INDY Week 1.03.18

raleigh 1|3|18

THE RETURN OF THE

SEGREGATIONISTS

THOMAS FARR, JESSE HELMS, AND TRUMP’S REMAKING OF THE FEDERAL COURTS B Y TH O M AS GO L D SM ITH AND E RICA H E L L E R STEIN P. 1 1

Duke University Chapel • 3:00 pm • Sunday, January 14th

DUKE UNIVERSITY 2018 DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. COMMEMORATION

Keynote Speaker: Sherrilyn Ifill

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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK 6 In 2018, can the state of North Carolina please treat its citizens like grown-ups?

8 A new diversion program is shedding light on why so many people in Durham County face eviction.

VOL. 35, NO. 1

DEPARTMENTS 6 Triangulator 8 News 15 Food 17 Music

11 In 1983, Jesse Helms was trailing Jim Hunt by twenty points. Then he attacked Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy.

20 Arts & Culture

15 Cocoa tea, which comes in a standard tea bag, is lighter than cocoa but retains the same satisfying aroma as hot chocolate.

29 Arts & Culture Calendar

17 Cinematic music for pirate films has evolved from glittering, brassy idioms to aggressive power anthems.

18 Charly Lowry needs a new kidney. She also wants to win a Grammy.

20 There’s so much action on Triangle stages this season that we couldn’t fit it all in one issue.

22 What to Do This Week 25 Music Calendar

Charly Lowry, who fronts the band Dark Water Rising, needs a second kidney transplant. She has a hemodialysis catheter on her chest for dialysis treatment (see page 18). PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA ON THE COVER PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SHAN STUMPF

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triangulator

18 THINGS WE WANT IN 2018

For most of us, 2017 was a full-on dumpster fire of a year, long and exhausting and infuriating and chaotic and oftentimes simply depressing. So as we embark upon another revolution around the sun, we here at the INDY wanted to lay out something of a wish list for 2018, eighteen things we’d like to see happen in our community and the world.

Want to add your own personal resolution? Email us: backtalk@indyweek.com.

1. The impeachment and/or prosecution and/or utter humiliation of Donald Trump and all of his cronies.

2. General Assembly Republicans to lose their supermajorities.

3. North Carolina to privatize liquor sales and relax its restrictions on craft brewers (i.e., treat its citizens like grown-ups).

1.

4. More late-night food options across the Triangle.

5. A conversation—at the very least—about medical and/or recreational marijuana.

6. North Carolina to repeal its law blocking judges from waiving fines and court costs for poor people.

7. The legislature to actually fund its class-size mandate.

8. The Wake County Commission to fully fund the board of education’s budget request.

9. Raleigh to figure out what the hell it’s doing with Airbnb.

10. Raleigh to figure out that backyard cottages aren’t really a big deal.

11. Durham to embrace tiny homes as part of its solution to affordable housing.

12. Durham to use the Bull City Connector to help lower-income east Durham communities.

6 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

5.

3.

13.

13. Someone to tear down Silent Sam. 14. No more music festivals in September.

15. More stability for local theater and dance venues

18.

and a more diverse pool of arts-grant recipients.

16.

More art-house cinemas and outlets or local and independent filmmakers.

17. Rapsody to win the Grammy for Best Rap Album.

18. A UNC-Duke Final Four game.

PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS

Your Week.

Every Wednesday. indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 7

indynews

A Roof Over Their Heads

A NEW PROGRAM IS SHEDDING LIGHT ON WHY SO MANY PEOPLE IN DURHAM COUNTY FACE EVICTION

BY SARAH WILLETS On a Thursday morning three days after Christmas, the eviction court on the third floor of the Durham County courthouse was quiet. Of the more than forty tenants on the day’s docket, just five had come to make their case in front of magistrate Aminah Thompson.

“Anyone here from 501 Towns? Copper Mill? Hardee Terrace? Century Trinity Estates? Bell West End? Arium Pinnacle Ridge? Phillips Research Park? Falls Pointe at The Park? Campus Crossing?” Thompson asked. A young woman walked to the front of the small courtroom. She recently got a new job, but her paycheck came too late to make rent, she explains.

Like all the other tenants who appeared that morning, she did not have a lawyer.

The same two lawyers, however, represented all of the apartment complexes called throughout the morning.

That has been common in Thompson’s nine years as a magistrate. The crowd, however, varies day to day. Durham County, after all, has the highest eviction filing rate of the state’s ten largest counties.

The stories also vary, says Thompson, who moved to Durham in 1999. Some are heartbreaking, like a woman in court Thursday who has been getting help from her father since being out of work. But his generosity is finite, she explained through tears. “My dad is willing to help me pay it because he doesn’t want me and my daughters out on the street,” she said. Other stories boil down to poor budgeting.

The number of summary ejectment filings has been falling in Durham County— despite the addition of more than 30,000 residents—from just over 14,000 in fiscal year 2010 to 10,134 in fiscal year 2016. But the county has maintained the highest eviction filing rate. Last fiscal year, one eviction case was filed per twenty-nine residents— and while this figure may include multiple filings against the same tenant, it also likely leaves out illegal evictions that don’t involve the court system. This all raises the 8 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Eviction notice on a door in Durham PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA

question: What’s different about Durham?

It’s an answer the Eviction Diversion Program—launched in August by Duke University’s Civil Justice Clinic, Legal Aid of North Carolina, and the Durham County Department of Social Services—is trying to uncover. Although it’s too early to say whether the program is achieving its goal of reducing the number of eviction cases filed, it is beginning to fill out the picture of who is being evicted, where evictions are occurring, and why.

“When people are paying more than fifty percent of their income [in rent], it doesn’t take much to disrupt their monthly budget to the point where they can’t pay their rent on time,” says Peter Gilbert, one of two Legal Aid attorneys who handle the bulk of the eviction cases that come through the program.

The Eviction Diversion Program con-

nects tenants to legal and financial help to avoid evictions and the costs associated with them. Whenever a summons for an eviction case goes out, a flyer about the program is included. TenAminah Thompson ants call county Social Services, which can determine whether they qualify for rental assistance, and get referred to Legal Aid if necessary.

In most cases, Gilbert says, an attorney is able to reach a settlement with the landlord, buying tenants more time in their homes or avoiding displacement.

A map by DataWorks NC of filings from 2012–16 shows clusters of eviction cases along major corridors with a lot of apartment complexes, like 15-501 and N.C. 55, but also in neighborhoods ringing downtown that have some of the city’s highest poverty rates.

“What we have is a wealth distribution issue,” says city council member Jillian Johnson. “We have a growing affordability crisis that is leading to an eviction crisis, and that inevitably leads, without intervention, to a homelessness crisis.”

The issue has caught the attention of the Durham Human Relations Commission, whose members have been sitting in on eviction court proceedings to learn more about the process and the people affected by it, and the city council. While the city already funds rapid rehousing programs, Johnson says she’d like to see the city help pay for attorneys to represent tenants in court.

Online records from the Administrative Office of the Courts only detail summary ejectment filings going back to fiscal year 2010, so it’s difficult to say just how long

evictions have been a problem in Durham.

But across the country, evictions rose amid the recession that ended in 2009.

Thompson says when she started hearing eviction cases, tenants were paying $300 to $500 a month. Now, they’re paying upward of $1,000. Tenants with relatively low rents are showing up in court more often, she says.

“They recognize that if they get evicted, they’re not going to be able to find something else,” she says.

Last fiscal year, Durham County saw an average of 859 summary ejectment filings each month. After a landlord issues a notice—for example, for late rent—he or she can file a summary ejectment complaint and ask a judge to grant the eviction.

Evictions were granted in about half of the cases filed last fiscal year. At that point, an eviction can appear on a tenant’s rental or credit history, even if a settlement with the landlord is reached.

Fewer cases result in writs of possession, which allow the Durham County Sheriff’s Office to remove a person being evicted.

According to the Sheriff’s Office, deputies padlocked 1,875 units in 2016.

“I was surprised at the number of cases that are resulting in judgments and not in being displaced from their homes that month,” Gilbert says. “In some ways it’s better, but really it’s just speaking to a different problem.”

Currently, Social Services only refers people to the diversion program who already have a notice to appear in court— about fifty cases per month. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to prepare. Ultimately, the goal is to get involved in cases earlier so attorneys can learn more about each individual’s housing and financial situation and try to avoid a judgement.

“I think people assume that if they come to small claims court and present the sad story, that’s going to help them,” says Jesse McCoy, with Duke’s Civil Justice Clinic. “It doesn’t work like that.”

THE EVICTION MAP

Although the number of eviction filings in Durham County has been decreasing since 2010, the county has maintained the highest eviction filing rate of the state’s ten largest counties. This map shows the number of summary ejectment complaints—a legal action filed by a landlord seeking to evict a tenant—filed in Durham County from 2012–16. Darker blue denotes census block groups with more filings. If a summary ejectment is granted (and the tenant hasn’t already moved out or reached a deal with his or her landlord to stay) a landlord can then seek a writ of possession to have the tenant removed.

SUMMARY EJECTMENTS: COUNT PER BLOCK GROUP (2012–16)

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

MAP BY DATAWORKS NC. SOURCE: DURHAM COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT

There are four attorneys working in various capacities for the program, plus about ten Duke law students. While there are bilingual people at Legal Aid and the Civil Justice Clinic, the Eviction Diversion Program does not have a bilingual attorney.

Gilbert estimates that the program needs another attorney and paralegal to help everyone currently seeking help from the program, not to mention those going to Social Services for assistance before an eviction is filed. Ten to fifteen tenants each month can’t be helped because of the program’s capacity, and approximately five more can’t be contacted by attorneys.

To reach more people sooner, the program is hosting clinics each Wednesday on the second floor of the county courthouse.

The program is also setting up a phone line so tenants can contact it directly.

Any increase in reach requires an increase in resources. Charles Holton, director of the Civil Justice Clinic, says the program is looking for partners to help people who need financial assistance but can’t get it from Social Services. Duke students will also study what role gentrification has played.

“These are bigger issues that I think one program alone may not necessarily be able to fulfill,” McCoy says. “We’ve historically neglected the impact of affordable housing in Durham. I think it’s telling that we can’t really put a definition on what we consider to be affordable housing locally.” swillets@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 9

S UMMER soapboxer CAMP GUIDE

A Republic, If You Can Keep It A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

There’s a famous anecdote—possibly apocryphal—about the time Benjamin Franklin, when leaving the Constitutional Convention of 1787, was approached by a woman asking what kind of government the clandestine gathering had produced.

“A republic,” Franklin is said to have replied, “if you can keep it.”

I’ve been thinking about that line—and the idea behind it—a lot lately, as we stand at the precipice of another new year and look in the rearview at an unsettling 2017. There’s an undeniable fragility to this moment, a sense that the country is ripping itself asunder.

Sure, there’s Donald Trump, a corporeal incarnation of narcissism, self-delusion, mendacity, and graft, helped into office by white nationalists and a meddling foreign government.

But it’s more than that. It’s also the widening gap

between rich and poor—U.S. income inequality ranks among the highest in the developed world—and a social safety net that is threatened while the wealthiest are showered with tax benefits, a parallel of sorts to the waning days of the ancien régime. There are the increasingly authoritarian proclivities of the ruling party and its leader. There are naked gerrymanders that render urban minority votes less meaningful that rural white ones. (And, for that matter, there’s the U.S. Senate, where two-thirds of the country’s population will be represented by less than one-third of senators by 2040, as more people migrate to the biggest states.) There’s the self-segregation of social media, amplifying enmity and reinforcing beliefs we already hold, whatever the reality. There’s the rise of the altright. And there’s the zero-sum mentality permeating our politics.

None of this bodes well, considering that this anxious undercurrent exists amid a growing economy that has added jobs every month for almost eight years. Imagine what happens when that inevitably goes south.

The rearview of 2017 is indeed unsettling. But America has survived a lot over the last twentythree decades—two world wars, one civil war, the Great Depression, the Cold War. And the republic will also survive Donald J. Trump.

But only if we can keep it.

“The brevity of [Franklin’s] response,” the late historian Richard Beeman once wrote, “should not cause us to undervalue its essential meaning: democratic republics are not merely founded upon the consent of the people, they are also absolutely dependent upon the active and informed involvement of the people for their continued good health.”

What Franklin was saying 230 years ago was that the republic can only be maintained with perpetual vigilance, lest it devolve into despotism. The first year of the Trump administration has only underlined his point.

The second year of the Trump administration will be no different. It’s up to us to resist the White House’s racial revanchism. It’s up to us to counter fiction with fact, to demand reality-based policymaking. And, most important, it’s up to us to defeat those politicians who, because they want to ban abortion or gift their benefactors with tax goodies or start another war in the Middle East, tolerate or facilitate the president’s abuses of power.

This is a time for resolutions, so this is mine: throw the bums out, and keep the damn republic.

Twitter: @jeffreybillman

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THE RETURN OF THE

SEGREGATIONISTS

THOMAS FARR, JESSE HELMS, AND TRUMP’S REMAKING OF THE FEDERAL COURTS B Y T HOMAS GOLDSMITH AND E RICA HELLERSTEIN

In the fall of 1983 , Jesse Helms needed something like political salvation.

