ KnoxvilleHardcourtBikePolo • FREE Monday, Dec. 28 KTC GROUP RUN• Mellow Mushroom• 6PM• Join Knoxville Track Club every Monday evening for a group run starting at the Mellow Mushroom on the Cumberland Avenue strip on the University of Tennessee campus. FREE BEARDEN BEER MARKET FUN RUN• Bearden Beer Market• 6:30PM• Come run with us. Every Monday year round we do a group fun run through the neighborhood. Open to all levels of walkers and runners. Everyone who

CALENDAR

participates earns a $1 off their beer. FREE

out points. Regroup as necessary. Lights required. FREE

Tuesday, Dec. 29 CYTOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE• Cycology Bicycles• 10:30AM• Join Cycology Bicycles every Tuesday morning at 10:30 am for a road ride with 2 group options. A Group does a 2 to 3 hour ride at 20+ pace; B group does an intermediate ride at 15/18 mph average.Weather permitting. FREE 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 CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES TUESDAY GREENWAY RIDE• Cedar Bluff Cycles• 6:30PM• Join us every Tuesday evening for a greenway ride at an intermediate pace of 14-15 mph.

Must have lights! FREE HARD KNOX TUESDAY FUN RUN• Hard Knox Pizzeria• 6:30PM• Join Hard Knox Pizzeria every Tuesday evening (rain or shine) for a 2-3 mile fun run. Burn calories.

Devour pizza. Quench thirst. FREE

Thursday, Dec. 31 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE• Cycology Bicycles• 10AM• Join Cycology Bicycles every Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. for a road ride with two group options. A Group does a 2 to 3 hour ride at 20+ pace; B group does an intermediate ride at 15/18 mph average.

FREE FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK• Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville• 6PM• Sometimes, a group of workout buddies is just what you need to get out there run! Join us every Thursday night at our store for a fun group run/walk.

We have all levels come out, so no matter what your speed you’ll have someone to keep you company. FREE NORTH KNOXVILLE BEER RUNNERS• Central Flats and Taps• 6PM• Meet us at Central Flats and Taps every Thursday night for a fun and easy run leading us right through Saw Works for a midway beer! FREE RIVER SPORTS THURSDAY EVENING GREENWAY BIKE RIDE• River Sports Outfitters• 6PM• Every Thursday night from 6 to 7:30 join River Sports Outfitters on an easy paced, beginner friendly Greenway Ride. Bring your own bike or rent one for $15. Lights are mandatory on your bikes from September through March. FREE KNOXVILLE BICYCLE COMPANY THURSDAY GRAVEL GRINDER• North Boundary Trails• 6:30PM• Join Knoxville Bicycle Company every Thursday evening for their gravel grinder. Meets at 6:30 pm at North Boundary in Oak Ridge, park at the guard shack. Cross bikes and hardtails are perfect. Bring lights! Regroups as

Wednesday, Dec. 30 KTC GROUP RUN• Runner’s Market• 5:30PM• If you are visiting Knoxville, new to town, new to the club, or just looking to get more involved, this is the place to start!

A festive and relaxed group get-together occurs every Wednesday afternoon at 5:30 pm at Runners Market, 4443 Kingston Pike Avenue, Western Plaza. FREE FOUNTAIN CITY PEDALERS SHARPS RIDGE MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE• Fountain City Pedaler• 6PM• Join us every Wednesday evening for a mountain bike ride from the shop to Sharps Ridge. 6-10 mile ride with plenty of bail

ADVERTISING EQUALS SUPPORT. Thanks to all of our advertisers for their help in keeping our presses running.

Return the favor by supporting them.

Adoption Event DEC. 21st-23rd

There’s no place like home for the holidays...

Especially if you’re a shelter puppy or kitty.

Grayson Subaru, Young-Williams Animal Centers & The Humane Society of the TN Valley have teamed up for Grayson Subaru's ‘Home for the Holidays adoption event.’ All adoptable pets will be vaccinated, spayed or neutered, registered & microchipped.

Special Adoption Fee:$25 For more details, visit: young-williams.org or humanesocietytennessee.com December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33

CALENDAR necessary.

CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES THURSDAY GREENWAY RIDE• Cedar Bluff Cycles• 6:30PM• Join us every Thursday evening for a greenway ride at an intermediate pace of 14-15 mph. Must have lights. Weather permitting. FREE Friday, Jan. 1 KTC CALHOUN’S NEW YEAR’S DAY 5K• Volunteer Landing• 9AM• The New Year’s Day 5k is an exciting and wonderful way to start the new year. This race is unique in several ways that separate it from other races in town. Of course the fact that it comes on New Year’s Day makes it unique, but the main difference is the award ceremony which awards the top 100 males and top 100 females crossing the finish line. Awards are also given to the oldest and youngest runners and top male and female as well.This year’s race will have an entirely new course back near Calhoun’s on the River. Stay tuned for details.This race will kick off the 2016 KTC Grand Prix Series and the exciting Team Competition grand prix as well. Bring your families and friends for a great way to start the new year and lots of fun and good food.• $30 UT ARBORETUM SOCIETY NEW YEAR’S DAY WALK• University of Tennessee Arboretum• 9AM• Start out the New Year by joining our walk that begins at 9:00 a.m. at the Arboretum Shelter where you will be greeted by fellow hikers and offered coffee, hot chocolate, and snacks. The UT Arboretum is located at 901 S. Illinois Avenue in Oak Ridge.The groups will leave for a guided walk that will last about an hour. We will have several

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

leaders taking groups on routes of varying difficulty and length. Most will visit the nationally recognized Elmore Holly Collection to view the hollies still covered with berries.This is an easy walk on the trails and is suitable for all ages. The UT Arboretum Society encourages everyone to come out and enjoy an outdoor activity and work up an appetite before heading home in time to watch football or relax while working on your 2016 New Year resolutions. This year UT plays Northwestern at noon, so you’ll have plenty of time to get home in time to watch the Vols.This is a free program offered by the University of Tennessee Arboretum Society in cooperation with the UT Forest Resources AgResearch and Education Center.To learn more about the Arboretum Society, go to www. utarboretumsociety.org.For more information on the lecture call the Arboretum at 865-482-4836.* FREE Sunday, Jan. 3 KNOXVILLE HARDCOURT BIKE POLO• Sam Duff Memorial Park• 1PM• Don’t know how to play? Just bring your bike — we have mallets to share and will teach you the game. https://www.facebook.com/KnoxvilleHardcourtBikePolo* FREE Monday, Jan. 4 KTC GROUP RUN• Mellow Mushroom• 6PM• Join Knoxville Track Club every Monday evening for a group run starting at the Mellow Mushroom on the Cumberland Avenue strip on the University of Tennessee campus. FREE BEARDEN BEER MARKET FUN RUN• Bearden Beer Market•

6:30PM• Come run with us. Every Monday year round we do a group fun run through the neighborhood. Open to all levels of walkers and runners. Everyone who participates earns a $1 off their beer. FREE

RIDE• Fountain City Pedaler• 6PM• Join us every Wednesday evening for a mountain bike ride from the shop to Sharps Ridge. 6-10 mile ride with plenty of bail out points. Regroup as necessary. Lights required. FREE

Tuesday, Jan. 5 CYTOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE• Cycology Bicycles• 10:30AM• Join Cycology Bicycles every Tuesday morning at 10:30 am for a road ride with 2 group options. A Group does a 2 to 3 hour ride at 20+ pace; B group does an intermediate ride at 15/18 mph average.Weather permitting. FREE 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 CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES TUESDAY GREENWAY RIDE• Cedar Bluff Cycles• 6:30PM• Join us every Tuesday evening for a greenway ride at an intermediate pace of 14-15 mph.

Must have lights! FREE HARD KNOX TUESDAY FUN RUN• Hard Knox Pizzeria• 6:30PM• Join Hard Knox Pizzeria every Tuesday evening (rain or shine) for a 2-3 mile fun run. Burn calories.

Devour pizza. Quench thirst. FREE

Thursday, Jan. 7 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE• Cycology Bicycles• 10AM• Join Cycology Bicycles every Thursday morning at 10:00 a.m. for a road ride with two group options. A Group does a 2 to 3 hour ride at 20+ pace; B group does an intermediate ride at 15/18 mph average.

