Word On The Street
Phillip Clary Beer Distributor “It gives stock car racing a more up-to-date image, which I think is overdue. I mean, since poor rednecks can’t afford race tickets anymore, let’s update things, you know?” Celia Northford Modeling Agency Owner “I’m just glad that NASCAR decided to get hip and be sponsored by a more modern type…
Making A Splash
The ocean. Both majestic and mysterious, it’s no wonder that countless films have been set on it, in it, or alongside it. From fact-based dramas (Titanic) to creature features (The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms) to all those beach blanket bingo flicks, the ocean has often proven to be as integral a movie character as all…
See & Do
MAY 27 – THURSDAY Racefans, start your engines! Food Lion Speed Street takes over uptown Charlotte today through Saturday from 11am-midnight. Tables, tents and stages set up on Tryon Street between Stonewall and 7th Streets offer music, food, driver appearances and autograph sessions, and most importantly, great people-watching. Headliners this year include Three Dog Night…
The Netflix Neurosis
When Kurt Andersen wandered into the living room at a recent Manhattan dinner party and noticed a stack of firehouse-red Netflix DVD envelopes sitting on the coffee table, he felt an instant sense of belonging. “It’s become this tiny badge of cultural brotherhood,” said Mr. Andersen, who’s been making his way through Netflix’s vast catalog…
Ask the Advice Goddess
Save The Males I was sitting at a cafe when the guy next to me struck up a conversation with me about the book I was reading. It turns out that we work in related fields and have a mutual interest in energy conservation and other environmental issues. To my surprise, less than an hour…
View From The Couch
AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS (1956). There’s a four-star movie included in this two-disc DVD set, yet it isn’t the marquee attraction. George Melies’ 1902 landmark A Trip to the Moon is among the extras, and it remains an extraordinary (not to mention historically important) picture in its early use of visual effects. As…
Stargazer
For All Signs Venus, goddess of love, continues to retrograde through June 28. Many of us will be pressured to encounter ourselves and our personal behavior within the framework of our relationships. We have a tendency to “go back” to previous relationships or to re-experience former behavior patterns in the present situation. During Venus’ retrograding…
Film Clips
NEW RELEASES RAISING HELEN Director Garry Marshall makes shiny, happy movies for shiny, happy people — even Exit to Eden, a film about S&M, turned out to be as threatening as a butterfly with a broken wing. Therefore, the plot of Raising Helen alone is enough to break even the most hardened of criminals and…
Remote Control
An art student who had quit painting told me he no longer needed to paint because he could imagine, exactly, what his painting would look like before he began. To produce the work would be, at best, merely redundant, at worst, boring and disingenuous. “If I can visualize the painting, it’s already finished.” My crazy…
High-Tailin’ It
Two bootleggers in 1940s garb are skidding around hairpin curves in the Blue Ridge mountains, outrunning a sheriff in hot pursuit, siren wailing. From the looks on their faces, though, the moonshine runners are having a hell of a time. They know damn well that the po-lice can’t catch their souped-up car. Thus the new…
Bye Bye Brevity
Down in Charleston, there’s an amazing flowering every year over the Memorial Day weekend. Spoleto Festival USA begins, with over 135 performances crammed into 17 days, featuring artists of international stature traversing opera, theater, dance, chamber music, choral and orchestral music, genre-bending hybrids, and jazz. Around the main festival, there’s the satellite Piccolo Spoleto Festival…
Shiny, Happy Badass
These days drivers have to be young, fast and good looking,” says Marty Smith, a commentator with nascar.com. Ever the ingenious businessman, Ray Evernham’s prodigy Kasey Kahne fits the description perfectly. If you saw him on the street you’d never guess that Kahne races stock cars for a living. He looks like someone you’d see…
Lucy in the Highlands With Dementia
There’s a healthy chunk of excess built into Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor. The opera pounces upon the proud Scottish lads and lasses of Sir Walter Scott’s colorful romance, strips away their gritty brogues, and has them warbling in florid Italian. Singers playing the roles of the principals, Lucia and Edgardo (nee Lucy Ashton and…
Resisting Liberation
It is hard for us to understand why the people would so violently resist freedom and democracy. The principles are so compelling, after all. Why would people not, as President Bush predicted of the Iraqis, welcome with open arms their liberators from the American government? Instead of open arms, we experienced violent, protracted “massive resistance.”…
Jonesin’ for Info
When Andrei Codrescu looks at modern America, he feels overwhelmed. So much material, so little time. What’s a Romanian immigrant bent on social satire to do? “Things are so goofy sometimes I have to give myself hickeys to keep from bursting out laughing,” Mr. Codrescu writes in a recent interview conducted by e-mail, the most…
World Class Crime Ignored
It appears that Charlotte may be developing into the international business destination our local leaders have long dreamed of. Although you may not read about it anywhere else, until recently, an international import-export business of sorts that had chosen Charlotte as one of its four premier global markets was blossoming here. As it turns out,…
