Faceless in El Salvador
Pedro Salmeron, Brooks’ Sandwich House, NoDa Brewing art unveiling, April Jones, Cracks and Snackmeat
Cover Story
Former Charlotte Resident Pedro Salmeron Struggles with Life After Deportation
(The following story is the result of a CL partnership with the Triangle-area INDY Week.) “I’m a young person with a sort of old mind. Does that make sense in English?” Pedro Salmeron says this in Spanish with an easy Salvadoran lilt, one that curls up at the ends of words into a quick tempo,…
LP commands attention at Underground concert
Pop-rocker hits Charlotte with stellar performance.
A Wrinkle in Time Misses Who, What and Why
A WRINKLE IN TIME ** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Ava DuVernay STARS Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon A literary classic becomes a cinematic clunker with A Wrinkle in Time, the ambitious but ultimately disappointing adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s lovely 1962 novel. Remaining faithful enough to the plot of the book, this screen version finds Meg…
Gringo: Fast and Furiosa
GRINGO **1/2 (out of four) DIRECTED BY Nash Edgerton STARS David Oyelowo, Charlize Theron A-list actors cutting loose is the prime draw of Gringo, an irreverent comedy in which Charlize Theron mocks the deaf, Joel Edgerton informs a Mexican that “Yo quiero Taco Bell,” and David Oyelowo is shown gettin’ jiggy wit it. Oyelowo, Selma’s…
Viva Vega in A Fantastic Woman
A FANTASTIC WOMAN *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Sebastián Lelio STARS Daniela Vega, Francisco Reyes The newly anointed Academy Award winner for Best Foreign Language Film, the Chilean import A Fantastic Woman tells the story of Marina (an excellent Daniela Vega), a waitress who’s the partner of the affluent and older Orlando (Francisco Reyes).…
The Blotter: Strikeout
Loose Lips With students speaking out against gun violence like never before, it was not a good time for a South Mecklenburg High School student to bring a gun on campus during baseball practice last week. The student said he forgot that the gun was in his car, and his real mistake was apparently telling…
Lady Bird, Thor: Ragnarok, Wonder Wheel 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.) HARPER (1966) / THE DROWNING POOL (1975). Paul Newman didn’t make the types of movies that generally lent themselves to sequels, although there were a couple of exceptions. (Thankfully, the dismal The…
Listen Up: Jah-Monte Brings the Baby to ‘Local Vibes’
On the heels of releasing his new EP, ReaL LiFe, Jah-Monte came by the podcast studio at Hygge West to discuss his alter ego, King Callis, and how his new tracks differ greatly from his last release, Testing Her Creation. He also brought a special guest, his 7-month-old daughter, who kinda-sorta gets on the mic…
News of the Weird: Drunk and Hopeless
Wait, What? Police in Mainz, Germany, responded to an apartment building after cries were heard from one unit early on Feb. 17, The Associated Press reported. When they arrived, officers found two men, the 58-year-old tenant and a 61-year-old visitor, “hopelessly locked up” with a mannequin dressed as a knight and a large remote-controlled car.…
James Lee Walker II Obliterates Boundaries Between Theater, Rock and Politics
In the fourth floor of a high-rise apartment building in Uptown Charlotte, the concierge is plotting a revolution fueled by art, theater, rock ‘n’ roll and God only knows what else. James Lee Walker II doesn’t just work at the Vue; he also lives here. One of the Queen City’s more wildly creative minds, Walker,…
April Jones Scales ‘The Mountaintop’
When April A. Jones walked off stage after a spectacular performance in March of 2016 as Penny in Actor’s Theatre of Charlotte’s production of Father Comes Home from the Wars, she was feeling a little off kilter. “I’d been feeling off for about a week, and I went to the doctor and told him I…
A Rundown of Charlotte’s Arcades for Grown Ups
When I was growing up, my mom and I used to go to a local laundromat at least once a week. Naturally, a child gets stir crazy in a space like that. Luckily, our laundromat had a PAC-MAN arcade game. My mom would even join in the fun, using the extra quarters we had to…
Light Rail Meets Brooks’ Sandwich House
A lot has changed in NoDa — or North Charlotte, as it was once known — over the last 50 years. As many longtime Charlotteans are aware, North Charlotte began as a textile town; a place defined by its warehouses and mills, but more by the workers who made those warehouses run and lived in…
New Reporting Paints a Bleak Picture for Former Charlotte Resident
I’ll always remember the panic in Carmen Salmeron’s voice. Sitting in Salmeron’s living room in north Charlotte in February 2016, she was beside herself with fear that her son, Pedro, would soon be deported. Pedro was one of the NC6, a group of young men who arrived in the United States as teens fleeing gang…
