Cover Story
The Big Brown Machine
UPS, the world’s largest parcel delivery service, lost a five-year battle with its air mechanics union earlier this month, and nobody seemed to notice. On Oct. 6, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Heyburn denied the company’s motion to overturn an April 10 federal arbitration board ruling that prevents the $45 billion company from outsourcing…
The Grape Escape: A Brünnhilde of a pinot gris
The last time we met over a glass of wine, we were talking about pinot gris and pinot grigio, and how you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a princess in this currently with-it category of varietal wine. Today let’s take a quick look at a California pinot gris that clearly…
Jerry’s kids
An offer that should’ve been refused? Perhaps. According to e-mails obtained by LEO Weekly, independent mayoral candidate Jackie Green told his staff that Democrat Greg Fischer’s campaign “raised the issue of our team” playing a role in Metro government, while negotiating his departure from the race. The question now is whether any laws were broken…
Film: ‘Freakonomics’ doesn’t always add up
Freakonomics Directed by Morgan Spurlock, Rachel Grady, Heidi Ewing, Alex Gibney, Eugene Jarecki and Seth Gordon. Rated PG-13; 1:25. Opens Friday at Village 8 Theatres. LEO Report Card: B Riding the A train through East New York years ago, I overheard a conversation between two young black girls about the names of their classmates. The…
The Circus arrives
Kim Richey has crisscrossed the globe, but it’s the drive from Nashville to her parents’ house in Dayton that, to paraphrase the title of her new album, wrecks her wheels. Tim Krekel’s death from cancer last June, at age 58, dug a hole so deep in his former writing partner that every time she passes…
Red Hot Zen
Scott Mertz still sports the big hat that makes you dare him to earn center stage, but the new crew around him seems slightly less crazy than Cornbread Mafia. Southside Freddy is offering new additions to his dialect of dry-rub guitar leads (all the goodness of greasier styles but with more flavor), as heard in…
d’Demonstrator
Imagine if you and your friends were sittin’ around one night listening to your jams, and decided on a lark to say, “Hey let’s start a band.” A couple of bong hits later, one of you boots up Twitter, fires off a hazy request, and dude agrees. That’s kinda what happened here. Shobaleader One is…
Video TapeWorm
THIS WEEK’S TWIN PEEKS: THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE 2010; $29.95, R Lisbeth Salander is back! Noomi Rapace once again stars as the oddly sexy — if tiny — super-Goth-chick you simply don’t screw around with. The welcome sequel to Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” this one seems a bit rushed…
Book: Franzen finds ‘Freedom’ with new novel
Freedom By Jonathan Franzen. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 562 pgs., $28. The furious critical activity over Jonathan Franzen’s new novel, “Freedom,” his first since the National Book Award-winner “The Corrections,” pivots on the definition of the Great American Novel. Heavy-hitting reviews in The New York Times and L.A. Times lined up nicely behind the idea…
In Person And On Stage
John Prine has been a favorite among music geeks and songwriters for four decades, on account of his clever and irreverent lyrics that often give way to deeply soulful observations on the human condition. On In Person & On Stage, his latest live album, Prine thumbs through his musical scrapbook and brings some friends along…
Inbox — Oct. 20, 2010
So Close, Yet So Far In response to the article “The Great Barrier” in the Oct. 6 LEO Weekly, I would say this. Virtually everyone who lives and works in the greater Louisville area agrees that the traffic situation downtown is abysmal, and national statistics bear this fact out. I heartily approve of Steve Wiser’s…
Opera: Love Potion No. 9
After opening its season in September with a pair of tragic Italian operas that end with blood on the stage, the Kentucky Opera this week turns back a half a 19th century for “The Elixir of Love,” a light-hearted romantic comedy that skips along through two acts to a happy ending. And while the Gaetano…
Losing faith
The allegations against Long, who is accused of having coerced a number of teenage boys into sexual relationships, have been well reported, so I won’t recount them here. And though these are allegations right now, not facts, at this early stage there seems to be some damning evidence against one of Atlanta’s leading mega-church preachers.…
