You expect to encounter a certain amount of furtive tooth-picking at a barbecue joint. If you’re lucky, you may stumble upon some sizzling flat-picking too. Sure, you can always blend your meat-and-music fix at one of the regional summer festivals that smartly combine these two Southern staples, as does the Blue Ridge BBQ Festival in […]
Author: Melanie M. Bianchi
Showing 85-105 of 277 results
The menu as masterpiece
Some carnivores argue that fish don’t feel pain. I don’t presume to know what fish feel — but I will protest the painfully overdone descriptions that distinguish the menu over at TGI-Friday’s. The popular eatery’s “Fish ‘n’ Chips” entree is described as a “prime-cut cod fillet.” (Cut by whom, I wonder? And can you request […]
Sylvia
Any survivor of Freshmen English has encountered the Sylvia Plath poems “Daddy” (dealing with the late poet’s legendary Electra complex) and “Lady Lazarus” (about Plath’s first serious suicide attempt at age 20, a decade before she finally made her death wish come true). Fierce as these poems are, they were dismissed by the poet herself, […]
Long-awaited ‘Angel’ finally descends
Danny Barnes’ new record clutters the stairway to heaven with rusty dreams and unearthly ex-lovers who refuse to quit their haunting ways. The former Bad Livers front man took two years to finish the jubilant Dirt on the Angel (Terminus, 2003). For better and worse (mostly better), it shows. The first major follow-up to Barnes’ […]
Vital signs
Having your future divined amid the steam and clamor of Max & Rosie’s’ lunch rush is like poring over your newly developed vacation photos at the city bus station: You’d acknowledge the humanity teeming around you if only your own image weren’t so engrossing. When I visited Max & Rosie’s on a recent Saturday, numerologist/feng […]
Have .44, will travel
When the day comes that old-time players start skimming their own diaries for lyrics, Cary Fridley will probably pack her bags and leave town. She’s safe for now. In a recent interview, the singer/guitarist singled out what isolates old-time from other locally popular musical forms: a noted lack of “the ego thing” — at least […]
How West Asheville was won
As Katie Gaddy was renovating the building she owns on Haywood Road in West Asheville, she kept running across remnants of other people’s personal history — bobby pins from the structure’s former incarnation as a beauty parlor. “It was great,” Gaddy says happily, standing in her Deluxe Retro-Modern vintage shop, which easily betrays her penchant […]
Outside the looking glass
Ami Worthen is to other singer/songwriters what Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie memoirs were to the correlating disease-du-jour TV series: at once lighter (i.e., less melodramatic) and deeper. Though clearly influenced by old-time sounds — in this case, urban strains of early jazz rather than mountain music — Worthen writes her own […]
St. Patrick’s long weekend
On March 1, Asheville’s homesick New Orleans transplants, attempting to offer the uninitiated a taste of Big Easy bedlam, donned monkey suits and delivered our city’s inaugural Mardi Gras parade. Not to be outdone, a local Ireland native and a Celtic-centric bar owner have united to provide the area’s first annual St. Patrick’s Day Festival. […]
Leaning toward the impossible
According to local choreographer Susan Collard, the Connecticut company Momix can’t be critiqued as a modern-dance group. Interestingly, Momix performer Todd Burnsed might agree. “We hate being called a modern-dance company,” he revealed in a recent interview. The group’s heavy use of props and visual tricks — though “wonderful and exciting,” notes Collard — makes […]
Beyond black and white
Dorothea Lange, best known for capturing a grievous esprit de corps in her Depression-era subjects, once wrote that documentary photography was “pre-eminently suited to build a record of social change.” Fellow documentary photographer Rob Amberg — best known for chronicling the I-26 corridor’s grim advance through rural Madison County — has built such a record […]
Mountain girl
It was an expectantly still winter night. But indoors, the posh Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium — so crowded the rest-room line was 20 minutes deep — seemed an unlikely place to witness miracles. And yet, that evening, something miraculous occurred: Emmylou Harris was upstaged. The Down from the Mountain ensemble tour was only two nights old […]
Caitlin Cary finds her voice
In a New York Daily News article last month, singer/fiddler Caitlin Cary had some unusually candid things to say about her former Whiskeytown bandmate Ryan Adams, whose latest solo album — the expertly pleasurable Gold — helped hurl him onto A-lists everywhere. (A recent People article showed him keeping company with Bob Dylan at a […]
A cut above
Most road movies share one crucial element. While young love (Niagara, Niagara) is a popular theme, wild living (Natural Born Killers, etc.) is the only essential ingredient. Even the quasi-feminist Thelma & Louise featured enough boozing and gunplay to blast home its “girls rule” message. No one gets held up, tied up, f•••ed up or […]
Promises, promises
The day this story comes out, a new man will, overnight, have become the face of America. Clinton’s bulbous nose and hedgerow hair will be excised from current events — replaced by Gore’s leaden mug or Bush’s out-of-work-clown grin. Down on Asheville’s riverfront, political expressions are likewise prominent — if less instantly recognizable. Politiclay: Social […]
Eden unveiled
No one is more serious about cider than Kevin Kilpatrick, who produces fall’s quintessential beverage at The Apple Barn and Cider Mill, a virtual El Dorado of apples (including a winery, restaurant and sweet shop) over in the Tennessee Smokies. At the height of apple season, the Cider Mill cranks out about 1,000 gallons of […]
Little consecrations
Don’t be fooled: Despite its term-paper title, Linda Larsen’s Instrumentality of a Disparate Conscience taps your soul, not your cerebrum. The Weaverville-based, internationally exhibited artist displays 50 new works in her current show at Zone one contemporary — including monoprints, oils, terra-cotta sculpture and a mesmerizing window installation. A self-described deconstructionist whose works echo memories […]
Blood sport
Many bands have amazing tales to tell detailing their genesis. How did such a talented group of musicians ever manage to find one another? is the unvoiced question they nonetheless seek to answer. Their minds a-hum with PR dreams, such folks may swear to an almost-unbelievable series of karmic events. But if you’re actually related […]
Preservation and passing fancy
Trapped under glass or frowningly tagged “Do Not Touch,” the woolen pieces displayed in the Southern Highland Craft Guild’s latest conservation-minded exhibit clearly weren’t crafted for everyday use. Yet California weaver Barbara Kent Stafford claims that her “Red Karakul Rug” (named for the breed of sheep that gave up its coat for the project) could […]
Streetwise
Chicago filmmaker David E. Simpson calls his latest work a love poem to his native city. This reporter wishes to stretch the metaphor. If Halsted Street, U.S.A. is a love poem, it’s a ripe ditty scrawled in ballpoint on a bathroom wall. No moldy sonnet ticking off indulgent cleverness in a neglected book, Simpson’s independent […]
From the bottom up
They once carpeted more than 200 million acres of Appalachia and accounted for nearly half of the tree population in Buncombe County. Today, spotting even one American chestnut tree is big news: It doesn’t happen very often. In fact, the number of thriving American chestnuts is so small, and the trees themselves are so widely […]