2018 Issue 47 Creative Loafing Charlotte

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 VOL. 31, NO. 47

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2 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

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CREATIVE LOAFING IS PUBLISHED BY WOMACK NEWSPAPERS, INC. CHARLOTTE, NC 28206.

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EDITORIAL

NEWS EDITOR • Ryan Pitkin rpitkin@clclt.com FILM CRITIC • Matt Brunson mattonmovies@gmail.com THEATER CRITIC • Perry Tannenbaum perrytannenbaum@gmail.com CONTRIBUTING WRITERS • Erin Tracy-Blackwood, Allison Braden, Catherine Brown, Konata Edwards, Jeff Hahne, Vanessa Infanzon, Alison Leininger, Ari LeVaux, Kia O. Moore, Grey Revell, Dan Savage, Debra Renee Seth, Aerin Spruill,

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PHOTO BY RYAN PITKIN

14

New dockless bike share programs have flooded the Uptown area with neon bikes, and reactions are mixed.

Check out the story on page 8.

We put out weekly NEWS&CULTURE

8

INVASION OF THE BIKE SHARES An invasion of neon bikes has been hard to miss in Uptown lately. What gives?

BY RYAN PITKIN 6 EDITOR’S NOTE BY MARK KEMP 9 NEWSMAKER: MUJTABA MOHAMMED BY RYAN PITKIN 10 BLOTTER BY RYAN PITKIN 11 NEWS OF THE WEIRD

12

FOOD&DRINK FARM FRESH FOR OVER 80 YEARS At Mecklenburg County Market, good food is a family affair

BY PAT MORAN

14 16

TOP 10 THINGS TO DO THIS WEEK

MUSIC SHAPESHIFTERS Astrea Corp’s dark electronic soundscapes are a trippy clash of post-rock madness

BY MARK KEMP 19 MUSIC MAKER: DOUGLASS THOMPSON BY MARK KEMP 20 SOUNDBOARD

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ARTS&ENT A ROSE THAT GREW FROM CONCRETE Local playwright laid tough roots in Charlotte, then bloomed in New York

BY KIA O. MOORE 25 FILM: BEST AND WORST OF 2017 BY MATT BRUNSON

26

ODDS&ENDS 27 CROSSWORD 28 SAVAGE LOVE BY DAN SAVAGE 30 SALOME’S STARS

COVER DESIGN GO TO CLCLT.COM FOR VIDEOS, PODCASTS AND MORE!

BY DANA VINDIGNI

PHOTO BY JONATHAN COOPER CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 VOL. 31, NO. 47

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NEWS

EDITOR’S NOTE

TRANSPORTATION BLUES Where did all those neon bikes come from?

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&OTHER PETS...

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THOSE DAMN BIKES. They’re everywhere. member Larken Egleston tells Pitkin.

Frankly, I have a simple solution: BikeOutside Creative Loafing‘s offices at the Music Factory this very moment, there are probably share companies should include ironclad rules three or four of them lying on the grass next about how the bikes are to be deposited, and in the agreement for renting the bikes, they to the steet.

I don’t even have to go look. They’re should explicitly state something like, “If you do not deposit this bicycle correctly, we will there. Trust me.

And they’re also scattered all over the add a $20 fee to your $1/per half-hour bill.”

When fees of $22 for an hour-long ride place up the street, at Romare Bearden Park.

And out at Mallard Creek Greenway and around the city begin to appear on bike-share Freedom Park. I know there’s a bunch of them customers’ credit card statements, they’ll get at those spots, because in his news feature the message. And voila! Problem solved.

Speaking of transportation, our music this week, Ryan Pitkin writes about a photo that captured one of them submerged and and arts features this week spotlight some folks who have either relocated to Charlotte frozen in a pond.

You know what bikes I’m talking about. or moved away from Charlotte to recharge their careers.

Everybody’s talking about them.

In the case of the talented playwright They’re the bikes that dockless bikeStacey Rose, the cover girl for this share companies like LimeBike, week’s issue, she moved away Spin, Ofo and Mobike have to New York City to attend unleashed on our streets.

NYU’s Tisch School of the And some folks don’t like Arts. In the case of Astrea them. At all.

Corp, a husband-and-wife Take Phillip Sanford, electronic-music duo — a local cyclist who they moved to Charlotte tells Pitkin in his news from south Florida, where report on page 8 that the they were the darlings of proliferation of scattered the Broward/Palm Beach dockless bike-share bicycles music scene. Americana all over Charlotte is giving MARK KEMP singer-songwriter Douglass serious cyclists a bad rep.

Thompson arrived here from “We need [for] a public Wisconsin, and promtly recorded a base that is very pro-car and antilive album at the Evening Muse. anything else to have a positive view of Stacey Rose, in particular, is a Charlotte bike commuting and its possibilities,” Sanford says. “Flooding the area with cheap bikes with treasure. (And for full disclosure, she’s also little oversight and a lack of acknowledgement a dear old friend of mine.) Not only was she of legitimate concerns just perpetuates the way ahead of her time in the local theater idea that biking is just a fad very few people scene several years ago — OnQ Productions founder Quentin Talley calls her a “visionary” should be a part of.”

Others tell Pitkin they love the idea in Kia Moore’s arts feature on page 26 — of more bike-share companies bringing but Stacey hit the ground running when she arrived in New York in 2012. She’s won transportation alternatives to the city.

“I would say, for other bike advocates: If multiple awards for her plays and landed a you see a bike that’s down, pick it up, move peach of a position working on Spike Lee’s it over,” Kate Cavazza, bike program manager new Netflix TV series version of his 1986 for the cycling advocacy organization Sustain debut film She’s Gotta Have It. What’s more, Stacey has a hell of a Charlotte, tells Pitkin. “It doesn’t take that much effort. If you have a problem with it, redemption story. A single mom and recovering addict who struggled for years move it three feet to the left.”

All agree that bike-share customers need in Charlotte to make ends meet, she got to become more aware of etiquette when it clean nine years ago and, through brute comes time to deposit the bicycles. Because determination, ungodly talent and a little no one wants to slog through a pile of bicycles help from her friends, plowed her way to success. It’s a powerful tale of a black female during their a leisurely walk in the park.

“We do need to be very cognizant to artist who just had to have it. And Stacey’s making sure [the dockless bikes are] not success turns out to be ours, too.

So drive in, park your bikes (in an orderly impeding accessibility for disabled folks or for pedestrians using sidewalks, that we do manner), sit down for a cup of coffee, and have some policies in place in terms of where enjoy this week’s edition of Creative Loafing.

We’ll see you next week. they can be left so they’re not blocking other MKEMP@CLCLT.COM pathways,” District 1 Charlotte City Council

Snuggle Up with CL

tonight....

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 7

NEWS

FEATURE

INVASION OF THE BIKE SHARES An explosion of neon bikes has been hard to miss around Uptown lately. What gives?

BY RYAN PITKIN

W

HEN YOU SEE them all alone, you almost feel bad for them.

As they’re depicted in Charlotte photographer Logan Cyrus’ ongoing Instagram photo series, the solo bicycles look like already-lost remnants of the city’s recent proliferation of bike-share programs. In a photo taken on the Mallard Creek Greenway, a neon orange bike sits alone, creating a contrast with the barren backdrop of the winter woods. In another pic, a green LimeBike cadaver is barely visible below the ice of a Freedom Park pond.

Elsewhere in the city, however, the bikes are healthy and growing in number. On a recent Friday at Romare Bearden Park, a multicolored group of bikes stood at every corner, although some were simply sprawled across the cement, giving up all pretense of decorum.

It’s a sight that nobody walking through Uptown over the last month could ignore.

Spurred by the launch of LimeBike and Spin in November, the city now hosts four dockless bike-share companies, which allow customers to rent bikes through an app and leave them wherever they please once they’re done. Riders rent the bikes for $1 for between 30 minutes and an hour, depending on the company.

Each company is on a one-year pilot program with the city of Charlotte, and each is allowed to put a maximum of 500 bikes on the streets, meaning the city will see as many as 2,000 neon-colored bikes by the end of 2018 — and potentially more if other companies are allowed to launch here.

At the park on Friday, about 75 dockless bikes total were spread around the corners and roadsides of the park, which takes up two blocks between BB&T Ballpark and Latta Arcade. Of those, more than a third were lying on their sides, some in interlocked piles, as if someone had kicked one over and let them all fall domino-style.

The new arrivals have enjoyed a lessthan-warm reception on social media, where people have complained about bikes blocking sidewalks or being thrown in yards. The city government has tried to allay concerns with posts clarifying the regulations each company should be following and encouraging residents to contact each specific company when they have a complaint.

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A group of dockless bikes sits across the street from a B-cycle docking station in Uptown.

“We are keeping tabs on the reports — both complaints and praise — that come in through the companies, 311 and social media,” the @CLTgov Twitter handle replied to a recent complaint about bikes parked in front of a bus stop in South End. So what rules do these companies and their customers have to follow?

Each of the four bike-share companies operating in Charlotte — LimeBike and Spin, as well as Ofo and Mobike — had to sign a contract mandating that they meet certain ongoing requirements regarding safety, maintenance, operations, parking and data. For example, companies are required to advise customers where they are allowed to leave the bikes (and they must be standing) within the app before they are allowed to rent one. If a complaint is received between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on any given day, the company must move the bike to a spot deemed reasonable within two hours.

Over the next year, the city will monitor each company’s adherence to these regulations, as well as take into account residents’ input, before deciding if the companies can continue to operate in the city.

According to city officials, next steps could include denying the use of dockless bike-share services in the public right-of-way, adopting new policies and regulations for the vendors or developing a city-owned bikeshare program operated by a single vendor.

The city has operated B-cycle, a bike-share program that requires riders to dock their bikes at designated stations, since 2012.

Larken Egleston, Charlotte City Council representative for District 1, where many of the bikes can currently be found, said he has already heard complaints from numerous constituents about the bikes — most regarding the “carelessness” with which riders leave the bikes behind — but hopes the

city can find a way to move forward by the end of the year.

“I think there’s room for B-cycle and dockless bike-share programs to coexist. I think in some cases they serve different clientele, and they’ve got their own pros and cons,” Egleston said. “We do need to be very cognizant to making sure they’re not impeding accessibility for disabled folks or for pedestrians using sidewalks.”

Taylor Bennett, a spokesperson for Ofo, said that if one of the company’s bikes is left in an improper location, the local team will look at who was the last rider and contact that person to make sure they are aware of the rules regarding proper parking.

“At this early stage, it’s a lot of education,” Bennett said. “It’s a brand new model, there’s going to be some growing pains in terms of how it works and getting people accustomed to moving out of the right-of-ways and parking properly.”

For Phillip Sanford, a Charlotte cyclist who regularly advocates for more bikeability in Charlotte, the rollout of dockless bikeshare programs has left him sore. He worries that the constant photos on social media of neon bikes strewn about like litter on the city’s sidewalks is giving cycling a bad name.

“Our city is close to capacity for cars and we need to utilize mass transit and bike commuting as the area grows,” Sanford said. “We need proper infrastructure. We need a public base that is very pro-car and anti-anything else to have a positive view of bike commuting and its possibilities. Flooding the area with cheap bikes with little oversight and a lack of acknowledgement of legitimate concerns just perpetuates the idea that biking is just a fad very few people should be a part of.”

Kate Cavazza, bike program manager with local cycling advocacy organization Sustain

RYAN PITKIN

Charlotte, thinks otherwise. She said she has high hopes for the programs and wouldn’t mind seeing more in the area.

Sustain Charlotte has been consulting with each company about where their bikes could be best used as they arrive in Charlotte, Cavazza said.

She pointed out that while the groupings may seem crowded during the first months of operation, once people start to ride them throughout the city — especially as the weather warms up — they won’t be as noticeable.

“Each new bike that gets dropped, they kind of stand there and people look at them. With time, we hope that people get on these bikes and they’re spread out into communities all over Charlotte,” she said.

Cavazza is optimistic that dockless bike sharing can help bring bikes to parts of the city not usually associated with cycling and help provide more people with a dependable mode of transportation.

