INDY Week May 3, 2023

40 NO. 18

CONTENTS

Heartless Bastards perform at Motorco Music Hall on Sunday, May 7. (See calendar, page 20.)

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO MUSIC HALL.

6 The Paper Route: Forty years and more than 2,000 papers after its inception, the INDY still produces powerful journalism grounded in progressive politics. BY BRIAN HOWE

10 New Era, Same INDY: Owner Richard Meeker discusses the future of the paper and altnernative media. BY BRIAN HOWE

12 The Hometown Paper: A seasoned journalist's circuitous route to covering the Bull City. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

ARTS & CULTURE

14 At Banh's Cuisine in Durham, a corkboard menu of specials spells out the heart of the restaurant. BY PATRICK MATHERLY

16 Black Restaurant Week, whichs runs in the Triangle through May 7, looks to draw support for all different kinds of Black-owned food businesses, all year round. BY LENA GELLER

17 At the Jewish Food Festival, family recipes are celebrated and passed along, one knish at a time. BY LENA GELLER

18 Stacey L. Kirby's behind-the-scenes exploration of the North Carolina Museum of Art scrutinizes the underpinnings of museums. BY BYRON

WOODS

19 A review of Mipso member Joseph Terrell's solo debut, Good for Nothing Howl. BY HARRIS WHELESS

THE REGULARS

WE MADE THIS

PUBLISHER

ADVERTISING NEWS

John Hurld

EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief

Jane Porter

Managing Editor

Geoff West

Arts & Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Jasmine Gallup

Lena Geller

Thomasi McDonald

Copy Editor

Iza Wojciechowska

Interns

Sarah Innes, Nathan Hopkins

Contributors Spencer Griffith, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Byron Woods

CREATIVE

Creative Director

Nicole Pajor Moore

Graphic Designer

Izzel Flores

Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

ADVERTISING Publisher

John Hurld

Sales Digital Director & Classifieds

Mathias Marchington

CIRCULATION

Berry Media Group

MEMBERSHIP/ SUBSCRIPTIONS

INDY Week | indyweek.com P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 919-695-4848

EMAIL ADDRESSES first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com

advertising@indyweek.com Raleigh 919-832-8774 Durham 919-286-1972 Classifieds 919-286-6642 Contents

2023 ZM INDY,

A Look Back: 40 Years of the INDY

And a look at what’s in store for the next four decades and beyond

BY JANE PORTER jporter@indyweek.com

Iremember the first story that I, then a curious, wannabe journalist in my early twenties, read in the INDY that really stuck with me.

Written by Vernal Coleman, the piece profiled Clarence Bender, a down-on-his-luck 2012 North Carolina state senate candidate. So down that, while trying to unseat Republican stalwart E. S. “Buck” Newton in Nash County, Bender was arrested on his way to the polls for allegedly selling oxycodone to an undercover DEA agent. His campaign was flailing. He had no support from the Democratic Party and couldn’t raise any money. He went to jail for weeks in the middle of early voting. And yet, through all of that, Bender still thought he would beat Buck Newton “in a landslide.” It was a story unlike what you would read elsewhere in the local media. In a manner both forthright and empathetic, it painted the picture of a complicated person, a commissioner in small-town Castalia with a spotty employment history, on good terms with his ex-wife and six children but “a con man” in the eyes of some neighbors, with an irrepressible sense of optimism despite it all. A lot of North Carolina’s political and electoral history is packed into that story’s lines, and it’s one that likely wouldn’t exist in the public record at all had the INDY not been paying attention.

I joined the INDY as an intern shortly after reading that piece, and more permanently as a staff writer in 2013. I remember my first cover story—a profile of Chad Johnston, the executive director of the People’s Channel, who was leaving the state after a decade of work in public access television. I covered coal ash, city council (Raleigh’s, that is), and police killings as a staff writer. In 2021, mid-pandemic, I came on board again as the editor in chief, bringing all that I learned from my INDY colleagues from over the years, including Lisa Sorg, Susan Harper, Grayson Haver Currin, Bob Geary, Barry Yeoman, Billy Ball, Paul Blest, and Jeff Billman.

Now, I’m writing on the INDY’s 40th anniversary to both look back on all that the paper has achieved and to look forward to what’s to come.

In his feature “The Paper Route,” longtime INDY writer Brian Howe reflects on a storied founding and decades of commanding journalism. He pays tribute to an institution firmly embedded in its communities, unbeholden to the powers that be, and dedicated to telling the stories of people like Clarence Bender, extraordinary in their regularness, or often just plain extraordinary. Howe speaks with Richard Meeker, the INDY’s owner since 2012, about the future of alternative and weekly news outlets. And we have a timeline that captures some of the INDY’s most important reporting over the years. To top it all off, we have a nice look back from staff writer Thomasi McDonald, whose fate with the “hometown paper” became intertwined along his circuitous career through North Carolina newsrooms.

We’re also happy to announce what’s next, beginning with a new partner in the upstart digital media outlet The Assembly that we believe will help guide us through a precarious financial situation to emerge a stronger, better-resourced, and better-rested newsroom.

There will be some changes—no more statewide news coverage, for instance, and we’ll soon operate on a biweekly print schedule that will free us up to go deeper on the hyperlocal news, arts, and culture reporting that our readers have come to know and depend on.

We’ll expand our food, arts, music, investigative, and accountability reporting. We’ll announce several new excit-

My first INDY cover story, Feburary 27, 2013

ing partnerships. And all of our journalism from our talented, hardworking team of writers, editors, and creatives—McDonald, Lena Geller, Jasmine Gallup, Sarah Edwards, Geoff West, Iza Wojciechowska, Nicole Pajor Moore, Izzel Flores, and Brett Villena, not to mention our many freelancers, and countless other contributors—will remain free online and in print. Thanks also to our publisher John Hurld and our sales director Mathias Marchington for paying the bills and keeping the lights on and to owner Meeker for always making payroll, guiding us with a steady hand, and securing a promising future. We brought the paper through a global pandemic, but we all still feel like we have a lot more work to do.

I’m not sure what ever happened to Clarence Bender—he didn’t win his state senate campaign after all, and his opponent went on to champion the odious House Bill 2—but Coleman, the former INDY reporter who told Bender’s story, went on to win a Pulitzer Prize as part of an investigative team at The Boston Globe in 2021. Such is the caliber of the talent that has emerged from this scrappy community newspaper.

It feels like a new day for the INDY . Thank you for your readership over these last 40 years (not to mention your financial support for Press Club).

Here’s to 40 years more. W

INDY 40: A Timeline

1988

1980

1983

First issue of The North Carolina Independent is published April 16

"Armageddon: 'It Could Have Happened to Anyone'" by Dee Reid on toxic waste in NC is the paper's first cover story

The paper publishes its first political endorsements issue

1992

Hardison Heist! INDY's endorsement of Democrat Harold Hardison's primary opponent leads to mass theft of papers by the campaign

"Silent Warriors," highlighting vital AIDS research throughout the Triangle, publishes

1990

1979

Steve Schewel and Dave Birkhead (with 15 others)—the Raleigh 17—are arrested in a sit-in at the corporate headquarters of Carolina Power & Light Company to protest construction of Shearon Harris nuclear plant following the meltdown at Three Mile Island

1990

Yeoman's “Highway Robbery” investigative series on campaign contributions and influence on the $1.6 billion transportation budget publishes

2000

Yeoman's "Walking Home" series on immigration publishes

1995

The paper covers Ladyslipper Music as it celebrates 20 years

1986

Inaugural Pride marches take place in Durham. INDY Week supports Pride celebrations to this day and remains dedicated to covering the Triangle's LGBTQ+ communities.

“The Landlord Hall of Shame” series by Barry Yeoman publishes, bringing unethical and unsafe property management practices to light

2000

2001

The paper profiles Nnenna Freelon in a story about local artists navigating a changing industry

2002

The Independent buys Raleigh's Spectator

2003

The Independent gives public voice to the anti-war movement during the Iraq invasion

2005

"Growth Rules" by Jennifer Strom, on regulation of stormwater runoff and other environmental concerns, publishes

2006

First reader-poll "Best of" issue

2007

"Stolen Youth" by Mosi Secret, on Erick Daniels's wrongful conviction, publishes

2010 Hopscotch Music Festival is founded by Independent staffers; the first festival takes place September 9–11, 2010, and features 130 bands in 10 venues

2014

"DENR Covers Its Ash" by Billy Ball; "Rivers of Ash" by Bob Geary; "Canary in the Coal Ash" by Jane Porter on coal ash waste dumping all publish

2015

INDY Week sues the McCrory administration over withheld travel records

2010

2011

"A Brief History of Pimento Cheese" by Emily Wallace publishes

2012

The Independent is sold to City of Roses, LLC, and is renamed INDY Week

2016

The INDY covers House Bill 2

2018

"Credible Fear," a story by Hellerstein on asylum for domestic abuse survivors, publishes

2023

"Durham's 'SCAD': Good or Bad?" by Lena Geller, on local developers' initiatives to change Durham's UDO, publishes

The Assembly takes over management of INDY Week

2020

2017

2021

"Hogwashed," a series by Ken Fine and Erica Hellerstein on NC hog farm waste, publishes "Man Without a Country," coverage by Hellerstein on Pastor Jose Chicas hiding from ICE in a Durham church, publishes

"New Church on the Block" by Sarah Edwards, on the antiLGBTQ+ Pioneers Church opening in downtown Durham, publishes

The Paper Route

Forty years and more than 2,000 issues after it began, the INDY is still producing powerful news and culture journalism grounded in progressive politics.

