Tuesday night fever?

The holiday season is just about here, which means all the usual cheer, gift wrapping, caroling, sugar consumption, goodwill toward men and five weeks of quality time spent with family and friends. Guest are great and all, but sometimes a pleasant Tuesday evening morphs into a painful eternity over the Scrabble board. Or maybe you— […]

Looking for greener goods?

There's more to green products than just an official-looking emblem on the packaging. Ingredients get top consideration — and buzzwords include organic, sustainable, renewable and recycled. Yet not everything that's dubbed "eco-chic" by advertisers is automatically earth-friendly. For example, wood is a renewable resource, but exotic species are not always harvested sustainably. Corn-based products are […]

Chariots of wire

There are athelete-punishing marathons, feats of spandexed agility and moments of community-bolstering brilliance. And then there's the Idiotarod, which is kindof none of the above and, then again, kindof all of the above. Serious runners booty: Costumed racers know that the Idiotarod is more about the fun than the run. Photo by Nicholas Noyes. "It's […]

Sound Track

Local country band The Honeycutters does not take its CD title from the Lead Belly folk standard. Instead, the tune is an original by vocalist/guitarist Amanda Anne Platt whose pragmatic voice and exceptional lyrics never falter on this 12-song collection. The crisp, waning autumn/time passing/unrequited love/dusty roads and pale sun feel of this album would […]

Sound Track

The Nova Echo's recent age 16+ show at Stella Blue contained a lot of elements foreign to Asheville: No beer was served, for starters. And then there's the matter of the tightly crafted, immaculately produced electro-pop. It's possible that, not since Sinead Lohan's tour stopped (inexplicably) at Stella Blue in 1998, has such a major […]

These are the good old days

Everything about Woody Pines (from his feather-festooned fedora and his vintage resonator guitar to the grainy pictured of boxcars on his Web site and deep cut covers of long-forgotten blues musicians) harkens to another era. One of juke joints, clapboard shacks and coal smoke on the wind. Pines, whose early performances borrowed from vaudeville and […]