The Independent Weekly back issues from July 2008:
front porch
Jul 02, 2008; ... IT'S OUR GAME In 1996, one sweltering evening at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, the home team's pitcher was stinking it up. "You don't have an arm! You don't have an arm!" an agitated fan bellowed from a few rows behind us. Scanning the crowd intently, my then-4-year-old ...
My life as a Bull
Jul 02, 2008; ... A conversation with Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan Hall of Fame second baseman Joe Morgan spent the bulk of his major league career with the Houston Astros and, most famously, as a key cog in Cincinnati's Big Red Machine in the 1970s. In 1975 and 1976, he was voted the National ...
Bullshitty
Jul 02, 2008; ... Why Bull Durham is a disservice to baseball, to the movies and to Durham BY G.D. GEARINO To watch the movie Bull Durham today is to realize that never has so much municipal mythology been built upon so flimsy a foundation. The city of Durham is, for all purposes, absent from the ...
Far away, so close
Jul 02, 2008; ... Far away, so close Poems that marry domesticity with wars abroad BY JAIMEE HILLS OLD WAR BY ALAN SHAPIRO Houston Mifflin, 96pp. In Alan Shapiro's latest book, Old War, we find many poems where he masterfully describes what seems to be absolutely nothing. The poem "Before" begins ...
Deleted scenes and extras
Jul 02, 2008; ... The making of Bull Durham, remembered by the people who were there In a classic scene in Butt Durham, the Bulls' rookie pitcher Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh doesn't want to take his socks off while founding the bases-so to speak-with Annie Savoy because "it's cold in here." Now, any North ...
The bad boys of summer
Jul 02, 2008; ... Remembering the 1980s, when the Bulls were bums, the fans were dangerous and a backup catcher came up big The Most Exciting Baseball Game I Ever Saw lasted 17 innings and five hours, around Labor Day of 1984. It happened at Durham Athletic Park, the DAP-not the DBAP, the retro-chic ...
Uptown brunch Down East
Jul 02, 2008; ... Uptown brunch Down East Wilmington's Deluxe restaurant draws vacationers downtown escapist eats Lazy Sundays on the Carolina coast call for a hearty brunch (you're bound to miss breakfast). Perhaps a Southern belle insists on something fancy, like mimosas with eggs ...
You got art on my chocolate
Jul 02, 2008; ... You got art on my chocolate Eye candy and bittersweets from Atlanta-based art collective at Wootini Before I jump into my art review, I have to tell you that Miel Bon Bons is now open in the Carr Mill Mall in Carrboro and it's a beautiful thing. No, they didn't pay me to write ...
Grill locally, eat healthily
Jul 02, 2008; ... Independence Day cookouts from Piedmont farms and N.C. waters locavore cooking We are creatures of habit, and in spite of the abundance and diversity at our high-summer farmers' markets, it's a likely default to think of hamburgers, hotdogs, potato salad and watermelon for a July ...
Beasts of burden
Jul 02, 2008; ... Beasts of burden aKabi's extreme demands on dancers and the audience Unlike most curmudgeons or writers of speculative fiction, Kurt Vonnegut amassed a truly impressive collection of dystopias over his career with, we sense, two abiding purposes in mind: to personally hold the ...
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?
Jul 02, 2008; ... WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? PARTY GIRL! PRODUCTIONS COMMON GROUND THEATRE Through July 12; www.cgtheatre.com Only time will tell if we've really hit upon the raison d'etre for Party Girl! Productions: to present its titled, er, archetype-the party girl-in all ...
Recycled music
Jul 02, 2008; ... These four North Carolina noise cassettes constitute part of RRRecords' "Recycled Music" series, which releases new works by noise artists on old, repurposed commercial cassette tapes. Founded In 198H, RRRecords Is both a record store in Lowell. Mass, aixU record label specializing in ...
Green noise
Jul 02, 2008; ... Four releases from local artists reconsider the state of physical media and the assumption that "all noise sounds the same" When people say that music from any given genre "all sounds the same," they're actually saying they aren't familiar enough with the genre to make valid ...
