CD Review: Best of the Sugar Hill Years Americana Master Series
Guy Clark’s Best of the Sugar Hill Years Americana Master Series was released March 13, 2007 The Deal: Texas singer songwriter Guy Clark’s retrospective on Sugar Hill Records The Good: “Ain’t no money in poetry,” Guy Clark sang on his 1999 release Cold Dog Soup. But set to music, Clarke‘s words have made him one…
CD Review: Security
Antibalas’ Security was released March 6, 2007. The Deal: Big and brassy, Antibalas takes Afrobeat to new levels. The Good: In 1968, Nigerian musician Fela Kuti mixed Afro-Cuban jazz with Latin influences, dubbing his creation Afrobeat. In the hands of the 14-member, Brooklyn-based musical collective Antibalas, (Spanish for bulletproof) the music sounds like James Brown’s…
FILM: Rewarding the Wrong Roles
When Martin Scorsese finally won his Oscar last month for The Departed, most film fans responded with a chorus of “About time!” A few, however, retorted with, “For that movie?” Yes, of course Scorsese’s Oscar should have been for one of his signature films, specifically GoodFellas or Raging Bull. or But the Academy has a…
THE SCENE: People-watching
So … in this blog, my job is to tell you a little about what’s going on in Charlotte. A little known event that few people really appreciate is people-watching at Northlake Mall. But, to sit still and watch people who assume it’s cool to just hang around the mall is kind of sad. I…
CITIZEN SERVATIUS: Observer, Not Petitioners Misleading Readers
The folks at the Charlotte Observer are in a tizzy over the idea of voters actually being allowed to have a say — God forbid! — on whether they want to keep the half cent sales tax for mass transit, and the multi-billion dollar boondoggle of a light rail line that goes with it. The…
NEWS: Who’s Homeless?
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently released a report on homelessness that estimates more than 754,000 people – or less than 0.3 percent of the United States population – were homeless at any one point in January 2005. The Charlotte Observer recently wrote that local homeless advocates say the HUD’s numbers for…
NEWS: Guess Some People Aren’t Fans of Modern Drunkard Magazine
Recently, I wrote an off-the-cuff article about things to do here for five bucks. It was intended to give people genuine ideas as well as make a few jokes. Some were, well, not too realistic. Days later, I received an e-mail from someone offended by this suggestion: Crash an AA meeting: On the classic sitcom…
FILM: From Oscar to … Norbit?
Ever since Luise Rainer won back-to-back Best Actress Oscars in the mid-1930s and then watched her career fade into obscurity, there’s always been talk of an Oscar curse, as if winning the gold statue was a sure sign that a performer’s days in the spotlight were numbered. This of course is pure nonsense — I…
The Rustic
Name of Kama Sutra Position: The Rustic Getting into the position: The woman lies on her back with both legs straight out and thighs pressed tightly together. The man then proceeds to make love to her keeping both of his thighs on the outside of hers. On a scale of 1 to 10 how would…
The Blotter
GIVE HIM AN INCH: One man hits a 69-year-old man with a tape measure. Then he threatens to damage the man’s vehicles. Then, a second assailant steals the tape measure. Must’ve been a damn good tape measure. PARKING VIOLATION: A woman reported two tires on her 1999 Mazda were slashed overnight, leaving her unable to…
Things CL loves about the Q.C.
CIAA week. You have sports, concert, parties, fashion, and the best people-watching imaginable. I’m in heaven. — Kelly Hill, circulations manager The view from Central Avenue at the Independence overpass. One of the few great lookouts that hasn’t been lost to development, this lookout offers the nicest look at Charlotte’s budding skyline. — Karen Shugart,…
Diary surfing
First, a sprightly Midsummer Night’s Dream on The Green, and then an equally satisfying Bad Dates at a Dilworth condo. Now Collaborative Arts is straying beyond their comedy comfort zone with their first suspense drama, Steven Dietz’s FICTION. Two happily married writers make the mistake of getting a wee bit too curious about the secrets…
Lynn Benjamin of Carolina Designer Dragons
Lynn Benjamin has always been passionate about animals of every kingdom, but she chose to breed and raise bearded dragons; these creatures, in her eyes, are just as much in need of nurture and love as both of her toy teacup Chihuahuas. Her home has become a dragon shrine; she owns a total of 22…
Oh, grow up
Boomer With Attitude
Word of the week
CONCUPISCENCE: n. Strong sexual desire; lust. Example: The concubines concurred that their concupiscence for the cock-eyed cow-handler was conspicuous when they cornered him.
