Monday, February 6, 2012
What the negative saw: M.J. Sharp's long-exposure photographs at Durham's Craven Allen Gallery
Say the word “click” out loud. It’s only one syllable, but its sound has a beginning, middle and end. There’s a duration, albeit brief, before its harsh, terminal consonants. Despite that fact, photographs are commonly thought of as moments of frozen time. The camera’s click doesn’t elapse, it just occurs.
M.J. Sharp’s clicks, however, last for minutes or hours. A selection of her long-exposure photographs at the Craven Allen Gallery in Durham through Feb. 11 in a show entitled Light Cache features meditative images of her home and neighborhood, and nocturnal landscapes both local and distant. But the exhibition is notable for more than just the unconventional beauty and format of the images. Sharp’s personal journey through which she arrived at this process offers an alternative to the inherent violence and closed-endedness of a pervasive point-and-shoot mentality.
That said, many of Sharp’s images look like regular photographs. Blurred outlines, light discrepancies, or other long-exposure clues are rarely present. In some, odd luminosities and hyperreal details could give the sense that the image isn’t in the simple “click” family of exposures, but never demonstratively so. They aren’t about their process. Instead, they speak to Sharp’s curiosity about seeing in a way that the human eye simply can’t. And they represent, for Sharp, how time might be experienced similarly.
Friday, February 3, 2012
3.5 stars (out of 5)
Broadway Series South / North Carolina Theatre
Through Feb. 5
Unfortunately, AMERICAN IDIOT is not—repeat, not—the great American grunge opera.
Not with seven central characters this poorly defined and developed. And not with a flimsy book that reads, more than once, like a downer version of HAIR retrofitted specifically for Generation Y.
Since it’s hardly the first—or the twentieth—retelling of the story of disillusioned youth trying to come of age, it’s particularly disappointing that AMERICAN IDIOT comes up with so few new findings.
Much of that difficulty lies with director Michael Mayer. Though Green Day's 2004 propulsive, raw concept album made a number of lists for best album of that year (and decade), the main plot points in Mayer's stage adaptation appear to have been lifted from a couple of that era's movies of the week instead.
Johnny and Tunny, two not particularly robust examples of the genus man-child, forsake the crushing banality of suburbia by fleeing to the big city. (A third man-child, Will, opts to stay home after his girlfriend becomes pregnant.) The experience humbles both in short order: one gets into drugs, while the other joins a military that is—wait for it—dehumanizing and nothing like the commercials on TV.
Just imagine. I’ll wait; it shouldn’t take you very long.
With only a small handful of dialogue lines written (by Mayer and singer Billie Joe Armstrong) to link the various songs, the album’s lyrics basically form the book for these far too familiar tales. Unfortunately, it’s one that’s uneven at best.
- CBS Films
- Daniel Radcliffe as "Scary" Potter
** stars
Opens Friday (see times below)
The epochs of classic creature features and splatter fests have gradually given way to a contemporary horror film genre shaped by Asian influences and, more notably, the trappings of today’s technology. Starting with Hideo Nakata’s Ringu—a convenient, affecting marriage of these two influences—popular modern scare fare is the stuff of The Blair Witch Project and such progeny as Paranormal Activity. They’re the same chills and thrills, just filtered through the grainy prism of camcorder and surveillance monitors.
From this standpoint, The Woman in Black feels more like a musty curio than a standalone frightener. This adaptation of Susan Hill’s 1983 novel—already the basis for a West End theater production now approaching a run of 23 years—pays homage to the Gothic Hammer Horror films, not coincidental as it is the first feature shot in England under the until-recently dormant production banner in over thirty years.
Director James Watkins imbues every scene with the typical tropes: creepy kids, evil apparitions, a vine-covered manse, overgrown cemeteries and an array of spooky toys and music boxes. Shadows flutter about and objects jump out of nowhere, usually accompanied by a musical flourish. It’s all a handsome showcase that taps your sense of nostalgia more intensely than your adrenal gland.
Set in Victorian England, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a widower whose wife died four years ago while giving birth to their son (Misha Handley). Now a struggling solicitor and single dad, Kipps is dispatched to Crythin Gifford, a fictitious town on the east coast of Britain, to attend to the affairs of Mrs. Alice Drablow, a recently deceased recluse. There, Kipps finds a village of the damned as townsfolk grapple with an inexplicable epidemic of their children doing fatal harm to themselves.
