Mar 19-25, 2014

Mar 19-25, 2014 / Vol. 28 / No. 4

Cover Story

About face … or beards

As I sit down in Plaza Midwood’s Common Market for a conversation with the Beard and Moustache Club of North Carolina’s Charlotte chapter president, Brian Quein, I can’t help but notice all the facial hair around us — he fits in well here. A man nearby rubs his five o’clock shadow as he admires the…

Jeff Hahne

Axxa/Abraxas’ Axxa/Abraxas

On Axxa/Abraxas’ self-titled debut LP, 23-year-old Athens, Ga.-based artist/musician Ben Ashley draws on the self-absorbed density of Elephant Six bands, quaintly British Village Green neuroses and the retro-psych of merry pranksters the Bevis Frond to craft insanely catchy tunes about gnawing self-doubt. Ashley copped the word “Abraxas,” referring to a god that fuses both good…

Pat Moran

Bizarre police crime from Charlotte police files (March 20)

Tipped off: A Hungry Howie’s delivery man was finally caught for allegedly fooling his employer with what looked like some gigantic tips from customers. Over five days, the driver made deliveries to customers who paid with credit cards over the phone and had them sign a receipt while at their homes. He could then take…

Ryan Pitkin

The Grand Budapest Hotel: First-class accommodations

THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL ***1/2 DIRECTED BY Wes Anderson STARS Ralph Fiennes, Tony Revolori It would be insulting and inaccurate to state that Wes Anderson is the Zeppo Marx to the Coens’ Groucho and Chico (or Groucho and Harpo, if you will), but as both sets of filmmakers have often leaned heavily on stylized dialogue,…

Matt Brunson

Muppets Most Wanted worth catching

MUPPETS MOST WANTED *** DIRECTED BY James Bobin STARS Ricky Gervais, Tina Fey The 2011 reboot The Muppets was an unqualified delight, smartly mining the nostalgia factor to reunite older moviegoers with the puppet protagonists of their childhood (or, in many cases, young adulthood). Whether building scenes around “The Rainbow Connection” or a modem connection…

Matt Brunson

Divergent: An OK YA adaptation

DIVERGENT **1/2 DIRECTED BY Neil Burger STARS Shailene Woodley, Theo James In the ongoing struggle to discover another Young Adult title that might possibly earn Twilight- or The Hunger Games-like dough — adaptations like Beautiful Creatures, The Host and The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones all fell disastrously short — Divergent appears to have a…

Matt Brunson

Enemy doubles down on ambiguity

ENEMY **1/2 DIRECTED BY Denis Villeneuve STARS Jake Gyllenhaal, Mélanie Laurent The year’s premier WTF? achievement, Enemy is the type of film that will leave most viewers initially dumbfounded as it comes to a baffling close but will begin to work itself out as one repeatedly replays it in the movie theater of the mind.…

Matt Brunson

CD Review: Sinners & Saints’ Love & Misery

With Love & Misery, Sinners & Saints singer/guitarist Perry Fowler and bassist/multi-instrumentalist Mark Baran craft an album so rollicking, tuneful and affable that it’s easy to forget just how serious they are. With sonic signifiers like the good-timey chug of The Faces’ “Ooh La La” and the acoustic blues swing of John Mayall, Love &…

Pat Moran

CD Review: Water Liars’ Water Liars

For Mississippi’s Water Liars, love seems more blood sport than godsend, more Antietam than Eden. The band’s sparse and gritty country-tinged indie-rock has depicted relationships — coming or going, though mostly the latter — in such heartrending detail that you wonder why they even bother. “Just one time, do what I ask/’cause I am bleeding…

John Schacht

Book review: Wiley Cash’s This Dark Road to Mercy

Let’s start with the hometown stuff. Wiley Cash grew up in Gastonia and his new novel name-checks all manner of mainstays in the Carolinas. Lineberger Park and Tony’s Ice Cream, the Gastonia Rangers and Sims Park are all here. So, too, are the Carolina Panthers, Wilkinson Boulevard, the late Myrtle Beach Pavilion and the low…

Erik Spanberg

Going nowhere fast

I turn 35 tomorrow and I am stuck. No, really, I am actually stuck. In my car. I parallel-parked, badly, and now I can’t get out. I want to call my mom, but I’m too old for that, and she wouldn’t be of much assistance over the phone anyway. Surely I can figure this out…

Abby White

Mad Monster Party: Return of the Living Dead

“Come on down and party with the Mad Monsters!” That’s the sage advice given by Joe Moe, and his exuberance is understandable. Moe, who created the Mad Monster Party along with Eben McGarr, has seen the selection of Charlotte as a host city for the event pay off. And after two successful conventions, the pair…

Matt Brunson

Deafheaven’s hardcore pink?

A hot pink blur isn’t typically one of the many visceral images that rushes to mind when one thinks of hardcore music. Many metalheads would deem such a rosy hue too effeminate for their beloved music. Meanwhile, the genre’s boldest band, Deafheaven, uses that contentious shade to adorn its latest album. “We were discussing summer-based…

Kyle Mullin

Three questions with personal chef Christopher Wheeler

During the recent CIAA basketball tournament weekend, 30-year-old Christopher Wheeler, chef/owner of Bobbi-Ashi Chef Services, was given the opportunity to provide personal chef services to several celebrities who were in town, including Doug E. Fresh, Charlamagne tha God and Mack Wilds. “It’s very private,” says Wheeler. “You take it to their hotel room or another…

Maria Dominguez

Cupids, Gargoyles and Naked Bricks

If you’ve spent all your life in Charlotte, you could be forgiven if a puzzled look crossed your face when someone described an artwork or a building as having “a Cupid” or, perhaps even more blasphemously, “Cupids.” With his signature bow and famously devastating arrows, Cupid is the god of love in Roman mythology, a…

Perry Tannenbaum

Weekly horoscope (March 20-26)

For All Signs: March 20th brings us the spring equinox, the time of symbolic renewal of all things spiritual, emotional and mental. The time frame around this particular equinox is likely to be dramatic, as it has been in recent history. The drama usually occurs within six weeks before or after the exact equinox. Examples…

Vivian Carol

Are corporate incentives worth the trouble?

In 2004, Dell was looking for a home for an assembly plant that would bring with it more than a thousand jobs. To lure the highly coveted project to North Carolina, the General Assembly quickly convened and approved an incentive package worth a staggering $242 million that exempted Dell from paying corporate income and franchise…

Ana McKenzie

Reviews straight from New York’s Lincoln Center

Life rolled on at Lincoln Center as if all the snowfall were a faraway rumor. As frequently as the swirling crystals descended upon Manhattan from perpetually gray skies, there were no humongous blizzards this winter to daunt the snow-clearing crew. That meant the lovely plaza was largely snow-free every time we came to an operatic…

Perry Tannenbaum

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