The Independent Weekly back issues from October 2008:
THAT OLD BALL GAME
Oct 01, 2008; ... front porch. We persuaded my father to stop driving and give up his car for his 90th birthday. He wasn't a bad driver, but we worried about him. He didn't want to stop driving. Who would? He loved his routines, his errands. To the cleaners, "shopping, to get a haircut-heck, just ...
What if Durham told its own story?
Oct 01, 2008; ... If the people of Durham created their own media coverage, what would it look like? A forum this Saturday will explore the possiblities. Organizers are inviting residents to join in abrainstorming and planning session to discuss the programming, equipment and training a community media ...
Hugh Webster's long-shot bid for Congress hinges on immigration
Oct 01, 2008; ... District 13 challenger chases votes with stalwart stance After finishing a plate of hot dogs and brownies, Hugh Webster addressed a small gathering of 30 supporters at a campaign fundraiser in East Raleigh. Wearing an olive-green safari shirt, khaki shorts and a bolo tie engraved with a ...
Don't drop The N&O
Oct 01, 2008; ... Why I'm renewing my subscription (and you should, too) It's hard to keep track of all the carnage at The News & Observer. Approximately 40 newsroom staffers have taken buyouts or been laid off since May, as the newspaper's parent company, McClatchy, struggles with declining ad ...
The "Meeker Majority" that isn't
Oct 01, 2008; ... The Meeker Majority on the Raleigh City Council lately lacks Meeker. The "majority" were the five members, including Mayor Charles Meeker, who emerged from the 2007 Raleigh city elections as a potential progressive alliance on neighborhood and growth issues. But a year later, when asked ...
Record at home
Oct 01, 2008; ... Two bands take budgets and do it (mostly) themselves Though notable and numerous exceptions abound, most records don't happen when a band simply sets up one microphone, hits the record button and plays the songs they've written and learned. Records oftentimes take days, weeks, months or, ...
Musicians make good neighbors
Oct 01, 2008; ... For its fourth alburn, The Rosebuds invited friends over On a May morning, Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp, the married core of The Rosebuds since 2001, were recording a new song in their modest home in Raleigh's historic Oakwood neighborhood. They sat in the front bedroom at a computer, ...
THE ROSEBUDS
Oct 01, 2008; ... REVIEW THE ROSEBUDS LIFE LIKE (Merge Records) The Rosebuds' four-IP discography has been like a series of Rorschach tests: Which album is best depends on what perspective you apply. For me, the duo's 2003 debut Make Out remains a high watermark, since it has the ...
Carry around
Oct 01, 2008; ... For its second album, Annuals found coining back home best Holed up in their unfinished practice space beside a metal machine shop on Raleigh's Capital Boulevard, the six members of the band Annuals are deciding which songs to cram into a 30-minute set. In two days, they'll drive six ...
ANNUALS
Oct 01, 2008; ... REVIEW ANNUALS SUCH FUN (Canvasback/ Terpikshore) Following the release of his band's 2006 buzz-magnetic debut, Be He Me, Annuals frontman Adam Baker described his songwriting process: "Fishing, catching something really small, dipping it into candle wax ...
Years of living dangerously
Oct 01, 2008; ... Years of living dangerously Revolutionary art from the age of Eisenhower, at the Ackland CIRCA 1958: BREAKING GROUND IN AMERICAN ART Ackland Art Museum www.ackland.org Through Jan. 4, 2009 I feel kind of queasy when I hear or read blasé, reductive ...
Slash and burn
Oct 01, 2008; ... Slash and burn Ron Rash's sensational Appalachian tale BY BRONWEN DICKEY SERENA: A NOVEL BY RON RASH Ecco Books (HarperCollins), 384 pp. In the late 1920s, before George Pemberton's Boston Lumber Company constructed its western North Carolina logging camp-the setting for Ron Rash's ...