Thursday, February 2, 2012
Birbiglia, Emo and Brill: Zach Ward discusses returning to North Carolina to oversee NC Comedy Arts Festival
- NC Comedy Arts Festival
- Zach Ward (right), performing with Emo Philips at last year's NCCAF
However, he’s still very much an integral, behind-the-scenes member of his pride and joy, the North Carolina Comedy Arts Festival, which began yesterday with shows at the DSI Comedy Theater. We spoke to Ward about what to expect at this year’s festival, as well as what’s going on comedy-wise over in his new Boston home.
Independent:So, Zach, you're up in Boston now. How long have you been there and what made you decide to move there?
Zach Ward: My first day as managing director of ImprovBoston was June 13, 2011. I was actively recruited by ImprovBoston, a 30-year-old comedy theater in Cambridge. I felt confident in both my company in Carrboro and the DSI leadership, so I was excited to take a pretty exciting professional step for my own comedy career. Paula Pazderka assumed my role as artistic director two weeks before I left for Boston and she has done exceptional work over the last seven months.
What made you decide to make the move up to Boston, and how different is the comedy scene over there as it is in the Triangle?
ImprovBoston as a theater and comedy school is very similar in many respects. However, the scope of my work has increased exponentially just given the metro market and what it takes to operate an arts organization in the city. The comedy scene and community are much larger—which has obvious benefits and unique challenges.
Was it difficult rounding up talent for the festival since you're in Beantown?
Not at all. NCCAF grows each year and we continue to see more and more unique acts to register, in addition to the veteran acts who have become festival favorites. I've been exposed to even more acts by traveling outside of North Carolina and, with our festival jury reviewing online submissions, NCCAF was able to curate one of the best line-ups we have ever had for the festival.
I see there is no film section this year. Why is there no more of that?
We really seek to provide the best line-up possible. NCCAF will bring film back when we can provide the strongest line-up possible with the ability to also bring the artists involved to the festival. For the past few years we have had specialized weeks, but we are considering introducing NCCAF Film into the other weeks for 2013 as a way to highlight projects by acts who may be performing live in standup, sketch or improv.
Mike Birbiglia is one of the headliners this year. He's lately been getting a lot of buzz for his movie, Sleepwalk with Me, which just played Sundance. You couldn't get him to play that flick at NCCAF?
Mike is part of our partnership with the Carolina Theatre—that is new this year. As we understand it, Mike was working on the film right up until the festival. Maybe next year. For 2012, Mike will be in town for the show and that's about it. But even that is awesome for comedy in the Triangle and great for the festival.
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
- Photo by Tamara Beckwith
- Adam Johnson
by Adam Johnson
Random House, 464 pp.
Most of The Orphan Master’s Son focuses on a North Korean man named after a government-appointed martyr whose name, Pak Jun Do, resembles “John Doe” for a reason. The book is at once a grand adventure, a hallucinatory ordeal, a deft spy story and a treatise on how the dogmas forced on people by ruthless institutions peel away truth and eventually even identity.
The book’s first section describes Pak Jun Do’s unlikely ascent to hero status. The rest of the book veers into something like magical realism gone wrong, where all the fantastical plot shifts and dreamlike moments are caused by the fear engendered by North Korea’s brutal regime.
Pak Jun Do and the others who live under Kim Jong Il are always prepared to hew to a reality in which all things glorify their Dear Leader. The stories they tell investigators and interrogators, the statements they make at work and in mandatory “criticism sessions,” and even private conversations among family members, are correspondingly nonsensical, and author Adam Johnson uses this absurdity to fuel Pak Jun Do’s bizarre journey from orphan to hero, from prisoner to politician.
Pak Jun Do’s identity is built on one such fiction, namely that, despite living in an orphanage, he is not an orphan. The boy decides he is actually the orphan master’s son mainly because the man treats him so badly: “Only a true father, flesh and bone, could burn a son with the smoking end of a coal shovel.”
The privilege of deciding which orphans do the merely menial jobs and which take the tasks more likely to be fatal also falls to Pak Jun Do—another sign, in his mind, of his true-born status—and the author implies that this may be at the root of his unwillingness to adhere completely to the rules of his society.
His ability to unmoor himself from the dogma is stymied somewhat by the simple fact that he has never known, or even glimpsed any other way of life, until he is recruited by the regime for various incursions into Japan, a mission monitoring radio transmissions from the hold of a fishing boat and, eventually, a surreal trip to Texas.
