Triad City Beat, June 10, 2015

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point triad-city-beat.com June 10 – 16, 2015

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Barefoot Bijou beckons PAGE 32

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Unicorn farts PAGE 30

June 10 — 16, 2015

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June 9-10

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CONTENTS

Office: 336-256-9320

by Brian Clarey

Business

Publisher Allen Broach allen@triad-city-beat.com

Editorial

Editor in Chief Brian Clarey brian@triad-city-beat.com Senior Editor Jordan Green jordan@triad-city-beat.com Associate Editor Eric Ginsburg eric@triad-city-beat.com Editorial Interns Sayaka Matsuoka intern@triad-city-beat.com Photography Interns Amanda Salter Caleb Smallwood

Art

Art Director Jorge Maturino jorge@triad-city-beat.com

Sales

Sales Executive Dick Gray dick@triad-city-beat.com Sales Executive Cheryl Green cheryl@triad-city-beat.com

Contributors Carolyn de Berry Nicole Crews Anthony Harrison Matt Jones

20 UP FRONT

ART

3 Editor’s Notebook 4 City Life 7 Commentariat 7 The List 8 Barometer 8 Unsolicited Endorsement 9 Triad power Ranking 10 Heard

30 Unicorn farts?

NEWS

GAMES

11 Restaurant stalled 13 IRC upgrade 15 HPJ: No IPO for IMC

35 Jonesin’ Crossword

OPINION

36 Cheap seats

16 16 18 18

Editorial: Small is big Citizen Green: Eye on cops It Just Might Work: Pipe dream Fresh Eyes: Team WSNC

COVER 20 Triad Summer Reading Guide

FOOD 26 Sushi fight 27 Barstool: Wine down

Cover Art by Tristin Miller

Schooled

MUSIC 28 A softer sound

TCB IN A FLASH DAILY @ triad-city-beat.com First copy is free, all additional copies are $1.00. ©2015 Beat Media Inc.

STAGE & SCREEN 32 Barefoot Bijou

GOOD SPORT 34 Rollergirl action

SHOT IN THE TRIAD ALL SHE WROTE 37 Gaysball

My old philosophy professor and drinking buddy John was a quote machine. He once told our student newspaper: “Not only do I consider myself a feminist, I consider myself a lesbian.”

At our small college in New Orleans, he would always assign intro-level philosophy students a paper due just a few days after the Mardi Gras break. “You’ll be a different person after your first Mardi Gras,” he would tell them.

My favorite line he held in his pocket for the one time in every semester — and there was always at least one — that a standoffish student, usually a Yankee, would interrupt a lecture about Xerxes or Anaximander with a burning question: “How is this going to help me get a job?”

“It’s not,” he would say, often with the kicker, “It will help you live your life.”

John came to mind last week when news about cuts to academics across the UNC System found me: 46 of 221 programs deemed “low performing” by the board of governors will get the axe.

Among them: Comprehensive science education at NC A&T University, biochemistry at UNCG, film-music composition at UNC School of the Arts, and, at WinstonSalem State, in a city that has just assembled a prestigious biotech corridor in its downtown district, the bachelor’s program in biotechnology has been eliminated.

More than half, 27 of them, were in education — UNCG alone lost five secondary education programs.

That means we’ll be turning out fewer teachers, who I suppose are becoming sort of a nuisance to this General Assembly, and surely cannot be counted among reliable Republican voters. A general decline in poorly paid personnel creates the self-fulfilling prophecy of low-performing public schools, which will make some people in North Carolina very happy.

Our state’s newfound disdain for education could find resonation here in the Triad. Just one-third of Greensboro residents have bachelors degrees or higher, even though the city boasts five colleges with more than 30,000 students. The rate is 28 percent in Winston-Salem, with four colleges, and 21 percent in High Point. Charlotte does not fare much better than Greensboro at 36 percent, but Durham weighs in at a muscular 39 percent. Raleigh hits 45 percent. Of the 10 biggest cities in the state, only Fayetteville ranks lower that the cities of the Triad.

It’s enough to make you start to think you’re surrounded by people who don’t have any books in their homes. It’s a terrifying notion.

Because while a college education is not necessarily an indicator of personal success, having the lowest rate of educational attainment of all the state’s big cities is surely nothing to brag about.

Like my old friend John promised, I use my education every day in the decisions I make, the causes I espouse, the opinions I hold. It’s the lens through which I see the world, one that brings most things into sharp focus and gives me the internal resources to figure out the rest of it.

And I like it here. Where else could a guy like me be in the top third just by showing up?

triad-city-beat.com

1451 S. Elm-Eugene St. Greensboro, NC 27406

EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

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June 10 — 16, 2015

CITY LIFE

June 10 – 16

WEEKEND

Twin City Rib Fest @ Fifth and Spruce streets (W-S) The four-day pop-up village in downtown Winston-Salem has a lot more to offer than just meat on the bone: Lucha libre wrestling, saloon ladies, live music, a sideshow and a pin-up contest are all part of the experience. Main stage acts include a Beatles cover band on Thursday, Artemus Pyle’s side project on Friday, Blind Boy Paxton on Saturday and Bombadil on Sunday. See twincityribfest.com for more.

Common Enemy @ Triad Stage (GSO) Preston Lane returns with this contemporary Cinderella story about the perils of success, set against the backdrop of March Madness. It opens this weekend and runs through June 28. See triadstage.org for more.

WEDNESDAY

Community Appreciation Day @ Triad Goodwill (GSO) Kicking off at noon, Goodwill offers free health screenings, job resources and a tour of the training facility on South Elm-Eugene Street. See triadgoodwill.org for more.

SynerG on Tap @ Revolution Mills (GSO) The old millworks has become a real showplace of office suites, grand hallways and foyers, event space and natural light. Starting at 5:30 p.m. there will be free food and beer courtesy of the young-professional’s networking group. See synerg.org for more.

Chastity Belt w/ Daddy Issues @ Reanimator Records (W-S) Girl-band fun begins at 7 p.m.

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THURSDAY

Small Farms Field Day @ NC A&T University Farm (GSO) Starting at 8:15 a.m. — farmers start early — and running until noon, the A&T Farm features demos on truffle farming, solar energy, urban farming and swine genetics, among others. It’s a freebie, with more to be found at ncat.edu.

500 Strong Social @ Spring House Grill (W-S) “Enthusiastic, dependable and supportive individuals of downtown Winston-Salem” are invited to Chef Tim Grandinetti’s showplace on North Spring Street at 5 p.m. for drinks, fellowship and benevolent scheming, courtesy of the Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership.

Dead Poets Society @ Bailey Park (W-S) The free, outdoor Innovation and Film Series lands at dusk with the Robin Williams classic and remarks by Lauren Rogers of Salem Academy & College.

FRIDAY

Downtown Jazz @ Corpening Plaza (W-S) The free summer music series kicks off this evening at 6 p.m. with Jackiem Joiner and Reggie Buie.

SUNDAY

Second Sundays on Fourth @ Fourth Street (W-S) Wha?!? More free outdoor events? This one has Bio Ritmo out of Richmond, Va. headlining the free monthly affair that begins at 3 p.m.

Dirty Dancing @ Center City Cinema (GSO) And more free, outdoor movies with a dusk screening of Dirty Dancing in Center City Park.

triad-city-beat.com

Whistle Stop Concert @ the High Point Train Depot (HP) More free, outdoor music, this time with the Chit Nasty Band at 7 p.m. as part of the Ignite High Point series.

Modern Robot release show @ the Crown (GSO) The highlight of the show is Modern Robot, aka Ben Singer, who plays live improvisation against classic silent films, this time the 1926 version of Faust, directed by the same guy who did Nosferatu. But there’s hand-built instruments with opening act Invisible.

Carolinatheatre.com has tickets.

SATURDAY

Greensboro Anime, Manga and Graphic Novel Convention @ Central Library (GSO) Karaoke, cosplay, trivia, art contests and more highlight this free summer event which begins at 2 p.m.

National Night Out Block Party @ Federal Place (GSO) The block party, precursor to the safe-neighborhoods activities later in the day, kicks off at 10 a.m. with K9 and CSI demos, a rock wall, barbecue and carny games. Thank the Greensboro Police Department for this one.

Second Saturday @ SECCA (W-S) Crafts for kids, classic cartoons and lots of art mark this free family event that begins at 10 a.m. See secca.org for more.

Grounding Grounds @ the Green Bean (GSO) The coffee shop that started it all opens a new exhibit of java-themed art tonight, in collaboration with the Greenhill.

Deep Roots/Crafted/Preyer Brewing Block Party @ Deep Roots (GSO) It’s getting a little out of control this weekend what with the free, outdoor business, but might as well roll with it. This one celebrates the grand opening of the new street-food concept and brewery, just across the street from downtown’s grocery store with music from Crystal Bright & the Silver Hands and the Ends beginning at 5 p.m.

Homegrown Artisan Market @ the Blind Tiger (GSO) Beginning at noon the Tiger’s lot fills with merchants, vendors, food trucks and hungover musicians for a paean to craft culture.

Sideshow Saturday Nights @ Goldenflower Tai Chi Studio (W-S) Interactive art is at the core of this series that begins tonight on Trade Street with dance, visual art, film and… dreaming? Cool. It starts at 8:30 p.m.

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Photography by Sara Lyn

June 10 — 16, 2015

Don’t miss a beat on our Small Business Special ad size. dick@triad-city-beat.com

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The Merit Pit Bull Foundation strives for a compassionate world where pit bull type dogs live in responsible homes and where owner education, training and anti-cruelty legislation support all pet owners regardless of breed. www.themeritpitbullfoundation.com

(336)618-PITS

Music Art Stage & Screen Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad

8. Go to an outdoor film screening Going to a drive-in movie with a handful of friends, lying on a blanket or posting up in lawn chairs while watching a classic or recent hit is a must on any summer bucket list. While my personal favorite is the Eden Drive-in, there are several notable series more locally including Geeksboro or Center City Park in Greensboro and the Sunset Flicks series in Winston-Square Park starting July 19, the Innovation and Cinema series at Bailey Park or at the Reynolda House in Winston-Salem. Don’t forget to fill up on some popcorn while you’re there.

Food

5. Drink up at a beer festival Summer and beer go hand in hand. And that explains the myriad beer festivals that pop up around the Triad this time of year. If you’re looking for something to do this weekend, check out the Carolina Summer Craft Beer and Music Festival happening this Saturday in Winston-Salem. Later this summer, the 11th annual Summertime Brews fest kicks off at the Greensboro Coliseum next month and Hopfest in the ’Boro takes place in the heart of downtown Greensboro in August. Bottoms up.

Cover Story

4. Check out the local lakes Although they don’t allow swimming, Salem Lake in Winston-Salem and Lake Brandt and Lake Higgins in Greensboro offer excellent spots for fishing and that latter both sunset and moonlight kayaking sessions for pretty cheap.

Opinion

Unlike a Foxx Good Lord… if people think we need someone in office crazier than Virginia Foxx, we’re in real trouble [“Kernersville ‘homeschooling mom’ challenges Foxx from right”;

by Jordan Green; June 3, 2015].

Daniel Bayer, Greensboro

3. Go to a baseball game Even though the season started months ago, it’s never too late to drop into a local game at the BB&T ballpark or the NewBridge Bank Stadium to catch the Dash or the Grasshoppers. Just watch out for stray balls — a friend of a friend was almost hit by a homer while texting on the Grasshoppers’ lawn this season.

7. Find some live music Whether you’re seeing a headliner or dropping in for some local talent, summer is the season for outdoor music. In Winston-Salem, you can check out the ongoing Second Sundays on Fourth, which brings great music in a free family-friendly event to the center of downtown. For classical enthusiasts, follow the Eastern Music Festival in Greensboro, which kicks off at the end of this month. While these performances are indoors, it might be a good excuse to escape the heat in the oncoming weeks.And finally for those yearning for some rock and roll, look no further than the Heavy Rebel Weekender that begins July 3 in Winston-Salem. Torn jeans and leather vests unite.

News

Observer, your takedown of Steve Hollingsworth might be more compelling if it wasn’t entirely premised on your imagined notion that he’s “waiting for a city paid ‘facade grant’ to cover the cost of signage.”

Jordan Green, via triad-city-beat.com

2. Light up some fireworks This one’s a no-brainer. Whether you light up for the Fourth of July or just because, take to the sparkler variety or the more obnoxious (and anxiety-inducing) grounded ones, fireworks are an essential summer treat. Just be careful when you light them (use a grill lighter) and know that your dog may not be as enthused with the whole thing as you may be.

6. Attend a cultural festival For a festival that doesn’t revolve around drinking (but still includes it), check out the variety of cultural events that hit the Triad this summer. Faeries, dancers and bodypainters take over the Greensboro Arboretum in Lindley Park on June 20 during the annual Summer Solstice celebration. If you’re looking for something more artsy, check out the National Black Theatre Festival this August in Winston-Salem. It will feature productions, solo performances, workshops, film screenings and kids’ activities.

Up Front

So do you people really like cars flying down city streets at 55+ miles an hour? I see it all the time on Johnson and Main. There are “very few pedestrians” in High Point because High Point is so damn pedestrian unfriendly. Go try to cross main or Johnson on foot sometime.

Mike Clark, via triad-city-beat.com

by Sayaka Matsuoka 1. Go berry picking There’s nothing like the sweet taste of a freshly picked strawberry or blueberry. The closest you can get is snagging some from a vendor on the side of the road, but why do that when you can drive to any number of places like Ingram Farm in High Point?

While strawberry season is coming to a close, blueberries, blackberries and raspberries are just around the corner.

triad-city-beat.com

Run, don’t walk Maybe if Mr. Hollingsworth took the time to put some kind of a sign on his building someone would know he is there [“High Point formalizes plan for ‘complete streets’”;

by Jordan Green, June 3, 2015]. Guess he’s waiting for a city paid “facade grant” to cover that little item all while he lives and parties in the “business” he runs.

Lots of stupid old-timers started businesses with nothing but borrowed money and hard and long hours and expected nothing in return but the fruits of a good idea or the end of one that wasn’t.

Get a grip: nobody in the real world owes you a damned thing.

Observer, via triad-city-beat.com

The List: 8 local summer must-dos

All She Wrote

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June 10 — 16, 2015

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food Music Art Stage & Screen Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Mountain biking at Rich Fork Preserve?

Triad City Beat recently covered the debate/discussion about whether to allow mountain biking at Rich Fork Preserve in High Point. It wasn’t part of Guilford County’s original plans, but now seems likely, so we decided it was time for our editors and readers to weigh in.

Brian Clarey: Yes. The last thing we should be doing is discouraging people from exercising. Besides, it’s public land and this is how people like to use their green spaces. I do think mountain bikes should have dedicated trails so they don’t plow through runners and hikers in the woods.

And I prefer it when they don’t wear those tight shorts. I’d be fine if those weren’t allowed.

Jordan Green: No. The Triad already has an excellent mountain biking facility at BurMil Park in Greensboro. Rich Fork Preserve was obtained by the county through bond money designated for the acquisition of open space. Nature conservation is a principle worth fighting for.

Greensboro is already among the best cities nationally for mountain biking, and it’d be great to see the county continue to build on that to distinguish our area. I’m admittedly much more concerned about the addition of road bike lanes on our streets, though.

