Vol. 2, Issue 39 Oct. 06, 2016

EXPOSING OURSELVES TO ART SINCE 2015

OCTOBER 6, 2016 KNOXMERCURY.COM V.

2 / N.39

THE

PR

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20 years ago, priest-turned-photographer Jan Lynch exuberantly documented Knoxville’s gay life • by Ed White

NEWS

The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: In Stores Now!

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

Digging Into West Knoxville’s Bloody Past

PROGRAM NOTES

Big Ears 2017 Lineup Announcement

MUSIC

Ben Maney Seizes His Moment

Historic October Knoxville’s bicenquasquigenary month presents more ways of seeing our past.

Oct. 9 is the 155th birthday of Knoxville’s most nationally successful studio photographer, Joseph Knaffl (1861-1938). Son of Austrian immigrants, Knaffl worked from a studio on Gay Street, and was famous in the 1890s for his study, “The Knaffl Madonna,” which has been reproduced on 21st-century mass-market Christmas cards.

business district for a neighborhood of middle and working-class people, most of whom worked for Brookside Mills, the weaving mill that was for 75 years one of Knoxville’s major employers. The tour will touch on the childhood of future Hollywood director Clarence Brown, and include brief visits to National and Old Gray Cemeteries.

Tickets are $16. To make a reservation, see thecentralcollective.com.

At the historic Foundry at World’s Fair Park on Friday, Oct. 14, faith-based financial expert and motivational speaker Dave Ramsey is the featured attraction at a fundraiser for Historic Ramsey House, the unusual stone museum house on Thorngrove Pike. (Is he kin?

Maybe he’ll clarify.) News Sentinel columnist Sam Venable will serve as host for an evening that also includes a dance accompanied by the big-band Streamliners. Tickets are $100. Check ramseyhouse.org or call 564-0745.

Saturday, Oct. 15 is the 79th anniversary of the current McGhee Tyson Airport. Named for a Knoxville airman killed on the North Sea in the final weeks of World War I, it had previously been located on Sutherland Avenue.

The Mabry-O’Conner Gunfight: On Oct. 19, 1882, these three men died on Gay Street within moments of each other. At left is Joseph Mabry III, a young attorney. At top, his father, Joseph Mabry II, prominent businessman who founded Market Square. At right, bank president Thomas O’Conner. The gunfight is the subject of a play, open to the public, at the Mabry-Hazen House on Oct. 16.

No one knows more about the history of Knoxville’s most independent-minded suburb, Fountain City, than Dr. Jim Tumblin, the genial scholar who writes the colorful and well-researched “History and Mysteries” column in the Shopper News. On Thursday, Oct. 20 at noon, he’ll be talking about his recent book, Fountain City: People who Made a Difference, a brown-bag discussion at the East Tennessee History Center.

Knoxville’s once-grand, 1919 Farragut Hotel, at the corner of Gay and Clinch, is becoming a hotel again. On Friday, Oct. 21, Images courtesy of the Calvin Chapelle Knox Heritage is giving a members tour of Executive Director Mabry-Hazen House On Sunday, Oct. 16, Mabry-Hazen House on the place where the New York Yankees stayed mabryhazen.com Dandridge Avenue hosts its annual Lineage in 1934—and where, a couple of years earlier, and Legacy event, an outdoor family reunion more than 100 administrators and coaches got to which the public is invited. One of East Tennessee’s most fascinating together to found an athletic organization called the Southeastern Conference. historic residences, Mabry Hazen was built in 1858 by hot-blooded entrepreneur It also witnessed, in the 1920s, the early evolution of the Knoxville Symphony Joseph Mabry, who co-founded Market Square in 1854—and 28 years later, Orchestra and some of the planning for the Great Smoky Mountains National was one of three shot to death in a gunfight. The program will include a short Park. Although most of the original interior has been modified away over original play by the Tennessee Stage Company, “Gunfight on Gay Street,” about the years—it was an office building for over 30 years —the original ballroom the bizarre incident that ended the lives of two Mabrys, as well as that of is intact, and will be part of the Hyatt project’s final product. Tours start at 5 Mechanics Bank president Thomas O’Conner, who shot them both. The event p.m. KH Memberships start at $25, and can be arranged at the time of the starts at 2:00 and lasts two hours. For more, check mabryhazen.com or call event. For more information, call Knox Heritage at 523-8008.

522-8661.

Meanwhile, the same Sunday afternoon, Oct. 16 at 4-5:30, Central Collective is hosting a walking tour of Greater Happy Holler by the Knoxville History Project’s Jack Neely. Located in a saddle of North Central, just northwest of downtown, Happy Holler was originally a

On Sunday, Oct. 30, at 2 p.m., Jack Neely, of the Knoxville History Project, will give a talk entitled “Subterranean Knoxville: The Buried Narrative of a Distracted City” at UT’s McClung Museum, to accompany the current archaeological “Knoxville Unearthed” exhibit. The lecture, part of a series, is free.

Sources: Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, and the organizations mentioned above.

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

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

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Oct. 6, 2016 Volume 02 / Issue 39 knoxmercury.com

CONTENTS

“Photography is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.” —Alfred Stieglitz

NEWS

10 Well-Read Rednecks

The East Tennessee comedy crew of Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan, and Corey Forrester took the best comedy clubs in the country by storm this summer at the same time they were writing The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Out of the Dark. S. Heather Duncan checks in.

11 Bringing

12 The Provocateur COVER STORY

Jan Lynch was no ordinary priest. If being a Byzantine Catholic from Knoxville wasn’t incongruous enough, Jan was also a gay photographer who was often called Knoxville’s version of Robert Mapplethorpe. His work included portraits, floral studies, drag queens, architecture, celebrities, gay rights marches, politicians, statuary, and street scenes—all interspersed with the glorious nudes that made him famous. Now, 20 years after his death from AIDS, a new retrospective of his work at Broadway Studios and Gallery provides an opportunity for Knoxville to reassess his life and his career as an artist.

Burlington Back

East Knoxville’s Burlington neighborhood faces challenges to redevelopment: a reputation for crime and poverty and a notably lower per-capita income. But Knoxville City Council member Nick Della Volpe is encouraging residents to start revitalization. Thomas Fraser provides an update.

DEPARTMENTS

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36

Howdy Start Here: By the Numbers, Public Affairs, and PechaKucha Knoxville—each week, we run a slide from an interesting local presentation. ’Bye Finish There: Sacred & Profane by Donna Johnson. Plus Crooked Street Crossword by Ian Blackburn and Jack Neely and Spirit of the Staircase by Matthew Foltz-Gray

Help Support Independent Journalism!

Nobody said this would be easy. Turns out there’s a good reason why! But if you appreciate our effort to provide a locally owned media voice for Knoxville, consider pitching in. Find out how you can help: knoxmercury.com/donate.

OPINION

A&E

8

18

9

Scruffy Citizen Jack Neely unearths West Knoxville’s bloody 18th-century history.

Possum City Eleanor Scott scrounges up her dinner with the Fungi Forager.

19 20 21 22

CALENDAR Program Notes: Big Ears announces its 2017 lineup, featuring Wilco, Blonde Redhead, Magnetic Fields, Meredith Monk, Henry Threadgill, Carla Bley, and more.

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Spotlights: Clarice Lispector, Destroyer, M83

Movies: Nathan Smith delves into the underworld of erotic Internet fan fiction in Slash.

Music: Carol Z. Shane seizes the moment with pianist Ben Maney and his new collaborative project, Carpe Opacare.

Books: Coury Turczyn explores the tiki lifestyle with Tim “Swanky” Glazner.

Theater: Alan Sherrod finds Clarence Brown Theatre’s Crucible as relevant as ever.

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 3

COMING SOON ON

OCTOBER 13

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 CONTRIBUTORS

Abode is a home living and design magazine unlike any other in Knoxville.

It celebrates the area’s most unique houses.

Featuring:

• Fascinating tours of the area’s most surprising homes • Stunning renovation projects with before/after photos • Intimate photo essays about local craftspeople and products • Local green living and landscaping ideas

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Chris Barrett Donna Johnson Ian Blackburn Catherine Landis Brian Canever Dennis Perkins Patrice Cole Stephanie Piper Eric Dawson Ryan Reed George Dodds Eleanor Scott Thomas Fraser Alan Sherrod Lee Gardner April Snellings Mike Gibson Joe Sullivan Nick Huinker Kim Trevathan Chris Wohlwend

White Lily Fla ts

INTERNS

BY TRACY JON ES

here was a time in Knoxville when many perfe ctly good buildings met the wreck king ing ball once they outlived their original purpose. Even beautifully ifu f lly constructfu ed, iconic pieces of architectur al histor y were left f to sit vacan ft t, invite vanda lism or decay, and then be decla red too o far ffa r gone to save.

Maybe that still happens sometimes. But not with a grow ing in network of herita ge preservatio nists and a d savvy devel opers who are repurposing the histor ic gems in Knox ville’s urban center and maki ng them shine. Once 6 the manufactu ring center for the south ’s best flour (ask a foodie), the four-story brick Whit Lily Flour build e ing (at Depot and Central avenu es near the Old City) is now home to White Lily Flats, a fully leased reside ntial complex from Dewhirst Properties. The developer has preserved much of the space’s manu factur ing histor y (gears Daniel F.

Hayley Brundige Maria Smith

DESIGN ART DIRECTOR Tricia Bateman tricia@knoxmercury.com GRAPHIC DESIGNER

ODEL ROOM REM

Charlie Finch

the kitchen

CONTRIBUTING PHOTOGRAPHERS

y Shaker Fountain Cit

Cabinetmaker

a Duncan creates

David Luttrell Shawn Poynter Justin Fee Tyler Oxendine

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PER KIN S

BY DEN NIS A BODE

MAY 2016

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Organ ically M o de r n : A Hols ton Riv er Hom e

A BODE

Photos by George

Middleb llebrook rookss

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 ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Michael Tremoulis michael@knoxmercury.com

BUSINESS BUSINESS MANAGER Scott Dickey scott.dickey@knoxmercury.com v id L ut t r el l

s ingbird, Atticu n To Kill A Mock advises his Finch famously that, “You never daughter Scout you a person until stand under really of s from his point consider thing of true in all sorts view.” That’s an Daniel F. Dunc ways. So when he starts on a kitchen, starts to work d. aroun ing by just stand I’m crazy at first, “People think walk in and stand because I just fforr a long kitchen fo around in the says. a time,” Duncan e Duncan in Should you engag ng space, of your cooki consideration he to learn that long take ’t it doesn per about cabinets, isn’t think ing think ing about se—instead, he’s , the en exper ience your entire kitch in it. live and work way that you most recent One of Duncan’s a his approach— dies embo cts o ects oj proje proj style cramped galley remodel of a tain City home kitchen in a Foun desperate The owners, built in 1929. ng keepi to ted resor fforr a long time, fforr space, had fo of the lasts fo at the bottom tough stuff. It get on too their microwave So, ; wine doesn’t they may have it’s easy to clean to the basement. be start a remodel, an stairs leading In fact, it can first we may to add space was their it—it won’t stain. how much space, so lots of counter finish so that’s way to it work.“ used as floor and the best —and island to make tive— desire b ective bj obj objec rs’ the is.” owne onto by adding tough this stuff In this case the emphasizes achieve that was created a style r an space fact, Shake er in The MAY 20 en is, desig n fforr lots of count fo with house; the kitch an adds, this they filled with a that 16 crea utility but, Dunc space. Armed tive, un wide-open area el, which “is ffeel, an built entirely new Shaker fe om the ffrom , which Dunc iqueof, alo ings fr is more a large island rough set of draw ca there’s a little he r, rs and electr ical irly simple, butl homexam er Ingra m Fulle ffairly fa es ple, with wide drawe architect, Brew it.” As an both a table space more pizazz to an open slate. outlets to create was steel He e ess Duncan had area. uniqu stainl a and work a s, this was ay points out the rs ways, and a storage “In some way ce ted by the owne what lete the surfa owners knew countertops (selec abricaffa fabric also able to comp gives o ectt in that the oj proj projec a local metall open to boards, which and made by but they were s): “I ks): with only two th W Work they wanted, were s MetalWor particularly smoo , too. And they tor, FourSeason ess the surface a some suggestions about the stainl a s. “It was ay says. y ” he say y, ty,” tive finish. was concerned quality, it attrac in but and sted the style, r intere f like f, Shake itself, se it was a really steel with the The cabinetry el ffeel also unique becau ” n.”

PLUS: in a Shaker-style fe rganized kitche looks pretty good. table, is made atureess detracts ffeatur fe was a big, well-o ed with a But none of the en occupies about y wood finish GEcherr om ffrom fr om ffrom fr ORGE The new kitch ty. That’s clear ality. open rsion varnish, ionali BA RB nction ffunct om fu ffrom fr asting conve et, but all that ffeet, ER’S “has a fy ft nifty long-l 225 square fe f l and nift fu INSID NA L HO one of the most usefu an expla ins,FI of challenge Dunc E more as lly , W pull-out actua which HI TE to the finish, so USE space is an’s design: a Duncan, aspects of Dunc st that’s added LILY . According to FL cataly seems AT it pretty than S on it bonds. It’s fforr a kitchen size fo when it goes e “There’s an ideal peopl nt. So when to make it efficie A 2016 AY MAY

Ph o t o s b y D a

• home furnishings and home-related products • custom home builders • renovation/preservation experts • architects • interior designers • home and garden service providers • landscapers • real estate agents • home listings • green products and services

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Repurposing History T

...all together in one special publication, with the editorial style and inviting design that only the Mercury can provide!

It’s the ideal place to advertise:

HOUSE TOUR

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY 618 South Gay St., Suite L2, Knoxville, TN 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

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4

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Jack Neely Coury Turczyn Joe Sullivan 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. © 2016 The Knoxville Mercury

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 5

HOWDY

Photo courtesy of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, US Department of Energy.

PECHA KUCHA NIGHT KNOXVILLE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE GOVERNOR’S CHAIR FOR ENERGY AND URBANISM | James Rose | May 12, 2016 What can we do together that we can’t do individually? This is the question that serves to unite the efforts of UT College of Architecture and Design, Skidmore Owings and Merrill, and ORNL as partners in the Governor’s Chair for Energy and Urbanism. Based in the downtown FabLab and taught in conjunction with Phil Enquist and others from SOM and ORNL, the Governor’s Chair studios challenge students to tackle tough design problems. One such challenge is the architectural application of additive manufacturing or 3D printing. In the spring of 2015 a graduate architecture studio was tasked with developing an understanding of the opportunities and limitations of this new technology. These findings foregrounded the design and construction of the AMIE prototype.

More akin to natural processes like seashell growth than familiar construction, the process of designing and building AMIE has created a platform for global leadership in this emerging field for UT, SOM, and ORNL. | Watch the 6-minute presentation at pechakucha.org/cities/knoxville

BY THE NUMBERS

Dangerous dogs in Knox County

21 8

court-designated dangerous dogs in Knox County.

“Level 2” dangerous dogs (the most dangerous, meeting criteria such as having bitten someone causing severe injury, or having attacked a person on three occasions within a year on its owner’s property)

6 10+ 2

of those dogs that are pit bulls or pit-bull mixes. breeds represented: (including border collie, lab, and terrier mixes)

public places near dangerous dogs: Tommy Schumpert Park, Brickey McCloud Elementary School

Halls

Region of county with the most dangerous dogs.

Source: Knox County Sheriff’s Office Check out an interactive dangerous dog map at knoxsheriff.org/dangerous_dog.php

PUBLIC AFFAIRS

10/8 HISTORIC PARKRIDGE EDGEWOOD-PARK CITY HOME TOUR SATURDAY

10 a.m.-6 p.m., Ashley Nicole Park (620 Winona St.). $10-$12 Visit some of the oldest and grandest houses in Parkridge during this annual home tour, which will encompass the old Edgewood and Park City neighborhoods. The houses on display date from the 1890s to the 1920s; many were designed by world-famous Knoxville architect George Barber. Info: parkridgecommunity.wordpress.com 6

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

10/8 FREE THE NIPPLE PROTEST SATURDAY

1 p.m., Gay Street. Free.

It doesn’t really make sense that women’s bodies have essentially been criminalized, does it? A group of protesters who think women should have the same rights as men—among them to take their shirts off in public—will march on Gay Street to Market Square this weekend. Info: facebook.com/events/737801039684932

10/9 OPEN STREETS KNOXVILLE SUNDAY

2-6 p.m., Sutherland Avenue, Mohican Street, and Homberg Drive in Bearden. Free.

Get a whole new perspective on Bearden this weekend when the city shuts down three of the neighborhood’s main thoroughfares to automobile traffic, making room for pedestrians, bicyclists, bands, pets, yoga classes, food trucks, beer, and a whole lot more. Info: openstreetsknoxville.com

10/9 STATE HOUSE 15TH DISTRICT CANDIDATES FORUM SUNDAY

6 p.m., The Gallery Event Venue (2658 E. Magnolia Ave.). Free.

All three candidates— Rick Staples, Rhonda Lynnese Gallman, and Pete Drew—vying for the General Assembly seat held by Joe Armstrong until his recent felony conviction for filing a false tax return will discuss their campaigns and platforms. After the forum, watch the presidential debate. Info: lwvknoxville.org

SOMETIMES DISCOVERY STARTS WITH A PATH.

EP

KN

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BRING AN

INSTRUMENT AND JOIN THE

BREAKOUT SESSIONS !

LLE BEAUTIFUL P RE

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Right outside of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is your own o u t d o o r a m u s e m e n t p a r k . We o ffe r m i l e s o f g re e nw a y s p a c e s t o unwind and enjoy everything the outdoors has to offer. From stream side trails, wilddower elds, forests, waterways and open spaces; all loc located within just a few minutes of quaint neighborhoods and downtown.

Walk , run or c ycle, the options are endless in the Peaceful Side of the Smokies. You’ll discover that you’re going to need a longer stay.

FOOD CKS TRU

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 7

SCRUFFY CITIZEN

A Grim Piece of Business A West Knoxville development may trespass on tragic history

BY JACK NEELY

M

y friends who are hardcore New Urbanists are fond of applying Gertrude Stein’s famous assessment of Oakland, Calif., to suburban West Knoxville. “There’s no there there,” they say.

Of course, there’s a there everywhere, even when we’re almost effective in our attempts to obliterate it. There is certainly a there on the western fringe of West Hills. For one developer, that’s the problem.

Faux-British names appeal to the culturally aspirant, and Bentley Fields, another cul-de-sac development with about 30 houses on it, would hardly have been noticed anywhere else.

But there’s no there quite like this one. The construction site—an odd, sloping field of almost 12 acres, with a deep, old sinkhole—is adjacent to the spot where a household of 13 was murdered and buried.

It happened in 1793. It was the worst mass killing in Knox County history.

The Metropolitan Planning Commission rarely has to consider such extraordinary background in their approvals, but they will have to consider those facts at their monthly meeting next week.

Among Native Americans, the Chickamaugan confederacy was the radical extremist fringe, the al-Qaida of the 1790s. The Chickamaugans sought vengeance for real wrongs.

But, like their enemies, they sometimes visited their vengeance on the innocent.

More than a thousand Chickamaugan warriors marched to Knox County

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

with one grim piece of business. That was the destruction of Knoxville, the fortified bluff-top village where a couple hundred people lived. It was the white man’s capital. The militia was out of town, raiding other Indian villages. One thousand men could easily have removed Knoxville from the white man’s map.

They paused a few miles before they got to town. There was a station—a fortified home—several miles west of Knoxville, near the road to Kingston. They besieged Alexander Cavett’s station, where the Cavett family, as well as a couple of visiting militiamen, huddled for protection.

They fired back as they could, but they were outnumbered 100 to 1.

Some of the chiefs lured the Cavetts outside their compound with the promise of safety. Some of them may have meant it. Then, on the orders of a chief called Doublehead, the unwelcome visitors killed the Cavetts.

Doublehead had a reputation, even among his people, as an impulsive sadist, but he may have felt justified. Whites had tricked his brother, the powerful chief Old Tassel, into an ambush and killed him.

The Chickamaugans distrusted the white people, and thought some ethnic erasure would increase their chances of survival in their homeland.

Some call Doublehead a psychopath, and maybe he was. Still, it would be hard to argue he wasn’t right about us.

As he and his men hatcheted the Cavett family, most of them children, other chiefs protested Doublehead’s violence. Doublehead earned the

nickname “Babykiller.” Even the radicals didn’t consider it a compliment.

After the slaughter came confusion, compounded by evidence of approaching armies—some of it a deliberate ruse by the 38 white non-soldiers who, hearing about the mortal threat to the city they’d barely founded, presented the illusion of a regiment—as a couple of old men back in town fired cannons in the blockhouse, presenting a separate illusion of soldiers in a different direction.

There are different stories, but at some point the dispirited Chickamaugans gave up their dreams of slaughtering Knoxville and fled.