She said she’s aware of some of the bad publicity the dockless bikes are getting, even from within the cycling community, but hopes she can rely on the folks who want to support bikeability concepts in Charlotte to lend a helping hand in the first months of the rollout.

“I would say, for other bike advocates, if you see a bike that’s down, pick it up, move it over,” she said. “It doesn’t take that much effort. If you have a problem with it, move it three feet to the left.”

And if you see a lonely bike waiting solemnly on a greenway, it’s probably just wondering how it lost all its friends. Hop on and give it a ride. Or post one of those #docklessbikefail photos if you want. But whatever you do, for God’s sake, don’t kick it over.

RPITKIN@CLCLT.COM

NEWS

NEWSMAKER

CLASS IS IN SESSION Mujtaba Mohammed wants to take the general assembly to school RYAN PITKIN

I

KNEW THAT I knew him from somewhere, I just didn’t know how far back we went.

Covering news in this city — especially on the social justice beat — I was vaguely familiar with Mujtaba Mohammed. He had sometimes moved in the same circles I have covered here over the past six years, so when he announced his candidacy for North Carolina Senate in District 38, I called him up to chat, figuring I’d at least be able to nail down exactly why he seemed so familiar to me.

When I met him at a Bojangles’ near his home in the University area on a recent morning, he quickly recalled our connection before I could even ask.

“You went to North Meck, right?” he asked, and it suddenly hit me. Mohammed was in my senior English class at North Mecklenburg High School in 2004, and as we soon found out while catching up, he was also part of a rezoning that sent us both from Vance High School to North Mecklenburg in 2002, less than a year after he moved to Charlotte from Greenville, South Carolina, where he grew up.

From there, Mohammed attended UNC Charlotte, and then the North Carolina Central University School of Law. He returned to Charlotte with his law degree in 2012 and began working for the Council for Children’s Rights before recently becoming a public defender in Mecklenburg County.

After reminiscing with a few old high school stories, I spoke with 32-year-old Mohammed about what made him decide to throw his hat in the political ring, something he never envisioned doing until this year.

Creative Loafing: Your first try at politics will be at a state level. Why not run for city council last year, as opposed to state senate?

Mujtaba Mohammed: Serving at the Council for Children’s Rights, serving young children, low-income families, people who have a lot of problems, I realized again and again, the North Carolina General Assembly under Republican leadership had been oftentimes the biggest impediment to success at the city level — constantly telling the city what you can do and what you cannot do. I want to help our fantastic city council. I want to help those wonderful people that were just recently elected. I want to help Mayor Vi Lyles by going up to Raleigh and literally taking our voices from

Mujtaba Mohammed is building bridges. the courtroom — the voices of people that are hurting and struggling — and taking those directly to Raleigh and the North Carolina General Assembly.

The NCGA under Republican leadership does not have its priorities straight. I feel like I can be an asset, understanding the intimate nature of our families, especially the working poor, people that don’t wake up every single day knowing, “How am I going to get to work today? How am I going to get to court today to see Mr. Mohammed? I haven’t been able to make my office meetings because I’m trying to figure out how to pay my bills. How do I put food on the table. How do I take care of my kids.” They have very little help. I feel like the general assembly could step in instead of telling the counties, “Listen, we’re not going to do this but we want you to do this.” How many times are the city and county going to have to step in and do their job for them?

You speak of Republican leadership, but if you win, you will be unseating a Democrat, Joel Ford. What do you think you can bring to the table that he does not?

In my conversations with folks in the district, I hear that my opponent is out of touch. He’s been absent, and he’s been supporting a reckless agenda. To be a Democrat and to be supporting Republican values, supporting a Republican budget, we need a state senator that’s going to fight for a budget that reflects our values in Charlotte — that reflects Democratic values, that represents the values of people in District 38, and that hasn’t been happening.

I have clients that are facing eviction.

This recent budget took money away from Legal Aid [of North Carolina] to serve people who are facing eviction. Clients tell me, “Mr. Mohammed, I can’t get help at Legal Aid, because they’ve had to layoff attorneys.” So how can you come in here and say you’re running for mayor of Charlotte and you care about affordable housing, and you vote for

SUZANNE STARNES PHOTOGRAPHY

things like that? We’re balancing budgets on the backs of poor people, expanding our sales tax, while the rich continue to be able to support their jets and their yachts and things like that. We’ve got to invest in our families.

That’s what’s going to help public safety.

That’s what’s going to help create a global economy. And this budget doesn’t reflect those values, and I’m deeply disappointed.

What type of work did you do with CCR, and what did that experience teach you?

When I was with the Council for Children’s Rights, I was representing young children coming through the school-to-prison pipeline, helping get them connected to services, supporting them, protecting their constitutional rights and supporting their families, because a lot of these families need help.

The wonderful thing is that, in Charlotte and all across North Carolina, we have one family court room, one judge, usually the same defense attorney and the same prosecutors, so we get to really know the families. That’s when good preventative stuff happens. That’s why raising the age [at which juveniles can be tried as adults] was so important; keeping young people in the juvenile justice system instead of sending them to the adult criminal justice system. We can give them the support that they don’t have there.

Did that inspire your passion for expanding access to early childhood education?

My wife and I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old, and we have to make these difficult decisions every day: Are we going to work or have childcare? My wife is a dental hygienist. I’m a public defender. So she’s staying at home right now raising our younger ones, because we can’t afford to send two boys to an early childhood education program, and that’s my thing. Our families shouldn’t have to make those choices.

When are we going to start early and start strong, and stop putting a price tag on kids,

on children, and telling our children they’re not worth it? “We’re not investing in you, but we’re going to build prisons.” When parents see test scores and tings, they see room for improvement. Unfortunately, this legislature sees room to fill jail cells.

Any other issues you have your sights set on should you win the state senate seat?

Bringing back the earned income tax credit.

This Republican budget doubled the standard reduction, but they brought it up to $20,000 for families. I know families in Charlotte that don’t even make that, it’s a zero benefit for them. So if we brought back the earned income tax credit, that would be money in the pockets of our families. If we brought back tax free weekend, imagine how much that would help our teachers who are spending their own money for classroom supplies because this legislature has decided we’re not going to prioritize that. Bringing back the childcare tax credit so parents can get that support to put their kids in early childhood education programs.

Those are things that this Republican legislature has gotten rid of; they’ve gotten rid of the childcare tax credit, they’ve gotten rid of the earned income tax credit. These are issues that could support middle class families along with the working poor that we got rid of. Instead, we decided we’re going to bring down our tax rates for corporations.

We’re going to cut tax rates for the wealthy.

These are all things that our opponent voted for.

Also, bringing back film credits to Charlotte. Charlotte used to make movies and TV shows. We used to make almost $20 million and 20,000 jobs in this state. These are simple ways to support our economy. It makes no sense to me why we got rid of that.

Visit clclt.com for the full interview.

RPITKIN@CLCLT.COM

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 9

NEWS

BLOTTER

BY RYAN PITKIN

THE RUBDOWN CMPD sent out a press release last week that should immediately be recognized as a Blotter classic. Police were only recently made aware of a crime committed at Charlotte Douglas International Airport in April 2017 by “the Piggyback Bandit,” who is already wanted for similar crimes in airports around the country. According to the release, a 20-year-old man was at the airport last April when another man began rubbing his shoulders without even buying him a drink first. The creepy suspect did, however, hand the confused victim an envelope containing $10 and a letter thanking him for allowing the massage. The victim didn’t think much of it until he saw a news report on January 4 describing a similar incident involving a juvenile at Newark International Airport.

When he recognized Sherwin Shayegan, the suspect in that incident, as the same man who gave him his massage last year, he called police and reported the incident. The victim met with police and handed over the note, which he had apparently kept all this time as a memento. He did not, however, turn over the $10. After all, he earned that. CMPD’s Airport Division has taken out a warrant for simple assault on Shayegan.

NEW YEAR, NEW CAR Police came across

the scene of a one-vehicle wreck near Clanton Park in west Charlotte just seven hours into the new year. According to the report, a Lexus had gone off the road and struck several trees before catching fire. The keys were still in the ignition, although the driver was nowhere to be found. Police went to visit the person who owned the car, and according to the report, “the vehicle owner would later attempt to report the listed vehicle stolen.” The use of the word “attempt” in that sentence leads us to believe the response was something like, “You already started this year with a wreck, don’t follow it up with a bad lie.”

LOSING IT Another man lost control in a

different way on New Year’s Eve, although he was far more honest with police when the shit later hit the fan. Police responded to a 7-Eleven on East Independence Boulevard and met a 46-year-old man who thought his car had been stolen. The man told police “he believed he parked his vehicle” at the gas station at about 12:15 a.m. before getting a ride to his residence, but the car wasn’t there when he returned later on New Year’s Day. An employee told the driver that the car wasn’t there when the employee arrived at work at 6 a.m. It soon became clear why the man was so confused about what may or may not have happened to has car when he admitted to police that at the time he parked the car, he was drunk and having an emotional breakdown. Here’s hoping this guy’s year turns around.

HITTING ROCK BOTTOM A man started off the new year with at least one felony 10 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

after his New Year’s Eve party night went too long and he completely lost his shit at Rock Bottom Restaurant & Brewery. Officers originally responded to the restaurant in Uptown at around 2:45 a.m. on New Year’s Day for a shots fired call. At some point, they tried to arrest the suspect, who tried to resist by kicking a male officer in the groin and trying to spit on another.

GOTTA HAND IT TO HER It’s unclear why

a 22-year-old woman was reaching for her gun at 12:05 a.m. on New Year’s Day, but what quickly did become clear was that she had made her first mistake of the year, and it was a bad one. The woman reported that she was in her east Charlotte home when she went to grab her gun out of a box right after midnight.

She did not know the gun was loaded, however, and accidentally fired it, hitting herself in the hand. She was hospitalized for the non-lifethreatening wound.

KAMIKAZE A couple CMPD officers were

either in the wrong place at the wrong time while patrolling near Romare Bearden Park last week, or they were the victims of a brand new kind of targeted attack. According to a report, two officers were patrolling near the park at around 11 p.m. one night when an “unauthorized drone” suddenly fell from the sky and struck one of them, a 40-year-old man. The officer suffered only a minor injury and did not need medical treatment, and the secretive suspect was down a drone.

RIDE SHARING While one might get into

an argument with their Uber driver over which way they’re taking to their destination, rarely does the conflict ever get to the level it reached between a driver and his rider on W.T. Harris Boulevard in east Charlotte last week. The 58-year-old driver told police he got into a dispute with one of his riders as they exited the vehicle, but before they left, the rider pepper sprayed the driver then ran away. You’ll probably want to sit the rest of this night out before getting back on the road.

RIDE SHARING II Another argument

between an Uber driver and a rider went the other way in southeast Charlotte, when a female driver ended up allegedly attacking her 22-year-old male rider. The driver effectively pulled a strong-arm robbery on the rider, if the accusations in the report are to be believed. According to the victim, the driver got out of her car after dropping him off at a Circle K on East Independence Boulevard, then grabbed him around the neck and pushed him up against the front door of the gas station. Then, the driver allegedly snatched the victim’s iPhone and wallet from his hand and left the scene, never to be seen again.

All stories are pulled from police reports at CMPD headquarters. Suspects are innocent until proven guilty.

BACKTALK@CLCLT.COM

NEWS

NEWS OF THE WEIRD

AWWWWWWWW When 5-year-old TyLon Pittman of Byram, Mississippi, saw the Grinch stealing Christmas on Dec. 16 on TV, he did what any civic-minded citizen would do. He called 911. TyLon told Byram police officer Lauren Develle, who answered the call, that he did not want the Grinch to come steal his Christmas, reported the Clarion Ledger.

