ARTS Pick: Place Based

Thomas Wolfe says you can’t go home again. Leah Naomi Green and Josh Garrett-Davis seem to disagree. After swapping his South Dakota home for New York’s cityscape, Garrett-Davis found himself drawn back through his recent novel, Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains. Green never attempted to leave home behind, yet her upbringing in […]

ARTS Pick: Easy Star All-Stars

Easy Star All-Stars are a cover band of Jah-normous proportions, but instead of playing another act’s songs, it translates landmarks of pop music history. Over the last 10 years, Easy Star has aimed its roots-reggae lens at Pink Floyd, Radiohead, and The Beatles, releasing Dub Side Of The Moon, Radiodread (based on Radiohead’s OK Computer), […]

Film review: Argo

The most noticeable thing about Argo —and this can’t entirely be the point —is that Ben Affleck, as a director, continues to grow into a confident helmsman. He trusts his actors (there’s not a weak supporting performance in the bunch), trusts the story, and doesn’t rush anything.

ARTS Pick: Stuart Davis

Stuart Davis is a man of many facets. You might even say he’s multi-faceted. He’s a musician with 14 albums to his credit, a comedian, a Bhuddist monk, a TV producer, a writer/actor, and a few dozen other things. The Minnesota-born punk monk is regularly referred to as the Twisted Mystic, earning his moniker with […]

Album reviews: No Doubt, Paper Route and The Bloody Angle

No Doubt Push & Shove/Interscope Records From the mid-’90s into the mid-’00s, No Doubt was one of the hottest bands on the planet, and even when lead singer Gwen Stefani went solo she continued to burn up the charts. Now the band has released a comeback album, its first of original material since 2001 and it […]

Home Movie Day moves Downtown for its 10th anniversary

Cameras are more widely available than they have ever been. There are estimates that 10 percent of all of the photographs ever taken were shot in the last year. 16mm and Super 8 may not have been as clean-looking or as professional as the 35mm film used in feature films, but it was cheap and […]

One day in the life of the Dalai Lama; a lasting impression on our town

At 2am in Williamsburg, the motorcade is already warming up. It’s not an atypical start for His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. His schedule usually has him up at 3am for prayers and meditation. But today’s schedule is a bustling one, and His Holiness, his accompanying aides and representatives, and their police escort are racing down […]

ARTS Pick: The Pollocks

Jason Pollock (former guitarist for grunge hitmakers Seven Mary Three) and his eponymous band of Albemarle-area musicians, carve out songs that sound like Tom Petty got his chocolate in The Smithereens’ peanut butter—resulting in familiar, flavorful tunes. The Pollocks roll out a new album, Life Of The Stars, and it crackles with the energy of […]

ARTS Pick: The Legwarmers

Raid your closet for those acid wash jeans and feather your hair back because the pop culture of the ’80s has come full circle. Naturally this requires a soundtrack, so Gordon Gartrell and Cru Jones, after hearing one too many bogus covers of their favorite decade, decided they weren’t gonna take it, gathered four similarly-minded […]