BY BRIAN HOWE backtalk@indyweek.com

Ilived in Chapel Hill 40 years ago, when the first issue of the INDY was published, but I didn’t read it. My tastes in periodicals ran more to Highlights. I was three.

When I started reading the INDY, I was 19. As a Hillsborough high schooler in the ’90s, I had seen it lying around and looking weird, but it wasn’t the sort of thing that interested me then. Once I plunged into the local music scene near the turn of the millennium, it did.

When I started writing for the INDY, I was 24. It had vanquished its rival, the Spectator, where I had been freelancing for a couple of years. So to the INDY my lightly founded, heavily wielded opinions went.

When I joined the staff at the INDY, I was 33. I was associate arts editor, then arts editor, then managing arts and music editor, then other stuff as the constriction of the media economy increased. It got hard. But I learned so much.

When I stopped working at the INDY to just read and write for it again, I was 40, the same age it is now. In those four decades, the paper has changed a lot, as all of us who’ve grown up with it have.

Whereas INDY Week focuses on the Triangle, covers arts as well as news, and publishes weekly in print and daily online, its original iteration, The North Carolina Independent, later and more lastingly known as The Independent Weekly, covered the whole state, sold subscriptions, and published biweekly. It had no arts coverage, and the only web involved was web offset printing, still used to press the newspapers that exist today.

But after all these changes, one constant (besides its age-old nickname) still makes the INDY the INDY: the friction between passionate progressive politics and rigorous conventional journalism, which generates the energy it takes to power a just democracy. This animating tension is the paper’s proudest tradition, the foundation of both its imperfect yet important place in local life and its national

renown for unflinching, sometimes outrageous, yet sternly principled reporting.

And it was set in motion at the very beginning, when the ideological spark of publisher Steve Schewel met the journalistic fuel of editor Katherine Fulton.

“I learned politics at my parents’ dinner table,” Schewel recalls one recent morning. Perhaps he looks a little more relaxed now that he’s no longer the mayor of Durham; perhaps not—a steadily warm, kind bearing has always been part of his art, whether as a politician or as a publisher.

In 1951, Schewel was born into a liberal, Jewish family in segregated Lynchburg, Virginia. He attended his first civil rights protest at age 13. When he went to Duke in 1969, there were also the antiwar, antinuclear, feminist, and environmental movements to strive with. As student government leader, he gave a charter to Duke’s first gay men’s group, defying university president and former state governor Terry Sanford. “I got an incredible education at Duke in every way,” Schewel says.

After he spent most of his twenties studying English and education at Columbia and Duke, doing some teaching and public-interest work, his first real foray into local politics came in 1976, when he cofounded the Durham People’s Alliance. The group campaigned against the election of a Durham City Council that wanted to strike the East-West Expressway through the historic Black neighborhood of Crest Street. The conservatives won office, though Crest Street would eventually win half the battle: the freeway was built, but without mass displacement.

But Schewel didn’t know this outcome at the time. He bought an Olivetti typewriter and wrote a memo called “Newspaper Thoughts,” venting about the conservative, stenographic local media’s role in denying Durham a diverse council, sketching the outline of a statewide progressive paper. The memo was shared, commented on, and put aside—until 1979, when Schewel was jailed in Wake County for eight days.

He was part of the self-described “Raleigh 17” who had been arrested during a sit-in against the construction of the Shearon Harris nuclear plant. “We have this movement,” Schewel remembers thinking. “We don’t like the way it’s being covered. How do we tell the truth about the politics we see in our state?”

He proposed starting a newspaper to fellow protester Dave Birkhead, who was already setting type for small leftist organizations in the Regulator Bookshop. In 1982, in the heat of June, they plunked a desk into a cinder-block room on Durham’s Hillsborough Road, where exhaust and weed smoke seeped in from the auto shop next door. The first North Carolina Independent came out on April 16, 1983, with a cover story about toxic waste.

Of course, much had developed in the 10 months before the official debut. There were fact-finding excursions to the Texas Observer and Flint Voice newsrooms; Schewel spent a week at the latter at the sharp elbow of filmmaker-to-be Michael Moore. Investors signed on, and editorial advisers, including Maya Angelou, were lined up.

They hired a staff: associate publisher Jim Overton, associate editor Dee Reid, reporter Alisa Johnson, sportswriter Barry Jacobs, columnist Garrett Epps, photographer Alma

An Independent staff photo from a 1989 issue.

Blount, intern Ann Morris, ad rep Sioux Watson, and ad director Greg Swanson, who, pivotally, convinced them to distribute for free in addition to offering subscriptions. And they lured an editor away from another paper, choosing her not despite but for the fact that, in some ways, she was so different from them.

Katherine Fulton grew up in the mountains of Virginia. After graduating from Harvard, she started working at The Greensboro Record covering local politics. She was 27 when she left for the burgeoning Independent, which did take some coaxing. After all, she had a job on the city desk of a good paper. Her boss had covered Watergate at The New York Times. And here were these scrappy activists offering less certainty and less money—but more freedom.

“An important part of my story is that I had fallen in love with a woman,” Fulton says via video chat from her booklined office in Northern California. “My sense of the limits of mainstream journalism and my personal evolution made the Independent a wonderful home for me.”

The paper was set against the grain of the South of Jesse Helms and the Moral Majority in many ways, especially in its outspoken embrace of gay rights, which it touted on covers and in editorials. It even hosted drag shows. But to Fulton, being not just a rare female editor but also a lesbian meant it was important to establish journalistic credibility above all.

“We were attacked as communist and queer,” she says. “If all we did was publish polemical opinion, we were going to be totally written off. I thought first-class investigative journalism could also influence the rest of the press, and without it, I didn’t think we had a prayer.”

None of this means that Schewel lacked a passion for the precision of journalism. But “Katherine was our real journalistic anchor,” he says. “She really believed that a fact was worth a million opinions. We certainly had a point of view, but we believed in the old journalistic virtues of credibility and fairness.”

Barry Yeoman, an iconic staff reporter, sensed this fine, taut line during his job interview.

“Katherine asked me if I thought we should be journalists or activists first,” he says. “That was easy for me. I have a journalism degree from NYU. I said journalists.” But he remembers answering a bit more subtly when Schewel asked him the same thing.

“If Steve wanted his clone, he could have chosen his clone,” Yeoman says. “He was completely transparent about the political player he was. But he was really good at staying out of the newsroom.”

Other staffers affirm that Schewel led by example and inspiration: you always knew what his causes were, but the only pressure to take them up was that you would hate to let him down.

“There was always a creative tension that I thought worked really well,” Fulton says. “Me being more moderate and a champion of the reporting side, while Steve and Dave wanted to pull us into more provocative stances. I still consider it one of the best work partnerships I’ve ever had.”

The Independent was still in flux in Yeoman’s earliest years. Around the time he arrived, in 1986, it was already starting to pull back from subscriptions and statewide coverage. Shortly after he came, it moved into a new office on Hillsborough Road, a crumbling farmhouse that was either a bohemian oasis or a tetanus-ridden death trap, depending on whom you ask. It swapped Greensboro coverage for Raleigh, cementing its Triangle focus. In 1989, it changed its publishing schedule and its name to The Independent Weekly. Soon, it added an events calendar and someone to run it, Bob Moser, who would become the first arts editor in 1992 before his run as editor in chief. Thus the paper assumed the shape we know today.

Yeoman started his career at an alt-weekly in Lafayette,

Review (for its “spine of steel”) and the Utne Reader, and it had started to win major honors like the Investigative Reporters and Editors Award.

Remembering the paper’s founding crusades, Schewel says, “We covered the hell out of Big Tobacco. Dee Reid and Ann Morris did some fabulous work on that. And we really wanted to give the kind of coverage to Jesse Helms that would help defeat him, which of course we never did. We did better against tobacco.”

As the ’90s began, the Independent’s investigative capacity and reputation grew. A unique grant arrangement with the Institute for Southern Studies allowed the hiring of reporter Bob Burtman so that Yeoman could spend eight months investigating the influence of political contributions on the NC Department of Transportation. His fivepart series “Highway Robbery” won two major prizes, the Green Eyeshade and the John Bartlow Martin Award, and caused much discussion.

“Each time a part dropped, other newspapers in the state wrote about it,” Yeoman says, “and when one of them asked the secretary of transportation about it, he said it was the work of the ‘left-wing attack media from hell,’” a slogan the paper promptly printed on shirts and mugs.

Though some of his definitive work was about uplifting the vulnerable, Yeoman also elicited many other memorable responses from the powerful. Somehow, he always got away with it, sources intact.

There was the time he went to state legislators who supported an antisodomy bill with this line of questioning: Why do you support this legislation? Do you think there’s a compelling public right to know if somebody has had oral sex? Have you had oral sex?

Louisiana. The publisher came back from an AAN meeting—the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, which was crucial to the Independent’s formation and has given its work many awards—talking about these “starry-eyed” newspaper founders from Durham that she’d met.