Develle made TyLon an honorary junior officer and had him come down to the station on Dec. 18 to help her lock away the Grinch, who hung his head as TyLon asked him, “Why are you stealing Christmas?” Although the green fiend apologized, TyLon wouldn’t release him from the holding cell. Police chief Luke Thompson told TyLon to come back when he’s 21, “and I’m going to give you a job application, OK?” WRONG PLACE, WRONG TIME In

Gilgandra, New South Wales, Australia, on Nov. 29, sheep shearer Casey Barnes was tramping down wool, and her father and boyfriend were working nearby, when her long, curly hair became caught in a belt-driven motor. Horrifically, the motor ripped her scalp off from the back of her head to above her eyes and ears. Barnes was flown to Sydney, where doctors performed an emergency 20-hour surgery to save her scalp, but were ultimately unsuccessful. Barnes will have artificial skin attached to her head instead, reports The Sun. A GoFundMe page has been established to help with her medical bills.

SELF-ABSORBENT The Tea Terrace in London is offering a new way for customers to enjoy themselves — literally. On Dec. 16, the shop began selling the “Selfieccino,” an image

of the customer’s face in the frothy topping of either a cappuccino or a hot chocolate.

Patrons send an photo to the shop via an online messaging app, and the “Cino” machine takes it from there, reproducing the picture with flavorless food coloring in about four minutes. “Due to social media,” shop owner Ehab Salem Shouly told Reuters, “the dining experience has completely shifted. It’s not enough anymore to just deliver great food and great service — it’s got to be Instagramworthy.”

AN ENGAGED CITIZENRY Pam Bisanti, a 31-year resident of Mount Dora, Florida, has approached the city council more than once about the speeding traffic along Clayton Street, where she lives. On Nov. 27, Bisanti made good on her threat to take matters into her own hands if the council didn’t by wielding a handmade sign reading “SLOW DOWN” as she stood next to the roadway during rush hour wearing her pajamas and robe. “The mothers up the street who send their kids down to the bus stop should have every expectation that those kids will be able to cross Clayton without being killed,” Bisanti told the Daily Commercial, saying she plans to continue her protest until the city takes action. “I am frustrated, angry and fed up.

There needs to be a solution sooner than later.

Remember that vision of me in my pajamas,” she added.

UNCLEAR ON THE CONCEPT Melissa

Allen, 32, was arrested on Dec. 19 after attempting to shoplift more than $1,000 in merchandise from a Framingham, Massachusetts, Target store, reported the Boston Globe. On hand to help in the arrest

were more than 50 police officers who were at the store to participate in the annual “Shop With a Cop” holiday charity event.

UNINTENDED

CONSEQUENCES

Stephen Allen of Tukwila, Washington, moved in with his grandmother years ago to help care for her. When she died last year, he invited his brother, a convicted drug dealer, to move in, but along with him came drug activity, squatters, stolen property and debris. Allen eventually asked police to raid the home, but when they did on Dec. 15, they evicted Allen as well, leaving him homeless. “It’s all legal, but it’s wrong,” Allen told KIRO-7 News. “I can’t do anything about it.”

FLORIDA FOLK Tracy Hollingsworth Stephens, 50, of Alachua, Florida, answered nature’s call on Nov. 25 by stopping her car in the middle of County Road 232 and stepping outside. An officer of the Florida Highway Patrol soon took notice as he had been searching for Stephens following her involvement in a two-car collision in the parking lot of a nearby T.J. Maxx store earlier that day. Stephens subsequently underperformed on a field sobriety test, according to The Independent Florida Alligator, and was arrested for driving under the influence and leaving the scene of an accident.

MORE FLORIDA Workers at Captain Hiram’s

Sandbar in Sebastian, Florida, resorted to calling police on Nov. 17 when customer William Antonio Olivieri, 63, refused to leave the bar after a night of drinking. Olivieri told Sebastian police he had arrived by boat, but when a quick walk down a nearby dock failed to uncover the boat, he said perhaps

he had driven himself to the bar in a black Hyundai. Throughout the interview with police, reported the Sebastian Daily, Olivieri also maintained that he was in downtown Melbourne, Florida, where he lives. Finally, he was arrested on a charge of disorderly intoxication and taken to the Indian River County Jail.

FLORIDA AGAIN Sumter County, Florida,

sheriff’s deputies were dispatched to The Villages on Nov. 19 where resident Lori Jo Matthews, 60, reportedly barked at her neighbor’s dogs, then entered her neighbor’s yard, yelling at the neighbor and finally slapping the neighbor after being told to leave. Deputies caught up with Matthews as she attempted to enter her own home, where she was handcuffed and arrested on charges of battery and resisting arrest. In an unsurprising twist, Villages-News.com reported that alcohol may have been involved.

THE STATE THAT KEEPS ON GIVING

North Fort Myers, Florida, homeowner Joanie Mathews was terrorized for hours on Nov. 14 by a large pig that wandered into her yard overnight and spent the day destroying the lawn and biting Mathews three times before trapping her in the cab of her truck. “She would circle the truck ... and I would jump in the back seat and I was like ‘Go away, pig!”

Mathews told NBC-2 TV. Mathews finally called law enforcement, and it took three Lee County sheriff’s officers to wrangle the testy porker. “It was just hilarious because the pig fought them every which way,” Mathews said.

No one, at press time, had stepped forward to claim the pig.

COPYRIGHT 2017 ANDREWS MCMEEL SYNDICATION

Check CLCLT.com for episode 25 of our Local Vibes podcast with CLT trip-hop experimentalists Astrea Corp.

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 11

FEATURE

FOOD

FARM FRESH FOR OVER 80 YEARS At Mecklenburg County Market, good food is a family affair

BY PAT MORAN

W

HEN IT COMES to food

terms like “organic” and “free range,” it pays to be careful, Dale McLaughlin says.

“I don’t like buying food that uses animal compost that goes directly on the ground,” he says. “If there’s salmonella [present] it goes right into the ground and into the product.” A similar common sense approach applies to eggs, he continues. Free range is fine, but it should have limits, namely a pen enclosed by a fence.

“You don’t want chickens that run all over the countryside. If your neighbor sprays harsh chemicals on their farm, your chickens could eat their dead bugs.”

On the subject of farm fresh food, McLaughlin knows what he’s talking about.

Now 80 years old, he’s been running Dale McLaughlin Produce at Mecklenburg County Market for over 50 years.

On this frosty Saturday morning, the red brick market sandwiched between hospital buildings on the campus of Carolinas Medical Center - Main near Uptown is filled with fresh fruits and vegetables, most of them from nearby farms. Shoppers sift through sweet potatoes, bell peppers and squashes, but many make a beeline for the refrigerator cases near Dale McLaughlin’s stand.

The coolers are stocked with packaged vegan and vegetarian meals — homemade soups, salads, quiches, pies, pasta dishes and more, all made with fresh whole foods.

If you live in the Charlotte area, chances are you’ve seen the mouth-watering offerings from Beverly’s Gourmet Foods at Healthy Home Market, Reid’s Fine Foods, Berrybrook Farms, Whole Foods, the Uptown and the Dowd YMCAs and several other locations.

“Some people think there’s not really a Beverly,” says the well-dressed, dark-haired woman loading entrees into the cooler.

“They figure it was a name we made up for marketing purposes.”

She laughs because she is Beverly McLaughlin, and she’s the namesake of the company.

If you ever asked yourself where all these products from Beverly’s Gourmet Foods come from, wonder no more. This is the place. In 1990, at 21, Beverly launched her now-ubiquitous line of healthy foods from the market where her father Dale still works.

Lucy McLaughlin, Dale’s wife and 12 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

Beverly McLaughlin.

WELDON WEAVER

Beverly’s mother, is also part of the family business. She handles the company’s accounting and payroll.

THE

Dale McLaughlin Produce at Mecklenburg County Market.

Mecklenburg County Market on Harding Place.

WELDON WEAVER

WELDON WEAVER

MCLAUGHLIN

FAMILY’S

connection to this cozy one-story building goes back much further than that. It even began 1988, when Dale McLaughlin retired from Southern Bell Telephone at the age of 50 so he could take over the family produce stand full time.

The building that houses the Mecklenburg County Market is over 100 years old, says Beverly. Prior to its current incarnation, the structure hosted a dance studio and a lumber warehouse. The market itself was launched as a food co-op by the long-defunct Mecklenburg County Ladies Home Extension Club at an outdoor location in 1932, and moved to its current home in 1937, making it the oldest farmer’s market in North Carolina.

At one time, there were as many as 40 vendors in the modest building, each with four feet of vending space. You can still see where they scratched the graphite on the market’s tables to mark their boundaries, Beverly says. Nowadays the McLaughlin family occupies most of the space, which they share with three other vendors.

One of the market’s founders, Pearl Wallace, was Dale’s grandmother and Beverly’s great-grandmother. A few years ago, Beverly’s oldest son started working for both Beverly’s Gourmet Foods and Dale McLaughlin Produce. Gavin Guiney, 22, marks the fifth generation of McLaughlins to work at Mecklenburg Market.

Pearl Wallace’s daughter was the first McLaughlin to sell prepared meals at the family farm stand, Dale says.

“She came up with the original TV dinner,” he maintains. “She’d make a meal on these sectional plates that had a lid. You’d just pop it in the stove to heat it up.”

“Rebecca was famous for her soup mix,” says Beverly, who follows her grandmother’s original recipe for Granny’s Vegetable Soup.

“It’s my biggest selling soup.”

“My grandmother was well-known for her pimento cheese, which I also carry in my line of products,” she continues. “It’s her recipe.”

After leaving her corporate gig — she’s a former graphic designer for Paramount Parks — Beverly started Beverly’s Gourmet Foods soon after Dale took over the market full time. She cooked out of her home, and balanced her business with her life as a wife and mother.

When her second child was born, she put her business on hold to devote more time to her family. (In addition to Gavin, her children are Eve, now 20 years old, and 14-year-old Evan, all of whom pitch in with the family’s businesses. Beverly divorced her children’s father in 2004.)

Thirteen years ago, Beverly started up her business again, selling her pre-packaged meals out of the quaint redbrick building.

The market for healthy foods was different then, with fewer outlets than today, so Beverly sold wholesale to Talley’s Green Grocery, Healthy Home Market, Reid’s Fine Foods and Berrybrook Farms. Excluding Talley’s, which closed its doors in 2008, she still delivers product to these stores, as well as multiple YMCA locations, Whole Foods, The People’s Market at Dilworth and more.

Beverly’s soups, salads, casseroles, quiches and salad dressings are also available at seven area farmers markets including Cotswold Farmers Market and the Charlotte Regional Farmers Market on Yorkmont Road.

“We have over 400 products in our line, and everything can be made vegan and gluten free,” she says. “We also do cobblers whenever particular fruits are in season.”

It’s a veritable feast, but her most popular products come down to comfort food.

“Hands down, our biggest sellers are macaroni and cheese and baked ziti,” Beverly says.

MECKLENBURG COUNTY MARKET Mon.-Fri., 9 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat., 7 a.m.-3 p.m.; Sun., Noon-5 p.m.; 1515 Harding Place. mecklenburgcountymarket.com

AT AN EARLY AGE, Beverly knew she

wanted to be an entrepreneur, and she was also certain that she wanted to work alongside her father. She believes her dedication to fresh food stems from her childhood growing up on the family farm in Charlotte.

“The closest grocery store was either in Huntersville or out on North Tryon,” she says.

“It was a long trip, so of course we raised our own vegetables.” Beverly remembers picking vegetables in the morning and having them for dinner later that same day.

Dale McLaughlin still lives on the family farm, which now covers five acres and includes two greenhouses and the original tractor shed. When her grandparents owned the farm it was much larger, Beverly says.

“We had a garden trail that ran through the property with gardens on both sides all the way back,” she adds. “At one time we counted over 40 gardens in [the farm’s] 40-acre span.”

At the age of 18, Dale started working for Southern Bell telephone, but he kept a part-time job running the family farm stand.

When he retired from his main job, Dale took over the family produce business full time.

Over the years, the market, which used to only be open on Wednesdays and Saturdays, started expanding its hours. Now the establishment is open seven days a week.

These days, Dale gets as much of his produce as possible from local farms, all within ten to forty miles from the market.

He travels during the week to farms in Rowan, Cabarrus and Mecklenburg counties.