HEXAGON
Jul 02, 2008; ... LOCAL REVIEWS BLACK SKIES HEXAGON (self-released) At the moment, several Southern metal bands offer some of the most dynamic, nuanced and fresh approaches the genre has enjoyed in some time: While Miami's Torche (above) lifts pop from murky depths, Savannah's ...
Plan ahead
Jul 02, 2008; ... Navigating stages at the Eno festival Preparing for its 29th birthday and getting stronger every year, the Festival for the Eno has earned the right to declare itself-alongside parades, picnics and pyrotechnics-a Fourth of July tradition. That "getting stronger" claim is clearly ...
Experiments in welding
Jul 02, 2008; ... Experiments in welding Miami's Torche is one of many brilliant Southern bands recasting metal My mom, probably just like yours, reminded me often that talking about religion and politics at the dinner table was inappropriate. I eventually took as much for granted. But it took a ...
Something changed
Jul 02, 2008; ... Something changed Norwegian literary lads become men There's a scene early on in Reprise where a young man is courting a girl, and the two are sharing their tastes and sensibilities. At one point, the couple bonds over the confession that neither really likes The Clash. The movie ...
Superhero agonistes
Jul 02, 2008; ... Will Smith's burned-out savior in Hancock; Roman de Gare, the cinematic love child of Umberto Eco and Jacqueline Susann HANCOCK Opens Wednesday throughout the Triangle ROMAN DE CARE Opens Wednesday in select theaters Summer, as we know, is lousy with ...
Raw milk may lose its gray dye
Jul 02, 2008; ... FOLLOW-UP In a rare move, the N.C. Department of Agriculture is supporting legislation to overturn the agency's own regulation requiring all unpasteurized milk sold in the state to be dyed gray. The House overwhelmingly passed the bill last week; the Senate is set to take it up in the ...
Bull Durham 20 years later
Jul 02, 2008; ... Durham native Thom Mount was the boy wonder of Universal Pictures, becoming its president in 1976 at the preposterous age of 26. He survived in the job for seven years and has survived as an independent producer since. His producing career has been erratic, to say UK least, but Bull Durham, his ...
N.C. Governor's School under pressure from anti-gay group
Jul 02, 2008; ... Instructor not invited back this summer; film series censored Each summer, 800 of North Carolina's most talented high school seniors attend the country's oldest Governor's School, a prestigious six-week residential program with campuses in Winston-Salem and Raleigh. The 45-year-old ...
Expensive runoffs with dismal turnout: What's the solution?
Jul 02, 2008; ... When Mary Fant Donnan won the Democratic nomination for labor commissioner in a statewide runoff last week, the cost to taxpayers was about $4 million. Given the tiny turnout, it amounted to about $50 a vote. The reason for the high price tag In most counties-Wake County, for ...
front porch
Jul 09, 2008; ... THE IDES OF SUMMER Fall, winter and spring, our household awakes to the familiar gurgling and puffing of the kitchen coffee maker. Summertime, however, brings Albert randomly slamming into our windows at sunrise. Named after St Louis slugger Albert Pujols, our Albert is a ...
History will not absolve him
Jul 09, 2008; ... Local leaders pull no punches about Jesse Helms' legacy At U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms' funeral Tuesday, approximately 1,000 people-friends, family, neighbors and public figures-gathered to honor the former congressman who died on the Fourth of July. In their summer dresses and dark suits, the ...
The devil is in the personal ads
Jul 09, 2008; ... SPOOF "Allegations that a local Democratic official and her husband were involved in satanic rituals that included shackling people to beds, caging them and depriving them of food and water have horrified county party leaders." -the News & Observer "Ms. [Joy] Johnson ...
Paradise lost
Jul 09, 2008; ... Because of an unfair housing system, mobile home park residents have few rights-except the right to leave. Only by chance did the people who live in Homestead Village, a once pristine but lately neglected mobile home park, learn the park's owner was planning to sell the land beneath ...