Readers: By a 20 percent margin, or readers said that yes, Guilford County should allow mountain biking in Rich Fork Preserve, with 57 percent compared to 36 percent. The remaining 7 percent went to “unsure.” Nobody left a comment on the post posing the question, though Lukas Escobar did comment on Facebook: “Yes. Most Definitely.”

New question: The battle between the Winston-Salem Dash, Greensboro Grasshoppers, and High Point/ Thomasville Hi-Toms is on. Vote at triadcity-beat.com!

57%

Eric Ginsburg: Unsure. I don’t know how much of the original trails, etc. would have to be altered to incorporate mountainbike trails, but I’d like to see it happen.

36%

7%

Fried artichokes

by Anthony Harrison America seems obsessed with deep-frying anything humanly possible. Fried bacon. Fried Snickers. Fried butter. Fried Kool-Aid is a thing.

When I come across something fried, novel and somewhat healthy, I’m amazed.

Last time I was in Winston-Salem, I covered the Cycling Classic, and it was hot as hell. I’d walked miles following the cyclists on their route. By the race’s end, I was parched and starving.

Admittedly, I don’t know the city that well, so I asked a random race officiant where I could get some decent food on Fourth Street. They recommended Mellow Mushroom — with which I’ve been familiar since my days in Boone — and Jeffrey Adams, if I happened to desire a steak or a good burger.

Since I knew Mellow Mushroom like the back of my hand, I opted for something new.

While many options at Jeffrey Adams on the solely carnivorous side piqued my fancy, I have to admit I have a soft spot for a Caesar salad. And while their burgers tantalized my taste buds’ fantasies, I saw that their Caesar salad came with, of all things, fried artichokes.

As with many trivial decisions in my gourmand life, it came to a coin toss between one of their burgers and the Caesar with smoked chicken. Heads went to the Caesar. Considering the heat of the day, I was happy the lighter option won, though I wasn’t expecting too much.

Caesar dressing is the greatest thing this side of olive

oil, balsamic vinegar and a touch of salt and whole lot of pepper. The chicken, while superb, was not as good as my neighbor’s recipe. Romaine never disappoints.

But I was pleasantly surprised — those fried artichokes were worth every damned penny.

A panko coating added texture. The leafy artichoke hearts, bursting with their lovely, slightly-sweet flavor, disintegrated on the tongue with buttery texture due to the deep fry. And since the dressing was served on the side, I could dunk each panko-coated heart into the beauty of Caesar, adding those familiar, old-world flavors to the delectability of the new discovery.

We fry lots of things in this country, either for flavor or novelty. Fried artichokes meet my apex in both categories.

triad-city-beat.com

The painted place

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food Music Art

ERIC GINSBURG

Stage & Screen

A new mural by the Greensboro Mural Project adorns the side wall of Boutique Hypnotica on Spring Garden Street in Greensboro, near College Hill Sundries.

Good Sport

1. Winston-Salem The two bigger cities each have several outdoor events running this weekend, with Winston-Salem’s slate of four just a little more impressive, bumping it into first. The Downtown Jazz series beginning on Friday night and a free film later at Bailey Park, Second Sundays on Fourth Street and the four-day RibFest taking over the parking lot of the Winston-Salem Journal. A few points get shaved for the cover charge at the rib thing, though it’s totally worth it.

All She Wrote

2. Greensboro The Gate City’s outdoor offerings number at least five this weekend, beginning with Field Day at the NC A&T University Farm on Thursday and rolling into Friday with a screening of Dirty Dancing in Center City Park. On Saturday the cops are throwing a free daytime block party for National Night Out. But the big guns land on Sunday, with an artists market at the Blind Tiger and a massive outdoor event at the junction of Eugene Street where Crafted, Preyer Brewing and Deep Roots Market celebrate their activated space.

Shot in the Triad

3. High Point Don’t pity High Point because it is the perennial Third City in the Piedmont Triad Paradigm. It’s also got the lowest cost of living, the best bones of all the downtown districts and a cool pit right in the middle of the city. But it’s only got one big outdoor event this weekend: the Whistle Stop concert featuring Chit Nasty at the train depot at 7 p.m. on Friday night.

Games

The Al Fresco Edition

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June 10 — 16, 2015

Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food

HEARD “Wilford Brimley’s not dead, is he? If he’s not alive I’ll be a jerk. Okay, he’s alive. He’s 80.”

Greg Shemkovitz, in the cover package, beginning on page 20

“He was having some personal issues, but it’s my understanding that he’s working it out.”

— Assistant City Manager Ritchie Brooks on shopping center owner Daniel Kim, page 11

Where else could a guy like me be in the top third just by showing up?

— Brian Clarey, from the Editor’s Notebook on page 3

While Greensboro has yet to attract an auto manufacturer, a major brewery or even a Trader Joe’s, small businesses have been rising to meet the employment demands of the city in their absence.

— from this week’s editorial on page 16

All She Wrote

Shot in the Triad

Games

Good Sport

Stage & Screen

Art

Music

“The police need to know they’re on notice. We

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have the same racialized outcomes year after year.

Dominantly it’s the east side, it’s African American, it’s poor people. And there’s the ‘dark figure’ of people who don’t even report [abuses] because they have no faith that they will be addressed.”

— Greensboro attorney Barbara Lawrence, chair of Interim Citizens Police Review Committee that found wrongdoing on the part of the GPD. More on page 12

Blame it on the indigenous muscadine grape, the climate or the consumers, but for whatever reason, Carolinians appear to like their wine as sweet as their tea.

— Eric Ginsburg, from Barstool on page 27

“My studio used to be a funeral home and that’s inspired some of my works.”

— Artist Kat Lamp, on page 30

“It’s easy coming, and it’s easier going/ When you’re lost without knowing where to begin/ And I count my blessings, each and every one/ I was taking for granted all that we had/ So many days like this, all down the line/ We could mend our parted ways….”

— Singer/songwriter Josh Moore, from the song “Parted Ways.” More on page 28

triad-city-beat.com

NEWS Work nearing completion on troubled restaurant project

by Jordan Green

News Opinion Cover Story Food

The city of Winston-Salem has paid a contractor $156,463 to renovate Malone’s Family Restaurant.

Stage & Screen Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

authorized the city to move forward with general improvements to the shopping center, whose parking lot is showing signs of distress. Brooks added that the money could be spent for resurfacing the parking lot, striping and signage enhancements.

“He was having some personal issues,” Brooks said, “but it’s my understanding that he’s working it out.”

Kim could not be reached for this story.

The city filed suit against Kim for nuisance abatement related to an alleged code violation at Ogburn Station Shopping Center on May 4. Based on visits on March 25 and April 30, city inspector Shawn Helm reported in an affidavit that he observed “old furniture, junk and rubbish on the side and back yard of the subject property which would attract rats and other vermin.” The lawsuit cited Kim for violating the city code regulating “creation of rat harborage.”

Brooks said last week that he was

Art

$750,200 initially allocated for the Ogburn Station Shopping Center, $120,000 was earmarked for Malone’s Family Restaurant. Millett said the original estimate of construction for Malone’s, part of which will be covered by the additional funds approved by city council in January 2014, was $230,077. He added that the total cost of the project, “including change orders and contingencies,” will be higher.

The $400,000 approved by city council in January 2014 should cover the additional costs, Millett said, and any unspent funds will be available for use in other parts of the shopping center.

The 2011 allocation also included $400,000 earmarked directly to the Ogburn Station Shopping Center, which is owned by Daniel Kim. Millett said $252,550 remains available from those funds. A January 2014 report by staff indicated that the money had been spent on façade renovations, painting and roof repairs. Brooks said Kim only recently

JORDAN GREEN

Music

It’s been four years since WinstonSalem City Council approved funds to revitalize the Ogburn Station Shopping Center in an aging industrial seam in the city’s northeast quadrant.

Funds for the shopping center were approved as part of a $2.8 million allocation through the city’s Revitalizing Urban Commercial Areas program, financed through economic-incentives money recovered from Dell when the computer maker closed its Winston-Salem plant.

The program also targeted tattered shopping centers in the Waughtown area in the southeast, the Cherry/ Polo crossroads on the north side and Peters Creek Parkway near the West Salem neighborhood.

It’s been a bumpy road for the Ogburn Station Shopping Center, whose revitalization efforts have centered on the old Bell Brothers Restaurant. In January 2014, almost three years after city council approved a total of $750,200 in low-interest and forgivable loans for the shopping center, staff came back to council requesting additional funds to complete the project amid reports of shoddy workmanship and a legal dispute between a restaurateur and the property owner. Council approved an additional $400,000 on a split 5-3 vote to keep the project alive. The majority included Mayor Pro Tem Vivian Burke, who represents the Northeast Ward where the shopping center is located, Councilwoman Denise D. Adams, Councilman Derwin Montgomery, Councilman James Taylor and Councilman Dan Besse.

Since then, staff has stepped in to provide additional oversight and hired a new contractor, Coe Electric &

Plumbing, to complete renovations of the restaurant.

Assistant City Manager Ritchie Brooks said he anticipates that renovation work will be completed within 45 days. After that, the only thing standing in the way of the restaurant opening would be for the building to pass city inspections and the installation of equipment such as refrigerators and furnishings by the restaurateur, Brooks said.

Bernetta Oakes, who plans to open Malone’s Family Restaurant in the renovated building, could not be reached for comment. Oakes also operates the Bunny Stop Preschool in Winston-Salem.

“Construction is moving along good,” Brooks said. “I checked with our construction manager, and he said it’s 75 percent complete. There have been a couple change orders, but otherwise it’s moving good. The heating and air conditioning has been installed. The floors and walls have been painted.”

The change orders are for minor issues such as an air-conditioning vent that needed to be relocated, Brooks said, adding that the figure was not significant enough to require staff to go back to council for approval.

“I don’t think there have been any types of problems or issues out of the ordinary that would have caused the project to be substantially delayed,” Brooks said. “There were some time delays. There was some confusion about the plans that were being used.

I think one of the engineers had reviewed the plan. To my memory we haven’t had any large obstacles that have come into play, just normal construction kinds of things.”

The city has paid Coe Electric & Plumbing $156,463 for renovations to Malone’s Family Restaurant, according to information provided to Triad City Beat by Ken Millett, the city’s business-development senior project supervisor. Out of the

Up Front

City official: A restaurant renovation project plagued by dysfunction and shoddy workmanship is 75 percent complete and could be ready for operation in 45 days.

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June 10 — 16, 2015 Up Front

News Opinion Cover Story Food Music Art Stage & Screen Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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unaware of the city’s lawsuit against Kim, adding that he didn’t see any reason why it should impede progress on the renovations of Malone’s Family Restaurant. If anything, he said, the city would charge Kim for the cost of hauling away the garbage and assess any associated penalties.

Malone’s Family Restaurant is not unique as a recipient of a loan with favorable interest and repayment terms from the city of WinstonSalem. Camino Bakery on a thriving downtown stretch of West Fourth Street and the Porch Kitchen & Cantina in the West End Mill Works are also beneficiaries of the city’s small-business loan program.

But Ogburn Station is a more challenging business environment than the city’s trendy downtown and West End. The shopping center lies five miles from the city center, just north of Smith Reynolds Airport. An area that never attracted suburban residential subdivisions, the rundown apartment buildings of northeast Winston-Salem gradually change over to rural farmhouses with little transition.

The area around the shopping center seems barely changed since 2006, when the city noted a variety of ailments in an official report, including “Dumpsters visible from the road and sidewalks”; “parking lot design/landscaping/weed control”; “abandoned ‘skeleton’ signs (frame only)”; “concentration of unsightly auto-related uses/tire storage” and “areas with trash and litter.” City staff estimated that 37 percent of structures in the area were dilapidated or deteriorated and 17 percent were vacant.

The cycle of divestment in the area appears to have been exacerbated in the past by conflict and lack of coordination between Oakes and Kim. “Problems started with the roof repair and interior wall work shortly after the work began, i.e. water from the roof began to leak into the restaurant area,” Brooks reported in a December 2013 memo to Mayor Allen Joines and members of city council. “The interior wall that was removed was a load bearing wall that should have either remained in

place or been removed by a qualified contractor instead of the on-site employees hired by Mrs. Oakes. Roof repair was the responsibility of Mr. Kim, and the interior wall repair was the responsibility of the tenant, Mrs. Oakes. These problems hindered progress of the interior upfitting in the restaurant area and caused a substantial delay in the work because each party believed the other was responsible for the leaks in the roof.”

Eventually work on the project halted, Brooks reported, when Oakes stopped making rent payments because she believed Kim was reneging on his agreements. The city recommended that Oakes hire a lawyer to represent her interests.

Brooks added in the memo that Kim agreed to pay for the installation of heating, ventilation and air conditioning.

“While the above was underway, Mrs. Oakes discovered that some actions taken by her project manager (which she hired), were not in her best interest and said manager was terminated,” Brooks wrote. “It was also discovered that her project manager was working for Mr. Kim. Discussions occurred with Mrs. Oakes regarding the city assisting with obtaining a new project manager to oversee the remaining work. This was suggested because the experienced city staff member that could provide this service was paid from community development block grant funds and was limited in the amount of time he could devote to the project.”

Brooks wrote in a harsh assessment of city staff that “failure to complete the above project can be attributed to lack of proper project management and supervision,” while simultaneously arguing for additional funding.

“Regarding the Malone’s Restaurant project,” he continued, “the following contributed significantly to the problems encountered: (1) the lack of city construction oversight at the beginning of the work; (2) staff’s opinion that the project manager who worked for Mrs. Oakes did not act in her best interest; and (3) the project not being adequately funded.”

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6/5/15 4:09:17 PM

by Eric Ginsburg

By the beginning of next month, the Interactive Resource Center in Greensboro will almost double its staff size thanks to two significant developments for the homeless center.

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It’s surprising, even for Michelle Kennedy, how quickly a 22,000-squarefoot warehouse fills up.

Kennedy, the relatively new executive director of the Interactive Resource Center, was running slightly late for meetings last week, jammed between discussions with staff about how to reconfigure the building to add more office space and meeting with someone about fixing the wireless signal so it reached the planned work areas. It’s a busy time; the Greensboro resource center for people experiencing homelessness recently tripled its hotwater capacity to respond to demand, and additional showers for male and female guests are planned. But more significant changes will be in place in less than a month.

The biggest shake-up comes as the Interactive Resource Center receives funds for a four-person outreach team.

It is the first time that a Greensboro entity has received money through the federal Projects for Assistance in Transition from Homelessness, or PATH, initiative. The $204,0000 a year will allow the center to dramatically expand its unstructured outreach efforts, coming in contact with those who need the most assistance, Kennedy said.

“Until now we’ve mostly been brick and mortar,” she said.

The PATH funds — which pass from the federal level to the state and then the local Sandhills Center for mental health services before reaching the Interactive Resource Center — are designed to use a street-outreach model to reach homeless people with significant mentalhealth issues and possibly substanceabuse problems as well, Kennedy said.

The four-person team will provide case management and support for navigating available services, and consist of a case manager, benefit specialist, peer-support specialist and a team leader who plays an administrative role, she said.

