Sometimes, there’s more to be learned outside the classroom. The Steep Canyon Rangers, now in their mid-20s, emerged as a cultural lesson for some rock-loving buddies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A year ago, they graduated with honors, so to speak, when they won the bluegrass competition at the local Mountain […]

Mark Pirro is a little fuzzy on the number of people in his band. There are 27 members listed on the Spree’s debut album, while the current band photo includes 25. But Pirro hazards that it’s actually 22. Or is it, he wonders, actually 23? “You know what?” the Spree’s bass player confessed by phone […]

In Larry Brown’s new book, The Rabbit Factory (Free Press, 2003), the characters multiply faster than, well, you know. There’s Arthur, an old, wealthy guy who suspects that his younger wife Helen might be having an affair. There’s Helen, who knows she’s cheating. And there’s Eric, a confused young runaway (and pet-store clerk) who ambles […]

If the dashing Count Dracula is impossibly slick, the verminous Count Orlok is impossibly sick. Orlok, aka the vampire Nosferatu, was the first screen representation (albeit an unauthorized one) of the blood-sucking gent immortalized in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. The Orlok incarnation crept into the public consciousness in 1922, in German director F.W. Murnau’s […]

“I’m not much of a critic but more an enthusiast,” Robert Birnbaum wrote Xpress. Be that as it may, book “enthusiasts” everywhere should check out identitytheory.com, a literary Web site that counts as its chief attraction a trove of author interviews Birnbaum’s conducted over the years with writers as diverse as Julian Barnes, ZZ Packer, […]

In the mid-’70s, I was a kid with a beer-can collection in a small, Southern college town where drinkers viewed Coors as prized contraband. Poking around behind a newly defunct wine shop one muggy summer morning, I uncovered a Lilliputian black can. Theakston Old Peculier, it called itself. It suggested it was beer. When I […]

• 4,300 BC — Oldest-known written recipe — a formula for beer — inscribed in clay cuneiform tablet. • 500-1000 AD — Brewing begins in Europe; hops added to process. • 1490 — Columbus finds Native Americans making beer from corn and tree sap. They do not sing drinking songs together. • 1612 — First […]

“I wouldn’t say relaxation is the state I achieve most easily,” Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan says with deadpan directness. How much, then, does music help? “It can get me there,” the guitarist/vocalist allows, almost grudgingly. If Kaplan isn’t the personification of mellow, you wouldn’t know it from the way he talks. His subdued, lagging […]

Where does Greenville, S.C., painter William Thomas Thompson fit into the “art brut” club, an association with increasingly loose standards of membership? Decide for yourself: The Art and Vision of William Thomas Thompson opens this week at Hendersonville art space Gallery 415. At one time, the title of folk or naive artist was restricted to […]

Perhaps without even knowing it, Enon drummer Matt Schulz reveals how frequently his band’s name is mispronounced. What prompted Schulz’s relocation from his native Dayton, Ohio, to Brooklyn, New York? I ask. “Enon,” Schulz says with a laugh, pronouncing the band’s namesake — a small town near Dayton — as E-nuhn. Still, if it weren’t […]