NOW SERVING
Jul 09, 2008; ... new restaurants and happenings Tyler's Taproom in Apex (1183 Beaver Creek Commons Drive, 355-1380, www. tylerstaprool. com) will host a "Brunch with the Brewer" at 11:30 a.m. Sunday, July 13. The brewer is jean et Alain DeLaet, owner and brewmaster of the Huyghe Brewery in MeIIa, ...
Judgment of Hollywood
Jul 09, 2008; ... Is Bottle Shock the new Sideways? wine beat On Aug. 8, at a theater near you, the story of the Judgment of Paris (not the Greek myth) will be on display. Long the provenance of wine geeks, this is the tale of Steven Spurrier, an energetic British citizen whose career training ...
Midsummer dances
Jul 09, 2008; ... Mulling the final weeks of ADF The 2008 American Dance Festival concludes with nods to the African-American modern dance tradition, postmodern performance, restagings of classics and a mini-festival featuring six Japanese companies spanning the last four nights of the season. (Unless ...
Day and night
Jul 09, 2008; ... Day and night New ideas-and a rehash Intentionally or otherwise, it was this season's clearest example thus far of curation as critique: One dance work magnified the shortcomings in another simply by being placed next to it in a concert setting. The place: Page Auditorium last ...
TRUE WEST
Jul 09, 2008; ... TRUE WEST HOT SUMMER HIGHTS AT THE KENNEDY PROGRESS ENERGY CENTER Through July 13; www.hotsummernightsatthekennedy.org No doubt a toast is in order. Yes, that is an inside joke for Sam Shepard's rough, dark filial comedy about two misfit brothers who get a little too ...
Durham burning
Jul 09, 2008; ... Durham burning Lewis Shiner's novel of the destruction of Hayti BY GERRY CANAVAN BLACK & WHITE BY LEWIS SHINER Subterranean, 376pp. "The past," William Faulkner wrote, "is never dead. It's not even past" Lewis Shiner's new Southern noir Blade & White-set in the author's hometown ...
Music for fuel
Jul 09, 2008; ... How three local bands are working to keep rising gas prices from silencing their sound on the road It's harder than ever to jam econo. Mike Watt of The Minutemen coined that phrase-"We jam econo"-in the '80s to mean rocking, especially on the road, in the most efficient, thrifty way ...
Come on in
Jul 09, 2008; ... The Club is Open Festival offers a well selected entryway into local rock Like schools and sweater sales, the concert calendar slows down in the dead of summer. This year, the seasonal decline comes freshly exacerbated by high gas prices that discourage bands from making long tours and ...
LOST TO THE LIVING
Jul 09, 2008; ... DAYLIGHT DIES LOST TO THE LIVING (Candlelight) With Lost to the Living, Raleigh's Daylight Dies offers a nine-track blackout of sweeping introspective melancholy. But this loneliness is so lovely: "Against the sky stands our cathedral/ A picture of our isolation/ In the ...
Undiscovered countries
Jul 09, 2008; ... Undiscovered countries An enigmatic dying father in an English drama; a man follows his job to India in a romantic comedy WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE YOUR FATHER? Opens Friday in select theaters OUTSOURCED Opens Friday at Galaxy Cinema What do you do ...
The 'straight-up extortion' express
Jul 16, 2008; ... When Hillsborough police officers responded to a knife fight in a McDonald's parking lot last month, they uncovered a network of van drivers delivering illegal immigrants to the East Coast-and allegedly extorting their passengers. On two separate occasions in the past month, officers in ...
The McHelms campaign
Jul 16, 2008; ... If you thought a "McBush" presidency was frightening, look at the connnections between John McCaIn and jesse Helms. A McHelms administration? Get thee to the passport office. -Lisa Sorg Alex Castellanos produced the "White Hands" commercial Helms used against Harvey Gantl Castellanos has ...
Improv music director Shannon Morrow brings outsiders in
Jul 16, 2008; ... Experimental, avant-garde, outsider: These are rubrics we use to define the wild fringes of the art establishment. But they can be just as elite as the academy they revolve around-an outside that becomes a different kind of inside. Those unfamiliar with the hermetic rituals and internal ...