Neighbors buried the Cavett family on site, perhaps in a common grave. There’s no reason to doubt the generations-old tradition that it was within this rectangular plot, about the size of a modest backyard and known as the Mars Hill Cemetery, named for a Baptist church established in the 1850s. The church burned down before living memory.

It’s back behind Doublehead Lane.

To get there, you have to trespass across well-tended backyards or know somebody. I knew Cindy Johnson, a neighbor who’s concerned about the prospective development of the big field adjacent to the graveyard. She’s descended from Cherokee on two sides of her family, but as she only recently discovered, she’s also descended from prominent settler James Campbell, a friend of the Cavetts who helped bury them. She helped host the recent Historic Cavett Station Picnic, attended by more than 50 neighbors.

One thing you notice about the graveyard is that all the existing gravestones, most from the mid-19th to early 20th centuries, are around the perimeter, leaving the broad center seemingly vacant, with only a few trees.

“I think that’s where the Cavetts are buried,” says Prof. Charles

Faulkner, the University of Tennessee archaeologist who began investigating the story almost 40 years ago. His book, Massacre at Cavett’s Station, was published in 2013 by UT Press.

By the time people started using it as a conventional churchyard, they respected the unmarked middle.

“People still knew about that in the 1850s, and just avoided that.”

In the otherwise umarked middle is one monument, installed in 1921: “IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THE DEFENDERS OF CAVETT BLOCKHOUSE.” Their resistance, its text implies, prevented the destruction of Knoxville. Johnson has learned that one of those who attended the ceremony was a descendant of Bob Benge, one of the Chickamaugan chiefs who pleaded for mercy toward the Cavetts.

Faulkner has looked, and never found evidence of the fort, which may have been lost to nearby development years ago. Faulkner and others who have been doing research on the area with ground-penetrating radar are convinced the graveyard is bigger than the fenced-off area, and urge further research.

Some archaeologists have been at work there recently, with some urgency.

Several radar “anomalies” consistent with graves are in the Bentley Fields site, right where the developer wants to build a road. Johnson thinks there may be many more. Faulkner says “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.” The Lonas family, who were kin to the Cavetts, are known to have owned slaves. They’re likely buried somewhere around here.

No one knows.

But the developer wants to get to work. Johnson points to evidence that a bulldozer has made a sortie along the prospective road.

It’ll be an uncommonly interesting afternoon at MPC. The meeting is Thursday, Oct. 13, at 1:30 p.m. at the City County Building. ◆

One thousand men could easily have removed Knoxville from the white man’s map.

POSSUM CITY

Finger-Lickin’ Good Developing a taste for wild foraged mushrooms

BY ELEANOR SCOTT

Photo by Eleanor Scott

Photo courtesy of Whitey Hitchcock

class about fungi, a subject he knew nothing about.

“She got me interested,” Hitchcock says, “I don’t know about the students, but I was.”

This spark of interest developed into a passion, and eventually, a career. Now retired from teaching, Hitchcock is known as the Fungi Forager, selling wild mushrooms to local restaurants and leading mushroom-foraging expeditions. He has a master’s degree in forestry and a

Whitey Hitchcock, The Fungi Forager, sells wild foraged mushrooms at the Market Square Farmers’ Market.

Photo by Eleanor Scott

A

friend of mine showed up on my doorstep earlier this month. She was fresh from a foray into the woods, carrying an old Kroger bag full of odd-shaped fungi that smelled of damp earth, which she suggested we eat.

Growing up in Middle Tennessee, my family cooked with foraged food like blackberries, chestnuts, persimmons, and even potentially poisonous plants like poke salad (boiled to death in plain water). We kids grazed on wood sorrel, lamb’s-quarter, and wild garlic, and our parents tolerated it.

But mom and dad put the kibosh on wild mushrooms, which we were told could be deadly. The only mushrooms I ate were the little white kind from the grocery store.

In recent years, wild-foraged mushrooms have enjoyed a resurgence in popularity, partly due to the mainstreaming of the “eat local” movement and renewed interest in traditional Appalachian culture and food.

For amateur foragers, edible mushrooms can be difficult to locate, or to distinguish from poisonous varieties. My friend had forayed into the woods with an experienced guide, Whitey Hitchcock.

Twenty years ago, during Hitchcock’s first year teaching high school, he invited a mycologist to speak to his

Over the sink, I shredded the mushroom with my fingers, rooting out the tiny beetle larva that burrow into the flesh. When I was fairly certain I had removed all the vermin, I fried the shredded mushrooms in butter with white wine and salt. It had the same texture as chicken. The flavor, in the first mouthful, did not recall damp logs or mossy woods, as I expected of traditional rustic food. Instead, I flashed back to an expensive meal, a pasta entree, eaten years ago at a fancy Italian restaurant. It was a flavor I associated with white tablecloths, sparkling wine glasses, good manners—a rich, cosmopolitan taste.

Scarce and elusive forest dwellers, wild fungi have a presence concentrated on the both ends of the gastronomic spectrum from backwoods fare to high cuisine.

Hitchcock sells wild mushrooms to Echo Bistro in Bearden. Another customer is the chef Bruce Bogartz, who has just left Primo, in the Sunsphere, to open Tata Creole Corner, a pop-up restaurant on North Broadway.

Hitchcock will provide the mushrooms for a six-course meal hosted by chefs Daniel and Rebecca Saldivar, owners of the Tootsie food truck, on Oct. 28 at the Central Collective.

Back at his booth, Hitchcock shares his Grandpa Mushroom recipe, which he often prepares for himself: Chop up a quarter-pound of chicken of the woods, fry in butter and olive oil, and scramble with eggs. He calls it Grandpa Mushroom because it’s a dish one can eat without teeth. ◆

Ph.D. in education. He also happens to be an Anderson County Commissioner.

I caught up with Hitchcock at his booth at the Market Square Farmers’ Market. Wearing his green “Virginia is for (mushroom) lovers” T-shirt, Hitchcock is a friendly old-timer, calling me “Little ’Possum” and rattling off Latin names in a Southern accent.

Hitchcock pulls out plastic bins to show me the assorted fungi for sale.

He says all mushrooms are from within a 50-mile radius of Knoxville.

Throughout the year he sells 12 edible species harvested in season. In early fall, he is selling three: cauliflower mushrooms, honey mushrooms, and chicken of the woods.

Of the three, only the honey mushroom, a gilled fungi, has poisonous look-alikes. To be on the safe side, Hitchcock avoids the entire genus of amanita, which contains amanita muscaria, the famous red-capped, white-speckled, sometimes-deadly toadstool. He also avoids mushrooms with brown spores.

Cauliflower mushrooms, so called because they resemble a head of cauliflower, are found on dead or dying pines. Cooked, they have the texture of seaweed. Honey mushrooms, with caps the color of honey, have the most familiar shape and texture, like grocery store oyster mushrooms.

My favorite, chicken of the woods, is an orange-and-white bracket fungi that grows on decaying hardwoods.

The orange fungi is chicken of the woods in its natural state.

A pasta dish prepared with chicken of the woods, honey mushrooms, and cauliflower mushrooms.

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 9

Photo by Jason Grindle

Well-Read Rednecks The Liberal Redneck comedy team takes its message to the masses with a national tour and a biting new political manifesto

BY S. HEATHER DUNCAN

S

kew! The Liberal Redneck comedy trend born right here in Knoxville just ain’t a joke any more. The East Tennessee comedy crew of Trae Crowder, Drew Morgan, and Corey Forrester took the best comedy clubs in the country by storm this summer at the same time they were writing a book that debuts next week. And this month Crowder will be making the late-night TV circuit, including a profile on Nightline, before headlining the Scruffy City Comedy Festival here in November.

The local comedians (Morgan is originally from Sunbright, Crowder from Celina, and Forrester from the Chattanooga area) launched their wellRed comedy tour in May after Crowder’s twangy back-porch rants gained a cult following on social media. Transgender bathroom bills, racists, and religious conservatives “get his red up.” The Knoxville-based comic has continued to post these hilarious screeds, plus online commentary videos in which he plays all

10

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

the parts for The New York Daily News, where he is “Hillbilly-in-Chief.”

The wellRed tour quickly graduated from a couple of weeks bouncing through the South to selling out shows from Washington, D.C., to California.

It’s now booked through the end of the year. While swept up in this unexpected whirlwind, the three comics committed their creed to paper; The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Out of the Dark will hit bookstores and digital shelves on Oct. 4.

Crowder is also scheduled for a slew of TV appearances in October: Nightline; an Oct. 8 interview on Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld Show (that should be fun); and the Oct. 15 episode of HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher. A BBC special about transgender bathroom bills will also likely include an interview with Crowder and excerpts from one of the wellRed shows, recorded live. Morgan will tell a story on MTV’s The Epic Party Show in mid-October, too.

Morgan was a public defender in

Knoxville before moving to New York City to pursue his stand-up career.

Last week he shared some impressions from the road and insights into the new book.

The tour has possibly been better received outside the South, Morgan says, but he and his colleagues frequently encounter surprise that these Southern white guys are expressing their real—liberal—opinions.

“Last night in San Jose, three people came up to us after the show and said they were just walking by and decided to come in,” Morgan says.

The two Latina women and a black man voiced wonder as they asked, “Are these people [in the audience] real? These white people supporting you guys?” Morgan says.

For Morgan, the highlight of the tour was not at a world-class comedy club but a performance at Johnson City’s punk dive the Hideaway.

“It was standing-room only,” he recalls, with people “whooping and hollering.” A guy who had been blowing a kazoo rolled something onto the stage, and Forrester jumped back, thinking it was an explosive.

When he realized it was a can of pork and beans, he popped the top and ate it onstage to the roar of the crowd.

“It reminded me of shows we did coming up that were drunk and wild, but these were fans that were drunk and wild,” Morgan says. “We were at a very redneck show but we weren’t having to fight them. It was probably a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

The guys were telling jokes at night and writing a book during the day. It was originally envisioned as something fairly light, along the lines of their Our Sunday Best blog. But Morgan says their agent told them, “Your message is more important than that, and I think you should do a manifesto.” They immediately erupted in laughter, because Morgan and Forrester had mocked Crowder for years using the same word. The inside joke was breaking out into the world. “‘Manifesto’ was tongue-in-cheek, but that’s what it really is,” Morgan says. At their stand-up shows, the point is to make people laugh. For Morgan, the main goal of the book was to say, “This is who I am. This is who we [Southerners] are. And we’re growing.”

The writers perform some interesting contortions, because they are in essence writing for two different audiences: progressive yet

pretentious non-Southerners who need to be educated about addiction and poverty; and Southerners who need to stop letting themselves to be manipulated by rich corporate and political interests.

The book starts off debating the many connotations of the word “redneck” and related labels, and how those have played out in culture and comedy. Their “Dark Foxworthy” bit—aka, “What If Jeff Foxworthy Had No Filters?”—is rich.

The manifesto is definitely funny, but it’s also well-researched and biting, and dead serious in the same way as having a come-to-Jesus talk with your alcoholic brother. I was as likely to read parts out loud to my husband because the facts made me angry as because it was funny. (Yes, I learned stuff.) The book is full of footnotes, which start out mostly as amusing sub-commentary until actual legal citations and scientific studies creep in.

Morgan says he and his friends wrote the book “like the Internet reads.” Chapters on cultural issues ranging from food to racism are punctuated by “porch talks,” with the individual comics telling personal stories related to the topic, as well as the occasional flowchart with titles like “What to Do With Your Food Stamps.” (Hint: “Buy food” is only one option—and not the one that “hits,” as the guys put it.)

Morgan’s favorite chapters provide an analysis of why religion and guns each hold such sway in the South.

“We’re super-Southern. We like guns,” Morgan says. “We don’t like AR-15s, and we don’t like how, if you even suggest any type of gun reform, people freak out and try to ridicule you and act like you are a radical.”

What’s next? Crowder is headed to Los Angeles early next year to work on some yet-to-be announced projects.

(An alum of the NBCUniversal Late Night Writers Workshop, he had been concentrating on writing pitches for TV until the Liberal Redneck videos blew up.)

Morgan says he and Forrester plan to pitch a Kings of Comedy-type wellRed television special early next year (with Crowder involved), before heading back South to work on an idea for an unscripted Southern social commentary show. “Imagine if The Daily Show had been hosted by Mark Twain,” Morgan says.

That hits. ◆

Bringing Burlington Back Knox City Council member Nick Della Volpe encourages “grassroots” economic development in East Knoxville

BY THOMAS FRASER

A

lice Allen knows her neighborhood has its share of problems.

But she’s confident in a big people-powered comeback.

Allen, chair of the East Knoxville Business and Professional Association and a graduate of Knoxville College, gave a tour of the community last week, the day after an East and Northeast Knoxville Economic Summit convened by 4th District Knoxville City Council member Nick Della Volpe to share the business opportunities he believes are available in a part of the city ripe for economic expansion.

Compared to other communities discussed at the summit, Burlington faces more challenges than most: a reputation for crime and poverty that dissuades business and residential investment and a notably lower per-capita income.

Della Volpe says there are no specific plans following the summit, which he organized as a sounding board for community members and to review a survey completed by about 300 people in his district. Across the board, he says, his constituents want more retail options, restaurants, grocery stores, and small and minority-owned businesses.

“It’s important that people appreciate the opportunities that exist in the north and east quadrant,” Della Volpe said in a press release ahead of the summit. “It’s home to 48,000 people, and another 110,000 people live within a 15-minute drive of East Towne , for example. That’s a big market.”

The main point of the summit was to encourage entrepreneurship and grassroots economic development.

“Let’s do bottom-up instead of bottom down,” Della Volpe said in a follow-up interview.

Allen, who helped facilitate the event, shares the concerns and aspirations of Burlington neighborhood residents. There’s the zoo, and Chilhowee Park, and a handful of famous restaurants, like Chandler’s and Pizza Palace. But there are also signs of steep urban decline. There used to be locally owned shops—including a soda

fountain and a grocery store—and bustling crowds here on the sidewalks of what was known as downtown Burlington. Now a row of empty storefronts is interrupted only by a barber shop and an old stopped clock on the sidewalk.

“It will take a while to rebuild it,” Allen says. The biggest challenge, she says, is to fight the stigmas attached to the community. When she moved back to Knoxville 20 years ago, real-estate agents didn’t even show her and her husband residential options in the area. The couple landed in Holston Hills. But Allen still considers Burlington her core neighborhood.

“I like to call it East Knoxville, because it all runs together,” she says.

While Della Volpe’s summit at the John T. O’Connor Senior Citizen’s Center was meant to focus on the Northeast and East Knoxville economy in its entirety—including Fountain City, East Towne, and Lower Broadway— there seemed to be special community interest in redeveloping Burlington.

“Slowly I’ve seen the Burlington area coming up and getting better, but it’s a very slow process because of the connotation of the East side,” says Allen.

Allen’s vision for community-based resurrection has support from the Knoxville Chamber, city government and Della Volpe, who urged the roughly 200 people in attendance at the summit that “grassroots” action is needed to revitalize and improve all of East Knoxville. He specifically mentioned the Burlington community as ripe for improvement, “but we can stand here and talk all day.” It’s up to the residents, he says, to make things happen.

“We’ve got to push entrepreneurship in a big way,” says Doug Minter, the director of small business development at the Knoxville Chamber. He encouraged use of a Chamber statistician and other expertise to further any business aspirations.

“Someone is dreaming of the things you are talking about,” he told those at the summit.◆ October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 11

THE

PR

O V O

T A C

R U E

20 years ago, priest-turned-photographer Jan Lynch exuberantly documented Knoxville’s gay life • by Ed White

12

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Ed. Note: Ed White was a friend and collaborator with—and now the official biographer for—Knoxville photographer, activist, priest, and provocateur Jan Lynch.

architecture, celebrities, gay rights marches, politicians, statuary, and street scenes—all interspersed with those glorious nudes that made him famous.

Now, 20 years after his death from AIDS, a new retrospective of his work provides a perfect opportunity for Knoxville to reassess his life and his career as an artist. Both are woven deeply into our local community and its history. They’re largely forgotten today, but both deserve wider recognition.

O

n March 25, 1969, 17-year-old Jan Lynch wrote in his diary, “I have sent off to obtain a 1st class relic of St. Anne, Our Lady’s Mother. I hope I get it soon. The donation was $50.00 - WOW! I won’t need to go to Europe - I’ll have enough of a shrine in my room to have them coming here!!?!”

Jan did eventually get to Europe, many times. The first trip was the same year he made that diary entry, an ecstatic pilgrimage to Fatima, Lourdes, and other holy sites. He even got to meet Conchita de Garabandal, who only a few years before had claimed to have seen apparitions of Mary and to have received divine messages.

“Jan was always far more into Mary apparitions than I was,” says David Perkin, who was Jan’s best friend during those years. They met as young, earnest parishioners at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church in downtown Knoxville. “In those early days he was quite traditional and conservative. I remember often chalking it up to his being a ‘recent’ or ‘new’ Catholic.” Jan had only converted a couple of years before then, but he converted hard and fast.

Jan ended up spending most of the next decade in Europe, at the University of St. Thomas Aquinas, a Vatican school in Rome. He was ordained in the Ruthenian Rite of the Catholic Church, a Byzantine rite that is rooted in the Carpathian region of Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine.

He traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East in those and later years. He made one last pilgrimage to Fatima in the final year of his life.

Perkin spent some time at school in Rome, too, but he mostly followed a separate path to the Roman Catholic priesthood. He gradually lost touch with Jan. He is now the Vicar General in the Nashville diocese.

I was a friend of Jan in his later years, and helped clean up his rooms after he died in 1996. Relics seemed to spill out of every nook and cranny.

We made a big pile of these little packets in plastic sleeves, with curious lumps in the middle of them.

Relics from Saint Anne, Pius X, Catherine Laboure, Vincent de Paul, Louise de Marillac, Bernadette, Alphonsus, Matthias, Francis, and on

EARLY EXILE

1992 (above) and r Boulevard on Dec. 6, ) AIDS Walk on Voluntee lly in June 1991 (below ville Pride March and Ra protesters at the Knox

and on and on. We even found what was purported to be a piece of the cross Christ was crucified on.

Someone joked that we could spread all the relics out on the floor and probably assemble one whole saint. For all that, we could even give him a woody.

As irreverent as it sounds, Jan would have liked that joke.

Jan Lynch was no ordinary priest.

If being a Byzantine Catholic from Knoxville wasn’t incongruous enough, Jan was also a gay photographer who liked to “rattle the cages” in his later years, and was often called Knoxville’s version of Robert Mapplethorpe.

When we found those relics, we were performing a ritual often done after the untimely death of a gay friend, at least in those days: cleaning their rooms to help their parents avoid uncomfortable surprises. Besides organizing his effects, we were looking to intercept personal items, you might say—such as erotica.

In Jan’s case, the erotica we were sifting through was mostly of his own making. His photographs were everywhere, piles and boxes of them, evidence of a life interrupted. But it wasn’t all erotica, by any stretch of the imagination. His work included portraits, floral studies, drag queens,

Jan was born in Petersburg, Va., in 1951, during his parent’s years managing Milner Hotels. But the family had deep roots in Knoxville and East Tennessee. His ancestors included the Truans and a range of other Swiss immigrants who first came to East Tennessee in the 1840s and whose family names graced such establishments as Lynch’s Restaurant downtown and Tallman’s Produce in Fort Sanders from the 1940s through 1960s.

Jan always had a strong sense of himself as a Knoxvillian. No matter where life took him, he always returned here. After his studies in Rome, he was ordained priest in the Ukrainian Catholic Eparchy of Toronto. He served parishes there and in Windsor from 1977 through 1979 before returning once again to Knoxville.

The circumstances of that return were dramatic and devastating. Jan was assigned to a parish that had not had a steady priest in some time and was not used to being led. In Jan’s opinion, that church had drifted too far towards Roman Catholicism, and needed a firm hand to bring it back to its Ruthenian roots.

In one of his first acts, he summarily ordered the statuary to be thrown out to the curb. (Eastern Rite Catholic traditions generally saw such depictions as approaching idolatry.)

After further feuds with the lay council, things came to a head in early 1979: Without warning, Jan excommunicated the ringleaders during mass.

Jan said it started a riot in the pews.

Someone called the police, and Jan went into hiding for several weeks.

Jan appealed to his bishop, Isidore Borecky, to resolve the situation, but he grew frustrated waiting. Finally, he was granted an indefinite leave of absence to return to Knoxville. Here, he said, he “plotted and preened like any queen in exile.”

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 13

Knoxville drag

performers M artina Dezeré (left) and Ang el Collins It was during this time that Jan first began exploring life as a gay man. I often imagine that, with his faith so dramatically tested, he simply let go of a lot of church doctrine.

When I knew him, though, he always strongly denied there was ever any conflict. I remain incredulous, but he insisted he had simply been too busy, and it had not been a priority to express himself as a gay man until well into his 20s.