FREE FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK• Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville• 6PM• Sometimes, a group of workout buddies is just what you need to get out there run! Join us every Thursday night at our store for a fun group run/walk.

We have all levels come out, so no matter what your speed you’ll have someone to keep you company. FREE NORTH KNOXVILLE BEER RUNNERS• Central Flats and Taps• 6PM• Meet us at Central Flats and Taps every Thursday night for a fun and easy run leading us right through Saw Works for a midway beer! FREE RIVER SPORTS THURSDAY EVENING GREENWAY BIKE RIDE• River Sports Outfitters• 6PM• Every Thursday night from 6 to 7:30 join River Sports Outfitters on an easy paced, beginner friendly Greenway Ride. Bring your own bike or rent one for $15. Lights are mandatory on your bikes from September through March. FREE KNOXVILLE BICYCLE COMPANY THURSDAY GRAVEL GRINDER• North Boundary Trails• 6:30PM• Join Knoxville Bicycle Company every Thursday evening for their gravel

Wednesday, Jan. 6 KTC GROUP RUN• Runner’s Market• 5:30PM• If you are visiting Knoxville, new to town, new to the club, or just looking to get more involved, this is the place to start!

A festive and relaxed group get-together occurs every Wednesday afternoon at 5:30 pm at Runners Market, 4443 Kingston Pike Avenue, Western Plaza. FREE FOUNTAIN CITY PEDALERS SHARPS RIDGE MOUNTAIN BIKE

Scuba cla es and diving gear make great s!!

Live Music | Dancing | Spirits | Food & Fun! Alive into

2016!

New Year’s Eve Party December 31st

@ 9pm (Doors @ 8pm) Featuring

Jenna & Her Cool Friends Admission: $60, $50, $40

*Includes supper and breakfast buffets by Rocky’s Jamaica Sunrise, and complimentary toast of bubbly at midnight.

For tickets / info: 865-934-2039

January 8 “Alive After Five” winter series premier Featuring

Aftah Party Like us on c

865-525-6101 • KNOXART.ORG

ALIVE AFTER FIVE - KNOXVILLE MUSEUM OF @RT

2543 SUTHERLAND AVE. 865-523-9177 • dive@skiscuba.com 34

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

grinder. Meets at 6:30 pm at North Boundary in Oak Ridge, park at the guard shack. Cross bikes and hardtails are perfect. Bring lights! Regroups as necessary.

CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES THURSDAY GREENWAY RIDE• Cedar Bluff Cycles• 6:30PM• Join us every Thursday evening for a greenway ride at an intermediate pace of 14-15 mph. Must have lights. Weather permitting. FREE 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 Friday, Jan. 8 RIVER SPORTS FRIDAY NIGHT GREENWAY RUN• River Sports Outfitters• 6PM• Greenway run from the store every Friday evening from 6-7:30 pm. Work up a thirst then join us for $2 Pints in the store afterwards. FREE Sunday, Jan. 10 KNOXVILLE HARDCOURT BIKE POLO• Sam Duff Memorial Park• 1PM• Don’t know how to play? Just bring your bike — we have mallets to share and will teach you the game. FREE

ART

Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. DEC. 4-31: Artwork by Fran Thie and Robert Conliffe.

JAN. 1-31: Artwork by Lil Clinard and Julia Malia. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Jan. 1, at 5:30 p.m.

mid century

Bennett Galleries 5308 Kingston Pike DEC. 4-31: Artwork by Richard Jolley and Tommie Rush.

Bliss Home 24 Market Square DEC. 4-31: Aurora, paintings by Jane Nickels. JAN. 1-31: Artwork by Ocean Starr Cline. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Jan. 1, from 6-9 p.m.

Broadway Studios and Gallery 1127 N. Broadway DEC. 4-31: Feast Your Eyes on This, an exhibit all about food.

The District Gallery 5113 Kingston Pike DEC. 5-30: From Knoxville to the Mediterranean, paintings by Joe Parrott.

