JAWS, TOO
Knoxville's got it all, including the impressive McClung Museum on the UT campus.

The Chronicles of an Extraordinary Effort to Ascertain Whether There�s Anything to Do Here

by Finny Fogg

there we were, the usual gang of Metro Pulse layabouts sipping Mad Dog at the exclusive Club LePulse in the basement of a large abandoned building on Gay Street (no jackets or ties allowed; shoes optional). I was holding forth, as I will after a bottle or two, on the deficiencies of life in Knoxville. Winding up what I thought was a particularly devastating critique of local savoir faire, couture, and various other things French people think are important, I asserted boldly, "There's just nothing to do here!"

"Izzat so?" replied one of my colleagues—a staff writer of uncertain moral extraction—with what I took to be skepticism and possibly even schadenfreude.

"Yep," I said, parrying his deft verbal thrust.

"Hah! Yer fulla crap," rejoined my colleague, knocking back a swig of the greenish liquid in his plastic bottle.

The intellectual atmosphere was getting a little intense, and I could see our co-workers' ears prick up at the promise of an involved philosophical debate.

"Look," says I, "if you wanna go to a mall, maybe, or some big blockbuster movie, or a chain restaurant with Marilyn Monroe and traffic lights on the wall, Knoxville's your town. But art, discourse, cultural interaction, the things that make a city a city—these you will not find."

"Oh yeah? Listen wiseguy, there's more stuff going on in this town every day than you could do in a month." My friend was obviously in his cups, as they say, and not of rational mind. It seemed like a good opportunity to lighten his hefty wallet (hefty from shaking down local politicos and band members who want to avoid the career-ruining sting of a Metro Pulse upbraiding).

"All right," I said, "I'll tell you what. I'll bet you a dinner at Mrs. Winner's, complete with a jug of tea, that I can exhaust all of Knoxville's paltry cultural resources in just one week. Without even trying."

Being a sucker for Mrs. Winner's tea, he agreed. As our colleagues watched in rapt silence and/or boozy stupor, we shook hands and synchronized our calendars. I was to return on the eighth day with a comprehensive log of my activities. Pausing on my way out the door, I picked up a copy of our most recent edition and turned to the event listings in the back...

Day 1

Hmmm. A bad start. It seemed like a safe bet to head to the subdivided wilds of West Knox, where I was fairly sure I could avoid anything even remotely interesting. Unfortunately, I somehow found myself in the basement of a pleasant home off of Lovell Road, smack dab in the middle of a joint meeting of the Rationalists of East Tennessee and the Skeptics Book Club. My host, Massimo Pigliucci, was a University of Tennessee scientist and Italian to boot, not exactly the kind of humdrum suburbanite I was seeking. What's more, the conversation was about not football or taxes or even the weather but the nature and value of belief systems. Specifically, the topic du jour was "Is religion good for you?," and the general consensus of the 20 or so assembled professors, teachers, students, engineers, and retirees was, "Probably not." My mind spun. This is Bible Belt Knoxville? This is what goes on in the basements of homes in developments with names like "Lovell Woods"? Intellectual inquiry, cultural analysis, and heretical assertions? I started to wonder about my own neighbors. Maybe the happy couple with the little girl next door are really anarchists. Maybe the older guy who lives behind me hosts Dadaist parties and drinks toasts to DuChamp (it would explain his striped Bermudas and knee-high white socks). In Knoxville? I had to admit it suddenly seemed possible...

Day 2

Okay, so Day 1 was an unlucky fluke. But Day 2 would prove my point. It was, after all, a Monday, and nothing happens on a Monday. To stack the deck even more in my favor, I refused to leave the house until well after dark. Then I picked up a companion, Sancho, so I'd have a witness to the dearth of activity in this so-called city. Winding down Broadway toward the river, my confidence increased. The buildings were dark, the sidewalks clear. I crossed the Henley Street Bridge and ventured a short way down Chapman Highway, just enough to quell any doubts, when suddenly...Sancho was the first to notice it, a large cluster of cars parked in front of Disc Exchange, which seemed improbably well-lit for 11:45 p.m. We pulled in to investigate and found the lot full of teenagers in an array of hip clothing (presumably hip, since it looked ridiculous). And the store was open! Inside, several dozen people were clustered around a small stage watching three young fellows pound out some noisy but, I had to admit, alluring rock music. On inquiry, I discovered this was not some college stunt—a danceathon or something similarly dreadful—but a release party for the first major-label CD by an outfit called Boy Genius. Major label. In Knoxville. At midnight on a Monday. I sighed, defeated two days in a row. Sancho, engrossed in a book about celebrity tattoos, just grinned...

Day 3

No better. I actually found myself unable to do all the things on the schedule for today. There was a lecture-cum-book-signing at Borders about stress management, which appealed to me in my mounting anxiety about losing the bet. There was the Odd Tuesday Film Society, meeting at the Terrace to watch and discuss foreign films. But a swing dance class at Church Street United Methodist Church (which isn't on Church Street at all; someone please explain) caught the fancy of Mrs. Fogg, and off we went. After an hour of learning moves like the male cuddle (quite cozy) and the barrel roll (careful not to dislocate that shoulder!), we were worn out. But many of our classmates responded enthusiastically when the instructor invited them to continue cutting rugs out at Michael's that evening. Knoxvillians swing dancing on weeknights. Good Lord. Who was going to be left to watch Frasier?