“There is no answer,” says Julia Tucker, one of Jan’s close friends. “I think there may be a battle with Jan that we don’t know about. But if it’s possible, he was true to both sides.”

Throughout most of the ’80s, Jan remained an active priest. He also became an integral part of Knoxville’s gay community. He mostly served as a supply priest—analogous to a substitute teacher—throughout Tennessee and several other states. He even tried to found a Ukrainian parish here in Knoxville.

As AIDS took its increasing toll throughout the ’80s, it began to radicalize the gay community nationwide, including here in Knoxville.

Technically, Jan remained a priest in good standing right up to the end of his life. But as his active priesthood wound down in the late 1980s, his role as a gay activist and artist blossomed.

A KNOXVILLE CANVAS

Jan admitted that he could have helped his career as an artist by moving to a major hub like New York or Los Angeles. But he drew his 14

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

strength and inspiration from his Knoxville and East Tennessee roots.

“This is my canvas,” he once said.

“This is very much my beat, as it were.”

He got his first camera in his early teens. Many of his earliest photographs, from long before he had any pretensions as an artist, are startlingly good. He developed a keen eye for portraiture and street photography almost by instinct.

“One of my prized possessions, currently hanging on my sitting room wall, is a black-and-white close-up profile head shot of me,” Perkin says. It was taken in the late ’60s, after he and Jan had been swimming in the Little River beside the Lynch family cabin they called Tanglewood, in Kinzel Springs. “I have always prized it because there is something quite artistic about it which I can’t explain. … Is it due to the shadows?

Being slightly out of focus? I don’t know. … But I do know it is special.”

When Jan returned to Knoxville, he taught himself darkroom techniques and began entering contests.

He won awards at the Tennessee Valley Fair in 1983, ’85, and ’87, and at Gatlinburg’s Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in 1985.

He began exhibiting regularly at Lawson McGhee Library in the late ’80s, then at the Candy Factory, the Art-O-Mat, and Key Antiques in the Old City.

Beyond its artistic merit, his work is also a record of the local gay community at a pivotal time. He documented it all: informal birthday parties, meetings of the Appalachian Bear Club, gay rights protests and celebrations, AIDS fundraisers, backstage shenanigans with local drag queens.

Sometimes he would arrive quietly, working diligently at the fringes. But usually his bright personality announced itself in no uncertain terms.

One of his models, who goes by the initials B.V. in Jan’s work, says, “Oh, he never had any shyness, anytime, anywhere.” B.V. recalls times Jan appeared at awkward moments in public, effusing loudly: “Why, hello there, you gorgeous man! I’d like to just tear all your clothes off and ravish you right here!”

Jan often forced anyone around him to be out as well, just by his presence.

“Yeah, he was out, and in a big way,” B.V. says. “But you know, that was who he was, and how he was, and you had to love him.”

Jan was aware of his outsized personality. “Oh, I like being me. I do,” he told me during an interview in 1992. “I can be silly and flighty and off the wall and rude and bolder and—” He trailed off, laughing. “Sometimes I like to startle people on purpose. And sometimes I do it without even meaning to. And other times I could just slap everybody around because they don’t have enough compassion in their bones for a certain event or set of circumstances. I can be read. I’m a book. I’m just so—there I am.”

His ability to jolt people out of complacency and connect with them was part of what made him as a photographer. He collected personalities—clothed and unclothed—with his camera, as obsessively as he once collected holy relics. And with the same reverence.

For every image he collected, he gave back in good measure. Local publications like the Brass Check,

) lva Lamé (left ar left) and Si (f r le nd al ha ob C gl na of the performers Ti the founders Knoxville drag elight, one of D P. ce (above) y en ar lg on du si Perpetual In and Sister Mis of s er st Si r orde quasi-religious Perspectives, Aware, Tennessee Green, Query, and even Metro Pulse were given free use of his work. He also worked with nonprofits like the Hope Center, aRK, and Positively Living, groups that used his name and images in fundraising campaigns and auctions.

His prints and postcards were almost like trading cards in the gay community.

It seemed everyone had at least one or two; usually they were gifts from Jan. People frequently passed them on to friends who admired them.

“He was a character. He was so much fun,” recalls local drag queen Angel Collins. “All of the guys wanted to be photographed by Jan. You were nobody until you’re asked to be photographed by Jan.”

OUT IN THE ’80S

For all of the ferocious fun that swirled around Jan, the gay experi-

ence in Knoxville was far different from what it is today. The exuberance was a radical tonic in the face of a threatening world.

“The Orlando shooting was real emotional for me, because I’d forgotten how guarded we were,” Collins says.

Collins has been a performer in Knoxville’s gay bars since the early 1980s. She is a chameleon who could morph from broad campy drag to Marilyn Monroe. One of Jan’s famous shots depicts a sassy, glamorous Angel in full drag at a urinal, her head thrown back, lips parted, looking at the camera from behind her sunglasses.

Collins remembers the Carousel bar, at the edge of the University of Tennessee campus, as a frequent target of harassment.

“Somebody threw a tear gas [canister] through the front door, so instantly the room was filled with smoke, and everyone was trying to get October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 15

) and a photo (above s title for the h’ nc k (right) Ly ac d Tr an ck s el’s initial T’s Tom Bla od U m at e th ph .,” ra .J og “B to phot t Lynch asked random cyclis out,” she says. “You know, you never dream of that happening today. You know it could—but just people driving there nightly down the street calling names, throwing stuff. That was a nightly thing back then.”

Jan celebrated local drag personalities regularly in his work. “I regard them all as quite precious people,” he said. He was especially struck by their courage during one of the first Knoxville Pride parades in 1991, when militant white supremacist Ken Gregg staged a menacing protest with his followers. Some of Gregg’s followers wore head-to-toe surgical gear and tried to intimidate participants by videotaping them. Jan, of course, captured them all on film as well, and he exhibited them often.

“I was very, very proud of [drag queens] Brandi and Silva Lame and the others, who were very visible in 16

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

that parade, because even though nothing untoward happened, we did not know if something would happen,” Jan said. “There were threats and they were to be taken seriously. And so when anyone sets themselves up as such an obvious symbol and target, and still stuck by their guns—I was very proud of them. You or I or just about anybody else could’ve disappeared into the crowd and be lost. But not them.”

It’s also important to understand just how inextricably gay activism and AIDS activism were bound at that time. They were virtually indistinguishable. If the Stonewall generation had been fighting for pride and dignity, those of the AIDS generation were fighting for their lives.

In the late 1980s, Julia Tucker established one of the first local apartments dedicated to housing PWA’s (People With AIDS): the Graham

Apartments on Magnolia Avenue. Jan helped with fundraising using his photography. He helped the Appalachian Bear Club collect basic toiletries and cooking supplies for the residents, and took people to the hospital and doctor’s offices. “He showed up. He was not just talk,” Tucker says.

“At the time, people were being treated terribly. Their families were throwing them out of the house. And there were some of them living in the basement and what we used to call coal chutes, where they kept coal, that they wouldn’t let them come upstairs, some things like that. [ Jan and the Bears] were so much help to me. I felt so alone doing that, because people thought I was crazy, and there was just no help for those people back then. [They] absolutely came to our rescue with things that mattered.”

All of these people can be seen throughout Jan’s work.

In 1995, when Jan first became ill from AIDS and nearly died of pneumonia, some of the Bears dropped by

his house for a visit. They found him staggering around his room in a daze, mumbling incoherently. When he finally noticed them, all he could say was, “Don’t tell Julia! Don’t tell Julia!”

Which is, of course, exactly what they had to do.

NAKED IN KNOXVILLE

Like Imogen Cunningham, the photographer he called his primary influence, Jan photographed “everything that could be exposed to light.”

His work was both byzantine and catholic, not to mention exuberantly gay. You could spread everything out and assemble a picture of Jan’s life, in a way, or at least his vision of it.

“I certainly do have a view, vision of the world, which I am trying to convey,” Jan explained to Norris Dryer in 1993 on a WUOT call-in program radio. Sometimes, Jan explained, he just liked to show something for its own sake. “And then other things, I’m trying to convey a story, trying to perhaps subtly tell you something

about yourself or about the world, or about the circumstances of yourself in the world. … If I can add some dignity to that, then I feel that I have accomplished something. … I think there’s a great many more things in life than just what most people suspect.”

Also like Cunningham, and many of the street photographers his work echoes, Jan worked simply. “I don’t like any bells and whistles on my cameras,” Jan said. He preferred to keep his process intuitive. “I’m very lazy,” he said. “I like to take the easy way out, which is just to set it and go do it. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time I hit the shutter button.”

Jan’s pared-down approach was part of his overall aesthetic. Local author and photographer Reed Massengill, in an article about Jan for A&U Magazine, wrote, “Jan’s approach was to strip away any artifice and expose something true—sometimes brutally truthful—about the model or subject matter he was photographing.”

This stripping down was literal in many ways beyond the obvious. His earliest nudes, for instance, were done in makeshift studio settings, but often with the studio trappings themselves exposed—the light stands and the room beyond the simple sheet backdrop are part of the shot. One of his signatures was to leave a model’s clothes in the shot: pants down around the ankles, or visible in a pile off to the side, like a shed skin.

Many outdoor public settings are recognizable in his photos, heightening the tension. Tom Black Track and the UT Aquatic Center were frequent backdrops. So was the University Center parking garage. The Cumberland Avenue Strip, downtown, and Old City appear, too, as do various graveyards, rail yards, and Tyson Park. Some shots are planned, but people were known to impulsively drop their pants for Jan’s camera in

the unlikeliest places.

It was easier to accomplish than you might imagine. Jan often chose the golden hour, just after sunrise, when the light was best and few people were about, or UT home football games, when the stadium fills up and the rest of campus is deserted.

All of these evocative touches make his shots more than simply nudes. They are bold statements about ordinary people baring themselves to the world, stripped down to their essential selves by Jan. They weren’t all gay, but they all were coming out in a way.

Jan titled his last exhibit before he died Naikkid in Knoxville. He chose the photographs for the show in his final months, from his hospital bed. The show opened to glowing reviews at Key Antiques in the Old City. As with most of his exhibits, the nudes were only a modest part of an extraordinary range of images. But as the show’s title made clear, everything on display was laid bare by Jan’s gaze, presented for our consideration.

E

ven as he lay in a bed at Fort Sanders Hospital, slowly dying, portraits of his great aunt Maude and of Knoxville drag queen Champale Denise were being seen in Danish newspapers in connection with Europride celebrations. The Tom of Finland Foundation, in Los Angeles, published a newsletter with a celebration about Jan near the end of his life, too, with the title “Dying in a Public Place.”

That was all 20 years ago. After his death, Jan’s photographic archives fell into a kind of limbo from which they have still not surfaced, uncataloged and largely unseen since then.

There is no money or expertise to deal with his estate. It will take an enormous amount of care to find a proper

Lynch’s ordina tion in Toront o in 1977 (far at Fort Sander left), Jan in O s Regional med ctober 1996 ical Center, w (center), and ith Angel Col a marcher at lins as Fat Elvi the March for Rights and Li s Lesbian, Gay, beration in W and Bi Equal ashington D.C ., on April 25, 1993 lasting home for it all.

The situation is not likely to improve if Jan is forgotten. In hopes of resurrecting Jan, as it were, I brought WHAT some of his work to Broadway Studios Jan Lynch: and Gallery last winter, and proposed A Retrospective a retrospective. The show will open on Friday, Oct. 7, and run through Oct. 29.

WHEN It didn’t take much more than a Oct. 7-29, with an opening glance at his photos to convince the reception on Friday, Oct. 7, gallery organizers to stage an exhibit. from 5-10 p.m.

Jan’s work, like his life, is extraordinary.

For some, this will be a homecoming, a WHERE chance to celebrate their memories of Broadway Studios & Jan and the local events and people he Gallery documented. For others, it is a chance (1127 N. Broadway) to learn things they never knew and to see what all the fuss was about.

INFO But it’s hard to imagine that broadwaystudios something good won’t come from it all andgallery.com one day. It’s all that Jan wanted, and it’s exactly what the world needs and deserves. ◆ October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 17

A&E

P rogram Notes

CARLA BLEY

HENRY GRIMES SUPERSILENT

WILCO

SIR RICHARD BISHOP

STEPHIN MERRITT

MERIDITH MONK

HENRY THREADGILL

Photos of Henry Grimes by Hollis King, Sir Richard Bishop by Uwe Faltermeier, and Meredith Monk by Julieta Cervantes.

uessing at the Big Ears lineup rarely pays off—AC Entertainment’s annual festival of far-out music is defined by its unpredictable programming. The previous festivals have been headlined by big-name American minimalist composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, each of whom served as artist in residence. After John Luther Adams’ 2016 tenure as composer in residence, there weren’t many obvious contenders for the office left.

So Ashley Capps and company have discarded the idea of a resident artist or composer altogether and come up with the festival’s biggest and broadest lineup yet, with a lineup of legendary septuagenarians, mid-career music legends in the making, and dozens of promising young promising artists who are redefining how we

hear and think about music. There’s also lots of indie and alt-rock—notably Wilco, ’90s icons Blonde Redhead, the krautrock- and minimalism-inspired instrumental band Tortoise, the wry New York singer/songwriter Stephin Merritt and the Magnetic Fields, and the noise-pop group Deerhoof.

The roster includes some imposing names, artists and composers of enormous talent and influence and intimidating, almost frightful reputations, most of them in the late stages of their careers: the pianist and composer Carla Bley, a towering figure in 1960s and ’70s jazz; Gavin Bryars, an English composer and bassist whose 50-year career has ranged from chamber music, opera, vocal music, to pieces that defy categorization; jazz bassist and

composer Henry Grimes, who has played with dozens of important jazz artists, from Gerry Mulligan and Archie Shepp to Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, Sonny Rollins, and Cecil Taylor; Meredith Monk, an experimental singer, composer, filmmaker, and artist whose wide-ranging career stretches back to the early 1960s; Musica Electronica Viva, the legendary Italian improv group featuring Alvin Curran, Frederic Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum; and the prolific and eloquent jazz saxophonist and bandleader Henry Threadgill, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for music.

The rest of the lineup: the prolific and Oscar-nominated Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson; the Norwegian jazz/improv troupe Supersilent; the electronic duo Matmos; Arcade Fire collaborator and young sax star Colin Stetson; folk legend Michael Hurley; Lisa Moore, a founding member of Bang on a Can; electronic composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith; former Sun City Girls leader Sir Richard Bishop; Ahleuchatistas; American Contemporary Music Ensemble; Claire Chase; Colleen; DakhaBrahka; the Dave Harrington Group; Deathprod; DJ Rupture; Emilia Amper; Frode Haltli; Glenn Kotche; Horse Lords; Imarhan; Jace Clayton;

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Big News Big Ears announces its biggest—and best?—lineup yet

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Movies: Slash

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Music: Carpe Opacare

Books: Mai-Kai

Joan Shelley; Julian Lage, Chris Eldridge, and Aoife O’Donovan; Junun, featuring Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express; the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra; Lætitia Sadier; Maya Beiser; My Brightest Diamond; nief-norf; the Nils Økland Band; Oliver Coates; On Fillmore; Philip Jeck; Rachel Grimes; Rangda; Sarah Kirkland Snider; Steve Lehman and Sélébéyone; Shane Parish; Six Organs of Admittance; Ståle Storløkken; Ståle Storløkken and Arve Henriksen; the Crossing; Theatre of Voices; Theo Bleckmann; Wu Fei; Xiu Xiu; Yasmine Hamdan; and Yuki Numata Resnick.

The 2017 festival will be held a week earlier than usual, and will last four full days, instead of just three, running March 23-26. The announced venues include the Bijou and Tennessee theaters, the Mill and Mine, the Standard, the Square Room, and two new spaces—Church Street United Methodist Church and Saint John’s Episcopal Cathedral. Weekend passes are on sale; prices range from $165 for a general admission pass to $550 for VIP access. Information for daily tickets and the film schedule will be announced soon. Visit bigears.com for more information or to buy tickets.

(Matthew Everett)

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Theater: The Crucible

Movies

Backward Slash

Slash offers a half-hearted defense of underground fan fiction

BY NATHAN SMITH

F

ew of the Internet’s many subcultures are as massive, or as misunderstood, as the slash-fiction community. Slash fiction is erotic fan fiction that pairs otherwise uninvolved fictional or historical characters: Kirk/ Spock, Dumbledore/Snape, the Skipper/Gilligan. I’m reluctant to invoke Internet Rule 34 (“If it exists, there’s porn about it”), but it applies here.

In my research for this review, I explored the underworld of fan-created fi lth, just to see how deep and broad it goes. My search for a pairing of Cuzco and Kronk, from The Emperor’s New Groove, turned up empty-handed, and the results for Brian/Dom, from the Fast and Furious franchise, were underwhelming and uninspired. But I did fi nd one glorious piece of prose that coupled Jeff Goldblum and a dinosaur, which used a brilliant, blush-inducing— though regrettably unprintable—alliteration to describe Goldblum’s genitalia. I don’t even want to tell you what I found about Minions.

The sheer breadth demonstrated by my small sample survey of slash fiction only hints at how much of this outsider content is out there. It’s safe to assume that millions of people, young and old, have used slash fiction to explore and express their own sexualities in a world still hostile toward fluidity and experimentation.

It’s surprising, then, that Clay Liford’s new fi lm, Slash, is among the fi rst to truly give the subject its due.

The protagonist is Neil (Michael Johnston), a teenager in Texas who is shunned at school but comes to life in front of his computer screen, where he constructs lurid prose about a sci-fi series called Vanguard. After his private obsession is outed at school, Neil falls for fellow fan and cosplayer Julia (Hannah Marks), who encourages his talents as a writer and soon becomes the object of his sexually confused affections. Their back-andforth relationship culminates in a testy weekend at a comic convention that decides their future not just as fanfic writers, but also as friends.

Neil and Julia often cite the Brontë sisters, who supposedly wrote fanfic about Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington. This historical tidbit, along with the film’s occasional nods to queer and feminist theories, demonstrates the significance of this once disregarded subculture. Slash uses that significance as evidence that a hobby some disapproving parents might consider deviant behavior is a lot more normal than it’s usually characterized.

Many offspring of Internet fandoms have lined up for a place in academia; after all, fan fiction, erotic or otherwise, is predicated on analysis, subversion, and reclamation. Fans

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must “unpack” a work before they can illuminate its erotic subtext. Besides, revealing the subversive sexual undercurrents of seemingly heteronormative media is what queer theorists and scholars have done for decades.

Erotic fan fiction isn’t just an expression of sexual identity—it’s a form of empowerment. In Slash, Liford succeeds at normalizing fan behavior for skeptical audiences. But he’s not as successful navigating his characters’ sexualities. Neil is confused about his orientation, but most of his attention— and most of the film—is devoted to his standard hetero relationship with Julia.

Julia is not much more than a rote collection of “bad girl” signifiers: She smokes, she swears at teachers, she wears globs of eye makeup, and her best friend is pregnant. Her own struggles with sexual identity humanize her, but that’s barely hinted at.

Sexual fluidity is hard to come by in coming-of-age films. The bookish, sensitive, insecure white male teenager is, by this point, a familiar and increasingly uncomfortable trope; the slash-fiction context and sexual questioning might be new, but not much else in Slash is. In a universe where Jeff Goldblum shacking up with a dinosaur can be presented with eloquence, it’s disappointing that Slash doesn’t offer more. Maybe it’s up to the future authors of Slash slash fiction to draw that out. ◆

WHAT

The Public Cinema: Slash

WHERE

Scruffy City Hall (32 Market Square)

WHEN

Wednesday, Oct. 12, at 8 p.m.

HOW MUCH Free

INFO

publiccinema.org

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 19

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Music

Piano Therapy Ben Maney seizes his moment with the wide-ranging new band Carpe Opacare

BY CAROL Z. SHANE

P

ianist Ben Maney plays eclectic, leg-pumping, lost-in-the-moment jazz. With his lightning-fast runs, chordal shifts, and tumbling textures, he takes the listener on a tour of his influences, from the early ones such as Motown, Chick Corea, and George Winston to stride to minimalism and, well, whatever he’s heard lately.

Known to Knoxville audiences as a soloist as well as through collaborations with the Mac Daddies, the defunct blues outfit Jenna and Her Cool Friends, and his own band Countless Sheep, Maney says his creative muse is “like a firefly.”

“I get involved in lots of projects,” he says. “For about two minutes at a time.”

The latest is Carpe Opacare, a collective that had its beginnings when Maney and vocalist Yasameen Hoffman-Shahin performed at a Big Ears kickoff party in March. More recently, the two appeared with the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra at Ijams Nature Center’s annual Symphony in the Park fundraiser. For Carpe Opacare—Latin for “seize the dusk”—Maney has pumped up the sound by adding bassist Daniel Shifflett and drummer Alonzo Lewis. The group will perform at least twice this month: at Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria on Monday, Oct. 10, and then at the inaugural Lincoln Park Community Festival at Lincoln Park United Methodist Church on Sunday, Oct. 16. Maney will also play a solo show at Sugar Mama’s Bakery on Saturday, Oct. 15.