“She said she loved their enthusiasm, but they would never survive,” Yeoman remembers. “They were way too idealistic. So of course, my ears pricked up.”

When he was laid off, he fled to the mountains of North Carolina and started freelancing, including for the Independent, where he honed the kind of long-form, social-justice-focused reporting, interviewing, and portraiture that he now teaches at Wake Forest and Duke.

“How do you interview people whose stories are undertold?” he explains. “And then, how do you interview those who have to account for their power?”

As the first wave of staff writers filtered out, Yeoman stepped in. Alongside reporters like Melinda Ruley, Adam Seessel, and Todd Oppenheimer, he would help to write the paper to national fame. By the end of the ’80s, the Independent had been praised in the Columbia Journalism

“I think that I played to a cognitive disconnect that people had between the byline and the person,” he says. “I was young, in a wrinkled shirt—a short, stuttering dude who didn’t have the swagger of a lot of journalists. I came across as an underdog, a stray mutt, and it worked in my favor.”

Then there was the time that legislators were debating the state’s official vegetable during a period when Republican governor Jim Martin seemed so ineffective that even his own party was grumbling. Yeoman made the connection, writing a story that compelled Martin to publicly deny that he was “the real state vegetable.” Behind the irresistible headline was “a great reported story with a lot of named sources, including Republicans,” Fulton says. “As a reporter, as a gay man, as a person, Barry was the heart and soul of the paper.”

The Independent was foundationally more diverse in gender and sexuality than in race, beginning with only one Black reporter, Alisa Johnson. It’s an ongoing shortcoming that was first seriously addressed in the ’90s, when Yeoman, after attending a weeklong Poynter Institute seminar on covering race relations, led an internal effort that earned

“How do you interview people whose stories are undertold? And then, how do you interview those who have to account for their power?”

the institute’s Model of Excellence Award in 1997.

“I can date my history as a journalist pre- and post-Poynter,” he says. “I recognized that all the goodwill I brought as a white liberal didn’t amount to much if I had not developed cultural competency, and I worked in an all-white newsroom, which I did. We did some really serious work, under Bob Moser, to change.”

The paper held summits with local Black and Latino leaders. It hired a number of Black columnists, reporters, and editors, and Yeoman did another eight-month embed, this time at a Hispanic church in Siler City, to write about immigration in his textured, intimate way. It was his parting gift before he left the staff on December 31, 1999, taking something of the paper’s 20th-century self with him.

As the paper’s weekly reporting developed, so did its annual traditions. Many have retired: the Citizen Awards, the Indies Arts Awards, the poetry contest. But some are still very much alive, including local election endorsements and Best of the Triangle.

Sioux Watson—who rose to ad director, then publisher, over her three-decade tenure—coordinated the massive awards parties the paper once had. Picture a thousand people in fancy dress at the Museum of Life and Science, with Schewel emceeing in silver sequins. Each winner would receive a small North Carolina pine tree. The inaugural Citizen Awards went to Lightning Brown, the state’s first openly gay political candidate, and Joe Herzenberg, the first openly gay mayor of Chapel Hill.

“Joe and Lightning took their trees and planted them on the grounds of the North Carolina legislature,” Schewel says. “I won’t tell you whether or not they’re still there, because if they are, I don’t want anybody to take them away.”

The Independent published endorsements from the beginning. They really caused a stir in 1988. The paper endorsed Harold Hardison’s opponent in the Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, and someone drove around picking up the papers and throwing them away. A friend in Raleigh saw the car in action; its license plate said “ATHOL.” (Sound it out.) Jim Overton went to Hardison’s office and found the ATHOL parked there. Confronted, the campaign denied any knowledge but apologized for some errant volunteer. Sensing an opportunity, Schewel alerted the TV media of “the Hardison Heist” and reprinted the issue with a flag on the corner: Steal this paper before somebody else does.

“That was a publicity booster,” Schewel says. “Even national NPR reported on it.”

The influence of INDY endorsements lives on, though it was more visible before smartphones, when every other person in the voting line held a telltale clip-out guide—at certain polling locations, anyway.

(L to R) INDY covers from 1997, 2010, and 2014.

Best of the Triangle came about, in part, to undermine the Spectator, which had long been running a feature by that name. The Independent answered with “The Real Best of the Triangle,” then published its competitor’s ceaseand-desist letter. For years, the Independent’s version, like the Spectator’s, was entirely an editorial product with no reader picks. It wasn’t until 2006 that it became a reader-driven poll run by the marketing department and started to make its real impact, the categories and zones growing more granular, the stickers layering the windows of local businesses year by year.

This was the innovation of Gloria Mock, a longtime ad director who first arrived in 1994, when the Independent bought the local publication she worked for, The Comic Revue. (Because of a personal connection on staff, the Independent carried Life in Hell, Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons comic strip, in its early days, though the paper’s real comics legacy was laid by the local cartoonist V.C. Rogers.) Mock stayed until 2015, when she went to work for

category: If X, Y, or Z started buying full-page ads, would you want our writers to be beholden to that?”

Lisa Sorg, the paper’s editor from 2007 to 2015, certainly wasn’t one to kowtow to advertisers or anyone else. “I enjoyed the license that we had, because there was an expectation that if you’re a weekly, you’re going to have a certain kind of fuck-you attitude,” she says. (Her greatest editorial headline: “When nipples are outlawed, only outlaws will have nipples,” describing a piece of legislation in the long tradition of policing women’s bodies.)

the paper’s music festival, Hopscotch. She recalls, “When I said to [editor] Richard Hart, ‘We need more categories, you know, best french fries,’ he was like, ‘You want to do a reader’s poll? Fine.’ And I never looked back.”

It’s not always easy selling ads in a publication that doesn’t pander to wealth and power. While the INDY’s marketing staff is a vital part of its culture and a necessity for its existence, the firewall between edit and ads is guarded from both sides. Watson remembers once luring back an offended restaurateur only to open the paper to a scathing review of her new venture. And she put on a big local food fair at the old South Square Mall—the same week the editors decided to publish a cover story about local food pollution called “Poisoned Harvest.”

“I would talk to people who really wanted us to write about what they were doing,” Mock remembers, “and I would say, ‘The advertising is just not tied in to what our writers write about.’ I would use the example of a wealthy business in their

Sorg arrived at the Independent from a long alt-weekly background in Texas, shortly before the paper left the old farmhouse and moved to the Venable Center on Pettigrew. She still has the “N” from the sign as a sculpture in her yard in Durham, where she now writes for NC Newsline Her tenure was defined by reporting on low-income housing issues, by an award-winning series on hog farms, and by her love of rich, narrative long-form, which, in 2014, brought us John Tucker’s magisterial 10,000-word profile of a high school wrestler who had been paralyzed in the ring. But shrinking budgets and a more crowded attention economy were starting to bite in.

When the first issue of the Independent came out, they didn’t have newspaper stands, so they just put them under the Spectator racks. The papers were mirror images, the Spectator dominant in Raleigh and the arts, the Independent in Durham and Chapel Hill politics. But the Spectator was older, with a wider base of advertisers and more readers. The Independent knew that a truly successful paper would have to consolidate those beats. It wanted to be the one, with the high-minded purpose of spreading its more progressive message and the practical one of gobbling up all of that ad revenue.

The first big coup was stealing star columnist Hal

“I would talk to people who really wanted us to write about what they were doing, and I would say, ‘The advertising is just not tied in to what our writers write about.’”

Crowther, who debuted in the Independent’s first weekly issue. It was a foreshadowing of 2002, when the paper bought and dismantled its weakened rival, scooping up the local arts writers it needed to capitalize on that now-open lane. It was finally the only game in town, and for a few years, it ventured to a place seldom glimpsed by alt-weeklies: the positive side of the ledger. The staff grew; people got raises. Print circulation topped out at 50,000, and the papers could be 80 pages long. Sorg remembers a 56-pager seeming like the end of the world.

As the 2000s waned, though, the recession exacerbated a specific problem: the internet was eating up classified ads, a major revenue source, and display ads were falling. Schewel remembers losing a quarter of their ad revenue in one year. As the Times has reported, more than 1,800 local print outlets shuttered between 2004 and 2019, opening news deserts across the country.

“It’s really sad,” Sorg says. “We hear a lot about news deserts and the centralization of media these days; [staff writer] Fiona Morgan was brilliant on that and really understood it long before anybody else did. But I long for the days of great alt-weekly long-form pieces.”

Another early seer of things to come was Katherine Fulton, who, after the Independent, went to California in the mid-’90s to study and advise on the emerging internet’s potential effects on public-interest journalism.

“It became clear to me by 1999 that the window for journalism to aggressively adapt had already closed,” she says. “I would say the Independent lasted because it was scrappy; it had to keep learning and changing over time. And it had this culture that was the result of an incredibly inspiring purpose and founder. If Steve had sold it to the wrong people, it would have put the Independent out of business, because these companies are just optimized for profit, and they’ve hollowed out the purpose of journalism: creating

a healthy, inclusive, pluralistic democracy, which we now understand is far more precious than we ever realized.”

In 2012, Schewel, turning to his political career, sold the paper to Richard Meeker and Mark Zusman, who own Willamette Week in Portland and the Santa Fe Reporter in New Mexico. Meeker has been the INDY’s sole owner for the past few years, though that is about to change (see page 10).