An existing staff member is shifting to the peer-support specialist role, which calls for someone with a mental-health

diagnosis of their own and the ability to relate through lived experience. A parttime employee will come on full time to replace her in the existing role, and the Interactive Resource Center is currently hiring for the other three positions, Kennedy said.

The PATH funding, which technically kicked in at the end of May, requires a $68,000 match, which Kennedy said the center was able to reach with existing programs such as hygiene outreach kits, designation of staff time and benefits payment.

The matching funds and the program itself will not detract or pull from existing services the center provides, she said, which range from a bike program to shower access.

Michelle Kennedy looks at the contents of one of the hygiene packs that will be part ERIC GINSBURG The resource center has of the PATH outreach efforts. an existing relationship don’t need to fill out similar paperwork workload appropriately. with the Congregational repeatedly at different organizations But even without the full team, the Social Work Educational Initiative — a and can more easily be directed to five new positions will dramatically joint bachelors and masters in social appropriate resources, Kennedy said. increase the size of the center, which work program at UNCG and North Using the US Department of is currently a full-time staff of seven.

Carolina A&T University — and Housing and Urban Development’s Kennedy realizes that the changes mean will use those yearlong students to Homeless Management Information the center is professionalizing, but said supplement the PATH team.

System, the Interactive Resource Center they will be careful to maintain the “Those students will add a layer of will be able to provide more streamlined culture fostered since 2008.

As part of street outreach,” Kennedy said, adding access to services for its clients and that, the Interactive Resource Center that the 10 to 15 students they work improve communication between will engage its full staff, partners and its with on a year-long basis are each at Greensboro groups involved in Partners guests — the center’s term for clients — the center two days a week, meaning Ending Homelessness, Kennedy said. in the hiring process. an average of five additional people on The change will also free up shelter That community-driven, grassroots any given day to help with intake or staff who are overwhelmed with intake approach is part of the core of counseling. work and ultimately save the Interactive the center’s identity, she said; lived There are annual benchmarks Resource Center in staff time as well, experiences and professional skills will for the $204,000 in federal funding, she said. continue to be equally important.

But but assuming they are met, there is The resource center received an aside from the shift in scope, the PATH no expiration date on the program, anonymous $45,000 donation to funds demarcate an even more notable Kennedy said. fund the coordinated intake specialist milestone in the organization’s timeline The Interactive Resource Center position to manage the organization’s — the moment that the Interactive is about to undergo another major new responsibilities, and they are Resource Center’s long-term finances change at the same time, having been currently hiring for the position.

Over started to look very stable. designated as the coordinated intake the next year, Kennedy said they would site for a network of shelter and work diligently to secure future funding Find more information about the job homelessness-related organizations. The for the position and try to expand it to openings at the Interactive Resource Center at idea is to turn the center into a one-stop a three-person team to truly handle the gsodaycenter.org. shop for those in need, so that people

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Show-room real estate company gets cold feet on public offering

by Jordan Green

International Market Centers has indefinitely postponed its initial public offering.

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Showplace is one of International Market Centers’ most valuable properties in downtown High Point.

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the public offering. But the prospectus lists its “substantial amount of indebtedness following this offering” as among the risk factors for potential investors.

The prospectus also notes that International Market Centers’ tenants include “large numbers of smaller manufacturers, and the bankruptcy, insolvency or inability to pay rent of these tenants may adversely affect the income produced by our properties and could have an adverse effect on our financial condition and results of operations.”

The most significant challenge for the company might be that it has yet to achieve profitability. The company has experienced net losses every year since it was formed in 2011, according to the prospectus.

“Our ability to achieve profitability is dependent upon a number of risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond our control,” the prospectus states.

“We cannot assure you that we will be successful in executing our business strategy and become profitable and our failure to do so could have a material adverse effect on the price of our common stock and our ability to satisfy your obligations, including making payments on our indebtedness.”

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formation of International Market Centers, which took control of the largest showrooms in High Point and the Las Vegas market, in 2011, rental rates have rebounded. The prospectus states that average rental rates in International Market Centers’ High Point showrooms increased from $13.50 per square foot in January 2012 to $15.84 in March 2015.

To accomplish its primary business objective of maximizing return for its shareholders, International Market Centers’ prospectus states that the company is creating value for its tenants and their customers by improving buyer experience and helping tenants generate stronger profits.

But several risks loom over the industry, the prospectus warns, which could cause prospective investors to lose some or all of their investment.

In August 2014, the company took on significant debt. As the prospectus explains, “Our operating partnership entered into new senior secured credit facilities, which are comprised of a $405 million first lien term loan facility, a $50 million first lien revolving credit facility and a $125 million second lien term facility.” The company expects to repay its debt with a portion of the capital raised from

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International Market Centers, whose properties dominate High Point’s central business district, has indefinitely postponed an offering of common stock as part of its interest in becoming a publicly traded company on the New York Stock Exchange.

The company is the largest taxpayer for the city of High Point and its properties monopolize the city’s downtown, which remains moribund for much of the year between the twice-yearly markets. The company’s financial prospects are a matter of intense interest in a city struggling to revitalize its core.

International Market Centers, which is based in High Point and Las Vegas, was scheduled to go public on May 8, but company spokeswoman Eden Bloss said last week that the decision had been postponed.

“The market conditions were really volatile and we felt like it wasn’t the best time to go public,” she said.

“We are calling it a postponement,” Bloss continued. “We were pleased because we did get a lot of institutional investor interest. We were oversubscribed.”

Bloss said the decision to postpone the initial public offering was influenced by volatility in Standard & Poor’s financial ratings and a 6 percent drop in the RMZ real estate index in late March.

The proposed aggregate offering price of the company is $185.2 million.

Regardless of whether the company goes public, International Market Centers’ prospectus indicates that Bain Capital and Oaktree Capital Management will retain majority ownership.

International Market Centers is the largest owner and operator of showroom space for the home furnishings and gift industries in North America.

According to its prospectus, the company generated $162.8 million in total revenues, but suffered a net loss of $29.6 million in 2014. The company estimates that it controls 59 percent of showroom space in downtown High Point. In contrast, no other property owner owns more than 4 percent of the city’s real estate zoned for showroom use.

The company’s biannual markets in High Point and Las Vegas provide an opportunity for a wide array of manufacturers and suppliers to interact with wholesale buyers. The prospectus states, “We believe this creates significant value for both our tenants and their customers in the US home furniture industry, in the US home décor industry and in the highly fragmented US gift industry.”

The furniture market in High Point has evolved over the past 100 years. In 2005, a competing market opened in Las Vegas. As an indication of the furniture industry’s continuing viability, the company cites the High Point Market Authority as saying that even between 2007 and 2009, during the depths of the economic downturn, annual buyer registrations dropped by only 7 percent.

The company argues in its prospectus that it holds a superior position over any would-be competitors because its portfolio of properties would be expensive to replicate.

“Our showroom space includes 6.7 million gross square feet in High Point and 5.4 million gross square feet in Las Vegas,” the prospectus states. “We and our tenants have invested significant capital in these facilities, which makes them extremely difficult and costly to replicate. Our High Point property includes the largest and most iconic showroom buildings in High Point, which are recognized throughout the home furniture industry. Their location in the heart of the downtown furniture district and proximity to the main transportation hub, event venues and food and beverage amenities offer incremental value to our tenants and their customers.”

The company has invested $33 million in its High Point properties since 2011, compared to $47 million in its Las Vegas holdings, according to the prospectus.

The prospectus suggests that International Market Centers’ consolidation of showroom real estate is part of its advantage. The fragmented nature of ownership prior to the recession, with three companies controlling the lion’s share of showroom space in High Point, drove down leasing revenues. Since the

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OPINION EDITORIAL

The future is small People love to talk about the free market, those raw, capitalistic forces of supply and demand that shape our nation’s economy.

But the truth is that we haven’t had a truly free market in the United States in more than 100 years, if ever. Government can regulate businesses out of existence with taxes or restricting legislation. Conversely, laws can be passed that are favorable to one sector or another, such as the Affordable Care Act, which among other things is a huge boon to the insurance industry.

And in this plutocracy we’ve created, those corporations that have grown more powerful than the government can manipulate the game at every level.

The cities of the Triad routinely give handouts in the form of tax incentives, reduced or free rent, sweetheart loans, prioritized municipal services like water and waste collection, public transportation to facilities, and sometimes just a straight-up payout. One Greensboro developer was even given a well-traveled downtown street to accommodate one of his projects.

Often lost in this government bounty are the small businesses and cultural bit-players who occupy the tiers beneath the outsized egos and powerful interests that dominate any city conversation about economic development.

Small, grassroots businesses don’t need six- or seven-figure incentives packages. But more than the big guys, they need a leg up.

We’ve been plugging micro-grants and microloans — small but meaningful amounts of money for local businesses and artisans — for this very reason.

So we stand behind Action Greensboro’s new Spark Fund, a microgrant program looking to hand out up to $5,000 every quarter for “new projects that will improve downtown” beginning next month — you can apply at the Action Greensboro website.

And we applaud Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County which just handed out 10 mini-grants of up to $500 for projects that “infuse the arts into all segments of our community, promote creativity, provide greater access to the arts and bring people together.”

But we don’t think they go quite far enough.

City budgets range from $340 million in High Point to more than $400 million in Greensboro. Surely each city can carve off a small fraction of a percentage, say $100,000, to be earmarked for 10 micro-grants of $10,000 each— a meaningful amount of money to a home brewer or clothing designer — to be awarded to entrepreneurs based in the city.

Even if just one in 10 make it in the long run, our investment in our own people will have paid off.

Because while Greensboro has yet to attract an auto manufacturer, a major brewery or even a Trader Joe’s, small businesses have been rising to meet the employment demands of the city in their absence.

It’s time we incentivize that.

CITIZEN GREEN

A shadow complaint review committee

When black citizens complain about mistreatment by the Greensboro Police Department, almost without fail the official

by Jordan Green processes uphold the officers’ actions as appropriate. When people feel that the system doesn’t work for them, they eventually give up on the system.

With events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Cleveland and elsewhere framing a national movement of protest against police abuses, activists in Greensboro have renewed longrunning demands for reform to the complaintreview process in recent months. In lieu of meaningful change, an independent panel, the Interim Citizens Police Review Committee, was formed to hear complaints.

On June 6, the committee delivered its opinion in the matter of Alfred Waddell, an 86-year-old black resident of Greensboro.

Waddell alleges that the police treated him, his wife and their grandson with discourtesy and racial bias when they wakened them at 2 a.m. in February 2014 to demand that he move his cars so the police could remove an abandoned vehicle from the area with a tow truck. At issue in the complaint is whether it was necessary for the police to wake up Waddell and his family at 2 in the morning to move a car, whether the family was treated rudely, whether the abandoned car wound up in the Waddell’s driveway or in an adjacent lot and whether the police falsified a report to justify the damage when they towed the car across the Waddells’ lawn.

The report of the Interim Citizens Police Review Committee makes no attempt to downplay the fact that its findings contradict those of the police department’s professionalstandards division and the complaint-review committee, a citizen panel of the Greensboro Human Relations Commission that is tasked with reviewing complaints against the police.

“When considered, Mr. Waddell’s testimony and documentary evidence provides sufficient record for reasonable persons to conclude the PSD and the CRC made the wrong decision in this case,” the independent report concludes.

The problem lies with the process, according to the independent panel. The Waddell report charges that “the rules and procedures for reviewing citizen complaints, both at the PSD and CRC levels, did not provide the complainant the opportunity to present witnesses, confront the police department’s evidence and witnesses, advocate for his claims or have a transparent, public review of his complaint.”

Chantale Wesley-Lamin, the chair of the official complaint-review committee, could not be reached for comment for this article. But Chief Wayne Scott dismissed the independent committee’s findings in a statement to Triad City Beat.

“Because the group’s alleged ‘findings of fact’ were arrived at without full access to evidence,” he said, “their investigation and any conclusions are flawed and biased.”

Barbara Lawrence, a lawyer who chairs the independent committee, told me that the officers involved in incident declined an invitation to attend the hearing and testify. That’s unfortunate, she said, because the committee might have been swayed by their account of what happened.

As members of the independent committee see it, the police’s withholding of information is selective and self-serving.

Chief Scott alluded to the impasse between the two groups in his statement to TCB. He said he had recently met with members of the committee “to discuss their complaint review process, and explained to them at length the state laws restricting their access to information they would need to conduct thorough investigations. Despite these legal restrictions, the group continues to proceed with its process and claim that its process and claim that is ‘consistent with constitutional guarantees of fair representation, examination of evidence and witness and compulsory process.’”

Among other restrictions, state law currently does not allow the police department to publicly release footage from police-controlled video cameras.

“We said, ‘That’s fine because we’re trying to change the law,’” said the Rev. Randall Keeney, one of the members of the independent committee who met with the chief and other city representatives. Keeney told Scott, “We’re asking for your support in that.”

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meeting of the Interim Citizens Police Review Committee on June 6 stood in stark contrast to complaint hearings by the officially sanctioned complaint-review committee, which hears complaints in closed session. Following the reading into the record of the Waddell decision, the agenda scheduled time for public comment and questions. During the meeting, held in a classroom on the second floor of Gibbs Hall on the campus of NC A&T University, Lawrence repeatedly invited members of the audience — all of four people — to ask questions and make comments, and committee members addressed their remarks to the audience as much as to each other.

Members of the committee insist they have a right under the US Constitution to review the action of the police. And despite the monumental effort required to investigate complaints, Lawrence said the members are committed to the work. James Mayes, another committee member, said during the meeting that there’s a long list of complainants who want the committee to review their cases, “so this is the tip of the iceberg.”

Although the independent committee can do little except forward its findings to the city, members said they are eager for community engagement with their work.

“Ultimately, it’s about community leverage,” Lawrence said. “It should act as a deterrent. The police need to know they’re on notice. We have the same racialized outcomes year after year. Dominantly it’s the east side, it’s African American, it’s poor people. And there’s the ‘dark figure’ of people who don’t even report [abuses] because they have no faith that they will be addressed.”

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IT JUST MIGHT WORK

The pot capital of NC Marijuana is not currently legal in the state of North Carolina, but 23 of our 50 as well as our nation’s capital have, pardon the expression,

by Brian Clarey green-lighted the use of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes.

Smart money says it’s only a matter of time before North Carolina follows suit, maybe after Virginia or South Carolina toke up.

And we should, for all the usual reasons: It’s a senseless prohibition that jams up our cops, courts and prisons; the active ingredients can improve people’s lives; and it’s popular enough to generate mad tax revenue — Colorado pulled in more than $2.3 million in tax revenues from pot sales… in January. That’s more than a halfmillion a week.

But we should also do it because it would be a game-changer for the Triad, which would naturally become the marijuana capital of the state.

We know a lot about combustibles here in the Triad. Winston-Salem was built on tobacco; executives who know how to navigate FDA regulations are as common as copperheads; and the tobacco farmers who dot the surrounding landscape could easily be convinced to incorporate a crop that needs no processing, pulls in exponentially more money by weight and, unlike tobacco, has a growing pool of domestic users rather than a shrinking one. They might have to put up fences, is all.

Greensboro has a marijuana marketing campaign embedded into its name. Think of the T-shirts!