Maney was born in Michigan but grew up in North Carolina. “I was

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

enamored of music, particularly live music,” he says. “I was fascinated by anyone playing an instrument. When I was about 7, my dad brought home a piano from a yard sale. I think he paid, like, 50 dollars for it.

“It looked like somebody had decided to build a piano, didn’t know how, got about halfway through with it, and then gave up. A lot of the keys didn’t have key tops; they were just bare wood.

I learned my way around it by thinking, ‘brown, brown, white, brown, white.’”

The family moved frequently to accommodate Maney’s father’s career in social work. Shy and introspective, Maney had a hard time adjusting to each new location. In some pockets of the Tar Heel state, the 1964 Civil Rights Act—and its attendant desegre-

gation of schools—was still a bitter pill only half-swallowed by the local populace. Bewildered and frustrated by the racism he witnessed, he yearned, he says, for something he couldn’t name. And then he found it.

“My mother dressed me up like a cowboy and I played some ‘Home on the Range’ kind of song in the school talent show,” he says. “And then this black girl got up onstage and sang something—it might have been ‘Tracks of My Tears,’ by Smokey Robinson. She didn’t have an accompanist—she just sang, and she was putting in fills and singing with such emotion. I mean, I just had chills. I was destroyed. This was, like, one of my peers. I’d never been so affected by a live music performance.

“I internalized that sound. And from then on, I was always trying to find it on the piano. The blues scale, the minor pentatonic scale—I’d get home from school and go straight to the piano. It became my therapy.

Later, when we lived in Hendersonville, I had a piano teacher who had no interest in blues scales. In fact, he detested jazz. But he taught me music theory, and the tools that he gave me helped with my piano therapy.”

When Maney landed in Knoxville for his senior year of high school, he fell under the spell of local blues legend Hector Qirko. Later, in the

University of Tennessee jazz studies program, he was tutored by Donald Brown and Rusty Holloway.

Maney gradually started to consider a career in music. He played with prog-rock and jam bands Free Fourmula and People of the Squares.

“Very impressive, but hard to listen to,” he says.

A stint with a fusion band in the Dominican Republic followed. When he returned to East Tennessee, he started to collaborate with other local artists. Soon, he was in demand. Now he’s found his own voice as a composer, and that’s what he’s concentrating on lately.

Listen to the extended intro of Maney’s composition “Like a Cat,” which will be on the set list this month, and you can hear his process, always in motion. Initially repetitive and minimalist, the music explodes out of its trance, as if a Bach toccata threw itself over a cliff and settled into a series of creeping, step-down chords, paving the way for the vocal: “Like a cat—you’re like a cat/Just sit and stare at me when I turn my head away.”

Maney’s a soulful singer himself, but Hoffman-Shahin, who also sings in Electric Darling, will be featured on this one.

“She’s phenomenal,” he says.

That’s not a bad description of Maney, either. ◆

WHO

Carpe Opacare

WHERE

Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (200 E. Jackson Ave.)

WHEN

Monday, Oct. 10, at 10 p.m.

INFO

barleysknoxville.com or facebook.com/ carpe.opacare

Books

Tiki Man Tim Glazner reveals the secret history of the Mai-Kai, the ultimate tiki bar

BY COURY TURCZYN

N

orth Knoxville’s Tim “Swanky” Glazner is one of the nation’s leading experts on tiki. How does a former punk rocker become an authority on the Polynesian pop-culture trend that consumed midcentury America’s collective imagination?

Thrifting. Knoxville’s second-hand shops in the 1980s were chock-full of Atomic Age ephemera.

Glazner began filling his home with vintage clocks, lamps, radios, sharkskin suits, and LPs. The snarling visage of the tiki became a recurring presence. In 2002, Glazner organized a tiki convention at Trader Vic’s in Atlanta called Hukilau—Creative Loafing named it the event of the year.

His tiki empire grew with a website (swankpad.org), his own line of tiki products (swankpadproductions.com), and a full-blown tiki bar, the Hapa Haole Hideaway, in his home.

His latest tiki achievement is a coffee-table book devoted to Fort Lauderdale’s Mai-Kai, one of the last great tiki bars in the world. Mai-Kai: History and Mystery of The Iconic Tiki Restaurant (Schiffer Books) shows how tiki is more than just campy fun—it can serve as a genuine way of life involving relaxation, complex mixed drinks, and a good deal of sex appeal. He will be signing books and serving up Jasper’s Jamaican cocktails on Friday, Oct. 7, at POP Weasel Emporium.

What is it about tiki that appeals to you?

Putting the primitive beside the modern and atomic-era furnishings is a perfect contrast. Like my midcentury collection, it was something you could collect for cheap and very intimately interact with it. You can mix up a 1940s Mai Tai recipe, pour it into a 1950s tiki mug, dress in a 1960s aloha shirt, and play old exotica records

surrounded by vintage ephemera in your home tiki bar. You can even collect vintage rum. It is a fantasy land in your home—an escape from your daily grind. Inside the bar the rest of the world can be very far away.

How deep does your tiki obsession go?

I’m just your typical obsessed collector. I’ve been known to spend a weekend driving cross-country to bring home a massive piece of wood because it used to be part of a tiki in the Mai-Kai, though now it is just unrecognizable rotten wood. My collection is pretty complete. But these days I am tracking down the descendants of Don the Beachcomber and people who were his friends to try to piece together his life. I’m collecting stories and anecdotes instead of mugs and menus.

Why did you choose the Mai-Kai as the subject of your first book?

I’ve been very involved with the Mai-Kai since we moved the Hukilau event there in 2003. The Mai-Kai chose me. I was collecting stuff and stories for years. One day I was feeling very weird. I was having a sort of anxiety attack and I just could not get calm. I went in the dark, quiet bar and started meditating and after about 10 minutes of silence I heard the answer. “You have to write the book.

You’ll never rest until you tell their stories.” It was clear as day and I started right then.

Is the place still authentically tiki today?

It is the last real vestige of tiki’s heyday, and they still keep everything as close to the early days as possible.

The whole place is tradition, from the white pants and dark-jacketed maitre d’ that greets you to the rain on the

windows of the bar. But one of the things that is really unique and goes back a long way are the drinks. The Mystery Drink is a crazy performance piece that started in 1958. A 28-inch gong resonates across the whole place and a lovely maiden in a sarong brings out a massive flaming drink bowl, puts a lei around your neck and a kiss on your cheek, does a sort of hula swaying dance and bows, then walks away. It’s mesmerizing. The Kona Coffee Grog is another show tableside, pouring long ribbons of flaming 151-proof rum into a wonderful coffee cocktail. That drink performance started nearly 80 years ago in Hollywood at the original Don the Beachcomber.

What sort of research did you undertake to tell its story?

I was hearing stories from the first visit in 2003. When Mai-Kai founder Jack Thornton passed away in 2008, I couldn’t believe I had never talked to him. So many stories were suddenly gone. That’s when I started tracking people down for interviews. I’d search Google for phone numbers and addresses and call them up. I really didn’t know if there was ever going to be a book but I introduced myself as someone writing a book about the Mai-Kai because that sounds a lot better than just being a weirdo tiki-obsessed fan. I’ve been collecting ephemera and stories for 13 years, but really started in earnest a couple of years ago when I realized the Mai-Kai’s 60th anniversary was coming up. That seemed like the ideal time to stop and write what I had.

Did you uncover any surprising tales?

The big surprise was Bob Van Dorpe.

I had never heard of him when I started researching and then realized none of it would have happened like it did without him. He was there from the earliest days. And then I found out that he became best friends with Don the Beachcomber. It was sensational.

Donn Beach is a god to tiki fans. We’d all love to time-travel back and meet the man. Now I was talking to his soul brother. He’d worked with him and was at his bedside when he died and arranged his funeral. It was an amazing connection among many.

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How is tiki culture today different than during its heyday?

In the heyday, we wouldn’t have gone to Don the Beachcomber’s or Trader Vic’s.

First it was too expensive and second we’d have needed a coat and tie. They were top-tier restaurants. Not many places like that exist now, and no tiki establishment is like that anymore.

Trader Vic’s is pretty fancy, but they will not turn you away if you aren’t in a sport jacket, but you still can’t wear a hat in the Mai-Kai’s Molokai Bar. It’s all much more relaxed. Thankfully the new crop of tiki bars have the correct vintage Don the Beachcomber drink recipes and are very eager to make them correctly.

There were many decades of bad rip-offs and then just devolved drinks in the ’80s and ’90s. The recipes had nearly died with Donn Beach himself.

This era of craft cocktails has perfectly dovetailed with the tiki resurgence. ◆

WHAT

Tim Glazner: Mai-Kai: History and Mystery of The Iconic Tiki Restaurant

WHERE

POP Weasel Emporium (611 N. Gay St.)

WHEN

Friday, Oct. 7, from 6:30-8:30 p.m.

INFO

facebook.com/ MaiKaiHistory

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 21

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Theater

History Lesson The moral of Arthur Miller’s Crucible remains depressingly relevant

BY ALAN SHERROD

T

he Crucible, Arthur Miller’s regularly revived dramatic take on the Salem witch trials—now running at the University of Tennessee’s Carousel Theatre, in a Clarence Brown Theatre production—has its roots in Miller’s own experience in the 1950s with the tyranny of McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. The play’s warning against irrational fear and hypocrisy has been valid throughout its life, since the first Broadway production in 1953. In the American political environment of 2016, its warning seems all the more relevant.

Although Miller drew all of his characters directly from the available history of the Salem witch trials, his

theatrical narrative has elements of both altered fact and fiction. Miller’s plot revolves around a farmer, John Proctor (played in CBT’s production

by Grant Goodman), and his wife, Elizabeth ( Jenny McKnight), who, along with other townspeople, are falsely accused of witchcraft by local children. One of the accusers is 17-year-old Abigail Williams (Lauren Pennline), a niece of the local minister, the Rev. Samuel Parris (Terry Weber). Abigail, who had been a housemaid for the Proctors until Elizabeth discovered her affair with John, moves between vengeance and self-protection, mindful of her own disingenuousness but unable to extricate herself. The accusations

Along with Alley and Weber, a number of UT Theatre faculty, CBT regulars, and MFA acting fellows filled out the solid ensemble cast. Roderick Peeples created a richly villainous judge, the Deputy-Governor Danforth, who is the epicenter of the unrelenting insanity that turns townspeople into suspects. Gracie Belt, as Mary Warren, was perfectly duplicitous. Carléne Pochette gave Tituba, the Parris family slave, a remarkable depth of presentation.

CBT veteran actors Carol Mayo Jenkins (Rebecca Nurse), Jay Doolittle (Giles Cory), and Donald Thorne (Francis Nurse) gave the secondary roles an expansive depth of character.

Designer Ron Keller’s set of rough-hewn boards, aided by the lighting of Kenton Yeager, created a sense of depth in the limited space of the Carousel Theatre. Joe Payne’s impressive soundtrack of music and environmental effects was immersive and beautifully subliminal.

The lasting value of The Crucible lies in its ability to have us question the nature of evil and the motivations of those who claim to want to vanquish it. The real evil, as history tells us, resides inside us, as fear and hatred. One hopes that is a lesson we will eventually learn. ◆

snowball, starting an inquisition led by the sanctimonious Parris.

Director Calvin MacLean has crafted a compelling production, emphasizing character development and narrative in a relatively simple physical environment and with the visual metaphor of constrained stage movement. Goodman, last seen here in the 2015 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, depicts a man capable of surprising philosophical depth.

Proctor is an honest man who battles human weakness, prone to emotional outbursts and physicality and unwilling to accept injustice. As Elizabeth, McKnight carefully portrays a resolute woman, blessed (or burdened) with an unbending moral compass—and forced to lie to save her husband’s life. Her transformation in facing their final crisis was remarkable.

The most stunning transformation, though, is that of the Rev. John Hale (David Brian Alley), a minister who has been investigating local witchcraft. Hale, who prides himself on his knowledge of demonic evil, wholeheartedly embraces the effort to root it out. But he eventually realizes that the Salem court is abusing justice, not serving it, and he encourages the suspects to falsely confess in order to save their lives.

WHAT

Clarence Brown Theatre: The Crucible

WHEN

Through Oct. 16

WHERE

Carousel Theatre (1714 Andy Holt Ave.)

HOW MUCH $26-$42

Photo by Brynn Yeager

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

INFO

clarencebrowntheatre.com

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

MUSIC

Thursday, Oct. 6 HOLLIS CREEK REVIVAL • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE HANDSOME AND THE HUMBLES • Scruffy City Hall • 6PM • Part of Wayne Bledsoe’s weekly Six O’Clock Swerve show on WDVX. • FREE SAM BURCHFIELD AND MICHAEL LOGEN • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • From folk, to funk, to southern soul — Sam and his band capture it all. • FREE DAVE COLEMAN AND THE COAL MEN • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 8PM DESTROYER WITH ZACHARY CALE • Pilot Light • 9PM • Destroyer’s latest incarnation often appears to take sonic cues from a distinctly British (usually Scottish, to be precise) strain of sophisti-pop: you might hear traces of Aztec Camera, Prefab Sprout, Orange Juice, or The Blow Monkeys. These songs merge a casual literary brilliance with intense melodic verve, nimble arrangements, and a certain blue-eyed soul sadness. 18 and up. • $12-$15 • See Spotlight on page 26.

THE DEAD 27S • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Sometimes the stars and planets align and things that can be difficult come surprisingly easy. Such is the case with the formation of Dead 27s. After playing a few casual gigs, the obvious chemistry could no longer be ignored.

OLD SALT UNION • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Friday, Oct. 7 NO FUSS AND FEATHERS WITH UNCLE SHUFFELO AND HIS HAINT HOLLOW HOOTENANNY • WDVX • 12PM • Part of WDVX’s Blue Plate Special, a six-days-a-week lunchtime concert series featuring local, regional, and national Americana, folk, pop, rock, and everything else. • FREE WEDNESDAY 13 WITH ONE EYED DOLL AND THE THINGS THEY CARRIED • The Concourse • 6:30PM • Plus Deconbrio and La Basura Del Diablo. 18 and up. Visit internationalknox.com. • $15-$18 THE DEER • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE TIM LEE 3 ROCK ‘N’ ROLL HAPPY HOUR • Pilot Light • 7PM • Knoxville band Tim Lee 3 and their offspring alt duo, Bark, have announced a four-week series of early shows at Pilot Light culminating in the TL3’s 10th Anniversary/ record release party for the group’s fifth full-length recording, Tin, Man, on Oct. 28. The first of the four events takes place on Oct. 7 and features the Greg Horne Band and R.B. Morris, who will perform a set backed by Horne and the TL3. • $5 THE NITTY GRITTY DIRT BAND • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Now in their fifth decade together, the iconic and profoundly influential Nitty Gritty Dirt Band continues to add to their legendary status. • $32-$52 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE BLACK JACKET SYMPHONY: THE BEATLES’ REVOLVER • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • The Black Jacket Symphony returns to the Bijou Theatre to perform The Beatles’ “Revolver” album in it’s entirety. Visit blackjacketsymphony.com. • $28 JACK HERRANEN • Laurel Theater • 8PM • Just back from Bolivia and Argentina, Jack will be highlighting songs written in south Knoxville, in particular tunes penned in his home base of Vestal—songs that draw upon workers’ history and agrarian folkways, and current struggles for 23

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

dignity and justice. • $11 MUTLU WITH THREE MILE SMILE • The Open Chord • 8PM • Mutlu is a soulful, singer-songwriter. A Philadelphia native and first-generation American of Turkish descent, Mutlu has already built a substantial fan base in his hometown, while winning widespread praise for his prior releases. All ages. • $12-$15 KINCAID • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM PALE ROOT • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria (Maryville) • 9PM VINCENT AND YAGER • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE THE NINTH STREET STOMPERS • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE RUSSIAN TSARLAG • Pilot Light • 10PM • Providence, R.I., garbage-sculptor Russian Tsarlag, aka Carlos Gonzales, has been trucking his moldy fruit cart of sewage-pop and bad acid storytelling across the American wasteland since longer than most people have had an email account. 18 and up. • $5 FOUR FOR KERRY BENEFIT CONCERT • Relix Variety Theatre • 7PM • Soul Connection, Phil and The Phat Notes, Smooth Groove, and the brand new SoulRevue will perform to honor and benefit Kerry Hodge, long-time guitarist for Soul Connection/Sanction, Chico and The Men, and more.

In Spring of 2015 Kerry suffered a stroke and is not currently playing the guitar. Four bands come together to show their love for Kerry and to raise funds to assist Kerry and his wife, Judith with his medical bills. • $10 Saturday, Oct. 8 THE DIGS WITH BOB DELEVANTE • 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 PAT REEDY AND THE LONGTIME GONERS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 4PM • FREE SAM LEWIS • The Shed at Smoky Mountain Harley-Davidson (Maryville) • 7PM • $10 DAVE COLEMAN WITH BOB DELEVANTE • Royal Oaks Event Center (Maryville) • 7:30PM • Dave Coleman, leader of the Coal Men, has been cited as a next-generation Tony Joe White, an artist known for writing soulful and thoughtful songs. • $15 TRANSPARENT SOUL WITH SHADOWED SELF AND CLOCKWORK ASYLUM • The Open Chord • 8PM • All ages. • $7 EXIT 60 • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM THE BURNIN’ HERMANS • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM HAROLD NAGGE AND ALAN WYATT • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE THE JON MASON PROJECT • Paul’s Oasis • 9:30PM FOUR LEAF PEAT • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • Knoxville’s finest purveyors of traditional Irish music. • FREE 40 OZ. BURRITO WITH WHITE NOYZE AND JAHIMSA • Preservation Pub • 10PM • A tribute to Sublime. 21 and up.

Sunday, Oct. 9 SHIFFLETT’S JAZZ BENEDICT • 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 J. LUKE • Wild Wing Cafe • 6PM • FREE HOWIE DAY • The Open Chord • 7PM • With hits like “Collide” and “She Says” Howie Days emotionally resonant lyrics and inventive melodies have earned him both critical praise and a legion of devoted fans. He is known for his energetic, heartfelt shows, where he connects with audiences through the strength of his songwriting

CALENDAR

and his quirky sense of humor. • $17-$20 SKILLET WITH SICK PUPPIES AND DEVOUR THE DAY • The International • 7:30PM • Skillet recently made headlines when their last album, Awake, became one of just three rock albums to be certified platinum in 2012. All ages.

UNIVERSAL SIGH • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Monday, Oct. 10 CAROLINE COTTER WITH THE BEARDED • 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

COLD COUNTRY • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Long time fixture in the Alaska bluegrass community, Todd Grebe and Cold Country has come full circle from being a string quartet to a five piece electric country band, having recently added drums and electric telecaster guitar to their sound. • FREE CAROLINE COTTER • Sugar Mama’s • 7PM • Caroline Cotter, Portland, Maine based singer-songwriter’s debut album, Dreaming as I Do offers an eclectic mix of melodic honesty. With a captivating soprano voice and award-winning songwriting, Caroline’s songs take you from an intimate Parisian salon to the mountains of Colorado and into the depths of the human heart.

LISPECTORFEST: A CELEBRATION OF THE WORKS OF CLARICE LISPECTOR Lawson McGhee Library (500 W. Church Ave.) • Thursday, Oct. 6 • 6 p.m. • Free • knoxlib.org

The Brazilian novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and journalist Clarice Lispector produced a dazzling, dizzying array of books during her short life. By 1977, when the 57-year-old Lispector died from cancer, she ranked as one of Latin America’s great modernists; her work varies over the years, and book from book, but it’s distinguished by glittering, diamond-hard prose, political courage, and penetrating psychological insight.

Lispector is ranked by knowledgeable critics among the greatest Latin American writers of the 20th century, but she’s been virtually unknown in the United States. That’s changing—the progressive independent publisher New Directions has released translated editions of several of Lispector’s key works in the last five years, including, last year, the monumental 640-page Complete Stories—the first collection, in any language, of Lispector’s all 85 pieces of short fiction.

This month, the University of Tennessee’s department of modern foreign languages and literature will take a look at Lispector’s life and work with four days of film screenings and lectures, including two talks by Katrina Dodson, who translated The Complete Stories. (Visit mfll.utk.edu for a complete schedule.) The Knox County Public Library is taking part, too, with a two-part discussion of Lispector’s short fiction on Oct. 6 and Oct. 13. The discussions will be led by Wanessa Velloso, a professor of Portuguese at UT. (You don’t need to have read Lispector’s stories to participate—think of these discussions as an introduction.) (Matthew Everett)

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Spotlight: Destroyer

28

Spotlight: M83

CALENDAR WONKY TONK • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

CARPE OPACARE • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 10PM • Ben Maney teams up with Electric Darling’s Yasameen Hoffman-Shahin for soulful jazzy tunes. See Music story on page 20.

