Welcome to A&E

Prodigies of cool: Teen sensations Skinny Legs and All. There have always been upstarts, like high school kid-turned-Rolling Stone-writer Cameron Crowe, and skatepunk-turned-bluesman Jonny Lang. Asheville’s answer to those prodigies of cool has to be Skinny Legs and All. The quintet, ages 12-17, started as a music club at Evergreen Community Charter School. But these […]

Larger than life

“Each project is like an expedition,” says Christo. “This is why it’s so exciting.” Really, every aspect of the shared life of husband and wife artist team Christo and Jeanne-Claude reads like an adventure, from their identical birthdates to their fated meeting (Christo was hired to paint a portrait of Jeanne-Claude’s mother). Artists Jeanne-Claude and […]

Better late than never

Talking to Patterson Hood, it’s easy to notice that the guitar-playing, rabble-rousing and whiskey-swilling frontman of the Drive-By Truckers isn’t quite the same person at home. Is that the sound of his daughter playing in the background? Truckers’ delight: WNCW listeners voted Brighter Than Creation’s Dark No. 4 on the station’s list of 2008’s Top […]

Old Kentucky Homework

Six slightly scruffy boys listen as their instructor reads from Look Homeward, Angel. She stops and asks, “How is Wolfe using melodrama here?” Tentatively at first, the boys offer answers, then discuss how they use melodrama in their own writing. Janet Hurley reads to her writing students from Look Homeward, Angel. The middle-school aged group […]

Edgy Mama

I admit it. I have a cougar crush on Troy Bolton. Yes, on the romantic athlete-slash-theater geek character in the three High School Musical movies (a cougar, for those of you who don’t know, is a woman of a certain age who goes for much younger men. I’m not really a cougar, I just have […]

SoundTrack

To get a feel for the Old Horsey Slideshow, picture the group as statues that come alive and start playing for dancing ghosts, goblins and creepy trees inside a forgotten graveyard in an old vampire movie. Their act is impressive—complete with clear, trained, just damn pretty voices singing three part harmonies, several instruments played in […]

Welcome to A&E

could we keep track of everything? But it’s also bad because there’s never enough space for All the Awesome Stuff Happening in Asheville every week. Velcroheads: The “how-did-they-think-of-that” choreography of performance art troupe Galumpha. The Diana Wortham Theatre, for example, has a great-looking roster of events planned for the spring. But Galumpha may take their […]