Day 4

Met up with Sancho after work for our weekly game of basketball. The conversation turned again to the bet. "All right," I allowed, "there's a little music out there, and maybe some groups of people sitting around talking. But what about really challenging intellectual activity?" Sancho grinned again—never a good sign—and said, "I don't know. Why don't you try the Candy Factory?" This sounded like an unlikely proposition. Usually when I'm in the Candy Factory, it seems like an empty shell, with more bulletin boards than people. But on entering, I did detect some sounds coming from below. Probably a janitor, I assumed, but I went downstairs to have a look. What I found would have surprised me more except for my experiences of the past few days. Here were several tables lined with a variety of people (well, okay, they were all male, but quite an age range) challenging each other on the hallowed ground of the chess board. Chess, the game of gentlemen and scholars through the ages, thriving on the ground floor of the Candy Factory. And this was no special occasion, I discovered, but the weekly meeting of the Knoxville Chess Club. Some matches were played for fun, others were official tournament games that counted toward international rankings. Excited by the intensity of the play around me, I foolishly accepted a challenge to play and quickly found myself wiped clean off the board. My opponent mentioned that he didn't play much anymore, at least not competitively. I sighed...

Day 5

I had been forced to check several things off my challenge list of activities and civic attributes. Fine. But I remained convinced one thing Knoxville couldn't provide was the exotic, the foreign, the sense of border-hopping cultural exchange available in a real city. Still, to give it a fair chance, I wandered after dinner down to the Old City, the place that seemed most likely to acknowledge the existence of a world beyond Halls and Strawberry Plains. It was warm, and feeling suddenly thirsty I traipsed over the threshold of the nearest bar, Patrick Sullivan's Saloon. The first thing I noticed was a group of gents sitting at the big round table by the window, surrounded by musical instrument cases. The instruments themselves—fiddles, guitars, a big flat drum I recognized as a bodhran—were in the hands of the assembled group, who were stroking and tuning and tweaking the strings the way passionate musicians do. Settling myself on a stool, I ordered up a cold pint of Harp's lager and asked the barkeep the nature of the gathering. It turned out this was Celtic night, a weekly affair featuring music and sometimes even Irish dancing. To underscore the point, the musicians soon fired up a reel (or was it a jig?) that compelled me to move closer to their end of the bar. With a sinking feeling I realized I had found what I was certain I would not. Drinking an Irish beer in a bar named after a real Irishman listening to Irish music, I was transported. I've been in pubs in Dublin that seemed less authentic. Things were starting to look bleak for my end of the argument...

Day 6

But not as bleak as they did by the end of Day 6. This was my art day, originally intended to prove the limits of Knoxville's museums and exhibit spaces. But even a full afternoon of trekking from one to another—with precious little time to actually take in the art on display—couldn't exhaust the possibilities. I began at the new Unitarian Universalist Church on Kingston Pike, a curving wall of a building that—whatever you think of it—at least proves architecture in Knoxville isn't always banal. Inside, I found a striking exhibit by UT professor F. Clark Stewart nicely presented in a gallery hallway. From there, I swooped by the McClung Museum on the UT campus for a preview of the new Mayan exhibit and found myself contemplating the ephemerality of life and the permanence of art. Then onto the 11th Street Expresso House in the Fort Sanders area, which offered an assortment of whimsical fare that would make great album covers if Emerson, Lake, and Palmer ever get back together. Then finally, with the strains of a B-52s soundcheck drifting up from the World's Fair Park (I think it was "Planet Claire"), I headed for my real destination—the Knoxville Museum of Art. I had been before, of course, to Rodin and all that, but I was unprepared for this experience. A two-story collection of works related to the Holocaust wasn't exactly the thing for a sunny Friday afternoon, but for as long as I could force myself to endure it, it was powerful, shattering, conscience-pricking, and all the other things socially relevant art is supposed to be. Searching for a respite, I turned to the other installation, a collection of modern American works. I think it was when I got to the Rothko and the Motherwell hanging side by side that I finally threw in the towel. Yes, okay, Knoxville had conquered me. There was more here than I could do, more than I could even imagine. As if to kick me when I was down, music started drifting up from the museum's hall. Wandering down in a daze, I found several hundred people gathered around a stage where a musical trio was putting forth some very convincing hep jazz. I couldn't take anymore, and stumbled toward the exit...

Day 7

There was some freedom in conceding defeat. I began the final day of the adventure with a determination to just drive around until something interesting appeared. And I wasn't disappointed. At Morningside Park, I found dozens of people gathered for a disc golf tournament. I had never heard of disc golf, and yet here was a day-long tournament being played out on a municipal disc golf course, complete with metal baskets and tee-off areas. There's a municipal disc golf course in Knoxville? I just chuckled, said to myself, "Of course there is," and drove on. My final stop turned out to be Chilhowee Park, usually reliably lifeless. But not today. Today was the East Tennessee Junior Livestock Expo, where Future Farmers of America and their animals (Future Entreés of America?) gathered to compare width and girth. Not being schooled in the niceties of cow watching, I was somewhat at a loss as the table of judges surveyed and rated the hulking beasts in each category. But the sizable crowd responded enthusiastically as each winner was announced. (The steers themselves seemed unimpressed, with the exception of a black bull that took to bellowing like a wounded dinosaur. I wondered if he was protesting the mobile hamburger and sausage stand just outside the judging pavilion.) I smiled again and headed off...

The following day, I returned to the old club, bearing a Mrs. Winner's dinner for eight and two jugs of tea. Between gulps of the brackish brown fluid, my colleague exulted in his victory. I could have launched into a soliloquy about how I hadn't really lost but instead had gained an appreciation of the liveliness and diversity of activities in our bustling town. Instead, I challenged my friendly adversary to a game of disc golf. Loser buys the Mad Dog.