Cover Story
Project Censored
The daily dispatches and nightly newscasts of the mainstream media regularly cover terrorism, but rarely discuss how the fear of attacks is used to manipulate the public and set policy. That’s the common thread of many unreported stories this year, according to an analysis by Project Censored. Since 1976, Sonoma State University has released…
LEO Concert Takes Place Saturday
This Saturday’s concert at Headliners Music Hall is a first for LEO Weekly, and it is one packed with musicians that have a rich history with Louisville. Having toured the world for more than a decade, VHS Or Beta have served as ambassadors of Louisville’s rich, and eclectic music scene appeared in the pages of…
Locavore Lore
Feeling slow? Let a local radish stimulate your thinking … As a passionate enthusiast of almost all things vegetable, I had always been perplexed by my reluctance for one of the more common and abundant root vegetables in our region, the radish. There are so many appealing things about radishes, most obviously their appearance and…
Nachts: Schnee/Aguirre I (Remixes)
Germany’s Popol Vuh were the sonic partner to many of Werner Herzog’s most majestic films, including “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” (1972) and “Cobra Verde” (1987). The brilliant Austrian label Editions Mego, known best for the digital experimentalism of their artists, released a beautiful wax slab of two re-worked Popol Vuh tracks from these film…
B-Sides
R.I.P. Rod Wenz We are sad to learn of the death of Rod Wenz on Nov. 19 following heart surgery. He was 72. A funeral was held Saturday at the Highlands Funeral Home on Taylorsville Road. A native of North Platte, Neb., Wenz moved to Louisville in the 1960s to work in journalism and later…
Tonight’s special: cheap beer with a side of homophobia
I learned two things on a recent Saturday: 1. Gay people will never have the “right” to be legally married if the decision is left up to a vote by the American people. There was a time when many white people would have never voted to overturn segregation. If left to the people, “separate but…
Outsourcing healthcare
Can we all now agree that Michael Moore was right about healthcare in America? His tragicomic 2007 movie “Sicko” was the first time many Americans realized our healthcare system was not the world leader, despite its state-of-the-art erectile-dysfunction drugs and cutting-edge nips and tucks. Moore, who heroically gained 783 pounds to portray an unhealthy American…
Kentucky Opera debuts ‘Werther’
If you’re looking for the Jules Massenet opera “Werther” on the big map of music, it’s pretty near Obscure, just east of Unknown. While Massenet’s “Manon” is still regularly performed, more than a century after its debut, the composer’s “Werther” (pronounced Vair-tair) is almost nowhere to be heard — at least on this side of…
Innocence tattered in ‘The Boy in the Striped Pajamas’
(Starring Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Jack Scanlon, Rupert Friend and Amber Beattie. Directed by Mark Herman. Rated PG-13; 1:33. LEO Report Card: A-) The film begins with a quote by English poet John Betjeman that perfectly sets the tone of the story: “Childhood is measured out by sounds and smells and sights, before…
Turkey tradition
Thanksgiving has never been my cup of cider. As a kid, it meant putting on the mom-ordained outfit of scratchy wool shorts, argyle knee socks, penny loafers and a stiff button-down shirt, topped off with a floppy bow cinched tight around my neck. I know, it sounds like we were in the circus. But the…
Mug Shots
I’ll never forget an evening long ago at one of Louisville’s upper-tier steakhouses. It was packed with fashionably dressed high rollers slapping down what seemed to me a week’s pay for immense cuts of aged beef, salads, shrimp cocktail, mushrooms and potatoes, preceded by top-shelf aperitifs and rare single-barrel bourbons, with their feasts accompanied by…
Community Listings
LEO Weekly is happy to list events of community interest, but if you’re trying to sneak an ad in here, forget it. Items are published on a space-available basis. The deadline is WEDNESDAY at 4 p.m. Mail to 640 S. Fourth St., Louisville, Ky. 40202, fax to 895-9779 or send e-mail to listings@leoweekly.com. No listings…
Video TapeWorm
THIS WEEK’S TWIN PEEKS CASABLANCA 1942; $64.95, PG-13 What could we possibly say that hasn’t been said before? A triple Oscar winner and the greatest love story ever put to film. Humphrey Bogart is a man once greater than the Third Reich, now broken by love. And Ingrid Bergman: strong but vulnerable; intelligent yet foolish;…
Sharp points; more Murphy’s; Shorty takes
Wednesday, Nov. 26Don’t let the name fool you — El Roostars aren’t cock rock. On Thanksgiving Eve, the blues denizens, from whom we hope to have a new album, chew up Stevie Ray’s (230 E. Main St., 582-9945). Showtime is 9 p.m., admission is $4. At Clifton’s Pizza (2230 Frankfort Ave., 893-3730), a newly married…
Sweat It Out
By third track “Seventeen Candles,” the Pink Spiders have shown their devotion to exaggerated variety-show production. Nothing wrong there: From the Sweet to Hot Hot Heat, countless bands have flirted with letting the excitement of a shifting arrangement drive the content of a song, until you have little segments that live or die on actor-like…
Oh(io)
First listen: “Am I in a nursing home? Everyone’s wearing white gowns. Oh, there’s a bunco game. Whatever happened to that gal, the one with the walker and the fake leg? I liked her.” Second listen: “Who knew a morphine drip could be this good? This is the speed everyone’s inner self should run at;…
Newshound or hatchet man?
