Listen in: “I received most of my musical education from a cheap Zenith radio,” says fingerstyle guitarist Bill Mize. Growing up in Tennessee with proximity to the area’s musical riches had a clear influence on Mize’s mastery of acoustic instrumentals. He is a past winner of the National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition at The Walnut Valley […]
Listen in: “I received most of my musical education from a cheap Zenith radio,” says fingerstyle guitarist Bill Mize. Growing up in Tennessee with proximity to the area’s musical riches had a clear influence on Mize’s mastery of acoustic instrumentals. He is a past winner of the National Fingerstyle Guitar Competition at The Walnut Valley […]
By Sean McGoey It’s easy to miss the Music Resource Center, hidden in plain sight inside the former Mount Zion Baptist Church, on Ridge Street at one of Charlottesville’s busier intersections. The MRC is one of the city’s best-kept secrets, and this week you’ll have a chance to see what you’ve been missing out on […]
The progression from animated family film to straight-to-Netflix series is perfectly natural. Kids want to spend more time with the characters, studios want to keep the property in the public eye between installments, and parents just want something that isn’t totally mind-numbing for them and their children. The drop off in scale and quality is […]
Cult of personalities: Almost 25 million people have visited Graceland since Elvis’ death in 1977; Beyoncé has 134 million followers on Instagram; and over 46 million adults read People magazine every week. Why do we care so much about famous people? In her new book, Sharon Marcus looks at The Drama of Celebrity, starting with […]
Axe grinder: Texas singer-songwriter Jackie Venson is starting to escape a tagline. Winning Best Guitarist at this year’s Austin Music Awards pushed Venson past all of the gender references that typically surround a woman with an electric guitar in her hands. Combining power, skill, and dreamy vocals, her music draws comparisons to Jimi Hendrix and […]
Water worlds: National Geographic photographers David Doubilet and Jennifer Hayes share their underwater experiences in Coral Kingdoms and Empires of Ice, a photographic journey that captures three unique marine environments—Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea, the icy waters of Antarctica, and Canada’s extraordinary Gulf of St. Lawrence. Doubilet jokes that he’s spent more of his […]
If Todd Phillips’ Joker had been better, or worse, then the pre-release controversy might have been worth something. If it defied the odds as a prestige work, or if it were a sloppy misfire, the incessant discourse might have led somewhere interesting. But a technically slick yet thematically shallow production keeps us in exactly the […]
Though Antony and Cleopatra isn’t always considered a problem play, after seeing it at the American Shakespeare Center I can report that it really should be. Categorizing it as a problem play might be a lazy definition for a work defying easy literary taxonomies, but it does the trick. In ASC’s case (here comes a […]
Paul’s passion: Doctor Paul Koors was just beginning to make his musical talents known when he died tragically of an undetected heart condition at age 38. The ear, nose, and throat surgeon, who’d connected with musician Greg Howard during his residency at UVA, had just recorded a second album of country-tinged rock songs before his […]
Lynda Dawn At First Light (Akashik) The first sounds on Lynda Dawn’s debut EP—a fat keyboard bass line and synthetic handclaps and claves —come straight from the ’80s glory days of electrosoul. And as it turns out, so do all the other sounds, including the U.K. singer’s sultry, gospel-tinged vocals. On At First Light Dawn […]