Cover Story
Charlotte Fashion Prodigy Kevin Carter Finds His True Voice in Music
Kevin Carter was 19 when he decided he’d had enough of fashion. He’d been designing clothes since ninth grade and was so talented by 15 that his bold and flashy Kevin Vain line made it onto a runway during Charlotte Fashion Week 2010. Two years later, a pair of Kevin Vain dresses were featured in…
Gogol Bordello provides relentless entertainment at The Fillmore
In the Whale offers blistering opening set.
RiverRun Wrap 2017
With the 19th Annual RiverRun International Film Festival officially in the books, here are the titles (reviewed in alphabetical order) that I caught during the esteemed Winston-Salem event. BRAVE NEW JERSEY — Nearly 80 years later, it remains one of the greatest hoaxes in American pop-culture history. On the evening of October 30, 1938, Orson…
Police Investigate Hate Crime in East Charlotte
Letter left at scene threatens refugee with torture
Land of Mine: An explosive watch
LAND OF MINE ***1/2 (out of four) DIRECTED BY Martin Zandvliet STARS Roland Møller, Louis Hofmann An Academy Award nominee this year for Best Foreign Language Film, the Danish import Land of Mine is a movie that affects the stomach even more than the heart or the head. Set in the immediate aftermath of World…
Going in Style: Veterans Day
GOING IN STYLE **1/2 (out of four) DIRECTED BY Zach Braff STARS Morgan Freeman, Michael Caine The 1979 sleeper hit Going in Style pooled the talents of two Oscar winners, George Burns and Art Carney, and one Oscar nominee, Lee Strasberg. The new version of Going in Style ups the ante — and simplifies the…
The Blotter: Jump At Your Own Risk
Dangerous Game A 27-year-old woman near Uptown filed a police report after someone tried to sabotage her backyard toys, either in order to get to her or her children. The woman told officers that known suspects sliced through the bottom of a trampoline in her yard, possibly hoping someone would try to jump and go…
Peyton Place, Rogue One, MST3K set among new home entertainment titles
(View From The Couch is a weekly column that reviews what’s new on Blu-ray, DVD and Streaming. Ratings are on a four-star scale.) A MONSTER CALLS (2016). Superior to The BFG but inferior to Pete’s Dragon, A Monster Calls was the most recent 2016 release to detail the relationship between a young child and a…
Three Questions for Deacon Ovall of Tavolo Restaurant
[IMAGE-1] Deacon Ovall only ever wanted one thing — to be a chef. As a child, he’d watch old cooking shows like The Frugal Gourmet and The Cajun Cook, fascinated by life inside the kitchen. Now, as executive chef at Charlotte’s new Tavolo Italian Restaurant, Ovall has accomplished his goal but along the way came…
Ben Shropshire Turns Magic, Dreams (and Bugs) Into Art
On a March afternoon after a freak snowfall, the back room at Jim McGuire’s “Happening” at Studio 1212 is filling up with artists, performers and onlookers. There’s a lot going on: Hula hoopers twist beside a psychedelic school bus blasting dance music. Aerialists swing from the rafters, practicing a routine. A “bubbleologist” blows smoke into…
Charlotte Duo Helps Rejuvenate Once-Forgotten Ancient Art
Each morning, between 7 and 8 a.m., Uday Deshpande holds court in a small field in Shivaji Park on the Mahim Bay in Mumbai, India. For that hour, he instructs any willing student between the ages of 5 and 85 in the ancient art of Mallakhamb, a gymnastic sport in which a gymnast or gymnasts…
Will the Factory Cafe Beat the Curse?
With its mix of music, comedy, bars, clubs and restaurants, the AvidXchange Music Factory has always managed to attract Charlotte’s night owls. But there were some things that sisters-in-law Tracy Ford and Jacquette Land noticed were missing on the boulevard, one being a restaurant serving breakfast foods to the tipsy late-night crowd. Ford and Land…
Weekly Horoscope (April 6-12)
For All Signs Mercury, ancient god of travel, messages and routine business, turns retrograde on Sunday, April 9. This phenomenon occurs three times per year, and lasts approximately 3.5 weeks. Those whose work involves appointments can be prepared for a flurry of phone calls and changes in schedule. If your work is related to publishing,…
Are You Smarter Than an Eighth Grader?
Two Saturdays ago, the boyfriend and I decided to go to Petra’s Bar in Plaza Midwood for Su Casa. If you didn’t catch one of my past articles on the event, search Creative Loafing’s website for the tag line, “The monthly oasis for Charlotte’s culturally starved.” What does it look like, you may ask? Afrobeats,…
Charlotte Man Plays Along With His Unwanted Political Following
Ken Buck is just a simple man, trying to live a simple social media existence. As stated in his Twitter bio, Buck’s interests include photography, football, food and family. Not included in that list are politics — especially not Colorado politics — yet the south Charlotte resident can’t seem to escape them. See, Buck has…
A Charlotte Fashion Maven Turns to Music
A year ago this month, the music world lost Prince, who was arguably the most important artist of the 1980s. Three months earlier, Charlotte’s Kevin Carter posted a video of himself to his Facebook page singing a track from Mercury, the homemade EP he’d just released on Soundcloud. I won’t say there’s any connection between…
VIDEO: Charlotte Students Appear in ‘Purple Dreams’ Doc at Full Frame Fest
“We’ve got gay, straight, black, white, Hispanic. This is what Glee looks like in real life,” Corey Mitchell says of his students at Charlotte’s Northwest School of the Arts, the magnet school on Beatties Ford Road where singer Kevin Mercury Carter got his start. Mitchell’s quote comes from Purple Dreams, a new film directed by…