“The restaurants call me the tomato man.”

-DALE MCLAUGHLIN

Dale McLaughlin.

Currently he’s getting greenhouse-raised tomatoes, leafy vegetables and root vegetables from Barbee Farms in Concord.

“At Christmastime I got a boxful of strawberries from Bush-N-Vine Farm in York,” Dale says. “I also get hydroponic tomatoes from Mocksville, North Carolina, every week.”

WELDON WEAVER

In fact, tomatoes are Dale’s most popular product. In addition to selling them at the market, he delivers tomatoes to local restaurants including Art’s Barbeque & Deli, Parkway Café, Laurel Market, both Rhino Deli locations and both Common Market locations.

“The restaurants call me the tomato man,”

WELDON WEAVER A selection of Beverly’s Gourmet Foods at Mecklenburg County Market.

Dale says smiling.

Despite Dale’s – and Beverly’s – focus on local foods, neither business claims to be 100-percent local year round.

“When this market was originally set up almost 90 years ago you had to raise everything you sold here,” Dale says. A produce market can’t be run like that today because people want fruits and vegetables out of season, he adds.

“People want oranges in the winter and you can’t get them locally,” Dale continues, adding that out-of-season items that aren’t grown in local greenhouses have to come in from outside the area. In her product line, Beverly also contends with customers’ desire for variety.

“People would be bored with collard greens dishes the entire season,” she says.

“We outsource our vegetables during the winter months, but we try to stay as local as we can.”

Beverly also makes no claim that her dishes are 100-percent organic.

“I use organic and local whenever I can,” she maintains.

Both father and daughter say that regardless of labels, their products are fresh and wholesome. As healthy eating becomes increasingly important to consumers, Dale and Beverly stress that the wisest course of action is to know where and who your food is coming from.

“The farmers we deal with are very concerned about what gets put on their product and they are very truthful about it, Dale says. “They don’t use harsh chemicals.

In fact organic farmers buy their spray from these farms.”

“They don’t produce anything that they won’t eat themselves,” the energetic 80-yearold adds. “And I’ve been eating it all my life.”

PMORAN@CLCLT.COM CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 13

THURSDAY

11

NOTHING FAKE ABOUT IT What: Trump’s climb to power has been a whirlwind of lies, smears and propoganda, but he’s been consistent on one point: fake news. Despite Trump’s desire to be blindly praised by America’s media, their refusal to follow through has led him to lash out, creating a dangerous environment in which his supporters write off all reporting as fake news. This panel consists of some of Charlotte’s best reporters, like Steve Crump, discussing responsible reporting in a new media world.

When: 7-8:30 p.m.

Where: Levine Museum of the New South, 200 E. 7th St. More: $10. museumofthenewsouth.org

FRIDAY

12

THINGS TO DO

TOP TEN

Dorothy WEDNESDAY

PHOTO COURTESY OF DOROTHY

FRIDAY

12

SATURDAY

13

SATURDAY

13

CHAD LAWSON PLAYS GEORGE GERSHIN

HECTORINA, NAKED NAPS, SWELL FRIENDS

THE WHOLE ENCHILADA BIKE RACE

BOULEVARDS

What: In 2015, pianist Lawson, best known for the quiet and eerily calm soundscapes he provides for the Lore podcast, approached the works of Frédéric Chopin — a flashy virtuoso if ever there was one — and stripped away the Romantic composer’s ornamentation with scalpel-like precision. It was a controversial move that paid off when Lawson’s album, The Chopin Variations went to #1 on the Billboard, iTunes and Amazon classical charts.

What: Charlotte experimental musician Dylan Gilbert has been keeping the lights on at Petra’s lately. Last week he did a solo show at the little piano bar that could — this week he brings the psychedelic dada rock of his band Hectorina, whose upcoming album Muck sounds pretty terrific to us.

Also on the bill (and also pretty oustanding): Raleigh-based Naked Naps (whose Year of the Chump is on Charlotte’s Self Aware Records) and local noise-punk Swell Friends.

What: Ever been walking on one of the many beautiful trails at the U.S. National Whitewater Center and thought, I wonder just how far-reaching these trails really are?

As Kevin Hart’s dad once told him, “You gon’ learn today!” This race will cover all 35-plus miles of the USNWC trail system on two wheels.

But if you can’t handle that, you can always register for half the enchilada. The afterparty features food, beer, bonfires and more.

What: Whether you grew up on Parliament and Prince, Dre and Snoop or recently rediscoverd oldschool funk via more contemporary producers like Pharrell Williams and Mark Ronson, expect to be moved

by Jamil Rashad’s Boulevards. The Raleigh artist found his way back to the funk by way of punk and metal and he’s been packing dance floors from the Triangle to here with sexy, Bootsy-licious songs like “Love and Dance” and “Move and Shout.” He shares this bill with locals Miami Dice and Astrea Corp.

When: 6 p.m.

Where: Stage Door Theater, 155 N College St More: $15-20. blumenthalarts.org

When: 10 p.m.

Where: Petra’s, 1919 Commonwealth Ave. More: $7. petrasbar.com

When: 8 a.m.

Where: U.S. National Whitewater Center, 5000 Whitewater Center Pkwy.

More: $35-45. usnwc.org/calendar

When: 10 p.m.

Where: Snug Harbor, 1228 Gordon St. More: $8 - $10. snugrock.com

H e re.

(Sorry we had to.... ) But you know what is coming soon, 14 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

Boulevards SATURDAY

The Whole Enchilada SATURDAY

Nothing Fake About It THURSDAY

NEWS ARTS FOOD MUSIC ODDS

PHOTO COURTESY OF USNWC

SUNDAY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

14

14

PHOTO COURTESY OF STEVE CRUMP

PHOTO COURTESY OF BOULEVARDS

WEDNESDAY

15

SCHOOL OF ROCK FEST

‘LOSING GROUND’

SOUP & SIP SOCIAL

What: Yo, mamas and papas: If you like to hear your kids play the music you grew up on, this is the show for you. School of Rock’s annual fest is a tribute to all things Boomer and X: Prince, Clapton, Beatles, Stones, Elton, Billy Joel, Foo Fighters and (mercifully) tributes to marginally more contemporary female artists like P.J. Harvey and St. Vincent. Catch ‘em doing this now, because they’ll be moving on to their own music before you can whistle “When I’m 64.”

What: The Classic Black Cinema Series rescues this upper middle class comedy of sex and manners from obscurity. A mildly surreal meditation on art and marriage, Losing Ground treads territory also explored in the work of Eric Rohmer — smart successful characters who blossom when they explore their unfulfilled desires. This 1982 flick was director Kathleen Collin’s only feature film.

She died in 1988. Horror fans will spot Duane Jones of the original Night of the Living Dead .

What: The perfect way to treat yourself on a day off while not guilt tripping off the fact that it’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Day and you should be out giving to some higher cause. You can do both at Soup & Sip, the first of 12 “Cocktails for a Cause” events hosted by Behind the Bar, a private foundation that provides financial support to local charities and social initiatives.

They make the drinks, chef Greg Collier provides the food, Jonathan Cooper curates the art and Quentin Talley spits the spoken word.

When: Noon - 10 p.m.

Where: Visulite Theatre, 1615 Elizabeth Ave. More: $10. visulite.com

When: 2 p.m.

Where: Harvey B. Gantt Center, 551 S Tryon St More: $9. ganttcenter.org

When: 3:30-6:30 p.m.

Where: Grace on Brevard, 219 S. Brevard St. More: $20. facebook.com/btbclt

17

LEADING ON OPPORTUNITY: EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION

WEDNESDAY

17

DOROTHY

What: An alarming stat states that less than 40 percent of fourthgrade students in CMS can read on grade level. Early childhood education can be key to tackling illiteracy in schools, and in this panel, local community leaders will discuss the impact of early care and education on economic opportunity, the effect of lack of early care and education on the community and the role we can play in charging a path forward.

What: Is it too much of a hassle to dig to the back of your closet to find those bone-rattling Blue Cheer and Sir Lord Baltimore records?

Dorothy, the name of the band as well as its ferocious front woman, has the heavy psych-blues sound down cold. Boasting growling fuzzball guitar licks, a subterranean pelvis shaking low end and Dorothy Martin’s chrome-plated pipes, this Los Angeles four-piece parties like it’s 1969, but these members of JayZ’s Roc Nation label are absolutely in the present.

When: 5:30-6:30 p.m.

Where: Biddle Memorial Hall, JCSU 100 Beatties Ford Road More: Free. tinyurl.com/ybqzf7z8

When: 8 p.m.

Where: Visulite Theatre, 1615 Elizabeth Ave More: $17.50-20. visulite.com

Creative loafing’s Cool ways to keep warm and avoid the cabin fever. Stay Tuned CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 15

MUSIC

FEATURE

SHAPESHIFTERS Astrea Corp’s dark electronic soundscapes are a trippy clash of post-rock madness

BY MARK KEMP

O

NE AFTERNOON several years ago, Mike Bachman sat at the desk in his south Florida home where he produced the rich, multilayered electronic soundscapes of his music project Astrea Corp. He opened one of the tracks he was working on. His girlfriend Carly looked over his shoulder.

“I remember sitting there and she was behind me and she started singing. My jaw dropped,” he says. “I was like, ‘Holy shit!’”

Bachman, who goes by the name Mike Astrea when he’s making music, had been creating beats for years. In the early 2000s he worked at Definitive Jux — the New York hip-hop label started by El-P of Run the Jewels — and later began making his own experimental music back home in Lake Worth, Florida, north of Miami. He began dating Carly Garrett in 2004 after the two met on Myspace, but had no idea she sang so well. It wasn’t until that fateful day at his work space more than five years later that he heard Carly’s voice, which can purr moodily like Beth Gibbons of Portishead, dance mischievously like ’80s art rocker Kate Bush, or let out blood-curdling wails like Bjork.

“Her family had mentioned that she could sing, but I was just like, ‘Oh, that’s cool,’” he says. In other words, Mike didn’t take them seriously.

Not that Carly had ever pushed the point.

“I never mentioned to him that I sang,” she says. “I had never said to myself, ‘I want to be a singer.’ That just wasn’t something I’d dreamed of doing. I was teaching art and I enjoyed it and that’s what I did.”

Mike Astrea had already formed Astrea Corp in 2009 along with percussionist Sandor Davidson. The group initially performed live improvisations, with Davidson on drums, Mike on a laptop and a pair of Music Production Controllers, or MPCs, and a guitarist named Frank Banisi. Eventually, guitarist Julian Cires joined, followed by Carly, who had come of age listening to the more straightforward emo and posthardcore of acts like Thursday and Save the Day. But she had grown intrigued by the music Mike and his crew were banging out.

“At some point I just thought, ‘Let me try this,’” Carly remembers. “I loved the music he was making, because it was nothing like anything I had ever heard before.”

The music Mke Astrea was making is rooted in the trip-hop that came out of 16 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

PHOTO BY DIGITAL CYPHER

Astra Corp’s mysterious Carly and Mike Astrea.

“I REMEMBER SITTING THERE AND SHE WAS BEHIND ME AND SHE STARTED SINGING. MY JAW DROPPED.” — MIKE ASTREA ON THE FIRST TIME HE HEARD WIFE CARLY’S VOICE Bristol, England, in the early ’90s — Massive Attack, Tricky, Portishead — but with a more austere vibe informed by the dystopian urban soundscapes of El-P’s 2002 solo album Fantastic Damage. Astrea would pluck from the early-‘70s Krautrock of Tangerine Dream and Can, but he also found inspiration in such pioneers of the avant-garde as Karlheinz Stockhausen, who was employing electronic tape music in his musique concrète as far back as the 1950s.

By 2011, the Astreas had compiled a 37-track project — a clash of crisp beats, wobbly synth lines, video-game sounds and other jarring effects that Mike, a sci-fi lover, called Disposable Orwelle. He posted it online. Astrea Corp followed up shortly thereafter with its first official release, Third String Asimov. Since then, the crew has released some of the more mesmerizing dark electronic sounds to come out of south Florida’s rich electronic scene, from the big, warm, epic music on their 7-song EP of 2014, paradise oscine, to the bare, frigid and more minimal sounds of last year’s a/d, produced in Charlotte by Justin Aswell.