The veteran Dixie senator faced an uphill reelection campaign against Jim Hunt, the popular two-term Democratic governor. Hunt, framing the ’84 election as an opportunity for the state to solidify its identity as a tolerant outpost in the South, was outperforming Helms in the polls. By October, the conservative firebrand was trailing Hunt by twenty percentage points.

INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 11

Then Helms made a consequential decision. When a bill to make Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a national holiday easily cleared the House, Helms launched a filibuster against the proposal in the Senate, accusing the slain civil rights icon of embracing “action-oriented Marxism.”

The senator’s colleagues were wary of his crusade; even Strom Thurmond voted for the bill. But Helms was astute enough to recognize that the voters he was courting did not care about the limits of acceptable Capitol Hill discourse.

As The New York Times explained, “Mr. Helms said his opposition to the King holiday would not hurt him politically in North Carolina, because, ‘I’m not going to get any black votes, period.’ A Republican political strategist added that in Senator Helms’s campaign, ‘the groups he is playing to’ would probably applaud his stand.”

Helms’s instinct was spot-on. He knew that his filibuster wouldn’t go anywhere.

Even President Ronald Reagan had signaled his intent to sign off on the holiday.

But it was the excessive pageantry—the barrage of headlines pitting Helms against communists and liberal softies—that galvanized white voters.

By December, polls showed Hunt’s lead over Helms had been cut in half. Helms then kicked off a campaign that exploited racial tensions, stoking fears over black voter registration and publishing campaign literature with headlines such as “Black Voter Registration Rises Sharply” and “Hunt Urges More Minority Registration,” alongside photos of Hunt with Jesse Jackson.

On the eve of the election, Helms “accused Hunt of being supported by ‘homosexuals, the labor-union bosses and the crooks’ and said he feared a large ‘bloc vote,’” The Washington Post reported. Asked what he meant, Helms responded candidly, “The black vote.”

The strategy earned dividends. Though Helms may have lost in Washington’s court of opinion, he won in North Carolina—52 percent to 48 percent. The lesson? Never underestimate the dog whistle.

It’s been more than three decades since Helms’s come-from-behind win over Hunt, and nearly ten years since Helms died. But an examination of the traces he left makes plain what critics call his core identity: a politician who had few scruples about inflaming racial resentment for his own political gain.

And it’s precisely within that context that we should focus on Donald Trump’s pick for the Eastern District Court of North Carolina: Thomas Farr, a Raleigh attorney who could soon wind up ruling on issues of grave importance to the African-American 12 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Jesse Helms

OFFICAL PORTRAIT, U.S. SENATE

community. Farr served as the legal counsel on Helms’s 1984 and 1990 Senate campaigns, both of which sought to suppress the African-American vote through intimidating postcard mailing campaigns.

More recently, Farr defended the General Assembly’s voter ID law, which the Fourth Circuit Court determined targeted African Americans “with almost surgical precision.” He also defended the legislature’s 2011 legislative districts, which had to be redrawn after a lower court struck down twenty-eight of them as illegal racial gerrymanders. And throughout his career, he’s aligned himself with North Carolina politicians whose policies have taken aim at communities of color.

As the Reverend William J. Barber, the former head of the state NAACP, pointedly put it in a New York Times op-ed December 26, Farr is “a product of the modern white supremacist machine that Mr. Helms pioneered.”

W

hen Donald Trump took the oath of office, he inherited an exceptionally high number of judicial vacancies—thanks, in no small part, to the Senate’s blockade of President Obama’s nominations in the final year of his presidency. Trump was given the rare opportunity to remake the judiciary in the Republican mold; to date, he’s selected the least diverse judicial pool in decades.

Among Trump’s picks is Farr, whose nomination—which cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee on a party-line vote in

October—is on hold until the Senate reconvenes this month. Because of his work for Helms and his defense of the legislature’s voter suppression efforts, Farr remains one of Trump’s most controversial choices.

The criticisms extend beyond ideology.

The Republicans on the Judiciary Committee were well aware of civil rights advocates’ concerns and voted for Farr anyway.

Instead, the key issue now, and the one that could imperil Farr’s lifetime appointment, is whether Farr has misled senators about his work with Helms. Civil rights groups and Democratic politicians are demanding that Farr return to the Judiciary Committee to answer questions—first raised by the INDY in November—about a controversial 1990 mailing by the Helms campaign, consisting of more than one hundred thousand postcards that a federal court determined were intended to suppress voting by African Americans.

In a written response to Senator Dianne Feinstein, Farr said that he did not know about the mailing until after the postcards went out and the Department of Justice intervened. But a former Department of Justice civil rights attorney who worked on the case, Gerald Hebert, has disputed Farr’s version of events, telling the INDY that Farr “absolutely” was in a meeting at which “ballot security”—i.e., the postcard initiative— was discussed [see sidebar, page 14].

In light of the INDY’s reporting, Senator Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, has asked the Justice Department to provide an

internal document known as a “J-memo” that could clarify Farr’s role in the postcard campaign. As of publication, the details of the memo have not been made public.

Because Farr’s nomination didn’t make it to the Senate floor in 2017, the chamber effectively punted it back to the White House. If he chooses, Trump can again nominate Farr—the president has been mum on the subject—and Farr could potentially have a second, and presumably more contentious, hearing before the Judiciary Committee.

W

hen Jesse Helms first won election to the U.S. Senate in 1972, his face and voice had been familiar to North Carolinians for more than twenty years, as a political advocate, journalist, and television editorialist. His rhetoric often served to drive a wedge between white and black people. Throughout his three decades in public service, Helms continued to express these same sorts of racial attitudes. He also built a powerful political and financial empire, with bright young men like Farr to keep it running.

Helms’s attitudes—expressed with the thinnest disguise, or no disguise— unleashed strains of racism that many Southerners thought had been quelled by the passage of the civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965. Under those laws, black people could exercise the same right to vote and eat at the same restaurants as white people.

Didn’t that mean that we were all going to

“FARR IS A PRODUCT OF THE WHITE SUPREMACIST MACHINE THAT JESSE HELMS PIONEERED.” live together in respect and peace?

Into that crystalline vision came Helms, with a history of making clear that, while he might hire and tolerate individual African Americans, he largely viewed the black community with contempt.

In 2001, The New York Times collected some of the head-turning comments that Helms made about people of color and gays and lesbians. One example, from 1963: “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that has thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic and commerce and interfere with other men's rights.” In 1993, after black Democratic senator Carol Moseley Braun debated Helms over the Confederate flag on the Senate floor, Helms joined her in the elevator, started singing “Dixie,” and told another senator, “I’m going to keep singing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”

Responding to Booker in December, Farr said that he only represented Helms because he joined a law firm that already did Helms’s work, not because he believed in Helms’s racial views: “I am completely opposed to using race to divide people.

I have never done anything in my life to use race to divide people.” (Helms stoutly resisted the racist label, referring often to the many home-state African Americans with whom he had good relationships.)

A partner at Farr’s firm was key Helms aide Tom Ellis, who introduced Farr to a political machine that was already cranking hard. Ellis had been scrutinized for

serving in the 1970s as an official of the Pioneer Fund, a group that funded research designed to prove that blacks were inferior to whites. In July 1983, the year Farr joined the firm, Ellis’s nomination for a seat on the Board for International Broadcasting was scrutinized by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee over his past racist remarks and actions, ultimately derailing his nomination.

Ellis’s rejection didn’t stop Helms or the Congressional Club, a fundraising arm of the campaign that took in millions for the 1984 race. It’s possible to trace the Citizens United-emboldened money raisers back to the Helms organization, which used a forprofit arm to “lend” money to favored politicians that several never paid back.

While they don’t often boast about it these days, some of the Republican Party’s most skilled operatives worked during the eighties and nineties for Helms.

The storied “white hands” ad, portraying a white worker who lost his job to a minority applicant because of quotas, was the work of Alex Castellanos, who went on to work for Republicans like Senator John McCain and to become a familiar voice on CNN. Top-level GOP politicos Dick Morris, Charlie Black, and Marc and Karen Rotterman were also on the Helms team, according to accounts in the Weekly Standard and the National Journal’s Hotline.

Carter Wrenn, a longtime Helms hand and a staunch Farr ally, has conceded that the “white hands” ad—which helped Helms

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defeat Harvey Gantt, the African-American former Charlotte mayor—was racist, telling NPR in 2012 that it “was absolutely a racial ad. That was the race card. ... I’ve been in the room when we played racist politics. ... We played the race card and I’m not proud of it.”

W

hen Helms announced his retirement from the Senate in 2001, the think pieces came far and wide. The Washington Post’s David S. Broder called on the press to ditch superlatives about the senator’s “conservative firebrand” politics, and instead call him what he really was: “the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country—a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired.”

Instead, Helms’s policies seem poised for a Trump-era revival. And Farr presents a direct link to the man who filibustered the renewal of the Voting Rights Act, supported the South African apartheid regime, introduced legislation to end affirmative action programs, and launched two consecutive Senate campaigns that made use of “ballot security” voter suppression initiatives. More recently, Farr has twice defended—unsuccessfully—the General Assembly’s legislative districts and voter ID law, two initiatives widely acknowledged as targeting black voters.

Farr has always denied having a racially based agenda, and he’s never exhibited the sort of racially explicit, lip-curling jeer that decades of North Carolinians heard from Helms.

But Farr’s legacy could be equally consequential. He could soon be named a judge for life. The forty-four-acre area the Eastern District Court of North Carolina encompasses includes the seven counties with the state’s highest concentration of African Americans—Bertie, Hertford, Northampton, Edgecombe, Halifax, Warren, and Vance. And yet, in spite of the demographics, the district has never had a black federal judge—primarily because Senator Richard Burr blocked two AfricanAmerican women whom President Obama nominated for that seat.

In the end, a judge with Farr’s record would be ideally placed to reinforce the kinds of policies and laws put in place by his former clients in the General Assembly.

More than that, though, his full-throated endorsement by Burr, Senator Thom Tillis, and other prominent Republicans is an active embrace of Helms’s divisive legacy in the age of the no-less-divisive Donald Trump.

Helms’s legacy is not to be sanitized.

Nor should it be forgotten. Indeed, it’s never really left. backtalk@indyweek.com 14 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

T

THE FARR SIDE

homas Farr’s involvement in Senator Jesse Helms’s “ballot security” program lasted longer and ran deeper than was previously recognized, according to federal filings, contemporary coverage, and recent interviews.

Today, the Raleigh attorney faces accusations that he knew more about the ballot security effort on behalf of the 1990 Helms campaign— specifically, a postcard campaign that sought to intimidate black voters—than he made clear when answering written questions from Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee will have the responsibility of once again voting up or down on Farr’s nomination—after approving it in October—if President Donald Trump decides again to nominate Farr for the federal district court in eastern North Carolina.

A look at his record shows that if Farr didn’t realize the implications of the Helms campaign’s initiative in 1990, he was ignoring a history of ballot security efforts that he himself had practiced and that were widely known in GOP circles well before then.

For example, in 1981, returned GOP mailings to black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey were used to challenge their ballots. That brought about a federal lawsuit filed by the Democratic Party against the Republican National Committee, which was settled with a GOP promise not to use voter intimidation tactics. Farr was not involved in the New Jersey effort, but it seems almost certain he would have been aware of it as a young Republican lawyer.

According to Farr’s own account— as well as that of Gerald Hebert, a Department of Justice attorney for twenty-one years—Farr oversaw a ballot security effort in Helms’s 1984 campaign against Governor Jim Hunt.

That effort reportedly used a similar scheme to, as the Hunt campaign alleged to The Philadelphia Inquirer, “blunt the black turnout.”

As the Inquirer reported, “A bulk-rate mailing of Helms campaign postcards was addressed to registered Democrats.

The cards, which cost 11 cents to mail, carried a notation to the postal service requesting that they be returned rather than forwarded. Paying 25 cents a card for each card returned, the Helms

Thomas Farr

C-SPAN

campaign is believed to have compiled a list of voters open to challenge at the polling places because they may no longer live at their registered address.”

In Farr’s response to a letter from Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey—who is not on the Judiciary Committee—seeking more information about his work for Helms, Farr wrote, “There were no complaints about the legality of the 1984 mailings.”

It’s far from clear that no one objected. In fact, the next year, the General Assembly passed a law prohibiting same-day electoral challenges based on returned mail.

In his letter to Farr, Booker asked whether Farr—as was stated in a 1992 civil rights complaint filed by the Justice Department in response to the 1990 postcard initiative—was the attorney involved in the campaign’s “ballot security” efforts.

“I do not know, but several weeks before the election, I participated in a short meeting with persons who wanted

to be hired to do a ballot security program for the Helms committee in 1990,” Farr replied. “During that meeting, I told them there was no reason to do a card mailing in 1990 because North Carolina law had been changed and returned cards could not be used to challenge voters.”

Farr has said he had no advance knowledge of the contents of postcards sent to more than one hundred thousand North Carolina voters, many of them black. The cards, according to the 1992 complaint, were designed to intimidate and discourage black voters in the U.S. Senate race between Helms and former Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt.

But by Farr’s own account, he didn’t try to dissuade those in that meeting from sending out the mailing. Indeed, he offered advice about how the cards might still be used.