The moments when Pak Jun Do’s received knowledge collides with the reality of the wider world are stunningly effective on their own, and also as a backdrop for the catalog of humiliation that grows with Pak Jun Do’s every return home. Johnson’s presentation of the young man on the cold, cramped fishing boat, listening to radio transmissions from around the world night after night, zeroing in on the reflections of a particularly pensive American athlete who is trying to row around the globe, would stand alone as a gorgeous short story.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
- Photo by Meredith Heuer
- Daniel Handler
INDEPENDENT WEEKLY: I'm going to be blunt. A copy of your book arrived just this morning, and I finished it, and it’s a very gray and rainy day in Raleigh and this book did not help things.
DANIEL HANDLER: I’m sorry to hear that. I can only think of your suffering.
Well, I mean it as a compliment—the book captured for me the verisimilitude of a first romance and break-up. I’m curious about the roots of the story, and what inspired you to try to capture such heartache.
Well, it was Maira’s idea, I guess. We had worked together on a picture book (13 Words, written as Lemony Snicket), and she wanted to do another book, and she said yes. And I asked her what she wanted to paint, and she wanted to paint small objects, and I tried to think of a way that small, ordinary objects might seem magical. And it seemed to me that it would take a romantic imagination to transform such objects, and I began to imagine small objects returned to an ex-boyfriend by a sentimental-yet-enraged young woman like so many women I know.
Did Maira think of the objects, or did you?
- Photo by Rick Meyerowitz
- Maira Kalman
Something you’ve done with this book is get other writers to talk about their own worst break-up stories. When you were going back and putting yourself in the mindset of Min, what was the hardest part—or even the easiest part—of capturing the outsize emotions of a teenager?
I didn’t find it particularly hard to capture the voice. I take public transportation every day, and I’m surrounded by young people conversing, and I listen in to as much as I can without being called out as a creep. I guess maybe one of the more strenuous parts is I wrote the entire thing longhand—seeing as the entire book is one long letter, I thought it was only fair that I write a letter of my own. I wrote it all in cafés, basically, on legal pads, and by the end of writing my hand was roughly some sort of subhuman claw. The easiest part was having Maira doing all these paintings and have people talk about the spell the book casts, when so much of it comes from her drawings.
That’s oddly reminiscent of Jack Kerouac writing things out on a continuous scroll of paper, though on the one hand you’re talking about a fictional teenage girl and the other a drugged-out beatnik. But there’s a spontaneous feel to both.
I guess so. I’m kind of a careful writer, so a lot of what looks spontaneous in the book is actually several drafts old. It’s like what Dolly Parton used to say: “It takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” So I haven’t experienced much of the Jack Kerouac method, which to my knowledge involves lots of cocaine and beating women. That hasn’t been my preferred strategy in writing fiction.
You can only abuse women if they’re fictional.
I don’t think that’s a line Jack Kerouac drew. Though I spent a weekend at Jack Keuorac’s cabin once, and it was very beautiful. It’s out in the middle of nowhere, and you can understand he might be prone to fits of despair, as it’s very isolated, but also in an unbelievably beautiful location.
The book’s a first-person narrative, but there’s a certain unreliable quality to Min in that she’s not completely aware of herself and how the romance is really playing out. And what I thought was relevant about the story was that Ed’s not an evil character—his great crime is that he’s a teenage boy who doesn’t see the big moments or hurtful moments the same way Min does. Do you find that’s a common flaw in first relationships, or relationships in general?
I think romance itself is constructing a beautiful story from the very ordinary things that you are surrounded by, be they objects or people. So I think Min had a long narrative in her head informed by movies that she liked that didn’t in fact always fit the narrative that was going on. So sure, I think she’s unreliable, in the way that everyone is a little unreliable in their memory.
And it gets into the idea of how you can define yourself by a relationship, even without realizing it, and how that’s fundamentally unhealthy, which is something that got to me as a reader.
That’s the idea. I think that the entire point of a romance is to get as memorable as possible for as long as possible, and you have to allow someone to get a certain kind of significance in your head. And when it’s over, you’re angry at yourself for allowing them to get to you.
Love is strange, as Mickey & Sylvia said.
And tainted, as Soft Cell said.
I thought that was a remake of an older one.
It is, but I don’t remember the original, and I think that two-note synthesizer riff feels like the pierce of heartbreak.
What, in your mind, are the great romances, be they film, literature or real life?