But the real winner here is High Point, which not only has a name that would seamlessly integrate it into marijuana culture but also has already gained a solid reputation among fans of drugs.

High Point is the heroin capital of North Carolina right now, with more than 100 overdoses and 14 deaths last year. Triad City Beat reported in January that law enforcement officials estimated that 100 grams a day are being smuggled into the city, and that people come from miles around to illegally obtain it.

In this case, becoming a city known for having fantastic marijuana would be something of an upgrade.

FRESH EYES

Make culture in the City of Arts & Innovation Yesterday, I had coffee with a successful young actor who is relocating from Brooklyn to Winston-Salem at the end of the summer.

I asked her why, with no family, school or work in the area, she wanted to make

by Devon MacKay the move. She said that she had never met so many creative people in one place working to advance their community more than their own careers and egos. She also cited the weather (and who could blame her?). For me, her perspective brought into sharper focus what I think we need to remember about our pursuit of being the City of Arts & Innovation.

Since I moved to Winston-Salem from New Haven, Conn. four years ago, I find myself having the same conversation nearly every time I meet someone new. Due to my work at the arts council, I have a lot of coffee with young professionals and artists interested in being more involved in the community. Whether my caffeinated conversation partner is a native or a transplant, we seem always to agree both that there is something special about WinstonSalem that bewitches and grounds us here, and that it still needs this or that one thing that we feel it’s missing. Whether we agree on that “something” hardly matters. The point, rather, is that so many of us — regardless of whether we were born here or moved here — are inspired by and want to be a part of Winston-Salem’s growth. Our belief that it needs us seems to be precisely why we love it so much. You can easily get wrapped up in this town.

You don’t have to look far to find some great examples of this devotion, like the Winston-Salem native who started a music festival to create the kind of performance opportunity that he and his friends almost left Winston-Salem to find. Consider the painter who, frustrated with the lack of professional opportunities for visual artists in Winston-Salem, recruited artists from his MFA program not only to move here, but to donate half of their online-gallery sales to a new fund that supports emerging visual artists.

And yet, too frequently behind the wellintentioned ruminations on what Winston-Salem needs, I hear people compare it to other cities like Asheville, Durham, Charleston, Austin — you know the drill. Too often they point to “things” that those cities have which we don’t. I admit, I did this a lot, too when I first moved here. And I still insist that we

need a good French restaurant with white tablecloths, snooty staff and a wine list filled with obscure, lowalcohol imports. Although this sort of comparison is inevitable, it’s important to remember that craft breweries, fancy tacos, pour-over coffee, food trucks and, yes, even French restaurants per se do not make a community creative. They certainly signal to residents and visitors alike that Winston-Salem is a cool, fun town, but we should not conflate what we think is cool with what is creative. To me, the real potential of places like Small Batch and Hoots derives not simply from the selling of beer, but from serving as a place for eclectic, interesting people to gather and connect through ideas.

So, what should we be doing with this overwhelming and benevolent interest in WinstonSalem? I propose that we participate actively in the cycle of creativity, and not just in its consumption.

We begin by seeking out experiences that refine the way we see and listen, and end with the daring to create something even better than what we have experienced.

Challenge yourself to experience different art every month. If you regularly imbibe classical music through the Winston-Salem Symphony or Piedmont Opera, go see a concert at the Garage or Muddy Creek Café next month, or vice-versa. Challenge yourself to experience art from communities different from your own. If you stick to Trade Street galleries, check out the Delta Fine Arts Center on New Walkertown Road or the gallery at the Enrichment Center. No idea what or where these things are? So much the better. Challenge yourself to cultivate a community of culturally curious friends with whom you enjoy fancy tacos and craft beer.

And, finally, choose a discipline and work hard at it. Take lessons at the Sawtooth School for Visual Arts or UNCSA’s Community Music School and put Winston-Salem on the map as the first place where anyone ever saw the next big idea that you helped to cultivate.

That’s the beauty of Winston-Salem, and it’s why we love it — because that culture exists here, and we’re able to create what we’d still like to see.

Craft breweries, fancy tacos and food trucks per se do not make a community creative.

Devon MacKay is director of major gifts at the Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County. Born and raised in Queens, NY, she moved here four years ago with her husband, John, who works at Wake Forest University.

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THE TRIAD SUMMER REA

ADING GUIDE

Greg Shemkovitz is far more self aware than Eddie Lanning, the protagonist of Lot Boy. Seated at a café table outside Spring Garden Bakery in Greensboro on a cool weekday morning, he’s explaining how he conceived the character — his attitude, backstory and dialect — how he built a world around a Ford dealership and service garage on the south side of Buffalo, and how he experimented with second person to convey perspective and drive the narrative forward.

“Maybe it’s early for craft talk,” he says. Later, he interrupts his stream of thoughts to check in: “Is this going well?”

A lot is happening all at once for the 35-year-old Shemkovitz, a Buffalo native who moved to Greensboro with his wife in 2010. Lot Boy, his first novel, comes out on July 21 on sunnysideout, a small publishing house in his hometown.

He’s carrying around first drafts of five other manuscripts, including one started in 2011 that he’ll be revising over the summer. After bouncing between adjunct gigs at area universities, he’s landed a faculty position at Elon University.

He and his wife have bought a house in Greensboro’s mannered Sunset Hills neighborhood. And they’re expecting a second child any day now.

“All the signs that indicate the baby’s ready to come out — they’re all there,” Shemkovitz says as he fills his to-go cup from the house coffee urn.

Whatever the pressures of turning out a novel, pursuing a teaching career and being a father, he seems to be maintaining a good equilibrium and taking joy from the process. In that regard, he’s 180 degrees from his character Eddie Lanning, who is responsible for the most menial jobs at the car dealership his father owns. With only the smallest glimmer of circumspection, Eddie lurches into an ill-conceived criminal scheme while creepily stalking an exgirlfriend, an addict in recovery and amputee.

“It can be considered autobiographical in some ways,” Shemkovitz says. “I lived there, I worked there, and I left. I did barely any of that stuff that Eddie did. That should be obvious — or at least I hope it is.”

While taking some time off from his undergraduate studies at SUNY Oswego, Shemkovitz worked as a lot boy — a job that entails everything from detailing cars and emptying oil pans to ferrying customers home.

“I was cataloguing what was going on,” he says. “Stephen King says he lets his characters go and records what happens.

That’s kind of my approach.”

In its first incarnation, Lot Boy was written as a novella for Shemkovitz’s MFA thesis at UNCG. He put the project aside, and in fact didn’t write at all for two or three years, while he was teaching GED classes to welfare clients in Philadelphia.

“I kept thinking about the novel,” he says. “You get these ideas.

triad-city-beat.com

S, LO C A L S TO R I E S

GETTING OUT OF BUFFALO, AND FINDING A WRITING LIFE IN GREENSBORO

By Jordan Green

You want to get the story right. I sat down with it again. I said, ‘I’m going to revisit this story without the deadline of graduation.’”

Shemkovitz wanted Lot Boy to be an entertaining read, above all.

He admires the book’s stripped-down prose, noting that he could probably turn it into a young-adult novel if he excised the profanity from his characters’ dialogue and interior musings.

“You don’t have to have a dictionary nearby to read it,” Shemkovitz says. “There are no 10-cent words. This a book with a lot of buy-one-get-one-free words.”

Beyond providing enjoyment, Shemkovitz believes literature can also be enriching.

“With this book I’m not trying to changes lives,” he says.

“It’s enriching enough to get a glimpse into a service garage and go along for a ride with a guy that does things you and I would not do. That’s what a documentary does. He’s not really sympathetic, but you’re stuck with him. He’s real: There are guys like that in the world. Beyond the fraud, he takes cars off the lot and wrecks them. He drinks and drives. He’s not really a bad guy. Nobody’s really bad.”

Shemkovitz pauses.

“Wilford Brimley’s bad.”

Then he laughs.

In the novel, Eddie calls the fence “Wilford Brimley” because he resembles the grandfatherly actor in the Quaker Oats commercial. The conceit is that the fence is the most ruthless character in the novel. He never gets a real name, just Eddie’s mocking reference.

Suddenly Shemkovitz is mortified by a thought, and stops to Google the actor’s name on his smart phone.

“Wilford Brimley’s not dead, is he?” he asks. “If he’s not alive I’ll be a jerk. Okay, he’s alive. He’s 80.”

Then the author wonders aloud whether his protagonist is a sociopath.

“He’s not Don Draper,” Shemkovitz says. “He has the traits of a sociopath, but he doesn’t have the power. Isn’t that every teenager? Can you be a sociopath and not have power?

Because he’s a 27-year-old lot boy. He hasn’t mentally grown up. Teenagers at their worst don’t have the cognitive backing to make rational decisions. Yet here they are desiring to break the rules and test boundaries.”

Shemkovitz carries around a smallish notebook where he jots down ideas for his manuscripts: problems that need resolution, ideas for pacing and scene setting, new perspectives. He advises against waiting too long to revise a first draft, considering that the author’s perspective can shift over time.

“I didn’t think about whether Eddie was a sociopath when I was writing Lot Boy,” he says. “I can’t reread it now without asking myself that question.”

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June 10 — 16, 2015

Cover Story

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27 Views of Greensboro: The Gate City in Prose and Poetry by various authors, Eno Publishers, 2015

by Brian Clarey Greensboro is a city of silos — not in the literal sense, though there’s plenty in this place to suggest its not-so-distant agrarian roots.

The silos in Greensboro are invisible, constricting our view of the larger picture through racial segregation of schools and neighborhoods, socioeconomic stratification, selective memory and inherent tribalism.

From 27 Views of Greensboro, a compilation of essays and poetry by some of the city’s best-known authors, journalists and educators, the reader gets the sense that it’s always been this way, and it always will be.

Recollections of idyllic childhoods run alongside disturbing memoirs of inequality — sometimes in the same piece, as with News & Record Editorial Editor Allen Johnson’s story about the house he grew up inwhile the downtown neighborhood was transitioning from white flight.

That underpinning of racial tension is a theme that runs through nearly every story.

Logie Meachum’s recollection of the bus lines that ran past the Magnolia Hotel called the place “a known safety zone, even for the more famous and well-known coloreds, as we were called in those days.” Journalism teacher and former N&R columnist Lorraine Ahearn tells the story of a grand old house from the city’s Gilded Age that slid into dereliction after its street was renamed to honor Martin Luther King, and then back to respectability as the neighborhood gentrified into Southside.

Memories of the 1960 Woolworth’s sit-ins

come from all sides: the black participant and the white observer and the clueless child who didn’t understand until years later.

The most compelling of the racial memoirs comes from author Linda Beatrice Brown, who in “A Nice, Nasty Town” busts the sit-in from its own silo and contextualizes it with the story of Josephine Boyd, the first black student to attend Greensboro Senior High in 1957.

She was pelted with eggs, threatened by a Klansman and called the N-word so many times she may have become numb to it, but probably not. Her family’s pets were murdered, a large tree felled across their driveway and her father’s business, a snack bar, “inexplicably burned down.”

Another theme concerns the transitory nature of the city beyond its generational residents. Historian and journalist Jim Schlosser’s captivating snapshot of the dirty days of Hamburger Square and the trains that moved people through lays the groundwork for the sentiment, with a slew of essays by writers who thought they were just passing through and ended up staying for decades.

It’s best captured by journalist Ed Cone, whose family history is analogous to that of the boom days in Greensboro, with his piece “Ghost City.”. He manages to find a connective thread, defining us by what we were, what we aspire to be and, most tellingly, what Greensboro is not not.

“We brag about our GPS coordinates in terms of proximity to the mountains and the beach, and even the geological designation of piedmont is defined by the region next door,” he writes Fred Chappell manages to capture an abstract portrait of the city in just a few brushstrokes with a few observations from the bar at the O. Henry Hotel during an ice storm.

Filling out the volume are separate pieces — funny, poignant, whimsical, authentic — that give a mosaic of what it means to live in this city where the trains run through all day and the shadow of Feb. 1, 1960 still looms large.

And that, perhaps, is where the book misses its mark. Because while the writers have an enlightened view of this vein of racism running through the city’s history, there is not much about the sentiment that moved some Greensborians to throw eggs at Josephine Boyd in 1957, other than a sort of blanket condemnation.

Perhaps, in silos of our own, it’s possible for us not to see that in some ways, the eggs are still flying.

Paradise Drive by Rebecca Foust, Press 53, 2015

by Eric Ginsburg In Rebecca Foust’s latest collection of poetry — Paradise Drive, published by Press 53 in Winston-Salem — she concludes several of her pieces the way someone might end a street fight, twisting a switchblade in their enemy’s gut for greater impact before disappearing past trash cans down a dark alley.

If Foust were an athlete she would be a closing pitcher, brought in for her devastating fastball, unexpected sinker and off-speed changeup to take home the win. Or maybe a boxer, deftly delivering quick punches that disorient her readers before she lands an uppercut directly on the button.

Paradise Drive, a collection of sonnets narrated by a character named Pilgrim, is the 2015 Press 53 award-winner for poetry.

Foust, A San Francisco Bay Area writer who attended Warren Wilson College in Asheville, deserves the distinction.

Foust’s poetic precision is almost wicked, calling to mind the captured sense of aimlessness and despair that is similarly chronicled in the prose of the great Joan Didion, particularly in a series of poems where Foust describes desperate California women committing suicide.

“She’s the slough all sin spawns in/ the one who was coached to rank linen/ by thread count and children by GPA,” she writes in “Despair,” one of several moving poems that ends with a knife twist: “She’d have said she was happy, if you asked./ (You didn’t ask.)

The cop sips his Starbucks./ The grapple

hook drags Phoenix Lake.”

In “The Options,” the first of two in a series called “How Then Shall We Live?” Foust writes “Join, while you can, the Cult/ of the Child,” listing several more choices before concluding with “Divorce. Kill yourself/ in a way that leaves the least mess.”

And other times the smoldering anger catches a coal, and lights.

“Let three times be the charm/ that life’s the bane. Or lays it on the men:/ may you be left. Poison yourselves. Jump. Drown,” she concludes in “Bane Laid on Behalf of the Latest Late Wife.” In another, where Foust takes a rare experiment with format and grammar like literary cubism, she ends a poem about a woman jumping from a bridge: “Lover, a lesion seeping like/ after he left her. Empty was found there./ It, at the bridge ramp, still running. The car.”

Some of Foust’s most memorable entries in Paradise Drive aren’t as heavy, instead aptly describing the alienation of vapid, elite parties and hiding in the bathroom to leave, or finally meeting a party guest worth talking to and realizing it’s just an illusion. “Yes, it’s a mirror and — s*** —/ you talking into it,” she writes in “Je Est un Autre.”

Foust’s cultural critique — especially when it comes to chic parties and their egotistical hosts posing as generously concerned with the world’s ills — are among her stronger moments, and that’s part of what calls Didion to mind. But it’s the narrator’s personal experiences that carry the most resonance, like “Prayer for My New Daughter” about a transitioning child: “You are soft as sown grass and fierce as cut glass./ You pack your new purse with lipstick, and mace.” Likewise, the three-part series “Party Etiquette” is the cripplingly poignant. The end of the first poem in the series, “Remain Upbeat and Polite” about an autistic son, ends like the brakes failing on a motorcycle barreling around a curve.