Downtown Gallery 106 S. Gay St. DEC. 4-JAN. 16: You Call That Art?, an exhibition of editorial cartoons by Charlie Daniel.

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.

Knoxville Museum of Art

CALENDAR

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.

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.

FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS Monday, Dec. 28

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 WINTER WONDERLABS • The Muse Knoxville • Visit The Muse over winter break and enjoy a family-style lab in addition to the 4,000 square feet of educational exhibit and play spaces. Winter Wonderlabs are available on December 21, 22, 23 and December 28, 29, 30 at 10:00, 11:00, and 1:00 each day.

Tuesday, Dec. 29 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. childrensmuseumofoakridge.org/ toddlers-playtime.

PRE-K READ AND PLAY • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • Pre-K Read and Play is a pilot program

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CALENDAR 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 WINTER WONDERLABS • The Muse Knoxville • Visit The Muse over winter break and enjoy a family-style lab in addition to the 4,000 square feet of educational exhibit and play spaces. Winter Wonderlabs are available on December 21, 22, 23 and December 28, 29, 30 at 10:00, 11:00, and 1:00 each day.

Wednesday, Dec. 30 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 10:20AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. * FREE PRESCHOOL STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For ages 3 to 5, must be accompanied by an adult. * FREE WINTER WONDERLABS • The Muse Knoxville • Visit The Muse over winter break and enjoy a family-style lab in addition to the 4,000 square feet of educational exhibit and play spaces. Winter Wonderlabs are available on December 21, 22, 23 and December 28, 29, 30 at 10:00, 11:00, and 1:00 each day.

Thursday, Dec. 31 THE MUSE NEW YEAR • The Muse Knoxville • 10AM • Enjoy a family-friendly New Year’s Eve celebration at The Muse Knoxville children’s museum at 516 N. Beaman Street in Chilhowee Park. Tickets are $6 for Muse Membership holders and $8 for non-members and may be purchased online at www.themuseknoxville.org. (Under 2 FREE)On-site activities will include:-Photobooth with Fun NYE Props-Hands-On Educational Activities and Crafts-Light Refreshments and a Noon-Time Ball Drop with Balloons and Confetti.

We will have special guests on hand to help us countdown till noon.

FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS • December 31 • Baby Bookworms • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. * FREE FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS • December 31 • 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 Monday, Jan. 4 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, Jan. 5 36

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Thursday, Dec. 24 - Sunday, Jan. 10

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. 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 Wednesday, Dec. 6 BABY BOOKWORMS • Lawson McGee Public Library • 10:20AM • For infants to age 2, must be accompanied by a parent or guardian. • FREE PRESCHOOL STORYTIME • Lawson McGee Public Library • 11AM • For ages 3 to 5, must be accompanied by an adult. • FREE Friday, Jan. 8 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 Sunday, Jan. 10 KMA ART ACTIVITY DAY • Knoxville Museum of Art • 1PM • Every second Sunday of each month, the KMA will host free drop-in art activities for families. A local artist will be on-site to lead hands-on art activities between 1pm and 4pm on the second Sunday of each month. * FREE

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Thursday, Dec. 24 PLANET MOTION WORLD DANCE FITNESS • Champion Ballroom Center • 10AM • All levels fun dance workout incorporating dance and music styles from around the world.

SATURDAY, DEC. 26 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE Wednesday,, Dec. 30 FLOW AND GO YOGA • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 12:15PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $10 BELLY DANCING CLASS • Illuminations Alternative and Holistic Health • 7PM • Call 985-788-5496 or email sandylarson@yahoo.com. • $15 Thursday, Dec. 31 PLANET MOTION WORLD DANCE FITNESS • Champion

Ballroom Center • 10AM • All levels fun dance workout incorporating dance and music styles from around the world.

Monday, Jan. 4 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com.

Donations accepted.

Tuesday, Jan. 5 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com.

Donations accepted.

Thursday, Jan. 7 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com.

Donations accepted.

PLANET MOTION WORLD DANCE FITNESS • Champion Ballroom Center • 10AM • All levels fun dance workout incorporating dance and music styles from around the world.

BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance. com. • $12

MEETINGS

Thursday, Dec. 24 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 Saturday, Dec. 26 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 Sunday, Dec. 27 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. • FREE 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. Free.

SUNDAY ASSEMBLY • The Concourse • 10:30AM • Sunday Assembly is a secular congregation without deity, dogma, or doctrine. Our motto: Live Better, Help

Often, Wonder More. Our monthly celebrations feature a different theme every month, with inspiring speakers and lively sing-alongs. Our community is also involved in rewarding service projects, with various discussion groups and events planned throughout the month.

Sunday Assembly Knoxville is part of the international movement of people who want to celebrate the one life we know we have. We meet the fourth Sunday of every month. Assemblies are attended by around 50 people, are family-friendly, and children are welcome. We always follow up with a potluck, so please bring your appetite and a dish to share.To find out more, visit our web page (http://knoxville-tn.sundayassembly.com) or email saknoxville.info@gmail.com. • FREE Monday, Dec. 28 KNOXVILLE CONTRA DANCERS • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Call 599-9621. Contra dancing to live acoustic music.

No experience or partner required. • $7 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.

APPALACHIAN MOUNTAIN BIKE CLUB • Central Flats and Taps • 7PM • Interested in getting involved with the mountain biking community here in Knoxville? The Appalachian Mountain Bike Club, meet the fourth Monday of each month. * FREE Wednesday, Dec. 30 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.

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. * FREE Thursday, Dec. 31 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. F REE 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. F REE Saturday, Jan. 2 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 • 9AM • Pat Bolan, a parishioner at the Church of the Ascension in Knoxville, will speak on the Stephen Ministry at the Jan. 2, 2016, Seekers of Silence Contemplative Morning at the Church of the Savior, 934 N. Weisgarber Road. The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. with a 20-minute silent meditation. SOS is an ecumenical-inter-faith group and all are welcome. * FREE

CALENDAR Sunday, Jan. 3 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, Jan. 4 KNOXVILLE CONTRA DANCERS • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Call 599-9621. Contra dancing to live acoustic music.

No experience or partner required. • $7 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 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.

Wednesday, Jan. 6 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.

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

THURSDAY, JAN. 7 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.

KNOXVILLE WRITERS’ GUILD • Central United Methodist Church • 7PM • The Knoxville Writers’ Guild’s Thursday, Jan. 7 program will feature Laura Still & Brent Minchey of Celtic Cat Publishing.The event, which will be open to the public, will begin at 7 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 7, at Central United Methodist Church’s Fellowship Hall, 201 E. Third Ave. CUMC is a new venue for monthly KWG programs and attendees should enter off of the large parking lot behind the church. A $2 donation is requested at the door. The building is handicapped accessible.In early 2015, Laura, a member of the KWG Board of Directors, and Brent Minchey purchased Celtic Cat Publishing from its founder Jim Johnston. They will be speaking to the guild about their experience running a local independent publishing company.For more information email Tyler Lewelling at tyler.kwg@gmail. com.

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 Sunday, Jan. 10 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.

ETC.

Thursday, Dec. 24 MASTER DISTILLER WHISKEY TASTING • McScrooge’s Wine & Spirits • 2PM • McScrooge’s Wine & Spirits will welcome Phil Prichard, master distiller and president of Prichard’s Distillery, for a special tasting and bottle signing Thursday, Dec. 24, from 2 to 5 p.m. The event is free and open to the public.Prichard started his distillery, based in middle Tennessee, in 1997, well before the craft distillery trend had taken root.

