Mar 28 – Apr 3, 2018
Conscientious coffee; March for Our Lives and gun threat at UNC Charlotte; Vadim Kolpakov, gypsy music; Charlotte Film Society
Cover Story
Conscientious Coffee
[Image-3] “Would you like a cup of coffee?” It seemed a simple enough question when Matt Hohler posed it at Mecklenburg Market on a recent Saturday afternoon, so I said yes to a sample of robust earthy brew with a slightly bitter bite. It’s when I asked Hohler about his business that the gateway opened…
Ready Player One: Snap, Crackle and Pop Culture
READY PLAYER ONE *** (out of four) DIRECTED BY Steven Spielberg STARS Tye Sheridan, Olivia Cooke In the name of full disclosure, I have never read Ernest Cline’s bestselling 2011 novel Ready Player One. Of course, I haven’t read many books that ended up becoming popular movies, but it’s a tidbit that seems worth mentioning…
The Blotter: Dinner Party
Personal Chef An employee of a property management company was surprised to find a dinner party in full swing when he went to check out one of his employer’s properties in east Charlotte last week — mainly because there weren’t supposed to be any tenants there. The employee told police that he walked into the…
The Black Scorpion, The Outer Limits, The Seven-Ups 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.) THE BLACK SCORPION (1957). Every once in a while, a movie would end up on Mystery Science Theater 3000 that didn’t quite deserve the destruction thrust upon it by the Satellite of…
Listen Up: LaLa Specific Jumps in the Cypher on ‘Local Vibes’
Shame on us for going 35 episodes without bringing a female rapper into the studio, but we couldn’t think of a better guest than LaLa Specific to break us out of that drought. LaLa put up with Ryan’s horrible puns to discuss her style (or styles) and the UNC Charlotte cypher world while taking us…
News of the Weird: Ambulance Driver
Acting Out Wait times at emergency rooms are notoriously long, and Danny Konieczny’s experience was no different on March 6 at The Villages Hospital in The Villages, Florida. The Lady Lake resident, 61, was at home earlier in the day when a neighbor called 911 to report Konieczny was drunk and suicidal. According to WOFL…
Celeste Fisher Gears up for Her Non-Hip-Hop Hip-Hop Show
Among our favorite denizens of Charlotte’s hip-hop scene is a little hobbit named Celeste Fisher, aka Celeste MoonChild. She’s a fixture at shows and has recorded some dope sounds on her own and with local artists including Yung Citizen and Ricky Rogers. In last year’s 420 issue, Creative Loafing listed a track she did with…
Charlotte Film Society Keeps the Edge on the Area’s Silver Screens
Most people enjoy going to the movies to see the latest superhero cash-grabbing crashdown, or maybe a heartstrings-pulling flick featuring Emma Stone’s big eyes. There’s a certain kind of film-goer, though, who wants — no, needs — to see Metropolis or Ran just as their auteurs intended: surrounded by fellow cinephiles in a dark room…
Springtime Brings Out my Hidden Brewery Lover Side
Despite the fact that winter is still trying to remain a part of the conversation, spring officially started on March 20, and you know what that means: brewery season will soon be in full effect. That’s right, welcome back babies, dogs and craft beer baking under the Queen City sun. I’ve never been much of…
David Butler Launches Modern-Day Brand That Embraces Throwback Mediums
David Butler was born and raised in Charlotte, but it took him going away to notice the change that was occuring in the culture here. While attending Winston-Salem State University from 2009 to 2013, Butler started to sense a change in his hometown from afar. “When I was up in school, kids were coming up…
A Disturbing Threat Raises Alarm at UNC Charlotte
While high school students and gun control advocates were busy in recent weeks organizing a march through Uptown Charlotte, authorities at the city’s largest university were dealing with a threat that only highlighted the need for Saturday’s march. UNC Charlotte student Matthew Saavedra, 20, was arrested on Tuesday, March 20, after telling a mental health…
The Art of Navigating Trump’s America — as a Russian
It must be tough to be Russian in today’s nutty America. “In the age of Trump, we are America’s Trojan horse, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in one person,” Anastasia Edel, the author of Russia: Putin’s Playground: Empire, Revolution, and the New Tsar, wrote last month in The New York Review of…
How a Russian Guitarist From Charlotte Wound up on Tour With Madonna
THE YEAR WAS 2008. Charlotte-based Russian guitar virtuoso Vadim Kolpakov was onstage in front of 60,000 Madonna fans packed into Park Izvor in Bucharest, Romania. Kolpakov and his uncle Alexander — the most famous Romany guitarist in Russia — were on tour with the American pop icon to perform the music and dance of Roma…
A Gypsy Music Primer
[Image-3] When Charlotte musician Vadim Kolpakov’s fingers flitter across the nylon strings of his blonde, cutaway 7-string Kremona guitar, he is carrying on a music tradition that began centuries ago in India, and spread to countries across the Middle East, Europe and the world. The Gypsy music tradition is bound by a culture that values…
Four Charlotte-Area Students Lean In to the Gun Debate
After school on Friday, March 23, on a chilly afternoon, Maddie Syfert stood in the plaza of First Ward Park with about nine other high school students, all young women. Behind her, 18-year-old William A. Hough High School senior Rosemary Colen stood at a podium, reading a list of school shootings; she recited the name…
