Hal on Jesse
During his 28 years in North Carolina, Hal Crowther has had occasion to write about former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms many times. Here are a select few of our favorites quotes from Crowther about the former senator we once called “The Prince of Darkness.” • Jesse is like a mascot, a huge old pit bull,…
Melty cheese, please
Ever since my muddied-leotard days as a precocious, pigtailed first-grader, I’ve loved making and tearing into grilled cheese sandwiches of all varieties, even those made from individually wrapped orange slices. The mechanics are simple but the results are alchemical: Buttered bread develops a crispy crust in a hot pan. The heat of the bread cuddles…
A change done come
More than two years ago, Karen Lee, former publicist for Tupac Shakur, Jaheim and Me’Shell Ndegeocello, tipped me to the talents of Leela James. Seemingly born to a musical lineage that includes the late Lynn Collins, Ann Peebles, Betty Wright and Lauryn Hill, James’s sound was so unique that the singer’s label didn’t quite know…
Letters to the editor
Letters
Wine List
French Wine Tasting Five French Wines along with complimentary appetizer buffet. Wed., Sept. 21, 6 p.m. $20. Villa Antonio, 4707 South Blvd. 704-523-1594. Wine Classes Fall classes presented by the Carolina Wine Club. www.carolinawineclub.com. Sept. 27: How To Read an Italian Wine Label, 6:15-8pm. $35. Westye Group Southeast Showroom, 127 West Worthington Ave. # 104.…
Karma Cleanser
Dear Karma Cleanser: I can’t believe this shit is happening to me. I was drunk at my friend Ben’s apartment, and threw up (again) in his bathtub. This keeps happening. When I came out of the bathroom, Ben’s friends were all laughing really hard and pointing at me and one of them said, “This is…
Dada doo da
The mother of all art movements was Dada, if you ask me. Check out these hot linx for a quick roots review, then on to some Spawn of Dada. The movie link is extra strange fun. Dada Rootswww.artlex.com/ArtLex/d/dada.html Shirin Kouladjie’s Movie Fragmentswww.photomontage.com Dadalandwww.dadara.nl Cracks In The Pavementwww.cracksinthepavement.com Candy Changwww.candychang.com
Stargazer
Libra The Scales (Sept. 22 — Oct. 22) You and a lover or a child could have confusion over money or other things of value. Do what you can to clarify your position and move beyond the problem. It is possible a cherished belief about the relationship is temporarily dissolved. Don’t make too much of…
Redneck Games
Yokel is essentially Jackass for Rednecks. The show follows three good-time buddies — (Johnny Knoxville crony) Storm, Skillet and Kevin — who travel to small Southern towns in order to “capture local flavor on camera.” In the premier episode, the trio head to Dublin, GA, for, predictably, the annual Redneck Games. Our hosts first set…
Film clips
Current Releases THE ARISTOCRATS This documentary revolves around a hoary joke that features the same set-up and punchline (“The Aristocrats!”), yet the middle of the gag is an open invitation for comedians to get as nasty as they wanna be in the retelling. This movie finds 96 such comics weighing in on the joke, either…
Kate Gregory
Kate “Slappy” Gregory is the silky-voiced singer of Bellglide, Charlotte’s sizzling shoegazers who owe more than a small debt to the 4AD/dream-pop line of indie rockers like Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, Opal, Mazzy Star and all the rest. Just back from the CMJ Music Marathon in Manhattan and the Atlantis Music Festival in Atlanta,…
Storm of Misinformation
Citizen Servatius
The real y’alternative
Cowboy Troy, the long, tall Texas country-rapper, is the nation’s leading proponent of hick-hop — or rather the most prominent one. His heavily rotated CMT clip for the infectious, fiddle-and-banjo-fueled single “I Play Chicken with the Train” features a curiously integrated audience “raising the roof” to lyrics like “I’m big and black, clickety-clack/And I made…
From Bandwagon to Hearse
Boomer with Attitude
Get Low:
Ever since computers were invented, people have been creating lewd games to put on them. Cheap, dirty jokes and carefree sexual situations are just two aspects of the mature videogame market. With the advances in graphics that many of today’s systems have, some games can be downright pornographic. However, a proud few games wear the…
View From The Couch
BEN-HUR (1959). For nearly a half-century, this mammoth production has held the record for the most Oscar wins with 11, a feat tied in recent years by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. While it may be depressing to interpret that as meaning the Academy believes these to be…
By the Sweat of Our Brows: The African American Experience
Over 70 costumed interpreters, singers, dancers and musicians will help tell the story of the African American experience during the slavery era to freedom. Visitors can take a tour of history through the eyes of the people who lived it as they travel thousands of years from the past into the 20th century. The living…
Short List
Breaking News
Picks
Thursday, September 22 The annual Southern Women’s Show features a weekend of events for contemporary women. The festivities include Charlotte firefighters strutting their stuff for a benefit fashion show, actress and skin care entrepreneur Meredith Baxter, fitness wiz Richard Simmons, scrapbook expert Faye Morrow-Bell, Friskies Cats stage show, cooking demos and plenty more. The show…
Savage arguments
Book Review
Back & forth