Tuesday, Oct. 11 MILKWEED WITH THE SINGER AND THE SONGWRITER • 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 MILKWEED • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Milkweed’s music is a mix of poetry and American music.

Harmony, strings and words that rise to the occasion are what make up the Milkweed sound. • FREE M83 • The Mill and Mine • 8PM • 2011’s Hurry Up Were Dreaming, placed M83 in the direct current of the mainstream, gaining acclaim as Gonzalez’s masterpiece summation of all the elements and influences of his epic space-age future pop. • $40 • See Spotlight on page 28.

Wednesday, Oct. 12 THE TALL PINES WITH ANTHONY ADAMS AND THE NITE OWLS • 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 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 ROYAL HOUNDS • Boyd’s Jig and

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

Reel • 7PM • Las Vegas roots-rock band The Royal Hounds celebrate their new CD, Poker All Night Long, on Tennessee Shines. The high-energy trio led by East Tennessee’s own Scott Hines has been wowing and entertaining audiences across the globe for years with their unique approach to live music. Known for their on-stage antics and humorous approach to music, The Royal Hounds offer a live show unlike anything on the scene. • $10 THE DANIEL RYAN TRIO • The Bistro at the Bijou • 7PM • Live jazz. • FREE MIKE STUD WITH SONREAL • The Concourse • 9PM • Most hip-hop stars don’t get their start playing college baseball, but Mike Stud is one MC who used his downtime from the diamond to hone his skills rhyming and rapping. (Billboard) 18 and up. Visit internationalknox. com. • $16-$75 SAFE IN SOUND TOUR 2016: BORGORE, TERRAVITA, AND LAXX • The International • 9PM • With opening act Ede Gee. 18 and up. Visit internationalknox.com. • $25-$60 LOVEJOYS • Bar Marley • 9PM Thursday, Oct. 13 DREW KOHL WITH THE GRASSABILLIES • 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 CARMONAS • Scruffy City Hall • 6PM • Part of Wayne Bledsoe’s weekly Six O’Clock Swerve show on WDVX. • FREE

THURSDAY NIGHT HIP-HOP SHOWDOWN • The Open Chord • 8PM • With Spook, Titan, Collin Steen, Black 865Finest, and GQ Lotto. • $5-$10 CHROME PONY WITH THAT’S MY KID • Pilot Light • 9PM • 18 and up. • $5 VIETJAM • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM QUAKER CITY NIGHT HAWKS • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

MIDNIGHT VOYAGE: MANIC FOCUS • The Concourse • 10PM • With Marvel Years and Live Animals. 18 and up. Visit internationalknox.com. • $10-$12 Friday, Oct. 14 ROCKY TOP PICKIN’ PARTY • Mabry-Hazen House • 6PM • The Rocky Top Pickin’ Party will feature the musical talents of The Bearded, the Hardin Valley Thunder, and you—all under an East Tennessee full moon and close to the heart of downtown Knoxville. All musicians are invited to play. This family-friendly and low-waste fundraiser for Keep Knoxville Beautiful is unlike any other in Knoxville; in between sets, pickers of all levels will form breakout sessions around the grounds. Everyone is invited, but musicians with an instrument pay only $5 to enter. For tickets visit KeepKnoxvilleBeautiful.org • $15-$20 COLIN HOTZ WITH BECKY WARREN • 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 ALIVE AFTER FIVE: THE BLAIRXPERIENCE • Knoxville Museum of Art • 6PM • Born and raised in Knoxville, Larry

Blair’s wide range of vocals has been described by many as” velvety and sultry”. Blair started his musical career as one of the lead vocalists in a group he and his brothers formed called “The Blair Brothers”, becoming well known in many local circuits. Blair and his brothers gained recognition and popularity and was the opening acts for such artist as Ray Charles, The Four Tops, Sha-Na – na, Jerry Reed, Tony Orlando, and Marie Osmond. He later formed a solo project which evolved into the current BlairXperience which has a range of music that is endless, from Pop, Gospel, R&B, Blues, Jazz, and Top 10 chart busters. They’re celebrating the 23rd anniversary of Alive After Five. • $10 JOSH COTTRELL • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 7PM • FREE ANDREW SCOTCHIE AND THE RIVER RATS • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • Andrew Scotchie and the River Rats formed in Asheville, NC, as a street busking project in late 2011. Revered for their high energy live shows, dynamic musicianship and Scotchie’s larger than life stage presence, the band has continued to craft their hard driving style of rock and blues and are dedicated to building their musical family everywhere they go. • FREE RED WITH DISCIPLE, SPOKEN, AND RANDOM HERO • The Concourse • 7PM • Over the last decade, RED has emerged as a career artist. Their honesty and transparency about who they are as human beings, what motivates and inspires them, and what they aim to accomplish with each step forward has established an army of loyal fans.

The band’s success emerged through a pure emotional connection with their audience, the power of their live

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Thursdays ~@~ 3:40 pm

October 18-21, 2016

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This fall the 2016 UT AuthorFest will celebrate the work and life of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, one of the most important writers of the 20th Century.

7240 Kingston pike

“One of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century utterly original and brilliant, haunting and disturbing.”

- colm tóibín

in the Gallery Shopping Center

For a full schedule list visit:

mfll.utk.edu/Lispector

Streaming 24.7.365 at WUTKRADIO.COM 24

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

CALENDAR performances, and most importantly, the passionate, honest dedication of band members Michael Barnes, Anthony Armstrong, and Randy Armstrong. All ages. Visit internationalknox.com. • $18-$20 FROG AND TOAD’S DIXIE QUARTET • The Crown and Goose • 8PM • Live jazz featuring a mix of original music, early jazz and more. • FREE THE VALLEY OPERA WITH STONE BROKE SAINTS • The Open Chord • 8PM • The time has come for locals The Valley Opera to release their debut album, Start Again. All ages.

• $5 THE DEAD RINGERS WITH HAZEL • Preservation Pub • 8PM • 21 and up.

REBEL MOUNTAIN • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM THE VIBRASLAPS • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM CAL ROBBINZ • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE

he began touring while at the University of Arkansas and two years after his first entry into the Top Twenty on the Billboard Album Chart, Ben Rector is back with a new album and is feeling Brand New. The singer-songwriter’s newest album marks a return to the spirit of his youth, when he was a music-crazed teenager playing guitar in his Tulsa bedroom. At the same time, its message is both sincere and humble, anchored by songs that are honest and meaningful. It’s pop music with a purpose. • $29.50-$39.50 LARA HOPE AND THE ARK TONES WITH BELLE OF THE FALL • Preservation Pub • 10PM • 21 and up.

Saturday, Oct. 15 BELLE OF THE FALL WITH MIC THE PROPHET AND THE BOTTOM LINE • 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 BRYAN PIXA • Vienna Coffee House (Maryville) • 7PM • FREE EAST CAMERON FOLKCORE • Sugarlands Distilling Co. (Gatlinburg) • 7PM • FREE DERIK HULTQUIST WITH SEAN MCCONNELL • The Square Room • 8PM • Enigmatic pop songwriter Derik Hultquist channels the emotion of losing two family members to cancer in the last year and watching his father battle the disease. He’ll be backed with a three-piece band, creating a troubadour psychedelia mix set to the tune of deep, visceral lyrics. Performing new material from his 12-track debut Southern Iron, where Hultquist merges the brain power of producers Frank Liddell (Brandi Carlile, Aubrie Sellers) and Eric Masse (Rayland Baxter, Andrew Combs, Mikky Ekko), creating a mix of classic production and aural atmospheres. Friends Rayland Baxter and Matthew Logan Vasquez weave their sultry vocals in and out of the record, which can be heard in full, backed by Hultquist’s band throughout the tour.

HILLBILLY JEDI • Two Doors Down (Maryville) • 9PM THREE STAR REVIVAL WITH MARADEEN • Scruffy City Hall • 9PM • Jazzy, jammy, funky Americana.

THE CHUCK MULLICAN JAZZ BONANZA • The Bistro at the Bijou • 9PM • Live jazz. • FREE THE TOMMY JOHN BAND • Paul’s Oasis • 9:30PM FRAZIERBAND • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 10PM • FREE SOULFINGER • Preservation Pub • 10PM • The local funk/ soul/R&B band celebrates its 10th anniversary. 21 and up.

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

Sunday, Oct. 16 SHIFFLETT’S JAZZ BENEDICT • 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 THE BLUES SESSIONS • Star of Knoxville Riverboat • 4PM • Come join the Smoky Mountain Blues Society as they present some of the best known regional Blues Music artists performing on specialty cruises on the Tennessee River. From April through October, blues lovers will convene to celebrate this truly American art-form during a 3 hour Sunday afternoon cruise on the Star of Knoxville Tennessee Riverboat. Visit smokymountainblues.org. • $16-$20 J. LUKE • Wild Wing Cafe • 6PM • FREE BEN RECTOR • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • Eight years after

OPEN MIC AND SONGWRITER NIGHTS

Sunday, Oct. 9 EPWORTH MONTHLY OLD HARP SHAPE NOTE SINGING • Laurel Theater • 6:30PM • Visit jubileearts.org. • FREE SING OUT KNOXVILLE • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • A folk singing circle open to everyone. • FREE Tuesday, Oct. 11 PRESERVATION PUB SINGER/SONGWRITER NIGHT • Preservation Pub • 7PM OLD-TIME JAM SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Hosted by Sarah Pirkle. • FREE Wednesday, Oct. 12 TIME WARP TEA ROOM OLD-TIME JAM • Time Warp Tea Room • 7PM • Regular speed old-time/fiddle jam every Wednesday. All instruments and skill levels welcome.

SCHULZ BRÄU OPEN MIC NIGHT • Schulz Bräu Brewing Company • 8PM • Every Wednesday. • FREE BRACKINS BLUES JAM • Brackins Blues Club • 9PM • A weekly open session hosted by Tommie John. • FREE

THURSDAY, OCT. 13

SCOTTISH MUSIC SESSION • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 7:15PM • Held on the second and fourth Thursdays of each month.

• FREE Sunday, Oct. 16 Family Friendly Drum Circle • Ijams Nature Center • 3:30PM • Drumming for kids of all ages on the third Sunday of the month. Bring a drum or share one of ours.

Bring a blanket or chair. Open to drummers of all ages and levels. Free and fun. • FREE

by Arthur Miller An enduring masterpiece on the evils of mindless persecution and the terrifying power of false accusations.

Old-Time Slow Jam • Boyd’s Jig and Reel • 4PM • A monthly old-time music session, held on the third Sunday

DJ AND DANCE NIGHTS of each month. • FREE

Saturday, Oct. 8 ASCEND • The International • 9PM • Ascend is Knoxville’s interactive dance experience. Take it to the next level with us every Saturday night with the best music of today and your favorite throwbacks. 18 and up. • $5-$10 REWIND DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Hits from

Photo: Lauren Pennline, Grant Goodman, and Jenny McKnight; by Elizabeth Aaron October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 25

CALENDAR the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and ‘00s. Visit internationalknox. com. 18 and up. • $5 Saturday, Oct. 15 TEMPLE DANCE NIGHT • The Concourse • 9PM • Knoxville’s long-running alternative once night. 18 and up. • $5 ASCEND • The International • 9PM • Ascend is Knoxville’s interactive dance experience. Take it to the next level with us every Saturday night with the best music of today and your favorite throwbacks. 18 and up. • $5-$10

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Thursday, Oct. 6 SCRUFFY CITY ORCHESTRA • First Baptist Church • 7PM • A new venue for musicians from the greater Knoxville metropolitan area. Scruffy City Orchestra kicks off with regular rehearsals on Thursdays beginning Aug. 25.

Conductors are Mat Wilkinson and Ace Edewards.

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

Prospective members, especially string players, are encouraged to contact Alicia Meryweather at ScruffyCityOrchestra@gmail.com for more information. • FREE

spicy mix of Latin, Spanish, Sephardic, Balkan, and classical sounds founded by four multi-award-winning, globe-trotting virtuosi who hail from Spain, the USA, former Yugoslavia, and the UK, and who have played, separately and together, on the world’s most prestigious stages. • $25

Friday, Oct. 7 KSO POPS SERIES: ‘PET SOUNDS LIVE - A TRIBUTE TO THE MUSIC OF THE BEACH BOYS’ • Tennessee Theatre • 8PM • 50 years ago, the Beach Boys made history with Pet Sounds- a groundbreaking effort that inspired the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper, and was voted second in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. Pet Sounds will be faithfully reproduced in its entirety with a second half of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits including “I Get Around” and “Barbara Ann.”

Sunday, Oct. 9 OAK RIDGE COMMUNITY BAND AND WIND ENSEMBLE: MUSIC OF EUROPE • Oak Ridge High School • 3:30PM • This concert begins the 2016-2017 season. For more information, visit www.orcb.org or call 865-482-3568. • $5 Tuesday, Oct. 11 MARYVILLE COLLEGE CHAMBER ENSEMBLES CONCERT • Clayton Center for the Arts • 7PM • The concert will include performances by four Maryville College ensembles: the Tartanband, MC’s newest ensemble directed by Dr. Eric Simpson, is an ensemble of student instrumentalists who create vibrant performances in the wind and percussion medium; the Maryville College Chamber Orchestra, directed by Dr. Christy Lee; the Lassies, a women’s student ensemble directed by Ashley Maynard; and Off Kilter, a small auditioned student ensemble directed by Stacey Wilner. • FREE

Saturday, Oct. 8 FANDANGO! • Pollard Technology Conference Center (Oak Ridge) • 7:30PM • The most exciting new group on Chicago’s musical scene, Fandango! is a toe-tappingly

Photo by Fabiola Carranza/Dead Oceans

DESTROYER Pilot Light (106 E. Jackson Ave.) • Thursday, Oct. 6 • 9 p.m. • $12/$15 at the door • thepilotlight.com or facebook.com/destroyer • 18 and up

Dan Bejar, the Canadian singer/songwriter who records and performs, with a rotating cast of backing musicians, as Destroyer, has followed a seemingly unpredictable creative path. In the late 1990s and early ’00s, he made several albums of better-than-average lo-fi indie folk-pop; by the time of Your Blues, in 2004, flourishes of Zombies- or Neutral Milk Hotel-style orchestral psychedelic grandeur were creeping into Bejar’s music. (It’s probably not coincidental that Bejar’s solo act reflected those influences after he began collaborating with A.C. Newman and Neko Case in the New Pornographers.)

Last year’s Poison Season feels like a culmination and a reconciliation of Bejar’s sometimes competing muses—a rich, slickly produced singer/songwriter pop album of surprising depth that owes debts to Leonard Cohen, the Walker Brothers’ Nite Flights, Bryan Ferry, and John Cale’s Paris 1919. It would have been hard to predict, in 2001, that Bejar would end up here—but looking back, it’s clear he’s been headed this way all along. With Zachary Cale. (Matthew Everett)

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Thursday, Oct. 13 SCRUFFY CITY ORCHESTRA • First Baptist Church • 7PM • A new venue for musicians from the greater Knoxville metropolitan area. Scruffy City Orchestra kicks off with regular rehearsals on Thursdays beginning Aug. 25.

Conductors are Mat Wilkinson and Ace Edewards.

Prospective members, especially string players, are encouraged to contact Alicia Meryweather at ScruffyCityOrchestra@gmail.com for more information. • FREE KSO MASTERWORKS: THE FOUR SEASONS • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • The KSO’s October Masterworks performances feature Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons, with violinist Giora Schmidt as soloist. • $13-$83 MARBLE CITY OPERA: ‘LA DIVINA’ AND ‘GALLANTRY’ • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 8PM • Marble City Opera will present two American comic operas: La Divina

by Thomas Pasatieri, and Gallantry, a soap-opera, opera

by Douglas Moore. Visit marblecityopera.com.

Friday, Oct. 14 KSO MASTERWORKS: THE FOUR SEASONS • Tennessee Theatre • 7:30PM • The KSO’s October Masterworks performances feature Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons, with violinist Giora Schmidt as soloist.

• $13-$83 MARBLE CITY OPERA: ‘LA DIVINA’ AND ‘GALLANTRY’ • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 8PM • Marble City Opera will present two American comic operas: La Divina

by Thomas Pasatieri, and Gallantry, a soap-opera, opera

by Douglas Moore. Visit marblecityopera.com.

THEATER AND DANCE

Thursday, Oct. 6 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: ‘THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE’ • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • The magic and mystery of the Great Lion Aslan and the struggle with the White Witch are what four children find when they inadvertently wander into an old wardrobe and arrive in Narnia. The war in Narnia is consuming the magical animals of Narnia, and only Aslan can bring about peace. Sept. 23-Oct. 9. Visit knoxvillechildrensthe-

atre.com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Arthur Miller’s searing play chronicles the historical events in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

The fear and accusations of Salem may be an aberration of the American Dream, but it has lent its name to later witch hunts that recur from time to time in the ongoing American story. Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

Friday, Oct. 7 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: ‘THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE’ • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 7PM • Sept. 23-Oct. 9. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • It’s opening night of Broadway’s newest play, and the wealthy producer is throwing a lavish party at her Manhattan townhouse. Downstairs the celebrities are pouring in, but the real action is upstairs in the bedroom, where a collection of theatre insiders (including the excitable playwright, the unstable director, and the pill-popping leading lady) await the reviews. Toss in an acerbic theatre critic and an insecure TV actor, and you have a hilarious recipe for the narcissism, childishness, and just plain irrationality that infuse the theatre. Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

Saturday, Oct. 8 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: ‘THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE’ • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 1PM and 5PM • Sept. 23-Oct. 9. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre. com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

Sunday, Oct. 9 KNOXVILLE CHILDREN’S THEATRE: ‘THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE’ • Knoxville Children’s Theatre • 3PM • Sept. 23-Oct. 9. Visit knoxvillechildrenstheatre.com. • $12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 2PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 2PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

Monday, Oct. 10 THE WORDPLAYERS: ‘HARVEY’ • The Square Room • 7PM • The WordPlayers present a staged reading of Mary Chase’s Pulitzer-winning drama about Elwood P. Dowd and his best friend—a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit named Harvey. Visit wordplayers.org. • FREE Wednesday, Oct. 12 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

Thursday, Oct. 13 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22 OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

ONCE • Clayton Center for the Arts (Maryville) • 7:30PM •

CALENDAR Once is the celebrated musical based on the Academy Award-winning film. Once tells the enchanting tale of a Dublin street musician who’s about to give up on his dream when a beautiful young woman takes a sudden interest in his haunting love songs. As the chemistry between them grows, his music soars to powerful new heights … but their unlikely connection turns out to be deeper and more complex than your everyday romance. • $39.50-$62.50 Friday, Oct. 14 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘EARTH AND SKY’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Earth and Sky is a poetic thriller about a would-be poet and part-time librarian named Sara McKeon whose lover of ten weeks, David Ames, is found dead one hot August morning in the city of Chicago. It appears that David, owner and manager of an expensive art-deco restaurant, may have been involved in several illicit activities including kidnapping, rape and murder. Unable to believe that the man she gave her heart to was a killer, and outraged that the police seem to have closed the book on the case, Sara begins her own investigation of the crime and is led deeper and deeper through the urban labyrinth into the contemporary underworld. Oct. 14-30. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Saturday, Oct. 15 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 7:30PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 8PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘EARTH AND SKY’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 8PM • Oct. 14-30. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15 Sunday, Oct. 16 CLARENCE BROWN THEATRE: ‘THE CRUCIBLE’ • Carousel Theatre • 2PM • Sept. 28-Oct. 16. Visit clarencebrowntheatre.com. • See review on page 22.

OAK RIDGE PLAYHOUSE: ‘IT’S ONLY A PLAY’ • Oak Ridge Playhouse • 2PM • Oct. 7-16. Visit orplayhouse.com.

THEATRE KNOXVILLE DOWNTOWN: ‘EARTH AND SKY’ • Theatre Knoxville Downtown • 3PM • Oct. 14-30. Visit theatreknoxville.com. • $15

COMEDY AND SPOKEN WORD

Friday, Oct. 7 FIRST FRIDAY COMEDY • Saw Works Brewing Company • 7PM • A monthly showcase featuring local and touring stand-ups comics. • FREE THE OOH OOH REVUE • Cocoa Moon • 10PM • We are classy cabaret, song, dance, comedy and bedazzling burlesque every First Friday. The show features some of Knoxville’s best and emerging talent: singers, dancers, comedians, spoken word poets, burlesque artists and so much more.

It’s a variety show where each cast member brings a different sizzling act each month to entertain, delight, surprise and more. Visit oohoohrevue.com. 18 and up. • $10

Bach or Basie?