“It got tough to stay all nice and polite/ when they said, J‘ ust a little blood,/ boys being boys.’ Yes, Pilgrim was pissed,/ her son razzed every day, maybe twice./ ‘Got Ritalin?’ And about what brick does, on contact, to a child’s perfect face.”

Or “Don’t Talk About This,” the third of the poems, which begins by describing the fear of your son hanging himself when you find the bathroom door locked. “Tell me… where to find/ the manual that tells how to respond/ to the loved child who from his snug bed/ whispers, I wish I were dead, Mom?/ Tell me, Dr. Spock, what to do about that,/ what does a mother f***ing do about that?”

The term we use in the journalism business is “uncooperative subject.”

It describes someone whose words, memories and insights are integral to the story, but who declines — sometimes politely, sometimes less so — to be interviewed.

That’s what journalist Eddie Huffman dealt with when constructing his biography of the Americana artist John Prine, which he managed to put together without input from the artist and his longtime manager Al Bunetta.

“The official reason from Oh Boy headquarters in Music City was that Prine Inc. was working on a documentary and songbook and considered my book to be ‘competition.’ My arguments that my book would complement rather than detract from their projects fell on deaf ears.”

Fortunately for Huffman, whose journalism credits span from Rolling Stone to the New York Times, John Prine’s life and career has been extensively documented, piece-by-piece, since his recorded debut in 1971.

And it seems Huffman digested every bit of it — liner notes, television appearances, magazine interviews and album reviews included — in a deep-research dive.

The term we use in the journalism business is “clip job,” but to label this work

A Black Urbanist — Essays, Vol. 1 by Kristen E. Jeffers, self-published, 2014

by Jordan Green With developer Roy Carroll emulating the exclusive enclaves of Manhattan with a new development next to Greensboro’s ballpark and Winston-Salem wrestling with how to keep its downtown from becoming a gated community as it turns into a flourishing cultural playground, the questions raised by this book couldn’t be more vital.

Every member of city council and employee of the planning department and city manager’s office in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, though not High Point (more on that later) needs to read this elegant and stimulating collection of essays, which clocks in at a mere 44 pages. That these pieces, revised from the author’s blog, arise from a perspective of passionate citizenship rather than professional expertise gives them an authenticity and organic intelligence that is missing from much of the literature of urban design and planning.

The book’s title comes from Jeffers’ definition of herself: “a young woman of African-American descent who likes all things built environment, especially when it comes to cities.” As the wealthy move back into cities and urban features like walkable streets, open-air markets, restaurants and art galleries gain prestige, what Jeffers calls “the democracy of placemaking” becomes increasingly urgent. Greensboro and Winston-Salem, though not High Point — an anomaly as

a city still dominated by a single industry — are following a national trend of urban revitalization, which happens to coincide with widening wealth inequality.

That dynamic creates the conundrum on which these essays pivot. In her introduction, Jeffers reveals that part of the reason she chose to live in downtown Greensboro was that she believed her credibility depended on creating a marketplace for her preferences. Yet she has to acknowledge that living outside the city center is less expensive.

“While I truly don’t want the center city to yield to the gilded class, I don’t want us to give up on making good places to live because we don’t or can’t afford to do so,” Jeffers writes. “I also don’t want those of us with massive privilege to forget that it doesn’t take much for anyone to fall on hard times, and not all dealing with hard times are lazy and uncommitted.” (Here is the appropriate place to disclose that an article by this author about the relative affordability of suburban housing is cited

by Jeffers.

The four informative essays that comprise A Black Urbanist respectively tackle the emotional bonds of place, consumerism and community development, neighborhood governance and transportation.

The book’s provocative conclusion raises more questions than it answers, suggesting that the suburban concept has become “a survival mechanism for African Americans of varying means.”

The piece also discusses how “streetcar suburbs” built on a grid retain an enriching network of services. But to cast a cloud on that silver lining, “Urban renewal also throws a wrench into the old streetcar suburb concept. Many proper, predominantly African-American streetcar suburbs were demolished or reconfigured to be car-dependent development. Gentrification is taking a lot of dense, service-rich neighborhoods away from those with lesser means, many of whom happen to be African American.”

The paradoxes explored in this book should serve as a tonic note for those of us who find ourselves swept up in the euphoria of urban revival in Greensboro and Winston-Salem.

To order a print copy of A Black Urbanist, visit blurb.com/b/5870644-a-black-urbanist. To order a digital copy of the book, visit gumroad.com/blackurbanist.

triad-city-beat.com

John Prine In Spite of Himself by Eddie Huffman, University of Texas Press Austin, 2015

by Brian Clarey

as such does it a disservice.

Prine’s place in the tree of rock split off from Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan — like contemporaries Bruce Springsteen, Loudon Wainwright and Warren Zevon, he was labeled as one of the successors to Dylan’s legacy as early as 1972, when Dylan’s creative arc had just begun to establish itself. And Prine’s catalog, which is also heavy with influences from country, rockabilly and blues, was Americana before there was such an appellation.

Prine’s been at it for nearly 50 years, largely unsung — he’s been called the “songwriter’s songwriter” and been described as “literary” in much of the writing about him, and it’s telling that some of the most noteworthy performances of his songs have been by other artists. “Angel of Montgomery” has become a standard in Bonnie Raitt’s live set, and he co-wrote “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” a song intended as a satirical dig at country music but which has become a beloved standard, with friend and collaborator Steve Goodman in 1975, though he declined to take a credit.

Huffman’s professional analysis of the music — rich with studio anecdotes, encyclopedic references to sidemen and production notes — and its place in history fleshes out the text.

Prine himself lends gravelly texture in pieces of interviews Huffman incorporates into the narrative. Prine, the former mailman with a taste for pretty words, is a veritable quote machine. It’s safe to say that the book doesn’t quite suffer from the lack of Prine’s cooperation because over the years he’s been quoted on nearly every aspect of his life and career, material that lives in the public domain. But it could have benefited from a contemporary interview with the artist, perhaps reflecting on the life so far and what it all has meant.

As it stands, the hero of this book — for the journalism community, anyway — is Huffman himself, who over a single year culled references on his subject ranging from old “Austin City Limits” YouTube videos to the pages of Penthouse magazine in pursuit of the story.

Like Prine himself, who made musical poetry from ordinary lives, Huffman has elevated the workingman’s clip job into something greater.

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June 10 — 16, 2015

Cover Story

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Motor City Burning by Bill Morris, Pegasus Books, 2014

by Jordan Green Since Motor City Burning was published in July 2014, Michael Brown and numerous other unarmed young black men have been killed by police officers; the streets of Ferguson, Mo. have erupted in rioting in response to heavy-handed, militarized law enforcement; two police officers in New York City have been murdered; and — circling back to Ferguson — officers have been shot by protesters.

It would be hard to imagine a time in the past 40 years, with the exception perhaps of 1992, when American life has been more polarized around questions of race and policing.

Bill Morris’ second novel, set in 1968 post-riot Detroit, seems utterly prescient.

In this novel, richly textured with the cadences of black folks and whites, the urban Midwest and the northern migration, the city is recovering from the previous year’s riots, and the Detroit Tigers’ 1968 pennant-winning season plays as a reprieve as the rest of the world seems to explode in rage. Morris, a Detroit native and former News & Record columnist, skillfully captures a sense of mounting unease coupled with the casual confidence of a city blithely unaware that an economy built on the auto industry is on the verge of unraveling due to the looming tug of global competition.

Told through the perspectives of Willie Bledsoe, a black civil rights worker, and

Frank Doyle, a white homicide detective, Motor City Burning illuminates the contradictions of the racial divide in America.

A foot soldier of the civil rights movement, Willie Bledsoe is undergoing a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder and struggling to come to terms with his disillusionment with the movement, a parallel to his brother, Wes’ more chaotic unwinding from combat in Vietnam. Wes is a kind of ghost in the story, having fled Detroit, but the brothers’ role in a murder as the riots descended into a spiral of rage and vengeance hovers ominously. Willie Bledsoe is gingerly treading through a minefield trying to get free, both literally and psychologically.

As a cop intent on maintaining law and order, Frank Doyle is on a parallel track with Willie Bledsoe, vacillating between obsession and ambivalence, and their respective destinies put the two on a collision course with one another. Morris renders both characters with humanity and complexity. Like Bledsoe, Doyle is not sure he’s all the way down with the cause: While Bledsoe contemptuously dismisses the Rev. Martin Luther King as de Lawd, Doyle feels some sympathy for black rage and wonders if the explosion of violence is not on some level justified.

Morris, like his two protagonists, is a man of impeccable tastes, and he infuses Bledsoe and Doyle with enthusiasms for baseball, jazz and cars, evoking the kaleidoscope of cultural and musical eruptions — the uptight-outtasight mod posture of a young Stevie Wonder, the psychedelic soul of the Temptations’ “Cloud Nine” and, elliptically, the hippie freakout of the MC5’s “Kick Out the Jams.” It’s fun to imagine where he might have mined the details to flesh out the world contained in Motor City Burning. Did the surname for the civil rights worker transplanted from Alabama come from Morris’ fellow News & Record columnist Jerry Bledsoe? The fictitious Detroit jazz bandleader Benny Anflick who says, “How ya doin, babe?” is easier to source: The real-life Sammy Anflick who trademarked the greeting was a jazz bandleader in Greensboro. Just ask another former News & Record columnist, Jeri Rowe.

In the gripping resolution of Motor City Burning, both Bledsoe and Doyle absorb an unsatisfying lesson when the battle lines are drawn hard: Justice is never complete. It might turn out to be wise counsel for the next six to 18 months in America’s current racial impasse.

Hotel Worthy by Valerie Nieman, Press 53, 2015

by Anthony Harrison Hotels host guests from all strata of society, from eccentric residents to families of four dropping in for the weekend. Like a true hotel, former News & Record reporter Valerie Nieman’s newest compilation, Hotel Worthy, contains poems of differing themes, forms and levels of sophistication. They all intermingle like guests coming down from their rooms for a complimentary continental breakfast.

Level of sophistication, of course, has nothing to do with the quality of the poems. which vary markedly in content and form from the clipped, seven-line free verse of “Release,” which kicks off the collection, and the rambling, unpunctuated prose of “Hotel Worthy” to the rigorous sestina of “Notorious” and the experiment in rhyme of “The Bride Comes Home to a House Planted in a Field.”

Forms and themes shift wildly even within some of the multi-part works. “A Blessing on the Tongue” — one of the highlights of the collection — starts off with a scene at the farmer’s market. Its focus on the sensory world heightens to the point of appreciating a King Lust apple nearly to the point of sensual love: “Sweet and rich,/ the juice coats my hand, an apple in full,/ an apple in spate.”

Then, seemingly overwhelmed by the apple itself, the poem breaks from reality in the next four sections, ranging

from TS Eliot-esque allusion about royal eroticism to a versified breakdown of a Merriam-Webster entry on LUSH, a programming language. The speaker seems so obsessed by this apple that her brain overloads in free associations. “A Blessing on the Tongue” is a blessing to the reader — an intriguing exploration of both poetic form and the concepts of imagination and memory.

Memory and imagination arise as themes in other pieces of Hotel Worthy as well. “The Guide: Cave Paintings at Font de Gaume” looks at a sort of creative cultural memory. The speaker marvels at the primitive sophistication of the prehistoric art while seemingly annoyed at the other tourists’ fascination with graffiti etched into them: “Ignore those childish scratchings,/ please.

See the mammoth, here,/ the aurochs’ curving horns./ So long ago, yet those artists understood/ perspective; this leg is clearly behind that one./ How long until we learned that again?/ Centuries.”

Nieman’s poems often use natural imagery. “Father Showed Us the Aurora Borealis” employs artful juxtaposition when evoking the colors of the northern lights: “Colors of a hummingbird gorget,/ parrot fish, shallow seas,/ mandevilla, bougainvillea,/ flametree,/ tropicalities weaving/ in the airless/ ineffable between earth and moon.”

These vibrant, tropical images placed alongside the arctic scene show off Nieman’s talent for playing with the reader’s expectations.

She toys with juxtaposing nature in two other fine poems, “Apocrypha” and “Catechism.” Both titles bring to mind religious themes, but they’re largely concerned with nature. Nieman even recognizes her tool explicitly; “Catechism” begins, “Quickly!/ Before your memory fades—/ what did you see?”

Some may think of the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles’ Creed, but not Nieman’s speaker: “Grass moving in the wind, birds, young pines/ like bottlebrushes, squirrels.” But Nieman realizes the power of suggestion, using it to craft an entertaining poetic narrative. In poems like “Catechism,” Nieman’s church seems to be the outdoors, flora and fauna, the corporeal.

Hotel Worthy contains suite after suite of poems as good as these. There’s a vacancy for any fan of poetry.

One of the great things about Dixie Be Damned, my former college advisor told me over our shrimp pho lunch last week, is that the authors set up each new section with very helpful historical context before diving into the minutia of each insurrectionary struggle. The authors’ ability to illuminate primarily forgotten rebellions while framing each within a broader narrative makes Dixie Be Damned an important and digestible read, she said. She may even incorporate the text into one of her classes.

Rather than take the comprehensive Howard Zinn-style approach of A People’s History of the United States, the Triangle-based authors — former Greensboro resident Saralee Stafford and Neil Shirley — selected seven moments of insurrection across the Southeast that have been largely erased by other accounts of US, Southern or even radical history.

Beginning with a chapter about outlaw communities in the Great Dismal Swamp in northeastern North Carolina, Dixie Be Damned weaves across hundreds of years and several states to illustrate a much stronger tradition of resistance than is generally attributed to the South, one created by teenage girls working in Tennessee mills and marginalized black communities rising up against police oppression in Atlanta, among others. Of

Shrimp by Jay Pierce, University of North Carolina Press, 2015

by Sayaka Matsuoka It’s not every day you find a cookbook that reads like a novel.

Shrimp by Jay Pierce, former executive chef at Lucky 32 in Greensboro and Cary, is the most recent addition to the Savor the South cookbook series, which highlights single dishes or ingredients in each of its books. The food connoisseur — who now bears the title of executive chef at Rocksalt in Charlotte — introduces readers to the small yet beloved crustacean and highlights his many experiences with the decapod.

Guiding readers through the strenuous process of catching then freezing and finally cooking shrimp, Pierce unravels an intricate world revolving around not only eating the delicacy but really understanding its position in the culinary world.

Before sharing his own takes on classic and contemporary shrimp recipes, Pierce takes readers from the salty decks off coastal waters in the Carolinas and Louisiana, illuminating his family’s personal connection to the food, to white tablecloths of fine restaurants and greasy fast-food joints that serve the seafood in a fried popcorn variety. He outlines the history of the crustacean and how its popularity came to be, answering in great detail the most efficient way to prepare

shrimp, setting up the scene for both cooks and food enthusiasts alike.

By detailing his personal experiences shrimping off the coast of Louisiana and recounting memories of hosting shrimp boils and buying stocks of them from vendors in crowded parking lots, Pierce creates a colorful experience that reads like a biographical novella while offering the best (and easiest) recipes for both beginning and seasoned cooks.