“I told them they might attempt to use returned cards in a recount,” he wrote to Booker. “However, at the time of this meeting I was doubtful of the utility of any card mailing, even in a recount, because of the change in North Carolina law.”

Farr, legal counsel to the campaign, walked away at that point, leaving the mailing in the hands of Ed Locke, a political operative who had worked on the 1984 campaign, according to Farr’s statement and a consent decree signed in 1992. (Efforts to reach Locke were unsuccessful.)

Longtime Helms aide Carter Wrenn told the INDY in November that he was at fault for sending out the postcards— which falsely informed voters who had moved that they were ineligible— without reading it.

In this scenario, Farr and Wrenn, both seasoned politicos who’d worked for Helms for years, made no effort to stop or even examine a racially targeted mailing that someone—presumably Locke—had designed to give Helms a leg up in a tight race.

Under the 1992 consent decree, which Farr signed for the campaign, the Helms crew admitted no wrongdoing but were barred from practicing certain techniques while assuring ballot security. The campaign and its associates were also prohibited from any program designed “to intimidate, threaten, coerce, deter, or otherwise interfere with a qualified voter’s exercise of the franchise.”

—Thomas Goldsmith and Erica Hellerstein

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This Tea, Though

f you walk down the aisles of a grocery store this time of year, it’s hard to miss the dozens of brands and boxes of hot chocolate beckoning as you pass by. They’re hard to resist; I have at least two boxes in my cupboard from last year. The decadent drink evokes a sense of comfort and ease during these long, dark winter months. But Videri Chocolate Factory in Raleigh has a better alternative if you’re seeking something familiar, yet somewhat new: cocoa tea.

327 West Davie Street, Raleigh www.viderichocolatefactory.com

Enter the modern chocolate factory and you’ll find bags of the tea on the shelves by the door. The drink, sometimes called cacao tea, repurposes bits of the chocolatemaking process to make a slightly sweet, steeped beverage.

While Videri is known for its beautifully crafted bonbons and luscious sipping chocolate, the manager of the coffee bar, Zack Willhoff, says cocoa tea has been on the menu since 2013. Chocolate starts as a

cacao seed. Videri roasts the seeds in-house with their outer shells—or husks—still on.

But the flaky shells are eventually forced off during a step in the process known as winnowing, when they’re cracked open and separated through a vacuum-powered wind vortex. Instead of discarding the husks, Videri sets them aside to make tea.

The resulting drink is simply delightful. Steeped in a paper tea bag just like tea leaves, cocoa tea is ready in just about four minutes. It’s light, but retains the same satisfying aroma of hot chocolate.

“We tend to only use husks and nibs from the Dominican Republic because it has such a smooth, classic flavor,” says Willhoff. “But we change it up occasionally if we get a bean that really shines. We also run into some beans that work excellent in chocolate, but don’t yield a comparable flavor when brewed as a tea for whatever reason.”

After about six minutes of letting the bag steep in the cup, I find it to be nearly perfect. Slightly sweet with a maltiness not often found in other chocolate drinks, the tea goes down smooth and becomes slightly more chocolatey and flavorful with each added minute of steeping. Although the levels of caffeine in cocoa tea seem to be contested on the internet, Willhoff claims that it has the same jolt as a cup of green tea. Either way, this simple drink has won me over.

At four dollars a cup, cocoa tea is comparable to numerous drinks on Videri’s menu but with something like half of the calories. It’s available hot or iced, and the factory also sells the husks in bulk, to steep at home, for twelve dollars a bag.

“It is incredibly popular, especially among some of our regulars,” Willhoff says.

“We have several people that come to get a cup every day.”

Asked if he thinks cocoa tea could be the new drink trend like cascara or chai, Willhoff says he hopes so.

“It is incredibly delicious and very high in antioxidants,” he says. He even recommends the drink for fighting off colds. He suggests adding about half a teaspoon of Benny T’s Very Hot Vesta Dry Hot Sauce, a dry hot sauce produced in Raleigh to your bag of cocoa tea when feeling under the weather (you can buy a bottle at Videri). food@indyweek.com

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food Fire Starters

YOU DON’T NEED A STOREFRONT TO RUN A POPULAR BAKERY, BUT A WOOD-BURNING OVEN HELPS

BY EMMA LAPERRUQUE

The home bakery set-up at Strong Arm Baking in Granville PHOTOS BY BEN MCKEOWN

J

ulia Blaine always walked by the same bakery on her way home from work in Barcelona. The streets were shadowed by black skies, but the shop glowed with bakers flickering like fireflies as they prepared the bread she would buy the next day.

Julia, who moved to Spain after graduating college, worked as a bartender, and several of her regulars were those midnight bakers at Baluard, the French bakery.

As they drank at the bar, she’d repeatedly ask them for a job. But she wasn’t eligible— because she didn’t speak French.

“Even though we were in Spain,” she laughs.

Eventually, another French baker did hire her: Lionel Vatinet at La Farm Bakery in Cary.

Julia and her husband now own Strong Arm Baking, one of many successful home bakeries in the Triangle. After three years abroad, Julia moved back to the States in 2009—the same time as Thomas Blaine returned from his tour in Afghanistan with the U.S. Marines. The two met long before as teenagers, but were just friends.

“To be fair,” Julia says of Thomas, now 16 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

her husband, “I was in love with him.”

When they finally reunited in their home state, they began to build a life together. Julia worked at La Farm for a year and a half before moving to Scratch in Durham, where she crimped crostatas, baked bread, and ultimately started wondering, What next?

Then Thomas built her an oven.

After reading The Bread Builders by Daniel Wing and Alan Scott, he drafted a few construction plans—and a lot of family and friends—to create the mammoth wood-fired oven behind their ranch house in rural Granville. From their kitchen window, you can peer into its domed, cavernous mouth, as their cat, CC (short for Crazy Cat), struts along the brick ledge.

It didn’t take long for the oven to ignite Strong Arm Baking, which soon became Julia’s full-time job and, eventually, Thomas’s. They work fifteen-hour days together, making “whatever we want.”

Hand-rolled croissants, stuffed with wedges of tortilla Española. Crackly ginger-molasses cookies. Cinnamon-sprinkled doughnut twists. Crusty loaves of sprouted-grain sourdough—all while

tending to their two-month-old, Jack..

These are sent to the Wake Forest and Eno River farmers markets, to a local bread share, and to various restaurants.

Sometimes they stay right where they are, waiting for a neighbor to pick up an order from the porch and leave a log of homemade sausage in its place. This intimacy, this blur between business and pleasure, is what the Blaines cherish.

As they continue to expand, the same question that sparked the oven swirls around like smoke: What next? This fall, they bought a storefront—a historic space in Oxford, where they can grow bigger in a small town.

It is pitch black in Pittsboro, North Carolina, long past sunset on a Monday night.

Rob Segovia-Welsh is outside his house, filling a wheelbarrow with wood to feed the oven. He fired it hours ago and it’s beginning to get hungry. Amid his stacking, he pauses to look at the sky. Out here, it is so empty, so clear, that if he looks long enough, he can see every nook and cranny of the moon.

But there’s bread waiting. The family home is also the family business—Chicken

Bridge Bakery. As with Strong Arm, the separation here between work and life is as thin and intangible as flour clapped between two palms into a cloud.

As Rob mixes caramel-colored roasted garlic cloves into bread dough, the ceiling stirs, then shudders with the sound of a stampede. Rob and his wife, Monica—the other half of Chicken Bridge—have two sons: Simon, thirteen, and Milo, four. As the younger one sprints and squeals and laughs upstairs, Rob can’t help but laugh, too.

In 2014, the Segovia-Welshes launched an online campaign to fund updates to the bakery—notably, a new oven. They raised over $14,000, which went toward the model burning outside right now, crackling and popping like a bowl of cereal. Still, it doesn’t take long to see that the real hearth, the real center of Chicken Bridge isn’t the oven at all. It’s the kids.

“My dad went to a factory and then he came home,” Rob says. “But I never knew what he did, you know?”

Simon and Milo don’t just know. They help—from stacking wood to cleaning proofing baskets to benching dough.

In its eleventh year, Chicken Bridge epitomizes what is exciting about baking right now in North Carolina: grains grown and milled locally; dark, sultry crusts, decorated with hand-cut stencils; and a rekindled closeness between producers and consumers. As Rob puts it: “What’s exciting about being a small bakery is being that role of a village baker.”

The fire is pretty exciting, too. He makes his way outside to check on its progress.

“It’s all alive,” he says. “You’re taking this wood that stood in the forest for hundreds of years, collecting energy from the sun. You’re releasing that energy into the oven. And that is going to raise the bread.

And that bread is going to become a person’s energy.”

He pauses as the flames lick the bricks inside the oven, turning them from black like the sky to white like the moon. By now, the kids are asleep, and Monica is downstairs, weighing dough and shaping it into rounds. He heads inside. When the door shuts, it’s completely silent, except if you get close enough to the oven, you can almost hear it breathe. food@indyweek.com

indymusic

N.C. SYMPHONY: HEROES AND VILLAINS

Saturday, Jan. 6, 1 & 4 p.m., $26 Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh www.dukeenergycenterraleigh.com

Unsung Heroes

IN THE LAST CENTURY, OUR CONCEPT OF GOOD AND EVIL HAS BEEN SHAPED BY FILM SCORES. HOW HAVE THEY CHANGED?

BY FRANK LEHMAN On Saturday, Raleigh’s Meymandi Concert Hall will be filled with the sounds of some of the most famous characters in musical culture—not Beethoven and Brahms, for a change, but Superman, Batman, and Captain Jack Sparrow. Led by Wesley Schulz, the North Carolina Symphony begins its Young People’s Concert Series with a new “Heroes and Villains” program. The event will showcase music for good guys, bad guys, and the eternally entertaining struggle between them.

The program promises some guaranteed crowd-pleasers. With excerpts from Superman and the Harry Potter films, plus a rousing overture for the 1984 Olympics, there will be plenty of music by John Williams, the eighty-five-year-old dean of American film composition (and maybe—with apologies to purists—plain old composition). Danny Elfman, Michael Giacchino, and Klaus Badelt also feature prominently, and the great Jerry Goldsmith gets his due as well with his riproaring score for the otherwise forgettable Supergirl movie. And the program isn’t just Hollywood heroics either; two warhorses from the original nineteenth-century purveyors of pop musical mythology—Rossini and Wagner—make an appearance too.

The program is heavy on iconic “classics,” even if a lot of those classics are actually pretty recent. The newest selection is Giacchino’s suite for The Incredibles, a brilliant pastiche of the 1960s spy-chic musical aesthetic, restored for 2004 audiences.

Still, anyone younger than fourteen years old couldn’t have seen or heard it in theaters.

Given that there’s no shortage of superhero blockbusters from the past five years to draw music from, one might wonder why there’s nothing featured from the true filmmusical cutting edge. Especially with cinematic mammoths like the Marvel Cinematic Universe and DC Films churning out film after film, this absence may seem, at first, like a missed opportunity to excite the young concert-going crowd. Where are all the big new hero themes?

ILLUSTRATION BY SHAN STUMPF

The cost of securing performance rights to major cinematic properties is one cause.

A deeper reason has to do with large-scale shifts in the expectations of film audiences toward both music and narrative. Big, memorable musical themes for characters— heroes, villains, and otherwise—have fallen out of favor over the past two decades.

Instead, film scores have focused on mood, texture, and ambience. At the same time, attitudes toward heroism in the movies have also changed. Most superhero films today feature very little actual heroism: superpowered characters are largely self-involved, too busy battling one another or incomprehensible alien menaces to be bothered with traditionally heroic activities like rescuing bystanders, performing impossible deeds, or generally just inspiring humanity.

We can observe the changing approach to “scoring” heroism in the Harry Potter series of films. The inaugural Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) has the most overt, unabashed hero music of the franchise, with bright fanfares for victory on the Quidditch pitch and sparkling, warm music for Harry’s personal journey. By the time John Williams

contributed his final soundtrack to the series (2004’s The Prisoner of Azkaban), very little of that initial geniality remained. Once the non-Williams soundtracks begin with the fourth movie, almost all shades of the old, extroverted Harry-as-hero music were gone.

Badelt’s music for the first Pirates of the Caribbean offers another good case study in the evolving attitude toward heroics. Earlier models of pirate-adventure music, like Williams’s score for 1992’s Hook or John Debney’s for 1995’s Cutthroat Island used the glittering, brassy idioms established

by Erich Wolfgang Korngold back in the 1940s, when he scored famous swashbucklers featuring Errol Flynn. (Korngold’s own brash pirate music was ultimately based on hero themes by Wagner.)

But when Badelt approached the project, he eschewed most of the markers of this supposedly old-fashioned sound, tossing out the self-congratulatory fanfares and broad major-mode themes in favor of a more minor, more aggressive, poweranthem sort of pirate music. Ultimately, Badelt’s music is no more or less effective than Williams’s or Korngold’s, but it does sound decidedly less gallant than previous musical imaginings of the genre.

Many people mistake Badelt’s score for Pirates as being composed by a much better known name in Hollywood: Hans Zimmer.

