ARTS Pick: Ween

Sometime in either 1984 or 1985 two junior high school kids with no interest in friendship were seated next to each other in typing class. It turns out they had even less interest in typing, and through a bit of distracted goofiness, including fusing the words wuss and penis, Ween was formed, and history was […]

ARTS Pick: Junior Brown

As a young boy moving about the Midwest with his family in the 1950s, Junior Brown became a good listener, and what he heard was country music “growing up out of the ground like the crops—it was everywhere; coming out of cars, houses, gas stations and stores like the soundtrack of a story.” Brown took […]

ARTS Pick: The Realistic Joneses

Merging the profound with the trivial, Will Eno’s absurdist script for The Realistic Joneses plays out like a tough-topic sketch comedy. When new neighbors arrive, two couples get to know each other through unlikely circumstances that bring them together and push them apart in unexpected ways. The Hollywood Reporter calls the story a “mordant, melancholy […]

Reggae legend Culture keeps local connections strong

When a major band comes to Charlottesville, it doesn’t necessarily take the stage at the John Paul Jones arena or the Jefferson Theater. Culture, one of the most influential reggae bands of all time, returns to play The Ante Room on April 21. And while the band hails from Jamaica, its current keyboard player is […]

Movie review: Fast and Furious series gets better and better

After 16 years—old enough, as it turns out, to finally get its driver’s license—the Fast and Furious series finally has nothing left to prove. There’s no need to explain why good guys turn bad, how a particular bit of technology works or where an improvised ramp came from that Vin Diesel somehow knew would be […]

Infinity Downs Farm launches with Earth Day concert

In 2013, Dave Frey and his partner, fellow music promoter Peter Shapiro, started the Lockn’ Festival, a multi-genre musical blowout that takes place in late summer on the sprawling Oak Ridge Farm in the Nelson County town of Arrington. Over the past four years the event has brought an array of heavyweight acts in roots, […]

UVA’s Kate Tamarkin takes her final curtain call

When Kate Tamarkin was an undergraduate at Southern California’s Chapman University, orchestra conductor was not on her list of career choices. “As a female back then, it never occurred to me to even want to [do that],” the music director and conductor of the Charlottesville Symphony at the University of Virginia says. But she was […]

Two exhibitions connect through travel at Second Street Gallery

Maybe it’s a cheap conceit for a writer, but there are times when it’s necessary to state the obvious: One of art’s prime functions is to take you somewhere else. In a riveting moment of contemplation, art conveys you to a deeper plane of thought, motivates you to cultivate an unexpected appreciation of the previously […]

ARTS Pick: Porchella

Tom Tom Founders Festival saves one of its highlights for last in Porchella, a free music event that turns the expansive front porches of the Belmont neighborhood into stages for local players, including University of Whales, Michael Coleman and Gina Sobel. Pull up a lawn chair or stroll the streets of Goodman and Graves and […]

ARTS Pick: Sallie Ford

By nature, musicians draw from their emotional lives, consciously or not, to commune and titillate. Sallie Ford puts it all on her sleeve unabashedly on her new album, Soul Sick, a confessional that deals with vulnerability and rebuilding, offered through a British Invasion-meets-girl group doo-wop melding of garage rock. Opener Molly Burch left a Hollywood […]