Well, I guess it depends on the kind of romance you like. My favorite novel is Lolita, which is a great romance, though if it were happening in real life it would be less of a romance and more of a monstrosity.
One of the more intriguing aspects of the book is that Min has these fictional touchstones she refers to throughout the book—films and music that don’t exist in the real world. I read elsewhere that you did this in part to not tie the book to any specific time period. How’d you come up with these—do you think of titles in your spare time or things like that?
I think the problem with these things when they’re referred to in a novel is that they don’t mean the same things to the same people. So if you say something like, “Going out with this person makes me feel like I’m starring in When Harry Met Sally,” some people are going to say, “Oh, he means the most romantic movie of all time!” and others are going to say, “Oh, he means two hours of nails on a chalkboard, having an unbelievably grating time.” And if you have negative views about some movie, and the reader doesn’t like it, it’s a strange and alienating thing. So when Min describes movies that didn’t happen, it’s easier to imagine them as something beautiful in your head than if she’d described an actual film.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
Disclosing arts education dilemmas in New York, and North Carolina: "No Child..." at PlayMakers
- photo by Carol Rosegg
- Nilaja Sun in NO CHILD...
4 stars (out of 5)
PRC2
Through Jan. 15
To be truthful, I haven’t taught drama in a “worst of the worst” New York City classroom like playwright and performer Nilaja Sun, whose semi-autobiographical one-person show, NO CHILD… closes at PlayMakers Rep on Jan. 15. I taught high school drama in an economically and culturally impoverished North Carolina county during half of the last decade instead. It was the hardest—and most rewarding—job I have ever undertaken. And on the basis of the experience, I can say this much: Ms. Sun clearly knows whereof she speaks.
NO CHILD…is reportedly based on her years of experience as a teaching artist in New York public schools. The news is that it’s not a world apart from the challenged classrooms I saw in the rural South. Both reflect a popular culture supersaturated with sexuality, violence and speed. And if either had once cornered the market on ADHD, emotional, sexual and physical abuse or attitude, ignorance and pride, neither does now.
Yes, the quest Sun’s character faces during a short-term (and short-sighted) state grant—staging the Australian penal drama Our Country’s Good with a group of at-risk high schoolers who are theatrical beginners, in six weeks—is certainly quixotic. But it’s hardly unfamiliar in North Carolina, where a public education in the arts mandated by the state’s master Basic Education Plan still hasn’t yet been fully implemented, much less evenly distributed, across urban and rural systems—some 27 years after its ratification in 1985.
A new legislative commission tasked with finally closing that deal this Spring would give some cause for hope—had the Republican-led legislature it will ultimately report to not slashed millions of dollars from education last year and then declared open political warfare on the teachers who dared oppose them. In the meantime, the sort of inconsistent, “drive-by” arts education on display here remains hauntingly familiar, to say the least. If one of Sun’s central points in NO CHILD…concerns the wholesale abandonment of children by their families, society and the state, it bears noting that the troubled kids of New York aren’t the only ones who have suffered—and still suffer—this on a number of fronts, including public education and the arts.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Last exit to Llanview: Michael Malone looks back at his work on "One Life to Live," which ends today
Nor was it the stroke, the brain aneurysm, the killer virus, the breast cancer or the traumatic repressed memories that had resulted in her developing seven personalities and forgetting about giving birth to not one but two daughters (one of whom developed a split personality of her own before dying of lupus). No, for all her resilience, what finally killed Viki and her fellow residents of the fictional Llanview, Penn., was a diet show.
Llanview, setting of the 43-year-old ABC soap opera One Life to Live is just the latest fictional small town to disappear from TV screens in the last few years, in a wave of cancellations that have also seen Guiding Light, As the World Turns, Passions and All My Children leave the air.
“In a way, it was inevitable — not just to One Life, but to a genre that had a very good long run,” says Duke University English professor Michael Malone, who served as One Life’s head writer from 1991-1996 and 2003-2004.
“I’ll always say the fiction of Llanview lasted longer than Shakespeare’s Globe. These were very long-lived shows—30 years, 40 years, Guiding Light was 70 years. That’s a lot of stability in a very fast-moving medium like television. And it taught other parts of television how to make serials.”
Malone, a Durham native who resides in Hillsborough, says it’ll be “too painful” for him to watch on Friday, Jan. 13 when Viki and the others say goodbye, with a few cliffhangers and Viki taking yet a third round-trip to heaven before giving way to the new self-improvement talk show The Revolution with Ty Pennington and Tim Gunn. But he remembers his time in Llanview fondly, and maintains a deep and abiding respect for daytime soap operas, a genre of TV that seems on the verge of extinction.
