Cover Story
Election Issue: Mayoral Race — Who’s next?
•Greg Fischer hopes business sense will entice voters — (By Jonathan Meador) It’s 7 p.m. on a Monday, and the candidate is late. I’m sitting in a cramped front room of a ranch-style house that serves as a community center in Newburg. Metro Councilwoman Barbara Shanklin, D-2, informs me this is a place where people…
What I like about you
On the other hand, recognizing a panoply of brilliant mysteries within this (so-called) reality, I have devised a personal response that recognizes a kind of divinity that makes church attendance appropriate — it has do with the possibility that people can communicate and find common ground more easily when judgments are stripped away and replaced…
Locavore Lore: Don’t be chicken about picking the right turkey
Thanksgiving has a lot of things going for it — A) it’s all about food, B) it’s a long holiday weekend that is mostly stress-free and requires no gift-giving, and C) see A. Thanksgiving is pretty awesome and delicious, but it’s not all pumpkin pie and happy, self-sacrificing turkeys. Most of the year, the word…
Election Issue: Metro Council Voting Guide
*denotes incumbency District 6 The sudden death of Councilman George Unseld created a power vacuum filled by ugly politicking. After hours of deliberation, Metro Council selected Hollowell, 31, a University of Louisville professor, as the city’s first independent representative and interim successor. Hollowell quickly jumped onto important initiatives in the district and successfully beat back…
Dance: Thriller nights
Lately, it seems, turning a corner to find a magically appearing throng of dancing zombies has become nearly normal. And that is almost comforting. For one thing, they’re too focused on shaking their tattered groove thangs to be eating brains, and now we know that, yes, Michael Jackson does still live, and, thank goodness, he…
Louisville’s Parthenon
“If you build it, they will come.” —The Voice, “Field of Dreams” That’s how America got so big. We called it Manifest Destiny a century and a half ago. The country remains mired in that hubristic mindset today. A nation much younger than now expanded relentlessly and inexorably toward the Pacific. It was our right, we…
Election Issue: Aqua Buddha: The LEO Interview
Over the last couple of weeks, Kentucky’s U.S. Senate race has degenerated into the typical electoral scenario you’ve come to expect from the American political process: Two wealthy men — one Republican, one Democrat — accusing each other of various bullshit designed to move the public’s attention away from so-called “real” issues and increasingly toward…
Jerry’s kids
Less than a week until Election Day, Democrat Greg Fischer and Republican Hal Heiner traded jabs over respective endorsements, with each candidate’s political party chairmen calling for an investigation. LEO reported last Wednesday that independent mayoral candidate Jackie Green told his staff that the Fischer campaign “raised the issue of our team” playing a role…
Film: Dirty movies
With religious intolerance seemingly going mainstream (see: Quran-burning pastors, or the one-in-five who still insist a cunning Muslim occupies the White House), this year’s Festival of Faiths may be arriving just in time. Now in its 15th year, the Center for Interfaith Relations’ weeklong event continues its mission to bring people of varied religious persuasion…
Comedy: Paranormal Comedy Show offers haunting laughs
We live in a very old city — a fact that has had generations of Louisvillians passing local ghost stories beneath bated breath and nervous whispers for more than 200 years. Whether it be ghoulish tales of famous spirits like Al Capone, or unknown apparitions whose names have been long lost to time — our…
Sit back, relax and enjoy your flight
Despite federal law, we won’t insult your intelligence by describing how to buckle a seatbelt. If you die on this flight because of your inability to buckle your seatbelt, we will pause for a moment of silence to thank natural selection for thinning the herd. Because it isn’t 1975, this is a non-smoking flight. Also,…
Plugged In
Readers are strongly encouraged to call ahead to verify these listings. To get your club, comedian, musical act or karaoke listed, please send e-mail to mherron@leoweekly.com with PLUGGED IN in the subject line. The deadline is NOON THURSDAY the week before the show happens. We do not accept listings via social networking sites. Wed. Oct.…
What Animates You
Keyboard-wielding local songstress Tamara Dearing begs for Tori Amos comparisons, if only for the two songwriters’ similar templates, but Dearing exercises her craft with a lot less esotericism and sports a few more Exile in Guyville-isms. In “Give It Away,” a song about failed past relationships, Dearing sings, You only saw things in black and…
Undercard
When John Darnielle sings, you listen. Over the course of The Mountain Goats albums, his lyrical wizardry and confrontational delivery shows something attempted by many songwriters but rarely achieved: a gift for merging verbal complexity and feeling. The Extra Lens is his on-again, off-again 20-year collaboration with Franklin Bruno of Nothing Painted Blue, and Undercard…
The Grape Escape: How much wine is too much?