“Having to lay people off and cut wages was really hard, and I was already on the Durham City Council by then,” Schewel says of deciding to sell. “I have to hand it to Richard and [publisher] Susan [Harper] and everybody else who kept it going. It’s not as big and has fewer stories, but that doesn’t mean it’s not as good a paper, and it’s harder now than it ever was.”

Before Schewel moved on, he had one more legacy to plant. Music and arts coverage had come gradually to the Independent, through the work of writers like David Fellerath (the affable arts editor I first worked under), Olufunke Moses, Karen Mann, Maria Brubeck, Linda Belans, Laura Hatmaker, and the INDY’s immortal theater critic, Byron Woods. By 2010, in some circles, the paper was better known for arts than for news coverage, and it was ready to claim that authority.

“I had already been wanting to do a music festival because a lot of my friends from the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies had these wonderful festivals,” Schewel says. (Recall that South by Southwest started at The Austin Chronicle.) So when sales staffer Greg Lowenhagen and music editor Grayson Haver Currin approached him with a big idea, he was ready for it.

The Hopscotch Music Festival also exemplified the mounting ambition of Haver Currin, who had been handed the local indie-rock torch by Kirk Ross, an INDY reporter

and editor, but also developed distinctly national aims, in concert with the Internet Age. Over his time at the INDY, from 2005 to 2016, he was calendar, music, and managing editor; these days he seems to spend most of his time hiking and writing for The New York Times

Haver Currin, who started writing for the INDY fresh off of NC State’s Technician, recalls that in his first years, the paper was still struggling with its foothold in Raleigh. So when his basketball buddy Lowenhagen proposed putting on a music festival, it seemed like a natural fit.

“It would give us a stronger inroad into Raleigh,” Haver Currin says, “and we saw it as an investment in the culture of the Triangle. It was a kind of proof of concept, and I think the line from it to, say, the IBMA Awards is pretty clear. That’s a risk Steve took that people in the Triangle could do big events, and he was right.”

Lowenhagen managed the logistics while Currin curated lists of bands and tried to navigate the obvious conflicts. “I think Lisa [Sorg] had some rightful hesitation about the music editor booking a music festival,” he says. No one could deny that Hopscotch was newsworthy, but then, no one can say how the paper’s coverage might have been different in other circumstances. Regardless, the conflict didn’t last too long: when Schewel sold the paper, he and Lowenhagen kept Hopscotch, then sold it to an Etix founder and other partners in 2015.

“We never made any money, but we had a good time,” Schewel says. “It was awesome on its own, and we were the music newspaper, you know that. It helped to increase that brand.”

But it wasn’t just the music newspaper. It was a beloved local institution that had changed with a changing world and would face even more upheaval to overcome. But where others fell, it still stands, still adapting and growing, in the promising light of a new local partnership, a large online readership, and, in its Press Club, the most direct community investment it’s had since the early days.

And it all began with Dave Birkhead typing stories on a rickety old typesetter, cutting up the pages and photographing them with a big camera.

Early in the morning, before sunrise, Schewel would take a grease pencil, fill in all the light spots on the cheap negatives, and hang them up to dry. He, Birkhead, and Overton would drive to Benson and bring back 10,000 papers in a van, adding subscription labels on the way. This was before the long service of distributor Brenna Berry, so each person had an extra part to play in getting the message to the people.

“Everybody on the staff had a route,” Schewel says. “I had a route. Reporters had a route. Ad salespeople had a route. We went and put the paper out. And that’s the way it was.” W

New Era, Same INDY

A Q&A with Richard Meeker, INDY Week’s Oregon-based owner, on the future of the paper and alternative media.

BY BRIAN HOWE backtalk@indyweek.com

A newspaper veteran since middle school, Richard Meeker was a founding reporter at Willamette Week in 1974, becoming the Pulitzer-winning Portland alt-weekly’s editor in 1977 and, in 1983, publisher as co-owner with Mark Zusman. The two own another weekly, The Santa Fe Reporter. They bought The Independent Weekly from Steve Schewel in 2012, rebranding as INDY Week, expanding into glossy magazines such as Finder, and keeping the paper alive through trying times.

A few years ago, Meeker became the sole owner of the INDY, but now a new business partner is coming in: The Assembly, a subscriber-based website for long-form reporting on North Carolina, is taking over management of the INDY’s operations. We spoke with Meeker about his history with the paper, the details of the sale, and how the fate of alt-weeklies, agile entities with ample audiences, might not be as gloomy as you hear.

INDY: Take me back to why you wanted to buy the INDY in the first place.

RICHARD MEEKER: I have long-standing connections to North Carolina. When I was 21 years old, I was a teacher on Ocracoke Island. After that, every year I’d go back, in part to check in on my students, and to get to Ocracoke, you need to go through Raleigh, where I would visit my brother [former Raleigh mayor Charles Meeker]. I also knew Steve Schewel and talked to him at length about suggestions for what he might do with the INDY. In 2012, after about five years of that, he turned the tables and offered to sell.

Covers from the archives

How were you thinking about the health and prospects of the alt-weekly model when you took on another paper?

Well, unlike daily newspapers, which have only become an economic challenge more recently, the alternative weekly model for most of the last 50 years, since all this began, has almost always been a challenging one. I’m an absolute heathen, but [journalism] is my religion. My view is that especially at the INDY, it’s just an incredible privilege to work on something where the goal is so much larger than yourself. If it had been some other community, the answer probably would have been no, because I wouldn’t have had the personal ties I had to Raleigh and the Triangle.

So it was less a vision of being able to fix the alt-weekly model and more a sense of civic duty?

Anybody in our business who cares about journalism does not see it as an opportunity to make a lot of money. But in the last 10 and a half years, we’ve had the chance to grow the INDY’s audience by a tremendous amount on the website and with our newsletters. And we have also developed a Press Club, which is a new and very strong form of support. You’re aware of the challenges we’ve faced, but the INDY is a stable operation, and it has more audience than it’s ever had while continuing to produce essential journalism.

At this point, we often talk about the Great Newspaper Collapse in a general way, like the Great Depression. Do you have any specific insights on how it played

out at the INDY and your other papers?

I think you need to separate daily newspapers from weekly newspapers. Daily newspapers operated as incredible cash-cow operations and slowly but surely got bought up by conglomerates. And they really did miss the digital age. The business model was that the cover or subscription price basically paid for the delivery; the display advertising paid for the production, content, and manufacture; and classified advertising was the profit. Daily newspapers just never anticipated Craigslist. That decimated their classified businesses, and they have been in a spiral of disinvestment ever since, because they’re committed to making a fixed amount of profit every year.

Weeklies are very different. Obviously, Craigslist did the same thing to our classifieds. But weeklies are a little more nimble. We also have done better on the internet than dailies have, I think. Having a free website for the INDY is very important. There is plenty of room going forward for weeklies, and it comes in part from reader support, which is essential to the INDY’s continuation and is a good thing.

What stands out as your proudest moments so far?

First, the INDY’s coverage of city council meetings and the affairs of the city in Durham and Raleigh—coupled with deeply researched political endorsements— has been really important. Number two, some of my favorite INDY stories over the past decade were the ones about the environmental horrors of eastern North Carolina’s hog farms. And number three,

setting the tone for dealing with House Bill 2—the INDY really played a part in that, and I particularly remember the great article Barry Yeoman wrote on the subject.

What can you tell me about the new arrangement with The Assembly?

Kyle Villemain and his team will be overseeing the INDY so that there will be a local operator. Jane [Porter] will remain the editor. John [Hurld] will remain the publisher. The goal is that over time, The Assembly will acquire INDY

I have been looking for years—since well before the pandemic—to find a good, sound, local operator for the INDY. I think the idea that a 74-year-old white guy in Portland owns the INDY is nuts. During my many decades in this business, it has become increasingly apparent that local, independent journalism is essential. And if you want to have effective local, independent journalism, there need to be local, independent operators—operators who are deeply committed to producing journalism that helps their readers navigate this increasingly complex world while, at the same time, holding powerful institutions and figures to account. That may seem obvious, but it’s not all that easy to achieve.

Over the two years Kyle has run The Assembly, he has grown it to become an exceedingly valuable source of long-form journalism. It’s based on a different model, all digital and behind a paywall. I expect The Assembly and the INDY to complement each other in ways that will be good for the Triangle and for North Carolina. W

Nominate your favorite Durham County bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum—whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Durham County treasures. Have no fear: Orange/Chatham Counties will have their own nominations soon.

The Hometown Paper

The INDY’s seasoned staff writer reflects on his circuitous route through North Carolina newsrooms to his current role covering the Bull City today.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

One September morning in 1991, I was awakened by the sound of O’Neal Patrick’s voice on WUNC Radio.

“Them people died because a stolen chicken counted for more than a human life,” Patrick was saying.

My first thought was “What the hell is O’Neal Patrick doing on NPR?”

Last I heard from Patrick was while I was in high school, nearly 13 years before, when he sprinted across the football field during a game at Richmond Senior High School with a gaggle of police officers running after him.

I learned soon enough that Patrick had made what was at the time the definitive statement about a massive fire at the Imperial Food Products processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina, that killed 25 workers trapped inside and left more than 50 injured.