Five years after his breakthrough performance in You Can Count On Me, Mark Ruffalo is a good thing who’s still waiting to happen, at least in terms of establishing himself as a Hollywood leading man. Then again, the 37-year-old actor suggests during a recent interview in Los Angeles that he isn’t necessarily the one doing…
Sit & Spin
VARIOUS ARTISTS Children of Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the Second Psychedelic Era 1976-1996 Rhino Nailing this 100-track box in a compact review is like engraving the Trouser Press Record Guide on the head of a pin, but that “poplopedia” could well be the perfect companion volume to this collection of musical riches. Lenny Kaye’s 1972…
CL Recommends
Hugo Chavez by Richard Gott (Verso paperback). All I knew about Chavez was that he was president of Venezuela, had P.O.’d the White House, and had survived attempts to overthrow him. But when Pat Robertson said he’d like to see Chavez killed, I had to know more. Gott, a former Latin American reporter for the…
Quotes of the Week
“I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible?” — Pres. Bush in a handwritten note to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice while seated at the United Nations, as reported by Reuters News Service. “I wanted to get people talking. I did that. It also got me fired.” — Columnist Jillian Bandes of…
Street Fighting Man
Urban Explorer
The Blotter
Mailbox Baseball: During the wee hours on a recent Sunday, some Beavis & Butt-Head/Jackass wannabes smashed at least eight mailboxes. The police report indicated the little hellions caused at least $1,000 in damages. The Great Shrimp Heist: A woman walked into a grocery store and stuffed two bags of shrimp into her purse. A store…
Enviro-Pat?
Most people don’t think of Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory as a tree-hugging, greenhouse-gas-fearing, international wealth redistributionist. Around here, the Republican mayor is generally known for redeveloping brown fields and getting light rail off the ground. You won’t find anything about global warming on McCrory’s campaign website. Among his “environmental” accomplishments, he lists rollout garbage collection,…
Humanizing a fiend
Sure, he’s one of the most virulent racists in the history of drama. And everyone would admit that he destroys a noble warrior whose paramount mistake was trusting his destroyer. But in Iago, playwright James McLure is willing to entertain the notion that Shakespeare’s wickedest villain was misunderstood, driven by gnawing love rather than fiendish…
A kinder, gentler Hal Crowther
This paper has published Hal Crowther’s essays and news features since 1989. In the days when he wrote weekly, Crowther was a virtual letters-to-the-editor machine, inspiring readers’ highest adulation as well as some of the most malicious letters we’ve ever received. He has since cut back his syndicated column to now-and-then status, but that doesn’t…
A fungus among us
It’s amazing what we’ll consume. We eat milk that’s gone bad and call it cheese (and sometimes it’s even moldy), we eat slimy fish eggs on toast points and it’s the oh-so-ritzy caviar. And we eat fungus, a parasitic lower plant. Of course, by calling it a mushroom we can forget it’s in the same…
Saint Hal and the Hellraiser
You’d be hard pressed to find two more dissimilar North Carolinians than journalist Hal Crowther and former U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms. One’s a left-leaning, uber-literate, erudite man of the world. The other’s a far-right, ill-informed, race- and gay-baiting provincial. They represent two sides of North Carolina that have been in opposition for well over a…
Play Me
Moodswing
The importers
CORKSCREW
Firing blanks
Review
Whitewash
I’ve only met Jesse Helms once. I was profiling him for two national magazines during his 1996 Senate race, and for two days I shadowed him around the US Capitol. He looked like a fragile, senescent bear and spoke with a mumble that the average Northerner might have had some trouble deciphering. He was harder…
This taste bud’s for you
Table Dancing
Has the Jester Found his Jingle?
For many weight-watching women, Richard Simmons has long been a god-sent savior from snack-food hell. With his frizzed, white-man’s Afro and fashion-impaired running shorts, the Peter Pan of fitness burst into Middle American homes a quarter-century ago exuding an “I-Feel-Your-Pain” ethos that would make Bill Clinton look aloof, and a you-go-girl spirit even Oprah would…
From the editor
Ever feel like you take things for granted in this city? We’re all guilty of not seeing the beauty in our own back yards. When I lived in New York City I never made it to enough of the cool events out in Queens or up in the Bronx. And now that I’m gone, I…
Columnist teaches where he once fled from racists
Bill Maxwell gained fame as an iconoclastic columnist for the St. Petersburg Times. He’s a black journalist who disdains the National Association of Black Journalists and champions the cause of Palestinians at a time when the idea of defending any beleaguered group gives many scribes weak bladders. Before garnering accolades as a columnist, he was…
Kiss my grits
Those who follow North Carolina’s culinary renaissance typically name Bill Neal as its founding member. Neal was the man behind two nationally recognized restaurants: La Residence and Crook’s Corner, both in Chapel Hill. (La Res started life in a Chatham County farmhouse, but relocated.) Fortune raved about La Residence in 1979, and in 1985, New…
