Metro Pulse/Ear to the Ground

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May Day

The most recent political rumor du jour is that City Council candidates Joe Bailey and Greg Pinkston are receiving help from the state Republican party. The evidence of that are the nearly-identical direct mail pieces the two campaigns churned out last week. The brochures were similar in layout and design and, most importantly in the eyes of some, they both bore "Nashville Tn. Permit No. 1" postmarks. Given the Republican connections of Pinkston and Bailey, it's gotta be the work of the GOP, right?Wrong. The direct mail is the work of lobbyist/consultant Joe May, who is involved in several other City Council campaigns as well. Some in the Bailey camp are not happy that their guy, an upbeat, happy kind of fellow, has a brochure that looks so much like Pinkston's, which features a scowling portrait on the cover. "[Pinkston's] looks like a mugshot," one Bailey operative grumbled.

WWMD? (What would Missy do?)

The incentive plan aimed at jump-starting downtown redevelopment and the restoration of historic downtown buildings was unanimously approved at Tuesday's City Council meeting, and so was the plan for the city to lease 23,000 square feet of unspecified office space in the Emporium Building for $185,725 a year for 10 years. Zimbabwe Matavo of the Black Business Contractors Association was the last speaker during the public forum segment at the tag end of the meeting, and pointed out that his group, and others, have been trying for 20 years—with little help from the city—to get a development plan going for the Five Points area in East Knoxville. He noted that City Council has a regular monthly workshop schedule, and asked that Five Points business development be put on the agenda of the next workshop. Carlene Malone informed him that even though every other Thursday is set aside for workshops, they are rarely held, and must be requested by a member of Council.

Thereupon Matavo tried to rouse his District 6 Council member, Raleigh Wynn, to ask for a workshop to be scheduled.

"Huh? What..." asked the sleepy-sounding Wynn.

Matavo tried to explain, but Vice Jack Sharp, who was chairing the meeting, interrupted him:

"Meeting adjourned."

Pillars of Wisdom

The location of Monday's "Market Square Workshop" proved to be felicitous. The meeting, a public input session sponsored by KCDC and Nine Counties One Vision (and led by Nine Counties guru Gianni Longo), was held at Green Magnet Math and Science Academy, an elementary school next to the Townview Terrace apartments downtown. The opening and closing sessions were held in the school gym/auditorium, which just happened to be decorated with six paper pillars representing a host of civic virtues: Respect, Responsibility, Trustworthiness, Caring, Fairness and Citizenship. The funny thing is, when representatives of various workgroups rose to give their ideas and suggestions for things needed in redeveloping Market Square, most of them started with respect, responsibility, trustworthiness, caring, fairness and citizenship. Maybe our local leaders should get together in elementary schools more often. It's always possible some of the students' knowledge will rub off on them.

Absence and Malice

That's not to imply many "leaders" were actually there Monday night (at the first and probably only real public input session in the city's nearly five-year downtown development saga). They weren't. Mayor Victor Ashe was notably absent, represented solely by deputy development director Kevin Dubose. The only current Council member to attend was, no surprise, Carlene Malone. At the end of the meeting, participant Rachel Craig asked what was going to be done with the many ideas generated by 70 or so attendees during the three-hour session—besides having them posted on the Nine Counties website. KCDC officials said that while the meeting had no formal weight, the results would be given due consideration. On the way out, one participant groused, "And they wonder why people don't participate in government."

People and Par-tays

(Courtesy of correspondent Barbarella Ascot-Bosch)The annual downtown Halloween bash last Saturday was a customarily costume-heavy affair. Organizers Dave Kenny, Mike Dotson (who returned from a sojourn in China and India just in time for the soirée), Scott Scheinbaum, Regina Rizzi and others converted three adjacent basement vaults in one of developer David Dewhirst's magnificent (in the construction-zone sense of "magnificent") buildings on the 100 block of S. Gay Street into a black-lit dance floor, a bar and lounge area, and a "chill room" (the latter featured mattresses beneath red-lit canopies designed by recent News-Sentinel cover boy Buzz Goss—for purposes of, ahem, relaxation). Talk of the party was the stunning headgear designed and worn by Goss' wife Cherie Piercy-Goss (of the Union Avenue Piercy-Gosses)—a huge helmet constructed entirely of glowing styrofoam cups. Other eye-catching costumes included John Sanders' Universe Knoxville costume, complete with cape and a pyramid-shaped helmet ("I'm going to save Knoxville!," he said, and who could doubt him?), and assorted harem girls, firefighters, monkeys, tigers, a giant dancing Q-Tip and, er, Gerald Ford. All in all, another fine night on the town.

Ingle Wasn't Recalled

Stan Ingle, who has served one term as president of the Knoxville Firefighter's Association, was re-elected to a second term by an almost two-to-one majority over his opponent, former KFA president Bill Warwick, who subsequently withdrew from the union. This election was seen by many as a referendum on the administration of Mayor Victor Ashe, because Warwick enjoyed the support of Knoxville Fire Chief Gene Hamlin, an unreconstructed Ashe-ite. Ingle's tenure in office has been notable for the number of times he has approved the hiring of lawyers to represent the rank-and-file in grievances against the city.

Everyone's a Critic

A Knoxville restaurant has gotten a bad review from an unlikely source: science-fiction icon Neil Gaiman, the popular comic-book creator (Sandman) whose international cult following has followed him into his career as a science-fiction novelist. In his latest novel, American Gods, he described an unfortunate dinner here:

"Lunchtime, they ate bad Japanese food while a thunderstorm lowered on Knoxville, and Town [one of the characters in Gods] didn't care that the food was late, that the miso soup was cold, or that the sushi was warm."

Our sources who accompanied Gaiman during the science-fiction convention Concat here about two years ago say the line is based on a real incident: the offending restaurant was Tomo, which operated in the Old City for several years.

In a post on this year's Concat website, at www.kasfa.org, Gaiman later claimed his reference in the novel was charitable: It was, in his memory, "the worst sushi restaurant in the world. I put it into American Gods, although the one we all went to was even worse than that. Sometimes I think my life since ConCat has been a dream, and that I shall wake up soon and find that I'm still sitting at that table, waiting for the cold miso soup to finally arrive."

Tomo recently moved west on Kingston Pike, where perhaps they're not as likely to draw the attention of famous conventioneers.