The second-worst workplace accident in the state’s history had taken place less than six miles away from my hometown in Rockingham. It was impossible to not know many of the victims, many of whom were single mothers who lived at a nearby public housing complex. When we were children, we eagerly looked forward to elementary school field trips to the Mello Buttercup ice cream factory that was formerly housed there.

I got out of bed that morning and started writing a poem, “The Imperial’s ‘Ism.’” Then I wrote a brief essay, “For Hamlet.”

I read the poem at local events accompanied by alto saxophonist Larry Place blowing “Naima,” the ballad by jazz icon John Coltrane, whose birthplace was a short distance from Imperial Food.

I dropped the essay off with an editor at the backdoor of The Independent, the parent of the INDY, which was then located in a ramshackle, two-story home on Hillsborough Road, near an ABC Store and Ninth Street.

We didn’t know it then, but it was a golden age of print journalism throughout the Triangle, though the storm clouds were starting to gather. The Durham Morning Herald and the The Durham Sun mereged that year. Two years before in Raleigh, the state’s paper of record, The News & Observer, ceased publication of its afternoon edition The Raleigh Times.

Meanwhile, The Independent’s big competitor was the now-defunct Spectator Magazine, which featured the film

critic Godfrey Cheshire and the great, must-read columnist Hal Crowther.

I was just out of college nearly a decade before when the ambitious NC Independent joined the Triangle’s print news ecosystem. I had interned at the now closed, once mighty Carolina Times, which was founded in 1919 and grown by the legendary, fiery civil rights pioneer Louis Austin.

By the time I walked through the doors of The Carolina Times in 1983, Mr. Austin had died and his daughter, Vivian Edmonds, a no-nonsense woman, served as publisher. Milton Jordan was the paper’s editor and the paper’s top reporters were Don Alderman and Isaiah Singletary. Working at The Carolina Times was like attending a journalism boot camp.

The Carolina Times didn’t publish a single story of mine. I mean not even one. Still, Edmonds taught me enduring lessons about accuracy and spelling, while sharing her observations about race and the community’s less fortunate.

I well remember The NC Independent’s earliest editions. I smile while recalling the names of its pioneering staffers; editors Katherine Fulton and Todd Oppenheimer; and “the three Sues,” Sue Houston, Sue Sturgis, and Sioux Watson, not to mention a fourth, Susan Harper, who would eventually become the paper’s publisher. The paper’s top journalists early on were Dee Reid, Barry Yeoman, Melinda Ruley, and Jenny Warburg.

During those early days of progressive journalism in the Triangle, diversity operated under a very different definition. Photos of the weekly newspaper’s staff show that the only thing Black in the newsroom was the ink that flowed through the reporters’ pens.

Still, it was a heady time, and the thick weekly paper— chock-full of hard-hitting investigative stories, along with features and profiles about the area’s arts scene—was happening. The paper offered the most acerbic, biting, and irreverent brand of reporting and writing south of The Village Voice in New York. It was a weekly whose pages echoed the New Journalism of Hunter Thompson, Tom Wolfe, and George Plimpton. I think one of the Sues, well into the mid-1990s, told me the paper’s annual advertising revenues were north of $300,000.

Never mind a holiday cash bonus, financially strapped newsrooms nowadays barely offer a holiday gift card. During the Independent’s salad days, its annual holiday

parties were among the season’s must-attend events in the Bull City. Years later, folks are still talking about the time the paper’s publisher turned Durham mayor, Steve Schewel, showed up at one affair wearing a tinfoil suit. It was, in reality, silver lamé, but after a couple of drinks and in the spirit of the season, we called it a tinfoil suit. Imagine Elton John with a notepad instead of a piano.

The Independent’s editors’ decision to publish my essay in 1991 kicked off a decades-long relationship. In 1997, I was writing regularly for the paper, along with a cadre of full-time Black staffers, notably Derek Jennings and Mosi Secret. My first full-length feature “Hayti’s Ghosts” reported that the historic Black community south of downtown Durham that was destroyed by urban renewal had its mirror images in similar communities across the country.

In 1999, I worked for the now closed Daily Southerner in Tarboro. I was startled to learn that poor white folks who grew up just like then president Bill Clinton hated him passionately. Less than a year later, I started a nearly 20-year career as a staff writer with The News & Observer, which ended when I agreed to an early retirement offer in 2019.

Months later, former INDY editor Jeff Billman offered me a job with the INDY, reporting and writing about one of the most envied beats in all of North Carolina journalism: the town of Durham. The INDY proves the old adage: it’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. And even though its smaller print editions reflect the war of attrition that are gutting newsrooms across the country, it still manages to consistently punch above its weight.

The INDY is a place where a nonapologetic brand of advocacy journalism takes place, and, to paraphrase the near-immortal words of James Weldon Johnson, each week lifts up voices throughout the community and beyond to sing.

Returning to the INDY newsroom was a no-brainer. It’s the hometown paper.

Happy 40th anniversary, y’all. W

Off Menu

At Banh’s Cuisine in Durham, a corkboard list of Vietnamese specials spells out the heart of the

restaurant. BY PATRICK MATHERLY food@indyweek.com

On a Saturday morning at Banh’s Cuisine, the line shifts and morphs as the door swings open and shut. There is no music playing, just the muffled whispers of customers and scrape of steel spatulas against cast iron woks from the back of the restaurant.

Above the counter, the restaurant menu lists Chinese dishes such as kung pao chicken, sweet and sour chicken, and fried wontons. Continue reading, and you’ll also see Vietnamese dishes such as chicken curry, chicken and broccoli in sate sauce, and the imperial roll.

But the heart of the Banh’s menu, one that draws regulars back on Wednesdays and Saturdays, isn’t posted here. Manuever toward the back of the restaurant, past the cash register and the tables of customers leaning over steamy plates, and you’ll encounter a corkboard with traditional Vietnamese specials tacked to it.

These specials, which are available just twice a week, include dishes like pho chay, bun ga, chicken turnovers, and the popular vegetarian plate.

Banh’s Cuisine, commonly referred to as Banh’s, was opened in 1988, by Chi Banh and her family. At first, the Ninth Street restaurant primarily served Chinese dishes with a few Vietnamese options, such as chicken curry (cà ri gà) and the imperial roll (chả giò) that Chi and Chan, Chi’s brother, believed would work with the American palate.

“We are from Vietnam and our ancestors are from China,” Chi says. “So we are Chinese Vietnamese.”

The first big wave of Vietnamese refugees settling in the United States came in 1975, followed by two more waves in the late ’70s and late ’80s. But in those early years, Chan recalls, it was still difficult to source Vietnamese ingredients such as fish sauce. Because Vietnamese restaurants were rare in Durham and unfamiliar to most Americans, the Banh family chose to focus on the cuisine that would be familiar to their clientele—Chinese food.

“Every Vietnamese restaurant we knew that opened [would] close within a year,” Chan says. “That’s why when we opened, we only did [Vietnamese foods] on Saturdays.”

Around the time that the family opened Banh’s, Chan recounts, he would only see the same three businesses, everywhere he went: a pizzeria, a Chinese restaurant, and a video rental store.

The widespread popularity of Chinese food and lack of access to many Vietnamese ingredients made opening a hybrid Chinese and Vietnamese restaurant the clear path forward.

Chi chose to open the restaurant on Ninth Street, which put them in good company alongside businesses like the Regulator Bookshop, Ninth Street Bakery, and Wellspring. The Banh family found that these businesses catered to a crowd that was willing to try new things. Ninth Street

patrons naturally became the early adopters of Banh’s Chinese and their Vietnamese specials.

Early on, Chi and Chan picked up on the number of vegetarians that came into the restaurant.

“We used to only have a stir-fry, you know, just mixed vegetables, and people started asking for more,” Chan recalls.

Chan took the feedback to heart and started experimenting with tofu. The vegetarian plate was born and added to the specials board. Nowadays, the customers that seek out the dish comment on how soft the interior of the tofu is and how light and crispy the crust is.

“I grew up in Hong Kong …. I have quite a refined palate for tofu,” says Christina Chia, a regular at Banh’s for 25 years. “And I feel like that dish [the vegetarian plate] is something I’ve never had anywhere else. It’s so specific to them, and it’s so perfect.”

“Even people that are not vegetarian that we know come in and get the vegetarian plate,” Chan explains. “They just like the tofu.”

The vegetarian plate consists of triangular slabs of tofu lightly fried and topped with black bean sauce. Accompaniments include a mound of sticky rice sprinkled with sesame seeds and ground peanuts and smoky wok-seared broccoli or a vegetarian salad roll.

“Our friends will go to San Francisco and

ask for a vegetarian plate, and there’s no such thing,” Chan says. “When they go to the heart of San Francisco, to all the Vietnamese Chinese places, and want to eat the black bean tofu and there’s no such thing. So, we are proud to say that the vegetarian plate [is something] we came up with.”

The Vietnamese population in the United States has grown steadily over the years, from roughly 231,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2022. North Carolina’s growth has followed suit—census data shows that Asians are the fastest-growing ethnic population in the state, with the Vietnamese community making up a significant portion of that population—and so has the availability of Vietnamese food. Several Vietnamese restaurants have opened in the last 30 years that serve familiar, delicious food to the community, such as Pho & Poke House on Erwin Road and Taste Vietnamese Cuisine in Morrisville, and many local groceries, like the expansive Li Ming’s Global Market, now carry Vietnamese staples.