Society screens
After a lengthy hiatus, the CHARLOTTE FILM SOCIETY returns for its latest “Second Week Series,” albeit at a new location. After offering its titles at the Manor Theatre for many years, the organization will now present its movies at the Park Terrace. March’s lineup, to be screened starting today, consists of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 Army…
Gold Grills shine
“I got my mouth lookin’ something like a disco ball … I got the diamonds and the ice all hand-set/I might cause a cold front if I take a deep breath.” — From Nelly’s “Grillz” Flava Flav, clown prince of the legendary rap crew Public Enemy, was an undeniable pioneer of not only hip-hop but…
Immigrant families sold out, locked up
Breaking the Sound Barrier
Cheap thrills
WINTER FILM SERIES This latest batch of classic films centers on breakthrough efforts by world-famous directors. The remainder of the schedule consists of Woody Allen’s Take the Money and Run (March 19). All films will be screened at 7 p.m. in the Wachovia Theater at ImaginOn; admission is free. For more info, call 704-336-6217. TANGO…
Got sweets?
Discovery Place will hit your sweet spot with CANDY UNWRAPPED Presented by Jelly Belly®. Kids can enjoy jumping on a massive tongue while learning about taste buds or rock climb a giant sugar crystal to investigating the mysterious stages of crystal growth. The whole family can choose from tasty chocolate covered termites, fried flying ants…
Scorpios
Scorpios, known by Creative Loafing readers as the best dance club in Charlotte, is also known for their notoriously weird drag shows. Perhaps you’re envisioning a Las Vegas-style song and dance act, but this club is in a different category of weird. The crowd — consisting of transvestites, a rainbow of diverse partiers and Miss…
David Barron’s Top Five
Culture Surfing
Dig it if you can
Holes At one point, late in the second act of Children’s Theatre’s fast-moving production of Louis Sachar’s Holes, we find out how Stanley Yelnats’ runaway chum, Zero, has survived his escape from Camp Green Lake. He has taken shelter from the lethal sun amid a heap of wooden wreckage he has found in the parched,…
Elana James
Snarf Records
Barebones Theatre Group
For centuries, the theater has been a place where it pays to shirk the ordinary. Jim Yost, co-founder/artistic director for BareBones Theatre Group, knows all about how stripping away the pretense makes for more room to stand out — i.e. go weird. Yost, a Pennsylvanian lured to Charlotte to attend Queens University, decided that the…
What a windbag!
Books
Welcome to Weird Charlotte
Ask anyone to describe the city of Charlotte and you’ll undoubtedly hear adjectives like “conservative” and phrases like “Bible Belt” and “banker’s town.” But, rest assured, there’s more to our city than just money, religion and stuffed shirts. Bubbling beneath the well-behaved surface of the Queen City lies a wondrous world of weird. Now, this…
Independence Promenade
Independence Promenade isn’t just another strip mall on the decline. It’s a place where the management clearly knows how to go out with style and character. You can buy everything at the Promenade — from a massage of a questionable nature to Halal meat. This is a place where freaks, geeks and those looking to…
Space berries
Hot Linx
Kangarooed
Citizen Servatius
Little Shiva
All are born little, but none are born Little Shiva. The birth of Charlotte’s Shiva, and the origin of her signature Dotmobile, are the stuff of fevered speculation and urban legend — commodities in short supply in Banktown, U.S.A. Amid a fast-track design career in Manhattan, the future queen of the underground publication QZ (Queen…
Master Psychic Sharon Brown
Type “Charlotte + psychic” into Google maps and 170 results will pop up for mediums in our area. That’s small in Internet terms, but large for our seemingly conservative city. CL sought out one of these precogs in particular — Sharon Brown, a self-described master psychic who reads palms, tarot cards, and crystals to see…
Charlotte’s throw-away pets
Animal overpopulation is a big problem in Mecklenburg County. Every additional puppy and kitten born or purchased from breeders takes a potential home from an animal at our county’s animal shelter. Every year, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Animal Control officers are forced to euthanize thousands of animals because there are no homes for them. The solution — adoption,…
Out of the shadows
