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As I get further into my tenure at Duke, as responsibilities increase and free time dwindles, I find something bizarre happening to me, a self-professed health nut: I’m eating worse.
The Christmas season is about giving and getting, and Sir Walter Records is providing Triangle residents with a local, musical variety of both.
It is a terrible feeling to read a book by your favorite author and wonder whether you should go back and reread their previous works to see whether they were really as good as you remember.
Throughout the Coen brothers’ new near-masterpiece, A Serious Man, it is made very clear that Larry Gopnik (played to perfection by Michael Stuhlbarg) is not the figure of the title. Gopnik is a hapless professor and a bumbling, panic-stricken cuckold, seeking tenure and anticipating his son’s upcoming Bar Mitzvah. At its most basic level, the film is a story about how all of this goes wrong.
The Strokes are rapidly becoming a better-dressed, indie-rock version of Bill Belichick. Like Coach Hoodie’s many disciples now also head-coaching in the NFL, the leather-clad New York outfit has spawned albums from four of its five original members, two having joined bands and two going it alone. The most recent of these is frontman Julian Casablancas with his solo debut, Phrazes for the Young, and it’s the best Strokes-affiliated release since 2003’s Room on Fire.
Traditionally, one of the best parts of Halloween is putting on a costume, which means adopting another identity—splitting your personality, if you will. Some, however, are lucky enough to not have to dress up to discover their doppelganger. Whether it’s because their egos are so large that one normal identity can’t contain them, or a demon has been unleashed inside of them or they’re just bored. Everyone from the most famous celebrities to mere students have fallen under the curse of multiple personality disorder. Jekyll and Hyde were the trendsetters, the Madonnas of schizophrenia. Theirs is a rare case of physical transformation, unless you include early and late Barry Bonds. Today’s popular music is rife with the phenomenon: there’s Beyonce, turned by a post-“Crazy in Love” explosion into the demonic and less talented Sasha Fierce. There’s regular, everyday sweetheart Miley Cyrus (she’s just this girl that’s rocking kicks!) and superstar blonde Hannah Montana, famous for a kids’ TV show and not posing for Annie Leibovitz. If you didn’t get the reference the first time, T.I. became T.I.P., pitting self against self. Wonder what kind of envy Freud would call that. Bowie’s a good one. He was David Bowie, Ziggy Stardust—homosexual space alien—and the Thin White Duke, a period in which he supposedly doesn’t remember because of all the coke (doubt anyone here could relate to that). Some bridge their personalities within genre, but Joaquin Phoenix made the unprecedented move from actor to rapper/full-time beard. Think showers in those sunglasses? Does he shower? What mysteries do these personalities procure? Who else has an evil twin that goes bump in the night? And might they even be other Duke students, even your own roommate? We here at recess know of at least one: our editor, Andrew Hibbard, who moonlights as radio personality Ira Glass. Some people don’t need Halloween costumes.
For this album, you’re obviously singing a lot more than rapping. What’s it like for you to sing versus for you to rap?
There are a few givens when it comes to a David Mamet play: profanity, liberal doses of chauvinism, rhythmic and complex dialogue. And especially with Glengarry Glen Ross—arguably Mamet’s best, most famous work—the script will offer few surprises. Regardless, these inevitabilities don’t make the piece any easier to perform. It is intricate and complicated with deftly intertwined lines that an unprepared or untalented actor will likely butcher. This just compounds the amount of credit due to the Deep Dish Theater Company, who are currently presenting Glengarry Glen Ross at their intimate theater inside Chapel Hill’s University Mall. The play tells the story of a competition between four salesmen at a struggling real estate office in Chicago. The top producer gets a Cadillac, the second a set of steak knives and the other two pink slips. These stakes seem high enough in the abstract, but Mamet makes them a matter of life and death. Nothing less than the characters’ existences seem to be at risk. Such narrative intensity demands a similar velocity of performance, and the company sweats blood on their well-designed set. In particular, actors David Ring (Levene), John Murphy (Moss) and Joshua Purvis (Roma) are incendiary, and the one scene where all three are on stage at once is breathlessly intense. Although there are times when a subtler approach might have achieved an equally convincing—and probably more nuanced—effect, it’s enjoyable and enthralling to watch the characters dress each other down with the full brutality of Mamet’s hypermasculine ego. The other actors hold their own as well, particularly Byron Jennings as Williamson; Jennings’ handling of the character’s delayed comeuppance recalls Kevin Spacey’s performance in the brilliant 1992 film adaptation. That said, there were times when a few of the more minor parts seemed to lose the thread of conversation, though these snags were usually trivial. The set, a dimly lit, generic Chinese restaurant prior to intermission and a squalorous and ransacked office post-break, is atmospheric and eye-catching. They supply a gritty realism to the characters’ diatribes and lectures, a reality that is beautifully phrased and viscerally wrought. Glengarry Glen Ross will be performed tonight through Saturday at the Deep Dish Theater. For more information visit deepdishtheater.org
The beautiful list of music video collaborations just got a new entry, and it’s so unhinged it makes Harvey Keitel playing poker with Hova look perfectly normal in comparison.