Carolina Wren Press gives poetic voice to often unheard writers
Jul 16, 2008; ... While it has no bricks and mortar presence (besides a tiny, cramped office in the basement of the Durham Arts Council), Carolina Wren Press has buih a literary community throughout its 32-year history. Launched by a single mom with barely a dollar in her pocketbook, this small independent ...
David García brings Latin music to the academy, and back to the people
Jul 16, 2008; ... Arts outreach is a two-way street for David García, an ethnomusicology professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel HiB and founder of the performing ensemble Charanga Carolina. Whether he's inviting local musicians to play with his students, inviting Durham high schoolers to sit in with ...
Michael O'Connell's Mountain Top Removal raised awareness of coal mining practices
Jul 16, 2008; ... When Al Gore presented Pittsboro, N.C., filmmaker Michael O'Connell with the award for best documentary at this year's Nashville Film Festival, he didn't just rattle off a prepared speech and smile for the photo-op. The former vice president, once berated for his lack of visible emotion, nearly ...
Steve Salevan provides a home for local music on the airwaves
Jul 16, 2008; ... Remember, if you can, the last time your new boss approached you with an exciting project, something you'd never even dreamed yourself capable of doing. Imagine the disappointment, then, when you discovered that your company had hung you out to dry, had asked you to do a job it didn't have the ...
NOW SERVING
Jul 16, 2008; ... It's always worth a reminder that there is free. food-related fun to be had. Nearly every area wine store hosts a wine tasting every weekend, all year long. And they're free. There's free wine, of course, but also free education. The wine guys/ gals often organize the tasting around a ...
Blueberry thrills
Jul 16, 2008; ... locavore cooking I'm chatting with a cheese vendor at the Wednesday farmers' market when my cell phone trills, alerting me to an urgent text message from my daughter Don't formet the blueberries! We're lucky around here. Well have some variety of the blue darlings through ...
Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern says yes
Jul 16, 2008; ... The Triangle is rich in theater, but there is one theater company that is different from all the others: Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern. Inspired by Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman, in which one little green pig holds out against the conformist pressures of all the pink pigs, this ...
History's rough draft
Jul 16, 2008; ... History's rough draft Bill T. Jones grapples with the Civil War ANOTHER EVENING: SERENADE/THE PROPOSITION BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE COMPANY American Dance Festival July 10-12 Particularly after the March performance of his disappointing 2006 work, ....
PETER PAN
Jul 16, 2008; ... PETER PAN N.C. THEATRE, MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM AT PROGRESS ENERGY CENTER Through July 20, www.nctheatre.com Can a generation of kids raised on Pirates of the Caribbean's Captain Jack Sparrow still appreciate Captain Hook? Well, they might at least as he's played by Ira David ...
GOIN' A BUFFALO
Jul 16, 2008; ... GOIN' A BUFFALO LITTLE GREEN PIG THEATRICAL CONCERN, MANBITES DOG THEATER Through July 19; www.manbitesdogtheater.org It seems wrongheaded to fault the actors In Coin'a Buffalo with playing at their characters more than actually playing them. After all, how could the show ...
10 BY 10 IN THE TRIANGLE
Jul 16, 2008; ... 10 BY 10 IN THE TRIANGLE THE ARTS CENTER OF CARRBORO Through July 20, www.artscenter.org The ArtsCenter's seventh annual 10 by 10 in the Triangle festival is "the year of high-risk behavior," according to the program notes. A more accurate description of the theme linking ...
WORLD CLASS
Jul 16, 2008; ... CALTROP WORLD CLASS (Holidays For Quince Records) If Chapel Hill quartet Caltrop has a weakness, it's one of audience perception, something that's well beyond the control of any such upstart. On the band's long-anticipated first full-length, World Class, the rifls and ...
Easy writer
Jul 16, 2008; ... Easy writer A documentary reinforces the legend of Hunter S. Thompson; plus, a stiff, mistitled melodrama "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That famous line from John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance shrewdly appraises our tendency to prefer the ...