The Astreas already had friends in Charlotte when they decided to relocate here two and a half years ago. Mike first

gained attention for his collaboration with former Queen City rapper Shane on their much-lauded Deep 6 Division EP of 2016. It featured cameos from local luminaries like rapper Elevator Jay, Junior Astronomers singer Terrence Richard, pedal-steel guitarist Wes Hamilton, as well as rapper Jabrjaw, a friend of the Astreas from their Florida music collective Black Locust Society. Carly sang on one Deep 6 cut, as did guitarist Will Gilreath, who is now an official member of Astrea Corp’s Charlotte-based line-up.

In the next two weeks, Astrea Corp will perform two area shows, one at Snug Harbor on January 13 with Boulevards and Miami Dice, and another at Petra’s on January 25 with FLLS and Deion Reverie. The trio is also working on a new album to be released later this year.

THE ASTREAS WERE at the top of their

game when they left Florida in 2015. After releasing paradise oscine and two other EPs — asomatous and the instrumental panther modems — the previous year, the south Florida alt-weekly New Times named Astrea Corp one of the “Top Female-Fronted Bands in Broward and Palm Beach Counties.” It wasn’t the first time the group had received

accolades from that media outlet. In 2012, the New Times named Carly “Best Female Vocalist” in its annual Best of Broward-Palm Beach issue.

Astrea Corp had become a darling of the south Florida music scene, appearing in numerous features and spotlights. But by July 2015, they were ready for a change, and bolted to Charlotte, where they promptly released the 8-song durban poison.

“We were just kind of burned out on south Florida,” Mike Astrea says. He’s sitting at Soul Gastrolounge in Plaza Midwood on a frigid weeknight wearing a black beanie and longsleeve shirt emblazoned with a triangular Astrea Corp design. Next to him, Carly is bundled up in a blue and white sweater, her ringlets of reddish hair bouncing just above her eyes. Gilreath sits across from the couple, talking about how he ended up playing with them after having put down his guitar to be a DJ in more recent years.

“It was the most romantic way I’ve ever been asked to be in a band,” Gilreath says, with a laugh.

There’s a story behind Gilreath’s comment: He had gotten to know the Astreas during the recording of the Deep 6 project, and immediately hit it off with the couple. “I had

ASTREA CORP W/ BOULEVARDS, MIAMI DICE 10 p.m. Saturday, January 13. $8.

Snug Harbor, 1228 Gordon St. snugrock.com.

Clockwise from left: Mike Astrea blows digital smoke into Carly’s face (photo by Digital Cypher); the couple onstage in 2011 (Ian Whitlen); and recently, with new member Will Gilreath (left), at Soul Gastrolounge (Mark Kemp). legitimately very serious respect for what they were doing,” Gilreath says. “But being a DJ at the time, it didn’t really cross my mind to ask them be a part of the group.”

That happened later, when Astrea Corp was on the road, about to perform at Terminal West in Atlanta. Mike got a case of the preshow jitters. “After sound check I was sitting there thinking, ‘Will should totally be here,’ so I texted him and said, ‘You should be here with us.’ Now, it’s become this running joke among us that it was this kind of romantic invitation to join the group.”

It made sense that Astrea would want Gilreath in the band. After all, guitar had played a role in Astrea Corp’s sound from early on. In the track “Frequency Lust,” from paradise oscine, Carly’s voice flutters Kate Bush-like over a bouncing electronic melody, shimmery beats and a mantra-like guitar line.

The instrument plays an even bigger role on the track “Simian,” from asomatous, which gets a turbo charge from the tangled riffs and feedback.

Even on a/d, which has a more minimal sound, the guitar remains a key part of the vibe. In the track “Rusted Jux,” which opens on a bleak industrial landscape, with harsh clicking and thumping sounds crashing into a wistful, almost serene melody, it’s the haunting guitar line that colors in the spaces between the beats and Carly’s voice, which serves more as texture than a vehicle for her lyrics.

“Will just kind of fills in the gap from the

guitar player we’d had before, but he brings in his own voice and writes his own parts,” Mike says. “And that was always the thing before: I would just kind of write a skeleton and then bring it in and say, ‘Do whatever you want here.’ I’ve never said we’re going to sit down and write a song this way or that way. It’s always been collaborative.”

That’s true. As far back as 2011, Carly had characterized Astrea Corp’s recording process as “pretty relaxed and stress free.” She told the New Times that year, “Mike is constantly working, experimenting and fleshing out basic skeletons. Just noodling around until something clicks. We’ll sit down and listen to all these demos and I basically have free range to do with it what I please.”

WHEN SHE’S NOT singing as Carly Astrea, the 32-year-old Carly Garrett runs a children’s art program at Bright Horizons Family Solutions in Charlotte. She worked for the same company when she was in Florida.

And though it would be tempting to assume she brings the creativity she encourages in the classroom into Astrea Corp’s music, she told the New Times that she keeps her creative outlets very separate.

“When I leave each day, I try to leave everything job-related in the classroom,” she said. “I do agree that creativity is a very important part of teaching, but my creative mindset when working with children differs widely from what I create personally.” As a

musician, Carly said, she’s able to let herself go to places she could never go as a teacher.

“I enjoy having the freedom to expand my vision through the art I create in ways that many times defies this reality, almost in an intangible way, to a certain degree.”

Likewise, when Mike Astrea is not making beats, the 34-year-old Mike Bachman is a sheet-metal worker. Unlike Carly, he does bring his work into his music. It would be shocking if he didn’t. After all, the sounds of metal against metal fit perfectly into the industrial aesthetic of Astrea Corp’s music.

“There’s stuff all the time at work where I’ll pull my phone out and record things, for sure,” he says, adding that his coworkers have become used to his idiosyncrasies.

From as far back as he can remember, Mike always heard sounds differently from his fellow hip-hop heads.

“I have an art teacher to thank for that,” he says. “I was just a snooty rap kid growing up, heavy into Wu Tang and everything New York East Coast — you know, Gang Starr and

all that stuff. And my art teacher during class would play Tricky and Bjork and Massive Attack, and this weird French rapper called MC Solar, and then she’d also play the Smiths and Tangerine Dream.”

It blew his mind.

“Something about all that stuff just kind of grabbed me,” he says. “Instrumentally, everything was fantastic. The beats were amazing. So I was like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And she said, ‘Oh, here, take this CD home,’ and it was [Tricky’s] Maxinquaye and [Bjork’s] Post. I took them home and would just lose my shit. And then I’d take them back and she’d say, ‘If you like that, check out this.’”

Mike suddenly had the key to standing out in the crowd. “You know, coming from hip-hop as a teenager, you go record-digging, so I started looking for other stuff,” he says. “Instead of sampling the jazz and funk breaks that everybody else sampled, I got into Tangerine Dream, because it was just so different and there was something to be had SEE

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RECYCLE ME, PLEASE (Only after you’re done reading me)

18 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

MUSIC

MUSICMAKER

DESPERADO SINGING IN THE RAIN Isn’t it about time Douglass Thompson cut a new record?

BY MARK KEMP The Astreas party down in south Florida in the early days.

PHOTO BY IAN WHITLEN

SHAPE FROM P. 17 t there, and I was just enamored by that kind of music. I mean, obviously I had a love for jazz and funk breaks, but something about this old electronic music just spoke to me a little differently.

“And of course, you’re always trying to one-up everybody else, because that’s the hip-hop thing,” he adds. “You don’t want to be like the next guy. So you say, ‘Why am I going to sample Miles Davis when there’s all this other wild shit?’ I probably have a couple of album’s worth of stuff that’s just Tangerine Dream samples, and that spring-boarded me into like Can and Ash Ra Tempel and all that other Krautrock stuff, and Silver Apples, and Stockhausen, and even Bruce Hack — all that crazy early electronic stuff.”

Carly had no idea where Mike’s aesthetic came from at first. She just thought it sounded good — like film music. “But I eventually wanted to challenge myself, and so I started learning about it,” she says. “And it was funny how organically it came about and how well it worked with my voice. It was meant to be.”

She grew up in a devoutly religious family and sang in the church choir as a little girl. “I knew I could sing, and there was, you know, somewhat of a spiritual connection that I associated music with,” she says. “So when I

heard his stuff, I kind of felt that. By then I had turned my back and gone my own way in terms of the religious stuff, but this music seemed to have some of that.”

When she first started performing with Astrea Corp, people assumed Carly was a triphop expert. She laughs. “I had no idea who Portishead was before we started working together,” she says. “I honestly did not listen to any of that stuff at all.” In 2011 she told the New Times, “After our first couple of shows, I was getting a lot of compliments on my voice and how it reminded people of Beth Gibbons [of Portishead]. I literally had to ask Mike who that was.”

She glaces over at Gilreath, who’d begun his own music life as a rock guitarist in posthardcore bands. “I was just very much into rock,” Carly says. “Not into hip-hop, not into R&B, not into any of that stuff. Like, rock was my thing.” But her church singing had stuck with her, and that’s what came out when Mike first heard her sing over that early Astrea Corp track so many years ago.

“I guess because of my religious background, certain things are just kind of embedded in me and it comes out naturally,” she says. “It really works for the music we do.”

MKEMP@CLCLT.COM PHOTO BY IAN WHITLEN

Mike Astrea in a mellow mood.

WHEN A HOUSEFIRE scorched Douglass

Thompson’s home in the tiny town of Waupaca, Wisconsin, in 2012, he and his wife decided to make a change. Everything they’d accumulated over the years was gone, so they took to heart the old Kris Kristofferson line “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose,” and hit the road.

“I had a friend here in Charlotte who offered us his place,” Thompson says. “He asked if we wanted to house-sit for him for a couple of years, so we said, ‘Sure. We’re older now, let’s take one last adventure.’”

The adventure led 61-year-old Thompson, who’d been a songwriter practically all his life, to Charlotte’s rich singer-songwriter scene. He’d spent time in the late ’70s in the singer-songwriter capital of the world — Austin, Texas — where he rubbed shoulders with greats like Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Butch Hancock. In Charlotte, Thompson fell in with Queen City greats like David Childers, Mike Strauss and Rick Spreitzer. In 2014, another local troubadour, Chuck Johnson, encouraged Thompson to do an album, which resulted in It Was a Good Plan (Live at the Evening Muse).

Recorded one rainy night in NoDa, the 13-song album includes such miniature works of musical literature as “Just Like Anastasia,” “The Day Spade Cooley Died” and “Peckinpah and Ford.” More recently, “Promise to the Wind,” a song Thompson cowrote with Childers, wound up on Childers’ 2017 album Run Skeleton Run. We caught up with Thompson, who performs January 12 at Catawba Coffee, to see if he plans a follow-up to that terrific set of songs that one local radio guy described as a collection of “three-minute novels.” .

Creative Loafing: How did the Evening Muse album come about?

Douglass Thompson: You know, I have a granddaughter and I wanted to leave something, so I thought, “Let me at least do one album. I think I have one album in me.”

I knew I wasn’t going to make any money from it, but I wanted to do it. So I called up [tmusician and producer] Eric Lovell, who I really wanted to work with, but he didn’t answer my calls. He’s a busy guy and he didn’t know who I was, so...

Chuck Johnson said, “Let me call him.”

Well, the very next day Eric got back to me.

I needed a reference, I guess. He was very

skeptical at first. He said, “What you got?”

And I put down 15 songs, sat in his studio and he recorded them and told me, “That’s a lot of songs — we’ll probably only do eight or 10.” I said, “Yeah, I understand.” He said, “I’m going to listen to these and then let you know what I think.” Well, the next day he calls me and says, “Hey, let’s do all 15.” [laughs] That made me feel pretty good.

We ended up doing. His wife Gigi [Dover, another local music luminary] sang on several of the songs. Eric played guitar, and he got Rick Blackwell [of the Monday Night Allstars] to play bass. It was a fun afternoon — pouring rain, a really nasty storm, but we filled the Muse and people seemed to like it.