Malone cites declining audiences for network programming for the soaps’ demise, along with the fact that “there became so many other ways to see this stuff,” citing shows such as Gray’s Anatomy and Six Feet Under as examples of programming that co-opted the soaps’ style of open-ended long-form serialized storytelling.
“It’s not that (audiences) don’t want story, it’s just that they have so many more ways to get it,” Malone says.
His tenure in Llanview was one of the show’s most influential periods, with many of the characters he created still playing major roles on the canvass as One Life to Live reaches its end. It was also one of the most unlikely pairings in television—a Southern literary novelist with no television-writing experience and a soap that by the time he arrived, had eschewed its roots as a spotlight for social issues in exchange for stories about time travel, lost underground cities and the aforementioned trips to heaven (in fairness, a storyline about a soap-within-a-soap had shot some exterior scenes on Duke University’s campus).
1993: Malone won an Emmy for this episode, which guest-starred Marsha Mason as a priestess who marries reformed bad boy Max and “North Carolina goddess-worshipping feminist” Luna.
Dirty Dancing producer Linda Gottlieb, who’d been brought on the save the program, recruited Malone as headwriter based on his experience as “someone who wrote capacious novels” such as Time’s Witness and Handling Sin.
“In a way, our complete ignorance of (daytime’s) traditions gave us complete freedom to do adventuresome things,” Malone says.
Those “adventuresome things” included tackling issues that even prime-time TV was shying away from in the 1990s. One of Malone’s first major storylines cast a 17-year-old Ryan Phillippe as a gay teenager struggling to come out; the story climaxed with the AIDS quilt being brought to Llanview, with the names of actual AIDS victims read on a location shoot.
For Malone, the story represented an opportunity to allow viewers to relate to the issue through characters they had come to know through years of viewing.
“To have Viki carry the AIDS quilt into the church and lay it on the altar was to say to the audience of One Life who had spent so many years with Viki and trusted her judgment that ‘It can’t be all bad to be accepting and understanding,’” Malone says. “For all its conservatism, daytime expands tolerance.
It also allowed him a broader audience than his literary work.
“There was no way ever on God’s green earth that five million people a week would be reading my novels, but they might see Viki carrying that AIDS quilt to that altar.”
1992: A CBS This Morning segment and the final scenes from Malone’s gay teen/AIDS storyline.
Malone’s greatest acclaim came the following year with a large story where town bad girl Marty Saybrooke (named for his daughter Margaret), was brutally gang-raped and brought her attackers to trial. The story won Emmys for many of the actors involved (and Malone himself received an Emmy for his work on the show that year), but ran into trouble when Roger Howarth, who played lead rapist Todd Manning, became so popular that the character had to be kept on the show.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
- Alex Bailey. Courtesy of Pathe Productions Ltd/ The Weinstein Company
- Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe
** stars
Opens Friday (see times below)
If ever it was possible for an opening scene to buoy an entire feature-length motion picture, The Iron Lady would be it. Having wandered away from her London home and past her caretakers, a senile, octogenarian Margaret Thatcher (Meryl Streep) is shopping in a small corner mart. As loud Indian music blares over the loudspeakers, a besuited businessman pushes past her while yammering into his cell phone; a young black customer in headphones faintly rolls his eyes at the doddering old woman. There’s irony when Thatcher, a grocer’s daughter, does a double-take when told that a pint of milk costs 49 pence.
No one recognizes the iconic Cold Warrior, but what’s more, it is a world she no longer recognizes. It’s a biting collage of class and culture as brilliant as anything Stephen Frears has ever filmed.
Off this lofty perch, however, falls the rest of this biopic from director Phyllida Lloyd (who directed Streep in Mamma Mia!) and screenwriter Abi Morgan (co-writer of Shame). Told in flashback rote, the narrative oscillates throughout from the present-day senescent Thatcher to her early days as an ambitious Oxford grad with an eye and gut for politics. The former Miss Roberts (portrayed by Alexandra Roach) falls for and marries Denis Thatcher (played as a young man by Harry Lloyd), but only after he agrees to abide by her political ambition.