The great debater
Oct 01, 2008; ... The great debater PlayMakers' strong take on rare Shakespeare PERICLES **** PlayMakers Rep www.playmakersrep.org Through Oct. 12 In Pendes, Shakespeare's absurd yet lifelike tragi-comedy, we follow the Prince of Tyre through many adventures ...
NOW SERVING
Oct 01, 2008; ... new restaurants and happenings Here come those dreaded words: "Hey, what's for dinner?" Well, how about grilled quail served with 20-year-old port? Or, perhaps, farm-raised chicken served by the farmers themselves. Or you could whip up something yummy in your own ...
May I propose ... an evening under the stars
Oct 01, 2008; ... if I were you Planning the perfect fall picnic September is the harshest month. Bombarded by back-to-school frenzy, bereft at neighborhood pool closings, we're forced to say farewell to vacation mentality and get serious again about work. And so it is easy to overlook ...
It's time for comfort food
Oct 01, 2008; ... locavore cooking Local meatloaf and mashed potatoes It seems every year we turn on the heat pump and fire up the woodstove a little later in October. Inevitably, though, we go to bed one night comfy in mild temps and with all the windows open, and wake up seeing our breath in the ...
FARMERS' MARKET MEATLOAF
Oct 01, 2008; ... Every ingredient here, except for the salt and condiments, came from the Hilhborough or Orange County markets. 1 pound ground beef 1 pound ground pork 1 cup scalllons, including beet of the gram parts, chopped (more If youl like onion-y) Two small (or one large) ...
One against all
Oct 01, 2008; ... One against all Blundering Blindness, intermittently successful Flashes BLINDNESS Opens Friday in select theaters ** FLASH OF GENIUS Opens Friday throughout the Triangle ** The movies have a poor track record with filming ...
Accident prone
Oct 01, 2008; ... How Blag'ard survived brushes with fame, F-150s and fatherhood Blag'ard's injuries have been numerous and fancifully acquired. The Chapel Hill duo of singer/ guitarist Joe Taylor, 36, and drummer Adam Brinson, 26, seems destined for near-misses and closeness-to-catastrophe. Lucky for us, ...
UNC POINT GUARD QUENTIN THOMAS RECORDING WITH 9TH WONDER
Oct 01, 2008; ... Former UNC-Chapel Hill Tar Heels backup point guard Quentin Thomas has exchanged the basketball for a microphone. Thomas-who played at UNC for four years, won an NCAA championship his freshman year, and averaged 15 minutes per contest as a senior last year-has recently been working with local ...
LOST HOUSES
Oct 01, 2008; ... THE CURIAINS OF NIGHT LOST HOUSES (Holidays for Quince) Unless you're Christina Scabbia or Bleeding Through's Marta Peterson-who've both accentuated their sexuality to ease entry into the boys' club of metal-it can be hard out there for a female metal musician. Years of ...
RAPPER'S DELIGHT
Oct 01, 2008; ... RAPPER BIG POOH & DJ WARRIOR RAPPER'S DELIGHT (mixtape) The most obnoxious form in hip-hop today is the mixtape: Every great verse or beat comes matched with a scrap of nothing, a ridiculous contribution by a guest you don't know, a beat by a producer who should be ...
CLASSIC MATERIAL
Oct 01, 2008; ... THE URBAN SOPHISTICATES CLASSIC MATERIAL (self-released) Regarded as one of the finer (and only) hip-hop crews in North Carolina to be built around live instruments, The Urban Sophisticates was once easy to reduce into an organic party band-as I did seven months ago in ...
BLINDNESS
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** BLINDNESS-An unnamed city is suddenly afflicted with an outbreak of contagious blindness. A quarantine fails to contain the virus, and the spreading contagion leads to a breakdown of the civic-and human-order. Not a bad premise for a novel by a Nobel Prize-winning author-as this is, by José ...
DRONA (SAVIOR OF THE WORLD)
Oct 01, 2008; ... DRONA (SAVIOR OF THE WORLD)-Abhishek Bachchan takes his turn playing a Hindi superhero, with lots of fantasy action and (promised) topdrawer special ...
