Park Devereaux. 510 Glenwood. The Creamery. Coker Towers. 600 N. Boylan. The names and addresses may be familiar to readers of TheNews & Observer, where the progress of these new or proposed upscale condo and mixed-use complexes is charted in the paper’s news pages, while the projects’ merits and demerits are debated in its editorials […]
Mark W. Hornburg
Posted inGuides
Michael Quattlebaum
The word of the day is “tangents.” Michael Quattlebaum can’t stop veering off on them, or drawing attention to them. Sitting lotus-style on the floor of a first-floor gallery in Raleigh’s Artspace, the playwright is discussing the process he goes through in conceptualizing a new performance piece, and his synapses are sparking like fireworks. So […]
Posted inArt
Chapel Hellion
By David Rees’ own accounting, he had an idyllic childhood. Growing up in Chapel Hill in the ’70s and ’80s, he played Rainbow Soccer, helped his parents tend a vegetable garden, attended theater and the N.C. Symphony, went to Chapel Hill High School, and hung out with close friends, who encouraged him in his artistic […]
Posted inNews
Prodigal son
Carrying only a sheaf of papers and a bottle of water, David Sedaris walked out alone onto the stage of the 1,700-seat Meymandi Hall at Raleigh’s BTI Center recently to face his hometown crowd. In Raleigh, where the now internationally known author and NPR personality grew up and much of his family still lives, Sedaris […]
Posted inNews
Funny How It Goes
The first night of Roger Bates’ standup comedy course begins much like any other class–with handouts. Fifteen of us are sitting two apiece at small tables on the third floor of Charlie Goodnight’s comedy club in downtown Raleigh, in a cozy nook occasionally used for elite dining customers. As Bates makes a circuit of the […]
Posted inGuides
Artistic Differences
The great poet and critic William Empson wrote that critics, as “barking dogs,” are of two sorts: those who merely relieve themselves on the flower of beauty, and those, less continent, who afterwards scratch it up. Empson heartily threw himself into the second category, saying that “unexplained beauty arouses an irritation in me, a sense […]
Posted inArt
Against Interpretation
In the Dec. 1999 issue of Esquire magazine, an article entitled “The Life List: 175 Things Every Man Should Do Before He Dies” featured comic writer David Sedaris, offering his choice at No. 52: “Read Moby-Dick.” It is a book, Sedaris wrote, that his brother Paul would call “all symbolical and shit,” meaning that “no […]
Posted inArt
Ravenel’s Reward
If the ghost of Christmas future had appeared in Shannon Ravenel’s office at the end of 1999, flipped the calendar ahead exactly one year, and plunked Ravenel back down in her office circa Christmas 2000, the editorial director of Carrboro’s Algonquin Books might have been able to watch herself slowly packing books, correspondence and unread […]
Posted inArt
Stunted growth
Some men deal with the insecurities that come with reaching middle age by taking up with a younger woman. At 38, married author Tony Earley has gone the far safer route of cavorting with a younger fiction. By his own admission, Earley’s first novel, Jim the Boy, is meant to be a children’s story for […]
Posted inGuides
Burning Coal Theatre Company
Trying to establish a new theater company in an unfamiliar town means scaling a steep learning curve. But after only four years in Raleigh, Burning Coal Theatre Company’s husband-wife team, Jerome Davis and Simmie Kastner, look upon the Triangle’s performing arts landscape from a mighty peak, with the eyes of seasoned climbers. Within that short […]