Do you have a second album in you?

I definitely do. I’ve got so many new tunes.

Everything that’s on that first album was written before I moved to Charlotte. A lot of them go back to the ’90s. My plan is to do a very stripped-down collection next time. Just me and an acoustic guitar. I don’t really need drums and full instrumentation for what I do. I’m just telling stories. And I know so many great guitar players who have been encouraging. So I’m thinking of doing between eight and 12 tracks, mostly with just one other guitarist or a harmonica player. I’d like to have it out by Christmas.

One of my favorite songs on the album is “Peckinpah and Ford,” about the two western film directors. Why did you write about them?

I’m a lifelong fan of westerns, and when I was in my 20s I did some scholarly stuff on them, just reading about the two directors and what they did. To me, they were like Bob Dylan and John Prine in folk music — they took this old genre and made it fresh and real, giving it something to say, using it as an artform and not just a time-suck.

My character in the song is like a young film director, finding lots of problems on the set and saying, “What would Peckinpah do? What would Ford do?” I knocked it out pretty quickly but didn’t play it for anyone, because I just thought it was just too weird and personal for anybody to relate to. Then when I did start playing it, it was everybody’s favorite song of mine. It’s just one of those situations where you write a song and you don’t really consider playing it because it’s too personal, and then people wind up loving it. I guess it’s the theme — the struggle to create. That’s kind of universal.

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MUSIC

SOUNDBOARD JANUARY 11 COUNTRY/FOLK Resonant Rogues (Heist Brewery)

DJ/ELECTRONIC Le Bang (Snug Harbor)

POP/ROCK Carmen Tate Solo Acoustic (Eddie’s on Lake Norman) Musicians Open Mic (Crown Station Coffeehouse and Pub) Charlie’s On Acid, Vic Crown (Milestone) Cuzco, The Most, Perspective, A Lovely Hand to Hold, Youth League (Visulite Theatre) Karaoke (Hattie’s Tap & Tavern) My 3 Sons (Evening Muse) Shana Blake and Friends (Smokey Joe’s Cafe) U2 Xperience (Don Gibson Theatre, Shelby)

JANUARY 12 CLASSICAL/JAZZ/SMOOTH Charlotte Symphony Pops: John Williams Unlimited (Belk Theater) Eric Brice Group (Morehead Street Tavern) The Jazz Room at the Stage Door Theater: Chad Lawson plays George Gershwin (Stage Door Theater)

COUNTRY/FOLK The Lenny Federal Band (Comet Grill) The Stray Birds (Evening Muse)

DJ/ELECTRONIC Cash Cash (World) Dash Berlin (World) DJ Raquest (RiRa Irish Pub)

POP/ROCK Paleo Sun (Bradshaw Social House) Abbey Road Live! (Visulite Theatre) Bill Miller Band (Smokey Joe’s Cafe) Flip Cup All Stars (Tin Roof) Hectorina, Naked Naps, Swell Friends (Petra’s) Party Animals! A Birthday Party For Mo: Dead Sea $crilla, Sext Message, On the Water, Ma’am (Milestone) Smash City (RiRa Irish Pub) Staton Bush Project (Hattie’s Tap & Tavern)

JANUARY 13 20 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

CLASSICAL/JAZZ/SMOOTH Charlotte Symphony Pops: John Williams Unlimited (Belk Theater) The Jazz Room at the Stage Door Theater: Chad Lawson plays George Gershwin (Stage Door Theater)

COUNTRY/FOLK The Kruger Brothers (Don Gibson Theatre, Shelby) Sally & George (Midwood Guitar Studio)

DJ/ELECTRONIC Cosmic Gate (World) Ferry Corsten (World) Tilted DJ Saturday’s: DJ Tookie (Tilted Kilt Pub & Eatery)

HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B The Queen’s Guard (Evening Muse)

POP/ROCK Carmen Tate Solo Acoustic (Freeman’s Pub, Gastonia, Gastonia) Paleo Sun (The Brickyard) Badfish - A Tribute To Sublime (The Fillmore) Bauner Chafin Band (Hattie’s Tap & Tavern) Boy Named Banjo, Pierce Edens (Visulite Theatre) Cameron Floyd, Victoria Victoria (Evening Muse) Charles Walker, CJ Boyd, Clang Slayne, David Z. Cox (Milestone) DJ Method (RiRa Irish Pub) Jamorah (Smokey Joe’s Cafe) Ruba Say And The Cosmic Rays (Keg and Cue) Steven Metz (Tin Roof) Strong Maybe (RiRa Irish Pub) Toleman Randall, Party Battleship, Red Dress Amy (Petra’s, Charlotte)

JANUARY 14 HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B Plies (The Fillmore)

DJ/ELECTRONIC Bone Snugs-N-Harmony (Snug Harbor)

POP/ROCK Annabel Lee, Voices In Vain, Divine Treachery, Den of Wolves (Milestone) Jordan Middleton: Album Release, Joe

SOUNDBOARD

NOW HIRING INTERNS. THE BRIGHTER, THE BETTER.

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MUSIC

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FRIDAY, JAN 19

TRACY LAWRENCE LIMITED ADVANCE $20 ALL OTHERS $23

❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈

EMAIL BACKTALK@CLCLT.COM Middleton (Evening Muse) Omari and The Hellhounds (Comet Grill) School of Rock Charlotte Fest: Rockin’ in the New Year (Visulite Theatre)

Greg Lilley & Co. (Hattie’s Tap & Tavern) January Residency: Swim in the Wild (Snug Harbor) Trivia & Karaoke Wednesdays (Tin Roof)

JANUARY 15

COMING SOON

POP/ROCK

Charlie Mars (January 19, Evening Muse) David Rawlings (January 19, Neighborhood Theatre) Tracy Lawrence (January 19, Coyote Joe’s) A Stained Glass Romance, Beshiba, Black Fleet, Abhorrent Deformity (January 19, Snug Harbor) Ultrafaux, Lon Eldridge (January 20, Evening Muse) They Might be Giants (January 21, Neighborhood Theatre) Royal Thunder, Backwoods Payback, Space Wizard (January 22, Milestone) Fiftywatt Freight Train (January 26, The Underground) Tim Barry, Laura Stevenson, Roger Harvey (January 26, Milestone) Donna the Buffalo (January 27, Neighborhood Theatre) Black Rebel Motorcycle Club (January 27, The Underground) Lana Del Ray (January 30, Spectrum Center) The Winter Sounds, Belle Adair (January 31, Evening Muse) Aimee Mann (January 31, McGlohon Theater) Lost Dog Street Band, Dead Cat (February 2, Evening Muse) Big Head Todd & The Monsters (February 2, Fillmore) Andrea Bocelli (February 9, Spectrum Center) Kid Rock(February 10, Spectrum Center) George Clinton & Parliament/Funkadelic (February 10, Fillmore) Fetty Wap (February 15, Fillmore) Molotov (February 22, Fillmore) John Nolan (of Taking Back Sunday), Andy Bilinski (February 23, Evening Muse) St. Vincent (March 1, Fillmore) Face 2 Face - Elton John & Billy Joel Tribute (March 2, Fillmore) Jorma Kaukonen (March 6, McGlohon Theater) Dropkick Murphys (March 9, Fillmore) Jeezy-The Cold Summer Tour (March 11, Fillmore) The English Beat (March 17, Fillmore) The Eagles (April 11, Spectrum Center)

Music Bingo (Tin Roof) Music Trivia (Hattie’s Tap & Tavern) David Dondero (Thomas Street Tavern) Find Your Muse Open Mic featuring Brook Pridemore (Evening Muse) The Monday Night Allstars (Visulite) Hip-Hop/Soul/R&B #MFGD Open Mic (Apostrophe Lounge) Knocturnal (Snug Harbor)

JANUARY 16 COUNTRY/FOLK Red Rockin’ Chair (Comet Grill)

POP/ROCK Tuesday Night Jam w/ The Smokin’ Js (Smokey Joe’s Cafe) Open Mic hosted by Jarrid and Allen of Pursey Kerns (The Kilted Buffalo, Huntersville)

JANUARY 17 HIP-HOP/SOUL/R&B Free Hookah Wednesdays Ladies Night (Kabob House, Persian Cuisine)

DJ/ELECTRONIC Karaoke with DJ Pucci Mane (Petra’s) Cyclops Bar: Modern Heritage Weekly Mix Tape (Snug Harbor)

COUNTRY/FOLK Suzanne Slair with Special Guest Danielle Howle (Neighborhood Theatre) Open Mic/Open Jam (Comet Grill)

POP/ROCK Carmen Tate Solo Acoustic (LakeTown Tavern, Cornelius) Peter Case & Deadrock West (Evening Muse) Pluto for Planet (RiRa Irish Pub) Open Mic & Songwriter Workshop (Petra’s) Open Mic (Jack Beagles) Dorothy (Visulite Theatre)

SATURDAY, FEB 3

DIAMOND RIO LIMITED ADVANCE $18 ALL OTHERS $20

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FRIDAY, FEB 9

THE CADILLAC THREE LIMITED ADVANCE $13 ALL OTHERS $15

❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈

The Darkness (April 27, The Underground) Foreigner (July 4, PNC Music Pavilion) Sam Smith (July 6, Spectrum Center) Khalid (May 23, Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheare) Barenaked Ladies (July 5, Charlotte Metro Credit Union Amphitheare) Weezer, Pixies (July 25, PNC Music Pavilion) Alan Jackson (Sptember 15, Spectrum Center) Maroon 5 (October 4, Spectrum Center)

1/12 ABBEY ROAD LIVE! 1/13 BOY NAMED BANJO 1/19UNKNOWNHINSON 1/17 DOROTHY 2/15 THE BLACK LILLIES 2/6 G. LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE 2/11 WHITE BUFFALO 2/28 BRETT DENNEN 3/4 BAND OF HEATHENS 3/8 DAVID ARCHULETA 3/13 COAST MODERN 3/25 ICON FOR HIRE 4/14 TOUBAB KREWE 4/20 The OLD 97s

SATURDAY, FEB 17

WALKER HAYES LIMITED ADVANCE GA $12 ALL OTHER GA $15 . VIP $69

❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈

FRIDAY, MARCH 2

CODY JOHNSON

TICKETS ON SALE NOW $12

❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈ ❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈❈

THURSDAY, MARCH 8

KANE BROWN

GENERAL ADMISSION $25 VIP $99 TICKETS ON SALE NOW!

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FRIDAY, MARCH 9

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CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 21

ARTS

FEATURE

A ROSE THAT GREW FROM CONCRETE Playwright laid tough roots in Charlotte, then bloomed in New York

BY KIA O. MOORE

N

O SLEEP till Brooklyn” could be the soundtrack to the making of Nola Darling’s second dance — and to Stacey Rose’s journey from the Charlotte theater world to a Spike Lee Netflix joint.

Darling, of course, is the character who made her black-and-white cinematic debut on movie screens across the country in Lee’s 1986 full-length film debut She’s Gotta Have It. Her story stirred up conversations about female sexual freedom. It challenged genderrole expectations. It prompted conversations about the daily lived experiences of young African-American women.

Nola Darling’s story has now been revamped for a 21st century millennial audience whose tastes skew more to ondemand binge-watching. Netflix released the first season of the She’s Gotta Have It TV series in November — and Rose contributed her talents to this still-relevant tale of an artistic Brooklynite.

Rose served as writers’ assistant and script coordinator for the series. From June 2016 to February 2017, the New Jerseyborn, Charlotte-schooled playwright pulled all-nighters, taking a no sleep ‘till Brooklyn mentality to get the work done. She was tasked with keeping track of the story arc driven by the lead character. Rose took notes in the writers’ room, kept tabs on script revisions and got the most up-to-date versions to the production team.

“There were a lot of nights I was not going to sleep until 2 a.m.,” Rose remembers of the experience. “I lived in Jersey and had to be back in Brooklyn at 8 a.m. before the writers got there.”

