A few years back, local musician David LaMotte would often come home to answering-machine messages from friend (and then-frequent touring partner) Shawn Mullins. The Atlanta singer/songwriter would intentionally mispronounce LaMotte’s last name, as if the Black Mountain-based folk musician were the son on the old TV sitcom Sanford and Son. “Lamont!” Mullins would yell, in […]
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Banjo strings and finer things
Danny Barnes has added a few items to his survival guide. Barnes, the former front man and banjo-pickin’ fool of the Bad Livers, left the loving arms of the red-hot Austin music scene in 1999, landing among the spruce and flannel of Port Hadlock, Wash., an hour-and-a-half, by boat and car, from Seattle. If the […]
Fashion and flowers on the avenue
A shop for sassy women First popularized by Shakespeare, the term “minx” was used to describe a woman who is feisty, outspoken and irreverent. Little wonder, then, that Jessica Brommer and Rebeccah Mark chose that name for their boutique, which caters to female clients of all ages who prefer timeless elegance to modern trends in […]
Choose clean air—or Uncle Sam will do it for us
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is offering five counties in Western North Carolina a chance to take a fast track to cleaner air. The catch is, it’s a one-time-only deal, and they have just three weeks to think it over. If city and county elected officials in Buncombe, Henderson, Madison, Transylvania and Haywood counties can […]
Missed by 8 miles
After reading Ken Hanke’s review [Xpress Nov. 13] of the new Eminem movie 8 Mile, I went to go see it for myself. Now I feel compelled to respond to Hanke’s indefensibly bad review, which missed the finer points of the movie in so many ways that, in reading over the review again, I am […]
No joy, no peace
The holidays are supposed to be joyous occasions for communion among family members and close friends. For many women and children, however, the winter-holiday season can be a terrifying and sometimes deadly experience. The sad fact is, the incidence of domestic violence increases during the holidays, leaving families and friends traumatized with feelings of emptiness, […]
The scam of Homeland Security
There’s a rule of bureaucracy that says: When confused, reorganize. The Bushites and the Congress have just resorted to this timeworn bureaucratic dodge in a major way. Clueless about how to deal with the threat of terrorist attacks at home, they’ve reorganized the federal bureaucracy. They’ve taken 22 existing agencies with 170,000 employees and jammed […]
From Asheville to Hendersonville
A cab ride from Asheville to Hendersonville, downtown to downtown, will set you back about $40 to $50, according to the Checker Cab Company in Hendersonville. If you go Greyhound, it’ll put you about a half-mile from downtown in either city, and it drops the fare to $8.75 one way (a dollar more on weekends), […]
The memory of trees
In recent months, numerous Asheville residents have contacted Xpress voicing concern about the loss of trees in the city. Architectural consultant Bill Wescott observes: “In the last two years, there seems to be a lot of convenient cutting of trees for contractors, and it seems that they cut on weekends. City employees cutting trees down […]
Notepad
Weekend events say no to war “President Bush says war will stamp out terrorism. But to map the ‘war on terrorism’ is to map the world’s oil,” declares Bob Wing, editor of the national newspaper War Times. Wing will be in town to dialogue with local activists at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville. “Organizing […]
Paraquat for breakfast?
Faced with an outpouring of protest against its proposal to loosen restrictions on aerial spraying of pesticides near homes, schools, hospitals and nursing homes, the North Carolina Pesticide Board has extended its deadline for accepting public comment on the rule change. The proposal, which was drafted at the request of the crop-dusting industry, would lift […]
1984 revisited
Recently, while watching a borrowed tape of Six Feet Under, I ran across a 15-minute segment from an HBO special presentation on Sept. 11, sandwiched between two episodes. I had sworn to myself that I would never watch those buildings fall again, that I have seen those images enough to last me a lifetime, and […]
Let’s do right by ALL N.C. children
Maybe you’ve heard about North Carolina’s mental-health crisis and are wondering who these children are that need state mental-health services. I’ll tell you: They are children of all ages and from all kinds of backgrounds. Let me share a few of their stories with you: • 12-year-old Becky is a deeply loved child with a […]
School days
It was tedious, a dry scraping-and-crunching sound: The sound military-issue boots make as the soldiers wearing them trudge up and down a pile of crosses. There was another sound, too — a light wooden patter at the top of the pile as each soldier dropped a fresh armload of crosses, bearing the names of more […]
Toe-sucking geek rock
When I was a degenerate college dropout in the mid-’90s — working in a laundromat, sustaining my body with frozen pizza and bad beer (the latter acquired via my roommate’s older brother’s driver’s license) — I was listening to a lot of music, probably with more attention and with more openness than I have before […]
Alice still lives here
As a boy, WNCW Program Director Mark Keefe recalls hearing Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree” on the car radio on a Thanksgiving trip to his grandmother’s house. Through the years, he discovered that many stations across the country made a habit of spinning the rambling comic epic on Turkey Day. “It’s one of those things […]
The Group W bench
In 1967, the year between my birth and my father’s being shipped off to Vietnam, folk singer Arlo Guthrie released his comic spoken-sung epic about a young man convicted of littering on Thanksgiving Day. The song, “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” tells how later, when the young man’s draft board learns of his former crime, he is […]
The Billy beat goes on
A game, I say. I toss out a word; you respond any way you like. “OK, sure,” Billy Jonas agrees via cell phone as he navigates Philadelphia-area traffic, bound for another show. Rhythm “Rhythm is what I live by,” Jonas notes. “It’s how I organize my creative life, as well as my more mundane life. […]
Between the lines
Readers make selfish friends. We demand that the writers we like keep to their keyboards and produce new novels for us on schedule, and we pooh-pooh any impediment that might keep them from their allotted task. Writer’s block, car accident, snow, sleet, dark of night — all are dismissed by the loyal reader with a […]
Lost in space
Hearing that North Carolina Stage Company’s late-summer run of the rock opera Hedwig and The Angry Inch was very impressive, I anticipated memorable things from the company’s current production, A Wrinkle in Time. But I emerged from a second-weekend performance of Wrinkle largely unmoved. The play, based on Madeleine L’Engle’s children’s novel of the same […]
From the big stage to back home
On June 13, 2001, bluegrass heavyweights Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, Alison Krauss and Jerry Douglas could be found on stage at New York City’s Carnegie Hall, feeding the new mainstream bluegrass and acoustic-music frenzy that sprung, almost unaccountably, from the soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? Alongside this group, playing to the capacity crowd, […]