Zimmer did indeed contribute heavily to the franchise, but even if he hadn’t been involved as a compositional ghostwriter, the Pirates scores bear all the hallmarks of the Zimmer approach to heroism. In an academic essay I wrote on how Zimmer tries to capture the epic in his music, I speculated that the current trend toward dark, gritty understatement in today’s heroic themes owes to his outsize influence.

Famously, Zimmer’s motif for Batman in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy consisted of just two notes, a minor third apart—a startling contrast to the elaborate gothicism of Danny Elfman’s motif for the Caped Crusader, and an even further depar-

ture from the heart-on-sleeve extroversion of Williams’s Superman march. The motif for Christian Bale’s interpretation of the Dark Knight is so dark that it could easily have substituted as a villain theme; in fact, Zimmer’s motifs for villains like Bane and the Joker are similarly spare and minimal.

Zimmer seems to equate musical minimalism with cinematic realism, favoring the appearance of psychological complexity over the sort of musical memorability that might leave filmgoers humming after leaving the theater. He discards the extravagance of previous archetypes in favor of an ominous, humorless sort of reluctant heroism. His score for 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice was bleak and oppressive, sounding more like it came from a horror film than a superhero movie. When Danny Elfman arrived to provide a score to its 2017 sequel, Justice League, fans chafed at the uncomfortable blend of old-school heroic thematicism with the Zimmeresque minimalist touch.

This dark new angle on the heroic composition carries over even to the comparatively more colorful Marvel franchise. Themes are in short supply here, and even Captain America—the most “heroic” of the heroes— loses his brassy, traditional leitmotif after The First Avenger. But while hero themes are in short supply, other musical ideas are rising to the challenge. Chord progressions, for example, are more likely to signify heroism today than a few decades ago: the ubiquitous C minor-A flat major-F major progression, for example, underlies a number of scores, including Man of Steel, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Avengers, Fantastic Four, and even Rey in Star Wars.

Though they’re a little more abstract, heroic chord progressions are just as capable of getting our hopes up and our fists pumping. Just don’t expect to be humming them after leaving a cinemaplex or a concert hall.

For sweeping heroics, you simply can’t beat the classics. music@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 17

music

DARK WATER RISING

Friday, Jan. 5, 9 p.m., $7–$10 The Pour House, Raleigh www.thepourhousemusichall.com

Grace Notes

IN DIRE NEED OF A KIDNEY TRANSPLANT, DARK WATER RISING’S CHARLY LOWRY TAKES A NEW LOOK AT HER LIFE’S WORK

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH

C

harly Lowry is going through a tough season, but she’s not about to let it best her. Lowry, the lead vocalist of local roots-soul combo Dark Water Rising, makes passionate music that intersects with her activism in standing up for Lumbee and Native American rights. After watching her mother succumb to cancer in November, it’s music—and being surrounded by her friends and family—that’s given Lowry the confidence and strength to keep fighting as she continues dialysis necessary to treat an autoimmune disorder that’s disrupted her life.

Diagnosed with IgA nephropathy at eighteen—“I wasn’t symptomatic and I didn’t feel any pain. I had no clue,” she remembers—Lowry took medication for the condition, which is also known as Berger’s disease, while in college at UNC-Chapel Hill. But her kidneys deteriorated to the point where she was on the transplant list by age twenty-five, a decade earlier than expected. The sudden death of her cousin in 2009 meant a life-saving donation for Lowry, but that organ, too, is now failing.

While she awaits a donor, Lowry has gained a renewed energy and focus toward exploring new musical ideas in the absence of her biggest fan, with her sights still set on a Grammy. “Mama was my best friend and I’ll always grieve her loss, but I think in the spring, I’ll come out like a butterfly,” she says.

INDY WEEK: What’s involved in your treatment now?

CHARLY LOWRY: I moved back to Pembroke a couple months ago to take care of my mother, who had stage 4 cancer and passed away on November 21, so I set up my treatments in Pembroke. It’s nice to be back home and that’s helping me a lot to deal with my treatments, to be back on the land I was raised on. I’d been living in Chapel Hill and commuting back and forth for the past four years, coming to Pembroke every two weeks or so.

Before going on dialysis, I feared it a lot.

I didn’t want to be hooked up to a machine 18 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

into my right lung. I had just performed at Shakori Hills and ended up going to the hospital the following Monday because fluid had been collecting in my lung. They were amazed that I was still breathing and able to perform, but they said I was able to do that because all the singing had conditioned my lungs to be strong.

Above and facing page: Charly Lowry PHOTOS BY CAITLIN PENNA

in order to live. I tried to avoid the conversation whenever the doctor wanted to talk about it, and I was bitter and angry when I first started my treatments. They finally put a catheter in my abdomen for me to do treatments from home [last summer] because they were aware of my schedule as a musician. I perform with another group called Ulali Project, and I took all my supplies over to France for about a week and a half and did my treatments there. I had some flexibility, but it was a lot of work and it was starting to take a toll on me.

I also found out that I had a hole in my diaphragm, so whenever I was doing the treatments from home, fluid was leaking

How has coping with this condition or the treatments given you a different perspective on life?

I don’t remember this fact from going through orientation the first time, but this time they made a point that a kidney transplant is only a temporary solution. It’s not a cure. So if I live for a good while, I’ll probably have to end up getting another transplant.

Being hooked up to the dialysis machine, that really puts it into perspective for me. If something goes wrong—if I get kidnapped and can’t get to a machine—I’m gone. I always think about if I was living in the 1800s and had this going on, I would’ve been a goner. My life may have been cut short by all this, but it is what it is. My mother showed me how to die gracefully and I’m ready whenever, I guess. I’m just embracing the whole situation and taking it one day at a time.

To what extent has this sense of mortality changed your approach towards either your activism or your music?

I told my friends that I knew I was going to go through a dark period when Mama passed because she was my main motivation. She’s the one that has supported me in all of my musical endeavors and my activism. She was always supportive, always a listening ear. We did a canoe journey down the Lumber River to raise awareness about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and Mama had

a fear of water and couldn’t swim, but she still went on the water with me.

Now I don’t have her here, so I’ve got to revisit how I approach my music. I’m sure some songs are going to come out of my experience. I’ve even thought about writing a book regarding her illness and my thoughts on her treatment.

I think now that she has passed, in some weird way, I’m going to be able to buckle down and be more focused. She was my main reason for coming home, so now that she’s not here, I’m more apt to travel away for shows and stay gone longer on tour. The time that I dedicated to her, I’m going to dedicate it to my music.

I’m very funny about the creative process. I haven’t found that it comes easy to me. I’m hoping that having my own space and being able to explore more and create whenever I want will help with that. I was always thinking about Dark Water Rising before, and now I’m thinking more about my solo career and experimenting with different genres and concepts. I’ve got a country accent and I’m from the country, so why not write some country songs and see how they do? I was raised in the church, so I might write some old-timey gospel songs and put them on an album.

How do you see Dark Water Rising evolving?

Our lineup has changed, so we’re going to be branching out anyway when we create music this next time around. Emily Musolino is no longer in the band so we’ve contemplated adding another member or just keeping it as a four-piece, but either way, it’s going to affect the music we create.

We’ve been talking about this third album for two or three years now. We did an Indiegogo campaign and didn’t reach our goal, but we raised a few thousand dollars, enough to pay for the recording. We don’t have a set release date but it’s ninetyfive percent done. It’s just a matter of going back and fine-tuning it. music@indyweek.com

MUSIC BRIEF

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YOUNG YONDER Young Yonder Self-released HH½

Young Yonder doesn’t make good of the young part of its name; neither its members nor its preferred genres are new to the scene. But as for “yonder”—a term of Middle English origin that has attained a distinctly Southern association— the Raleigh sextet delivers. An assortment of distinctly Southern characters, all in search of a better place than the one they occupy, show up on the group’s debut LP, seeking escape, forgiveness, relief from spiritual doubt, and redemption through a variety of means.

The set opens with “Cocaine,” a sturdy rocker whose narrator waits in a hotel room while his lady friend scores some blow. Rather than painting a dire scenario, its protagonist’s self-delusion erupts into rapture as he imagines the drug will “wash me white/white as snow” before a screaming classic rock finish. Following is “California,” an escapist tale that posits the sunshine fantasy of the Golden State as the answer to a desperate dreamer’s prayers. Frontman David Teeter rips into every refrain as if his life depended on it, the first indication of the band’s preference for the dramatic slow build. The words of an apoplectic preacher herald “Pentecost,” a dramatic stomp that would work as the opening theme of the next season of True Detective. One of the most affecting tracks, “How to Be a Baptist,” shows off stirring highlonesome harmonies and the gritty pipes of second vocalist Erik Hawks. On the poppier side, “Get Lost” suggests a happy melding of early Kings of Leon and .38 Special.

But despite Young Yonder’s generally pleasant veneer, the band’s production approach ensures that you can’t miss a word, which means confronting the band’s tendency toward overwrought metaphors head-on (“I’m a river about to flood/overflowing from all this rain”). With attention paid toward animating the desperate souls behind these proudly melancholic songs, the band might forge more of a distinct sensibility from well-worn parts. —David Klein

week.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 19

2 0 1 8 S TA G E P R E V I E W

We’ll Have a Crystal Ball AN EARLY GLIMPSE OF WHAT YOU’LL SEE IN THE INDY’S ARTS PAGES AND ON TRIANGLE STAGES IN 2018

FIVE ART SHOWS BECOMING A WOMAN IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT: FRENCH ART FROM THE HORVITZ COLLECTION (Ackland Art Museum, Jan. 26– Apr. 8) With more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures from an esteemed private collection, UNC-Chapel Hill’s art museum explores the shifting roles of women in eighteenth-century French art.

BOB TROTMAN: BUSINESS AS USUAL (Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Feb. 1–Jul. 1) N.C. State’s revamped museum mounts one of the largest exhibits ever of the works of the legendary North Carolina sculptor, whose motion-activated realist woodcarvings of business executives strike a political chord in this tense American moment.

BY BRIAN HOWE

SOLIDARY & SOLITARY: THE JOYNER/GIUFFRIDA COLLECTION (Nasher Museum of Art, Feb. 22–Jul. 15) A major national touring exhibit that reconsiders the contributions to abstract art by artists of African descent comes to Duke’s museum, featuring works by Norman Lewis, Theaster Gates, Mark Bradford, and others.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater PHOTO BY ANDREW ECCLES

I

n this tiny lull between 2017 and 2018 shows, we’re whetting our appetites for the bounty coming our way this year.

Here’s a sneak peek at what you’ll see in the INDY and on local stages each week—and yes, it took us two pages just to get through March.

Part two’s coming next week.

JAN. 10

Raleigh Little Theatre kicks off the year with What We’re Up Against, Brooklyn playwright Theresa Rebeck’s comedic drama about a woman who gets fed up with the boys’ club at the architecture firm where she works. (The show will play at Peace College while RLT’s GaddyGoodwin Teaching Theatre undergoes renovation.) Durham Independent Dance Artists cofounder Nicola Bullock, who performed the first show ever at the Fruit, returns to debut Imago, a dance theater solo inspired

by Greek mythology, Impressionist paintings, and golden age Hollywood. The massive New York-based dance company Shen Yun Performing Arts tours its overwhelming 20 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

staging of Chinese classical and folk dance at Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium. And NC Theatre tries something different—a straight play rather than a Broadway musical, featuring only two actors, one of whom is Raleigh fixture Ira David Wood III and one of whom is stage-and-screen legend Sandy Duncan— in Love Letters at Fletcher Opera Theater.

JAN. 17

Little Green Pig playwright Tamara Kissane, who earned a four-star INDY review in 2016 by updating Chekhov in The New Colossus, premieres The Master Builder at Hillsborough’s Mystery Brewery, updating Ibsen by flipping the genders. At Manbites Dog Theater, Joseph Megel directs a full production of The Miraculous and the Mundane by prominent local playwright Howard L. Craft; the staged reading last year elicited four INDY stars. At the Cary Arts Center, Black Irish, Ronald West’s contemporary hip-hop dance company, premieres LIT, an incandescent piece you might consider a counter-

part of 2016’s nocturnal Shade. Meanwhile, Raleigh’s Burning Coal Theatre Company is putting up Larry Kramer’s cataclysmic 1985 AIDS drama, The Normal Heart.

JAN. 24 At Reynolds Industries Theater, Duke Performances premieres the nationally renowned Duke theater professor Jody McAuliffe’s stage version of Don DeLillo’s transgressive novella, The Body Artist, with sets by visionary designer Jim Findlay. Carolina Performing Arts brings the indispensable Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater back to UNC’s Memorial Hall, while the Carolina Theatre of Durham brings back mold-setting Chicago improv comedy troupe The Second City with its new show, Look Both Ways Before Talking, about things you probably shouldn’t say.

Les Misérables hits DPAC after its umpteenth acclaimed Broadway revival, while North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre teams with Actors Comedy Lab for An Act of God, based on the @TheTweetOf-

THOMAS SAYRE (Craven Allen Gallery, opening Feb. 28) North Carolina sculptor Thomas Sayre (you might have caught his exhibit White Gold at CAM Raleigh in 2016) is nationally renowned for his largescale outdoor sculptures, but you can get a more intimate look in this small gallery show, featuring mixed-media works inspired by the cotton fields and farm buildings of the rural South.