Sunday, Oct. 9 UPSTAIRS UNDERGROUND COMEDY • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic. Visit scruffycity.com.

Monday, Oct. 10 ON THE MIC WITH MIKE • Scruffy City Hall • 7PM • Bee Valley Productions and Scruffy City Hall are proud to present an attention-deficit, topsy turvy take on the late-night talk show format. Mike Bartlett created the show as a way of marrying his passion for music and comedy; the purpose is to showcase the abundance of talented artists in the Knoxville music scene. Each episode features unique interviews and performances from Knoxville’s best artists, as well as sketches, segments, games, and more. Visit beevalleyproductions. com/comedy/onthemicwithmike.

FRIENDLYTOWN • Pilot Light • 7:30PM • A weekly comedy night named after the former red-light district near the Old City. Visit facebook.com/friendlytownknoxville. 18 and up. • FREE

Your music, your choice.

Your classical and jazz station.

Tuesday, Oct. 11 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 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 can email us at longbranch.info@gmail.com to learn more, or simply WUOT_Ad_4.625x5.25_ClassicalJazz_KnoxMerc.indd come to the show a few minutes early. • FREE KNOXVILLE POETRY SLAM • The Open Chord • 8PM • All ages. • $5 Wednesday, Oct. 12 FULL DISCLOSURE COMEDY • The Open Chord • 8PM • Full Disclosure Comedy is Knoxville’s long-form improvisational troupe, bringing together community members for laughs and overall general merriment.

Thursday, Oct. 13 PIZZA HAS • Pizza Hoss • 8PM • On the second Thursday of the month, Pizza Hoss in Powell hosts a showcase featuring sets from some of the best comedians in East Tennessee along with selected up-and-coming talent.

Each month one of the hosts of Rain/Shine Event productions (Shane Rhyne, Tyler Sonnichsen, and Sean Simoneau) serves as your guide to introduce you the best of our region’s comedy scene. • FREE HENRY ROLLINS • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • In describing Henry Rollins, the tendency is to try to squeeze as many labels as possible into a single sentence. “Rollins is many things,” says the Washington Post, “diatribist, confessor, provocateur, humorist, even motivational speaker…his is an enthusiastic and engaging chatter.” • $24-$34 Friday, Oct. 14 PAULA POUNDSTONE • Bijou Theatre • 8PM • 32 years ago Paula Poundstone climbed on a Greyhound bus and traveled across the country -- stopping in at open mic nights at comedy clubs as she went. She went on to become one of our country’ s foremost humorists. • $33

SUNDAY, OCT. 16 Upstairs Underground Comedy • Preservation Pub • 8PM • A weekly comedy open mic. Visit scruffycity.com.

FIX THIS BASTARD 2

WALK FROM WINERY TO WINERY along the Rocky Top Wine Trail!

9/17/16 5:00 PM

WINERY WALK, BBQ & FREE WINE TASTING SATURDAY, OCTOBER 22, 2016

Begins at 9:00am at Hillside Winery • TICKETS $25 Available in Store or Online Call 865-389-9490 for more information or to register www.HillsideWine.com

$5 will be donated to the American Cancer Society for each Pink bottle sold!

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 27

CALENDAR FESTIVALS

Thursday, Oct. 6 2016 CUP OF HOPE LUNCHEON • Jackson Avenue Terminal • 11:30AM • The third annual Cup of Hope Luncheon is a domestic violence awareness event that will coincide with Domestic Violence Awareness month and benefit the Salvation Army’s Joy D. Baker Center. Guests will be able to participate in a silent auction and fun shopping experience to benefit the women and children of the shelter. Our guest speaker will be Rebekah Lyons, author of Freefall to Fly: A Breathtaking Journey Toward a Life of

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

Meaning. For more information, please call 865-971-4937 or visit www.salvationarmyknoxville.org. • $40

join in celebrating a year of accomplishments for Legacy Parks Foundation at their annual outdoor luncheon along the banks of the Tennessee River on UT’s Cherokee Farm.

Call 865.525.2585 or visiting legacyparks.org.

Friday, Oct. 7 LEGACY LUNCHEON FOR THE PARKS • University of Tennessee • 11:30AM • Summiting the second highest mountain in the world and building an international outdoor apparel company both require managing risk and Rick Ridgeway, this year’s Legacy Luncheon for the Parks speaker, knows about both. Ridgeway, vice president of environmental affairs for outdoor apparel leader Patagonia, is often recognized for his accomplishment of making the first American ascent of K2. Ridgeway will

Saturday, Oct. 8 TENNESSEE MEDIEVAL FAIRE • 11AM • The first annual Tennessee Pirate Fest is on the horizon. This daytime family-friendly costume-play event is being produced by Darkhorse Entertainment, LLC, and will be held at the Tennessee Medieval Faire site in Harriman--just 30 miles west of Turkey Creek. Patrons will feel transported to the fictional town of Port Royale in the Tortugas, circa 1700-1800’s. Visit TNPirateFest.com. • $13 HISTORIC PARTRIDGE NEIGHBORHOOD HOME TOUR • 1PM • This tour features a variety of homes with a focus on Barber-designed houses as part of Knoxville’s 225th birthday bash. Learn about history as you tour beautiful historic homes and experience the Parkridge community.

More information is available at historicparkridge@ gmail.com, or 865-406-4364. • $10-$12 KNOXVILLE BREWERS’ JAM • World’s Fair Park • 1PM • The 20th annual Knoxville Brewers’ Jam will benefit the non-profit organization Community Shares of Tennessee, which has produced the festival since 2004. More than 50 brewers and brewer reps will be serving up 5-ounce samples and answering questions about their craft beers.

Additional unique and exotic beers will be available for tastings, including the award-winning Goose Island Bourbon County Stout and Founders Brewing Co. Kentucky Breakfast Stout. Visit knoxvillebrewersjam.com.

• $20-$100

Photo by Andrew Arthur

M83 The Mill and Mine (227 W. Depot Ave.) • Tuesday, Oct. 11 • 8 p.m. • $40 • themillandmine or ilovem83.com • 18 and up

“Midnight City,” M83’s glorious, synth-drenched dance-floor pop hit from the band’s 2011 double album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, is the kind of song that can weigh an artist down after a while. It was only a minor hit, by blockbuster pop standards, but it still felt like it was everywhere at the end of 2011 and deep into the next year. Nearly every music magazine or website named it one of the best songs of the year, and throughout 2012 it popped up on TV shows, sports broadcasts, video games, and ads for Gucci, Renault, and Victoria’s Secret. If you attended a single party in 2012 where “Midnight City” didn’t play, you’re lucky. Huge success, deserved accolades, a wheelbarrow full of money—but what do you do next?

Anthony Gonzalez, the French-born, L.A.-based synth programmer/guitarist/composer who is M83’s mastermind, laid low, which is probably the best approach. It took five years for Junk, the follow-up to Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, to appear. And Gonzalez isn’t just repeating himself—on Junk, he’s traded his trademark streamlined synth juggernaut for funky disco, Top 40, and some soppy traditional pop. It might not be what fans expected, but it might be just what Gonzalez needs—it’s smarter to try something new, even if it’s not an obvious success, than try to replicate your biggest hit. With Shura. (Matthew Everett)

28

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Sunday, Oct. 9 TENNESSEE PIRATE FEST • Tennessee Medieval Faire • 11AM • The first annual Tennessee Pirate Fest is on the horizon. This daytime family-friendly costume-play event is being produced by Darkhorse Entertainment, LLC, and will be held at the Tennessee Medieval Faire site in Harriman--just 30 miles west of Turkey Creek. Patrons will feel transported to the fictional town of Port Royale in the Tortugas, circa 1700-1800’s. Visit TNPirateFest.com.

• $13 JAZZ PICNIC • James Agee Park • 5:30PM • Gypsy jazz with Swingbooty, flow, art, and Vietnamese food. • $3 OPEN STREETS KNOXVILLE • Bearden • 2PM • Knoxvillians are invited to walk, bike, jog or dance their way through town at Open Streets Knoxville. Sutherland Avenue, Mohican, and Homberg Drive, will be closed to all motorized traffic, allowing revelers a day of shopping, playing, exercising and socializing all on foot or two wheels. • FREE

FILM SCREENINGS

Thursday, Oct. 6 ABORTION: STORIES WOMEN TELL • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Abortion: Stories Women Tell offers an intimate window into the lives of women who have had abortions through their personal stories. After the film we’ll be discussing how the film relates to Tennessee and what we can be doing to defeat abortion stigma and increase abortion access. • FREE SCHULZ BRÄU FILMNACHT • Schulz Bräu Brewing Company • 9PM • A free weekly movie screening—check social media for the week’s entry. 21 and up. • FREE KNOXVILLE HORROR FILM FESTIVAL PREVIEW NIGHT • Scruffy City Hall • 7PM • Join us and get a taste of the insanity we’ll be bringing during KHFF 8. We’ll have

trailers, short films and lots of teases for what to expect.

Most importantly, we’ll be premiering our pal Will Allman’s new film Something’s In The Woods. Will has participated in the KHFF Grindhouse Grind-Out every year since its inception, and we’re really excited to see what he’s done in expanding his team’s very first entry into this locally-prouced feature film. Visit knoxvillehorrorfest. com.

Friday, Oct. 7 MOVIES ON MARKET SQUARE • Market Square • 8PM • Knox County Public Library’s Movies on Market Square is gearing up for its 13th season of family-friendly outdoor movies in the heart of downtown Knoxville. On six consecutive Friday nights, from Sept. 9-Oct. 14, bring the whole family to see a free movie. The lineup includes The Fox and the Hound (Sept. 9); Legally Blonde (Sept. 16); Up (Sept. 23); Night at the Museum (Sept. 30); Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Oct. 7); and Ghostbusters (Oct. 14).

Shows start at dusk. Visit knoxlib.org. • FREE FIRST FRIGHT-DAY: ‘THE LOST BOYS’ • Ijams Nature Center • 7PM • As we creep ever closer to Halloween, join us for a night of vampires and demons for our First Fright-Day Movie Night, presented by Ijams Nature Center and Knoxville Horror Film Fest. We’re switching things up this year from our usuual Zombie Movie Night and bringing you a fan favorite horror classic- The Lost Boys. Join the Coreys and the rest of the cast as vampires take over the town Santa Clara, CA and the epic battle begins against the living and the undead. We’ll have a special secret screening right after Lost Boys of another lesser known, but equally awesome 80s classic. The movie will start at dark. • $10 Monday, Oct. 10 UT OUT FILM SERIES: SCREAMING QUEENS: THE RIOTS AT COMPTON’S CAFETERIA • University of Tennessee • 6PM • Documentary about transgender women and drag queens who fought police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin in 1966, three years before the famous riot at Stonewall Inn bar in NYC. Part of the OUT Film Series at John C. Hodges Library. • FREE THE BIRDHOUSE WALK-IN THEATER • The Birdhouse • 8:15PM • A weekly free movie screening. Visit birdhouseknoxville.com. • FREE Wednesday, Oct. 12 THE PUBLIC CINEMA: SLASH • Scruffy City Hall • 8PM • Neil is an introverted, questioning high school freshman. His main social outlet is the steamy erotic fan fiction he writes about Vanguard, the brawny, galaxy-hopping hero of a popular sci-fi franchise. When his stories are exposed in class Neil is mortified, but the fearless, effortlessly cool Julia comes to his defense. Visit publiccinema.org. • FREE • See review on page 19.

SPORTS AND RECREATION

Thursday, Oct. 6 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES THURSDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • 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 FLEET FEET GROUP RUN/WALK • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 6PM • Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE

CALENDAR BEARDEN BIKE AND TRAIL LAPS ON CHEROKEE BOULEVARD • Bearden Bike and Trail • 6PM • Visit beardenbikeandtrail.com. • FREE RIVER SPORTS GREENWAY RIDE • River Sports Outfitters • 6PM • Visit riversportsoutfitters.com. • FREE-$10 CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES BEGINNER ROAD RIDE • Sequoyah Park • 6:20PM • Visit cedarbluffcycles.net. • FREE CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES THURSDAY NIGHT RIDE • Cedar Bluff Cycles • 6:20PM • Visit cedarbluffcycles.net. • FREE Friday, Oct. 7 RIVER SPORTS FRIDAY NIGHT GREENWAY RUN • River Sports Outfitters • 6:15PM • Visit riversportsoutfitters.com.

• FREE Saturday, Oct. 8 SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: THOMAS DIVIDE TRAIL • Smoky Mountain Hiking Club • 7:30AM • After leaving cars at the entrance to the Smokemont campground, hikers will car shuttle up to the Thomas Divide trailhead on Newfound Gap Road. The hike is 14.9 miles and rated difficult due to distance. Meet at Comcast, 5720 Asheville Highway, at 7:30AM or at the trailhead at 9:30AM. If meeting at trailhead, please email note to leaders.

Leaders: Cindy Spangler, spangler@utk.edu and Ken Wise, kwise@utk.edu. • FREE WEST BIKES SATURDAY RIDE • West Bicycles • 8AM • Visit westbikes.com. • FREE BIKE ZOO SATURDAY MORNING RIDE • The Bike Zoo • 9AM • Visit bikezoo.com. • FREE BIKE N’ TRI GROUP CLIMBING RIDE • Bike N’ Tri • 5PM • Join us for our group climbing ride of 30-40 miles, for intermediate to advanced riders only. • FREE Sunday, Oct. 9 KTC CROSSKNOX 15K • Morningside Park • 8AM • The Knoxville Track Club’s annual point-to-point 15K race covers the city’s greenways, from Morningside Park to Bearden Elementary School. Visit ktc.org. • $25-$30 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES SUNDAY MORNING GROUP RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 9AM • Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE SMOKY MOUNTAIN HIKING CLUB: BAKER CREEK PRESERVE • Smoky Mountain Hiking Club • 10AM • We’ll hike the new trails of the Baker Creek Preserve in South Knoxville.

Total distance is 3.3 miles. Meet at the trailhead parking lot at 1516 Taylor Road at 10:00 am. Leader: Mac Post, mpost3116@aol.com. • FREE OPEN STREETS KNOXVILLE • Bearden • 2PM • Knoxvillians are invited to walk, bike, jog or dance their way through town at Open Streets Knoxville. Sutherland Avenue, Mohican, and Homberg Drive, will be closed to all motorized traffic, allowing revelers a day of shopping, playing, exercising and socializing all on foot or two wheels. • FREE Monday, Oct. 10 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. Visit ktc.org. • FREE TVB MONDAY NIGHT ROAD RIDE • Tennessee Valley Bikes • 6PM • The soon to be famous Monday night road ride happens every Monday. We usually split into two groups according to speed. Both groups are no-drop groups. The faster group averages over 17 mph and the B group averages around 14 mph. • 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 $1 off their beer. Visit beardenbeermarket.com. • FREE BIKE N’ TRI MONDAY GROUP RUN • Bike N’ Tri • 6:30PM • Every Monday evening, join us for a social three- to six-mile group run. All runners/joggers/walkers welcome.

• FREE Tuesday, Oct. 11 CYCOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 9AM • Join Cycology Bicycles every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. and 10:30 am for a road ride with two group options. Weather permitting. Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE CYCOLOGY BICYCLES TUESDAY MORNING RIDE • Cycology Bicycles • 10:30AM • Join Cycology Bicycles every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. and 10:30 am for a road ride with two group options. Weather permitting. Visit cycologybicycles.com. • FREE AMBC BIG GROUP MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE • Ijams Nature Center • 6PM • We tour the trails of Knoxville’s Urban Wilderness every Tuesday evening. Riders meet at the Meads Quarry parking lot ready to ride at 6 p.m. The ride usually has 30 or more riders, which always break off into two or three sub-groups, depending on skill level, familiarity with the trails, or desire to ride hard or take it easy. Visit ambc-sorba.org. • FREE THIRD CREEK GREENWAY SOCIAL RIDE • Bearden Bike and Trail • 6PM • Join us every Tuesday evening at 6 p.m. for our Third Creek Greenway ride with rest stops and no drop. Option for Mexican food after ride. Helmets required.

Visit beardenbikeandtrail.com. • FREE CEDAR BLUFF CYCLES TUESDAY NIGHT RIDE • Cedar Bluff Cycles • 6:20PM • Join Cedar Bluff Cycles every Tuesday night for their group ride. Riders will divided into 2 groups. The A group rides an extremely fast-paced 40-plus-mile loop at a speed of 22-24 mph. The B group is a little more relaxed, riding at an 18-20 mph pace. Visit cedarbluffcycles.net. • 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. Follow us on Facebook. • FREE BIKETOPIA TUESDAY ROAD RIDE • Biketopia • 6:30PM • Join us every Tuesday evening at 6:30 pm for our shop ride.

The route is around 30 miles. It consists mostly of rolling hills with a couple of sustained climbs and skirts Melton Hill Lake. Lights recommended. Visit biketopia.com. • FREE FOUNTAIN CITY ROUNDABOUT • Casual Pint (Fountain City) • 6:30PM • It’s our weekly neighborhood bike ride followed by pints. Riders get $1 off pints. Visit facebook. com/TheCasualPint/. • FREE Wednesday, Oct. 12 BIKE N’ TRI GROUP RIDE • Bike N’ Tri • 10AM • Every Wednesday, join us for a social group ride of 20-40 miles.

We’ll split into two groups to make the ride suitable for all riders. All riders welcome. • FREE FLEET FEET WEDNESDAY LUNCH BREAK RUN • Fleet Feet Sports Knoxville • 12PM • Join us every Wednesday at for our lunch break run. All levels welcome. We’ll run 30-60 minutes. Visit fleetfeetknoxville.com. • FREE 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 p.m. at Runners Market.

Visit ktc.org. • FREE

TVB EASY RIDER MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE • Ijams Nature Center • 6PM • On Wednesday nights we hit the local trails for an easy-paced mountain bike ride. Riders of all skill levels are welcome, and if you would like to demo a mountain bike from our shop this is a great opportunity to do so. Rides are weather permitting. If the trails are too wet, we do not ride. Check out our Facebook page or give us a call at 865-540-9979 for more info. We meet near Mead’s Quarry. • FREE AMBC CONCORD PARK MOUNTAIN BIKE RIDE • Concord Park • 6PM • Group mountain bike ride every Wednesday evening. Meet at the Concord Park Pavilion, and ride all the fast, fun trails Concord has to offer. Bring something to grill and hang out after the ride. Visit ambc-sorba.org.

• FREE WEST BIKES WEDNESDAY BIKE RIDE • West Bicycles • 6:15PM • A no-drop ride that will always return before dark. Riders will split into groups. Ice cold watermelon served after the ride. A Group: 17-20 mph (30-40 miles); B Group: 14-16 mph (25-40 miles); C Group: slow to moderate (14-18 miles). Ride lead by staff. Visit westbikes. com. • FREE

ART

A1 Lab Arts 23 Emory Place The Diptych Project collects work by 24 A1 Lab Arts members who were randomly paired together. On display Friday, Oct. 7, from 5-10 p.m.

Art Market Gallery 422 S. Gay St. OCT. 4-27: Paintings by Brenda Mills and clay art by Karyn Kyte. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, at 5:30 p.m.

Broadway Studios and Gallery 1127 N. Broadway Oct. 7-29: Jan Lynch: A Retrospective. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, from 5-10 p.m.

See cover story on page 12.

The District Gallery 5113 Kingston Pike OCT. 7-29: Mask, an exhibit of animal masks by sculptor Nan Jacobsohn. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, from 5-8 p.m.

East Tennessee History Center 601 S. Gay St. APRIL 16-OCT. 30: Come to Make Records, a selection of artifacts, audio and video recordings, and photographs celebrating Knoxville’s music heritage and the 1929-30 St. James Hotel recording sessions.

Emporium Center for Arts and Culture 100 S. Gay St. OCT. 7-28: Tennessee Artists Association Fall Juried Show; The Arrowmont Experience; pottery by Rex W. Redd; Impressions of Nature, photographic paintings by Dennis Sabo; and artwork by Melanie Fetterolf. An opening reception will be held on Friday, Oct. 7, from 5-9 p.m.

Knoxville Arts and Fine Crafts Center 1127B Broadway AUG. 1-OCT. 31: Whimsical Creatures, paintings and photographs by Lela E. Buis.

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 29

CALENDAR Knoxville Museum of Art 1050 World’s Fair Park Drive AUG. 26-NOV. 6: Romantic Spirits: 19th-Century Paintings of the South From the Johnson Collection SEPT. 12-OCT. 7: Frutos Latinos, Hola Hora Latina’s 10th annual art exhibit and contest. ONGOING: Higher Ground: A Century of the Visual Arts in Tennessee; Currents: Recent Art From East Tennessee and Beyond; and Facets of Modern and Contemporary Glass.

McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture 1327 Circle Park Drive SEPT. 17-JAN. 8: Knoxville Unearthed: Archaeology in the Heart of the Valley. JULY 12-OCT. 19: Land, Sea, and Spirit: Alaska Native Art From the 19th and 20th Centuries.