For all of us who enjoy a taste of wine now and again, the modern hypothesis that moderate wine consumption is good for heart health and longevity comes as excellent news. But how much is enough? Wine, like all alcoholic beverages, can be a blessing or a curse. A little makes good medicine, but more…
Staffpicks
Oct. 27-31 ‘How I Learned to Drive’ U of L Thrust Theatre 2314 S. Floyd St. • 852-6814 $8-$12; 8 p.m. (plus 3 p.m. Sun.) Incest and child molestation are not funny. But Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer-winning 1997 comic drama approaches the issues a little differently, telling the story from the points of view of both…
The Fool
Together, guitarists Emily Kokal and Theresa Wayman, bassist Jenny Lee Lindberg and drummer Stella Mozgawa form a sleeping giant. The Fool is an unpretentious, focused work that plucks from the best parts of dream-pop wonder while tossing in choice variables. The revelry begins with hypnotic tones on “Set Your Arms Down,” and by the time…
Inbox — Oct. 27, 2010
Corrections In the Oct. 20 cover story “The Big Brown Machine,” LEO reported that UPS was the first parcel delivery service in China. That distinction actually belongs to FedEx, which started Chinese flights in 1984. In the same story, LEO reported that Todd Lally is a former UPS pilot. Lally is a current employee of…
The Mystic Sessions
Chekane’s effort predates the departure of singer and guitarist Doug Slaughter. The band could benefit less from a lineup change and more from re-education about mixing Americana and classic rock into a work that’s unique. Slide guitar on “Houston” promises competent blues in the beginning but stumbles across a white-boy finish line, awarding nothing. “Appalachian”…
Women, lovers, warriors
Haitian, Jamaican and West African influences permeate new world soul ensemble Zili Misik, whose members hail from Trinidad, Japan and North America, five of them graduates of Berklee College of Music. Taking its name from the Haitian deity Ezili, a spiritual entity depicted as a mother, lover and warrior, the band is built around the…
Book: School builder goes beyond ‘Tea’
Greg Mortenson, the philanthropist who brought a personal missionary zeal to schoolbuilding in Pakistan as recounted in the bestseller “Three Cups of Tea,” is coming to town to speak about his follow-up volume “Stones into Schools,” which is just out in paperback. The Tuesday talk at the Main Library has limited seating — you may…
The Taste Bud: I ate a pig sandwich (and I feel fine)
In the shadow of a McDonald’s near the corner of Phillips Lane and Preston Highway sits a food destination for the smart among us. Sure, sure, Frank’s Meat and Produce may look like a simple produce stand, featuring a harvest of fresh vegetables, fruits and plants, but as one local blogger put it, it’s actually…
Pervertigo
Bu Hao Ting puts one foot in the same post-rock time zone inhabited by Yank Crime-era Drive Like Jehu and the other in the crust-punk ephemera of Richmond-via-New York band Born Against. Frenetic drums, scattershot time signatures and raking, furious atonal guitars act as sonic uppercuts. It’s not for everyone. “The Clown Particle Experiment” condenses…
Election Issue: Look who’s local now
What a difference four years can make. When John Yarmuth ran for Congress in Kentucky’s 3rd District in 2006, he mounted a distinctly national campaign and veritably soldered George Bush to Anne Northup’s back. Yarmuth understood the public’s disgust with the Iraq War and other Bush policies and used it. Try as she may, Northup…
Forever…
Welcome back to disc, guys. Fifteen years after their last studio release, this Louisville-by-way-of-Hollywood group is once more pitching its forward-by-mixing-up-the-past approach. Ben Daughtrey and his five cohorts give each cut its own blend of lounge and club styles. Often it works out fine, achieving a kaleidoscope of party music that’ll fit either happy hour…
Leading youth onward
There’s fast, and there’s rewarding. It’s the latter that has kept Jason Seber as music director of the Louisville Youth Orchestra for six years. As its conductor, Seber leads a group of 300 musicians ages 5 to 21 through the bottomless world of performance education. But just because his students aren’t paid doesn’t mean they’re…
Film: French connection
Mesrine Starring Vincent Cassel, Alain Delon, Sandrine Bonnaire, Ludivine Sagnier and Gerald Lanvin. Directed by Jean-Francois Richet. UR; 2:12. Starts Friday at Village 8 Theatres. LEO Report Card: B+ You’ve seen Vincent Cassel before. The droopy-eyed, pointy-nosed Frenchman plays characters as charming as they are ruthless. The actor can be at once ugly and pretty, with…
Web Exclusive: Q&A with Loni Love
I can hear the bizarre-o version of the Journey classic now: She’s just a city girl, born and raised in south Detroit/She took a midnight train goin’ anywhere. Loni Love has a lot of heart and a lot of fight in her, and those two qualities (not midnight trains) have taken her everywhere. The Detroit…
