Downtown Asheville’s Lexington Avenue Arts & Fun Festival, now in its sixth year, is billed as a local festival for the locals. Locally based merchants sell locally made foods, microbrews, crafts and other products. Local talent pulls out all the stops when it comes to music, dancing, spoken word, performance and visual arts. In fact, […]

Perry Farrell has always been a visionary. When audiences first noticed him as lead singer for Jane’s Addiction, he was melding elements of Led Zeppelin and Joy Division into a musical vision that not only helped his very un-mainstream band find mainstream success, but also paved the way for the grunge and alternative-rock revolution that […]

“Shouldn’t I have mutated from doing this to myself by now?” asks songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird. “What are the side effects of hurling through space?” The world is his living room: In a post-Bowl of Fire world, Andrew Bird’s musical vision still thrives. He’s talking about flying in airplanes, and specifically the aspect of […]

Stories that depend on magic can all too easily become fairy tales—childish and cute, often far-fetched and always divorced from the real world of grownup love and tragedy. They frequently come off as self-referential and self-centered as a spoiled 7-year-old. Asheville-based novelist Sarah Addison Allen’s Garden Spells (Bantam, 2007) is a wonderful world away from […]

For the casual reader, the thought of a typical fantasy book probably conjures up visions of dragons, elves and various other Tolkien-esque creatures. It’s an image that makes noted fantasy author Charles de Lint bristle. “I love reading high-fantasy stories, but now I find it tiresome because I think that there’s nothing really fresh about […]

It’s the end of rush hour on a Thursday afternoon when a custom Acura—black and low-slung with glossy ground effects and a spoiler on the back so big it could double as a lunch counter—screeches into the parking lot of the Lowrider Shop. A seismic bass riff escapes from inside the car. The driver, a […]

I’m not the reader for whom Diana Gabaldon’s Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade (Random House, 2007) was intended. “Almost all of the people reading Blade would have read the entire Outlander series,” the author admits, referencing her wildly popular six-book bevy that follows the adventures of 18th-century Scotsman Jamie Fraser and his […]

After four years of nearly constant touring with both his band The Rentals and as the original bassist for Weezer, Matt Sharp was tired. Uncool before it was cool: Having come undone from years of touring, ex-Weezer bassist Matt Sharp (with book at center) has decided to stake his hipster cred on The Rentals. Those […]

It’s ironic that kirtan music artist Jai Uttal’s 2002 recording, Mondo Rama, was nominated for a Grammy in the “Best New Age Album” category. Uttal, who’s been performing Asian-influenced world fusion for decades, considers that genre a bit outdated. A fire inside: Jai Uttal has spent a lifetime fanning the flames of cross-cultural devotional music. […]

When they left New York for Asheville in 2003, drawn by stories of the creative and innovative spirit of Black Mountain College, Robert and Arlene Winkler arrived in the mountains with an idea. “Settle” by Marc Maiorana. A big idea. Bigger than any one gallery could hold, in fact. The Winklers wanted Asheville to have […]

• BookOpolis is coming again! BookWorks in West Asheville is holding its annual exhibition of artist’s books, broadsides, original hand-printed posters and prints from Monday, Sept. 10, through Friday, Sept. 14. The exhibition is open to all artists working in any of these media. Several works will continue to be exhibited through December. Learn more […]