Arnold Garson isn’t what you might expect for a guy sent by corporate America to cut costs and preserve profit. And last week, the new Courier-Journal publisher agreed to be the target of a public grilling, a brave move considering yet another round of layoffs is looming at the paper. Arriving here from South Dakota…
Ferment
No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. NO! The next … the next … person who tries to sound like Layne Staley gets a stack of Labrador droppings for Christmas and their instruments repo’d. Dogwater succeeds in becoming the 1,000,000th band to borrow wholesale from Alice In Chains’ Facelift and Dirt albums — and…
Inbox — Nov. 26, 2008
Corrections In the Nov. 12 issue of LEO Weekly, Edgardo Mansilla, director of the Americana Community Center, was incorrectly identified in the story “Beyond Race.” The same story also erroneously stated the percentage of African-Americans living in Metro Louisville; according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s latest estimate, 22.6 percent of the city’s residents are black.…
Scene of the execution
State troopers guard three traffic checkpoints along the winding road that leads to the Kentucky State Penitentiary, which has been on lockdown for 24 hours. The maximum-security prison in rural Eddyville is home to Kentucky’s death row, and for a few more hours, Marco Allen Chapman. The foreboding stone structure overlooks Lake Barkley, and on…
Staffpicks
Wednesday, Nov. 26 Zen koan: Do good by eating well Feeling a little guilty about the turkey that gave his life so you can have a great Thanksgiving feast? You can restore your karma to proper balance — and get a free Vietnamese vegetarian meal, too — all day today at Zen Garden. As she…
Hush Arbors
Folk music has never really gone away, but it hasn’t stayed the same either. Forty years later, it’s evolved into, among others, freak folk (Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsome, Vetiver) and psych-folk (Hush Arbor, Six Organs of Admittance.) For our purposes, let’s focus on psych folk and its use of hymnal-like choral arrangements, hypnotic, fuzzy guitar…
Countdown to E-Day: the aftermath
Where were you when it happened? That’s a question most of us will be asked at some point in our lives. Where were you on Nov. 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected? Me? I was in Washington, D.C., the very heart of the storm. I’ve always thought D.C. was an interesting place. During my…
Some Kind of Salvation
This Tennessee fire’s burned for a long time. Cut from Universal after refusing to cover “All You Need is Love” for a commercial, these frontrunners for “World’s Most Underrated Band” exact revenge the only way they know how: making a landmark album, steeped in skewed interpretations of rock that rupture and boil from beginning to…
What a Week
Get ready to hit the road this Thanksgiving: Gas prices in Louisville are less than half what they were this time last year. As of Tuesday, the average cost of gas in the region was $1.66 a gallon, according to louisvillegasprices.com. Now for the bad news: You have no valid excuse to avoid family this…
Budget blues
Our nation’s economic troubles have hit the proverbial Main Street in Louisville, with the city facing its worst budget crisis in nearly three decades. In response to a projected $20 million budget shortfall this fiscal year, Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson last week announced a series of rapid remedies to reduce the deficit, including an immediate…
Ignorant vacation
I’ve been on vacation, and I’m still technically not at work as I write this, although I am technically working because I am writing this, which is an antinomy for the backburner. A lot worth ignoring has happened in the past week, and ignorance of world, national, state and local affairs was the stated goal…
Aftertastes
Dakshin Indian Restaurant, Eastland Shopping Center, 4742 Bardstown Rd., 491-7412. This recent arrival ranks as a favorite among the region’s Indian community. The menu is said to include at least one dish from every Indian state, from Tamil Nadu and the Malabar Coast to Kashmir and the Himalayas. (Reviewed 10/1/08; Rating: 86) THE Colonnade, Louisville…
