Tell It in the Mountains events take place Friday, May 1 through Sunday, May 3, at the Asheville Community Theatre (“A.C.T.,” at 25 Walnut St.), the Central Methodist Church (“Central,” at 27 Church St.), Jubilee! Community Church (“Jubilee,” at 46 Wall St.), and Saturday night, on the top level of the Pack Square Parking Deck […]

Ani DiFranco couldn’t care less what you call her. Musician, feminist, bisexual — none of those labels comes anywhere close to summing up who she is or what she’s about. The only label she seems comfortable with is the willfully amorphous folk singer — which, truth be told, doesn’t cut it, either. As an energetic […]

It’s half-past midnight on Tuesday (48 hours before deadline), and I’ve just spent the last three-plus hours intermittently speaking with two harried desk clerks and one vaguely flustered public-relations person at the Vacation Village Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas. The reason? I want to talk to the Prez. To Dr. Funkenstein. To the Grand […]

‘Tis the season once again to officially show the love and respect for Mother Earth that we all-too-often forget about, the rest of the year. Here are just a few of the ways western North Carolinians can celebrate the 28th annual Earth Day (which technically falls on April 22): • EarthStage Productions provides the city […]

Natalie MacMaster is a pyrotechnic performer with more lift than a NASA launch pad. This step-dancing dervish in skin-tight neon pants kicks higher than her waist — simultaneously launching into a full-blown fiddling frenzy. You can practically see smoke beneath the blur of her fingertips, curls of 24-karat golden hair fly every which way, and […]

Imagine, if you will, the plaintive, lonesome wail of a train whistle in the far distance as the splendid, graceful beast of a machine cuts its way through a ruggedly lovely mountain gorge. Imagine the faint luminescence that finally becomes a full-on blaze of headlights as a night train whooshes through your placid hometown on […]

A farmed valley, vast under the fanning rays of a setting sun. A cottage, petite and cunning, set beside a singing brook. Cliffs and gulls; the stray grassy knoll and placid cow. At best, the words “landscape painting” can conjure images of such bucolic vistas — a sort of pastorale cum Rousseau — casting in […]

The name Old World may be ethnocentric, but it’s accurate. Across the Atlantic, modern gun emplacements keep watch over the English Channel from Dover Castle’s massive, 1,000-year-old walls. In France and Italy, people drive snazzy sports cars over cobblestones laid down by the Romans in the age of Augustus. And in 1000 B.C., when Solomon […]

It’s pretty hard (although fairly hilarious) to envision Russia’s heavy-set, stern-faced president, Boris Yeltsin, in a frothy tutu, satin toe shoes and a plumed, rhinestone tiara, his countenance aglow with beatific expression, mid-jete to the strains of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Nevertheless, Yeltsin and his recent political predecessors have profoundly — and not altogether gracefully — […]

Hmm. How to describe Fishbone? First off, you’re gonna have to use some hyphens. What about Punk-funk? Ska-jazz? Avant-R&B, perhaps? Then again, maybe the best thing is just to avoid that dilemma altogether. Because whatever label you use, there’s always some element of the music left ignored, some ingredient in the mix that refuses to […]