Good value Knoxville

We all met VolDad for lunch yesterday and ate at the Copper Cellar. It's kind of weird being on the strip visiting your old drunken haunts.

The Vol-in-Law got good Christmas from VolDad. A bottle of Basil Hayden's Kentucky bourbon and an Oxford University pewter hip flask. He was thrilled. Not only has he always wanted a flask, but he got one with the logo of his alma mater and made in the city of Sheffield, England where he did his PhD. Sheffield has an ancient and venerable pewter and cutlery industry and truly we should have stocked up when we lived there.

After lunch we went to the Knoxville Museum of Art, which was very enjoyable. On the way in we were asked for our zip codes and explained we lived in London. The volunteer at the entrance was quite interested and asked us how we had found out about the KMA. Ummm... well, not in London. I'm not sure the Vol-in-Law had ever been, but both VolDad and myself used to be quite frequent visitors.

If you haven't been, the KMA is quite small but they take a lot of care with their exhibits. I've seen stuff I don't particulalrly care for there but I can't remember seeing any junk. And that's the thing with modern art, a lot of it is rubbish. The Tate Modern in London (well worth a visit for the building alone) is huge and chock-a-block with crap -and lots of great stuff, too. They take more of a weird quantity over selective quality apprach to curating at the Tate Modern.

There was a knowledgeable dosun who explained all sorts of things. After a number of years in London with only limited visits out really, you get kind of used to the cold and distant human relationships and when someone does approach you, you're always sort of wondering what they want. I couldn't help but think - get away, can't you just watch me suspiciously like I might steal or damage something? What do you care which piece I like? But, his presence enhanced our visit tremendously. There was an excllent exhibit of light and image display by I think Jim Campbell (sorry can't remember the name exactly that might be it -I'll revise when I get Internet access again.) although the first thing you come to was a kind of "sound sculpture" - the kind of thing I precisely hate. I like visual art, music, the spoken word, performing arts, etc. But don't record bits of spoken words and then hang a speaker up on the wall and expect me to be impressed.

Later on we went to the dollar theater out west. I fully expected it to be 2 or 3 dollars, but it was only 1.50. I can remember when Movies 7 opened and it was only a dollar. Maybe a year or so later it went up to a buck fifty. Some nine years after I left Knoxville it's still the same price and I can't help but feel that I had to bear the brunt of the inflationary pressure on ticket prices.

We saw 40 Year Old Virgin which I thought was quite good. All the better in that it was less than a pound. The ViL and I hardly ever go to the movies any more and it's mostly because we almost never walk out of the cinema feeling we got out our money's worth. It's a lot easier to get that feeling of that movie was worth my money when the ticket's under two bucks compared to over 12.