Jack Neely

For decades, Knoxville hailed itself as the Gateway to the Smokies. Not many cities identify themselves by wonders that are an hour’s drive away, but the practice offers obvious advantages. It doesn’t cost anything, doesn’t cause traffic or parking tie-ups ...

He’s maybe not as familiar by sight as some of Knoxville's other jazz players, but judging by the crowds he draws around the world, and the prominent discs that have featured his saxophone, Greg Tardy is one of the most ...

But do we serve anything worth waiting in line for? Something that we’d say, “When you’re in Knoxville, you just have to try a ___”?

I’ve been talking around that conclusion for a long time, without ever daring to suggest that particular superlative.

After 12 mostly successful years on Gay Street and Market Square, the city will be moving the Rossini Festival’s unusual street fair in 2014 to Henley Street, between Main and Clinch, saying it is responding to business owners’ complaints. Jack ...

If you’re a student of folk music, over 50, or both, you can sing along with an unusual song called “Big Rock Candy Mountain."

Knoxvillians of a certain age have been struggling avoid a certain comparison, but maybe it’s time to go ahead and get it out. Consider two brothers, successful businessmen, the more outgoing of whom has gubernatorial aspirations.

Robinella, one of the most credible local almost-hit-it-big stories of the last decade or two, is still around, with its unusual jazz-country sensibility and its popular lead singer, Robin Bailey.

State rankings are kind of like ethnic slurs. We can use them as punchlines of jokes about being grateful for Mississippi, and as motivating tools to talk about ourselves. But when someone else uses them, it can rankle.

On Wednesday, with some Edwardian fanfare, Mayor Madeline Rogero and her staff announced the centennial celebration of the National Conservation Exposition of 1913. If all goes according to still-unfolding plans, this year’s Centennial Conservation Expo will be an unusual Saturday ...

I had things to do on Saturday afternoon, but it was such a lovely day I took a walk through Market Square.

I’d never looked twice at the building on Depot Street at Ogden. It was just a big, blank, one-story building, looking from the front like any utilitarian warehouse from the 1970s. I remember the ’70s, but can’t account for what ...

The Tennessee Legislature has been dabbling with the concept of nullification as of late. In particular, our very own Sen. Stacey Campfield, Rep. Bill Dunn, plus area Sen. Frank Niceley have all supported extraordinary bills to “nullify” federal initiatives, especially ...

If you’ve been feeling a little more metropolitan lately, you’ve got some numbers to back it up.

After a couple of recent accidents involving death and injury, in West Knoxville and then North Knoxville, it’s not clear that cars are safe in parking lots.

The smooth, rich tones of Lance Owens’ self-titled CD are a statement of a confident tenor saxophonist who favors the classics. It is, at turns, suave, sweet, sensitive, swinging. You may want to put on a tie just to listen.

Years ago I discovered the easiest way to dull the pain of paying bills is by paying them in person.

The press conference at the blank corner of State and Commerce last Friday drew an impressive convention of mayors, commissioners, councilmen, and other conspicuous Knoxville boosters, affirming that architect-turned-developer Buzz Goss’ Marble Alley project is huge. But it’s not much ...

Ever try googling Knoxville to see what pops up? Unsurprisingly, a lot of public and semi-public websites from government-related organizations. But have you ever taken a good look at them, and considered what kind of image they portray of Knoxville ...

Most prominent local websites include outdated information. Many herald attractions and events now in the past. Anachronisms are almost everywhere, even on homepages.

Most websites, certainly including metropulse.com, offer puzzlements and creaky dysfunctions, things that aren’t clear or take longer than you’d expect.

After a few months in charge of the best bookstore in Guatemala, Bill McGowan’s back in town, and wanted to catch up. A skinny guy in a tweed Irish cap and a stubbly white beard, McGowan is originally from Chicago, ...

In my column about filmmaking, to emphasize the unusualness of the fact that James Agee is still regarded as relevant to current cinema, 58 years after his death, I stretched one point. I stated that James Agee died before he ...

Is Knoxville the fourth biggest video-production city in America? We’ve been saying that, and I don’t hear rivals for that title complaining.

Most folks, even people who live and work nearby, don’t know he’s here. He stands alone in a contemplative spot in a copse of trees where curious walkers find him.

Sutherland Avenue is West Knoxville’s cluttered back porch. It has a lot of important stuff on it, some cool and even beautiful stuff, but all pretty much jumbled out there, and we’re not always eager to show it to guests. ...

