Is it possible that Father Joe, the Benedictine hero of Tony Hendra’s best-selling memoir, has been reincarnated and is living in West Asheville? DeWayne Barton’s politics likely steer him away from mainstream Catholicism, but the artist does echo the monk’s generous spirit, his ready joyfulness, his gentleness and his apparent belief in the eventual turnabout […]
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Digging up the past
When I got David Schulman’s new mystery novel, The Past Is Never Dead, I flipped to the back to look at the author photo. There was Schulman, smiling in a baseball cap. But where’s he standing? I wondered. Behind the author, I could make out a row of ivory balusters shaped like giant pepper-shakers. Looks […]
Cartoons
Homegrown in North Turkey Creek
Rachel Clearfield’s gardens sit high up on Pinnacle Knob in a hollow with a stream running through it. There’s a wonderful view of mountains to the south and east. Bathed in light all morning long, it’s the perfect eco-niche for an artist who paints the sensual, seasonal energies of Southern Appalachian landscapes. Rachel’s love of […]
A talent for tradition
“If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.” In one sentence, John Dall, husband of Scottish-heritage performer Flora MacDonald Gammon, has just defined Asheville’s Mountain Dance and Folk Festival. The 77th-annual event is an embodiment of everything that’s original about traditional Appalachian music — an almost exotic concept in […]
Cartoons
Xpressly yours
“No matter which side of an issue you support … you can rely on Mountain Xpress for accuracy, balance and fairness. … It’s been a decade of true community service.” — former Asheville Mayor Leni Sitnick It’s been 10 years since the premiere issue of Mountain Xpress hit the streets. The phrase “Weekly Independent News, […]
Asheville City Council
The blunt, belligerent rhetoric that often characterizes neoconservatism reared its tough-talking head at the Asheville City Council’s marathon July 27 formal session. Council member Joe Dunn shocked many in the packed Council chamber when he publicly berated a Blue Ridge Parkway official — who’d been invited by the city to discuss a forest-management plan for […]
Letters to the editor
Ethics violations seem Taylor-made In a coup for justice and the personal accountability of our elected officials, Congressman Chris Bell, D-Texas, filed a U.S. House of Representatives Ethics Committee complaint against [House Majority Leader] Tom DeLay, R-Texas, in June. Although the political dynamics for Bell were unique, in that his electoral base was lost to […]
Experts, numbers and no-shows
The North Carolina Department of Transportation wants you to believe that an eight-lane highway through West Asheville is the only responsible option. And to drive home that point, DOT officials recently traveled to Asheville for a pair of meetings, seeking to win the confidence of members of the public and local officials. Just two years […]
Letters to the editor
Red Cross “savings” far too costly On May 5, 1989, while hospitalized for a bleeding ulcer, I was given a transfusion of blood infected with hepatitis C virus. The Red Cross did not have a test for HCV until a year or so later, so a lot of HCV-contaminated blood was distributed, though they knew, […]
In a different light
On a recent visit to Western Carolina University’s new Fine and Performing Arts Center, I find the 12 students in the school’s first M.F.A. program working in spacious, airy studios. But not all students are enjoying an atmosphere of such well-lit comfort. Right now, some are enduring relentlessly tough critiques from teachers brought down from […]
Cartoons
The Wild Gardener
Eryngium yuccifolium, known as rattlesnake master or button snakeroot, is an unusual and interesting flowering plant that’s native to the Southeast. Its range runs from the northern border of Florida west to Texas and up to Pennsylvania (USDA zones 5 to 10). Other common names include yucca leaf and snake button. The genus name is […]
Portrait of the environmentalist as a sentimentalist
When a car manufacturer wants to sell you a new model, his ads show the vehicle speeding unhampered through an immense, pristine landscape. It’s always some vista utterly unscathed by the mark of human habitation: no Exxon stations, no Taco Bells, no landfills, no asphalt plants, no disfigured mountainsides. Sort of like the scenery captured […]
The bright lights tonight
So you’re throwing a little shindig to celebrate your band’s anniversary. As the party gets under way, Richard Thompson glides in, guitar in hand. Then a battle-scarred Tom Waits slouches through the door, Elvis Costello and Dave Alvin close on his heels, while Mavis Staples and Bobby Womack saunter in a bit later. Rounding out […]
Cartoons
Pests with attitude
A recent summer-evening reverie on the porch was abruptly interrupted when a swarming mass of mosquitoes attacked, forcing us to seek shelter behind screens and solid walls. Later, as I pondered the irony of having been put to flight by something no bigger than a freckle and lighter than a hair, I began to wonder […]
Smell? What smell?
“Keep an open mind; be fair; realize that you stand at the intersection of the public and our industry … [and] keep politics as far away from this place as you can.” Those were Nelda Holder‘s parting words of wisdom to the two new appointees replacing her and Lew Patrie on the Western North Carolina […]
Asheville City Council
What do Pittsburgh, Portland, Santa Barbara, Vancouver and Brooklyn have in common? None of these large metropolitan areas has an eight-lane highway running through it. Traffic-engineering consultant Michael Moule reported this tidbit during the Asheville City Council’s July 13 formal session. Moule is one of two consultants hired by the Southern Environmental Law Center to […]
Letters to the editor
Time for truce with Texas & war on DUDU When I first made the decision to turn toward our city’s hard-drug problem, I anticipated shin-busting hurdles, personal attacks, misinterpretations and manipulations of my motives, philosophical differences with some colleagues on City Council. I even expected a few myopic mud pies from Mr. Molton [Xpress cartoonist], […]