Amid these changes, Banh’s Vietnamese specials have stood the test of time. In response to the popularity of the specials, the restaurant eventually expanded the menu to Wednesdays. And regulars have factored these days into their schedules.

“If it’s Wednesday [or Saturday], you don’t even have to say what that means, it means you’re going to Banh’s,” says Joe Schwartz, a local chef whose restaurant of

The vegetarian plate and hu tieu specials at Banh’s Cuisine

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Jewish Southern fare, Max Jr’s, will open in the Brightleaf District this fall.

Though the vegetarian plate is the most popular special, regulars have good things to say about each and every dish. Many regulars opt for the noodle soups, such as the pho chay or the hu tieu, which are especially recommended in the winter.

“They only had the beef noodle soup two or three times a year,” Chia recalls. “I remember that, on a [rainy] day like today, how perfect that is.”

Situated by Old West Durham, Trinity Park, and Duke’s East Campus, Banh’s has become a comfort food mecca for students and locals alike. The restaurant is cozy, with two- or four-top options perfect for a small group or for dining alone with a book. Part of the restaurant’s comfort derives from its customer service: Chi greets customers and works the register, bringing out food, utensils, and condiments in a calculated order. It’s clear from the calmness of the crowd surrounding the counter during a lunch or dinner rush that customers put a great deal of trust in the Banh’s experience. Chi and Chan have built a place where newcomers can taste something unique that will keep them coming back, and regulars can enjoy the wholesome comfort food they’ve become familiar with.

“You see other chefs eating Banh’s on their off days,” says Schwartz, “It’s something that’s presented humbly and tells a story of who they are and who Durham is.” W

The “secret” specials menu at Banh’s Cuisine PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

BLACK RESTAURANT WEEK

Through Sunday, May 7 | blackrestaurantweeks.com

Expansive Appetites

Black Restaurant Week reminds patrons that all kinds of food businesses need support—all year round.

BY LENA GELLER food@indyweek.com

“Alot of times people pigeonhole Black cuisine into being just corn bread, collard greens, or stuff that is not healthy per se,” Queen Precious-Jewel Zabriskie says. “It is so much more than that.”

Zabriskie, who owns Indulge Catering, LLC, with her wife, Jacqueline “Jay” White, in Franklinton is one of 51 business owners participating in Black Restaurant Week Carolinas, an initiative that aims to celebrate and boost traffic for local Blackowned food and beverage purveyors and combat misperceptions about what constitutes Black cuisine.

In the weeklong event, participating businesses are promoted on the Black Restaurant Week website and social channels and receive marketing resources.

Falayn Ferrell helped spearhead the launch of the week in 2016 in Houston.

“When we first started saying ‘Black Restaurant Week,’ everyone assumed that we were just offering soul food everywhere,” Ferrell says. “It leads to that conversation of how diverse the Black culinary community really is.”

The initiative also aims to raise awareness around the many “mainstream” dishes that have roots in Black culture.

“Oxtails started in the heart of the South,” Ferrell says. “Now we have a joke— ‘bring back down the price of oxtails’— because they’ve become so popular. Shrimp and grits started in the Lowcountry area, and now they’re on every menu in every state,” she adds. “Chicken and waffles started in Harlem. Now they’re on every menu.”

Indulge Catering is hosting a pop-up at its commercial kitchen in Franklinton with to-go menu items including halal lamb burgers with tzatziki, barbecue jackfruit on pretzel buns, Italian chicken Parm burgers, and beef “BullCity Burgers” topped with pimento

cheese and turkey bacon. The pop-up menu, like the dishes Indulge Catering offers at routine event gigs, is a showcase of the cuisines Zabriskie and White ate while growing up in the Bronx and Durham, respectively. Some items also pay homage to Zabriskie’s Muslim and Gullah/Geechee backgrounds.

Locally, participating businesses include the Chicken Hut, Royal Cheesecake, Bon Fritay Food Truck, and Blu Tee Spoon.

Durham cold-pressed juice business Blend of Soul, which operates as an online store, is featuring an acai “soul bowl” as a Black Restaurant Week special.

Kiera Gardner, who owns Blend of Soul with her wife, Margo Newkirk, says Black cuisine is distinguished by flavor depths that translate from generations of lived experiences.

“We are able to take disparity, and take heartache, and take passion and love and just clump it up all in one pot, like some gumbo, and excel and really push past the barriers that we experience every day waking up in the morning,” Gardner says. “That’s what makes Black-owned businesses stand out. That’s what makes us unique and beautiful.”

Zabriskie agrees.

“I’m not classically trained,” Zabriskie says. “These are all home-taught recipes. When I cook, I listen to what my ancestors say.”

In summer and winter months, when business is sluggish, restaurant owners in more than 100 U.S. locales are solicited to participate in promotional “restaurant week” schemes, which began in New York City in the early 1990s.

With a few exceptions, like Black Restaurant Week, the initiatives take the same format: for a defined week, participating restaurants offer a two- or three-course prix fixe menu to customers at a set discounted rate.

Some initiatives, like Asheville Restaurant Week, are staged by city staff. Many, though—like our own Triangle Restaurant Week—are hosted by third parties who offer to promote participating restaurants on their websites and social channels.

Across the board, the restaurant weeks have been touted as a way for small businesses to generate additional revenue and for diners to discover new places to eat.

But for many industry entrepreneurs, restaurant weeks pose barriers to entry.

The prix fixe menu requirement doesn’t mesh well with food trucks, kitchenless bars, or casual eateries with cafeteria-style or counter service. Food businesses that operate out of incubator kitchens, like Indulge Catering, or that specialize in a specific product, like Blend of Soul, are wholly disqualified from participating. And when restaurant weeks are hosted by third parties, there’s almost always a processing fee involved.

Triangle Restaurant Week, which requires a $350 fee, does provide participants with a $250 gift card for wholesale supplier US Foods. But for owners like Gardner, who sources produce from Black farmers, or Zabriskie, who cooks with halal meat, that gift card may not be as compensatory as it appears.

According to Ferrell, Black Restaurant Week’s 2016 launch in Houston was sparked by the noticeable lack of Black representation in the city’s conventional restaurant week.

When Black Restaurant Week came on the scene with a more inclusive alternative—a 100 percent free promotional campaign for participating businesses, with no requirement for participants to serve prix fixe meal specials—it was met with enthusiasm.

It was particularly important, Ferrell says, that the initiative be accessible to businesses without brick-and-mortar locations.

“A lot of businesses in [the Black community] are started out of passion, as well as survival,” Ferrell says. “The passion of ‘This is my grandmother’s recipe, I want to sell it’ and the survival of—especially now after COVID, you’ll hear a lot of people say, ‘I was laid off from my job and so I focused my attention on this [personal venture]. Which is great. But a lot of the time, they might not be starting out with the space or the resources for marketing.”

In the Carolinas, this year’s Black Restaurant Week runs from April 28 to May 7. Gardner believes the event is sowing the seeds for long-term change.

“It’s so important to make sure that you’re not only supporting these businesses during Black Restaurant Week but that you’re extending it beyond and saying, ‘What else can I do?’” Gardner says. “Really ask that question: What can I do to be better in my community? What can I do to align myself with these Blackowned businesses?” W

Margo Newkirk & Kiera Gardner, partners and co-founders of Blend of Soul, at the Apex Farmers Market. PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Keeping Tradition

BY LENA GELLER food@indyweek.com

Given the intensity of the task at hand, things are going surprisingly smoothly this morning in the kitchen at Jewish for Good in Durham, where seven volunteers are at work making nearly 1,000 traditional Ashkenazi pastries to be served at the community center’s annual Jewish Food Festival on May 7.

The volunteers—mostly Jewish grandmothers, or bubbes—are working shoulder to shoulder around a large prep table to assemble the bite-sized pastries, which are called knishes and consist of a potato-and-onion mixture wrapped in a flaky crust.

The process is unforgiving and requires both tenderness and haste. Rectangles of dough, which become unworkable if they sit at room temperature too long, must be rolled out thin enough that the table is visible underneath. The next two steps—smearing the rectangle with potato filling and scrolling it into a log—are tricky to pull off without tearing a hole in the dough.

Each log is sectioned into 16 pieces and each piece indented with a thimble-capped index finger before being egg-washed and baked.

Knishes are just one of the many festival items being made in-house by volunteers and Jewish for Good’s small baking staff, whose weekly production is typically limited to loaves of challah and babka.

Other in-house festival items include sweet, cheesestuffed crepes called blintzes; spinach-and-ricotta-filled hand pies called bourekas; liver on crackers; black-andwhite cookies; and brisket sliders on challah rolls, among other traditional fare. There will also be a number of vendor stations: matzo ball soup from Short Winter Soups; kosher hot dogs and hamburgers from Chabad; bagels from Isaac’s Bagels; and pickles from Julz Creations.

Part of the mission behind the Jewish Food Festival, now in its 11th iteration, is tzedakah: the Jewish obligation to perform deeds of justice, often fulfilled through charitable giving. All proceeds from the festival’s ticket sales will be used to help stock Jewish for Good’s food pantry, which in 2022 provided $16,000 in monthly food assistance to community members in need.