I left class with instructions to Google Anton Meiwes, the German cannibal (it was a relevant example, promise). This was an instruction from my professor, a man who proclaimed that he wears “cheap-a— clothes” from Bangladesh, to not just me but an entire class (and a great class, in the academic sense—not sucking up, it’s just the highlight of my average Monday/Wednesday)(What up, MF). I never got around to Google-ing Meiwes beyond checking the spelling of his name for the purposes of this bit of writing, but, in true Carrie Bradshaw fashion, it got me thinking about that Dirty Projectors song “Cannibal Resource” (What up, AG).
At this moment, one of North Carolina’s most rapidly ascendant writers of fiction is probably very busy not writing. Terrence Holt—Dr. Terrence Holt, M.D. and Ph.D.—is likely attending to the inpatient geriatric ward at the University of North Carolina’s School of Medicine, teaching a class on the ethics of medicinal practice or administering to the elderly at a Triangle-area retirement home.
Taking the reins of a jazz band numbering over a dozen musicians is challenging enough. But Marshall Allen faced a unique obstacle after eventually replacing the deceased Sun Ra as director of his eponymous Arkestra.
East Campus is a part of Duke, and freshmen are Duke students. But if a concert—namely, Wale’s appearance Friday, Aug. 28—was produced in such a way that 75 percent of undergraduates had little chance of showing up, was it truly a Duke event?
The future of rap was on East Campus Friday night. With him came inclement conditions but the general attitude seemed to be encapsulated by the response of one student when asked how long he was willing to wait for Wale: "Forever."
Do you play a lot of concerts at colleges?
So it's a lovely summer evening, and you want to see a show. You don't have a car, which means Cat's Cradle is out of the question. Most of your cash is going toward food, making an expensive ticket to Carolina Theater unrealistic. And you're underage, so a bar isn't the, ahem, most legal of options. But don't fret-Director of Duke Performances Aaron Greenwald has an idea for you. And it's free, if you're a student.
I'm a New Englander. You can tell. I don't have the Southern charm (read: accent). I harass people when they claim to be cold. I call Manhattan "The City," regardless of who I'm talking to. Before I came to Duke, I'd lived in Connecticut all my life. And as a New Englander, from the heart of a state that relies on this broader identity for the bulk of its own character, I went through the typical rites of our coastal culture in high school.
Seven years of LDOCs have given Duke University seven lineups of varying success. In the interest of nostalgia for concerts that I've never seen, one that I have and one that hasn't even happened yet (I'm pretty confident about that one, though), here is an authoritative ranking of the LDOCs, in descending order.
It's rare to see Ethan Coen's name in print without a "Joel &" preceding it. This is unfortunate, considering that my first reaction upon finishing the noted screenwriter's collection of three one-act plays, Almost an Evening, was a desire for more.
Durham isn't the suburbs, but a bevy of local and national artists will be rocking the Gothic Wonderland this LDOC. Music begins on the Plaza Stage at 12:30 p.m., with folksy Ithaca, N.Y. band the Makepeace Brothers kicking off the festivities. Fresh from touring with Jason Mraz, the Brothers' acoustic sound emulates Mraz's shambling, relaxed style.
