Arts + Entertainment
Teaching manners and other life skills
Recently I had the opportunity to speak by phone with writer and podcaster Jennifer L. Scott. The author of the Madame Chic books — “Lessons from Madame Chic: 20 Stylish Secrets I Learned While Living in Paris” was the first — Scott is as delightful a conversationalist as we might expect, witty, thoughtful and easily given to laughter.
It's Only Fear That Makes You Run: A conversation with Melissa Etheridge
If there’s one word to describe singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, it would be persistent.
From humble and hardscrabble beginnings as a performer in dive bars and back rooms throughout the Midwest in the late 1970s and early 1980s to international acclaim just a decade later, Etheridge has remained a beacon of creativity and purpose throughout the decades — where now words like “legend” and “icon” tend to precede her name in the bright lights of show business.
A new take on an old issue
Glass half-full or glass half-empty?
For the past 20 years, we’ve heard from academics, some politicians and various commentators that America is a deeply racist society. In response, some colleges, the federal government and certain corporations require employees and students take instruction in DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion.
Smokies Life publishes George Masa biography
Smokies Life has announced the publication of “George Masa: A Life Reimagined,” the first comprehensively researched biography of the visionary Japanese photographer whose dedication to art and conservation helped spur the national park movement in the Great Smoky Mountains, as well as the creation of the Appalachian Trail.
Shine your light: Patton Magee of The Nude Party
It’s a hot, early evening at FloydFest, the storied independently-run music festival held each July in the backwoods of rural Virginia. With live music radiating from stages positioned in seemingly every direction, indie-rockers The Nude Party finish its set to the deafening roar of the jubilant crowd begging for just one more tune before dispersing into the next melodic adventure.
Living off the grid for 40 years
In a book written in a first-person, vulnerable and intimately entertaining narrative oral storytelling voice, Ken Smith takes us through his entire life — of youthful globe-trotting adventure and hardship, to an eventual life of self-sufficiency and spiritual awareness in Scotland.
Melodies of love: Asheville Mountain Boys to play Sylva
The sheer beauty and fundamental foundation of bluegrass music resides in one simple truth about the tones, textures and talents within the “high, lonesome sound” — its timelessness.
In this book, old-time means good time
Over 30 years ago, I read Helen Hooven Santmyer’s “And Ladies of the Club,” a doorstopper of a book chronicling life in a small Ohio town from the post-Civil War era to the early 1930s.
Spread it heavy: WNC rockers Porch 40 return
It was a special time and place when rock-n-funk act Porch 40 emerged onto the vast, vibrant Western North Carolina live music scene. In a landscape of mostly bluegrass, Americana and country acts, to see something of local origin with loud electric guitars and amps cranked to 11 was, well, refreshing.
