36 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
(01/28/10 4:26am)
Correction (Feb. 1 12:16 a.m.):Due to a reporting error, and earlier version of this story incorrectly named the Greensboro theater where Stuart Hoyle landed his first projectionist job. It was the Janus Theater. The story has been changed to reflect the correction. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for the error.
(01/21/10 5:38am)
Dive verdict: 4 of 5 stars
(01/14/10 3:52am)
Plot isn’t so much an ornament or a fixture as it is a messy obstruction in “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.”
(11/19/09 5:02am)
Correction (March 1 10:35 pm): Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Backtracks is a two-CD, three-DVD set. The version reviewed by Diversions contains two CDs and one DVD. The story has been changed to reflect the correction. The Daily Tar Heel apologizes for these errors.
(11/12/09 4:29am)
“It’s subtle. It’s clever. But is it convincing?”So says Sy Ableman, the seemingly benevolent acquaintance of the Coen brother’s latest ill-fated protagonist. The victim this time is Larry Gopnik, an average suburban- American Jew in the late 1960s, and Sy has actually stolen his wife (in a totally kosher way, of course). It’s one of many misfortunes to befall poor Larry, who seeks guidance from three very different rabbis, searching for the reason why God is punishing him.Sadly, Sy’s commentary has to be turned on the movie itself. We know it’s subtle and clever, like everything the Coen brothers do. But for some reason it just isn’t that convincing this time around. Their trademark black humor is neither particularly black nor particularly humorous. Save for Fred Melamed as Ableman, none of their actors stand out — they didn’t collaborate with any of their usual stars. And the fool-proof crowd pleaser for any Coen brothers fan — a sudden act of unexpectedly brutal violence — is dearly missed. The good thing about the Coens is that one can always appreciate what they’re trying to do, even if one doesn’t necessarily appreciate what they have done. “A Serious Man” is without a doubt a thought-provoking translation of “The Book of Job.”Like the Hebrew parallelisms of the original poetry, the Coens’ inventive side plots and pensive long takes labor intensively over the question of human suffering, folding and unfolding in drowsy Semitic rhythm.I can also say, without giving away too much, that God has a cameo out of the whirlwind that’s bewildering at first but increasingly meaningful the more I reflect on it.But overall the Job-correspondence might be a little too perfect. It’s always infinitely frustrating to get to that point in Job where the poor guy finally receives his answer from God about why he suffers. “Where were you when I made the hippopotamus?” asked God rhetorically and senselessly. Had I been Job, I would have asked God what I now ask the Coens: “WTF are you talking about?”
(11/05/09 4:23am)
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the Varsity Theatre on Franklin Street is set to reopen. Sometime in late November the reels will be running again under new management, playing mainstream and classic films rather than the more unmarketable independent fare it used to offer.
(09/24/09 3:52am)
When owner Bruce Stone made the tough decision over the summer to close the Varsity Theater, he had more than just the loss of a landmark weighing on his mind. Having owned the Varsity for a mere nine years, and his other, larger Chapel Hill theater, the Chelsea, for 19, experience told him that the Chelsea stood a better chance in the changing economy of art-house cinema, despite the fact that the Varsity was actually a far older institution.“That was the decision we made,” Stone said. “We had to go with one or the other.” It was a decision few welcomed, though all had to accept it in the end. The Chelsea stayed while the Varsity closed up.The sad reality is that art-house, or “specialty” cinema, is a sector of the economy in a state of dramatic and destructive flux.A host of problems, mostly caused by the closing of specialty distributors and the withholding of potentially popular independent films until the winter awards season, has created a kind of annual boom and bust cycle in smaller specialty theaters, which often have only two to four screens. In this cycle, theaters eke out slight ticket sales during a slow summer movie season, and then don’t have enough screens to run all the myriad award contenders in late fall and winter. This makes it hard to support multiple small independent theaters in a town the size of Chapel Hill.“It’s thin in the summer,” Stone said. “The issue was that there were fewer movies available. Closing one theater is a way to keep all your eggs in one basket.”When asked if this summer’s crop of independent films drew bigger crowds, Stone’s assessment was measured, listing bigger drawers such as “(500) Days of Summer,” “Away We Go,” and “Whatever Works.” However, he also acknowledged the reality of summer syndrome.“We’ve had a couple of slow weeks recently.” As for one of the other big problems that crippled the Varsity, the notoriously inconsistent, inconvenient and unappealing parking situation on Franklin Street, Stone says that the Chelsea remains immune to such a problem.