The festival also aims to provide the local Jewish community with an opportunity to eat foods that are hard to find in the South, where Jewish populations are particularly small.

“A lot of the dishes we’re serving are things that you just can’t otherwise get around here,” says Kenneth Case-Cohen, the manager of Jewish for Good’s coffee and snack bar.

“That’s a big part of the reason that we do it: just so there’s an opportunity for people to access this food and enjoy it in the same space.”

Even in places like New York City, where Jewish food is more widespread, traditional items have become harder to find.

Knishes, for instance, have seen a drastic downturn in availability in New York over the past three decades. In the late 1980s, then mayor Ed Koch signed a bill requiring street vendors to sell frozen knishes instead of fresh ones.

A few years later, Koch’s successor, Rudy Giuliani, effectively prohibited the pastries from being sold at food carts by classifying cooked potatoes as hazardous.

The struggle to keep Jewish food traditions alive may explain why many Jews regard passed-down family recipes not as well-guarded secrets but as something to be shared and celebrated.

“Most of the recipes that we’re making in-house are from somebody’s bubbe,” Case-Cohen says. “It’s pretty amazing to feel connected to these ancestral food items.”

The knish recipe, for example, was provided by Elaine Marcus, the bubbe leading this morning’s effort. She learned the method from her own bubbe, who spoke fluent Yiddish. Marcus, accessorized in a mint-green bandana and two flour-caked rings, spends most of the morning whisking around the kitchen, showing the ropes to less-experienced volunteers and doing damage control on leaky dough logs.

At one point, though, she stops in her tracks when the team hits a snag: all of the thimbles have disappeared.

Thimbles play an essential role in indenting knishes, according to Marcus. The dimples in the top of a thimble create tiny holes in the knish dough, which release steam during the bake and prevent air bubbles from forming between the filling and the crust.

Making her grandmother’s knishes without thimbles, Marcus says, is out of the question.

“I’m going to have to start checking pockets,” she warns. Then, a breakthrough from one bubbe: “It was on my finger the whole time!”

Two others are still missing. Marcus, huffing a little, leaves the kitchen and returns with a few from her private stock. Production resumes. W

At the Jewish Food Festival in Durham, family recipes are celebrated and passed along, one knish at a time.

Top: Brisket slider on a challah roll Bottom: Using a thimble to indent knishes PHOTOS BY LENA GELLER

Empowering Curation

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

“We tend to get lost in museums when we think museums are about art,” Stacey L. Kirby says. “Art museums are actually about humans.”

But the problem that the Durham performance artist finds with most museums is that people have been displaced in them.

“Humans are not centered in museums; the objects are, the art is,” she says. “I think that does us all a disservice; it really disconnects us.”

Kirby, whose work “The Bureau of Personal Belonging” won a juried $200,000 grand prize at ArtPrize 8 in 2016, is speaking with an insider’s personal knowledge of the scene. In addition to creating a series of pop-up civic office installations over the last 16 years to document and validate the identities, experiences, and civil rights of the marginalized, Kirby has done conservation work at a number of museums across the country, including eight years with the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA).

Her latest work, The Department of Humanity, debuts over two afternoons there this weekend, in a series of 45-minute guided experiences. The work is based on her research and experiences with a broad range of artists, curators, archivists, managers, and patrons who have given her the chance to scrutinize the cultural underpinnings of what an art museum is.

It’s a particularly appropriate moment for such a work: to commemorate its 75th anniversary in 2022, NCMA undertook a reimagining of itself as an institution, accompanied by the largest reinstallation of its permanent collection since the museum’s West Building opened in 2010.

Museum director Valerie Hillings also got a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foun-

dation to fund Kirby’s work: a two-year critical interrogation of the premises and practices underlying the museum’s daily work.

“Valerie has experienced some of the more controversial works that I’ve done,” Kirby says. “I think it’s pretty incredible she was willing to invite me in, to sort of hold their feet to the fire.”

Starting in July 2022, Kirby and the agents in her “Research and Development” office installation at the museum interviewed visitors, artists, and staff, including custodial workers, through conversations and an “official” survey form. It asked patrons questions like “Who has the power here?” Referencing the museum’s recent high-profile rebranding as “The People’s Collection,” the form pointedly asked participants, “Who are ‘The People’? Are you included?”

It’s long been a point of pride that a $1 million allocation by the state legislature in 1947 made North Carolina the first in the country to fund and start a state art museum. But its first acquisition, “Mammy,” a 1923 oil on canvas by Gari Melchers that was donated by one of the museum’s chief first sponsors, clearly stands now as a document of racism: In the portrait, an elderly, bespectacled Black woman holding a discomforted white, blue-eyed baby. According to Kirby, it hasn’t been publicly exhibited since the 1960s.

Establishing an art museum is largely a series of actions taken by people with power, privilege, and wealth. Though museum spaces are all but inevitably created to preserve and celebrate the culture and aesthetics of their founders, they also frequently encode their prejudices.

Kirby says that an art museum is “a series of agreements—some spoken, some

unspoken—that are made with many different types of people: artists, staff, visitors, funders, donors, board members, and legislators, not to mention the people of a ‘people’s collection.’”

But such institutions don’t always fully follow through on agreements made with a number of partners, including their own staff and communities. In recent years, museums have been criticized for little or selective outreach, and problematic pay gaps and working conditions have resulted in an unprecedented rise in unionizing at major museums across the country, including the Whitney and Guggenheim in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kirby has designed her latest work to give patrons the chance to examine some of the agreements the NCMA and its partners have made with one another. In the process, she hopes to cultivate museum patrons’ sense of their status as active stakeholders.

“It was really interesting that most people did not check the box on the questionnaire identifying themselves as the museums’ funders, even though their tax dollars go to it,” Kirby says. “I want to empower them to think that they actually do fund this institution, that there is some ownership over the space.”

After stops at self-styled “social location” and “declarations” offices, where patrons can reflect on their varying social identi-

ties and declare belongings they bring with them into the space, participants launch on a self-directed experience through the museum’s galleries.

In this second part, guides lead patrons through backstage sections of the museum that visitors don’t usually get to see, including an underground tunnel that links its two main buildings.

“Being in the tunnel is part of transparency of process, to give the public a little more insight into how things are physically moved and also the different environments that staff work within,” Kirby says. “Transparency is really challenging for museums because they’re so used to being encouraged to keep things private.”

Indeed, only a fraction of the museum’s collection of 4,000-plus artworks is ever on display. Going behind (and beneath) the public galleries is also intended to counter what Kirby calls “the feeling that [museums] need to be perfect as institutions—this performative front, like, ‘we don’t make mistakes.’”

Owning her own experiences as a museum worker in The Department of Humanity, Kirby concludes, “I’m trying to encourage people to be accountable for being human. We do make mistakes. We just need to call that out, be accountable to it, and commit to doing better.”

The written responses patrons can leave at the end of their experience may help the museum’s stakeholders do just that. W

In special backstage explorations of the North Carolina Museum of Art, artist Stacey L. Kirby asks who art museums are for and what they can be.

Stacey L. Kirby’s “Research and Development” installation for The Department of Humanity PHOTO BY ALEX MANESS

STACEY L. KIRBY: THE DEPARTMENT OF HUMANITY North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh | Saturday, May 6–Sunday, May 7 | ncartmuseum.org

Spring Forward

In

BY HARRIS WHELESS music@indyweek.com

some of the best of Terrell’s career.

JOSEPH TERRELL: GOOD FOR NOTHING HOWL | HHH1/2

Sleepy Cat Records | Friday, May 5

GOOD FOR NOTHING HOWL RELEASE SHOW AT STEEL STRING BREWERY’S 10TH ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION

Saturday, May 20 | Pluck Farm, Mebane | steelstringbrewery.com/10-year-anniversary

Good for Nothing Howl, the first solo album from Mipso’s Joseph Terrell, takes its concept from the imprecise boundary between human language and sound, articulated meaning and an animalistic cry.

The album, as its pastoral imagery would suggest, was born in the spring. As Terrell, now based in Durham, explains, he had been moving around, crashing with friends, briefly quitting writing and playing altogether. But the onset of spring in 2021 inspired him to establish a daily writing routine: each morning he would drag a chair under a tree in the yard and “spend the morning outside with a guitar.” The album unfolds as one’s thoughts might in such circumstances: stray images wrap themselves in associative frills and vague memories, and half-registered sentiments congeal. Confessional yet enigmatic, the lyrics are

Eleven years after Mipso formed in Chapel Hill, Terrell is the group’s latest member to put out a solo record (Wood Robinson released Wood Robinson’s New Formal in 2017 and Libby Rodenbough released Spectacle of Love in 2020). Good for Nothing Howl is a natural continuation of the group’s indie-Americana sound. The album finds Mipso’s guitarist and primary songwriter back in the studio with a host of collaborators, joining isolated strains of bright finger-style guitar and string washes with arrangements by producer Chris Boerner (Hiss Golden Messenger) and the boisterous rhythm section of Matt McCaughan (Bon Iver) and Cameron Ralston (Bonny Light Horseman, Bedouine).

