Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom By Ken Ilgunas Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 320 pp. Reading at The Regulator Bookshop Tuesday, July 9, 7 p.m. If there is such a thing as the “American character,” Henry David Thoreau neatly exemplifies everything worth salvaging in the idea. Thoreau died in relative obscurity […]
Douglas Vuncannon
Posted inGuides
A walk from Raleigh to Garner yields surprises
The original plan was to ascend 1,000 feet in a hot air balloon, and then drift with the wind for an hour or two. Wherever we ended up would be our starting point, and from there I would try to find my way home on foot. Alas, ballooning doesn’t seem to be a good business […]
Posted inArt
Pantheon of Modern Gods is radioactive and potentially explosive
Robert Mihaly: Pantheon of Modern Gods Louise Jones Brown Gallery, Duke Campus Through May 5 Robert Mihaly seems perfectly at ease standing beside his sculpture “The Angel of Depleted Uranium” (2009), which incorporates a small sample of nuclear waste encased in a yellow and purple lead storage container. Depleted uranium, a neurotoxin and radioactive byproduct […]
Posted inNews
It’s time to reread Gore Vidal’s enduring Lincoln
Gore Vidal, a self-described narrator of empire, seems to enjoy nothing more than puncturing sacrosanct American icons. In novels and non-fiction he savages the “founding fathers,” portraying them as real, contemporary, political and, above all, thoroughly corruptible. In Vidal’s literary universe, the gods descend from Rushmore and become pedestrianand it’s not hard to imagine a […]
Posted inArt
Ackland’s collection of prints from Robert Frank’s The Americans
The Fifties and the Anti-Fifties: Robert Frank’s The Americans Ackland Art Museum Through Jan. 4 In 1958, Swiss-born Robert Frank published The Americans, and photography has never quite recovered. Frank’s passionate and penetrating visual statement taught the world a new way to see and, in the process, obliterated fastidious technical concern for exposure and traditional […]
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Photos document workers who built Convention Center
Five years ago, when it was announced that several major construction projects were to be undertaken within a few blocks of Doug Van de Zande’s McDowell Street studio, the photographer decided to document the cycle of demolition and erection on film. “Since I was right in the middle of it all, it was easy to […]
Posted inFilm & Television
A conversation with Errol Morris about the Abu Ghraib atrocities
Errol Morris, the Oscar-winning director of The Fog of War, The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death and Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, spoke with the Independent by telephone in late April from Seattle, where he was promoting Standard Operating Procedure, his new film that tackles the definitive scandal of America’s war in Iraq. In […]
Posted inArt
Adventurous group show at Durham Arts Guild
Dave Alsobrooks, Klint Ericson, Lindsay Pichaske and Melissa Miller Durham Arts Guild Through May 9 It’s agreeable to visit a gallery and notice that the law has been violated in the production of one of the paintings. It’s right there on a wall in the CCB Gallery of the Durham Arts Guild: While graffiti artists […]
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Vanlife
When I recently read about Angel Hess, an artist who has converted a 1953 bread truck into a garishly colored mobile home, I scoffed. At the moment, Hess is reportedly traveling around the country to promote his project and solicit donations. He even has a Web site (purple53.com) where he boasts that he’s “attempting something […]
Posted inArt
Excellence in photojournalism at the Ackland Art Museum
Picturing the World: Carolina’s Celebrated Photojournalists Ackland Art Museum Through April 6 Among the many exceptional, provocative and edifying photographs currently on exhibition at the Ackland Art Museum’s Picturing the World: Carolina’s Celebrated Photojournalists, there is one image that should be absorbed into the heart and mind of every American taxpayerespecially those who, unbelievably, still […]