MARGARET BOWLAND: PAINTING THE ROSES RED (CAM Raleigh, Mar. 2–Jun. 10) Bowland’s challenging, realistic figurative paintings disrupt the standard narratives of beauty, race, and gender propagated by the European tradition from which she draws.

God Twitter account of Emmy-winning The Daily Show with Jon Stewart writer David Javerbaum. And MOJOAA Performing Arts Company artistic director Monét Noelle Marshall premieres her potentially explosive Buy My Soul and Call It Art, a collaboration with more than thirty

local artists at Durham’s Living Arts Collective that explores the fraught relationship between African-American artists and mainstream art spaces, the emotional labor of African-American artists, and the connection between the art market and American slavery.

JAN. 31

The meeting of B-boys and robots is a bit less novel in the Triangle than it might be elsewhere, thanks to visionary puppeteer Jeghetto, but you’ve probably still never seen anything quite like Antony Hamilton and Alisdair Macindoe’s Bessie Award-winning MEETING, in which algorithm-controlled robots generate random sound for two dancers; Duke Performances brings a rare American staging of this Australian production to the new von der Heyden Studio Theater.

Equally far-our things are afoot at Carolina Performing Arts, which is installing the Paul Dresher Ensemble’s interactive Sound Maze at its new venue, Current.

Carolina Ballet brings its beloved, original version of Romeo and Juliet to Fletcher Opera Theater, while PlayMakers Repertory Company puts Tony nominee Lucas Hnath’s The Christians and David Ball’s adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe in rotating repertory for a critical but compassionate look at organized religion.

FEB. 7 NC State Live brings the femaleled, African Diaspora-driven powerhouse dance company Urban Bush Women to perform Hair and Other Stories, probing broader social injustice through the fine strands of tresses. The Carolina Theatre features the chameleonic comedian and actor Eddie Izzard in support of his first book, Believe Me. Raleigh Little Theatre artistic director Patrick Torres takes the helm of camp classic Little Shop of Horrors at Cantey V. Sutton Theatre.

FEB. 14

Adam Trent, fresh off Broadway bamboozler The Illusionists, conjures his blend of comedy, stage magic, and music at DPAC. The Call, by Tanya Barfield (whose Bright Half Life so impressed us at Manbites last February), a play about a white couple trying to adopt a baby from Africa, receives a Bartlett Theater staging at the Durham Arts Council’s PSI Theatre. Theatre Raleigh presents Pooled, an alumnus of its newplay development series, in which the City of Raleigh arts commission’s Moses T. Alexander Greene offers a gospel-infused tale of healing. Raleigh’s Sonorous Road launches its new in-house repertory company with Burn This by Lanford Wilson. And I’m just going to leave this here: Pauly Shore is coming to Goodnights. Dude.

Jerry Seinfeld PHOTO COURTESY OF DPAC

FEB. 21 Seldom seen below Brooklyn, Bedlam wreaks its minimalist madness on Hamlet and George Bernard Shaw’s St. Joan at von der Heyden Studio Theater for Duke Performances. Raleigh’s Theatre in the Park brings back theater god Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant, batty Assassins, a musical populated by people who’ve tried to or succeeded in killing U.S. presidents. (Timely, no?) The threshold-smashing British-German performance art group Gob Squad invades Current with a mélange of text, video, and sound that amounts to an interactive performancelecture on authenticity and the self. Choreographer Aya Shabu premieres LandED: My Hayti|Haiti|History, based on her walking tours of African-American neighborhoods in Durham, at the Hayti Heritage Center for DIDA. At Manbites, Jules Odendahl-James directs Jen Silverman’s dreamlike Romantic satire, The Moors. For world-class dance lovers, the Carolina Theatre has Dance Theatre of Harlem, while Motorco hosts an intimate café-style evening with Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana.

FEB. 28 At Memorial Hall for Carolina

Performing Arts, Cloud Gate Dance Theatre performs a sweeping abstract history of Taiwan, painted in martial arts, modern dance, and ballet. At the Living Arts Collective, DIDA produces its first split bill ever, pairing Declaration, Cara Hagan’s response to the 2016 presidential election, with a sitespecific ritual improvisation by the collective Paideia. Theatre Raleigh stages a contemporary, kid-friendly A Midsummer Night’s Dream, while superstar theater producer Cameron Mackintosh’s earthier, gritter retooling of The Phantom of the Opera swoops into DPAC on its North American tour, complete with a sprawling cast and orchestra and falling chandeliers.

MAR. 7 Carolina Ballet regularly premieres

new works by its artistic director, Robert Weiss, but March brings something else: the world premiere of Lynne Taylor-Corbett’s setting of Ravel’s Bolero at Fletcher Opera

Theater. (Taylor-Corbett works previously seen at Carolina Ballet include Dracula, The Little Mermaid, and The Ugly Duckling.)

Bianca del Rio, “the Joan Rivers of the drag world” (The New York Times) and the winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race Season 6, will glam up the Carolina Theatre. NC Theatre and Broadway Series South join forces for family musical The Wizard of Oz at Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium. NRACT puts up another classic, Ain’t Misbehavin’, a tribute to the musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. Following AndAlwaysWhy, her memorable dance theater installation in the 2016 DIDA season, local experimenter Ginger Wagg returns with Frivolous Artist, exploring “the precarious state of being normal.”

MAR. 14 The most exciting news of March might be the launch of Black Ops Theatre Company’s new Bull City Black Theater Festival at Manbites, which brings together a cross section of artists from local AfricanAmerican theater groups for workshop stagings of new, short plays as well as forums and classes. For the kiddos, Raleigh Little Theatre sprouts Beanstalk! The Musical!, whose exclamation points give you a good idea of its ingenuous take on fairy tales. For the oldies, DPAC has booked nineties sitcom legend Jerry Seinfeld (cue slap bass) and his durable observational stand-up.

MAR. 21 Following its premiere at Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival last year, the whimsical “absurdist travelogue” The Principles of Uncertainty, choreographed

by Mark Morris-trained John Heginbotham and based on acclaimed painterillustrator Maira Kalman’s picture book, comes to Reynolds Industries Theater via Duke Performances.

MAR. 28 NC State LIVE hosts the inim-

itable performer Marc Bamuthi Joseph at Stewart Theatre; the spoken-word and movement artist was called one of the most influential people in dance today by Dance Magazine. His soccer-inspired multimedia piece, /peh-LO-tah/, draws on his experiences as a child of Haitian immigrants. The large, Dutch contemporary dance company Nederlands Dans Theater performs a selection of works at UNC’s Memorial Hall for Carolina Performing Arts, including The Statement by Crystal Pite, whose Betroffenheit wowed us at the American Dance Festival last year. The Oprah Winfrey-produced Broadway musical of The Color Purple, Alice Walker’s Pulitzer-winning novel about African-American women in the 1930s South, will shake the rafters with its gospel and blues numbers at DPAC. After its premiere in Roanoke Rapids, homegrown play In Everything Trust God, an inspirational comedy by Wanda Dunston, brings popular gospel singer Paul Porter to Raleigh’s Memorial Auditorium. And in April, classical Indian dancer Ramya Kapadia, whose “crystalline clarity” shone (quoth the INDY’s Byron Woods) at this year’s NC Dance Festival, brings the ancient form Bharatanatyam to the restively modern world of DIDA. See next week’s issue for part two.

FIVE READINGS JOHN DARNIELLE (Flyleaf Books, Feb. 13) The Mountain Goats musician turned breakout-success author celebrates the paperback release of Universal Harvester, his second novel, a philosophical take on the improbable genre of literary foundfootage horror.

JOHN GRISHAM AND JOHN HART (Meymandi Concert Hall, Feb. 23) UNC-TV bibliophile D.G. Martin hosts a conversation between one-man thriller industry John Grisham and John Hart, whose popular novels are frequently set in his native North Carolina.

CHRIS BOHJALIAN (Quail Ridge Books, Mar. 14) Bohjalian ought to pay rent on The New York Times best-seller list; his twentieth social-issue-based novel, The Flight Attendant, takes on binge drinking and addiction through a murdermystery lens.

ANNA QUINDLEN (Quail Ridge Books, Mar. 23) Quindlen, a Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist and widely acclaimed novelist, charts the fault lines exposed by an unexpected act of violence in a tight-knit New York community in her new novel, Alternate Side.

VEGAS TENOLD (Quail Ridge Books, Mar. 26) Tenold, a widely published journalist, embedded himself in three American white nationalist groups to report on them from the inside, resulting in the vital new book Everything You Love Will Burn: Inside the Rebirth of White Nationalism in America.

INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 21

WHAT TO DO

THIS WEEK

FRIDAY, JANUARY 5

DEFACTO THEZPIAN

Durham emcee Defacto Thezpian has become a fixture in the Triangle’s rap scene with a style all his own, from his distinct flow to his impeccable presence, honed over years of stage training (hence the Thezpian part of his moniker).

Defacto’s music is exciting—not in the sense of over-hyped, SoundCloud-style screaming, but with well-crafted execution of his rhymes that creates a rhythm that’s impossible to ignore. He nimbly links syllables and phrases together with double-time rhyme schemes, slowing it down at times to glue it all together. Listening to Defacto rap is like watching Spiderman web-slinging his way across a skyline: deceptively effortless yet inimitable. Burgundyskylines, released last March, is an exceptional display of his skills, featuring guest appearances from Lil Bob Doe (the Method Man to Defacto’s Red Man) and G Yamazawa. — Charles Morse BEYÙ CAFFÈ, DURHAM 7 & 9 p.m., $12, www.beyucaffe.com

Defacto Thezpian PHOTO

BY MARK MAYA

FRIDAY, JANUARY 5

FIRST FRIDAY AT ARTSPACE

There’s never a shortage of things to do and see at Artspace on First Fridays. This week, the new exhibit is Processing, which displays the results of Megan Bostic and Davis Choun’s six-month residency at the Raleigh exhibition and studio center. But this reception also sweeps up several ongoing exhibits, including the Fine Contemporary Craft Exhibition juried by Gregg Museum of Art & Design director Roger Manley, which includes Robert Lewis-Nash’s appealing “Banana Field” (yes, I did that on purpose), pictured below. There’s also Character Space, Scott Hazard and Stephanie Strange’s abstract, text-based show, and more work by other artists tucked into various corridor galleries.

And there’s a new satellite exhibit at HQ Raleigh on South Harrington Street, featuring Austin Caskie’s abstract paintings based on computer-generated 3-D models, which is worth a look if you can stand a short walk through this bitter cold. —Brian Howe ARTSPACE, RALEIGH 6–10 p.m., free, www.artspacenc.org

“Banana Field” by Robert Lewis-Nash 22 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Untitled work by Stephanie Strange

PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARTSPACE

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10

THE GREAT COVER UP: NIGHT ONE

One of Raleigh’s most esteemed annual tradition is Kings’ nearly twenty-year-old Great Cover Up, wherein local musicians pay tribute to some of their favorite acts. Their efforts can be as elaborately wide-ranging as they are earnest—previous years have included nods to Siouxsie and the Banshees, Carly Simon, The Mummies, Fleetwood Mac, Atlanta Rhythm Section, and Phil Collins. Though the spirit of most Cover Up bands is surprise, one-off sets, some favorite outfits have gone on to make occasional extracurricular appearances: see The Whom, a spirited and convincing tribute to The Who, or the TV Man Band, which tackles beloved television theme songs. In addition to all the musical fun, The Cover Up’s proceeds all go to charity, with this year’s beneficiaries including KidzNotes, InterAct, and others. If you miss night one, all is not lost—the Cover Up extends for three more nights, through Saturday, January 13. —Allison Hussey KINGS, RALEIGH 8 p.m., $10, www.kingsraleigh.com

1.3–1.10 Henry Rollins PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST SATURDAY, JANUARY 6

HENRY ROLLINS: TRAVEL SLIDESHOW

When they say everything old is new again, believe them. One short century ago, legendary low-key radio newsman and raconteur Lowell Thomas made major coin after he more or less invented the modern travelogue, touring the heartland as he narrated the cavalcades of photographs and film he made as a journalist in Alaska, Europe during World War I, and the Middle East with Lawrence of Arabia. Iconic Black Flag singer turned storyteller and columnist Henry Rollins presumably won’t be wearing tweeds and loafers when he cues up his slide projector with shots he’s taken in Antarctica, Central Asia, South America, and the Middle East. Still, the stories accompanying them should be pretty choice—and they’re sure to be a bit more intense than Lowell’s. —Byron Woods FLETCHER OPERA THEATER, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m., $38, www.dukeenergycenterraleigh.com

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

ANNA BONANZA ROUNDUP AT MOTORCO (P. 25), DARK WATER RISING AT THE POUR HOUSE (P. 18), ASHLEY FARMER AT THE REGULATOR (P. 32), THE IN-LAWS AT NCMA (P. 32), LINDA PRAGER AND BRYAN COLBURN ELLIS AT HORACE WILLIAMS HOUSE (P. 29), THE MOUND BUILDERS AT WARD THEATRE (P. 31), N.C. SYMPHONY: HEROES AND VILLAINS AT MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL (P. 17) INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 23

1/6/18 "BEAR IT ALL" KARAOKE PARTY TO BENEFIT CARRBORO ELEMENTARY PTA ($10/$15) 1/12/18

YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND

W/ THE SOUTHERN BELLES ($25/ $30) 1/15 THE WOMBATS W/ BLAENAVON, COURTSHIP ($22/$25) 1/18 THEY

MIGHT BE GIANTS ($25/$28)

1/22 AND 1/23/18

TWO SHOWS!