The album leans heavily on accented production: underscoring verses with strings and choruses with harmonies (Chessa Rich, Skylar Gudasz, Tift Merritt), supplying inter-verse string fills, dwelling in the recordings’ exacting polish. These overdubs, which set and embellish the mood, enhance the odd mysticism of Terrell’s lyrics. This dynamic is on display in the blending of object and personhood in “Cast Iron Kettle”: “I was a cast iron kettle in the pouring rain … I was a repeat back seat sleeping pill.” Or the fractured perspective of “Howl”: “The radio doesn’t have to notice the snowing / And never have I criticized a train out of tune / How come I was whistling but stopped as soon as you walked in the room?”

In these new songs, Terrell reaches a more mature lyrical style than in his previous work: the extended metaphors of Mipso’s Terrell-penned songs (“My broken heart, every injured ventricle, every aching atrium,” from “Red Eye to Raleigh”) reach a darker, more pointed absurdism that, at its best, revels in associative jumps, in personal ambivalence, and in the volatility of expression. W

Mipso member Joseph Terrell’s solo debut, landscape is awash in sound and symbolism.

music

Andrew Duhon $20. Wed, May 3, 7:30 p.m. Magnetic Sound Studios, Durham.

Bonies / My Sister Maura / Daytona $10+. Wed, May 3, 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Seven Lions: Beyond the Veil–The Journey III Tour $45+. Wed, May 3, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Yaeji $25. Wed, May 3, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in Concert with the North Carolina Symphony $85+. May 4-6, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Attila $25. Thurs, May 4, 7:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Erie Choir / Lud $10. Thurs, May 4, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Grateful Dub: Reggae-Infused Tribute to The Grateful Dead $15+. Thurs, May 4, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thurs, May 4, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Punk and Drag Night $10. Thurs, May 4, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Larry Q Draughn: Tribute to Woody Shaw $25. Fri, May 5, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Mamis & the Papis and Party

Illegal Present: Moodboard $5. Fri, May 5, 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

NiiTO $12. Fri, May 5, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Palmyra / Dissimilar South $25. Fri, May 5, 6:30 p.m. Down Yonder Farm, Hillsborough.

Pert Near Sandstone / The Way Down Wanderers $17. Fri, May 5, 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Puma Blue $25. Fri, May 5, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Sadie Rock and the Mad Ryans $10. Fri, May 5, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Sorry Papi Tour: The All Girl Party $33+. Fri, May 5, 9 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

The Turkey Buzzards / James Davy $10. Fri, May 5, 7 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Big City Lights $5. Sat, May 6, 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Susto $18. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Will Wildfire $10. Sat, May 6, 9:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Yacht Rock Revue: Reverse Sunset Tour $25+. Sat, May 6, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Ana Popovic $25. Sun, May 7, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Heartless Bastards

$25. Sun, May 7, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Michael Feinberg Quartet $25. Sun, May 7, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

S. C. Gwynne: His Majesty’s Airship Wed, May 3, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Simon Winchester: Knowing What We Know Wed, May 3, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Eric Muller: Lawyer, Jailer, Ally, Foe Thurs, May 4, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Carmen Cauthen: Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh Sat, May 6, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Louise and Anne Jordan: Sunny the Sideloader Sat, May 6, 2:30 p.m. Oberlin Regional Library, Raleigh.

Patti Callahan

Henry: The Secret Book of Flora Lea Sat, May 6, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

W. Fitzhugh

Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle $25. Sat, May 6, 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

The Defacto Experience: Producer Showcase Sat, May 6, 9 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

Destroyer (Solo) SOLD OUT. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Durham.

Go-Go a Gojo: A World House Music Dance Party $30. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m. Gojo by Goorsha, Durham.

Mdou Moctar $20. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Michael Hawkins and the Brotherhood $25. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Six Sundays in Spring: Big Bang Boom Sun, May 7, 5:30 p.m. E. Carroll Joyner Park, Wake Forest.

Spring Concert: Voices in the Light Sun, May 7, 3 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Morgan Wade: Crossing State Lines Acoustic Tour $28+. Mon, May 8, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Hoodoo Gurus

$29. Tues, May 9, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio

$8. Tues, May 9, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Keb’ Mo’ $47+. Tues, May 9, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Destiny Hemphill: Motherworld: A Devotional for the Alter-Life Fri, May 5, 6 p.m. perfect lovers, Durham.

Brundage: New History of the American South Tues, May 9, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

screen

Crooklyn, Presented in Conjunction with Special Exhibition Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design $7. Thurs, May 4, 11 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Star Wars: A New Hope $6. Thurs, May 4, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

First Friday Market and Movie Night: Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings Fri, May 5, 5 p.m. Moore Square, Raleigh.

Planet of the Vampires and Danger: Diabolik $10. Fri, May 5, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham. Home Is Distant Shores Film Festival $19. Sat, May 6, 1 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

North Carolina Symphony performs in concert with Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back at Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts May 4–6.

PHOTO COURTESY OF NORTH CAROLINA SYMPHONY

The Color Purple $90+. Apr. 22–May 7, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Moulin Rouge! The Musical $35+. May 3-14, various times. DPAC, Durham.

We Choose the Moon $20. May 4-6, 7 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

art

Gallery Talk: Jessica Womack Thurs, May 4, 6 p.m. The Nasher, Durham.

Opening Reception: Orange County Artists Guild Spring Art Show Fri, May 5, 6 p.m. Eno Arts Mill Gallery, Hillsborough.

Art-Making Workshop with Caroline Kern Sun, May 7, 3 p.m. LEVEL, Chapel Hill.

stage

Burlesque Wars: A New Thong, a Star Wars Tribute by Nerd-Vana Burlesque $10+. Thurs, May 4, 7:30 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh.

The Monti StorySLAM: Jedi vs. Sith $12. Thurs, May 4, 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Big Red Dance Project 2023

Spring Concert $12. May 5-7, various times. Durham Arts Council, Durham.

The Golden Gals Live: An AwardWinning Live Parody Show $94+. Fri, May 5, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Ryan Hamilton $27+. Fri, May 5, 5 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Switchyard Theatre Company: The Tempest $20. May 6-7, various times. Raleigh-Cary JCC, Raleigh.

$20. May 11-14, various times. Durham Central Park, Durham.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Sat, May 6, 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Thresh & Hold: Marlanda Dekine and Brittany Green Sat, May 6, 2 p.m. The Nasher, Durham.

Kevin James: The Irregardless Tour $110+. Sun, May 7, 7 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

like to plan ahead?

like to ahead?

Caroline Kern hosts an art-making workshop at LEVEL on Sunday, May 7.

su | do | ku

© Puzzles by Pappocom

this week’s puzzle level:

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

U Z Z L E S

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page”.

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page” at the bottom of our webpage.

Move in ready Ideal for therapist, or attorney. Close Brenda at (919) for details and

C L A S S I F I E D S

EMPLOYMENT

Summer Outdoor Counselor Positions

Piedmont Wildlife Center is seeking employees to run outdoor summer programs in Durham, Orange, and Wake locations. Seeking Day-Camp, Aftercare, and Specialty Counselors. Work outside and connect campers to nature. Programs start in June. To apply: Email your resume to camp@piedmontwildlifecenter.org. Hourly rates range from $12-$14.

Senior Software Engineer

919-416-0675

Senior Software Engineer sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to perform research, design & software development assignments within specific software functional area or product line. Minimum of Bachelor’s degree or foreign equiv in Computer Science, Computer Engg, Information Systems, or rltd + 5 yrs exp in job offered or rltd required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office in Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1000 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job

Associate Program Director

Associate Program Director, R&D Portfolio and Program Management sought by Seqirus, Inc. in Holly Springs, NC. Provide opnl & strategic program leadership for New Product Dev Programs. Req: BS+7/MS+5. Apply by mail to: Seqirus, Inc., Attn: W.Turner, 475 Green Oaks Pkwy, Holly Springs, NC 27540 (Ref Job code: TC1209)

Mechanical Engineer

Mechanical Engineer (Durham, NC) - Dsgn components, assemblies, & tooling in support of NPI for a technology co. that optimizes the electric grid. Reqmts: Masters in Mechanical Engg w/ 1 yr exp in FEA simulation using SOLIDWORKS, dsgn of CNC machined parts, inspecting parts using CMM & POL YWORKS, engg change order s/ ware such as Sage or Agile. Worksites: 80% at Durham, NC Headquarters, 10% at Jabil (St Petersburg, FL), & 10% telecommuting from home (w/in Durham, NC MSA), Resume to Smart Wires, 1035 Swabia Court, Ste 130, Durham, NC, 27703; Shannon.ross@smartwires.com.

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

OFFICE/STUDIO SPACE

Move in ready Broad Street Cottage

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Ideal for therapist, integrative health and wellness coach or attorney. Close to Duke and Whole Foods. Please call Brenda at (919) 471-0100 or Michael at (919) 493-7633 for details and showing.

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feature a pet for adoption, adver tising@indyweek.com

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To adver tise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact adver tising@indyweek.com

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The Not-At-All Official Alternatives Sponsor Of Ditching Work To Spark Joy

Okay Mister Bosslady, you want us to stick around when it’s this nice out? you know they got wifi at the bar now right?? maybe instead of offering some lameo-beer (super fun

2011), you hook-up some Alts with a side of Mat Leave and we’ll take it from there...