Mar 26 – Apr 1, 2014

Mar 26 - Apr 1, 2014 / Vol. 28 / No. 5

Cover Story

This Tiny Life: Ditch the square feet, gain the world.

Ryan Mitchell has spent the last two years building his dream home. It’s no bigger than a backyard tool shed, and he’ll go to the bathroom in a bucket. He doesn’t seem like the type who would give up modern conveniences with such rigor. Glasses frame his round, boyish face, which turns pink when he…

Ana McKenzie

Bizarre crimes from Charlotte police files (March 27)

Show Yourself: Police responded to a municipal building after someone reported that about eight people were fighting outside it. When they arrived, officers witnessed a man punch a woman in the face and stomach. When they started to arrest him, he showed his penis to officers and the female victim and cussed at the cops.…

Ryan Pitkin

Noah: Bold Biblical flick makes a splash

NOAH *** DIRECTED BY Darren Aronofsky STARS Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly Accomplished enough to wash away all the doubts that preceded its opening, director Darren Aronofsky’s Noah is a muscular and meditative work whose strengths should in the long run drown out the feeble protests of close-minded detractors (most of whom, as is par for…

Matt Brunson

Bad Words is amusing for a spell

BAD WORDS **1/2 DIRECTED BY Jason Bateman STARS Jason Bateman, Kathryn Hahn Jason Bateman makes his feature directorial debut with the acidic comedy Bad Words, and it must be noted that he does yeoman’s work on the picture. His helming is competent but colorless, which in turn places more of a burden on the screenplay…

Matt Brunson

Recipes for success

Half-moon light paints a scattering of stilted village huts in blurred lines of quicksilver and shadow. I sit cross-legged in a deserted market stall, drinking a can of Angkor beer with a tough Cambodian broad and social entrepreneur named Chantha Nguon. I initially met Nguon when I interviewed her for a magazine story many months…

Kim Green

Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn: Two banjos and a baby

The plan was to talk to the husband-and-wife duo of Béla Fleck and Abigail Washburn, along with their 9-month-old son Juno, together over the speakerphone. But, as with many of the best-laid plans involving an infant, this one gets foiled before it really gets off the ground. “Sorry, Abby had to step out to feed…

Kyle Petersen

Case Conrad falls into place

Malmö, Sweden-by-way-of-Barcelona collective Case Conrad has followed an unusual, almost anti-music business trajectory that brings their brand of horn-punctuated, folk-and-surf-inflected dream pop to The Evening Muse on Friday, March 28. According to songwriter and group founder Gustav Haggren, it’s not so much a case of the band’s plan being “no plan” as it is a…

Pat Moran

Put an egg on it

I fell for the golden, drippy center of nature’s perfect food early in life. Every weekend, my father religiously made eggs with bacon. He would fry an entire pound of pork, then crack a few eggs into the hot grease, where the sizzle and pop would make the eggs dance inside the pan. A crisp…

Keia Mastrianni

Weekly horoscope (March 27-April 2)

For All Signs: Between March 30 and April 3, we will experience one of the challenging windows of this time of squares among the outer planets. The squared arrangement of the outer planets has been occurring periodically since 2011 and will continue into 2015. As the planets closer to the sun cross the already squared…

Vivian Carol

Faith, fasting and a foreign land

The column originally used an incorrect name. The young DREAMer mentioned in the first paragraph’s name is Jessica Contreras. It’s a beautiful spring Saturday in March — the kind of beautiful that calls for firing up the barbecue grill — and a group of 11 Charlotte women is spending the day fasting at the Sacred…

Ailen Arreaza

The art of (embellished) storytelling

Mike Birbiglia’s humor starts painfully close to home. The award-winning stand-up comic is best known for his long-form, embarrassment-fueled monologues, which are filled with wild stories. There’s Sleepwalk with Me, in which the aspiring comedian struggles with his anxiety toward his girlfriend while navigating a sleepwalking disorder. (At one point, during a sleepwalking episode, he…

Patrick Wall

The backwards backwoods

When Cameron Joyce was a senior in high school, a school administrator came to his classroom to read a newly adopted policy. Any student at the private, Christian school near the Triad who was lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender would no longer be allowed at the school. Each student was asked to sign a statement…

Matt Comer, QNotes Editor, Special to Creative Loafing

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