In her nonfiction bestseller, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild dives into bayou country, where systematic industrial pollution has devastated residents so completely they’ve come to accept environmental blight as an unavoidable fact of life.
Francis Pavy’s One-man Press
“It would be nice to have some oysters that big, huh?” quips Francis Pavy, the childlike blues of his eyes lusting over his own creation. The object of his desire — a plus-sized oyster etched into a 3-foot-by-4-foot slab of composite vinyl — is a custom-print block, a particularly appetizing example of Pavy’s preferred method of application for his vivacious […]
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3 min read
Hard Facts, True Stories, Real Talk
The sky settled down into an early May gradient of twilight colors over the statue of Confederate General Alfred Mouton, his arms crossed over his white stone chest. Across the street, crammed standing-room-only inside of The Hive’s black box theatre space, more than 50 people hushed as Dr. Rick Swanson took the stage. Swanson unfurled tables and charts, photos and […]
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3 min read
Portrait: Walter Imahara How a Japanese immigrant found glory and camaraderie in a nation that once imprisoned him for his race.
How a Japanese immigrant found glory and camaraderie in a nation that once imprisoned him for his race.
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8 min read
City Smarter, Not Harder
Andrew Rodgers, a Chattanooga-based technologist, smiles as he speaks to an eager Acadiana audience, his hands moving like a Cajun grandmother. A keynote speaker at Lafayette’s inaugural Smart Community Summit, his energetic presentation to a room full of Lafayette notables is fueled by one driving force — belief in the powers of cooperation and technology. “Researchers and academia work in […]
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14 min read
Lost Boys And Strong Girls
A musical based on a novel co-written by humorist Dave Barry, Peter and the Starcatcher is fast-paced and funny, following the orphan Peter Pan before he becomes the flying, mischievous lost boy. But Starcatcher also introduces a new character to the Pan canon, the empowering female lead, Molly — Wendy’s precocious, brainy predecessor. The show makes its Lafayette debut in […]
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2 min read
Southern Graphic
Marshall Blevins grew up listening to the blues (Robert Johnson is her favorite), and later devoured Southern authors such as Zora Neale Hurston, Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, resulting, she says, in a “gritty fictive world made in my imagination.” All these influences come to bear in her work, which combines colorful, energetic portrayals of the landscapes and animals she […]
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2 min read
What You’ve Left Behind
CAST: Derek Joseph: 28, black, poetry student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y. Christine Baniewicz: 28, white, nonfiction student at UNO in New Orleans, La. SETTING: Your own mind. Also, later, Artmosphere. I. Derek enters your mind. He’s short, somewhere in the mid-5-foot range, with a distinctively powerful and peculiar presence, a mysteriously hypnotizing quality about him. DEREK: I […]
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9 min read
Portrait: Scott Feehan
Last November, Festival International’s executive director nervously stood before a crowd of TV cameras and reporters. Unfortunately, the purpose of this press conference wasn’t to announce any big-name musical headliners, or the new theatrical additions to this year’s Festival, or shower praise on community partners for Lafayette’s biggest public event — then just six months away. Rather, Scott Feehan had […]
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9 min read
Dominion, Distance And The Butcher’s Dilemma
Chanel was in the middle of a half-year cooking fellowship in Chicago when she phoned to tell me she’d just won a three-month butchery apprenticeship on an organic farm in rural Italy. A career chef just a couple years removed from the dawn of her vocation, she would leave me yet again, and less than a month after returning from […]
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7 min read
Dying But Not Yet Dead Hand-painted signs are an endangered species, and Lafayette is their preserve.
Hand-painted signs are an endangered species, and Lafayette is their preserve.
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5 min read
How To Fund A Better Lafayette
If balancing the bare necessities of providing and maintaining city services is not difficult enough, we city dwellers demand that our local governments deliver civic innovation to compete with rival municipalities on a regional, national and global scale. Though as the burden of paying for essential capital improvement projects rests more and more with local governments, cities are being asked […]
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5 min read