Don’t look to Jean-Pierre Melville’s low-key 1969 thriller Army of Shadows to romanticize the French resistance. Despite having himself belonged to the resistance, Melville refuses to cast the film’s freedom fighters as matinee idols or noble martyrs carrying out spectacular missions that turn the tide of war. An overlooked classic, Army of Shadows (being shown…
Purgatory
Entering last month’s Purgatory XXX: St. Valentine’s Day Massacre event — Single Cell Productions’ semi-regular bondage and S&M party at Amos’ SouthEnd — the first thing I noticed was a swing hanging from the ceiling. “Look,” I said, poking my companion’s side, “they use a mannequin as the seat of the swing. How clever!” Or…
Sip and savor
Corkscrew
Middleterrean
A falafel sandwich is a common street food found throughout the Middle East. When I lived in Egypt, it was as common to see falafel stands on street corners as it is to see hot dog stands in downtown Charlotte. The only difference was the stand consisted of a boiling hot caldron of hot oil…
The Head
Twenty years ago, a wave of decidedly funky urban pioneers helped bring The Plaza Road off of Central Avenue back to life, putting radical paint colors on their charge cards and hanging hip wind chimes in their yard. James McGuire, who bought his house in 1986 for $58,000, was one of those broke pioneers who…
Film Clips
New Releases THE LIVES OF OTHERS Pan’s Labyrinth deserved to win the Best Foreign-Language Film Oscar, of course, but the Academy’s selection of The Lives of Others hardly qualifies as an outrage. While it’d be easy to cynically rack up this film’s victory to the fact that the organization’s septuagenarians would more readily respond to…
Whites only party
To co-opt and remix Jeff Foxworthy: You might be a racist if … you single out the lone Negro at the Arcade Fire show. As cited in the last column, a recent New York Times Style piece by Jessica Pressler sought to spotlight the supposed trend of black indie rock fans as a rising subculture.…
The Dog Bar
Americans are obsessed with their pets, and Charlotte is no different. We might just even be a little bit more so, considering the plethora of animal-themed shops, services and publications. You want someone to pick up your dog poop? Services compete for your dollars. You want to read dog-themed articles and see glossy cat photos?…
View From The Couch
UNIVERSAL CINEMA CLASSICS (1930-1949). Two years ago, Universal Studios Home Entertainment debuted its Legacy Series, which featured classic motion pictures like To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting in deluxe DVD editions packed with extras. Now, the outfit has seen fit to offer a scaled-down version of this idea with the new Cinema Classics line,…
Cheris Hodges
Profile
John W. Love
John W. Love is weird. He’s a churning, burning hunk of fire. He is our own Oscar Wilde spliced with an ill-tempered Will Rogers and genetically modified with equal parts street and preacher speak. He is a writer of passion plays and both a player and a writer of commentaries on the American psyche, from…
Zach McNabb’s Top Ten
As one of the co-owners of the Neighborhood Theatre located in NoDA, Zach McNabb is in charge of booking and production, and of course, management. “We’re pretty eclectic,” he says. “We like to look for acts with a Charlotte-based history.” For his playlist, he rifles through a stack of CDs on his desk, as he…
The drama beyond the DJ
It was only a month ago when DJ Drama and Don Cannon’s arrest shocked the music industry. Morrow, Clayton County and Fulton County police (with assistance from the Recording Industry Association of America) raided the Aphilliates’ downtown Atlanta office on Jan. 16, seizing most of their assets and arresting Tyree “DJ Drama” Simmons and Don…
‘Z-Axis’
A group of goose-stepping Nazis, including one sporting a pink frilly boa, is on the loose in Charlotte. They’re trying to brainwash the unsuspecting masses to watch Gilligan’s Island and other mindless programming … or something like that. Oh yeah, and their leader is a watermelon that talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger. But before they can…
You get what you copay for
Advice Goddess
Bad medicine
Three years ago, Dr. Everett Echols II thought he was on the cutting edge of medicine. Now he’s facing prison time. The North Carolina doctor, who lost his medical license after two people committed suicide with drugs he prescribed over the Internet, was indicted last month on federal drug trafficking charges. Echols, whom Creative Loafing…
Annie McClendon Gurley
