Editorial dead-on Thank you for your editorial on free speech in the May 14 edition, and especially for the comments on the Wachovia banners installed downtown. I, too, was disturbed to see advertisement like this in a public space. Ads on buses are not free. I wondered what was going on, but didn’t have a … Read more
The city Planning and Development Department has recently allowed Wachovia Bank to place 50 advertising signs on lampposts downtown. The bank says the 5-foot-tall banners are meant to thank the people of Asheville for 100 years of support. Yet when Xpress asked a bank spokesperson why the banners don’t say “thank you” if that is … Read more
As Katie Gaddy was renovating the building she owns on Haywood Road in West Asheville, she kept running across remnants of other people’s personal history — bobby pins from the structure’s former incarnation as a beauty parlor. “It was great,” Gaddy says happily, standing in her Deluxe Retro-Modern vintage shop, which easily betrays her penchant … Read more
The Middle Ages were rife with disease and death, war and poverty. But the Mountain Renaissance Adventure Faire, notes its co-director, Jan Love, offers escape to the storybook side of that troubled epoch. The local event, now in its third year, allows people to indulge in ideals that have remained attractive for almost five centuries: … Read more
Most of us have seen it: A man berating a woman in a parking lot. An angry boyfriend slapping or shoving a woman in front of a crowd of people. The majority of the time, nobody intervenes. Local singer Laura Blackley once tried. During a set break at a Johnson City, Tenn., club, her band … Read more
Have that landmark album be refused as patently noncommercial by your major record label, allowing a smaller company to instead release it, and again, they will come. Outrun the music style you helped create such that a key band member quits on you, and still, they will come. Finally, book a show at The Orange … Read more
There are ghosts in her singing. When Linda Thompson’s wine-dark alto dips and feathers and swoons and swells, souls long snared by time’s winnowing tide seem to have found voice once more, seeping like new blood through her own. Lately, one of those ghosts is Thompson herself. Until last year, her own voice was, effectively, … Read more
“I was a psychedelic kid,” Daniel Lanois revealed in a recent phone interview. “I grew up listening to night radio.” As a grownup, Lanois is probably best known as the atmosphere architect of such Grammy-winning albums as U2’s Achtung Baby (Island, 1991), Bob Dylan’s Time Out of Mind (Columbia/Sony, 1997) and Emmylou Harris’ genre-shifting Wrecking … Read more
Among the definitions of “intimate” in The Oxford American Dictionary is “having a sexual relationship with a person, especially outside marriage.” The word, then, is a collection of syllables fraught with tension and innuendo — as is the Asheville Art Museum’s current exhibit, Self and Soul: The Architecture of Intimacy. Ann Batchelder curated the show … Read more
Put yourself in Bill Wirth’s place. You’re watching an off-road truck race with your wife. But as much as you like racing, you’re simply not impressed with the action. In passing, you make a seemingly harmless boast: “I [could] beat all those guys with that truck I’ve got.” You have, after all, recently purchased a … Read more