FLASH OF GENIUS
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** FLASH OF GENIUS-The true-life account of Robert Keams' lone stand against a corporate giant who wronged him reads like lowhanging, Capra-esque fruit ripe for Hollywood's picking. After inventing the intermittent windshield wiper in the early 1960s, Reams' process was pilfered by the Ford ...
KIDNAP
Oct 01, 2008; ... KIDNAP-The world's richest Indian (Sanjay Dull) is forced to play mind games with a hot young kidnapper (lmran Khan) who has abducted his estranged daughter ...
NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST-The feature-length sophomore effort of director Peter Sollett (Raising Victor Varjas) is an eclectic mix tape, intertwining alt-rock edginess with sappy love ballads while elevator music drones incessantly In the background. Ever since she heard his awesome ...
BURN AFTER READING
Oct 01, 2008; ... Current Releases **** BURN AFTER READING-A CIA agent abruptly dumped from the Balkans desk (John Malkovich) fumes that the agency is all bureaucracy and no mission. Frances McDormand and Brad PiH, a couple of clueless personal trainers, stumble onto a computer disc of his bitter, ...
CHOKE
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** CHOKE-Demented yet strangely endearing, screenwriter-director Gregg Clark's adaptation of Ficht Club author Chuck Palahniuk's source novel is the blackest of comedies, cobbling together the "lighter side" of sexual addiction, dementia, religion and parental abandonment. When not deliberately ...
THE DARK KNIGHT
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** THE DARK KNIGHT-While terrific, Christopher Nolan's latest Batman tale is not the masterpiece many would proclaim. The storyline is at times bloated and meandering, but the late Heath ...
DEATH RACE
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** DEATH RACE-Bereft of a sensible plot, two-dimensional characters or any glint of eight decades of cinematic evolution, this is ...
EAGLE EYE
Oct 01, 2008; ... * EAGLE EYE-A crackerjack premise riffing on our omnipresent technological age rapidly devolves into a pseudo-political howler. Shia LeBeouf and Michelle Monaghan are strangers who find themselves enslaved by the techno machinations of an unknown, omnipotent force. Matters remain suitably taut ...
GHOST TOWN
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** GHOST TOWN-As you get older, It's easy Io believe in ghosts; shades of the departed still live so vividly In memory. In this hybrid of Truly, Madly, Deeply, The Sixth Sense and It's a Wonderful Life, Dr. Bertram Pincus (Ricky Gervais) discovers that, after an anesthesia glitch during a ...
KENNY
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** KENNY-Could the second coming of Crocodile Dundee be a man in coveralls who services portable toilets? This man would be Kenny, a disarmingly straightforward (and straight-faced) common man who mixes hard work with off-the-cuff philosophical asides to the camera. The star of this ...
LAKEVIEW TERRACE
Oct 01, 2008; ... * LAKEVIEW TERRACE-For fun, squint hard and try seeing this as an examination of the disparate viewpoints on Obamamania. In one comer, we have him as GOP bogeyman: an upper-middle-class African-American wielding authority. Across the ring is a lefty, Prius-driving, multi-culti type besieged by ...
THE LUCKY ONES
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** THE LUCKY ONES-An odd-trio road movie starring Tim Bobbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena follows three Iraq veterans on a cross country trek. Resolutely apolitical, Cheever, Colee and TK's picaresque adventure touches the length of the red/ blue spectrum, one and all piously thanking them ...
MAMMA MIA!
Oct 01, 2008; ... * MAMMA MIA!-The film adaptation of the long-running musical, based on ABBA's songbook, is a garish affair that treads the line between show-stopping ...
MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA
Oct 01, 2008; ... * MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA-The sad truth is that if this had been made by anyone other than Spike Lee, it would be roundly dismissed as a hyperreductive, racist rant Written with the sophistication of a Robert Benigni script, this World War II epic failure trades in childish whimsy and ...