Come July, our favorite reality-television program, Antiques Roadshow, is on its way to Knoxville.

Preservationist developers lament that they’re rapidly running out of old downtown buildings to renovate. Joe Petre’s Conversion Properties is reducing that dwindling number by one. A well-known real-estate broker, Petre has just lately turned preservationist developer, and is now converting ...

If you know the Lonetones mainly as the good-natured and obliging string band that’s always happy and capable to fill an early slot in a modest festival’s bill, you won’t have much clue about their albums, especially their latest. The ...

The gun debate may be the crispest demonstration of America’s city-country split. Our political divide is starkly geographical, in a way that’s true on a micro level in Knox County, precinct by precinct, and on a national level, state by ...

Downtown’s residential wave is finally lapping at Main Street. The Medical Arts Building—that tall, beatific jazz-age tower underused and underappreciated for years—is getting rehabbed, and that’s good news.

The first thing you need to know about PechaKucha is how to pronounce it. You emphasize both Cha’s: pe-CHA-ku-CHA. If you say it fast, p’CHA’k’CHA, as veterans do, it gives you a sense of the pace of the thing that, ...

At this point, with the preservation-fueled revival of downtown bringing people, dollars, and uncustomary positive press to the city, the value of the community’s limited stock of old buildings might seem obvious. But their demolition is still occurring, often without ...

Our recent issue about What Knoxville Needs stirred up an old futuristic dream that won’t die. We talk about it today in the same tones we used in the ’60s when we talked about jet packs and hovercraft and computers.

The year’s only a few days old, but Knoxville has already lost two influential and very different architects.

Finally, we’ve arrived in a gracefully nameable era. For 13 years now, those of us who are accustomed to making sense of our recent past by sorting it into decades with distinct personalities, like the ’20s or the ’50s, haven’t ...

A funny thing about the news: It always rhymes.

One century ago, a dozen different Knoxvillians might give you a dozen different ideas about what constituted a Christmas tradition. There survived a few people old enough to recall when Knoxville hardly celebrated Christmas at all. Until the ’40s—the 1840s—it ...

We take the Knoxville Jazz Orchestra, who played their annual Christmas show at the Bijou Theatre Tuesday night, for granted, but National Public Radio just named KJO’s Christmas Time Is Here one of five recommended jazz Christmas albums of the ...

And there’s been a pretty extravagant variety of very local books this year. These are the ones I’ve encountered and, for one reason or another, been impressed with.

They’ve rarely worked together. They didn’t learn cooking together as kids. And the last time the two lived in the same house, 30-something years ago, neither aspired to be any sort of chef. Yet sisters Holly and Peggy Hambright are ...

That anyone named Grimaldi ever lived in 1870s Knoxville might be surprising in itself.

Tuesday night at a public meeting, the city rolled out a long-term plan to fix a problem people have been complaining about since the 20th century: a lack of coherent, informative signage. Jack Neely gives them a look.

Scaling the Lilliputian ramparts of Fort Higley last week, I hardly knew the place. One of the two best-preserved Civil War battlements in Knox County, the little fort’s been half-forgotten in these South Knoxville woods for the last 149 years, ...

No big fan of chain-link fences to begin with, I especially hate to see that fence go up around the Aconda Court building on Cumberland Avenue and what’s now Volunteer Boulevard, and some other historic buildings just behind it, just ...

Saturday I was at work downtown, as I am most Saturdays, catching up on stuff. I’d been half paying attention to the Missouri game on my desk radio, when early in the fourth quarter I went out to get a ...

Here’s my theory, in a nutshell. You’re liberal, I’m liberal. You’re conservative, I’m conservative. We’re probably conservative or liberal about different things. My theory, and I’m sticking to it, is that everybody is both conservative and liberal, maybe even in ...

Yes, we know, East Tennessee is ultra-conservative. But Knoxville has also presented the world with quite a few influential liberals over the years. In fact, several nationally controversial “liberal” institutions, from The New York Times to the United Nations, have ...

One thing Republicans and Democrats and Libertarians and Green Partisans can agree on is that we’ve all survived presidents we don’t like, presidents we thought were dangerous idiots who’ve wasted our money. Maybe that’s the foundation for a new dialogue.

It’s a school. It’s a controversy. It’s a former voting place that lost its status over what critics claim was a politically based charge about handicap access. This will be the first year in many decades that voters haven’t been ...