“As a man is,” said William Blake, “so he sees. As the eye is formed, such are its powers.” As children, we do not perceive ourselves as different because we cannot imagine anything outside the small scope of our own existence. Poverty. Privilege. Safety. Danger. What we know is what is natural to us. It…
Hell-raising soul
It’s a crime. But when you ask Bettye LaVette who you need to contact to rectify the fact that she’s not more famous, she lets you know right quick that she’s already on it. “Ooh honey,” she squeals. “I’m trying to get a coalition together myself.” It was a lack of promotion that excluded LaVette…
La natura
North Carolina Dance Theatre is promising us a trio of old and new gems as the city’s most-esteemed performing arts company unveils NATURAL BEAUTY. The lush Amazonian rainforest is the inspiration for Spanish-born choreographer Nacho Duato’s Na Floresta, spiced with the music of Villa-Lobos. George Balanchine’s classic Rubies is a pretty eclectic mix in its…
VisArt
There are the normal, run-of-the-mill video stores, and then there’s VisArt. Tucked away in a shopping strip on 7th Street near downtown, VisArt is familiar to readers of CL’s annual Best of Charlotte issues, given its habit of winning the critics’ prize for Best Video/DVD Rental Store year in and year out. And the main…
Lary’s new drug
Moodswing
Shut up and serve
Table Dancing
Ty flips the script
R&B singer TYRESE (Gibson) began his career as a model in the late ’90s and launched into the music world soon after. He did a double-take on his 2006 album, the two-disc Alter Ego, where one disc is a collection of slow jam crooners while disc two turns up the heat with a stack of…
Charlotte Roller Girls
Tattoos weren’t an unusual sight the night I visited Kate’s Skating Rink in Gastonia; in fact, tattoos adorned the upper arms of many patrons, despite the fact it was Christian Music Night. Purple and black must have been the signature colors of the evening because every woman there could be seen wearing the dark, lusty…
Stargazer
Pisces The Fish: (Feb. 18 — March 19) Your personal identity is the subject under consideration. Who are you becoming and who do you need to be? How do you wish to define yourself before the world? How can you develop an individual identity that is workable while simultaneously maintaining a personally rewarding relationship? For…
Karma Cleanser
Dear Karma Cleanser: I met a guy who I soon fell head over heels in love with. Everything seemed to go right in the relationship. I wasn’t needy, I trusted him and gave him what I had if I had it. Everything changed when I confessed my feelings to him. About a month later, he…
Pirating in uptown
No map to slow you down as TREASURE HUNT fever hits lands in a grand outdoor excursion that’s sure to help you brush up on local history. Ravenchase Adventures presents this quest for the would-be Indiana Jones or Lara Croft. It began as a distraction for three little boys losing their mother to cancer and…
Preaching and drinking
At Revolution’s inaugural service in November 2006, minister Jonathan Hughes, 23, gazed over 30 or so faces tinged red from the Milestone’s stage lights and uttered three christening words to his congregation: “I’m really stoked.” From his pulpit, a stage littered with graffiti and band stickers, one in which Hughes has graced more than once…
Dives and divas
Last week I dove into the dive bar scene at Jeff’s Bucket Shop on Montford Road, which may as well be called Dive Drive. There is nothing shiny about Jeff or his Bucket Shop; it’s diminutive, grubby, and crowded (even though there were only about 20 people there). Yet, it was an endearing venue with…
We’re winners!
Two CL staffers were recently handed awards by the North Carolina Press Association. Here’s who and what won: • Staff writer Karen Shugart snagged 2nd Place for News Feature Writing for the story “Party Politics,” which was an examination of the racial divide in Charlotte’s downtown nightclubs. • And Arts & Entertainment Editor Matt Brunson…
Check on this
Hockey really is a fun … OK, so maybe watching grown-ass men fight and smash each other into a wall all for the sake of a tiny, black puck seems rather inane. But, no more so than watching one of the guys from Jackass shoot himself with a staple gun. You should look away, but…
Creative Lunch Group
There’s a veritable wellspring of weird creativity that flows from a group of folks who meet for lunch every Monday at Creation restaurant in Plaza-Midwood. Over the years it’s evolved into a great platform for folks to share ideas and promote interesting and alternative ventures. The group’s all about self-expression, art and innovation, and contributes…