SAY ANYTHING

IN DEFENSE ANNIVERSARY TOUR W/ AARON GILLESPIE, BACKWARDS DANCER ($22/$27; $40 FOR 2-NIGHT PASS) 1/26 ENTER SHIKARI W/MILK TEETH, SINGLE MOTHERS ($18/$20) 1/27/18 TENNIS W/ OVERCOATS 1/28/18 GAELIC STORM (SEATED SHOW) $25/ $28

FR 1/12

YONDER MOUNTAIN STRING BAND 3/30/18 CIGARETTES AFTER SEX 2/27/18 DIET CIG W/ GREAT GRANDPA, THE SPOOK SCHOOL ($20/$23) 3/5/18 KOLARS 4/2/18 UDO DIRKSCHNEIDER W/ ESCONDIDO ($12) TWO 4/11 AND 4/12/18 SHOWS! 3/7/18 SONREAL ($15/$17) YO LA TENGO ($22/$24) 4/27/18 SUPERCHUNK W/ROCK*A*TEENS ($16/$18) 5/8/18 BAHAMAS ($16/$18) 5/18/18 DAVID BROMBERG (SEATED SHOW) ($23/$26) 5/25/18 PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT ($28/$31)

1/30/18 DESTROYER W/ MEGA BOG ($20/$23

2/15/18 COREY SMITH ($20/$25) 2/17/18 THE BLACK LILLIES W/ SAM QUINN 2/20/18 PHILLIP PHILLIPS ($27.50/$30) 2/21/18 PEDRO THE LION W/ MARIE/LEPANTO ($20/$22) 2/22/18 LIGHTS W/CHASE ATLANTIC, DCF ($20/$23) 2/24/18 ANDREA GIBSON W/CHASTITY BROWN ($18/$21) 3/1/18 QUINN XCII SOLD W/ CHELSEA CUTLER OUT 3/2/18 JOYWAVE ($15/$17) 3/6/18 WALLOWS ($15) 3/7/18 LP W/ NOAH KAHAN ($22/$25) 3/9/18 SENSES FAIL W/ REGGIE AND THE FULL EFFECT, HAVE MERCY, HOUSEHOLD FR 1/12

SA 1/13 SA 1/20 SA 1/25 SA 2/3 SA 2/10 TH 2/15 TH 3/1 FR 3/2

JASON MARSALIS AND THE 21ST CENTURY TRAD BAND JASON MARSALIS AND THE 21ST CENTURY TRAD BAND TRANSACTORS IMPROV: FOR FAMILIES! NO SHAME THEATRE CARRBORO

3/13/18 J BOOG W/JESSE ROYAL, ETANA ($20) 3/16/18 DIALI CISSOKHO & KAIRA BA AND THE OLD CEREMONY ($10/$12) 3/21/18 MOOSE BLOOD W/ LYDIA, MCCAFFERTY ($18/$22) 3/28/18 CRANK IT LOUD PRESENTS:

OUR LAST NIGHT

3/13/18 JESSICA LEA MAYFIELD W/ T HARDY MORRIS ($15) 3/19/18 BORN RUFFIANS 3/20/18 SHAME / SNAIL MAIL ($12) 3/25/18 STEVE GUNN W/ NATHAN BOWLES ($15/$17) 3/26/18 S CAREY W/ GORDI ($15)

CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM 2/1/18 TYPHOON W/ BAD BAD HATS, 1/4/18 MELODIME W/ THE BREVET, SUNBATHE ($18/$20) THE ROMAN SPRING ($12/$14) 2/10/18 WHY? W/ OPEN MIKE EAGLE 1/6/18 MILLIE MCGUIRE W/ DJANGO ($16/$18) HASKINS (OF THE OLD CEREMONY) $6/$8 2/11/18 NOAH GUNDERSEN 1/10/18 BEN GERBER (COMEDY) ($15/$17) 1/12/18 HEAVEN / ORGANOS / 2/12/18 DECLAN MCKENNA FAULTS ($5/$8) ($15/$17) 2/13/18 SONS OF APOLLO ($25/$28)

3/9/18 VUNDABAR W/ RATBOYS ($10/$12)

1/13/18 THE STRAY BIRDS / MAD CRUSH 1/17/18 YUNG GRAVY

SOLD OUT

1/18/18 BE LOUD CAROLINA: MKR, PEOPLE OF EARTH, LOCAL FLORA 1/20/18 CHARLIE MARS 1/28/17 1ST ANNUAL CARRBORO DJANGO FEST FT. STEPHANE WREMBEL AND ONYX CLUB BOYS; & GYPSY JAZZ GUITAR WORKSHOP WITH STEPHANE WREMBEL 1/31/18 THE DANGEROUS SUMMER W/MICROWAVE, THE BAND CAMINO ($15) 2/2/18 BAT FANGS RECORD RELEASE PARTY W/ PIPE, SOLAR HALOS ($10) 2/7/18 WILLIE WATSON ($18/$20) 2/13/18 TINY MOVING PARTS W/ MOM JEANS, OSO OSO ($13/$15) 2/16/18 NORA JANE STRUTHERS ($12/ $15) 2/17/18 HANK, PATTIE & THE CURRENT ($7/$10) 2/20/18 MAGIC GIANT W/ THE BREVET ($12/ $14) 2/22/18 LARRY CAMPBELL & TERESA WILLIAMS

4/5/18 THAT 1 GUY ( $15) 4/6/18 GRIFFIN HOUSE 4/23/18 DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS ($13/$15) CAROLINA THEATRE (DUR) 3/24/18 LUCIUS MOTORCO (DUR)

4/2/18 TWIN PEAKS W/ THE DISTRICTS ARTSCENTER (CARRBORO) 1/27/18 AN EVENING WITH LLOYD COLE ($20) 3/3/18 AN EVENING WITH COWBOY JUNKIES 3/21/18 NEIL HILBORN ($15/$20) 4/20/18 GREG BROWN ($28/$30) THE RITZ (RAL)

2/17/18 SNARKY PUPPY W/ SIRINTIP KINGS (RAL) 2/17/18 PHOEBE BRIDGERS W/ SOCCER MOMMY ($10) 3/30/18 SORORITY NOISE W/ REMO DRIVE, JELANI SEI ($17/$20) HAW RIVER BALLROOM 2/1/18 THE DEVIL MAKES THREE 3/3/18 BRETT DENNEN ($22/$26) 3/23/18 GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR W/KGD ($27/$30) NORTH CHARLESTON PAC (CHARLESTON, SC) 2/25/18 STEVE MARTIN &

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24 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

music WED, JAN 3 2ND WIND: Yeaux Katz; 7-9 p.m., free. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Blue Wednesday: The Spoonbenders; 8 p.m.

• THE CAVE: The Worst Residency Ever; 9 p.m., $5. • HUMBLE PIE: Peter Lamb & the Wolves; 8:30 p.m.

• LOCAL 506: propersleep, Ol’ Sport; 8 p.m., $7. • POUR HOUSE: Canadian Waves, Poor Pie; 9 p.m.

THU, JAN 4 Ecostrike GLOBAL The rafters will be HXC rattling during this international hardcore show.

Ecostrike is a straight edge band from Florida, and they’re joined by English straight edge act Firm Standing Law, Jukai, Dead Heat, and Poland’s The Fight. —KH [LOCAL 506, $10/8 P.M.]

Andrew Kasab Raleigh’s Andrew FLEET FINGERS Kasab plays a curious instrument: the harp guitar. His twelve-string acoustic apparatus looks like something snatched from a Heironymous Bosch painting, but in Kasab’s hands, it delivers the most delightful sounds. On 2015’s Fish, Kasab tackles a surprisingly wide range of styles over twentyfour tracks, from the opening, American Primitive-inspired licks of “IRE” to the snappy, aptly titled “D St. Funk.”

Kasab’s music is pleasant and gentle enough that it works well as a background complement to an easygoing night out at Arcana, but do yourself the favor of giving him your rapt attention instead. —AH [ARCANA, FREE/9 P.M.]

Melodime Melodime’s POSI VIBES catchy, uplifting country-rock tunes have made

1.3 – 1.10

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

WWW.INDYWEEK.COM

CONTRIBUTORS: Grant Britt (GB), Spencer Griffith (SG), Kat Harding (KH), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Noah Rawlings (NR), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS)

SATURDAY, JANUARY 6

the quartet a popular festival draw. Even as the group’s profile has risen, Melodime has distinguished itself with an unusual policy of donating album sales toward its nonprofit, which provides musical instruments for kids in need. With The Brevet and The Roman Spring. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $12–$14/8 P.M.]

Vaughn The 2017 Deep REGAL RAPPER South Open Mic winner Vaughn will prove why he’s No. 1 with his rhymes, bringing the personal and the political to the stage.

With a voice that alternates between raspy and melodic singing, the songwriter and composer will get you thinking and dancing. Indie band Sorelle opens. —KH [DEEP SOUTH, $5/8:30 P.M.] ALSO ON THURSDAY 2ND WIND: 2 fer; 7:30-9 p.m. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Nash Street Ramblers; 7-9 p.m. • THE CAVE: The Daze, Blue Frequency, Ivy Hill; 8 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: Local Band Local Beer: Lovely Budz, Inner Prolific, Six Shots Later; 9 p.m. • SLIM’S: Essex Muro, Trunkweed, De(b)t; 9 p.m., $5.

FRI, JAN 5 Breathe New Life BREATH- It’s not quite clear LESS what Lumberton’s Breathe New Life is supposed to be breathing new life into, as the quintet follows the same basic radio-rock pattern that post-grunge bands have been using since well before the turn of the millennium.

“Three More” does kinda sound sorta like vintage Soundgarden, though, so that’s something. With Promo, Merges, and Jamie Hurt.

—PW [THE MAYWOOD, $8/8:30 P.M.]

The Eccentrics

THE ANNA BONANZA ROUNDUP

Greensboro’s The NOT WILD Eccentrics released Black Market Disco in February of 2017, an EP of nondescript rock. It’s rife with electric guitars and vocals that like recall the Arctic Monkeys, but it’s pretty middling fare. With the Dreamhouses and Indoor Cats opening, hopefully the show is more memorable than the EP. —KH [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Aaron Hamm & the Big River Band TWANGY Honky-tonk group ROCK Aaron Hamm & the Big River Band boasts a thick Southern drawl, twang, and lyrics about hating Obama and drinking whiskey.

Maybe save your money for a flight to Nashville instead— Southwest flies direct. Justin West Band, Sixteen Penny, and Heads Up Penny all open.

—KH [LINCOLN THEATRE, $14/8 P.M.]

Lillie Mae HONEST Fiddling since age HEART seven and singing with her family band even earlier, charismatic multiinstrumentalist Lillie Mae teamed up with Jack White and added an edge to her bluegrass upbringing that’s still evident in her emotive, high-lonesome vocal. The result is expansive, aching Americana tunes that are perfectly earnest and tender.

New Bern’s Jeremy Squires adds raw, haunting twang.

—SG [MOTORCO, $10–$12/9 P.M.]

Magma Opus “You should do it PARTY ROCK if it feels all right/ Because you won’t know what you’re doing by the end of the night,” Trent Fabio sings on Magma Opus’s “Party Logic,” and his logic scans.

Caitlin and Anna Wells

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAITLIN WELLS

Last Memorial Day, Durham theater fixture Caitlin Wells faced some shocking news: her younger sister, Anna, had passed away unexpectedly at age twenty-six.

Wells and her sister, who had Down syndrome, were remarkably close, and they lived full, fun lives together. Wells remembers Anna as someone who was “wildly social, ridiculously positive, stupid outgoing, and participated actively in the world.”

As a child, Caitlin dreamed of having a little sister, and her wishes were fulfilled with the birth of Anna, named after an imaginary friend of Caitlin’s. Caitlin and Anna were typical sisters—loving, fighting, watching bad movies. There wasn’t anything Anna couldn’t do, according to Wells. Anna loved to cook and play softball, and recently had her jersey number retired from Miracle League of the Triangle.

She picked up her “Anna Bonanza” nickname on the softball diamond.

Touched by the number of attendees at Anna’s funeral, Wells wanted to honor her sister’s legacy with a benefit bash, offering a night of support and inclusion for folks with disabilities. It all comes to fruition this weekend with the joyful Anna Bonanza Roundup.

Anna loved singing and dancing, so Wells recruited her friend Skylar Gudasz to provide some music, as well as Blue Cactus and members of Blanko Basnet and Canine Heart Sounds. Members of the comedy troupe Mettlesome will serve as emcees, offering plenty of laughs between the tunes. Proceeds from ticket and drink sales all go to ATLASFit, a Duke-run health and wellness organization for adults with developmental disabilities, which Anna sometimes attended.