“The parking there has always been free, abundant and clean.”While the Chelsea continues precariously on its own path, mainstream multiplexes in the area are doing strong business as usual. Possibly even stronger now that the Varsity is closed, says Jason Barker, a manager at the Lumina Theater in Southern Village. “It’s been more of a help than a hindrance,” Barker said on the Varsity’s closing, adding that even during the general economic downturn “there hasn’t been much of a change.”Jennifer Gallinari, another manager at the Lumina, expanded on their drawing power with students, which was also a major cause of the Varsity’s closing. “With the close proximity of campus, they’re coming out more often,” she said. “They’ve even been coming out more in recent years.”Gallinari added that she has noticed students coming to the Lumina even from Duke and N.C. State, which is curious given the Varsity’s inability simply to draw crowds from UNC. It was this lack of patronage from college students that ultimately doomed the Varsity. Where an off-campus, independent theater like the Chelsea, in a comfortable, geriatric location like a shopping center, can bet on sufficient patronage from older movie-goers, a Franklin Street theater is unlikely to succeed without strong student attendance. Meanwhile, multiplexes virtually have their work done for them once a spacious parking lot has been paved, and, as the Lumina’s situation has shown, when the competition of art-house cinema shuts down. But despite the difficulty of running an independent movie house, Bruce Stone is stoic in discussing the Chelsea’s future prospects. “It’s promising when you hunker down,” he said. “We always worry. We worry everyday. “But we’ve been at it for 19 years, and we think it works pretty well.”Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(09/03/09 3:20am)
Dom Flemons is excited, and he thinks you should be too. After years of intensely studying Piedmont string music, often at the side of wizened veterans, Flemons and his two bandmates Justin Robinson and Rhiannon Giddens, together known as the Carolina Chocolate Drops, are coming to play the Cat’s Cradle for the first time on Saturday.“We were too small-time,” Flemons said, explaining why the band has never played the venue. “And now we’ve come around the block and we’re coming to Chapel Hill.”The Carolina Chocolate Drops are an old-time string band, and a household name among fans of folk and bluegrass in the Triangle. And considering their meteoric ascent in the string music community, which includes three studio albums in as many years, spots on the soundtrack of 2007’s “The Great Debaters,” multiple appearances at the Shakori Hills Festival, opening for the legendary blues guitarist Taj Mahal, and a guest spot on A Prairie Home Companion, it’s surprising that the Chocolate Drops have never played the Cradle before.But just because they’re new to the Cradle doesn’t mean they’re new to Chapel Hill. The Chocolate Drops, based out of Durham, have performed at Carrboro’s ArtsCenter, and have even been spotted around campus, picking away at their unique style on the stone walls of Polk Place.That style, according to Flemons, is pretty simple. “When most people ask us what we play, I just tell them old-time fiddlin’ banjo music,” he says. “But we also do old-time blues and country, and old-time jazz as well. I try to keep it really simple.”Specifically, though, the Chocolate Drops have revitalized a style of African-American string music that originated in the Piedmont of North and South Carolina, centering on the banjo. They learned many of their tunes from mentor Joe Thompson, an African-American fiddler from Mebane who is one of the last of the original Piedmont string musicians.They also learned from Durham blues legend John Dee Holeman, a guitarist largely responsible for the prominence of “Carolina blues,” a style showcased in the annual Bull Durham Blues Festival. Holeman will be opening for the Chocolate Drops at their Cat’s Cradle concert.“By that point I was already starting to play the old-time styles,” Flemons says of the first time he played alongside the legend. “And you know, playing with people like John Dee, I learned a lot from standing next to these guys.”Flemons, like the two other members of the band, is a multi-instrumentalist. When asked how many instruments he could play, Flemons kept a running list, eventually totaling six or seven, including “the guitar, the banjo, the jug, the harmonica and the bones” (also known as the spoons). As a result, their shows are often rollicking events that never stagnate, encouraging the audience to get up and dance even if they don’t know the traditional clogging techniques that accompany the music.“It’s good time music,” Flemons concludes. “And they should come in with open hearts and open minds and open bodies ready to dance. It’s community music, so I hope that people will want to sing along, they’ll want to dance, they’ll want to clap their hands with us, of course.”Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(06/24/09 4:00am)