MOVING MIDWAY
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** MOVING MIDWAY-Longtime Indy film critic Godfrey Cheshire follows his family's decision to relocate their ancestral Midway plantation home as a means to save it from encroaching suburban sprawl in Knightdale. The impressive result is a multileveled personal, historical and literal odyssey ....
MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL
Oct 01, 2008; ... * MY BEST FRIEND'S GIRL-Reviving his persona as a foulmouthed, blue-collar worker who moonlights as a ladies' man, Dane Cook takes another meathead approach in this romantic comedy. This time, he drags former Hollywood 'It' girl Kate Hudson along with him. Cook plays the misogynistic Tank, who ...
NIGHTS IN RODANTHE
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** NIGHTS IN RODANTHE-In this romance based on the novel by New Bern's Nicholas Sparks, we meet Dr. Paul Planner (Richard Cere) as he sets out for a trip, which ends at an oceanfront B&B on Halteras Island. Tending the inn is Adrienne (Diane Lane), herself lorn over an invitation to reunite ...
RIGHTEOUS KILL
Oct 01, 2008; ... * RIGHTEOUS KILL-Evoking the macabre, uneasy collaborations between Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi during the latter days of their careers, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino share the screen as aging NYPD cops-onthe-edge. They're on the trail of a serial killer exacting vigilante justice on rapists, ...
TROPIC THUNDER
Oct 01, 2008; ... **** TROPIC THUNDER-A wildly funny film about the making of a Platoon-style war movie in Southeast Asia, this Ben Stiller-directed "action comedy" also has the distinction of being the sharpest satire of Hollywood since Altman's The Player. The main satiric target here is not any particular ...
TRANSSIBERIAN
Oct 01, 2008; ... ** TRANSSIBERIAN Today's so-called Hitchcocklan thrillers are nothing more than a series of shock edits and cheap, music-cued jolts. As a representative of a badly degraded genre, Brad Anderson's thriller-a tale of treachery and drug trafficking aboard a train traveling from Beijing to ...
TYLER PERRY'S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS
Oct 01, 2008; ... TYLER PERRY'S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS-Wealthy socialites go on a road trip to discover themselves and escape ...
VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA
Oct 01, 2008; ... *** VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA-Woody Alien takes his droll romantic pessimism to Spain, following two young Americans on a summer abroad. The film jumps to life when two Spaniards, Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, are on screen, ...
THE WOMEN
Oct 01, 2008; ... * THE WOMEN-Meg Ryan, Annette Bening and Eva Mendes star in a completely unnecessary remake/ update/ travesty of the bitter 1939 bon-bon starring Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. It may seem quaint to see Park Avenue ladles living only for luncheon, shopping, gossip and the sex ...
Endorsements on the horizon
Oct 08, 2008; ... up front At last week's vice presidential debate, Democratic candidate Joe Biden wasn't overstating the case when he said the 2008 election is the most important of our lives. Doggone it, you betcha it is. Given readers' requests and the gravity of this year's races, the Indy is ...
Voting myths debunked
Oct 08, 2008; ... There are some confusing e-mails going around about when you can register, where you can vote, even what you can wear to the polls. We asked Don Wright, general counsel for the North Carolina State Board of Elections, to sort fact from fiction. MYTH: If you wear an Obama T-shirt to the ...
Food fight
Oct 08, 2008; ... Meals tax forges unholy alliances State Sen. Floyd McKissick Jr. sat down at Hardee's last week and although tempted by the chill-smothered Thickburger, opted instead for the version topped with bacon and cheese. Total cost: $1.62. Multiply that by 1 percent-about H cents-and McKissick ...
Not BFFs forever: Baldwin and Paul
Oct 08, 2008; ... In an April 2008 Internet column, Baptist pastor and conservative talk-radio host Chuck Baldwin wrote, "I am convinced that only a miracle can save America now." "I am expecting God to grant such a miracle," continued Baldwin, a former Florida state chairman in Jerry Falwell's Moral ...