“Anna was so lucky to have access to a terrifically inclusive, supportive community, while many folks with disabilities live in isolation,” says Wells. “We’re hoping to change that poco a poco.” ATLASFit serves to help adults with differing health needs become independent and resilient, with classes on coping skills, leadership, and more.

Though Wells still misses her sister deeply, this party in Anna’s memory promises good cheer for all.

“Forus, the most important piece of the evening is that a bunch of folks from differing backgrounds come together to enjoy throwing down and sharing space,” Wells says. —Kat Harding MOTORCO, DURHAM 8:30 p.m., $15, www.motorcomusic.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 25

The Raleigh quartet is all about a good time, deploying classic cock-rock swagger and ram-jam riffs in search of sybaritic indulgence. “Why don’t you get a clue and get down,” Fabio sings. Indeed.

With Stone Eye and Mantismass. —PW [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.]

Of Good Nature REGGAE Now more than PARTY two decades since the heyday of Sublime and Slightly Stoopid, rock-reggae has shown unexpected staying power and commercial viability. This Charlotte quintet, led by Cameron Brown and percussionist Joey Vachon, uses it as the base, but the group also incorporates fusion, R&B, and other rhythmic elements into its good-vibes mix of sounds. Porch 40, a dynamic outfit that’s toured with the Doobie Brothers and REO Speedwagon, leans more toward the funk and jazz. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE, $10–$12/8 P.M.]

Bette Smith SOUL QUEEN

She’s being touted as an heiress to

Sharon Jones, but Bette Smith’s latest release, Jetlagger, makes her sound like Betty Wright with an undertone of Mavis Staples.

There’s soul aplenty, but a heapin’ handful of blues, too.

Tim and Denise Duffy’s Music Maker Foundation provides mostly blues artists for the Bullpen, but this soul-funk excursion is an outstanding exception. —GB [THE BULLPEN, FREE/8:30 P.M.]

Songs from the Road Band Steep Canyon SUPER STRINGS Rangers bassist Charles Humphrey III spearheads the songwriting for his side project Songs from the Road Band. The ensemble is a loose, progressive-minded Appalachian string band collective whose rotating cast of longtime friends—with roots in both Chapel Hill and Asheville—varies based on obligations to their respective main gigs. Tonight’s lineup features members of Town Mountain and Fireside Collective along with a special guest appearance from Hank

Smith and Pattie Hopkins Kinlaw. —SG [FLETCHER OPERA THEATER, $25–$33/7:30 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Defacto Thezpian; 7 & 9 p.m., $12. See page 22. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: The Terry Wiley Band; 9 p.m., $8. Duke Street Dogs; 6-8 p.m., free. • DEEP SOUTH: MechaBull, Jehova’s Witness Protection Program, The Cattle Mutilators; 9 p.m., $7. • IRREGARDLESS: The Doug Largent Trio; 6:30 p.m. • KINGS: Young Yonder, Antique Hearts, Tan Sanders, Halen Sykes; 8 p.m., $7–$10. See page 19. • LORRAINE’S COFFEE HOUSE & MUSIC: Drive Tyme; 7:30 p.m.

• LOCAL 506: Family Vision, LittleBoyBigHeadOnBike, Mountain Lions; 7-11 p.m., $7. • POUR HOUSE: Dark Water Rising, Lotus Sun; 9 p.m. See page 18. RUBY DELUXE: No Dudes Pwr Hr w DJ Thunderthighs, DJ D/X; 10 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Eric Hirsh Quartet; 8 p.m., $10–$20.

SAT, JAN 6 Bear it All Karaoke Benefit YOU DO YOU

The pun in this evening’s title

Present this coupon for

Member Admission Price (Not Valid for Special Events, expires 01-19)

WE 1/3 TH 1/4 FR 1/5 SA 1/6 SU 1/7 TU 1/9

BLUE WED: THE SPOONBENDERS NASH STREET RAMBLERS DUKE STREET DOGS THE TERRY WILEY BAND POPA CHUBBY TBS ROAD TO MEMPHIS/SUNDAY BLUES JAM: FRANK GREATHOUSE, BULL CITY BLUES BAND & BUDDY BLACK TUESDAY BLUES JAM

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Donna the Buffalo In the wild, buffalo HAPPY JAMS have a life expectancy between fifteen and twenty-five years. Roots rock outfit Donna the Buffalo has already surpassed that—it’s closing in on its thirtieth anniversary. Over the years, little has changed about Donna the Buffalo’s groovebased jams, made for dancing and hooping—in which zydeco, roots rock, and reggae mix, often in meandering jumbles— other than the particular messages of its earthy, socially conscious charges. Ragtime and rockabilly busker Woody Pines brings forgotten 78 records back to life. —SG [HAW RIVER BALLROOM, $20–$22/8 P.M.]

The Funky Dawgz Brass Band BRASSY You might not FUNK expect a hot New Orleans-style brass band to come out of Connecticut, but these guys will make you realign your expectations.

With six horn players up front and two drummers keeping the polyrhythm going, the Funky Dawgz blend the Crescent City brass band tradition with some slamming funk grooves for a pure party vibe. —JA [POUR HOUSE, $8–$10/9 P.M.]

QDR’s Happy Q Year COUNTRY The cowboys to PARTY keep an eye on in this year-end roundup of up-and-coming country stars are Midland, which made a lot of country music top ten lists this year with the hit “Drinking Problem,” sung by former actor and underwear model turned frontman Mark Wystrach. —GB [LINCOLN THEATRE, $25/8 P.M.]

Millie McGuire This Chapel Hill POP WONDER singer-songwriter isn’t even out of her teens yet and she’s already played the coolest clubs in the area, been featured on NPR, and sung in Chris Stamey’s radio production Occasional Shivers. She’s also got a debut album in the works with Stamey as producer. But even though she’s a teen crafting pop tunes, it’s not teen pop that she’s turning out—there’s a distinctly adult sensibility in McGuire’s music. Django Haskins opens. —JA [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $6–$8/8 P.M.]

Thunder Dreamer It’s maybe a bit INDIE HEART reductive to say that Evansville, Indiana’s Thunder Dreamer sounds like My Morning Jacket or Built to Spill putting a spin on the desolate openness of John Mellencamp’s middle-America boomer rock, but that’s also not a bad shorthand. Capture, the indie rock outfit’s 2017 record, sparkles, shimmers, and shines,

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refers to the Carrboro Cubs, cherubic recipients of this night’s proceeds, but some baring of souls might well occur as people take a shot at belting out a familiar song chosen by a karaoke pro in front of a large audience. Face your fear, or hog the spotlight.

Your call. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE, $10–$15/8 P.M.]

@TeasersDurham

MUSIC•NEWS•ARTS•FOOD INDYWEEK.COM

SATURDAY, JANUARY 6

POPA CHUBBY

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

neatly emoting the existential ennui rooted in small-town America. It’s grand, expansive, sprawling roots rock that’s not necessarily grandiose or epic— more a slow burn that builds to bristling, bustling crescendos.

Stray Owls open. —PW [THE PINHOOK, $8/9 P.M.]

Angela Winter WITCHY Searching for a VIBES spiritual awakening after the new year? Find it with droney, witchy, lute-y tunes from Angela Winter and Knives of Spain. Breath of the Ether opens. Aside from the music, you’ll be able to get your tarot read, too. Get your new year started off nice and gothy. —KH [ARCANA, FREE/8 P.M.]

Deon Yates SMOOTH There’s someHORN thing inherently silly about the soprano saxophone. In the right hands, it can go to all sorts of fantastic places. The rest of the time, its pinched, nasal tone just sounds dinky, like an overgrown melodica.

Detroit native Deon Yates

sadly tends toward the latter.

His songs mix the highly varnished surface of smooth jazz with a gentle R&B shuffle. His songwriting and solos are generally inoffensive, but they don’t necessarily do that much.—DR [BEYÙ CAFFÈ, $15/7 & 9 P.M.] ALSO ON SATURDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: Popa Chubby; 8 p.m., $13–$15. See box, this page. • THE CAVE: Bobby’s Fever, Thirsty Curses, 90 Proof Therapist; 9 p.m., $5. • DEEP SOUTH: Graham’s Number, Cuttin Grass; 8:30 p.m., $5. • IRREGARDLESS: Lou Padro Duo; 6 p.m. The Second Line Stompers; 9 p.m.

• LOCAL 506: Down by Five, Inner Prolific, Six Shots Later; 9 p.m., $5. • LORRAINE’S COFFEE HOUSE & MUSIC: Heartbreak Station; 7:30 p.m. • THE MAYWOOD: Bloody Sabbath, Walpyrgus, Unicorn King and the Supernatural; 9 p.m., $10. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: N.C. Symphony: Heroes & Villains; 1 & 4 p.m. See page 17. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Luxeposh; 10 p.m. • SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH): Those Dogs, Mourning After, Pushback; 7 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Keenan McKenzie; 8 p.m., $10–$20. • SLIM’S: Propersleep, Cavity Kids, Myself & I; 9 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Jazz Saturdays; 2 p.m., free.

SUN, JAN 7 Sam Harmonix ELECTRIC Inspired by SLIDE dance-pop royalty like Prince and Michael Jackson, Sam Harmonix adds a heavy electronic pulse to his percolating pop confections.

Possessed of a dexterous, soulful tenor and light on his feet, the Raleigh-based songwriter-producer is young, confident, and committed to moving crowds. With Scott Mulligan, Bozuku, Tiyane Clark, Trez Falsetto, Jaye Bullo, and Cody Daniel. —DK [POUR HOUSE, $10/8 P.M.]

Resonancy: Shawn Galvin and David Menestres, Joe Westerlund and Nathan Bowles STICKS & Every Sunday in SKINS January, the Resonancy series explores the ways in which percussion can distort time and space. Kicking off the series are sets led by two complementary drummers. First, New Music Raleigh’s Shawn Galvin joins with Polyorchard’s

The career of blues-rock guitarist and vocalist Ted Horowitz, aka Popa Chubby, is not merely based on an ongoing dick joke. The versatile guitarist’s sound is affected as much by punk as rock. Although he cites the royal trinity—Albert, B.B, and Freddie King—as heavy influences, he also played with Richard Hell and The Voidoids. You can toss Hendrix in the mix as well, but not for his feedback or firestarter antics.

Horowitz was more impressed by Hendrix’s rhythm guitar playing, and the way he incorporated it into his lead work.

Horowitz says an early mentor taught him to play phrases instead of just throwing out licks on guitar, playing the way a vocalist sings. His playing becomes even more interesting with the unusual juxtaposition of his muscular, aggressive guitar against his vocals, which sound like Neil Diamond with a country accent.

On 2016’s The Catfish, Horowitz takes on “Bye Bye Love,” the 1957 Everly Brothers hit penned by country music songwriting legends Felice and Boudleaux Bryant (“Rocky Top,” “Love Hurts”). But Horowitz takes it in a direction that neither the Bryants nor the Everlys ever envisioned, turning the song into an instrumental reggae number.

On 2017’s Two Dogs, however, Horowitz doesn’t wander far from his blues-rock work ethic. “Me Won’t Back Down” has a reggae tinge, backed by a swampy, percussive whomp with a screaming Hendrix guitar overlay. From the title, “Cayophus Dupree” sounds like it might be a swamp pop throwdown, but it instead comes off like an instrumental mash-up of George Benson and Eric Clapton. “Chubby’s Boogie” is a handful of John Lee’s endless by-product mixed with some Allman jam.

A cover of “Sympathy for the Devil” recalls Diamond’s vocals once again, while Horowitz simultaneously channels Jagger gargling grave dirt and challenges Keith Richards with some fiery, wicked licks of his own. To close it all out, Horowitz throws in a rock-gospel cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” just for the hell of it.

Horowitz has said that the blues offered him the opportunity to stretch out on guitar and play all night. These days, for Horowitz, it’s always nighttime somewhere.

—Grant Britt BLUE NOTE GRILL, DURHAM | 8 p.m., $13–$15, www.bluenotegrill.com

David Menestres for a deep study of sonic materiality that can and will go anywhere at any time. After that, Joe Westerlund (Grandma Sparrow, Megafaun) brings along Nathan Bowles (Black Twig Pickers) for Appalachian grooves and quicksilver textures.—DR [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $7/9:30 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: Logie Meachum, Bull City Blues Band, Buddy Black; 4 p.m., $8–$10. • THE CAVE: The Delta Son, Laura Rabell, The Brooks Hubbard Band; 8 p.m., $5. • DEEP SOUTH: Live & Loud Weekly; 9 p.m., $3.

• IRREGARDLESS: Some Hands; 6 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Back Stabbath, Subliminal Surge, Chrome Plated Apostles; 2 p.m., $5. • WEST END WINE BAR-DURHAM: Eric Meyer, Noah Sager & Friends; 4-6 p.m., free.

MON, JAN 8 Glue Thanks to TEXAS PUNK notoriously chaotic live shows and an unparalleled eye for the “good band sweatshirt” market, the Austin, Texas, band Glue has nearly unparalleled roots in the 2017 punk underground.

They dropped their first “actual” LP, Glue, last year. It’s a seventeen-minute absolute triple uppercut of a record.