ONGOING: The Flora and Fauna of Catesby, Mason, and Audubon and Life on the Roman Frontier.

FAMILY AND KIDS’ EVENTS

Thursday, Oct. 6 LITTLE LEARNERS • Blount County Public Library • 10:30AM • Recommended for ages 3-5. Interactive sessions focus on language acquisition and pre-literacy skills incorporating stories, music, motion, play, crafts and more. • FREE CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library •

FEATURING : JACK DANIELS DISTILLERY GEORGE DICKEL DISTILLERY

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

1PM • For middle and high school students, with coach Tom Jobe. Visit blountlibrary.org. • FREE LEGO CLUB • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • LEGO Club will take place in the children’s library. Kids will complete different-themed and timed LEGO Challenges, as well as have some time for free building. The library will provide the LEGOs, so all you have to bring is your imagination. • FREE BOO! AT THE ZOO • Knoxville Zoo • 5:30PM • Boo! at the Zoo is Knoxville’s largest Halloween event, featuring 12 nights of safe and not-too-scary Halloween fun perfect for preschool and elementary-aged children. A Halloween tradition for 30 years, Boo! at the Zoo is a family event featuring trick-or-treating along the B00! Trail, where little trick-or-treaters can fill their bag with goodies as they make their way through the zoo. Each night of BOO! at the Zoo will have a variety of entertainment including dancing with some of your favorite characters in the Chick-fil-A Monster Mash Tent, the Zoo Boo Choo Choo and the only “haunted” carousel in East Tennessee, the Scary-Go-Round. (How can you tell it’s haunted? It goes backwards, of course.) Oct. 6-23. Visit zooknoxville.org. • $9 Friday, Oct. 7 S.T.E.A.M. KIDS • Blount County Public Library • 4PM • For grades K-5. Every week will be a different adventure, from science experiments to art projects and everything in between. Materials will be limited and available on a first-come, first-served basis. • FREE BOO! AT THE ZOO • Knoxville Zoo • 5:30PM • Boo! at the

Zoo is Knoxville’s largest Halloween event, featuring 12 nights of safe and not-too-scary Halloween fun perfect for preschool and elementary-aged children. Oct. 6-23.

Visit zooknoxville.org. • $9 Saturday, Oct. 8 CHESS AT THE LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 10AM • For middle and high school students, with coach Tom Jobe. Visit blountlibrary.org. • FREE GAMING AT BLOUNT COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY • Blount County Public Library • 2PM • Games of all kind: board games, MarioKart, Super Smash Bros., Yu-Gi-Oh!, or bring your own game to share. • FREE BLOUNT COUNTY NERD GROUP • Blount County Public Library • 3PM • Starting this summer, students can learn the basic principles of computer programming, also known as coding. By participating in the newly-formed Blount County Nerd Group, students seventh grade and up can learn skills such as making simple games, developing professional websites and creating mobile apps. Participating students are encouraged to bring their own technologies including a laptop. However, students who do not have adequate technology will be provided a laptop by the library when necessary. • FREE BOO! AT THE ZOO • Knoxville Zoo • 5:30PM • Boo! at the Zoo is Knoxville’s largest Halloween event, featuring 12 nights of safe and not-too-scary Halloween fun perfect for preschool and elementary-aged children. Oct. 6-23.

Visit zooknoxville.org. • $9 Sunday, Oct. 9 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 1 p.m. and 4 p.m. • FREE BOO! AT THE ZOO • Knoxville Zoo • 5:30PM • Boo! at the Zoo is Knoxville’s largest Halloween event, featuring 12 nights of safe and not-too-scary Halloween fun perfect for preschool and elementary-aged children. Oct. 6-23.

Visit zooknoxville.org. • $9 Tuesday, Oct. 11 LITTLE LEARNERS • Blount County Public Library • 10:30AM • Recommended for ages 3-5. Interactive sessions focus on language acquisition and pre-literacy skills incorporating stories, music, motion, play, crafts and more. • FREE CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY KID TO KID: FUN WITH A PURPOSE • Cancer Support Community • 3:30PM • Your children will gain coping skills and have opportunities to talk about a loved one’s cancer diagnosis while also having fun. Please call before your first visit and RSVP. 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

Wednesday, Oct. 12 BABY AND ME • Blount County Public Library • 10:30AM • Recommended for ages 2 and under. These lapsit sessions for baby and caregiver feature short stories, action rhymes, music and pre-literacy tips and tricks for caregivers. It is also a great time for caregivers and babies to socialize. • FREE

a CELEBRATION of southern spirits and gourmet grub

OLD FORGE DISTILLERY

BLACKBERRY FARM & BLACKBERRY FARM BREWERY BLUETICK BREWERY

POPCORN SUTTON / AVERY’S TRAIL DISTILLERY

DANCING BEAR

SUGARLANDS DISTILLING CO.

APPALACHIAN BISTRO

THUNDER ROAD DISTILLERY

LI MISS LILY’S.

H CLARK DISTILLERY

OLD MILL POTTERY HOUSE

SPEAKEASY SPIRITS DISTILLERY

FLATS & TAPS CADES COVE CELLARS

NELSON’S GREENBRIER DISTILLERY

AND MANY MORE TN FAVORITES

CORSAIR DISTILLERY COR

LIVE MUSIC & ACTIVITIES

CHATTANOOGA WHISKEY PYRAMID PREMUIM VODKA

LOCATED ON THE PEACEFUL SIDE OF THE SMOKIES

SHORT MOUNTAIN DISTILLERY JUG CREEK DISTILLERY LEIPER’S FORK DISTILLERY BOOTLEGGERS DISTILLERY BO KNOX WHISKEY WORKS TENNESSEE LEGEND DISTILLERY

30

FEATURING :

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

TOWNSEND, TN

November 5, 2016, 5-9pm The Townsend Grains & Grits Festival is a celebration of southern spirits and gourmet grub. We have created a unique opportunity for you to experience our thriving craft spirits and gourmet food community, while discovering some of the region’s legendary distillers and blenders, taking place in the Peaceful Side of the Smokies.

FOR TICKETS & MORE INFORMATION, VISIT GRAIN GRAINSANDGRITSFEST.COM OR CALL, (865) 983-2241

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

LECTURES, READINGS, AND BOOK SIGNINGS

Thursday, Oct. 6 MARY HEADRICK: “INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE CLIMATE SOLUTIONS” • Oak Ridge Unitarian Universalist Church • 7:30PM • Climate activist Mary Headrick will discuss the importance of both collective actions, and next steps attendees can take can take to effectively reduce our carbon footprint.

LISPECTORFEST: A CELEBRATION OF THE WORK OF CLARICE LISPECTOR • Lawson McGee Public Library • 6PM • Hailed as one of the premier Latin American prose writers of the modern era, Brazilian author Clarice Lispector has been compared to the likes of Woolf, Kafka and Nabokov.

Although she has historically received relatively little attention in the United States, a new English translation of her short stories has opened her work to wider audiences, and many readers are now discovering the woman Colm Tóbín hails as “one of the hidden geniuses of the twentieth century.” This October, KCPL is proud to partner with UTK Modern Foreign Language and Literatures to present LispectorFest: A Celebration of the Work of Clarice Lispector. Please visit the UT AuthorFest Page for a listing of on-campus LispectorFest events: mfll.utk.edu/Lispector/index.php. • FREE Friday, Oct. 7 BILL BASS AND JOHN JEFFERSON: ‘WITHOUT MERCY’ • Union Ave Books • 6PM • Book signing and reading with Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson, authors of the newest Body Farm mystery, Without Mercy. Visit unionavebooks. com. • FREE TIM “SWANKY” GLAZNER: ‘MAI-KAI: HISTORY AND MYSTERY OF THE ICONIC TIKI RESTAURANT’ • Pop Weasel Emporium • 6:30PM • We’ll sell and sign Knoxville author Tim “Swanky” Glazner’s Mai-Kai: History and Mystery of The Iconic Tiki Restaurant books and serve some samples of the Jasper’s Jamaican cocktail. Swanky will be taking over the music and we’ll enjoy a fun First Friday downtown. • FREE • See Q&A on page 21.

Saturday, Oct. 8 MICHAEL LLEWELLYN: THE GOAT CASTLE MURDER • Union Ave Books • 2PM • Book signing and reading with former Knoxvillian Michael Llewellyn, author of The Goat Castle Murder. Visit unionavebooks.com. • FREE SARAH LEE BLAIR: ‘DARKNESS SHIFTING’ • Union Ave Books • 4PM • Book signing and reading with Sarah Lee Blair author of Darkness Shifting: Tides of Darkness Book One. Visit unionavebooks.com. • FREE Sunday, Oct. 9 UNEXPECTED TREASURES: AN EVENING WITH LARK MASON • McClung Museum of Natural History and Culture • 5:30PM • Join UT alumnus and Antiques Roadshow appraiser, Lark Mason for an special evening and fundraiser at the McClung Museum. Mason will give the presentation, “Unexpected Treasures and How to Find Them: Why Great Works of Art Turn Up in Odd Locations,” which will be followed by farm-to-table dinner stations interspersed throughout the galleries, delectable dessert displays, craft cocktails, and music. • $150-$800 Tuesday, Oct. 11 JAMES ZOGBY: “THE U.S. AND THE MIDDLE EAST: HOW WE GOT INTO THE MESS WE’RE IN AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT” • Howard H. Baker Center for Public Policy • 5:30PM • Zogby has been the leading voice on

CALENDAR

Arab-American rights for more than 30 years by co-founding the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the Arab American Institute and creating and hosting the political television show “Viewpoint.” • FREE KNOXVILLE CIVIL WAR ROUNDTABLE • Bearden Banquet Hall • 7PM • Featuring notable historians and other Civil War experts. Call (865) 671-9001 for reservations. • $3-$17 Wednesday, Oct. 12 CALVIN DICKSINSON AND MICHAEL BIRDWELL: “PEOPLE OF THE UPPER CUMBERLAND: ACHIEVEMENTS AND CONTRADICTIONS” • East Tennessee History Center • 12PM • Tennessee Technological University professors Calvin Dickinson and Michael Birdwell will discuss their new book, People of the Upper Cumberland: Achievements and Contradictions. The anthology, recently named the Tennessee History Book of the Year by the Tennessee Library Association, presents a complex view of the rich history and culture of the Tennessee-Kentucky Upper Cumberland, an area composed of the 24 counties that mostly border the eastern half of the Cumberland River.

Visit EastTNHistory.org. • FREE

CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS

Thursday, Oct. 6 GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 12PM • Call 865-577-2021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

PORTRAIT AND LIFE DRAWING SESSIONS • Historic Candoro Marble Company • 12:30PM • Portrait and life drawing practice at Candoro Art and Heritage Center. $10. Call Brad Selph for more information (865-573-0709). • $10 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: KNIT YOUR WAY TO WELLNESS • Cancer Support Community • 1PM • Whether you are a novice knitter or an old pro, you are invited to bring your own project or join others in learning a new one. Special attention will be provided to beginners interested in learning how to knit and experience the meditative quality of knitting. Supplies provided. Call 865-546-4661. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • This class is an hour of student-led training and review of Capoeira skills and exercises.

Come prepared to sweat. Visit knoxvillecapoeira.org. • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 THIRSTY (FOR KNOWLEDGE) THURSDAY • Old City Wine Bar • 6:30PM • Join our sommelier, Matt Burke, every Thursday in the cellar of the Old City Wine Bar for our ongoing wine education series. Free to listen and only $20-$25 to partake in the libations. • $20-$25 COMEDY IMPROV CLASS • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 7PM • Paul Simmons of Einstein Simplified will be teaching a six-week improv/comedy improv class Sept. 22-Nov. 3. (There’s no class on Oct. 13.)

Contact Paul at dr.p@tds.net or 865-898-6448 for more info or to register. Walk-ins are welcome. Cost is $100 for the six classes.

BELLY DANCE LEVELS 1 AND 2 • Knox Dance Worx • 8PM • Call (865) 898-2126 or email alexia@alexia-dance.com. • $12 SUP YOGA • Concord Park • 7PM • Yoga on a SUP board?

Come join us every Thursday at the Cove. We will meet at the River Sports Outfitters building. Cost is $25 and includes board, paddle and PFD. Register at barrebelleyoga.com/class-schedule. • $25 Saturday, Oct. 8 YOGA AT NARROW RIDGE • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 9:30AM • Narrow Ridge invites you to join us every Saturday morning for yoga instruction from Angela Gibson. This class can be tailored to each individual’s ability level. For information call 865-497-2753 or email community@narrowridge.org. • FREE KNOX HERITAGE PRESERVATION NETWORK • Knox Heritage • 10AM • Preservation Network is a series of free workshops held once every month on the second Saturday. The monthly workshops feature guest speakers who are specialists in windows, flooring, roofing, stained glass, tile, plumbing, electrical, and more. For more information visit www.knoxheritage.org. • FREE ALAN SIMS: BLOGGING BASICS • Central United Methodist Church • 10AM and 1PM • Alan Sims, author of the award-winning blog Inside of Knoxville, will lead back-to-back workshops for the Knoxville Writers Guild on writing and caring for a blog and maintaining a social media presence. Sims will lead Blogging Basics from 10 a.m. to noon and a more advanced session, Branding Your Blog, from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Cost of the workshop is $50, with members receiving a 40 percent discount and student members a 50 percent discount. Visit knoxvillewritersguild.org. • $50 IMPROV COMEDY CLASS • The Birdhouse • 10:30AM • A weekly improv comedy class. • FREE KNOX COUNTY MASTER GARDENERS • Bearden Branch Public Library • 1:30PM • Join Master Gardener Alice Greene to learn what to do with bulbs. Plan and plant the spring bloomers and dig up and store those tender summer bloomers like gladiola, caladium and dahlia.Call 865- 588-8813 or visit knoxlib.org. • FREE BEARDSLEY COMMUNITY FARM WORKDAYS AND GARDEN CLASSES • Beardsley Community Farm • 9AM • CAC Beardsley Community Farm Saturday Workdays are from 9 a.m.-noon, followed by a garden class from 12:15-1:30 p.m. The upcoming schedule includes “Beat the Bugs …

With Bugs” (July 23); “organic Disease Control” (Aug. 13); “Preserving the Harvest” (Sept. 10); and “Green Manure: Build Your Soil With Cover Crops” (Oct. 8). For more information visit beardsleyfarm.org, email beardsleyfarm@gmail.com or call 865-546-8446. • FREE SUP YOGA • Concord Park • 9AM • Yoga on a paddle board, every Saturday at 9 a.m. Cost is $25, including rental, or $12.50 if you already have you own board. Visit riversportsoutfitters.com. • $12.50-$25 Sunday, Oct. 9 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE BALLET BARRE CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 1PM • This open-level barre class is designed to help students build and maintain strength, flexibility, and coordination for ballet technique.

This is a great class for beginning and experienced students alike. Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE OPEN LEVEL MODERN TECHNIQUE CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 2PM • This class is open to all. Teachers cover basic technique and vocabulary for modern and contemporary dance. The class includes floor and standing work to build proficiency in alignment, balance, initiation and articulation of movement, weight shift, elevation and landing, and fall and recovery. Instruction is adjusted to meet the experience and ability of those in attendance.

Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10

ADVERTISING EQUALS SUPPORT. Thanks to our advertisers for their help in keeping our presses running. Let’s return the favor by supporting them.

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 31

CALENDAR CIRCLE MODERN DANCE IMPROVISATION CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 3:30PM • Our improv classes offer an introduction to dance improvisation as a movement practice, performance technique, and a tool for creating choreography. Class involves both structured and free improvisations aimed at developing creativity, spontaneous decision-making, freedom of movement, and confidence in performance.

No dance experience is necessary—only the desire to move. Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 ACROKNOX FOUNDATIONAL ACROYOGA • World’s Fair Park • 5:30PM • AcroKnox offers a Foundational AcroYoga Class on Sunday evenings from 5:30-6:00pm on the festival lawn at World’s Fair Park. The class is followed by the Knoxville Acro-balance, Fire, and Flow Jam. Never tried AcroYoga? Come and gain a bit of experience before the rest of the group arrives for an open jam and play time.

Visit acroknox.com. • $5 BEGINNING BRIDGE LESSONS • Knoxville Bridge Center • 1:30PM • Contact Jo Anne Newby at (865} 539-4150 or email KnoxvilleBridge@gmail.com. • $5 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: MINDFULNESS-BASED STRESS REDUCTION SERIES • Cancer Support Community • 5PM • This Mindfulness series teaches practices which help develop the skill of self-compassion while living with the stressors of a cancer diagnosis. Research shows that increasing levels of self-compassion are correlated with a greater sense of wellbeing, lower anxiety and depression levels, maintenance of good health habits and more satisfying interpersonal relationships. RSVP. 865-546-4661. All Cancer Support Community programs

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

ROOFTOP YOGA • The Central Collective • 5PM • Take your practice outside and breathe in some fresh air. This class will be accessible to all levels, and will include some breath and body awareness at the beginning to help calm the mind and get centered for class. • $10

style is significantly more dynamic than most other styles while expressing the mindful, fluid movement for which Tai Chi is famous. No experience necessary for this beginners’ series. Begins Monday, Oct. 10. $120 for the eight-week series. Visit breezewayyoga.com or email russellsauls@gmail.com for more info • $120

Monday, Oct. 10 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • Blount County Courthouse • 9AM • Call 382-5822.

GENTLE YOGA AND MEDITATION • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 5:30PM • Call 865-5772021 or email yogaway249@gmail.com. Donations accepted.

BEGINNER MODERN BELLY DANCE • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 6PM • Tribal fusion belly dance is a modern blend of traditional belly dance infused with hip-hop, modern dance, and more to create a new, unique dance form. Each class will include an invigorating warm-up designed to increase flexibility and strength followed by an overview of posture, isolations, and basic footwork. At the end of class we put the moves together in a fun and simple combination. No dance experience is necessary. • $13 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING BOOT CAMP • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $15 BEGINNING CHEN-STYLE TAI CHI • Breezeway Yoga Studio • 8:15PM • An eight-week introductory-level training with Shifu Russell Sauls in the original form of Tai Chi. Chen

Tuesday, Oct. 11 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • Blount County Courthouse • 9AM • Call 382-5822.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY NUTRITION AMMUNITION • Cancer Support Community • 12PM • Call (865) 546-4611.

All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

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

KNOXVILLE CAPOEIRA CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • Capoeira originated in Brazil and is a dynamic expression of Afro-Brazilian culture. It is an art form that encompasses martial arts, dance, and acrobatic movements as well as its own philosophy, history, culture, music, and songs. Visit capoeiraknoxville.org. • $10 KNOXVILLE PERSONAL TRAINING PILATES • Beaver Creek Cumberland Presbyterian Church • 6:30PM • Every Tuesday and Thursday. First class is free. Call (865) 622-3103 or visit knoxvillepersonaltraining.com. • $4 BEGINNING BRIDGE LESSONS • Knoxville Bridge Center • 6PM • Contact Jo Anne Newby at (865} 539-4150 or email KnoxvilleBridge@gmail.com. • $5

Wednesday, Oct. 12 AARP DRIVER SAFETY CLASS • First Baptist Church Seymour • 12PM • Call 382-5822.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY: HEALING THROUGH ART • Cancer Support Community • 1PM • No experience necessary. RSVP. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

CIRCLE MODERN DANCE INTERMEDIATE/ADVANCED MODERN TECHNIQUE CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 6PM • A rotation of core members and guest artists of Circle Modern Dance teach this class. They present a variety of modern and contemporary styles, including Bartenieff and release-based techniques. This class is primarily designed for students with a basic knowledge of modern dance technique and vocabulary, but is open to any mover who is willing to be challenged.

Visit circlemoderndance.com.

BEGINNER MODERN BELLY DANCE • Broadway Academy of Performing Arts • 6PM • Tribal fusion belly dance is a modern blend of traditional belly dance infused with hip-hop, modern dance, and more to create a new, unique dance form. Each class will include an invigorating warm-up designed to increase flexibility and strength followed by an overview of posture, isolations, and basic footwork. At the end of class we put the moves together in a fun and simple combination. No dance experience is necessary. • $13 CIRCLE MODERN DANCE OPEN LEVEL BALLET CLASS • Emporium Center for Arts and Culture • 7:30PM • This is a basic ballet class open to students of all levels of

New Age Fair & Masquerade Ball October 29 & 30 2016 Kid’s Activities & Prizes Vendors & Readers Costume Contest Mascarade Ball with DJ

Family Fun!

Hosted by A Touch of Magic and Such at the Jubilee Center 6700 Jubilee Center Way, Knoxville TN 37912 for info visit: atouchofmagicandsuch.com

Lots of Prizes!

“ALL PHOTOGRAPHS ARE ACCURATE. NONE OF THEM IS THE TRUTH.” — RICHARD AVEDON    

32

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

Do you have an existing photo series of life around Knoxville?