The Union
In one corner: a Tulsa heavyweight at 68. The red-dirt, Gandalf-like baron from the Wrecking Crew, edging toward twilight, whose hospital stay couldn’t silence him from turning in one of the better Grammy cameos. In the other corner: a once-fiery Brit phenom who knows too well he might never have built that Honky Château in…
Fiddle and keys
Old-time fiddle and banjo player Alan Jabbour performs at 7 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 25, in Malcolm Bird Recital Hall as part of the University of Louisville School of Music’s World Music Series. Born in 1942 in Jacksonville, Fla., Jabbour did his graduate-school work at Duke documenting old-time folk music in West Virginia and North…
Louisville wins best (gay) city
I showed up for the Louisville Youth Group’s Forum, hosted by the Metro United Way, which brought together 40 organizations and a packed house of individuals from Kentuckiana who are working to counteract anti-gay bullying by finding ways to support our LGBT youth. Well more than 100 people, from grandmas to teenagers, church members to…
Terror, Blood
The name of Lee Van Cleef’s new album conjures a darker image than any of the song titles on Terror, Blood. “Pro Xylophone Propaganda” and “I Hereby Announce My Retirement From Music” paint a much goofier picture. The resulting music is, of course, somewhere in between. The songs are aggressive but not necessarily angry, harsh…
Bar Belle: Kiss my grits
This might come as a shock to you, but I don’t cook — I open. My specialties are cans, bottles, jars, bags and Pringles canisters. I don’t mind if other people cook for me, as long as their use of vegetables is limited. My carbon footprint has been fingerprinted and is on the run —…
Comedy: Bill Bellamy, manning up
It’s hard to believe it’s been more than two decades since Bill Bellamy stood onstage at “Russell Simmons’ Def Comedy Jam” and uttered the two words that would change the American sexual vernacular forever … “Booty call.” Since coining the term, Bellamy has continued to be a presence in pop culture ever since, through television…
I hear there’s an opening
My platform? Well, my politics and mood are about as predictable as the frayed, sparking end of a downed LG&E power line and really depend on whether I’ve had breakfast, if I’ve been listening to country or classical, Limbaugh or Terry Gross, and the status of any NCAA probes into the Men’s Cardinal Basketball program.…
Staffpicks
Thursday, Oct. 21 Pam Grier Borders Fourth Street Live 562-2100 Free; 6 p.m. When I heard Pam Grier was stopping through town this week to tout her book “Foxy: My Life in Three Acts,” I scrambled for an interview. Somehow I bypassed her publicist and found myself e-mailing back and forth with the real, live…
Surfin’ the bacon bubble at The Blind Pig
The chattering classes in the urban centers are badmouthing bacon, and I don’t want to hear it. “We are in the midst of a bacon bubble,” The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, and The Atlantic gleefully passed it on. “A growing number of chefs … say it’s about to pop,” snorted Journal reporter…
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.…
(Don’t) take a deep breath
University of Louisville’s sports complexes are undergoing some major facelifts. The KFC Yum! Center opened last week, the Trager indoor practice facility serves pole-vaulters to soccer players, and the football stadium finally has some bona fide nosebleeds. Not one of these sites lies more than a mile from Interstate 65, which funnels more than 180,000…
Lucky Shiner
With a handful of short releases and remixes over the last year or so, Gold Panda has been lighting up the hype machines. That would be the part of the Internet age musicians welcome. The unwelcome part is the knee-jerk contrarianism that often meets the full-length debuts of blog darlings. Up till now, Gold Panda…
Art: Rock ’n’ roll Retrospective at Revelry
“Retrospective: Don Aters” at Revelry Boutique Gallery is the kind of art exhibit you want to bring your dad to — accessible, interesting, affordable. Nestled in the two-room nooks of the gallery, the show features 50 candid photos of iconic rock ’n’ roll legends from the last four decades, shot by Versailles, Ky., photographer and…
