As generations of bored student have known all too well, poetry cannot be forced to life like some grudging Frankenstein. “[Teachers] harp too much on the metaphors and the similes and the rhetoric,” actor Roscoe Lee Browne once told a reporter for the Oakland Tribune. “It’s good to point those things out, for academic purposes, […]

Their voices mingle so exquisitely that the result is ultimately voiceless, a lone divine note that sounds almost unattributable to human effort. But Anonymous 4 — an all-woman a cappella ensemble formed to explore medieval chant and polyphony as sung by higher voices — actually toils harder than most musical groups to produce its unearthly […]

As a youth in Russia, Harry Finkelstein saw a Bolshevik soldier make advances toward his mother. He proceeded to knock the offender unconscious with a piece of kindling. Little did the teenager dream that his rash heroics would forever alter his life. Although Finkelstein’s father paid the soldier 50 rubles not to report his son’s […]

Robert Earl Keen’s latest release, Walking Distance (Arista, 1998), offers starkly pretty accounts of journeys both rough and tranquil, but the Southwestern balladeer confides that he wrote most of those songs sitting in one place — a small trailer behind his home in the Texas desert country. “There’s no phone, no TV in [the trailer],” […]

While attending Black Mountain College in the 1950s, award-winning writer Michael Rumaker says he was “literally shaken up” as, each day, a fresh yet rigorous world of artistic freedom was disclosed to him. His vivid memories of those impressionable years served him well when he began to record his memoirs of the controversial and celebrated […]

A few years back, I saw Man or Astro-man? in Knoxville with my friend Louise, a tenderly devoted fan of the Alabama-based aliens. The unreasonably narrow venue (more like a hallway than a club, really) was packed, but audience members weren’t the only ones who were space-challenged, so to speak. The band had perched its […]

Carrying the entire weight of a full-length play must be a soul-shaking endeavor for any single pair of shoulders. But local actress Ellen Pfirrmann welcomes the challenge with rapt enthusiasm — albeit tempered by a healthy touch of anxiety. “It’s pretty intimidating,” she admits before a recent rehearsal of Lillian, William Luce’s one-woman show based […]

“If you like bluegrass, it’s just like a paradise.” That’s Bluegrass First Class co-founder and producer Milton Harkey’s take on the festival, now in its fourth year at Asheville’s Great Smokies Holiday Inn Sunspree Resort. “We wanted something that people could come to [at] this time of year, an indoor event where people could come […]

There’s something touching about nine brothers and sisters liking each other enough to record a best-selling CD together — never mind incessantly touring in close quarters and still managing to get along. Far from being just a latter-day Celtic Brady Bunch, however, the four brothers and five sisters that comprise Canada’s Leahy (it’s their last […]

Todd Pasternack’s laugh takes on an eerie life of its own. At one point in a recent phone interview, the Ominous Seapods’ newest member lets his rampant guffaw feed on its own energy for a full five minutes before he once again becomes its master — by which time the guitarist has nearly forgotten what […]

In his book Thinking About the Playwright, drama critic Eric Bentley presumes to know the mind of Moliere. Bentley presents his theory as to why the 17th-century French satirist created his infamously slick villain, Tartuffe — and then raises a philosophical eyebrow at the playwright’s intentions. “In Tartuffe, Moliere may have wished to get at […]

Urban Grind — Atlanta’s foremost rock/rap band — never troubled itself with the dilemma that seems to irk so many other rhythmically cross-pollinated groups today: how to avoid media-induced entrapment in a single musical style when their sound makes fervent use of so many. Instead of worrying about how they might be misrepresented, this savvy […]

Containments — a visionary, four-part dance piece conceived by local choreographer Julie Gillum — offers an intense evocation of self-imprisonment and psychic release. “I got to thinking about the actual word ‘containment,’ and when I looked it up, there were all kinds of wonderful descriptive terms,” says Gillum, offering these examples: “‘To hold,’ ‘to have […]

Renowned dancer/choreographer David Parsons would just as soon delight a child as impress a seasoned dance enthusiast. Truth be told, he regularly (and spectacularly) accomplishes both missions in a single show — a coup made possible by Parsons’ unerring aptitude as a people-pleaser and by the roster of fine dancers employed by the Parsons Dance […]

From self-portraits on velour to burnt-newspaper collages, an almost bristling originality marks the works chosen for this year’s Regional Scholastic Arts Award Show, now on display at the Asheville Art Museum. Appalachian State University Art Professor James Toub, one of the judges for the show, believes that, “Technical ability alone does not make for quality […]

If there’s one thing jazz trumpeter Steven Bernstein hates, it’s a jazz show. “A bunch of guys with beards, just sitting there … I can think of nothing more boring,” he relates, without a trace of irony. Sure, it seems an odd indictment at first, coming from him. The country’s only professional slide trumpeter, Bernstein […]

Raised a fire-and-brimstone Pentecostalist, edgy singer/songwriter Iris DeMent traces her fall from organized grace to a dispute over pantyhose. “The minister said the rules were that I had to wear nylons or leave the church choir,” she remembers of the incident — which happened going-on two decades ago, when DeMent was only 16. “I knew […]

Salif Keita’s buoyant success stems from a voice nearly silenced in youth. The Malian singer, now hailed as “The Golden Voice of Africa,” is descended from royalty, yet he was born in disgrace: An albino in a country where light skin is considered sinful (the stone slabs upon which albinos and other outcasts were once […]