We’re always on the lookout for new views of our city’s many different neighborhoods—and we’ll feature them in our Howdy section. For more information or to submit samples, email tricia@knoxmercury.com.

Thursday, Oct. 6 - Sunday, Oct. 16

experience and ability. Students will learn new steps, build coordination and flexibility, and learn choreography.

Visit circlemoderndance.com. • $10 CLIMBING FUNDAMENTALS • River Sports Outfitters • 6PM • Come learn the basics of climbing every second and fourth Wednesday of the month. Space is limited so call 865-673-4687 to reserve your spot now. Class fee $20.

Visit riversportsoutfitters.com/events. • $20

MEETINGS

Thursday, Oct. 6 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.

CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY BREAST CANCER NETWORKER • Thompson Cancer Survivor Center West • 6PM • This drop-in group is an opportunity for women who have or have had breast cancer to come together to exchange information, offer support, education and encouragement. Bring your favorite seasonal snack to share. Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

NAACP • Beck Cultural Exchange Center • 6PM • The mission of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to eliminate race-based discrimination. Join the fight for freedom by becoming a member of the NAACP. Regular individual annual membership rates vary.

KNOXVILLE WRITERS’ GUILD • Central United Methodist Church • 7PM • The Knoxville Writers’ Guild exists to facilitate a broad and inclusive community for area writers, provide a forum for information, support and sharing among writers, help members improve and market their writing skills and promote writing and creativity. A $2 donation is requested. Additional information about KWG can be found at www.

KnoxvilleWritersGuild.org.

BLACK LIVES MATTER • The Birdhouse • 7:30PM • #BlackLivesMatter is working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. Visit blacklivesmatterknoxville.org. • FREE ADULT CHILDREN OF ALCOHOLICS/DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILIES • The Birdhouse • 6PM • A 12-step meeting for adults who grew up in alcoholic or dysfunctional homes.

The group offers a safe space for emotional healing.

Contact Laura at 706-621-2238 or lamohendricksll@ gmail.com for more information or visit the international ACA website at adultchildren.org. • FREE Saturday, Oct. 8 CANCER SUPPORT COMMUNITY PROSTATE CANCER NETWORKER • Cancer Support Community • 10AM • This drop-in group is an opportunity for men to network with other men about their experiences with prostate cancer.

Call 865-546-4661 for more info. All Cancer Support Community programs are offered at no cost to individuals affected by cancer.

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

CALENDAR

farragutalanon.org or email us at FindHope@ Farragutalanon.org. • FREE NARROW RIDGE SILENT MEDITATION GATHERING • Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center • 11AM • Narrow Ridge invites you to join us for our Silent Meditation Gathering. 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 information call 865-497-2753 or email community@narrowridge.org. • FREE Sunday, Oct. 9 SKEPTIC BOOK CLUB • Books-A-Million • 2PM • The book club of the Rationalists of East Tennessee meets on the second Sunday of every month. Visit rationalists.org. • FREE Monday, Oct. 10 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.

Tuesday, Oct. 11 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 DER GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS STAMMTISCH • Los Amigos • 6PM • A weekly gathering for Germans and anyone interested in German culture and the German language. • FREE HARVEY BROOME GROUP OF THE SIERRA CLUB • Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church • 7PM • The Sierra Club is a national, member-supported environmental organization that seeks to influence public policy in Washington D.C., in the state capitals, and locally through public education and grass-roots political action.As one of five Groups within the Tennessee Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Harvey Broome Group is based in Knoxville and focuses on Knox County and 17 surrounding counties in East Tennessee. Our namesake, Harvey Broome (1902-1968), was a founding member of the Widlerness Society and a native of Knoxville.The Harvey Broome Group undertakes important conservation issues, offers year-round outings to enhance appreciation of the outdoors, and presents monthly programs that range from experts in environmental issues to entertaining speakers who have explored our world. • FREE THREE RIVERS! EARTH FIRST! • Barley’s Taproom and Pizzeria • 8PM • Three Rivers! Earth First! is the local dirt-worshiping, tree-hugging, anarchist collective that meets every Sunday night on the second floor of Barley’s in the back room (when its available) to organize against strip mining, counter protest the KKK and Nazis, to clean up Third Creek and to fight evil corporations in general.

Open meeting, rotating facilitation, collective model. Y’all come. Call (865) 257-4029 for more information. • FREE

ETC.

Thursday, Oct. 6 KNOXVILLE SOUP • Kerbela Temple • 6:30PM • SOUP is an exciting community-focused project sponsored by the South Knoxville Alliance (SKA) and is open to the public.

It is a combination of a dinner and a showcase of proposals for community-based projects, from which attendees will choose a winning proposal to receive funding for their project. Visit www.KnoxvilleSOUP.com or

email SOUP@SouthKnoxvilleAlliance.org. • $5 Friday, Oct. 7 LAKESHORE PARK FARMERS MARKET • Lakeshore Park • 3PM • FREE Saturday, Oct. 8 UT ARBORETUM FALL PLANT SALE • University of Tennessee Arboretum • 9AM • Fall is the ideal time to add plants to the landscape. To help satisfy that need, Beaver Creek Nursery, East Fork Nursery, Riverdale Nursery, Sunlight Gardens, as well as the UT Arboretum Society’s members and friends, will offer a variety of high quality plants at this sale. To learn more about the Arboretum Society, and the UT Arboretum Endowment Fund, go to utarboretumsociety.org. For more information on the Plant Sale, call 482-6656. • FREE SEYMOUR FARMERS MARKET • First Baptist Church Seymour • 8AM • FREE OAK RIDGE FARMERS MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 8AM • FREE MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 9AM • The MSFM, a project of Nourish Knoxville, is an open-air farmers’ market located on historic Market Square in the heart of downtown Knoxville. Visit marketsquarefarmersmarket.org. • FREE GOOD SPORT NIGHT • Central Collective • 7PM • Here’s the deal. You purchase a ticket to a mystery event. Show up to The Central Collective at the specified date and time, and be ready for anything. Past events have included: a live studio game show, an egg drop competition, a garden party in a castle, and a walking tour of North Knoxville. These are events for folks who are curious, adventurous, and like trying new things & meeting new people. Unless otherwise noted, these events are not programmed for children. Visit thecentralcollective.com.

• $20 FREE THE NIPPLE PROTEST • Downtown Knoxville • 1PM • Come join your fellow sisters and brothers on Gay Street in downtown Knoxville to participate in a Free The Nipple Protest. Let’s band together, peacefully protest our basic human rights of equality. Women are done sacrificing our comfort for the comfort of society. If this is something that resonates you please join, the more people, the more powerful our collective voice. • FREE Tuesday, Oct. 11 EBENEZER ROAD FARMERS MARKET • Ebenezer United Methodist Church • 3PM • The market offers hand-picked produce in season, artisan breads and cheese, grass-fed meat and farm fresh eggs. • FREE Wednesday, Oct. 12 MARKET SQUARE FARMERS’ MARKET • Market Square • 11AM • The MSFM, a project of Nourish Knoxville, is an open-air farmers’ market located on historic Market Square in the heart of downtown Knoxville. Visit marketsquarefarmersmarket.org. • FREE OAK RIDGE FARMERS MARKET • Historic Jackson Square • 3PM • FREE UT FARMERS MARKET • University of Tennessee • 4PM • For more information about the UT Farmers’ Market you can visit the market website: vegetables.tennessee.edu/ utfm.html or find it on Facebook. • FREE

Knoxville’s BEST live music venue 6 nights a week!

Happy Hour 4pm - 8pm | mon - fri Huge selection of Craft, Import & Local beer Locally roasted coffee

wed oct. 5 • 8pm

Hazel w/ The Holifields, & Holiday free • all ages ( indie rock )

thurs oct. 6 • 8pm

Brewhouse Blues Jam w/ Robert Higginbotham & the Smoking Section free • all ages ( blues )

fri oct. 7 • 8pm

Mutlu w/ 3 mile smile $12 Adv | $15 Day of All Ages ( Singer-songwriter )

sat oct. 8 • 8pm

Transparent Soul w/ Shadowed Self & Clockwork Asylum $7 • All Ages ( rock )

sun oct. 9 • 7pm

howie day w/ Kathryn dean $17 ADV | $20 Day of all ages ( Singer-songwriter ) "Coolest venue in town! Not too big, not too small. Great sound system and audio engineers. Lights show, good food, cold beer and a music store in the back. Oh, and they give lessons, too. Seriously? I still can't believe this place is real."

-Austin Hall of Sam Killed The Bear

Knoxville’s Best Musical Instrument Store

Send your events to calendar@knoxmercury.com

8502 KINGSTON PIKE • (865) 281-5874 openchordmusic.com

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 33

OUTDOORS

Voice in the Wilder ness

Photos by Kim Trevathan

Green Clean Seeking shinrin-yoku on the Boogerman Trail

BY KIM TREVATHAN

R

eeking of the usual quiet desperation, I needed a cleansing session of forest-bathing, or shinrin-yoku—a kind of wellness therapy researched by the Japanese for over 30 years, reputed to prevent disease, relieve stress, lower your blood pressure, boost your immune system, and generally improve your well-being. What better place to go forest bathing than among the oldest trees in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on the Boogerman Trail loop in North Carolina’s Cataloochee section of the park?

After a two-and-a-half-hour drive (two from Knoxville), I was the first one at the trailhead, at Caldwell Fork Trail, a little before 8 a.m. Right away, my sense of touch was engaged by a feeling that I had not experienced in months: cold. The temperature was probably in the mid-40s.

I like being first on trails because I feel like I get the first shot of seeing

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KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

something rare or elusive, like a bobcat or a bear. Elk were nearby, and they were in rut. I wasn’t sure if a sighting of a horny elk would be in keeping with forest-bathing or not. Perhaps it would, if observed at 50 yards, which is the closest the park advises.

After eight-tenths of a mile, I crossed the creek on the second footbridge and paused at the sign for the Boogerman Trail, a left turn off Caldwell Fork Trail. I gazed upward into the yellowing canopy and contemplated the tick-tick of accumulated moisture passing from leaf to leaf. There was the sound of my own breathing as I began to ascend the ridge, puffs of vapor fleeting and faint.

I made myself bite into one of the red berries at the edge of a trail—a partridge berry, I knew, not poisonous but not very tasty, either. I spit a few times, but I was happy to have checked off the five senses of forest-bathing in the first mile.

The ascending trail curved east, and the sun, just risen above the ridges, suffused the trail with a welcoming glow at odds with the trail’s name. Robert Palmer, who owned this land before the park system purchased it from him in 1929, obtained the nickname Booger, according to Hiking Trails of the Smokies, when a teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. He gave a great answer to a mundane question: “The boogerman!”

A boogerman (or boogeyman or bogeyman), according to my experience, is a nasty character who oppresses children. My grandmother used to say, “If you don’t behave, the boogerman will get you!”

I feared the boogerman as a child, though as an adult, hiking a trail named after a supernatural hobgoblin seemed quaint and endearing. Palmer, who never allowed his acreage to be logged, must have been a mischievous guy, perhaps a bit of a smart-aleck as a kid. In Kenneth Wise’s account, though, the teacher asks Palmer his name, and he’s so shy that “boogerman” is all he can come out with.

Staying in the spirt of forest-bathing—going slowly—I took another break to consult the Smokies guidebook to see if I should start looking for landmarks such as the hol-

lowed-out tulip tree big enough to stand inside.

As I arose and half-turned to hoist on my backpack, the boogerman appeared on the trail five feet behind me. “Oh shit!” I said.

“I’m not a bear,” said the young hiker. He grinned and walked on past, speedy and very quiet.

Another mile in, I sat in what I call a tree throne at the base of a chestnut oak whose trunk was so massive it had to be two centuries old.

I climbed to the top of Den Ridge and began my descent toward another junction with Caldwell Fork Trail, which would lead back to the parking lot.

Thinking about the traffic on the way home, I increased my pace. The last 11 miles of driving had involved a road so curvy that a couple of signs set the speed limit at five miles per hour. A few miles of it had been narrow, bumpy gravel that would be treacherous in heavy traffic.

I paused in the white-pine grove where Booger had lived and farmed.

He built a 100-yard-long stone wall that still stands.

Contemplating poor Booger Palmer building this thing, stone by stone, made me more tired than I already was after having hiked about four miles. It was evidence of work, and forest-bathing was the opposite of

OUTDOORS town to trail

20% OFF ONE FULL RETAIL ITEM

UNCLE LEM’S MOUNTAIN OUTFITTERS work. Perhaps Palmer would have scoffed at the notion of forest-bathing.

Or maybe not. Having protected his trees from the axe, he had walked the walk of a conservationist.

I did find the tulip tree, the biggest one, by my estimation, that I’d seen on the hike. The hollowed-out trunk would make a great shelter for a small group waiting out a rain.

As you meet up with Caldwell Fork trail again, you have 2.8 miles to go. I was really tired, my forest-bathing mood long gone, and I quickened my pace to end the hike and get back to my car.

Though the old growth diminished on this last stretch of trail, the creek crossings (without bridges) increased. Most of them were fairly easy, but a few required a bit of strategizing and hopscotching to get across with dry feet. (A hiking staff/ pole really helps, too.) Looking back, the mindfulness required of stepping across a cold rushing stream seemed the closest I’d come to the true spirit of forest-bathing.

Three or four of the log bridges had deteriorated, the hand rails completely or partially gone, but they all held, and I was back at the car around noon, a seven-plus mile hike that took about four hours. I had failed at walking slowly and also at walking fast.

I think the Boogerman loop might have been a bit too long to maintain a shinrin-yoku state of mind, but it felt good anyway, and I think it’s well worth the drive. At the beginning of the loop, there are views of the valley and adjoining ridges that promise to fill up with fall color in the coming weeks.

Full disclosure: On the way out, in that hairpin-heavy gravel section that I was dreading, I did meet two pickups pulling big wide horse trailers. I had to back up the Subaru and get as close as possible to the drop-off at the edge of the road to let these guys pass. We had a foot or so to spare, and one of them rolled down his window and thanked me.

Further disclosure: I went last Saturday, Oct. 1, and it hadn’t rained in a while. I imagine that sections of this trail get very soggy after rain and that the creek crossings become a little less meditative and more problematic.

How to get there: Take Interstate 40 east to Exit 20 in North Carolina.

After exiting, take an immediate right on Cove Creek Road. It’s about 11 miles from there. Just past the campground, on the left, you’ll see the Caldwell Branch trailhead on the left at a footbridge that crosses Cataloochee Creek. ◆

9715 Kingston Pike Knoxville, TN 37922 865-357-8566 - unclelems.com

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 35

’BYE

Sacred & P rofane

Living Too Large

Obesity: Physically disabling and socially damning

BY DONNA JOHNSON

T

o become bedfast because of your weight is no laughing matter. To be trapped inside your house because you are too large to get through the door is tragic. To be an outcast to oneself and society is as cruel a fate as one could imagine.

And to be a witness to this state of affairs with empathy and insight takes a skill few social workers have. I was one of the many who did not.

So it was when I entered the residence of Mr. Patterson as a case-manager for Adult Protective Services, DHS. I was 37 years old, had survived serious drug addiction in New York, returned to Knoxville, finished my degree, and knew everything there was to know. Or so I thought. Now I realize that to think you know everything is the truest evidence of ignorance.

The case record did not prepare me for what I was about to see. It just stated that my client, a man, was obese and neglecting to take care of himself.

When I entered the house it was very dark, with a weak ray of light coming through the kitchen window, revealing a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a very large man lying in a bed that took up the entire room, his arms and legs outstretched like an animal about to be slaughtered. Each of his arms separated in three sections, like three enormous loaves of bread. His legs were the size of tree trunks. He was over 600 pounds.

What do you say when you meet a person like this? “What’s up, dude?”

But I soon forgot his size and noticed only his eyes, which were like those of a hunted animal that knows there is no escape.

Finally, I took out my notebook and asked the questions I had been taught to ask: What meds are you on?

He nodded toward the bedside table where 15 or so medicine bottles stood

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along with a few used tissues and a pitcher of water.

Do you have any family members?

He shook his head from left to right.

On the wall above his bed was a plaque with angels heralding the words “God Loves You.” I wondered how this gentle soul who lay there trapped in his own body felt about God’s love.

An attractive nurse with long blonde hair came in, took his vital signs, gave him his meds, and straightened up the room. Rain fell in sheets and made music on the tin roof: tap, tap, tap, like tiny soldiers marching back and forth. The sad man’s eyes followed the nurse as she moved around the room. She turned the radio on to gospel music and the man’s eyes seemed to brighten.

My client died shortly after this and I closed the case, but I never forgot him.

I have two longtime friends who weigh 400 pounds each, but I never think of them as being overweight.

David was valedictorian at Bearden High School 20 years ago, voted most likely to succeed. Because of schizo-affective disorder, he has to take psychotropic meds, which has caused his weight to balloon. This is a state as bad or worse as the mental illness. He gave up for a time and began eating and drinking excessively until his weight soared even more.

His best friend, Mac, was agoraphobic for many years, until a girlfriend coaxed him out, little by little, into the world. Except for David, other people still make him nervous.

In order to socialize, he has to drink.

He is a computer genius and a graceful dancer. But he can only dance when he drinks.

They tell me that people treat them differently because they are obese. “The

liquor store is the worst,” Mac says.

“They let other people go ahead of us and are rude. And we spend a lot of money there.”

I saw this firsthand when I accompanied them to a West Knoxville restaurant. One young man snickered to his girlfriend and said loudly, “Looks like they’ve been to a few too many restaurants in their lives. Maybe they should apply to be the next Goodyear blimps.”

David, a black belt in karate, looked them dead in the eye and said, “We’re overweight, not deaf.”

“Should we take this guy out now or later?” Mac asked David, at which point the rude young man grabbed his girlfriend’s arm and scurried away.

The three of us went in and enjoyed our dinner without thinking about the incident again.

BY IAN BLACKBURN AND JACK NEELY

There are many different kinds of traps in this world, most of our own making. There are physical disabilities, which my client had; mental illness, such as depression, which can be crippling; criminal traps such as jail; and the trap of thinking that if we could just lose five more pounds, be two years older or younger, be more confident, smarter, faster, or better, we would be happy. Why not be happy now?

My client would probably have been thrilled to be as thin as most of you are. The gifts of the spirit do not come from how we look, but how we feel inside. Why not work on your inside instead of all the externals you think are you, and see what happens?

How about it? It’s worth a try, anyway. Isn’t it? ◆

Building a legacy with Dave Ramsey (A Benefit For Historic Ramsey House)

Friday October 14, 2016 at 6:30 pm The Foundry

747 Worlds Fair Park Drive

Doors open at 6:30 for “Meet & Greet” | Silent Auction Items Dinner and Dancing 7pm-10pm Mr. Ramsey will be speaking on “Building a Legacy.” He is the nationally known expert on how to take control of your finances and stay debt free.

The guest emcee will be Sam Venable, Knoxville’s very own advisor on anything and everything.

Peruse the Silent Auction and bid on that special item from one of our quality area merchants. After dinner the big band sound of the Streamliners will provide music from the 40’s and early 50’s with sounds of Count Basie and Duke Ellington, for your dancing or listening pleasure. *There will be a prize for the best dressed 40’s attire. (40’s attire encouraged but not required)

Tickets for the benefit are $100 per person.

For more information or reservations please call 865-546-0745 or email judy@ramseyhouse.org Historic Ramsey House 2614 Thorngrove Pike, Knoxville, TN 37914 www.ramseyhouse.org

October 6, 2016

KNOXVILLE MERCURY 37

’BYE

Spir it of the Staircase

BY MATTHEW FOLTZ-GRAY

38

KNOXVILLE MERCURY October 6, 2016

www.thespiritofthestaircase.com

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ALICE - is a 2 year old, gorgeous Domestic Short Hair mix who enjoys being held and unlimited cat nip!

Visit Young-Williams Animal Center / call 865-215-6599 for more information.

GYPSY - is a 5 year old German Shepherd who’s number one goal is to be your friend and snuggle!

She loves playing with other dogs. Visit YoungWilliams Animal Center / call 865-215-6599 for more information.

NEWTON - is a 6 year old Akita / Terrier mix.

He enjoys all of the attention, and would do best in a home with no other animals where he can truly blossom and learn what it’s like to be loved. Visit Young-Williams Animal Center / call 865-215-6599 for more information.

RUBY - doesn’t mind getting all dressed up!

She’s an 8 month old Terrier/ mix who’s a fun, lively goofball. She loves toys, and other dogs. Visit Young-Williams Animal Center / call 865-215-6599 for more information.

REESES PIECES - isn’t too fond of spider outfits— but she’s easy going enough to let us dress her up! She’s a 10 year old Chihuahu. Visit Young-Williams Animal Center / call 865-2156599 for more information.

October 6, 2016

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