When she’s in a Beatrix Potter mood, my gardener/granddaughter Ivy Rose begins to hint that we ought to pay a visit to what she calls the “storybook garden” in the West End, a neighborhood Joe Fioccola and Byron Ballard have dubbed “Asheville’s forgotten historical district.” Byron and Joe live at the West End’s west end, … Read more
Asheville’s own French Broad has been waiting a long, long time for this city to live up to its reputation as the Paris of the South. But looking around in the autumn of 2004, it seems the river’s patience has finally been rewarded. Start with a stroll past the Grove Arcade, whose five restaurants plus … Read more
Clarification The Sept. 1 installment of “Junk Journal” attempted to lavish praise on the “biting original rhymes” of Pens & Needles‘ master wordsmith The Mad Rabbi. However, “biting rhymes,” in its hip-hop “verb” form, amounts to the very uncool thievery of another rapper’s lyrics. Thus, some readers may have read the line as an unintentionally … Read more
The dashing retro packaging of the new, live, self-named and self-produced double-CD/DVD by The Goodies! whiffs strongly of a rich future for the band. Then again, the trio of singer/guitarist Holiday Childress, bassist Patrick Kelly and drummer Michael Allen has been busy not making it big for more than 10 years now. Tricked out in … Read more
As a boy growing up in the town of Cherokee, Lloyd Arneach was immersed in tales of the Trail of Tears, the terrible forced exodus in 1838-39 of eastern Cherokee Indians to Oklahoma. But when Arneach became a professional storyteller, he was drawn to a tale of a different tribe, from a land he’d never … Read more
“When I think of the 1980s, when I think of skinny ties and big hair, when I think of many, many sweatbands and teal pants with white drawstrings, I think of Queen.” So writes Daniel Nester, author and diehard fan, in his new book God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (Soft … Read more
