ARTS Pick: Jennifer Stuart & the Design

Meet Jen, Jacob, Jimmy, Jon, Jason, and…Dave. A local work in progress since 2004, Jennifer Stuart & The Design has one tradition—creativity fueled by a melting pot of countless musical influences. Don’t expect a resemblance between sets, because the group constructs each soul-funk-jazz-rock song with its own stamp of clever, upbeat originality, just like its […]

ARTS Pick: Storm the Bridge

The Fourth of July may have passed, but don’t let your revolutionary spirit falter. Invoke the essence of 1780s Paris as the good citizens of Charlottesville join together to tear down the walls of stagnation and release creativity into the community. Storm the Bridge begins at Champion Brewery, followed by a fife-and-drum escorted march to […]

Honky tonk girl

Country music legend Loretta Lynn died on October 4, 2022. C-VILLE Weekly spoke with her in 2013, and the interview is reposted below. Loretta Lynn released her first record, Honky Tonk Girl, in 1960 and began a 53-year-and-counting career that has made her the most awarded woman in country music. A true-to-her-roots Kentucky girl, Lynn never let […]

ARTS Pick: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Blending the tragic with the triumphant, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly depicts the life of renowned magazine editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, after suffering a stroke that paralyzed his entire body except his left eye, used a blinking code to write his own memoir in 1997. Adapted to film by director Julian Schnabel in 2007, the remarkable story has […]

Musical loom: Dan Deacon weaves dense sonic delights

Dan Deacon is a busy man. Best known for his sweaty, gloriously fun concerts, his talents go far beyond the ability to get a crowd excited. Once you get past a surface-level wackiness his music is finely crafted, and sublimely structured, owing as much to Philip Glass or Aaron Copeland as it does to underground […]

Spoiler alert: No more spoiler alerts

There’s an episode of “Magnum P.I.” in which Magnum (Tom Selleck), who played for Navy’s football team during his time at the academy, can’t watch that season’s Army-Navy game live on television. There’s a case or someone gets shot or something—you know how it goes with Magnum. This is all from distant memory, but Magnum […]

ARTS Pick: Andrew Combs at The Garage

A country-folk revolution is gaining momentum in Nashville, and singer-songwriter Andrew Combs is one of the founding fathers. Defending the right to defy conventional boundaries, Combs plays deeply emotional tunes that borrow equally from traditional rural sounds, with indie intonations, and punk flair that sounds like it came straight out of a warehouse in Detroit. […]

C’ville Art Blog: An Outpost at Chroma Projects

The objects and contraptions assembled in the main gallery at Chroma Projects seem like props from a wild Terry Gilliam film. The sculptural collages are built from found materials, mostly things which look salvaged from roadsides or abandoned lots. Dymph de Wild has made the objects appear functional, meaningful, bizarre, and beautiful. Some of them even […]

Film review: Pacific Rim knows no monster fight boundaries

Many years ago, when summer action blockbusters were a new-ish thing, my mother would say at their conclusion, “That movie was so loud.” It wasn’t really a complaint. It was an observation that, at 10 years-old, I found spurious. Maybe they were loud, maybe they weren’t. I was probably more interested in disagreeing with her. […]