Attendees of the free event who are at least 21 years old will be able to sample several of its products, including Sweet Lucy, Sweet Lucy Cream and Sweet Lucifer liqueurs, as well as Prichard’s Fine Rum and Cranberry Rum. The distiller will be available for autographs.“We are thrilled to offer the community a chance to meet Phil, a true groundbreaker in the craft distillery industry,” said Brent Barnett, general manager of McScrooge’s. “Autographed bottles from a regional distillery make for unique Christmas gifts.”* FREE CHRISTMAS CAROL SING-ALONG! • Windows on the Park, Holiday Inn World’s Fair Park • 6:30PM • Here’s a fun and festive way to spend Christmas Eve: Join a Christmas carol sing-along and enjoy free cookies and spiked cider at Windows on the Park in downtown Knoxville. Windows on the Park will provide the music and songbooks; you bring the holiday spirit.The restaurant’s kitchen and bar will be open until 9 p.m. on Dec. 24 and will offer holiday menu and beverage specials. No cover charge; no reservations required. • Free Thursday, Dec. 31 HOLIDAY INN WORLD’S FAIR PARTY • Holiday Inn (World’s Fair Park) • 7PM • Ring in 2016 with overnight accommodations, a live band, DJ and dancing. Dinner, drink tickets per person included, party favors, midnight champagne toast, Times Square coverage and balloon drop.

KNOX FOODIE NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY • Holly’s 135 • 9PM • Ring in the New Year with KnoxFoodie—it’s open to everyone at Holly’s 135’s upstairs social lounge. Free appetizers with that special KnoxFoodie/Holly Hambright flair will be served and a cash bar will be available.* FREE

Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com

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FOR SALE

COMMUNITY

HOUSING

200+COMICS FOR $200 Includes: Eightball, Neat Stuff, Verotika, Marvel, DC, and EROS. Call 865-206-1843 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 PLACE YOUR AD AT STORE.KNOXMERCURY.COM

BRENTON IS A 6-MONTH-OLD SMALL MALE BEAGLE/HOUND MIX. He will be neutered, UTD on vaccinations and microchipped when adopted. Visit www. young-williams.org or call 865-215-6599 for more information.

MARYVILLE’S FAIR TRADE SHOP. Unique gifts from around the globe. Hours: Wednesdays 2-8 pm and Sundays 8:30-9:15 am and 11:30 am-12:15 pm. Monte Vista Baptist Church 1735 Old Niles Ferry Road. For more information call 865/982-6070.

LOST DOG IN SOUTH KNOXVILLE ON 12/2/15.

Wheaton Terrier, Golden with gray markings.

Limited hearing and vision.

May answer to Ellie May or Rufus. Cash reward. Call or text 865-680-8126 or 865-776-5346.

1BR APARTMENT IN PARKRIDGE - $425. 2BR $465. Take half off rent for first month, for December or January leasing. 865-438-4870 DOWNTOWN PRIME 1st fl 4500 sq. ft. office space w/ parking. Easy I-40 access. 637-8400

SERVICES J. DAVID REECE, Master 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.

NORTH KNOXVILLE’S PREMIER RENTAL HOMES pittmanproperties.com COMING SOON! One-level living in Farragut School Zone Numerous updates 3BD/1.5BA Stonecrest Subdivision Call Jim today @865-924-2941 for more details! Keller Williams Reaty 865-966-5005 PLACE YOUR AD AT STORE.KNOXMERCURY.COM

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Saturday, Jan. 9 AL-ANON • Faith Lutheran Church • 11AM • Al-Anon’s December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37

’BYE

Spir it of the Staircase

BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY

www.thespiritofthestaircase.com

BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY

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Look for more great stories in 38

KNOXVILLE MERCURY December 24, 2015

Architecturals

A vibrant district along Central Street and Broadway.

Visit Downtown North

Architectural Antics Art & Antiques HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

Happy Holidays Knoxville !

Merry Christmas ONE OF A KIND HOLIDAY GIFTS • STAINED AND LEADED GLASS YARD ART • POSTERS & PRINTS • UNIQUE DECOR

12pm-6pm Wed-Fri • 10am-5pm Sat 12pm-5pm Sun 865.414.4838 or 865.696.7777 820 N. Broadway • Knoxville TN www.architecturalantics.com

& Happy New YeaR!

Artist: Matt Burns

1020 N. Broadway 865-971-3983 www.sainttattoo.com

MAKE EVERY DAY A

HOLLY DAY!

’ 842 N. Central Ave 851-7854 AVAILABLE FOR PRIVATE PARTIES!

hollyseventfuldining.com

1204 N. Central St. Knoxville, TN 37917 865.247.0392 December 24, 2015

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 39