For Rose, seeing her name roll in the credits of a series created by Lee, one of her screenwriting idols, was nothing short of surreal. And it would not have happened had she not immersed herself in Charlotte’s poetry and theater scenes while finding a path to recovery from addiction. Her experiences as a single mother, divorcée, non-traditional college student and respiratory therapist with a theater side hustle led to Rose’s transition out of Hell and into her second career as a full-time playwright.

“Stacey is a phenomenal writer and has been way ahead of her time for a long time,” says Quentin Talley, founder of Charlotte’s African-American theater company OnQ 22 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

Rose (second from right) with a group of fellow playwrights in Minnesota.

Productions. “I think she’s a visionary. She has work that takes a specific topic and looks at it from a totally different angle.”

This week, the Charlotte Arts and Science Council announced it has awarded Rose with a grant that will bring her back to Charlotte this summer to do a theater workshop.

A BUDDING ROSE

If anybody knows about the daily lived experiences of a young African-American women, it would be Rose. She grew up in Elizabeth, New Jersey, where the notion of making a living wage from writing plays had never crossed her mind, although teachers throughout her life had made note of her talent. It wasn’t until Rose turned 30 that she would see that talent in herself.

As one of four siblings in a single-parent home, Rose saw on a daily basis what it took to provide for a family. “My mother was one of the hardest-working women I ever knew. She started working for Bell Telephone Company at age 16 and did not stop until she retired at 42,” Rose says. Having her mom as an example of what hard work looked like, it’s no surprise Rose overlooked the idea of the arts being a viable career path.

Still, she was a mere third grader when she was selected to be a part of a special program for bright students. “They put a bunch of black kids from my neighborhood on a bus and shipped us to these gifted and talented schools,” Rose remembers.

Had it not been for that opportunity, Rose says, her exposure to the arts would have been limited. “Going to those schools, and not the neighborhood schools, afforded us more

engagement with arts and culture,” she says.

Her class often took field trips into New York City to see shows. One, in particular, left a strong impression. “The Nutcracker was a huge experience for me,” Rose remembers.

“I was in awe of the dancing, the costumes and the symphony.” It allowed her a space to feel her feelings. “I knew I could be at The Nutcracker and cry just from how the music made me feel. But I never connected it with being anything I could do with my life.”

After she left the gifted and talented school program and reached high school, another teacher told the teenager she could make a living as a writer. She didn’t believe her. ”I was like, ‘Oh, that’s cute, but I want to make money,’” Rose says.

Two years after graduating from Elizabeth High School in 1994, Rose found her way to Charlotte with her sights set on studying chemistry. What she didn’t know is that her own internal chemistry would alter her path.

PARTY N’ BULLSHIT

After arriving in the Queen City in 1996, Rose eventually enrolled into Johnson C. Smith University. There, an English professor reiterated what Rose’s high school teacher had told her: She was a talented writer. But Rose, once again, brushed it off, continuing to study chemistry in JCSU’s labs. She also began studying ways to alter her own brain chemistry.

“Addiction snuck up on me,” she says.

“I was the college party-girl addict. It just built. And built. And built. It progressed from minor weekend hanging out and being social, to [using] every day of the week.”

Another internal biochemistry experience

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PLAYWRIGHTS’ CENTER.

changed Rose’s course more dramatically. In 1998 she found herself pregnant. The upside was that it put a temporary kibosh on her addiction and gave her a beautiful son, Zion.

The downside is that it also put a kibosh on her plans to get a degree in chemistry.

Rose dropped out of JCSU — pregnant, in a low-paying job, and her child’s father long gone. She had to find a way to provide for her new baby as her own single mother had provided for her and her siblings. Rose settled on a career in respiratory therapy, because of her own history of asthma. She enrolled into Central Piedmont Community College’s respiratory therapy program, but since she was pregnant, the school suggested she wait.

“I showed up anyway. To hell with that,” Rose says. “I was making $7.10 per hour and there was no way in hell I was taking care of a baby on $7.10 per hour.”

She landed her first job as a respiratory therapist at Gaston Memorial in 1999. But by the time Zion was 2, she had found her way back to the party scene and her drug use began to escalate.

“It was not terrible the whole eight years [of active addiction],” Rose says. “All this great shit was happening, [but] then little by little I realized how much I was getting high to cope.

It became less about partying and more about entitling myself to a reward. What I did not realize is that I had not given myself a healthy way to cope.”

As substance use took Rose to lower depths, she had two motivations that kept her from total demise: Zion and theater. “Being a parent has grounded me to be able to do a lot of the things that I have gone on to do,” she

says. “For me, if Zion would not have been there — if Zion had not always popped up in my mind as, ‘If I fuck up, what is going to happen to Zion?’ — I think I would have lost my damn mind. There would not have been anything to stop me.”

By 2009 Rose finally found a way to stop.

She’d had enough of the deep, dark emotional lows that were only exacerbated by her drug use. She wanted to be present for Zion. On November 10 of that year, Rose got clean.

And the sun shone down on her like the swell of strings in a rom-com.

OK, it wasn’t really as cinematic as that.

Three years before she got clean, Rose had decided to give a shot to the old writing talent that her professors had touted. She’d been married briefly and gone through a difficult, emotionally draining divorce. So she began to dip her toes into the theater world.

“It’s a weird, fucked-up fairy tale,” she says. “I thought art was going to fix me. And I love school, so whenever I feel like the world has its foot on my neck I always feel like I can go to school and study something.”

when I did not feel like I was getting any airplay as a playwright in the city at all. Q is the person who always believed in me as an artist,” she says, referring to Talley.

For his partn, Talley saw a combination in Rose that he coudn’t ignore. “She just has a beautiful perspective on things,” he says, then pauses. “She also has a hilarious perspective on things.”

He cites a specific example of a cuttingedge play by Rose that OnQ produced — The Social NetWorth.

“This was about five years ago, before Facebook and Instagram exploded the way it has now,” Talley says. “It was a live theater piece about being online. It was this whole interactive play that could be online and live theater at the same time.”

Rose was ahead of the curve, Talley says — too much so for some. “It is plays like that that I believe put her in the forefront of tackling issues that other folks might not be keen on,” he says. “And then five years Rose (second later you’re like, ‘Oh, that is genius.’ But, at the time it may have been too progressive for

COOPER PHOTO BY JONATHAN

“I AM 41. I’M AN OLD BITCH. I HAVE TO GET MY SHIT OUT. I HAVE TO GET A CANON GOING.” — STACEY ROSE

CHARLOTTE THEATER

Rose enrolled in English and theater classes at UNC Charlotte and CPCC, where her teachers once again encouraged her to seriously pursue a career as a playwright. This time, she listened.

After all, she was now 30 and it was time she pay attention to her inner artist.

From 2006 to 2008, still trying to deal with her addiction, Rose navigated the theater landscape, getting hands-on experience at the Afro-American Cultural Center on Myers Street in First Ward. There, she met Sidney Horton, a longtime fixture of Charlotte’s theater community, who pulled Rose into the fold of hosting poetry events. “Those were some good days,” she remembers. “My baby was small and would follow me around doing theater. The first few things I wrote were based on that little church [at the Afro-American Culture Center].

Even today I could write something to go into that space. It was my go-to space.“ At the AACC, Rose met Talley, whose thennew OnQ provided her with opportunities to express herself, learn how to make a production work, and put to practice what she studied at UNC Charlotte. “OnQ would produce my shit and respected me as an artist

people. So everybody is catching up to her and she has already been there and done that and is moving on to the next topic.”

BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY

Naturally, a rose has to bloom, and for this Rose, New York City was the next stop.

Many of her peers in the local arts scene — Talley, her friend Eric Paulk, who also worked with OnQ, and even CL’s current editor, Mark Kemp — strongly pushed her.

“Everybody was like, ‘You should be applying to grad school with your level of talent,’” she remembers. “They believed in me more than I did.”

With encouragement from her circle of friends — and a distinct lack of support from the Charlotte arts scene at large — Rose enrolled in New York University’s prestigious Tisch School of the Arts, got accepted and crowd-sourced a move to the Big Apple. By then, she’d been clean for about four years and had developed healthy coping mechanisms.

“I don’t ever let myself wallow in disappointment more than 24 hours,” she says, using the mantra of recovery. The arts world, as they say, is not for the faint of heart. “In this business you really do have

PHOTO BY STACEY ROSE

Top: Actors read Rose’s play America V. 2.1 at Playwrights Horizon in New York.

Middle: Manuscript for Rose’s play Muva Death (right), and Rose (left).

Bottom: Actors perform Muva Death at The Amoralists Theatre Company in New York.

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 23

JONATHAN COOPER

to seek to ground yourself and be OK with yourself,” she says, “because the business will not always affirm you.”

She recalls an opportunity to work with the SoHo Rep Writers Directors Lab. She was rejected. “I was devastated,” Rose says, “but in the middle of all this emotional pain I sat up and said, ‘Wait a damn minute! I will have been done jumped off a damn bridge if I don’t pull myself together.’”

So she did. “Now I am more confident with myself. I know what the hell I want in a way that I never have,” Rose says. “I know specifically what I want to do. It is so clear to me now that the things I don’t get do not affect me near as much as they did before.”

The key, she says, is to allow herself time to mourn: “I give myself a day. I let myself feel it. Then I move on. I got stuff to do. I am 41. I’m an old bitch. I have to get my shit out.

I have to get a canon going.”

SHE’S GOTTA HAVE IT

Rose’s time at Tisch taught her many things, not the least of which is how to curate her career as a working writer. And she’s now doing it through fellowships, grants and film opportunities — like She’s Gotta Have It. One of the more unexpected experiences while Rose was studying at Tisch, she says, was developing a mentor-mentee relationship with Spike Lee, who teaches film at the school.

Since she did not study film and did not take classes from Lee, she assumed she’d never come into contact with him.

“Everybody would have these stories: ‘Oh, you will see Spike Lee on the elevator, but he is not going to say anything to you,’” Rose says. “I had not seen him and I had not put any faith in seeing him or hoping to build 24 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

a relationship with him. That just was not my focus. So when I did meet him, it threw me off.”

It happened off campus one day at a little sandwich shop around the corner from the school, which is in Greenwich Village at Broadway near Waverly Place. “I was online and my friend was like, ‘Spike Lee is behind you.’ I was like, ‘Yeah right.’ And of course I turn around and there he is. He is being haggled by this guy about the Knicks. I was like, ‘I am not talking to him. He is going to be aggravated and I am not doing it.’”

Rose’s friend kept bugging her: “Oh, you are just going to let him walk away?”

“I was like, ‘Yeah, I am going to let him walk away.”

Rose did not let him walk away.

“It was so surreal,” she says. “I remember it being the windiest day ever. His Knicks hat blew off.”

Once she finally spoke to him, Lee had lots of questions for Rose. “He asked me who I was and were I was from,” Rose remembers.

“He said, ‘You should meet my TA — y’all have a similar story’ and, ‘Come and sign up for advisement.’” That’s something Lee does with his students once a week at NYU, unless he’s working on a project. “So he walked me up to show me where the sign-up was and closed the door in my face,” Rose says. “It was so great.”

That connection led to her seat in the writers’ room of She’s Gotta Have It. She admits it felt pretty weird at first. “Even being in the room did not feel regular,” she says. “The first few weeks were like, ‘Oh my god...’” She reels off names of famous people.

“I’m like, ‘Holy shit, how did I end up here?’”

Rose knows exactly how. “Theater got me there,” she says. “The long and short of it is: I went to NYU and I met Spike the second semester of my first year there, he took me on as a mentor, he would read my work and we would just talk about things.”

It was during those reading sessions that he brought up She’s Gotta Have It. “Being who I am, I was like, ‘If you have a spot for me…’ — not thinking at all that he actually would,” Rose says. “But then when the time came, he gave me a call and told me that I would come on as his assistant for the writer’s room.”