Arts Agenda
Comedy Bayou Kitchen Comedy. Extreme Improv: Fridays 8pm – Chicago Style long form improv “The Gallery”; Saturdays 8pm – “Who’s Line Is it?” style improv; Psychotic Pooch at 10pm. Fridays and Saturdays. www.extremeimprov.comwww.psychoticpooch.com. $10. 1958 E 7th St. 866-467-7681. CJ’s, Adams Mark Blue Light. Talent show with stand-up, musicians and more. Thursdays, 8pm. 555 S.…
Wal-Mart To Govern Iraq
Topping the list of unanswered questions in Iraq is “Who will be taking over next month?” (Here’s a hint, it won’t be Ahmed Chalabi.) Dubya has been emphatic that a “transfer of limited sovereignty” will take place on June 30, but the administration has been less than clear about exactly what that means. The bloody,…
Wine In The Fast Lane
Richard Childress, owner of Richard Childress Racing Enterprises, is one of the great success stories in NASCAR racing with six Winston Cup Series championships, and whose stable once included the legendary Dale Earnhardt. Yet I had no clue who Richard Childress was when I first moved to NASCAR country. Am I related to Richard Childress,…
School Violence
It’s so predictable. Once again, students at the county’s highest poverty, highest minority schools said they don’t feel safe at school in an annual student survey. And once again, the problem is the starkest at the system’s Equity II Plus schools, which have the highest poverty and minority student rates in the county. At four…
Good Eats
All Around Town Anntony’s Caribbean, 400 S. Tryon St., 704-339-0303; 2001 E. 7th St., 704-342-0749. All locations have different owners. A hint of the tropics; rotisserie chicken with Jamaican jerk sauce, ribs, Paradise Island fish special, curries, and Caribbean styled greens. $$ Azteca, 116 Woodlawn Rd., 704-525-5110; 9709 Independence Blvd., 704-814-9877; 1863 W. Franklin Blvd.…
Vita Brevis, Ars Longa
Art lives long compared with our limited lifespan. The Greek physician Hippocrates summed this up in his famous Aphorisms. Art, and beauty, are with us for centuries after its creators have passed away. The power of art to inspire hope in the human condition is profound. I was reminded of that potential recently, during a…
Life During Wartime
“This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, This ain’t no fooling around/No time for dancing, or lovey dovey, I ain’t got time for that now” — The Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime” Neil Postman, the author of Teaching as a Subversive Activity, wrote a book some years back called Amusing Ourselves to Death. The…
Letters
Hydrogen Bomb This letter is in reference to the picture on the front of Creative Loafing’s May 12 issue. The cover consisted of a Colorado DMU with the CATS logo imposed on the train. The Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) did not give permission for usage of distortion of our logo to fit into the…
Jett Set For Speed Street
“I Love Rock and Roll,” Joan Jett sang in 1982. But as Jett was already discovering, the business end of rock and roll didn’t necessarily love her. Twenty-three record companies turned down the 16-year-old Runaway before she put her first solo record out on her own label, Blackheart Records. Jett, who appears at Charlotte’s outdoor…
News of the Weird
No coupons needed: In May, in the latest blooming of the lawyers’ class-action money tree, California law firms asked a court to approve $258 million in fees for their handling of a lawsuit against Microsoft Corp., amounting to $3,000 an hour for the lead attorney (who billed for 6,000 hours of his own time, even…
Bikers and Beerhounds
Pat McCrory probably had a hissy-fit. Last Sunday afternoon, downtown Charlotte was absolutely filled to the brim with folks in tattered jeans and beards settling in to shoot the breeze on benches, content to merely watch the traffic pass by and laze the day away. Of course, these weren’t those dreaded (gasp) homeless people that…
Sit & Spin
Pedro The Lion Achilles Heel Jade Tree Among the litany of annoying personality traits some allegedly devout Christians share, nothing results more quickly in a “no, thanks, I’ll just burn in hell” rejoinder than their self-righteous and proselytizing ways. But when a true believer has the courage to share their doubts, honestly confront their own…
Yard Slaves and Slackers
This is the time of year that separates the yard slaves from the yard slackers as the grass shoots up like a pre-teen and the weeds diabolically spring to life. Winter’s dormant cover is off and everybody’s true yardwork personality is exposed. You’re revealed to either be a hawk, hellbent on launching fanatical assaults against…
Music Menu
WEDNESDAY 5.26 Jason Hausman — Hausman’s voice is eerily reminiscent of U2’s Bono, reaching operatic levels on occasion and mimicking a pedal-sustained guitar riff at other junctures. Yet his pipes don’t overpower the music with that obvious “I’m the singer” zeal. His music has an ’80s pop vibe mixed with bits of ’90s alterna-rock. While…
The Blotter
WHERE’S THE KRYPTONITE?: A woman called police to report being threatened by a friend. According to the report, the other woman told her, “Once I snort my cocaine in my nose, I’m going to come and fuck up your car. I’m going to beat your ass.” The woman filing the report told police that when…
Soundboard
Wednesday, May. 26 Blue Melinda Hansen, Royce Guin, Korey Dudley & Rob Knox Breakfast Club DJ Boney B Brickhouse Tavern, Davidson Robin Brown & Andy Seets Cajun Queen 7th Street Gator Band Cecil’s Robin Rogers Band Charleston Chops, Cornelius Michelle Smith w/ Bill & Ray Comet Grill Open Mic w/ Bill McDonald Double Door Inn…