Extending from his passionate introduction, Pierce’s love and respect for shrimp can easily be detected in each of his 50 recipes, from his small plates consisting of bacon-wrapped shrimp to his salads and soups, as well as dishes with noodles and rice and finally entrees exhibiting shrimp as the main event. Each of the recipes opens with a paragraph explaining Pierce’s connection to the dish and the history behind its making. With shout-outs to restaurants and chefs from all over North Carolina, Pierce’s Shrimp is not only an homage to the scrumptious shellfish itself but also a culinary love letter to the state and its finest establishments and restaurateurs.

triad-city-beat.com

Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South by Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, AK Press, 2015

by Eric Ginsburg

the seven pockets of history chronicled in this book, three are in North Carolina, including a chapter on the Lowry Wars in Robeson County during Reconstruction and the concluding insurrection in the book, a 1975 revolt at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women.

It’s not surprising that the anarchists at AK Press would be interested in examining and distributing these histories that had been brushed to the side, but the majority of those who came to listen to the authors at Greensboro’s Scuppernong Books last week didn’t necessarily harbor the same feelings about the state and capital as the presenters.

While a few questions touched on the process of examining contemporary newspaper reports and searching for scant historical documents, the most vocal members of the audience wanted to talk about anarchism or pontificate about what would make a successful social upheaval.

People — many of them long since gone gray — packed the back of the bookstore for the reading, the authors’ first since the book’s release.

The audience quickly drew connections between a passage Shirley read about a series of riots in Atlanta after heavy-handed policing in the 1960s and modern street fights after police killings of unarmed, black men in the last year. But Shirley pushed attendees deeper, drawing out the ways that wealthy blacks attempted to speak for disenfranchised urban communities or how authorities used civil services to try and placate the public while fueling their own agenda of gentrification and displacement.

At the outset of their research, Stafford expected to find a history dominated by men, but said she was shocked to discover resistance led by women and teenage girls, stories that shook stereotypes about ideas of Southern womanhood. But all of the moments of insurrection challenge existing notions of the region, and counteract the notion that to be proficient in radical history, one must heavily rely on European examples, Stafford said.

“As a radical Southerner, I’ve always had to look to other people’s histories as an example of resistance,” she said at the event, adding that even accounts of historical resistance in the American South usually follow a narrow scope, documenting only certain components such as nonviolent civil rights struggles.

But now, an alternative narrative exists.

25

June 10 — 16, 2015 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story

Food Music Art Stage & Screen Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

26

Banquet

FOOD

by Anthony Harrison

Infuse yourself with culinary knowledge Small Farms Field Day @ A&T University (GSO), Thursday The early bird gets the… truffle… if you show up to A&T at 8:15 a.m. And it’s a truffle of knowledge. You’ll get to learn how to infuse truffles, pastured pork, veggies and grape pomace into such things as bread, beef and other foods.

Also, they’ll teach alternative and urban growing techniques, swine genetics and efficient solar-energy and rain catchment systems. Nerd out on a Thursday morning, man.

I want my baby back Twin City RibFest @ 500 N. Marshall St. (W-S), Thursday Remember that Chili’s ad campaign from, like, the early ’00s? No? Is it just me?

Anyway, if you don’t get your fill of swine at Small Farms Field Day, or you just don’t care for driving to A&T to learn, I’m sure you’ll be able to grab a handful of sweet pork ribs in downtown Winston-Salem during the 11th annual Twin City RibFest. It starts at 11 a.m., just in time for pre-lunch and a nap.

Craft beer and rock ’n’ roll Carolina Summer Craft Beer and Music Fest @ Winston-Salem Fairgrounds and Annex (W-S), Saturday Since 2010, Carolina Summer Craft Beer and Music Fest has dedicated itself to support music culture and education through the promotion of the arts. I mean, good for them, but what I figure is, there’s going to be some decent beer and live music, and that’s what matters in life, am I right? The festival kicks off at noon. For more information, find Carolina Summer Craft Beer and Music Fest on Facebook.

Ain’t no party like a Eugene party Grand opening block party @ Preyer Brewing Co. and Crafted: The Art of Street Food (GSO), June 14 …cause a Eugene party is mandatory!

It isn’t really, but if you don’t show up, you’re a damn fool. While Deep Roots Market is helping out with some vittles like kombucha, the block party is centered around Preyer Brewing Co. and Crafted: The Art of Street Food, but if you can’t figure out where it is once you park your car and hear the sweet sounds of Crystal Bright & the Silverhands or the Ends, you’re in need of professional help. The party starts at 4 p.m.

We all predicted Sayaka would win the sushi-eating competition, but we didn’t anticipate her speed, or a surprise factor in the matchup. See more photos of the food at triad-city-beat.com.

ERIC GINSBURG

Sushi showdown at Mizumi

by Eric Ginsburg

Everyone in the office predicted it, but our intern’s boyfriend said it best: “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” he warned as we scanned the allyou-can-eat sushi menu.

Ours is an office filled with proud eaters, many of us with a propensity for bragging about our voraciousness and an endless willingness to talk — mostly trash — about food. So it’s not surprising that a sushi-eating competition between our departing interns, Anthony Harrison and Sayaka Matsuoka, has been a long time coming.

The only delay really was the price and timing of the special at Mizumi Hibachi & Sushi on State Street in Greensboro, which is $22 for lunch the first four weekdays and more for other meals during the week. We saved up for a few weeks, which coincidentally allowed for more chest puffing and braggadocio. But before we left the office on Monday, the editors all put our proverbial money on Sayaka.

She’s a regular at Mizumi, grew up power-eating sushi and before the first round arrived, pointed out that she specifically wore a dress to allow unrestricted expansion for her stomach.

We all predicted that Anthony would fill appetizers in a separate column. This up and slow down, his eyes exceeding left a window of opportunity for either his gut and his will to win inferior. In an intern to exploit the smaller size of the amateur move, he ordered a Sapporo upon sashimi to get ahead. arrival, because — as he pointed out — they “It’s like air, so basically it’s nothing,” were half off.

Sayaka said.

We sat on tatami mats around a low But neither intern took advantage of table at the back of Mizumi, a Japanese the loophole. As Sayaka’s boyfriend Sam, restaurant owned by a Chinese couple who came along on his lunch break, All-you-can-eat sushi is popular in the said as we quibbled about scorekeeping Northeast and West Coast, Sayaka and whether a crab Rangoon and a tiny explained, but this is one of the only places shumai were equal: “When the dust in the area that offers it, and she’d argue settles, I don’t think it will matter that it’s the best. much.”

It was For the important to appetizer round Visit Mizumi at 309 create a few rules — which also State Street (GSO) or at for the match, included fried mizumihibachisushi.com. but Mizumi calamari rings, lays out some gyoza dumplings requirements and fried tofu — of its own. Namely, it adheres to the Anthony held his own despite his underdog outdoors adage of “leave no trace” — status, matching Sayaka with six pieces. diners are charged extra for sushi left For the main fare, we picked a on the plate in order to cut down on combination of nigiri — sushi where overordering and wastefulness. the fish comes atop the rice instead of For our purposes, we decided against rolls most Americans are more familiar forcing each contestant to consume with —several specialty rolls and exactly the same thing, instead sashimi — which is served without rice counting all rolls as equal and recording — consuming them family-style. Some

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Salute Wine Festival

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ERIC GINSBURG Cheers: Four Salute patrons celebrate while relaxing at one of several tables at the outdoor wine festival. See more photos at triad-city-heat.com

more than satisfied, making plans for a pit stop after a day hike near Jones von Drehle and wondering what next year at Salute would hold.

Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

Correction An article in the June 3, 2015 issue of Triad City Beat, “High Point’s enduring coffee shop,” incorrectly stated that XII Tribes Brewing uses espresso beans from DeBeen Espresso. The brewery actually uses product from Foster Hobbs, while Liberty — another High Point-based brewery — does use DeBeen’s coffee. We regret the error.

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If you’re reading this it’s too late to attend Salute, but take care to check out Jones von Drehle and Jolo Winery & Vineyards online.

You can thank me later.

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line-up on a side street, almost forgotten at the end with barely a line to speak of.

Jolo brought three wines to the gun show, including its dry red blend that won silver in Sonoma and a dry white that took gold in Asheville, as well as a sweet white that was a far cry from the bludgeons of sugar other vineyards were peddling. In short — the hype is on the money.

The list of impressive vineyards extends beyond two, of course; we ran into trustworthy friends leaving with a box of three reds from Sanctuary Vineyards, a booth we didn’t catch, and three red bottles from Mocksville-based RayLen, a vineyard I noted that I enjoyed as well.

There’s plenty more that we missed, like the fried Oreos, and others we could’ve done without, like a blackberry “wine” or $5 bottles from Cauble Creek in Salisbury. But we left

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of Salute, but either the viogniers are new or I forgot them. Our late arrival kept our buzzes in check, though it also meant we didn’t reach every one of the vineyards represented, so it’s possible a few standouts were overlooked. But from the crop we caught, one viognier stood above the rest.

Jones von Drehle, a vineyard about the age of 2 from western Surry County near Stone Mountain, plied a viognier with more dimension and less heavy-handed sweetness than the others we sampled. It’s a white wine known for its peach flavor and inability to age well, and Jones von Drehle’s product manages to deliver the goods without smacking you across the face with it.

The vineyard’s Dulcimer wine, the name for its rosé, was also the best of the bunch we found, and the merlot provided a nice change of pace from many of the wines available that hot Saturday afternoon on downtown Fourth Street.

It was with great satisfaction that we learned, after running into preeminent Winston-Salem foodie Nikki Miller-Ka, that Jones von Drehle is one of the darlings of the state’s wine scene at present. Guess we know what we’re talking about after all.

Miller-Ka directed us to Jolo Winery & Vineyards from Pilot Mountain, the other rising star, she said. We found the vineyard — whose name will always remind me of YOLO, thanks to Drake — at the end of a

Food

I’ve never seen so much viognier in the same place, not even at a wine shop.

I forgot how much the North Carolina wine scene is dominated by sweet wines, some of them overly so and several of them designed for dessert, until I stepped up to my second or third tent at Salute Wine Festival last weekend. Blame it on the indigenous muscadine grape, the climate or the consumers, but for whatever reason, Carolinians appear to like their wine as sweet as their tea.

We showed up midway through the affair, knowing that five hours of day drinking in concentrated, small sips might be too much of a precursor to a cookout in Winston-Salem’s Ardmore neighborhood that evening. Moving from booth to booth with my girlfriend Kacie, line-hopping for the shortest wait, we repeatedly saw signs for beverages other than wine.

Admittedly most were wine influenced, like a wine slushy from Rocky River Vineyards east of Charlotte, a truly fantastic concoction involving the vineyard’s White Gold muscadine wine and its pinot grigio. Others couldn’t be classified as wine at all; if it ain’t from a grape it ain’t wine, but we mused that an alcoholic blueberry juice could make a good adult Popsicle, one of the things we’ve added to a summer bucket list.

I remember being overwhelmed by fruit-forward, sweet wines at past iterations

Opinion

But Sam, without a single boastful word, cruised to victory with 25 notches in his belt, not to mention three beers.

“I feel like I’m a good 50- 60 percent fish,” he said when it ended.

But with office bragging rights on the line, Sayaka deserved credit of her own, though when Sam offered to pay for her meal, she quipped: “That’s really winning.”

It’s hard to say if Anthony learned enough from his slow pacesetting that he could’ve run away with it in a third round, but Sayaka should never be underestimated.

After all, when our green-tea ice creams came out to top off the meal, she grabbed mine and traded our bowls before I could react, claiming the slightly larger dessert portion for herself despite already being declared the victor.

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intake as well. When he shared that he had knocked back 17, Sayaka expressed pride and I insisted he continue counting. Would a dark horse emerge?

We all marveled at the specialty rolls — my favorite being the Phoenix topped with eel, but I thoroughly enjoying the fried J-Style, Firecracker, Sunshine and Playboy. We tried mackerel, red snapper, crab, shrimp, white fish, tuna, spicy salmon, octopus, yellowtail, squid, tofu skins and likely several others.

Anthony, who described the octopus as perfect, closed ground in Round 2, nearly eliminating Sayaka’s early lead.

But with time on the meal expiring, the end of the round became the final count. Sayaka led Anthony as predicted, but a mere 23-20. Meanwhile, casually adding 11 to my rough initial estimate, I believe I clocked in at 21.

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by Eric Ginsburg

story about her mom ordering two entrees on ski trips back in her twenties.

For all of Anthony’s grandstanding in the office about how he once tied a high-school classmate by eating 26 pieces of Cici’s Pizza in a single sitting, nobody was impressed.

Anthony started making excuses about his math skills, and protesting that he was too excited about the quality of the food to scarf it down. The family-style approach was cramping him, as we emptied the first two large plates before he noticed.

By that point Sayaka had consumed 16 pieces, a phenomenal showing compared to Anthony’s pithy nine.

Determined to enjoy myself, I hadn’t kept track but estimated I was probably responsible for the demise of 10 pieces.

Sam had quietly kept track of his own

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come in an order of eight while many are individually selected, up to 20 at a time, allowing us to diversify the experience.

Sayaka, a veteran of such meals, quickly established her lead.

“Damn, you’re on four already?”

Anthony said, looking down at the hash marks on the divided sheet in front of them. He was on his second piece, and also his second beer.

By the time he put down five, Sayaka hit double digits.

“You’re just shoveling the food now!” he said. “Goddamn, girl!”

Only Anthony was surprised.

“Living with her is like training for a food competition,” Sam said, while Sayaka described how it runs in the family, recounting how she used to lie and say she was related to Japanese competitive hotdog eater Takeru Kobayashi and sharing a

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Setlist

MUSIC

by Jordan Green

Let it rock Lindsey & Joshua’s Rock N Roll Jamboree @ New York Pizza (GSO), Friday Lindsey Sprague and Joshua Johnson, the First Couple of Greensboro rock and roll, host a hootenanny of fairly epic proportions. Charlie Megira, he of the Bet-She-an Valley Hillbillies, is only one of fascinating cast of reverb throwback cats and rock-and-roll true believers scheduled to appear. The lineup also includes Baltimore blues-garage rockers Lazlo Lee & the Motherless Children, Brooklyn rock and surf revivalists the Chickenhawks, one-man trash-garage punk band Deadly Lo-Fi, Baltimore manic punkers the Slower Jerks, along with DJs Dick Vinegar and Charming Snake. Show starts at 9 p.m.

You’re pretty ugly The Pretty Ugly @ the Blind Tiger (GSO), Saturday Out of the ashes of the 5-Ls comes the Pretty Ugly, a band that apologetically straddles the line between hard rock and metal. They celebrate the release of their new CD, with support from friends Trailer Park Orchestra, the Swamp, Soapbox Arson and Hexxes. Show starts at 7 p.m.

It came from Memphis The Delta Monks @ Muddy Creek Music Hall (W-S), Saturday Paying homage to blues music from Memphis downriver to New Orleans, and all variants of country and soul in between, the Delta Monks took second place in the Piedmont Blues Preservation Society’s solo/duo contest last year. Tonight they grace Muddy Creek Music Hall, the new listening room in historic Bethania. Show starts at 9 p.m.