BACK TO CLT

With She’s Gotta Have It wrapped, Rose has curated two more arts opportunities for herself. She is currently a Many Voices Fellow at The Playwrights’ Center in St. Paul, Minnesota. And in July, she will head back to Charlotte to do the theater workshop for The Danger: A Homage to Strange Fruit, a thesis play from her days at Tisch that she describes as a “sprawling piece of theater.”

It examines the legacy of white supremacist patriarchy and violence against black bodies through the eyes of ghosts lost in the same dilapidated railroad waiting room in no set time period, trying to find their way out.

With the help of a diverse group of Charlotte artists, experts and community members, Rose will learn how the piece works on stage before she debuts it in Brooklyn next fall. Yet again, her theatrical experience in Charlotte will inform her theatrical growth in New York.

“No matter where I go,” she says, “my artistic heart always beats strongest in Q.C.”

UNIVERSAL

Daniel Kaluuya in ‘Get Out.’

ARTS

A24

Willem Dafoe and Brooklynn Prince in ‘The Florida Project.’

FILM

FILM 2017: THE BEST & WORST The year’s wonders and blunders

BY MATT BRUNSON

D

URING 2017, it seemed that

movies mattered as much as ever.

While the country burned as Nero continued to fiddle with his Twitter account, Hollywood did its part to put out the flames.

In real life, sexual predators were finally

tagged and caged (yes, liberals condemn their perverts while conservatives elect theirs President; go figure).

In reel life, filmmakers told the stories of folks who were increasingly being marginalized by an insidious right-wing agenda.

The year’s best pictures often reflected the issues of the day: the persecution of

minorities; rampant misogyny; honest journalists fighting back against alternate facts; the have-nots having even less. And let’s not forget the wonderful heroine — make that superheroine — who would have no qualms about breaking the arm of any shortfingered vulgarian who tried to grab her by the ... ahem.

THE 10 BEST

Of the 130 films I viewed over the past 12 months, here are my picks for the 10 best movies of 2017, followed by 10 worthy runner-ups, and one final look at the worst of the worst.

To read complete write-ups on each film, as well as check out more year-end superlatives, head to www.clclt.com/film.

THE 10 WORST

1. THE FLORIDA PROJECT 2. GET OUT

1. THE MUMMY

3. THE POST

2. SUBURBICON

4. HAROLD AND LILLIAN: A HOLLYWOOD LOVE STORY

3. FIFTY SHADES DARKER

5. LADY BIRD

4. FREE FIRE

6. THE DISASTER ARTIST

5. FIST FIGHT

7. WONDER WOMAN

6. THE HOUSE

8. CALL ME BY YOUR NAME

7. TRANSFORMERS: THE LAST KNIGHT

9. THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI

8. UNFORGETTABLE

10. WIND RIVER

9. CHIPS

Honorable Mentions, In Preferential Order: Mudbound; Land of Mine; T2 Trainspotting; Dunkirk; Quest; Beauty and the Beast; Blade Runner 2049; mother!; Coco; Your Name.

10. KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE

CLCLT.COM | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | 25

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SAVAGE LOVE

‘AM I A CREEP?’ Dan parses some (particularly) strange encounters

BY DAN SAVAGE

I’m a 67-year-old gay man. After a breakup 15 years ago, I believed the possibility of emotional and sexual intimacy with a partner was over for me. Then a couple of months ago, my desire for sexual contact increased dramatically. For the first time, I began using apps, and I felt like the proverbial kid in a candy store; it seemed strangely similar to when I first came out in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood in the early 1970s. Also, I was surprised — not unpleasantly — by the whole Daddy phenomenon, never imagining that this old face and body would interest younger men. You can probably guess what happened next: I was contacted by a 22-year-old man who revealed himself to be mature, intelligent, sweet, and, fatally, the physical type that arouses me most. I fell hard, and he seems to like me too. Am I a creep? A fool? Is my judgment impaired?

DUMB AND DADDY

The sexy “Daddy” thing — which has always been with us — seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Perhaps our omnipresent abusive orange father figure is giving us all daddy issues that are manifesting (in some) as a burning desire to service kinder, sexier, more benevolent daddies. Or perhaps the internet is to blame — not for creating more people interested in intergenerational sex and/or romance, but for making it easier for people to anonymously seek out the kind of sex and kinds of sex partners they truly want. Even if the initial looking is anonymous, DAD, discussing one’s desires with others who share them helps people grow more comfortable with their desires and themselves — nothing melts away shame quite like knowing you’re not alone — and more people are coming out about their non-normative sexual desires, partner preferences, relationship models, etc., than ever before.

That said, DAD, if the affections of a consenting adult 40-plus years your junior is your particular perk of aging, go ahead and enjoy it. Keep your expectations realistic (a successful STR is likelier than a successful LTR), don’t do anything stupid (see Father Clements, below), and reacquaint yourself with my constantly updated and revised Campsite Rule: When there’s a significant age and/or experience gap, the older and/or more experienced person has a responsibility to leave the younger and/or less experienced person in better shape than they found them.

No unplanned or planned pregnancies, no sexually transmitted infections, no leading the younger partner to believe “forever” 28 | JAN. 11 - JAN. 17, 2018 | CLCLT.COM

is likely. Do what you can to boost their questions should I ask? knowledge, skills, and self-confidence while HELP INTERESTED STRAIGHT BOY UNDERSTAND LUST’S LIMITATIONS you’re together, and do your best to stick the nearly inevitable dismount — the chances that you’ll be together forever are slim, but 1. “Are you a cuckold or is this a hotwife you can forever be a friend, mentor, and thing?” (Considering your sign-off, HISBULL, either you’ve assumed he’s a cuckold or he’s resource.

While the age difference will creep some told you he is one. If he is a cuck, he may want out, DAD, that doesn’t mean you’re a creep. dirty texts and pictures — or he’ll want to Don’t want to be a fool? Don’t do anything be in the room where it happens. Is that OK foolish (see Father Clements, below). Worried with you?) about infatuation-impaired judgment leading 2. “Have you done this before?” (The reality of you to do something foolish? Ask a few another person sleeping with your up-to-nowtrusted friends to smack you upside the head monogamous spouse can dredge up intense if you start paying his rent or lending him emotions, e.g., jealousy, sadness, anger, rage. your credit cards. And just as you don’t want If they’ve done this before and enjoyed it, you to take advantage of this young man, DAD, can jump right in. If they haven’t, maybe start with a make-out session at a time or in you don’t want to be taken advantage a place where you can’t progress of either. We associate age with to sex.) power, but youth and beauty 3. “Can I speak directly confer their own kinds of with your wife?” (You’ll power, and that power can want to make sure she be abused — it can also isn’t doing this under lead seemingly sensible duress and that she’s into men to sign their life you, and you’ll want to savings over to 24-yearindependently verify the old Romanian “models.” things he’s told you about For example: “A their arrangement, health, 79-year-old retired priest experiences, etc.) has been left heartbroken DAN SAVAGE and homeless after his I recently started seeing 24-year-old husband left him a gorgeous 24-year-old just after their home was put into woman who’s smart and sweet and his name,” LGBTQ Nation reported. “Philip Clements sold his home in Kent, England, also happens to have a few out-there for £214,750, before moving to Romania and fetishes. There’s not much I’ll say no purchasing an apartment for the couple to live to, Dan, but one of the things she’s into in in Bucharest. He signed over the property is formicophilia (a sexual interest in to Florin Marin, so that Marin would have being crawled on or nibbled by insects). security after he passed away… Marin broke I offered to get some ants and worms things off just weeks after the apartment was to crawl on her body while I fuck her, put in his name, and Clements found himself but she wants me to put earthworms in her vagina. Is there a safe way to do homeless.”

Keep Father Clements’s sad story in this? Female condom? I want to help, but mind, DAD, but don’t be paralyzed by it. putting worms in your vagina seems like Because there are lots of examples of loving, it will end with an embarrassing trip to lasting, non-creepy, non-foolish relationships the ER. WORRIES OVER REALLY MESSY SCENARIO between partners with significant age gaps out there. So enjoy this while it lasts, and if things start to get creepy — if he starts shopping for “I thought I had heard everything,” said Dr. an apartment in Bucharest — then you’ll have Jen Gunter, an ob-gyn in San Francisco. to pull the plug. But if this turns into a loving, “Apparently not.”

Dr. Gunter, “Twitter’s resident lasting, healthy, and unconventional LTR, DAD, then one day he’ll get to pull your plug. gynecologist,” first went viral when she urged (When that day comes, which hopefully won’t women not to put jade eggs in their vaginas, just one of the many idiocies pushed by the be for a long, long time.) idiots at Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s idiotic Someone at work — not my boss — asked “lifestyle” website. Last week, Dr. Gunter had me to fuck his wife. He’s a nice guy, to urge women and men not to shoot coffee his wife is hot, and I’m single. This is a up their butts, also recommended by Goop. first for me. Besides STI status, what So I thought she might have something to say

about stuffing earthworms in your girlfriend’s vagina.

“This is obviously unstudied,” Dr. Gunter said, “but anything that lives in soil could easily inoculate the vagina with pathogenic bacteria. Also, I am not sure what earthworm innards could do to the vagina, but I am guessing the worms would get squished and meet an untimely demise during sex. How would you get the pieces of dead earthworm out of her vagina? I can think of a lot of ways this could go very wrong. I would advise against it.”

I’m with Dr. Gunter (and, no doubt, PETA): Don’t stuff earthworms in your girlfriend’s vagina. That said, WORMS, tucking a few earthworms into a female condom and carefully inserting it into your girlfriend’s vagina without shoving your cock in there too… is a thoroughly disgusting thing to contemplate and blech. But while it would most likely kill the earthworms (maybe switch ’em out for gummy worms at the last second?), it probably wouldn’t damage your girlfriend or land you both in the ER. Even so, WORMS, don’t do it. Because blech.

Read Dr. Gunter’s blog (drjengunter. wordpress.com), follow her on Twitter (@ DrJenGunter), and check out her new column in the New York Times (The Cycle).

On the Lovecast: Finally, a toy to help you DO YOUR KEGELS!, savagelovecast.com; follow @ fakedansavage on Twitter; mail@savagelove.net; go to ITMFA.org.

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SOLUTION TO THIS WEEK'S PUZZLE

WHERE WE ALL REFUSE TO WEAR SOCKS.

ARIES (March 21 to April 19) Guess what, Lamb?

You’re about to experience a new perspective on a situation you long regarded quite differently.

What you learn could open more opportunities later.

TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) The Bold Bovine is tempted to charge into a new venture. But it might be best to take things one step at a time, so that you know just where you are at any given point.

GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) It’s a good time to go on that fun getaway you’ve been planning. You’ll return refreshed, ready and, yes, even eager to tackle the new challenge that awaits you.

CANCER (June 21 to

July 22) The Moon Child loves to fantasize about magical happenings in the early part of the week. But the sensible Crab gets down to serious business by week’s end.

LEO (July 23 to August 22) What goes around comes around for those lucky Leos and Leonas whose acts of generosity could be repaid with opportunities to expand into new and exciting areas of interest.

VIRGO (August 23 to

September 22) Your concern about your job responsibilities is commendable.

But you need to take some quiet time to share with someone who has really missed being with you.

LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) Aspects favor getting out and meeting new people. And as a bonus, you might find that some of your newly made friends could offer important business contacts.

SCORPIO (October 23 to

November 21) You might take pride in wanting to do everything yourself.

But now’s a good time to ask family members to help with a demanding personal situation.

SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) Pay more attention to the possibilities in that workplace change. It could show the way to make that long-sought turn on your career path.

CAPRICORN (December 22

to January 19) Your need to succeed might overwhelm obligations to your loved ones. Ease up on that workload and into some well-deserved time with family and friends.

AQUARIUS

(January 20 to February 18) Love rules for amorous Aquarians who can make good use of their ability to communicate feelings. Don’t be surprised if they’re reciprocated in kind.

PISCES (February 19 to March 20) Fishing for compliments? No doubt, you probably earned them. But it’s best to let others believe they were the ones who uncovered the treasure you really are.

BORN THIS WEEK Your good works flow from an open, generous heart. Nothing makes you happier than to see others happy as well.

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