Category Archives: Underground & Unofficial
Italian Festival Dumps Chip, Tells Friends She’d Get Into Bed With Charleston
Just because we’ve so far been unable to loosen any lips on next festival’s program doesn’t mean there’s no news to report. The other side of the pond has a Spoleto Festival, too, you’ll recall – the original one in Spoleto, Italy, begun in 1958 and known as the Festival of Two Worlds. Last spring, [...]
Human behavior
It’s something of an understament to say that a lot of people have been looking forward to seeing newly minted MTV celebs and Comedy Festival/Piccolo alumns Human Giant in Theatre 99’s Piccolo Fringe this week. The comedy trio’s overnight success hasn’t landded them on the cover of Rolling Stone yet, but it’s not out of [...]
Spoleto central: Kudu Coffee
If, as Geoff and Dan at SpoletoToday have observed before, the Spoleto press room this year is not quite as buzzing with activity as in previous years, the unofficial top artist hangout spot this festival is more than making up for it. That would be African-themed Kudu Coffee on Vanderhorst Street, half a block from [...]
Ticketmaster snafu?
Unlike Spoleto’s performers, Piccolo artists usually aren’t paid anything to appear in the festival; they’re here as self-producers and self-promoters, splitting a portion of the box office take and marketing expenses with the City of Charleston Office of Cultural Affairs. Often they barely break even, sometimes they make a little money; it’s all a function [...]
The medium is the message
Now this is interesting.
Yesterday the Lowbrow received the below image as an e-mail attachment from an anonymous artist. Remember my post yesterday about the City’s strange snipe fixation? Consider that earlier this week the Mayor’s office and local busybodies Keep Charleston Beautiful announced a new crackdown on graffiti. “Graffiti is not a question of creativity [...]
How to assure a strip-search at the airport for the rest of your life
Last November, a group of — let’s call them “dissatisfied” — local actor-Americans made something of a stink when they produced an underground play called I’m Gonna Kill the President: A Federal Offense. The comedic political satire was written back in 2003 by a New York playwright who goes by the pseudonym Heironymous Bang and [...]
Stephen Colbert and Spoleto!
BREAKING NEWS on next week’s Opening Ceremony, which goes down exactly one week from today. Last year, Spoleto organizers had hoped to lure Charleston native and international television supercelebrity Stephen Colbert back home for the festival kickoff, but it wasn’t in the cards. Finally, after a full year of wheeling and dealing, pulling strings, veiled [...]
Josh Rosenblum beats around the Bush
We giggled ourselves into fits last year watching The Post and Courier pretend not to know anything about their new Spoleto critic Joshua Rosenblum’s creds as a card-carrying, Bush-bashing, blue-state Liberal. Rosenblum, you may recall (or not, if all you read was the P&C), was the writer and lyricist behind the NYC production Bush Is [...]
Wanted: Big Brother buffoonery
One of my favorite things about Charleston has always been the willingness of its artists to take subversive swipes at the establishment. Taggers, street artists, guerrilla designers, practical jokers, whatever you want to call them, they make things interesting. This, after all, is the city where Shephard Fairey, of OBEY fame, grew up and cut [...]
Getting forensic on Spoleto 2007
The 31st Spoleto Festival USA is officially in the past tense. It’s now time to get forensic on the thing. But that’s less easy than it sounds. Part of the difficulty in summing up the festival after the fact lies in its nature; as Mayor Riley noted during the mid-festival tribute to founder Gian Carlo [...]