More an attitude than a style Bio Ritmo @ Second Sundays on Fourth (W-S), June 14 Bio Ritmo’s new album Puerta Del Sur, scheduled for release on Spain’s Vampisoul on June 24, literally translates as “door to the South.” That’s fitting for a salsa band based in Richmond, Va. With 23 years of recording and touring experience, the novelty of being a salsa band in the South has begun to wear off; the label denotes a fierce sense of experimentation and righteous political posture as much as anything like a purist Afro-Cuban musical genre. The band headlines the monthly Second Sundays on Fourth, the free street festival on the most happening block of Winston-Salem’s most vibrant downtown street. Show starts at 3 p.m.

Josh Moore of the defunct hardcore band Beloved has a new, acoustic-tinged solo album out.

JORDAN GREEN

The acoustic return of the hardcore son

by Jordan Green

Josh Moore and his band took the stage at the Garage in Winston-Salem on June 6 for the inaugural outing of the material on his new album Parted Ways.

Rows of plastic chairs lined in front of the stage hinted that this would be far from a rowdy hardcore show. Wearing skinny jeans that recalled the style of his youth, Moore’s eyes shone with the same piercing gaze of his days as a hardcore frontman. But a full, bushy, red beard signaled the new path of the past 10 years.

Moore follows a time-honored evolution in North Carolina music from punk rock to country. It’s a logical path for a musician primarily interested in authenticity.

The first and most significant example is Whiskeytown, which laid a plank for Raleigh in the alt-country movement of the mid-1990s, and whose

frontman Ryan Adams had played in the punk band Patty Duke Syndrome previously. Primarily inspired by the country rock of Gram Parsons, Adams’ singing on Whiskeytown’s second album displayed flashes of Paul Westerberg’s reckless inebriate punk-rock howl. More recently and locally, Winston-Salem’s Caleb Caudle transitioned from punk bands inspired by the Clash to Steve Earle-style folk with a sound that has developed into something very much like mainstream country.

Josh Moore rose to prominence as vocalist for the Triad post-hardcore band Beloved, founded around the turn of the millennium in Kernersville.

(Incidentally, twin brother Ian Moore took a slightly different route as lead singer of the now-defunct street-punk band Queen Anne’s Revenge.)

Beloved played with a slightly

harder edge than a brace of bands that elaborated on an exuberant pop-punk template established earlier by Jimmy Eat World. What Beloved shared with peers from the North Carolina and Virginia Piedmont like Sullivan, FarLess and the Necessary was energetic delivery, emotional directness and a sense of camaraderie between performers and audience.

Following Beloved’s final show in Winston-Salem in early 2005, Josh Moore eventually wound up in Carrboro and immersed himself in acoustic singer-songwriter music.

When he started writing songs as a solo artist, Moore took cues from people like the late Jason Molina and Iris DeMent. He played music continuously after the breakup of Beloved, collaborating with a group of like-minded musicians in the Triangle,

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and soaring by turns. With Crawford and Rich’s voice adding gentle harmony to Moore’s lead, not to mention the interplay of keyboards with countrytinged folk guitars, comparisons with Whiskeytown seem almost inevitable.

The reflective cast of Moore’s songwriting didn’t hamper the dynamic interplay of the band. As the evening progressed, Wallace’s drumming displayed increasing commitment and the band’s tight arrangements rocked around bracing melodic signatures.

Skylar Gudasz, whose opening set showcased jazz- and old-timeinfluenced vocals with a pop-savvy sense of melody, accompanied Moore’s band on flute for a handful of songs, furthering the collaborative spirit of the show. She also contributed sympathetic harmony vocals.

The trenchant tone of Moore’s voice along with occasional flourishes of organ called to mind Bob Dylan in “Ballad of a Thin Man” mode, albeit without the caustic edge.

Despite the billing of the new album, Moore’s strongest theme is reconciliation.

“It’s easy coming, and it’s easier going,” he sang in his rendition of the title track during his performance at the Garage. “When you’re lost without knowing where to begin/ And I count my blessings, each and every one/ I was taking for granted all that we had/ So many days like this, all down the line/ We could mend our parted ways….”

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but only in January 2013 did he start recording his first solo album. By then he had a go-to group of players, including bassist Jeff Crawford, who also recorded and produced the record, which was recorded incrementally: Moore would write songs and go into the studio to record them one by one until the album was complete.

The result, Parted Ways, will be selfreleased on CD this week, with vinyl following in July.

Armed with an acoustic guitar, Moore was joined onstage at the Garage by Crawford on bass, along with Ryan Gustafson on electric guitar, James Wallace on drums, Chessa Rich on keyboards and Mark Simonson, who coaxed a warm organ-like sound from a Crumar synthesizer. Like his Triangle cohorts Loamlands and Mount Moriah, Moore’s music is built around a voice and an acoustic guitar, with a warm sound filled out through additional instrumentation. Put forth without angst or dissonance, the music often rocks, with tinges of country and soul cropping up here and there.

Josh Moore possesses a warm, luxuriant voice, almost a contralto, that wraps around the reflective confessionals of his lyrics. During his performance at the Garage on June 6, Crawford and Wallace’s rhythm section gently kicked beneath the melody line, while Gustafson provided tasteful filigree with lead guitar and Rich and Simonson fleshed out the songs with keyboard signatures that were textured

Good Sport Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

Skylar Gadasz opened for Josh Moore and later joined him onstage.

JORDAN GREEN

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June 10 — 16, 2015 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food Music

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Palette

ART

by Anthony Harrison

For the children Second Saturday @ SECCA (W-S), Saturday Do you think your kid has what it takes to be the next Picasso, Dali, Rothko, Caravaggio or Warhol? Would you settle for them being the next Pollock?

If they want to show their stuff, take them to SECCA in Winston-Salem, where they can create artwork based on the current exhibition or, if they aren’t the ambitious type, just watch some classic cinema and cartoons.

The event begins at 10 a.m.

Sorry, I’ve never seen Spirited Away Greensboro Anime, Manga and Graphic Novel Convention @ Benjamin Branch Library (GSO), Saturday And, hell, aside from Achewood, I’ve never really read a graphic novel. But I did just pick up Maus at Edward McKay’s, so I’m pretty hyped. Anyway, this full day of events includes trivia, karaoke, voice acting, speed drawing and even a costume contest. However, if you wish to compete in the art contest, you must submit your piece by 2:30 p.m. The con is free and open to the public and begins at 2 p.m.

The art of coffee Grounding Grounds @ the Green Bean (GSO), Saturday Beginning on Saturday, the Green Bean in conjunction with Greenhill will show the selection for its newest show, Grounding Grounds, composed of art crafted from coffee-making supplies.

All works are for sale, and the artists receive 100-percent commission.

An onlooker stands in front of Hello, Magic City, Kat Lamp’s first art show in 10 years at the Ember Gallery in Winston-Salem on June 5.

SAYAKA MATSUOKA

It’s all about the unicorn farts

by Sayaka Matsuoka

Snickers and giggles slipped from viewers as they read the titles of Kat Lamp’s paintings during her exhibition opening in the gallery portion of the Ember Gallery in the downtown WinstonSalem Arts District.

Quips like “Groovy Panda Bass Magic” and “You wouldn’t know this by looking at them, but Woofie and Sally are totally dancing to some weird-ass dubstep s***” identified Lamp’s equally hilarious paintings of pastel animals both real and imaginary, clouds, vegetables and random body parts. Wood panels and old records served as canvases for all of Lamp’s works, fitting the theme of the ’‘60s- and ’‘70s-styled space lined with high-quality speakers and boutique audio equipment.

The show, titled Hello, Magic City, is the first solo exhibit that Lamp has put on in 10 years, opening on June 5 to coincide with the monthly First Friday Gallery Hop. A native of Winston-Salem, Lamp moved back to the city after living

Some pieces involve dancing animals in Greensboro from 2005 to 2014. paired with ridiculous titles like, “You “It’s good to be back,” said Lamp, who wouldn’t know this by looking at them, was dressed in an equally quirky green but Woofie and Sally are totally dancing blouse patterned with tiny deer, a silver to some weird-ass dubstep s***.” skirt and red platform sandals. “I’m While her titles may be purposefully relieved to be working at home again.” crude, her style appeals to a broad Youthful themes mixed with adult audience. She’s even designed posters humor characterize her style, which for the Avett Brothers. draws inspiration from storybooks. Many The crowd that of the paintings had gathered include starry in the small unicorn farts.

Kat Lamp’s art show Hello, electronics shop “I try to make Magic City will be on display and gallery myself laugh,” through June 27 at the Ember included adults Lamp said. “My Gallery (W-S). looking for studio used to something unique be a funeral to adorn their home and that’s walls as well as younger kids who had inspired some of my works.” straggled in with their parents.

Electric Pyramid studio is a few blocks One painting of a pretty hip bee with east and is home to about a dozen sunglasses titled “Beezus” — which working artists. alludes to Kanye West’s self-proclaimed Lamp’s work includes a painting of haunted Jello-O and an equally haunted album “Yeezus” — had already sold within the first half hour of the cup of coffee.

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exhibition. By the end of the first hour, Lamp had sold nine of her paintings.

One however, was not for sale.

“It’s of my dog Cracker and my cat Mini-me,” Lamp said. “Cracker died recently and the painting depicts what Mini-me is thinking of; it’s therapeutic for me.”

The round painting shows an orange tabby dressed in a white shirt and navy jeans high-fiving a black dog, also sporting a white shirt and red pants.

The success of the show excited Lamp and helped her look forward to her future shows at Camino Bakery a few blocks away on West Fourth Street and another in the Fiction Kitchen in Raleigh.

She even has a favorite title from her show.

“The title that makes me laugh the most is, ‘Look at Those F***ing Carrots Being all Healthy and S***. Just Look at Them.’” Lamp said. “I like how it works in an obvious way but I like how it works metaphorically as well. I can’t help but marvel at how healthy and fit some people are when I see them out jogging, and I can’t help but look at them. And then I feel creepy.”

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The wind through my soul blows cold Barefoot Bijou @ PB & Java and the Forge (GSO), Wednesday It’ll last through June 27, and it’s a very special thing: Barefoot Bijou is Greensboro’s first summer film festival.

You may notice that I wrote about it this week. The Group A screening was grand.

The Forge will host the Group B screening of short films starting at 8:30 p.m.

You ain’t need no crossroads for to sell your soul Faust @ the Crown (GSO), Friday I’m one of those rare, pretentious jackasses who likes watching silent films.

No matter what, FW Murnau’s Faust is truly a landmark in European cinema.

Riding on the coattails of his vampire classic, Nosferatu, Murnau took his turn at the old legend of selling souls and the consequences thereafter. Modern Robot accompanies the film with improvised music. The show starts at 9:15 p.m.

Ain’t no doubt, we are here to party Boogie Nights @ A/perture Cinema (W-S), Friday While some other Paul Thomas Anderson films picked up some Academy Awards, like There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights cements its status as the wunderkind auteur’s cinematic breakthrough. Set in the Golden Age of Porn, the movie follows Dirk Diggler, a half-witted young man with the wang to make up for his lack of smarts, on his meteoric rise to sexual stardom and the ensuing, spiraling downfall. It’s one of my favorite movies of all time, I guess because I like movies about making movies — meta.

The show starts at 10:30 p.m. and plays at the same time on Saturday.

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People filter into PB & Java’s black-box theater for Barefoot Bijou’s first short-film screening.

LES BUTCHART

Grassroots film fest sprouts in Greensboro

by Anthony Harrison

Billy Ingram, flaunting a creamcolored jacket, black shirt, black pants and a golden curtain rope draped across his shoulders, excitedly led a few stragglers from Gibb’s Hundred Brewing Co. in Greensboroalong an uneasy, mud-caked alley off the south end of downtown.

Greensboro isn’t known for having many alleyways, but this one off Elm Street led to the back entrance of what will soon become PB & Java. The rear of the anticipated restaurant features a black-box theater.

Due to weather concerns, the first screening of 16 short films for Barefoot Bijou, a new film festival in Greensboro, debuted at PB & Java instead of outside the Forge makerspace, as originally planned.

It might not have been as “barefoot” as initially hoped, but the first screening

of short films left no one disappointed, giving hope to its month-long run ending on June 27.

All films to be shown were either made in state or by North Carolina filmmakers.

Ingram told the story about how Greensboro very nearly became Hollywood, due to the railyard, manufacturing, integration of Jewish business and cheap labor.

“It came down to us and southern California, and they have more sunny days than us,” Ingram said, referring to the fact that old “sound” stages relied on natural light.

Without much further ado, the screening began.

These first shorts ranged from the silly to the serious, features and documentaries, horror and cheese, slapdash to high-brow and

from the comedic realism of “The Barbituaries” to the morality play of “Locker 212” and the experimentation of “Icarus Ascending,” produced by everyone from professors to student filmmakers.

Considering the first showing presented 16 films, it’s surprising that most of them were pretty good.

Even those which fell somewhat short had their own merits — a good script bolstered shoddy acting or crisp cinematography amplified a blasé slice of life.

“Icarus Ascending” by UNCG professor Michael Frierson opened the event. Frierson, known for a documentary on his father’s role as an informant against the KKK, turned more towards the abstract with this work.

Two women, dressed identically in black with brunette hair pinned in

by Anthony Harrison

It should be Duke.

Common Enemy @ Triad Stage (GSO), Wednesday Sports create drama. This drama concerns sports. Specifically, basketball, my personal favorite sport. Preston Lane wrote this one.

Come and see. For tickets and showtimes, visit triadstage.org.

Part of your world The Little Mermaid Jr. @ Starr Theatre (GSO), Wednesday Do you wanna be where the people are? Do you wanna see, wanna see them dancing? Then take your kid to see this play. For showtimes and tickets, visit ctgso.com.

All the freaks will be there!

The Sideshow Saturdays Project @ Goldenflower Tai Chi Studio (W-S), Saturday I mean not to offend; it’s just, you know… sideshows… featuring freaks back in the ol’ days. This is an immersive performance event about creating stuff. The performance begins at 8:30 p.m.

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Got a show coming up? Send your theatre info to brian@triad-city-beat.com.

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You’re a crook, Captain Hook The Boy Who Would Be Captain Hook @ Greensboro Central Library (GSO), June 15 The library may not seem like the most fitting venue, but no matter what, The Boy Who Would Be Captain Hook debuts there on Tuesday. The play starts at 4 p.m.; check davidharrellonline. com to find more information.

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’Cause after all, he’s just a man Stand By Your Man: The Tammy Wynette Story @ 1047 Northwest Boulevard (W-S), Friday Tammy Wynette, the First Lady of Country

More like Corny and Drought, am I right?...

Maizy and Sprout @ Children’s Museum of Winston-Salem (W-S), Friday Naomi Shafer’s play serves as a parable about two American Indian sisters. Further details forthcoming (not really). For tickets and showtimes, visit peppercorntheatre.org.

Opinion

I am completely naked right now…ladies…

Don’t Dress for Dinner @ Barn Dinner Theatre (GSO), Friday It is a sexy, sexy farce from France about affairs and friends and cooks and everything, and things get mixed up because farce. Thank God I don’t have to write about it any longer. Oh, and it’s rated PG-13. Visit barndinner.com for tickets and showtimes.

