Working the web: Documentary filmmaker Ricardo Preve is a former Crozet resident who’s stayed connected to the local community through his work. Now based in Genoa, Italy, Preve has screened several movies at the Virginia Film Festival, including his most recent, Coming Home, about the first Italian sub to sink in World War II. And […]
MC Yallah X Debmaster Kubali (Hakuna Kulala) The most frenetic moment of Kubali comes right at the top, like an intimidating bouncer. Once you get past the brief jabbery pattern of vocables, percussion, synthesizers, and unidentified sonic objects, Kubali just swaggers and bumps. Uganda’s MC Yallah spits in Kiswahili and Luganda, reveling in the stinkface […]
Best short-timers: The Indie Short Film Series includes highly regarded festival selections as well as local productions such as The Devil’s Harmony, Best International Short Film award winner at Sundance. A disquieting tale of a bullied teenage girl enacting revenge on her enemies and abusers, the movie promises to stick with you long after its […]
Circling back: Dan Deacon has been working his synth-pop magic for nearly two decades. From the self-released CD-Rs of his student days to the hyperactive live shows made legendary through audience participation, Deacon is an established trailblazer in electronic music. At a 2010 Charlottesville appearance, C-VILLE’s James Ford reported that the DJ/composer “led the sweaty […]
When I reach politically enraged comedian Lewis Black by phone on an early February morning following the Iowa caucus, I expect he’ll be ready with one of his signature rants, and after a polite exchange of salutations, he does not disappoint. Black immediately unleashes a torrent of frustrations. Clearly he wants me to listen—which is […]
Most musicians will tell you that Craigslist isn’t the best place to find bandmates. Sure, it’s worked for some groups (The Killers), but in a small town like Charlottesville, the odds of finding a copacetic match on the internet are especially slim. You’re more likely to meet like-minded musicians at a show. But Films on […]
![Amber Zion (top), seen here in Deaf West Theatre’s production of My Sister in This House, is in town to push the boundaries of opera during a VHO workshop. She has performed music since she was a child, but this will be her first opera performance. Opera singers “have so much more emotions in their voice,” she says, and “[as deaf actors], I think we will be able to bring that out through our beautiful ASL.” courtesy of VHO.](https://www.c-ville.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/Amber-Zion-My-Sister-in-the-House-320x170.jpg)
Amber Zion started analyzing acting techniques when she was 5 years old. The only deaf child in her family, she grew up watching movies without captions, and she made up her own stories based on what she saw in the actors’ expressions and gestures. When she watched MTV, she’d ask her mother to act out […]
Punk from here: When her family relocated from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C., in the early ’80s, Cynthia Connolly brought her camera and her passion for punk rock to the nation’s fledgling scene. Her documentation resulted in Banned in DC: Photos and Anecdotes from the DC Punk Underground (79-85), one of the first books on punk […]
The greatest horrors of the movie world are creatures pulled straight from our nightmares, abominations that mutate from our most irrational fears. It is cathartic and emotionally healthy to confront the monsters that scare us, in order to realize that they have no power over us. The monsters of the real world are far more […]
New York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett has published 12 books across three genres, won a long list of awards and fellowships—including the Orange Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award and a Guggenheim—appeared on “The Colbert Report” and Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday, opened a thriving bookstore in Nashville, and been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most […]
It’s haiku season. Sling your wildest words out there. You could last longest. Wednesday 2/19. Free, 8pm. Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 293-9947.
Adventurous Strumming: Ross Martin knows guitar, and his deep knowledge of the instrument has led him on explorations of jazz, bluegrass, country, folk, experimental, and classical music. Over the course of his many tours and projects, he’s perfected both the entrancing acoustic duet and the invigorating electric duel, and taught guitar workshops all over the […]
Breakdown lane: The Drive-By Truckers are unapologetically political on The Unraveling, their first album in three and a half years. “I’ve always said that all of our records are political but I’ve also said that politics is personal. With that in mind, this album is especially personal,” says band co-founder Patterson Hood. “… Watching so […]
Growing up on the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, Brian Robinson drew on walls, windows, the kitchen table, the back fence. “Pretty much everywhere,” he told C-VILLE last month. “That creativity continued to grow and flourish” over decades of art-making, says the artist, who is now in his 40s, and has works in major public […]
Heartening beats: With over a thousand years of cultural tradition, 400-year-old instruments, and 25 years of performing globally, the 12-member drumming group Yamato brings a dazzling exhibition of showmanship to the stage. Japan’s traditional Wadaiko drums serve as the foundation for tamashy—translated as soul, spirit, and psyche—which channels the basic elements of life into a […]
Despite obstacles: Morgan McCoy, author and actor recently seen in the Oscar-nominated film Harriet, comes to town with a one-woman show, Evolution of a Black Girl: From the Slave House to the White House. Depicting the struggles and triumphs of fictional and real African American women across numerous generations, the play combines comedy and drama […]
Field Recordings: Music, poetry, and the English countryside merge for British Riches, Charlottesville Symphony’s curation of works by A.E. Houseman, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Middleton, William Wordsworth, Wilfred Owen, John Keats, and William Shakespeare. American tenor Zachary Wilder sings through an ambitious program that includes Elegy for String Orchestra […]
Throughout history, rules and procedures have been established to provide structure—like getting from point A to point B. Books are read from beginning to end; a race participant begins at the starting line and progresses to the finish. But creative fields promote originality, leaving space for a band like The Lumineers to throw out the […]
Fleeing the circus: Recruiting from his Fugazi lineup as well as his band The Evens, Ian MacKaye formed an unnamed trio with wife Amy Farina (drums) and bassist Joe Lally in 2018 for a Washington, D.C., benefit show. We still can’t confirm a name, but we happened upon an event post with the aforementioned lineup […]
There’s a funny kind of freedom that’s recently emerged in the DC Extended Universe. After a series of colossal failures, each one worse than the last, the powers that be decided not to cancel the whole project, but to bring in fresh blood with new ideas, then empowered them to do whatever the hell they […]
Green-House Six Songs for Invisible Gardens (Leaving) Beginning an album with pooling water sounds is a risky venture. But at the start of the instrumental Invisible Gardens, Green-House combines those liquidy murmurs with some malletophone, and for nearly 30 minutes, casts a spell that’s all the more remarkable for the attendant new age clichés (yes […]
KISS off: There’s a longtime rock ‘n’ roll rumor that Eddie Van Halen tried to break up Van Halen so he could join KISS when Ace Frehley left the band in 1982, citing the friction with VH’s wild frontman David Lee Roth (fate had other plans, i.e. Van Hagar). Today, DLR is back in Van […]
Ghost hunt: Melanistic leopards are so rare they are known as the ghosts of forest. Photographer Shannon Wild spent almost two years in southeastern India, battling weather, terrain, and injuries, to capture images of these elusive cats. At National Geographic Live’s Pursuit of the Black Panther, Wild shares the experiences that fill her three books […]