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Lost Flesh, Lost Sonatas

Knoxvillians were all over the place on NPR’s Weekend Edition a few days ago. The Saturday show did a you-are-there profile of Dr. William Bass and his famous Body Farm. After other network TV news stories about him and a bestselling book, we may as well face the fact that until Johnny Knoxville makes another movie, or the Vols win another national championship, Dr. Bass and his experiments in human decomposition are Knoxville’s chief claim to fame. But the Sunday show ran a more surprising feature about an eccentric pianist, Knoxville native Guy Livingston, who’s doing an inventive cabaret-style show in Paris about notorious jazz-age futurist musician George Antheil. Livingston’s show is called “The Lost Sonatas,” and Le Monde has called it “dazzling.” Livingston, son of former UT architecture prof and Fort Sanders preservationist Phillip Livingston, has performed occasionally hereabouts in recent years at places like the Laurel Theatre.

How to Fest Best

Knoxville’s been kind of a laboratory of festivology lately. It’s gratifying when the experiments work as expected; it’s at least interesting when they don’t.

Saturday’s Gay Street-a-Go-Go had its moments, as when the original Turtles, of “Happy Together” fame, gave a call-out to Harold’s Kosher Style Foods, something we never expected to witness in this lifetime. It was fun to look at the old cars, and to see an Elvis movie playing on Gay Street. At its height, there were maybe a couple of thousand people there, and it probably gave a boost to sales in the Old City. But the festival experienced some disappointments—and it wasn’t just that the original Turtles were talky snots. Its late-arriving and early-departing crowd raised some interesting sociological issues. We’re glad the sponsors mounted it and hope they will try it again, with the knowledge that Saturday’s experience demonstrated some Newtonian Principles of Festivity. Namely:

1.) When contemplating unusual events, families tend toward inertia. Therefore it requires a vigorous propaganda campaign to induce large numbers of parents to bring their kids out for a “family-friendly” festival.

To be fair, an hour or more of brief hot-weather showers were a significant problem for the early events on Saturday. But it’s unclear whether more than a couple dozen families ever had any intention of attending this party. Modern families operate something like the permanent members of the UN Security Council; every member has veto power, and you need to appeal to each of them. A family-friendly festival is, therefore, more complicated than any other sort of festival. You need a guaranteed variety of activities, various glowing things, and perhaps one of those inflatable bouncing chambers, to fetch them. Furthermore, for veto-empowered kids between 8 and 17, the chief criterion of attending any given festival is an absolute parental guarantee that there will be large quantities of other kids their age. The successful festival-giver also may need to make some sort of a deal with a school, church, or soccer league to prime the pump with happy children.

2.) If you hold your festival on a street where many people have access to private space adjacent to or overlooking the street, the adjacent population may actually have a deleterious effect on the festival itself. This Counterintuitive Draining Effect (CDE) is exacerbated if such spaces are newly renovated, trendy and/or funky. Judging by figures in windows of adjacent buildings, multiple tenants used the street festival as a backdrop for multiple private parties in the many private spaces on the 100 block of Gay. In doing so, they invited erstwhile festivalgoers to leave, or stay away from, the street. The uninvited could only envy. The phrase, “That’s where I want to be” was overheard on the proletarian asphalt.

Private revelers, of course, have a First Amendment right to assemble with their fellow citizens as they choose. The draining effect can be overcome; you just need more attendees than you might otherwise. Holding a street festival on a block where 100 or more sociable young adults live is something like painting a porous surface. It can be done, but you’ll need more paint.

Corollary: Private, invitation-only parties, especially when sponsored by the festival sponsor, and held simultaneous to the festival and adjacent to it, have a corrosive effect on general festivity.

As it happened Saturday, one of the most-talked-about private parties that drew people away from the festival was an invitation-only soiree hosted by the organization sponsoring the festival itself. The guests, who were admitted by required sticker, included many of Knoxville’s conspicuously jovial sorts, several of whom were happy to report to the peasantry outside that the sponsor’s party, supplied with free food and drink, was much more appealing than the sponsor’s festival. These reports did little to raise the spirits of rank-and-file festival attendees.

3a.) Though it’s not yet proven that a street festival necessarily requires beer vending to succeed, this popular beverage is known to help promote a festive mood. However, (b.) if the sponsor has commenced any given festival by providing attendees with multiple gallons of beer per hour, the sudden cessation of such services will tend to have a demoralizing effect on the festival itself. The subsequent rate of diminution of the festival crowd can be predicted mathematically.

Corollary: This effect is exacerbated if (a.) the beer sales cease at or about the very moment that the most-promoted part of the festival begins and when the largest part of the crowd arrives, (b.) the beer sales cease when the festival’s duration, as announced, is only halfway over, and (c.) the attendants who sell tickets and bracelets are unaware of such impending cessation.

Saturday’s festival was announced to run from 4 p.m. to midnight. At 7:52, the end of beer-ticket sales “in eight minutes” was announced from the stage. Several of the people who actually sold the beer tickets at that time told purchasers that tickets could be redeemed throughout the evening. However, by 8:15 the kegs had disappeared. The crowd was not far behind. Many took their beer tickets home, perhaps consoled that it was for a worthy cause.

4. Showing bizarre old movies outdoors at downtown parties is a splendid idea. However, showing such movies at a spot more than 100 yards remote from the main festival site, or showing such movies more than two hours after beer sales have ceased, and after much of the attendee population of the festival has departed, is not optimal for attracting a large and festive crowd and requires, at best, vigorous promotion.

Watching Elvis Presley and Ann-Margret in Viva Las Vegas on a Gay Street viaduct at 10 or 11 p.m. was a surreal and memorable scene. We wish you could have been there. We’re pretty sure you weren’t. Only 60 rapidly sobering festivalgoers found their way to the movie, and by the time Mr. Presley won the Las Vegas Gran Prix, therefore marrying Ann-Margret, barely 25 stalwarts remained. Some of them appeared to be late-night viaduct regulars.

May 27, 2004 • Vol. 14, No. 22 © 2004 Metro Pulse