Making Papa Proud It takes a certain kind of writer to wrestle the grit and guts of insight into a short story worthy of Hemingway, but Brian Railsback did. No doubt using his most terse and muscular prose, the WCU Professor of English penned the piece “Clean Break,” recently given top honors at the Ernest […]

From The Unintentionally Silly Name Department Asheville Christian-rock group Autumn Rising, one of the growing crop of badly named bands with predictable pop-punk sounds which spring, fully formed, from local high schools each year, recently announced a tentative release date for their debut EP. According to the band’s MySpace blog, the album will be available […]

A bishop, a clown, a chicken, and a Vietnamese peasant farmer walk into a bar … the Feral Chihuahuas yuk it up. There are two reasons you’ve never heard of the Feral Chihuahuas. It’s not that they’re not funny, that you wouldn’t like them, or that they couldn’t market themselves out of a roll of […]

Asheville’s Other Vance By the time you read this, you will have already missed your chance to catch the Asheville debut of Vance, which was last week at Asheville Pizza & Brewing Company. Don’t blame yourself — it’s not like the filmmakers bothered to tell anyone about it or anything. Vance was shot in downtown […]

No Depression-approved: John Brannen. When you talk to him, his voice rolling from mellow West Coast surfer tones to Southern-rocker grit poured from the mop buckets of Charleston beach bars, it’s easy to see why John Brannen never quite became a celebrity. It’s not that he’s not talented — in his time, he’s been hailed […]

Big News In Ukulele Land Local hokum/novelty act Mad Tea Party recently announced that bassist Lora Pendleton will be leaving the band. Pendleton joined the ukulele-powered group following the release of MTP’s second album, 73% Post-Consumer Novelty, and recorded two albums with them, 2005’s Flying Saucers and the soon-to-be-released Big Top, Soda Pop. According to […]

Word Up Local blogger and creative deviant Devin Walsh is slowly making his way into the legit lit world. His elegantly disturbing short story, “Here’s to the Losers,” was recently published in the University of San Francisco’s online lit rag Switchback. Although he’s a relatively new name on the scribe scene, Walsh is anything but […]

All Right Lads, Get Your Kits Off Two words I never, ever expected to be putting together in a sentence: “Waynesville” and “naked.” And yet, Waynesville’s ever-interesting Haywood Arts Regional Theatre recently announced auditions for that most unencumbered of Broadway comedic musicals, The Full Monty. It may seem like an unlikely turn, given that Waynesville […]

The Asheville IQ Test How well do you know your city’s culture? How hip are you to the local lingo? Are you down with the arts and music scene? And, more importantly, how do you fare on standardized testing? Take the quiz below to find out. Answers are given at the bottom of the page, […]

Time Enough For The Pain Take 20-plus teams of local filmmakers, fill them with cinematic dreams and desires, and then give them two frantic days to do the impossible — script, cast, design, shoot, score and edit a short film. Add in a random genre and a preselected prop, character and line of dialogue, and […]

Flopping is part of the fun: The OxyMorons. In the spirit of improv comedy, Xpress has decided to frame this article in a way that you, the reader, can participate. Fill in the blanks as directed to create your own wacky article. It’s a Friday night at Asheville Brewing Company, and the place is bustling […]

Passing The Baton They say old symphony conductors never die, they just fade away. But that’s a lie: Sometimes they just retire. Such is the case with near-legendary conductor and symphony artistic director David Effron, who announced last year he’d be giving up the post he’s held for 11 years at Brevard Music Center, effective […]

Pimp My Symph As we all know, the world of classical music is filled with both haters and fakin’ ‘gratulators. If it’s not some big-scene Symphony Conductor braggin’ on his sweet Symphonic crib and how yours is ghetto, it’s some bling-bound patron dissin’ ’cause you ain’t bustin’ out those phat baroque beatz he’s shelling for. […]

Write What You Know Last year, WCU student Craig Buchner mined a painful personal experience to write “Good Night,” a story about a son’s last chance to bond with his aging father who’s suffering from Alzheimer’s. Enter the Association of Writers & Writing Program, which recently honored the piece, awarding Buchner its annual Intro Journals […]

More Than Just Gamecocks And A Crappy Mall This is the true story of four Carolina artists, picked to live and work in a renovated 1920s Cadillac store in downtown Spartanburg and find out what happens when art stops being polite and starts getting real. While this may not be the official tagline to the […]

Even Better Than A Philosophy Degree To all of you college-age cinemaphiles who were thinking about blowing your parents’ hard-earned money on going to some distant film school — have I got news for you! Now, you can blow your parents’ money and still go home on the weekends to do your laundry! Western Carolina […]

Totally, Actually, Really Going To Be Completed — For Real According to director Chusy (Jardine), the much-anticipated local flick Asheville, The Movie is still in production. The film has been made in a series of fits and starts — most notably a multi-month hiatus caused by a need for a high-definition camera — but Chusy […]

PodCast bombast Somewhere out there, an elderly antiques-hoarder with blue hair and a disdain for any retail store that doesn’t end in “shoppe” is desperately begging one of her put-upon grandchildren to install iTunes onto her aging Gateway PC. You guessed it: Biltmore Estate is now podcasting. Biltmore Insider began broadcasting in late March, and […]

It Wasn’t Video That Killed the Radio Star … It Was Videobot! The rotten thing about making a short film or music video for your friend’s band is that, once you’ve made it, it’s hard to find a place for people to see it. Sure, you’ve got the odd film festival and the occasional Web […]

“I will kill you, House,” he gasped. “Vile and accursed House, I will tear you down. I will bring you down upon the whores and boarders. I will wreck you, House … I will make you fall down on all the people in you, House,” he said. — Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel Forget everything […]

Holding Their Own Say what you will about our hometown’s pretensions of being a world-class art haven, but when it comes to posters, Asheville Art Museum recently proved it can hold its own against the big kids. The AAM’s poster for Tradition and Beyond: The Basketry of Billie Ruth Sudduth took home an Honorable Mention […]