Music, was kind of a badass. I guess you’d have to be to hang with George Jones. Go and see this musical revue. For showtimes and tickets, visit wstheatrealliance.org.

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The festival’s next events include outdoor, short-film screenings at the Forge Thursday and June 18 at 8:30 p.m.

For more information, find Barefoot Bijou on Facebook.

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it could be anywhere. It’s just that the Flatiron, ReCycles, College Hill Sundries and Suds & Duds are such familiar sights that only those in the know realize the town’s character.

The script was witty as hell and realistically laid out the worries of a twentysomething, almost-hopeless romantic.

Matt Nunn’s “Locker 212” was a tiny tragedy with immense proportions and gravitas. Two high-schoolers get locked into detention with one another for smoking weed in the bathroom. One, the denim-bedecked bully without a cause, goads the other, a neurotic introvert, into opening up, but with unintended backlash. Jacob Leinbach and Matt Mitchell, the bully and the outcast, both display prodigious talent, and the twist — simultaneously revealing the “bully” to be brighter and more empathetic than originally suspected — speaks volumes to the state of classroom drama in the modern age.

Chris Crutchfield’s “Fait” began on a deceptively weak note. A writer sits on a bench, idling until an eccentric little girl asks what he’s doing. They chat. It’s cute.

But when little Rachel shows off her journal, a world of imagination and poetry in motion opens up to the writer, astonished as the text literally jumps off the page into the real world. The girl’s mother, embarrassed — as if she knows her kid shouldn’t show off to a Muggle — hurries her away, leaving the young man dazed yet inspired.

After the final short ended, everyone filed out happy. The festival had gotten off its feet.

Barefoot Bijou’s future remains to be seen, but for the moment, the festival seems content in celebrating itself and the work of local filmmakers.

“We love the south side of Greensboro,” festival organizer Les Butchart said to the audience before the screening began. “[Barefoot Bijou] is a Southside project… event… mission.

Creativity spans all of us, whether you’re an artist or trying to make something in digital media.”

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buns, stood superimposed in a shot reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. The score strained as the women danced together, and archival footage of a self-propelled wheel became incorporated with their movements. Soon, the film seemed to fall apart. As the women danced more independently, the score became more and more frantic and discordant, and the archive footage showed the wheel failing miserably, exploding upon itself.

At the end of the short, the room sat silent through the credits until a smattering of appreciative applause accompanied the second short: a documentary about Tate Street.

While charming and informative, featuring interviews from local musicians and Tate Street figures, some interviews were practically intelligible, their audio warbly and muffled, likely due to faulty recording.

Better sound editing could have salvaged a promising piece.

The fourth film, Eric Henderson’s “Drawn,” was completed as part of the 48 Hour Film Project, wherein participants complete a film from script to print in two days. It was a miniature psychological thriller featuring an uncanny performance from a young boy who could draw his own realities. The film cribbed the best of David Lynch in its editing and music, and the twist shot shivers down the spine.

Closing the first half of the screening was Maurice Hicks’ “A Letter to My Son,” an impassioned monologue delivered by Crenston Johnson. Venting about the African-American experience in a stark white Oxford shirt, Johnson apologized to his son for everything he would endure.

“I have never been a perfect man, but I ask for forgiveness before you’ve even been born, because I’ve already failed you,” Johnson’s narrator states. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry.” A tear streams down his face. “I’m sorry.”

Hicks, in attendance, received rave applause from the audience before intermission.

“The Barbituaries,” directed by and starring Ryan Walker, was a highlight, as well as the longest film in the program. Featuring New Waveinspired framing and quirkiness a la Wes Anderson, “The Barbituaries” follows an obituary writer and hopeful novelist named Wes in his humdrum life around Greensboro — though

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June 10 — 16, 2015 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food Music Art Stage & Screen

by Anthony Harrison

Ain’t lookin’ too hot Wilmington Blue Rocks and Myrtle Beach Pelicans @ Winston-Salem Dash (W-S), Wednesday Midweek marks the halfway point in the Dash’s homestand against Carolina League Northern leaders, the Wilmington Blue Rocks (33-23). They’ll play both Wednesday and Thursday before the Dash hits the road, coming back on June 15 to face the overall Carolina League leaders, the Myrtle Beach Pelicans (33-22). Keep in mind, at this point, the Dash are at the bottom of the Carolina League with a 22-33 record. You might want to shut your eyes for this week. All games start at 7 p.m.

You got to fish e’ry damn day Bass Tournament and Children’s Fishing Clinic @ Lake Higgins (GSO), Friday and Saturday Friday evening, pro angler Sabrina Thompson will appear at Lake Higgins to compete against local anglers in the National Fishing Week bass tournament. Registration begins at 5:30 p.m., and the tournament starts at 6 p.m. and lasts until 9 p.m. The next morning, Thompson will coach the first 40 children aged 6 to 14 in a children’s clinic, beginning at 9 a.m. A catfish tournament at Taylor Turner hatchery pond starts at 11 a.m.

‘Burpee’ is a funny word Fitness at the Downtown Greenway: Circuit Training @ Spring Garden Trailhead (GSO), June 16 “Burpees” are those silly donkey-kick-lookin’ pushups, but there’s certainly nothing silly about how pumped up they’ll get you.

Instructor Sarah Ward will turn that flab into ab and transform the rest of your body parts with other terrible rhymes when she takes you through high-intensity upper-, lower- and total-body aerobics. Parking is available across the street in the lot between Edgeworth Street and Blandwood Avenue.

The training commences at 6 p.m.

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GOOD SPORT Kick out the jams Greensboro Coliseum’s Pavilion reminds me of a gigantic, deluxe Quonset hut.

There’s a cold

by Anthony Harrison sterility in the cool concrete floors, the white walls and the high, arching ceilings.

But the in Austin, Texas. She tried out for the Texas Rollergirls without ever having skated.

She did not make the cut, but it inspired her to pursue the sport, eventually playing for the Lehigh Valley Roller Girls in her home state after convalescence from a broken leg.

She just received her MFA from UNCG — “I’m a writer, too,” she laughed — and will soon return to Pennsylvania and play with the Philadelphia roller derby.

“I’m heading back to live with the fam,” Reichgott said. “Philly’s ninth in the world, though, so I’m pretty excited.”

Her performance during the bout will likely enter Gate City All-Star legend.

While Emma Ture ably muscled, bumped and busted her way past New River Valley blockers and Hitter Miss possessed undeniable balance, poise and vision of seams between opposing blockers as a jammer, Reichgott stood as the fiercest competitor of the evening. She captured lead jams without pause, bursting ahead of the pack as though she could teleport through bodies. She barked for blocks up the track, and her team complied as if taking orders from Napoleon — or Boudica. Black war paint slashed vertically across her eyes only intensified her intimidation factor.

Her performance capped a fitting end to an illustrious career.

Naturally, she’ll miss her teammates.

“They’ve been a wonderful home,” Reichgott said. “I’ve moved every two years for the past decade, but I’m gonna miss them so much. If you play roller derby, you have a home wherever

you play immediately.”

The second bout between hometown rivals, the Battleground Betties and Elm Street Nightmares, proved to be a much closer contest.

The best from each team comprised the Gate City All-Stars: For example, the aforementioned Hitter Miss and Emma Ture played for Elm Street, while jammer Baby Bird served as co-captain for the Battleground Betties and AllStar blocker General Sew took pivot.

The pivot — a team member who can switch from being a blocker to a jammer — plays a fluid, strategic, often crucial part in roller derby.

General Sew — real name Gina Hicks — explained the multiple rules and nuances pertaining to the pivot position.

The helmet cover must be handed off from the current jammer. The jammer must be upright, inbounds and in pre was plenty of character inside.

And character matters.

It was D-Day. That is, Derby Day. But it was a different kind of Derby Day than the first Saturday in May — Greensboro Roller Derby hosted the second doubleheader in as many weekends.

About 200 or so people sat in folding chairs around the improvised track marked with yellow duct tape. The salty, buttery smell of popcorn wafted through the space. Kids dueled with plastic lightsabers along the perimeter of the pavilion.

For the first doubleheader on May 30, the derby rolled with a superhero theme. Last weekend, they went with Star Wars.

The first bout occurred between the Gate City All-Stars and the New River Valley Roller Girls.

I don’t mean to offend the Christianburg, Va.-based team, but this matchup wound up a complete wash.

Despite the valiant efforts of New River Valley’s jammers, especially Lil Capone, Sylvia Wrath and Slingin’ Gritz, Gate City scored effortlessly for the first few jams until New River finally put two points on the board, which only began a 50-point unanswered tear by the

All-Stars.

The final score was 214-56.

Team co-captain Dalea Reichgott — known on the track as Betty Switch — led many of the scoring drives and would eventually be named Gate City’s MVP. “Whether I’m playing or coaching, I keep one word in mind: Urgency,” Reichgott said after the bout. “It’s the most important word in roller derby, no matter if you’re jammer or blocker.

I try to take the lead; I’m playing every jam like it’s the one that really matters.”

Originally from Pennsylvania, Reichgott first heard about roller derby while a studentlay. Typically, the pivot takes the jamming role when the team needs to force the jam to end or when a lead can be cut or even taken.

Hicks exemplified the strategy in Jam 10 of the second half of their bout.

The jam began with a slim, 10-point lead by the Betties, but as the jam turned into a stalemate, Hicks called for the jammer cover.

She absolutely demolished.

“I saw the jammer was winded,” Hicks said following the match. “I felt I could take the opportunity, so I yelled for a pass while their jammer was in the penalty box. I knew the jam would last the full two minutes, and we needed to capitalize.”

Hicks added 13 points to their score, spreading the lead to 122-106.

The bout became a battle of attrition. The Nightmares seemed to struggle to score for a time, but later rallied thanks to WhipO SnapHer’s masterful 24-point jam, and eventually spread their lead to upwards of 18.

In the final two jams, the Betties needed a miracle. What they got was Hicks shutting down the Nightmares and adding eight points until Johnny Applespeed drove the crowd into a frenzied uproar with another eightpoint jam.

But it wasn’t enough. Final score: 146-144, Elm Street Nightmares.

It was the most exciting two minutes in sports this side of Churchill Downs.

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Founder of the American Shakers Workday start, for some Phrase of reassurance, to a Brit F flat, enharmonically Copier option smaller than 29-Down Go limp Hockey legend Bobby Early Coloradans Booster phase on some rockets Unoriginal idea “Whoa, look at the time ...”

Photo album contents?

Do the news Arm art, for short ___-mutuel (type of betting) Relating to a certain column Out in the open Copier option larger than 6-Down Eurasian cousin of the plover Password accompaniment Airy beginning?

Like 4, 6, 8, 9, 10, and 12 Onetime R.J. Reynolds mascot Bottom of the ocean 1996 Gibson/Sinise flick Never, to Nietzsche Aphid that produces honeydew Olivia Newton-John film of 1980 Lamentable Slab of meat “Beloved” writer Morrison Capt. juniors “Now I understand!”

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Nullifie Basketball hoop part Savory bakery appetizers Hungarian wine city “Tommy” star The heart’s location?

Hard rain Straddled Service pieces Prefix before pod or pub Drake’s genre, derisively Target for some vacuum attachments Henner of “Taxi” Figure out “Deliverance” piece “Save us!”

Words before well or often Lifelong Head-of-the-line boast Subway in a Duke Ellington tune They chase in chase scenes Tony with a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Attacked on foot Times long gone?

Upgrade from black-and-white Submission tape NPR show covering journalism “Solaris” author Stanislaw ___ “Here goes nothing”

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At the Vineyard you can come as you are and be yourself.

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Yanceyville St., Greensboro

The quietest baseball stadium in the land.

PHOTO BY CAROLYN DE BERRY

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June 10 — 16, 2015 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Food Music Art Stage & Screen

Ballpark Frank Mother: I still don’t understand why you go to baseball games if you don’t really care about the

by Nicole Crews sport.

Me: The only thing I like about baseball is the pants. And beer.

Mother: The pants used to be good.

Now they just look like they’re wearing ill-fitting polyester khakis.

Me: How would you know?

Mother: I do own a television Nicole.

It’s pop-a-cork thirty when the boys flop onto my front porch like flounder on a dock. They’ve been marinating in Hot Springs for two days and getting basted in high-end Homestead-ery up in Vah-ginia.

They’re so relaxed I’m wondering if their skin will stick when I peel them off the porch to make it to the ballpark on time.

Gaysball Me: Tell me again why we are going to a baseball game?

Frank: It’s fun. I think you’ll like it. I still can’t believe you’ve never been to the new stadium.

Brad: It’s really good people-watching. Especially on Thirsty Thursdays.

Me: I’m glad Tony and David invited

us. I think I might be able to get into Gayesball.

We arrive at NewBridge Bank Park — home of the Greensboro Grasshoppers — and head to the private deck where our friends Tony Doles and David Farris have a gaggle of power gays sandwiched between a quinceñera and an eighth-grade graduation party. Catering troughs bearing orange tiles of American cheese, dead cow, fluffy buns and chopped onion mountains glistening like diamonds delineate our space.

Cafeteria Me: So this is a lot like Cafeteria in New York.

David: You have no idea how expensive that catering line-up is.

Me: I’m glad you didn’t order it. I’m wearing mother’s high-waisted cut offs from the ’70s – the pre-stretch years.

David: They’re darling.

Me: ‘The Longest Zipper’ should be at least a chapter title. A homage to both mother and Erica Jong.

Me: You guys should have booked for a game in Winston. My cameltoe would go with the Camel City better.

Obviously my mother had a longer vaginal torso than I do.

Tony Doles: Ugh, those buffets smell.

Me: Like a foot.

Tony Doles: Between a foot and a wet, plastic ashtray.

As the second beer slides down our gullets we reflect that Walt Whitman would have liked this day because Whitman liked baseball — and men. Frank and Brad regale us with tales of putting the homo in the Homestead, building a swimming pool and, inevitably, talk turns to shrubbery.

Leaves of grass Todd McCain: You want to stagger the shrubs so that if one dies there’s not a gaping hole.

Frank: We hate gaping holes.

Me: Do you think the ballpark has a gay groundskeeper? He mows on the bias.

Todd: He obviously missed a spot in the children’s section.

Me: Is the children’s section supposed to be in the shape of a vagina? And is sliding down that hill into the brown spot supposed to be a metaphor for childbirth.

Frank: What are those things the moms are all holding? Foam fingers?

Me: Either that are the mom’s are really bold to bring their vibrators out in public.

As we admire the dad bods of the ballplayers and the earbobs of the sisters (“Were those traffic cones,” says Frank) the news that our host David Farris went to high school in Fort Worth, Texas and that he knew Blair from “The Facts of Life” hits us

“I have two items on my bucket list – to have my name in your column and Liz Smith’s!”

like a fly ball to the noggin.

Blair, b****es and Botox Me: What was she like?

David: She was a b****.

Me: She never did lose that hate weight did she?

A crackle in the stands interrupts our high-brow talk.

Me: Yikes. I live in fear of getting hit in the face with a baseball. Of course there’s enough Botox in there to stop a steam engine.

Did you know that Shar Peis are often given Botox so that the folds over their eyes arch up so they can see?

Tony: What do poor Shar Peis do?

Me: I guess they can’t watch baseball, so we should count ourselves lucky all around.

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