3 of 5 starsDon't be fooled by the opening credits of ""Easy Virtue."" The cheesy animation passes it off for a BBC television special" with all the prissy Brits fretting woefully over silverware placement. But director Stephan Elliott trumps up the illusion only to smash it to bits. This movie isn't so much Jane Austen and Masterpiece Theatre as it is F. Scott Fitzgerald with a dash of Flying Circus for good laughing measure.The stage is England at the end of the Roaring Twenties. Jessica Biel is cast as Larita a race car driver a widow and (gasp) a Yankee with the gall to marry her youthful British lover-boy John Whittaker (Ben Barnes). It turns out however that this lover-boy is a derelict aristocrat with a manipulative mother (Kristen Scott Thomas) and a faraway shell-shocked vet of a father (Colin Firth). As John brings Larita home to meet the in-laws his parents and sisters (and butlers and cooks and gentry neighbors" etc.) are all dazzled at first by her beauty and then alternately shocked or endeared by her ""easy virtue.""The ensuing conflicts of spirit are rather predictable" whether between Redcoat and Yankee Tory and Whig Victorian and Modernist or country gentry and city slicker but the effect is still appreciable. In the end Elliott has tied together all the complex threads of a troubled family. They seem charming at first in that way that Brits are always good for a diverting patronizing laugh" but they are all masking lifetimes of utter disappointment.It's a useful coincidence that Scott Thomas stars in ""Easy Virtue"" because it can be compared with her other astounding role in the recent French film I've Loved You So Long."" That film"" along with ""Rachel Getting Married"" and a few others"" was part of a recent crop of dramas concerned with the reintegration of siblings into troubled families. ""Easy Virtue"" the comparison reveals, is not nearly as significant a human exploration as its peers. Despite above-average performances by Scott Thomas and Firth, its stock characters and its plain old silliness drag it down.But, thankfully, it's also the silliness that saves the movie. Without it, the melancholy love story that tries to be the center of attention would come off as flatly conceited. This is one movie where it's imperative to ignore the story for the genre. For Easy Virtue"" this means ditching the heartbreak for the comedy of manners. The movie's real backbone is its high-quality" dead-pan British humor and its greatest treat is actor Kris Marshall who plays a hilarious" stone-cold butler named Furber. While the ""serious"" actors wrestle with the implications of poison gas and pornographic Modernist literature" Furber presides over a house staff that functions like a slightly more sober version of Monty Python. The best antidote to British drama apparently is British comedy" and ""Easy Virtue"" makes this clear as the manor-house crystal. Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(06/17/09 4:00am)
It's mind-boggling to understand how difficult ""The Brothers Bloom"" must have been to act in or direct. It's a meta-fictional con story unlike any other. At points it could care less for the actual scam being pulled than it could for telling the story of the art of scamming.Brothers Stephen (Mark Ruffalo) and Bloom (Adrien Brody) have lived a life full of cons in which Stephen makes up elaborate narratives for Bloom to execute as they trick rich victims out of their millions. The major plot thrust of the film is their last con"" a sad job on a lonely and loony heiress (Rachel Weisz) who is so wealthy that all she can do is ""collect hobbies.""Stephen's dream is ""the perfect con"" inventing a story that his brother can tell so well that it becomes real. This gives the acting more layers than seems sustainable at first. Ruffalo and Brody play characters who are playing characters with stories both real and fake, and whose profession is to blur the line between the two. The actors are required to straddle the threshold between underacting and overacting, which isn't exactly narrow. And director Rian Johnson is required to harness the perpetual anticlimax of their con to keep the movie rolling. It must have been hard, but all three pull off the cinematic heist with more than just the familiar cheap tricks of the genre. There's a pleasing taste of the urban retro to The Brothers Bloom."" It's like a gourmet Guy Ritchie film" playing the artsy patrician to Ritchie's Cockney plebeian. Stephen and Bloom run around in signature pork pie and bowler caps passing themselves off as antique collectors in a universe where the European and American upper classes retain the fashion sense of the inter-war years. Johnson looks hard for the texture of the Old World in hotels bars and Belgian plazas and though it doesn't give him as much as he thinks it does it does give him a good deal. It smacks of Euro-hipsterism occasionally but mostly it rings with literary wit and intelligent humor.Unfortunately the movie's nature of meta-fiction is artificially limiting. You can't really make a story about itself and expect it to go too far; it's a post-modern dead-end. It can provide interesting explorations of small and localized issues" but ""The Brothers Bloom"" doesn't seem too invested in these. What it does well is re-imagine the con movie"" substituting anticlimax where the traditional ""Ocean's 11""-style flick wraps things up in a neat little bank account. And by harnessing this for it's ending as well as its start" it showcases Johnson's control as director. It's not every day someone can re-imagine a fun genre and still keep it fun. Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(06/10/09 4:00am)
