Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere Every artist who hits it big faces an inevitable question: What do I do for a follow-up? Bruce Springsteen confronted it after his fifth album, The River, topped the charts in 1980. Instead of trying to create another commercial smash, he produced Nebraska, a deeply personal acoustic album that surprised […]
Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz returns to the Virginia Film Festival to discuss director Ang Lee’s 1997 drama The Ice Storm, and to introduce The Sting at a Robert Redford tribute screening. Set during the holiday season in 1973, The Ice Storm examines the tangled relationships of two generations of suburbanites grappling with everything […]
Some childhood interests turn out to be just a passing fancy. But that was not the case for Fiona Balestrieri when she was a young musician. “My first instrument was actually the fiddle,” she says. “I only played that for a year because I discovered the Irish flute. … The sound of the wooden flute […]
Long before he stepped onto a stage, Jim Waive was putting on a show. “Our household was filled with music,” recalls Patti Rightmier, one of Jim’s three older sisters. “My mom loved music. My mom listened to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass…” “Tom Jones, the 5th Dimension—a variety,” adds Judy Crist, another sister. “And Jim—as […]
On a sunny, breezy Sunday morning in late April, Mary Ames is paying for her membership in the Loving Cup Wine Club, but not by credit card or cash. Instead, she is dusting the roots of about-to-be-planted vines with an organic fungicide. “Without this, the roots would not thrive,” Ames says, as she sprinkles a […]
Did you hear the one about the photographer who went out of his way to take terrible pictures? It’s no joke. For his latest project, Ézé Amos, whose photojournalism has regularly appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and C-VILLE Weekly, has been intentionally ruining his own work. And he’s not hiding his […]
“This stage is for you. You don’t have to be an artist to share a story.” This is Ty Cooper’s message to anyone attending his One Mic Stand shows, a live series staged for more than 10 years at Piedmont Virginia Community College. “We just wanted to provide a platform for artists to express themselves […]
The New York Daily News once called it “The death that won’t die.” On September 14, 1983, Michael Stewart, a 25-year-old artist and DJ, was taken into custody by a transit officer who claimed Stewart was graffitiing a subway wall. Half an hour after his arrest, Stewart arrived at Bellevue Hospital hogtied, severely bruised, not […]