by Stuart Gaines in Vol. 11 / Iss. 7 on 09/15/2004
Mountain Xpress, http://www.mountainx.com/
Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival, downtown Asheville; Sunday, Sept. 5
Despite all the kind-veggie hoopla surrounding this year’s Lexington Avenue Arts and Fun Festival, the local-arts extravaganza still saw a spot of trouble. Early in the day, Asheville police questioned one costumed patron about his decorative long sword and additional side arms.
The gentleman in question, who — in apparent response to LAAFF coordinators’ requests that patrons wear costumes — came dressed to the hilt in full Middle Earth battle gear (complete with a puzzlingly unrelated, ghost-white, Brandon-Lee-in-The Crow makeup job), subsequently found himself stripped of his defenses. In the end, he looked less like Aragorn or Legolas than a playful young sprite or medieval clown.
Thankfully, this was one of the more serious disturbances at an otherwise passive to passive-aggressive display of our city’s eclectic local-arts scene. Pristine, late-summer mountain weather blessed the creative chaos, ushering in an impressive herd of locals and a healthy helping of tourists, most of them unencumbered by costumes or weapons of any kind.
One notable exception was the bicycle-jousting competitors, who provided substantial comic relief via the padded lancing of several would-be knights. And just down from that heated competition, the local-band stage featured a pleasant barrage of area-based music throughout the day.
All the acts I encountered on the south-end stage made the most of their limited time slots, without exception giving energetic, happy-to-be-there performances. The Labiators‘ Fugazi-esque, distortion-riddled sound proved the most appropriate soundtrack for the nearby jousting, while roots-reggae from The Zion Project kept a number of twirl-happy dancers in a blissfully dizzy place. The herb-healing practitioners of GFE fought through some poorly timed power outages in their otherwise funk-tabulous set, while Scrappy Hamilton closed things out with their swinging brand of rock ‘n’ roll.
Up the street, a partisan-specific voter drive unfolded near the performing-arts stage, where newly registering voters were presented with their choice of a Kerry/Edwards bumper sticker or pin after completing the necessary paperwork.
Team Nader and supporters of the incumbent president were noticeably absent, and this one-sided dynamic — especially in the midst of such an eclectic crowd — was the day’s only noticeable weak point: While the freak-in-Asheville set enjoyed a fruitful showing at this year’s LAAFF, other manifestations of local diversity were noticeably absent. Children (with young parents) were a common sight, but seniors, African-Americans and Latinos — all comprising substantial local demographics — remained few and far between.
Despite the mostly rice-flavored crowd, the performing-arts stage boasted a culturally diverse lineup, ranging from the African dance and drumming of the colorful and inspiring Ballet Warraba to the old-school break-dance shenanigans of Hunab Kru. The latter, defying gravity to the break-beats of DJ Brett Rock, expertly demonstrated their craft as a vastly underrated, retro art form — and one requiring a good bit more skill, muscle power and practice than even the most competitive bicycle jousting.
The evening wound up with the groovy-yet-saucy collaboration of Scrappy Hamilton (playing as The Pheremones) and The Rebelles Burlesque, performing excerpts from the latter’s latest production, A More Perfect Union. One particularly vivid segment came sandwiched in an instrumental treatment of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs,” with an elaborate puppet/puppet-master scene unfolding between a pair of The Rebelles’ finest.
Scorecard: On the cartoon-couples scale, the third-annual LAAFF scores a Homer and Marge Simpson: Despite the blue hair, mild alcohol abuse and silly antics, they’re still a happy family in the end.
[Asheville-based music writer Stuart Gaines, a contributing editor at An Honest Tune, can be reached at // ‘;l[1]=’a’;l[2]=’/’;l[3]=”;l[30]=’\”‘;l[31]=’ 109′;l[32]=’ 111′;l[33]=’ 99′;l[34]=’ 46′;l[35]=’ 111′;l[36]=’ 111′;l[37]=’ 104′;l[38]=’ 97′;l[39]=’ 121′;l[40]=’ 64′;l[41]=’ 121′;l[42]=’ 116′;l[43]=’ 105′;l[44]=’ 99′;l[45]=’ 115′;l[46]=’ 105′;l[47]=’ 104′;l[48]=’ 116′;l[49]=’ 119′;l[50]=’ 111′;l[51]=’ 110′;l[52]=’ 107′;l[53]=’ 117′;l[54]=’ 111′;l[55]=’ 121′;l[56]=’:’;l[57]=’o’;l[58]=’t’;l[59]=’l’;l[60]=’i’;l[61]=’a’;l[62]=’m’;l[63]=’\”‘;l[64]=’=’;l[65]=’f’;l[66]=’e’;l[67]=’r’;l[68]=’h’;l[69]=’a ‘;l[70]=’= 0; i=i-1){
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