Tough as nails
Jul 16, 2008; ... Caltrop's not exactly a metal band It rained yesterday. The Hillsborough air is thicker than usual. The mosquitoes are out early. The five of us face the road in a cluster of old chairs on the front porch of Murat Dirlik's home, a century-old structure he and his girlfriend recently ...
Dual endowments
Jul 16, 2008; ... Dual endowments On a Saturday night in Durham, institutional sanctions pale to the city's steamy underbelly The first rock concert on the verdant rear lawn of Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art was meant as a celebration for the waning days of The Birth of the Cool, the first ...
Time to reload
Jul 16, 2008; ... Bill for state's burgeoning video game industry gutted in legislature My friend Steven Allison recently left his job to become a game master for the online role-playing game Age of Conan: Hyborian Aduentures at the Durham office of Norwegian game developer Funcom. He works third shift, ...
OUTBOUND
Jul 23, 2008; ... front porch. At my last table on my last day as a waitress in Chapel Hill, I served a polite, little old man. As he finished his meal and I took the plate away, I asked him how everything was. "Just as good as I remembered it." He paused, and then asked me, "Did you go to school at ...
Realtors rankled over political spending
Jul 23, 2008; ... On June 10, the North Carolina Association of Realtors announced a $10 million plan to "educate the public on key issues," including the awfulness of property transfer taxes. But it didn't seem to register with NCAR's 42,000 members until last week just how the association intended to pay for ...
Buying the farm
Jul 23, 2008; ... Public meeting is the last on disease lab "We've all seen the same movies-a government lab in your backyard. Movies with conspiracy theories. It sounds scary." Comparing the National Bio and AgroDefense Facility to a honor flick: That's how US. Department of Homeland Security ...
Campaign finance: A mid-year snapshot of Triangle races
Jul 23, 2008; ... There are 15 weeks until the November election, and candidates across the Triangle are balancing their campaign checkbooks. June 30 marked the end of the reporting period for candidates to file paperwork with local and state elections boards. This period covers the weeks just prior to the May 6 ...
More than cactus
Jul 23, 2008; ... Conserve water, beautify your yard with xeriscaping Xeriscaping finds its.root word in the Mediterranean, the Greek xeros, meaning "dry," but xeriscape gardening can take root just about anywhere. This type of landscaping emphasizes using native plants to beautify your space and conserve ...
Blade runners
Jul 23, 2008; ... Sheep, goats, electric mowers: Tending a sustainable lawn Some kids grew up in the South in the '60s learning legacy skills-pottery, canning, farming. The thoroughly modern skill my brother and I perfected over a decade of sweltering summers was less romantic, but remunerative. We mowed ...
The Avetts ascend
Jul 23, 2008; ... The Concord trio rose from obscurity to balance on the brink of fame As the H5-foot, metallic-gray bus heads northwest on Interstate 76 through Pennsylvania, no one is lying or telling the truth. Sitting on a brown leather couch in the bus' back lounge, the younger of the two Avett ...
Festival of feats
Jul 23, 2008; ... DANCE The best and worst of American Dance Festival 2008 The lovers' most heartfelt wish can be put into one word. Here it is: Stay. It's no less true for those who deeply love the dance. Stay, Zvi Gotheiner, Laura Dean, Doug Varone and Takuya Muramatsu: ...
Death by sex
Jul 23, 2008; ... CASUAL OBSERVER Revisiting a bawdy comedy shot 41 years ago in Chapel Hill It's Friday night, and I've driven from Raleigh to the Horace Williams House in Chapel Hill to watch a 40-year-old sex comedy projected onto a bed sheet from a bootleg DVD on the rain-slicked lawn. "Are ...
OZMA OF OZ: A TALE OF TIME
Jul 23, 2008; ... OZMA OF OZ: A TALE OF TIME RALEIGH LITTLE THEATRE Through July 27; www.raleighlittletheatre.org Raleigh Little Theatre's Teens on Stage production of Ozma of Oz: A Tale of Time is a lovely piece of all-ages entertainment. Loosely adapted from one of the many sequels L ...