A guide to third parties
Oct 08, 2008; ... The Boston Tea Party's time-traveling slogan is "Party like it's 1773!" (OK, but only if women, Native Americans and blacks have equal rights and everyone can receive the proper immunizations.) Teetotaler Gene Amondson, an Alaskan evangelist, is running for the nation's top job on the ...
Brian Moore
Oct 08, 2008; ... Q & A Socialist Party presidential candidate Terry Sanford's defeat is responsible for Brian Moore's split from the Democratic Party. In 1976, Moore was the New Mexico state coordinator for Sanford, who was competing against Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination. Sanford ...
Correction
Oct 08, 2008; ... A story in the Oct 1 issue, "What if Durham told its own story?" incorrectly stated that Channel 8 ...
EAT WHERE YOU'RE AT
Oct 08, 2008; ... The Triangle's bedroom communities host an expanding array of restaurants At the end of a long, winding road carefully landscaped to echo the surrounding woodlands, fledgling houses aimed at suburban, upper-middle-class families rise from raw day in various states of ...
Dixie soul on ice
Oct 08, 2008; ... What Southerners need to know about the Carolina Hurricanes and that Canuck sport Few would have predicted that the game of hockey could survive and thrive here in the Triangle, the land of NASCAR, sweet tea and the "art" of tailgating. While Sidney Lowe, Coach K and Ol' Roy are the ...
Pit bulls with hockey sticks
Oct 08, 2008; ... Women have played amateur hockey in the Triangle for more than a decade It's only in the second period that the hockey game between the all-female Trailblazers and the all-male Ice Hawks starts to look a bit like a blowout. After a fierce first period and a beautiful last-minute shot ...
Apocalypse soon
Oct 08, 2008; ... Apocalypse soon Durham playwright Miriam Angress tackles the big issues The N.C. Arts Council provides funding for theatrical endeavors in various ways, as evidenced by the NCAC logo on many playbills, but not often do we see the results of that funding as a distinct ...
HOME
Oct 08, 2008; ... ON THE BOARDS HOME UNIVERSITY THEATRE, NCCU Throujh Oct. 12; tickets: 530-5170 The stage directions to Samm-Art Williams' 1975 play, Home-the story of a black farmer's journey from the Carolines to New York City and back again-begin with two women singIng a Negro ...
NOW SERVING
Oct 08, 2008; ... new restaurants and happenings Forgive me, Tex-Mex fans, for I have sinned. It has been ... um, entirely too long ... since my last column devoted to breaking news in salsa, guacamole and quesadillas. In penance, I shall douse myself in margaritas and make regular pilgrimages to Taqueria ...
Live and let Di
Oct 08, 2008; ... Live and let Di The Duchess and I Served the King of England look back to European history In the anarchic world of cyber-communication, there's something I called Godwin's Law that states that as discussion on, say, a blog comment thread grows longer and more heated, it ...
THE DUCHESS
Oct 08, 2008; ... I SERVED THE KING OF ENGLAND Opens Friday in select theaters THE DUCHESS Opens Friday throughout the Triangle Why can't we let Diana, Princess of Wales, rest in peace? Other than in the minds of movie studio bean counters, there is little perceptible sales ...
Sounds and shapes
Oct 08, 2008; ... Three area musicians explain their new visual art MARIA ALBANI [Presents "The Aliphants"; plays in Schooner and Organos] "These are called 'Aliphants' because they're sort of elephants, and I incorporated my name into that I'm not very good at depicting things exactly as they ...
Five words with Girl Talk
Oct 08, 2008; ... Despite his popularity, producer Gregg Gillis, performing as Girl Talk, manages to skate beneath lawsuits for his mash-ups of unauthorized clips and bits: Rap dance anthems like "Walk it Out" bump hard against Sinead O'Connor's cover of "Nothing Compares 2 U" and Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," ...