3.5 of 5 stars""Tyson"" is a strange" surprising sports documentary. It's about as strange in fact as its subject which is really saying something.Everyone remembers Mike Tyson for his precocious boxing ability his reputation for brutalizing women and his sweet tooth for the delicious earlobe of Evander Holyfield. What people forget about Tyson is his tough sadly touching childhood in east Brooklyn. It can be assumed that a lot of people grow up underprivileged in America and that it negatively affects the rest of their lives as well. But Tyson's childhood can't be taken for granted. Listening to this human dump-truck reminisce about the first fight of his life when a neighborhood bully broke the neck of one of his beloved pet pigeons which seemed to be his only friends at the time it becomes clear that Tyson is trying to remind people that he's human. We can criticize him for being a juvenile delinquent (he was arrested more than 30 times by the age of 13) or dismiss his boxing career as that of a vicious animal in the heat of blood lust but then again what does a childhood in the ghetto give you to work with?It gave Tyson like it has given so many other angry scared young men" a quick punch. At the age of ten he was routinely ""humiliated in the street"" as he puts it with almost classical gravity. At 20, he was heavyweight champ. At 26 he was in a federal penitentiary on conviction of rape. At 30, heavyweight champ again. Tyson"" follows this history" which reeks of the absurd as if it were an existential nightmare of identity. And it's Tyson interestingly who is the first to identify the nightmare. To highlight Tyson's identity crisis director James Toback gets adventurous on the cutting-room floor periodically fragmenting the interviews with three-way spit screens and audio overlaps. Tyson's recollections as a result are mashed up in a totally unique stream of consciousness that flows like the soupy brain pulp of a pro boxer. Toback also calibrates the rhythm of his cuts to fit the archive footage of Tyson's lighting fast punches. It goes a long way to help one understand the psychology of fighting that Tyson speaks of often.Non-judgmental cameras capture interviews with Tyson for the bulk of the movie aiding in his project of recasting himself as a man maligned. He speaks with his distinctive soft lisp recites poetry that isn't half bad and constantly puts his finger on the pulse of his life's story. But none of it can mask the footage of his brutally homophobic public ranting or his eagerness to sling misogynistic insults at former lovers. This curious combination of sensitivity and hateful pigheadedness gives the most honest moral impression of the man that's conceivable which is one of ambiguity and surprising versatility. Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(05/27/09 4:00am)
3.5 of 5 starsIt isn't hard to believe in a professional sport so riddled with cheating and shortcuts" that almost all Major League Baseball teams operate puppy mills in the Dominican Republic.That's what their ""baseball academies"" amount to" for the most part: puppy mills for young ball-players aspiring to the American major leagues. They're fed decently and sleep in barrack-style bunk-beds under curfew and armed guard. In return" they get a one-in-a-hundred shot against cut-throat competition for a place in the major leagues.It's this fine line between exploitation and opportunity that Miguel Santos (Algenis Perez Soto) walks in ""Sugar."" Santos"" whose nickname is ""Sugar"" is a young Dominican pitcher who gets called up from one of those baseball academies to the minor leagues in the Iowa corn country. It's the break he's been waiting for to improve his and his family's prospects in his jobless homeland.Apparently, being a chicken in a pen (as the directors suggest Santos is in his academy) is better than being hungry in the Third World, but both are trumped by living with an embarrassingly un-cosmopolitan host family in lily-white middle America.Or so Sugar thinks at first. He's a promising pitcher and strong-willed, but with a temper and an unfavorable learning curve. With a good pitch (a knuckle-curve, for the record) and a prayer, he hopes to avoid the fate of so many other Dominican players in America who are deported when their abilities slip and their contracts are not renewed. As this fear begins to materialize, he takes his life into his own hands and leaves Iowa for the only thing more American than baseball: New York City, the immigrant's Eden.Like it sounds, Sugar"" is a story of Americanization" but it isn't star-spangled. Directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck a young couple that tag-teamed on the directing and screenplay make it clear on multiple occasions that the road to American prosperity is paved with the bodies of those who fall by the wayside.This paradox even extends to baseball. One person tells Sugar that baseball is a game to be enjoyed while another tells him he has to look out for himself and best his brothers to stay alive. Welcome to the American Dream son.Boden and Fleck do a surprisingly decent job not getting bogged down in the usual cliches of their genre. It's not a sports movie with a sparkling ending or a predictable one but the ending fits like a broken-in glove.They also thankfully don't overuse the montage that has become so stale in most sports movies. Their style has an urban cultural freshness to it with a dozen colors for every borough in New York.If the movie bogs down for the long middle section it's because the slow story through Sugar's Iowa excursion doesn't mesh with this cinematic cosmopolitanism. Like a good baseball game it's slow going till the ninth inning. It just might not be the best formula for a movie.Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(04/15/09 4:00am)