From there, it’s off to a whirlwind of biographical touchstones: Thatcher (now played by Streep) being elected to Parliament in 1959; unseating Edward Heath as leader of the Conservative party; becoming England’s first female prime minister in 1979; her 11-year tenure, highlighted by trade union strikes, IRA terrorism and, of course, the Falkland Islands conflict; and being deposed as party head in 1990.
The film’s true iron lady is Streep. Her role is susceptible to suspicion as it contains all three ingredients of the Oscar formula: British, biographical and disability-centric (in the case of the latter-day Thatcher). However, Streep’s depiction goes well beyond mere impersonation, ably portraying Thatcher at both her most harrowing and heroic.
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
A tribute to the lovable awfulness of "One Tree Hill," which begins its ninth and final season tonight
On Jan. 11, the CW drama—and that term is used loosely—One Tree Hill will begin its ninth and final season, bringing to an end nearly 200 episodes of teen melodrama that included brazen guest stars (Kevin Federline!), shameless product placement (watch Tree Hill High’s cheerleaders pose for Maxim!) and plot twists seemingly borne out of a combination of desperation and illegal narcotics (villainous Dan loses out on a heart transplant because a dog eats his donor heart!).
Please take a moment to think of all the decisions required for this scene to take place, including finding a heart and training a dog to grab it on cue. Or just the impulse to write this, pitch it to a network, have sets built and make actors play it out with a straight face.
Other shows and films produced in North Carolina have made more of an impact on the cultural zeitgeist, notably One Tree Hill’s predecessor in teen angst, Dawson’s Creek, which also filmed in Wilmington (One Tree Hill premiered the fall after Dawson's Creek wrapped).
But for all its insanity, One Tree Hill remains one of the most important productions in the history of North Carolina for one simple reason: It lasted. Even as production for film and TV moved out of state—or out of country, more often—One Tree Hill's patented combination of vacillating romance, 20-somethings playing shirtless teenagers and wall-to-wall emo rock that provided episode titles and a slew of bestselling soundtrack albums kept it on the air for nearly a decade, coming in second only to the original Beverly Hills, 90210 as the longest-running American teen drama.
Its success was improbable—originally a feature film, it was reconceived as a TV series and saw its production abruptly move to Wilmington after the then-head of The WB was concerned for the area after Dawson’s Creek wrapped production there. (I dimly remember reading at the time he was moved to tears after receiving the key to the city.)
It then got bumped at the last minute from a mid-season replacement to the fall lineup when The WB decided to preemptively dump the series Fearless before its premiere. It launched with no hype, negative reviews and was initially beaten in the ratings by a short-lived UPN sitcom called The Mullets.
And then it somehow ran nine years.
The smaller viewership expectations of The WB and later The CW no doubt helped, but One Tree Hill's longevity can be attributed to certain ruthlessness in targeting its audience. Its attitude can best be summed up in the Gavin DeGraw lyrics that made up the theme song for its early seasons: “I don’t want to be anything other than what I’ve been trying to be lately.”
That strange mixture of earnestness, defiance and articulate-yet-inarticulate grammar defined One Tree Hill, allowing it to survive a changed network, the loss of its original stars and a time-jump that conveniently skipped over the characters' college years. The world of One Tree Hill served as an interior landscape for the teen psyche worthy of Charlize Theron’s deluded author in Young Adult.
Teenagers got married—and stayed married. Or they launched hugely successful clothing lines straight out of high school. Bands like Fall Out Boy would just happen to show up in the fictional hamlet of Tree Hill, N.C., and stick around for a while. Interlopers would turn out to be full-blown psychos who had to be blown away in a cornfield. Parents weren’t just disapproving—they would actually commit arson, manipulate politics and in one case, kill one another. We’re still trying to figure out that bit with the dog and the heart.
Behind the scenes, One Tree Hill was…well, nothing could be as insane as its storylines, but it came close. Star Chad Michael Murray married co-star Sophia Bush, was divorced by her on grounds of “fraud” and became engaged to a Wilmington extra who was still in high school when they met.
Recurring player Antwon Tanner pleaded guilty in a federal court with plans to sell Social Security numbers.
And Paul Johansson, who played Dan, used his time away from the show to direct the critically derided film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.
Awesome work, ladies! I love getting know a bit more about the micro communities around the Triangle. And I can't …
by April McGreger on At the gas station, biscuits, tortillas—and community (Food Feature)
@michael pollan
"Occupy Chapel Hill has been on the whole very supportive of both the building takeovers. "
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by Michael Czeiszperger on Carrboro Commune occupies CVS building (Orange County)