Welcome to Charlottesville, Va. -- where the booze flows freely and the girls are pretty. Well, perhaps freely isn't exactly true, but the University area is certainly famous for its unique bar scene and affordable intoxications. The Corner area is home to a unique collection of restaurants and bars, each with its own flavor and specialties.
It's a risky venture when the lead singer of a popular band takes a stab at a solo album. Andrew McMahon, the man behind Jack's Mannequin and more famously the lead singer of Something Corporate, approached his solo album with his trademark passion and sheer hard work.
It's necessary to be wary of the UK music press. If one were to take seriously each time the "next big thing" or "album of the year" is heralded, the number of tragically trendy and instantaneously outdated albums in one's record collection would increase exponentially.
Above the stage in Old Cabell Hall is a mural of Raphael's "The School of Athens." The work depicts Plato, Aristotle and other significant philosophers from Ancient Greece, a civilization much admired in the Italian Renaissance.
Terry Gilliam uses shock and terror the way you or I might use air and oxygen. These qualities saturate the entirety of his colorful and checkered career.
Two years after their last album, the New Pornographers are back and bigger than ever with Twin Cinema. Formed in 1997, the Vancouver band has regaled the world with its giddy pop albums Mass Romantic and The Electric Version.
Charlottesville is an artsy town. Along with other small, southern cities like Ashville and Raleigh, it plays host to a tight-knit but fertile art community.
Even before this summer's flurry of renovations and openings, Charlottesville boasted an impressive eatery-to-headcount ratio, with over 200 restaurants to feed a small-town population of only 45,000. This fall, the new Bodo's opening may be generating the greatest student buzz, but an impressive selection of adventurous Corner eateries may prove more exotic yet still affordable.
Michael Cunningham's 1999 The Hours is a masterful novel -- perhaps the last great novel to close out the 20th century in American fiction.
"Best of You," Foo Fighters' new radio single, begins with the lyrics, "I've got another confession to make." That phrase sums up most of what this record has to offer.
Remember that nerdy kid in sixth grade? The one who knew all the state capitals? Well, he might have missed his calling as a geography teacher, but he certainly has become quite the folk troubadour. The master of longitude and latitude himself, Sufjan Stevens, recently released Come On, Feel the Illinoise!, a whirlwind tribute to The Land of Lincoln.
Welcome, readers new and old, to the summer mail-out edition of tableau, Charlottesville's only arts, entertainment and culture guide for students. Normally, we'd be coming to you in living color, but for the sake of mail-ability, we're constrained to the confines of this black-and-white broadsheet.
System of a Down's Mezmerize does little to move past the style of the band's previous efforts, System of a Down, Toxicity and Steal This Album, but manages to put forth a strong effort that is both radio-friendly and pleasing to longtime fans. Toxicity managed to be brutally heavy as well as exotic and experimental, but Mezmerize often lacks these characteristics, instead falling back on the formulas found in SOAD's earlier work.
After queuing overnight to be the first in line for tickets and braving the crowds of the London Underground, we finally found ourselves amidst more than 130,000 people for the biggest musical event of our lifetime: Live8 2005 in Hyde Park. The lineup would have impressed even your grandmother: Coldplay, U2, The Who, Sting, Pink Floyd, The Killers, Paul McCartney, Elton John and Mariah Carey, just to name a few.
I have never tripped on acid. And, unless you count the WinAmp visualizer, I have never seen colors when listening to music.
Colors and shapes in the abstract tend to elicit little from the average person beyond, "Oh, that's pretty." But Buffalo, NY artist Monica Angle's exhibit, Loose Leafs, featured at the Bayly Art Museum through July 17, presents abstraction with a rare lucidity. Originally out of Minneapolis, Angle's work in Loose Leafs is based on aggregations of rectangular monotypes -- the Leafs -- generated by painting small sheets of soft mulberry paper with watercolor inks.
For ten years, the signs have promised: the Corner Bodo's is "Coming Soon." Now, when students return to Charlottesville this fall, they will find that the improbable has finally happened.
The introductory video reminded me of our very own Cavalier, riding into Scott Stadium on the back of his horse.
For the past quarter-century, Japanese animator/director Hayao Miyazaki has dazzled audiences with fantastic visions of magical worlds -- his immense talent in combining epic storylines with breathtaking visuals has earned the respect of critics and fans around the world.
Plague. Injecting this malady into an opening narration guarantees Broadway success. Providing, of course, that the introduction precedes a gaggle of Scandinavians smacking each other with halibut. The bizarre humor of Spamalot is hardly surprising, considering the show was lovingly adapted from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the classic film spoof of Arthurian legend.