One Day You'll Understand"" a quiet meditation on the legacy of the Holocaust, is a valiant, if sometimes preachy, stab at a nearly impossible theme. It follows the growing anxiety of Victor, a middle-aged French professional who suspects, in the late 1980s, that his dead father's moral credentials during the German occupation of France weren't exactly stellar. Victor digs up old family records while trying to fill in gaps in the story, discovering troubling facts about his collaborationist father and his murdered grandparents along the way. All that holds back the whole story is Victor's stubborn mother, who doesn't want to relive a traumatic past that no one is sure she had. Her silence on the matter only sends Victor digging deeper into his family history.It's good to know that somewhere in the world directors like Amos Gitai are still doing interesting things with movie cameras. Gitai turns his exploration of the tension between past and present into a love affair with foregrounds and backgrounds, invoking every little detail of petit-bourgeois life from the trinkets on the mantelpiece to the wine on the dinner table, the old French naturalism. This is European cinema, after all, where people still have aesthetic sense. This is where people searching for their past can summon an entire consciousness just from touching faded floral wallpaper, and where even the kids have incisive literary curiosity. (Dad"" what is intertextuality?"")More than anything else"" ""One Day You'll Understand"" shows how people make movies about the Holocaust when the subject is familiar and personal" and not merely Oscar bait.Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu
(03/18/09 4:00am)
Movie ReviewChe4 of 5 starsAfter sitting through the first part of Steven Soderbergh's massive biopic of the world's most famous iconic misunderstood overrated and wrongly-vilified (all at the same time) revolutionary I have just a few rhetorical questions to ask. First with Benicio del Toro in as the leading man" could any movie be more perfectly cast than ""Che?"" Then" has any panoramic take on a larger-than-life figure been more successfully directed by a more improbable schmuck than Soderbergh? And finally when dear God is the second part of this film coming to town?For those already familiar with the details of Che's life as a revolutionary (a number which decreases in inverse proportion to the number of hipsters wearing his face on T-shirts) this movie provides the imagination for events that could never have been documented.In many ways the film allows us to see and experience what before we could only merely know. To correct this discrepancy Soderbergh shoots his film in a cinéma vérité style that complements the revolution it depicts. Its story is at once too Spartan to be Hollywood glamour and too magically unthinkable to be a true documentary. So instead the film falls somewhere in between which ironically for this man who is nowhere near the middle is exactly where it should be. If you're wondering how a ragtag group of fewer than 100 doctors lawyers and partisans could start a rebellion from a leaky 12-man yacht and build it into a movement that overthrew a corrupt government backed by some of the Western hemisphere's most powerful agricultural corporations then this movie has all of your answers.The scenes of Che's rather sanguinary defense of military executions may be a bone thrown to the conservative critics of fellow travelling Hollywood types (and to be fair the historical record) but it is his musings on revolutionary love that get us closest to the real Che: the physician-guerrilla.This is a role Benicio del Toro was born for. He fits it like a puzzle piece. He has the handsome face of an iconic and populist swashbuckler which is Guevara the shell but he also has the ability to carry himself as an aloof theorist of communist revolution which is Guevara the seed. When he scores a military victory (which he did often) he is not a hero and when he delivers strict revolutionary discipline to wayward rebels he is not a villain. He is a man not an airbrushed poster but even men need a little powder before American TV interviews sometimes. Just ask Che. Or del Toro. After this movie the two might be fused in your mind.Conservatives and Cuban ex-pats will probably rend their political mantles because Soderbergh based much of the plot on Guevara's own reflections on his time as a guerrilla. But to do this would be as foolish as treating the movie as a fluff piece. Soderbergh knew to avoid that" and only extremely rarely does he dip into his ""Ocean's 11"" style editing. This is not a frantic or triumphant movie. Its mood is" above all somber. It is a Caribbean twilight — heavy sultry and soft — for a man who was only two of these things.Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu
(01/29/09 5:00am)
Darren Aronofsky has made a directorial career out of depicting pitiful human subjects strained to the breaking point in the struggle against life. ""The Wrestler"" is the greatest of these movies"" because Aronofsky no longer has to rely on abstract fantasy (as in ""The Fountain"") or repulsive circumstances (as in ""Requiem for a Dream"") to tell his story. Instead" all he has to do is give us a shot of real life and what's harder everyday living. This is a movie of dirt and blood and brutal necessity set on the fringes of the entertainment industry; it's hard to watch" but infinitely rewarding. The story follows Randy ""The Ram"" Robinson (Mickey Rourke)" an aging professional wrestler with a love for the sport (or as he treats it the art) who is decades past his heyday. Living in a trailer park in a run-down overcast post-industrial New Jersey the Ram works in supermarkets by day and wrestles in sad underappreciated independent matches by night. The only thing more disheartening than his failed relationships with his daughter (Evan Rachel Wood) and would-be stripper girlfriend (Marisa Tomei) are the long looks on the faces of his fans overweight middle-aged men and pubescent boys all seemingly conscious of the pathos of The Ram's slow slip from his glory days. Here it's vintage Aronofsky: gray skies to accompany the gray lives of his characters.Though the movie is set in the present the hopeless texture of the 1980s is always looming in the background from closed factory doors to the stale rock of the big hair bands to the whole notion of the pro wrestler with shoulder-length blond hair. The setting is established flawlessly as a critical throwback to the seedy cultural underbelly of the Reagan years. Even the dialogue without a spare word is made to match. It's as sparse as domestic social spending under the Gipper. (As if to underscore this theme the movie includes a title song by Bruce Springsteen.)But the Ram's life and what his life represents is greater than this sadness. At the showing I attended two moviegoers walked out on the film's most memorable scene a wrestling match that involves barbed wire thumbtacks and an unforgiving staple gun. It's a masterful episode of sadism and masochism told in gruesome reverse and it shows Aronofsky at the height of his editing abilities but it was too much for these two weak stomachs. Little did they know they walked out on one of the most important scenes in the movie which shows us who the Ram really is: a proletarian gladiator for the blue-collar trailer trash of America.Aronofsky has worked deliberately to make a material movie about the salt of the earth and he's wound up with a Marxist's wet dream. This film is both high art and low" accessible and painfully beautiful. ""The Wrestler's"" subjects are some of the most underrepresented and interesting in Hollywood. They're roughneck pugilists and strippers" all more tender and pleasantly unpredictable than you'd expect. They are modern working-class folk heroes and this honorable movie is the least of their dues.Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.
(11/05/08 5:00am)
The night before the release of their latest effort" the First Time EP" three-piece Chapel Hill rock outfit Embarrassing Fruits had a bit of a crisis. Singer and guitarist Joe Norkus likes to remember it primarily as ""a funny incident.""""The ceiling in our screen printing room caved in"" Norkus said in an e-mail, recalling how water flooded the room. It's funny because I believe this is the third time Trekky's offices have flooded. We had high-powered fans and dehumidifiers going while screening CD's into the wee hours of the night before our EP release show at Local 506.""The Trekky he's referring to is Chapel Hill-based Trekky Records" who put out the record" and the experience is emblematic of residing in a town that's not exactly known for show-biz and recording for a small independent label.""This sure ain't Brooklyn" but it's not some hick town either" he said, Norkus said that is a good thing as Chapel Hill's laid back nature is one of the reasons his band likes it so much.We feel a great freedom to just play and have fun in this environment because there's not a ton of expectations" he said. We like the Chapel Hill scene for the most part" past and present."" But for Embarrassing Fruits" identification with Chapel Hill runs deeper than just where they make base camp. Much of the press they've gotten has focused on defining their sound" which many identify as ""slacker rock"" or, more immediately relevant, as a return to the Chapel Hill sound.""""It is flattering to be compared to some of our heroes such as Archers of Loaf" Norkus said.But he is quick to qualify such comparisons. The way in which we're different is that we're young and experiencing a world much different than those bands were he adds. I think anyone in their mid twenties feels some of the same things they were feeling in a way; growing up in this area which is somewhat progressive" yet sometimes gets a little big for their britches in that respect.""In the end" Norkus says his band is just trying to write the best songs it can and perform them with passion" not really focusing on what people will think.""For me"" I try to write songs based around very basic concepts from what I observe of the world or scene that surrounds me. ""We listen to a variety of music"" and I like to think that we aren't just re-hashing the past.""Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.