This highly recommended night of wild punk and hardcore fun also features Alabama’s Bad Example, plus locals Vittna and Das Drip.

—DS [NIGHTLIGHT, $8, 9:00 P.M.]

Truth Club If you miss emo EMO REVIVAL rock, go to this show. Truth Club is a jangly indie pop group, while Mineral Girls (from Charlotte) and Chem (from Connecticut) are whiny, pop-punk groups.

These acts all sound a bit dated, but if you’ve got an emo pop-punk hole in your heart, it can be filled at Slim’s.

—KH [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.] ALSO ON MONDAY THE CAVE: Ben Cosgrove, The Paul Swest; 7 p.m., $5. • IMBIBE: Grewen and Griffin; 7-10 p.m., free. • MOTORCO: Flash Chorus; 7 p.m., $7–$10. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: The Atomic Rhythm All Stars Residency; 8:30 p.m., $5. • NIGHTLIGHT: Glue, Bad Example, Vittna, Das Drip; 8 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Lord Redbyrd; 10 p.m.

TUE, JAN 9 Red Death Quick on the heels of the Glue show at Nightlight the evening before, a double dose of hardcore heats up these freezing January nights. This overstuffed selection features Washington, D.C.’s Red Death and Richmond’s Division of Mind, Invoke, and Nosebleed.

Leave a few of those extra clothing layers in the car for this one. With Enforced. —DS [NIGHTLIGHT, $10/9 P.M.]

VA PUNKS

ALSO ON TUESDAY IRREGARDLESS: Marilyn Wienand; 6:30 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: The Fat Catz, Trike, The Nitrogen Tone; 8 p.m., $6. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: ECU Jazz Faculty with James Riggs and the ECU Student Combo; 7 p.m., $5–$10.

WED, JAN 10 Grüt Phonetically, LOOSE LIMBS Atlanta’s Grüt sounds like Groot, the giant, gentle tree creature from the Marvel comics universe.

INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 27

deep dive EAT • DRINK • SHOP • PLAY

The INDY’s monthly neighborhood guide to all things Triangle

Coming January 17:

Downtown Durham/Ninth & Broad For advertising opportunities, contact your ad rep or advertising@indyweek.com 28 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Lillie Mae performs at Motorco in Durham Friday night.

It sounds as though the ensemble shares the superhero’s big, loose-limbed ambitions. On its self-titled 2016 EP, Grüt offers four expansive, ambitious tracks that blend all shades of smooth jazz with a bit of prog thrown in, just for fun. What the band lacks in focus and precision, it makes up for with noodling chops and polished production. With The Daze.

—AH [POUR HOUSE, $6–$8/9 P.M.]

The Worst Residency Ever AIN’T NO We don’t really DRAG even know who’ll show up during this five-week residency at The Cave: It could be the the ragged-but-right Durham (via Baltimore and Greensboro) trio Drag Sounds, or it could just be guitarist Mike Wallace. Either way, expect radical dive-bar rock that splices slanted and enchanted nineties slacker vibes onto

PHOTO BY LAURA PARTAIN

Beggars Banquet-era Rolling Stones riffs. —PW [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY 2ND WIND: Yeaux Katz; 7-9 p.m., free. • CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Ben Gerber; 8 p.m., $5–$7. • EMPRESS ROOM: Ed Stephenson; 7:30 p.m. • HUMBLE PIE: Sidecar Social Club; 8:30 p.m., free. • IRREGARDLESS: The Barred Owls; 6:30 p.m. • KINGS: The Great Cover Up; 8 p.m., $10. See page 23.

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SUNDAY, JANUARY 7

LINDA PRAGER AND BRYAN COLBURN ELLIS Linda Prager and Bryan Colburn Ellis work in seemingly unlike mediums— clay sculpture and drawing, respectively—but the two local artists covertly meet at the seam of shared concerns, such as the exploration of pure form and the serendipity of unintended outcomes. Prager regards her clay forms as canvases for delicate layers of color and texture, while Ellis calls his drawings “illusory configurations referencing abundance, bodily structure, and landscape” that draw on (without being beholden to) traditional methods such as Japanese woodblock printing. This double cross-wiring of tradition and modernity is the January exhibit at Horace Williams House, courtesy of Preservation Chapel Hill.

—Brian Howe

HORACE WILLIAMS HOUSE, CHAPEL HILL

2–4 p.m., free, www.preservationchapelhill.org

Art by Linda Prager (L) and Bryan Colburn Ellis (R)

OPENING SPECIAL Bryan Colburn Ellis EVENT and Linda Prager: Drawings and ceramics. Jan 7-28. Reception: Sun, Jan 7, 2-4 p.m. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. chapelhillpreservation.com.

Austin Caskie: Artspace satellite exhibition of 3-D models. Jan 5-Mar 31. HQ Raleigh, Raleigh.

SPECIAL Paintings from the EVENT Estate of Wladimir de (Wlodzimierz) Terlikowski: Jan 7-Feb 13. Reception: Sun, Jan 7, 1-4 p.m. Gallery C, Raleigh. www.galleryc.net.

SPECIAL People & Spaces: EVENT Sculptural paintings by Amy Levine.

Reception: Fri, Jan 5, 6-9:30 p.m. Local Color Gallery, Raleigh. www.localcoloraleigh.com.

SPECIAL Processing: Megan EVENT Bostic and Davis Choun. Jan 5-27. Reception: Fri, Jan 5, 6-10 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Resolutions 2018: Statewide juried exhibit featuring 2-D & 3-D media. Jan 3-21.

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. www. hillsboroughgallery.com.

ONGOING And Then the Sun Swallowed Me: Black tape and video installation by Heather Gordon.

Thru Feb 4. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh.org.

Art of Paper: Mary Ann Anderson, Pauline Galiana, Shiho K. Rice, Terry SchupbachGordon. Thru Jan 12. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www.durhamarts.org.

Character Space: Text-based art

by Scott Hazard and Stephanie Strange. Thru Jan 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF PRESERVATION CHAPEL HILL

LAST Envision Saint Agnes CHANCE Hospital: Community and student artists.

Thru Jan 5. Miriam Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www.raleighnc.gov/arts.

Exterminati Sunt Mechanica: John Elliott. Thru Jan 28. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. naturalsciences.org.

A Field, A World: Charlotte native John Beerman spent three decades living and painting in the Hudson Valley.

Six years ago, he returned to his native North Carolina, bringing with him a delicate way of dealing with light.

Beerman’s paintings, while indebted to the light-obsessed Hudson Valley painters of the nineteenth century, are less grandiose visions. His eye directs itself toward nature and landscapes, but he often frames only fragments of them, fixating upon uncommon angles of perception. Segments of tree trunks are foregrounded, the earth in which they are rooted and their leaves overhead unseen. This photographlike framing, along with a gentle way of abstracting away shadow, lends his work stillness and softness. Thru

Jan 20. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. cravenallengallery.com.

—Noah Rawlings Fine Contemporary Craft Exhibition: Juried by Roger Manley. Thru Jan 13. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

LAST Flash of Light, Fog of CHANCE War: Japanese military prints 1894-1905. Thru Jan 7. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland.org.

LAST Freeze!: Installation CHANCE by Mary Carter Taub. Thru Jan 5. Miriam Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www.raleighnc.gov/arts.

INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 29

LAST Gutter Box: CHANCE Translatio Imperii North Korea, 1950: Painting by Lien Truong. Thru Jan 4. Lump, Raleigh. www.teamlump.org.

LAST Imprinted: When CHANCE she lived in Japan, the Durham-based artist Ely Urbanski lacked access to a studio, so she adapted to meet her circumstances instead of fighting them. She turned from human models to pieces of their clothing, devising her own printmaking method of soaking the clothes in ink or bleach and then pressing them onto fabric with her body weight. Obliquely but poignantly, the prints hint at the stories their former owners relate in accompanying videos; when Urbanski deconstructs the clothes rather than printing them whole, they also capture something of memory’s degradation. And they are weirdly, simply beautiful. Thru Jan 5. Duke Campus: Louise Jones Brown Gallery, Durham. duke.edu.

—Brian Howe

More Than One Story | Mas de una historia: Photography.

Thru Feb 1. UNC Campus: Davis Library, Chapel Hill. www.lib.unc.edu/davis.

Painted Medicine: A Ceremony of Color: Ashley Spero. Thru Apr 12. Durham Convention Center, Durham. durhamconventioncenter.com.

Raleigh Makers Market: Sat, Jan 6, 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Benelux Cafe, Raleigh. raleighmakersmarket.com.

LAST Richer Than Gold: CHANCE Stephen Hayes.

Thru Jan 3. Durham Art Guild, Durham. durhamartguild.org.

The Shape of Fashion: Dress trends from the 1800s to the 1900s. Thru May 6. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www.ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Step Right Up: Sculpture by Patrick Dougherty. Thru Aug 31.

Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland.org.

The SuperNatural: We’ve lost sight of the seams, once considered inviolable, between nature, technology, and commerce—though we

sometimes imagine we are crossing a boundary when we take thousand-dollar bikes into deceptively wild woods with our smartphones and moisturewicking socks. The SuperNatural wades into this liminal zone, exploring how we see and shape the contours of our planet as the physical refuse of the industrial age shades into the digital refuse of the present. The show includes a generative digital video by Tabor Robak, a virtual reality installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and photos by Lars Jan, among many others.

Winter Corridor Artists Exhibition: Dana Ayscue, Cynthia Bickley Green, Stephen Cefalo, Eileen Hendren, Kelly Murray. Thru Jan 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

The Woman Who Made Snow: Photography by Anna Exum Snow. Thru Mar 31. Durham History Hub, Durham. www. museumofdurhamhistory.org.

Louis C. Tiffany: Art and Innovation from the Wester Collection: Stained glass windows, vases, lamps. Thru Mar 4. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

LAST Low Country Life: CHANCE Paintings by Irene Tison. Thru Jan 4. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www.historichillsborough.org.

30 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation: Photographs by Lauren Pond. Thru Feb 4. Duke Campus: Rubenstein Library, Durham.

LAST Triangle Weavers CHANCE Art Exhibition: Fiber art. Thru Jan 6. Carrboro Branch Library, Carrboro. www.co.orange.nc.us/library/ carrboro.

We’ve Met Before: Handwoven cloth has a certain rigor, a requirement for stitches to interact with structural integrity rather than spontaneity. Ink, meanwhile, has a quicksilver impulsiveness, a tendency to slip and run unbounded.

Andrea Donnelly holds this contrast in tension.

The images on her large textile pieces evoke bodies, Rorschach blots, abstract flora, and, most of all, memory. Dyed, woven, unwoven, and rewoven, the work contains “a literal record of its own making.” Thru Jan 28. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe

A Kiss of the Earth: Apt for a work about a season of fecundity, the epochal modernist ballet The Rite of Spring just keeps on giving, more than a century after its legendary premiere. It’s the inspiration for this experiment

by UNC-Chapel Hill associate art professor Sabine Gruffat, whose interactive threechannel video projection remixes the story of a pagan tribe’s maiden sacrifice: real-time weather data from Paris affects the weather in the animation, and viewers can text to a number on the wall to further alter the proceedings. Thru Jan 28.

NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe

Mike’s Attic: Partnership with Mike’s Art Truck. Self-taught artists. Thru Feb 28. Durham Technical Community College (Orange County Campus), Hillsborough. www.durhamtech. edu/orangecountycampus.htm.

Brooklyn artist Chris Doyle created “Dreams of Infinite Luster,” a digital animation, for the exterior vitrines. In it, “All the elements are rendered in gold, the color of lucre—the product, engine, and goal of capitalism.” Is a luxury hotel an odd site for post-capitalist critique? Sure. But, as we’ve said, what seams? Thru Jul 1.

21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham. —Brian Howe

food “White Gold II” by Thomas Sayre, whose February exhibit at Craven Allen Gallery is one of our picks in our 2018 arts and culture preview (see p. 20) PHOTO COURTESY OF CRAVEN ALLEN GALLERY

LAST Faithful Friends: CHANCE The Holiday Tea: $16-$32. Thru Jan 7. 2:30-4:30 p.m. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. washingtondukeinn.com.

Free Wine Tasting: Mondays, 5:15-7:15 p.m. Bottle Rev Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill. bottlerev.com.

stage OPENING

Don DC Curry: Fri, Jan 5-Sun, Jan 7. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

Hannah Hogan and Dusty Slay: Stand-up comedy. $12.

Thu, Jan 4, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

The Mound Builders: Play. $25.

Thru Feb 19. Ward Theatre, Durham. wardtheatrecompany. com. See p. 31

ONGOING Anything Goes Late Show: Sat, Jan 6, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

Eyes Up Here Comedy Showcase: Comedy by local women. $5. Wed, Jan 3, 8 p.m.

Neptunes Parlour, Raleigh. www.neptunesparlour.com.

The Harry Show: Ages 18+.

Improv host leads potentially risque games with audience participation. $10. Fri, Jan 5 & Sat, Jan 6, 10 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh. www.comedyworx.com.

On Your Feet!: The critics largely agree: the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and The Washington Post all call On Your Feet!, the story of pop sensations Emilio and Gloria Estefan, one of the better jukebox musicals of the last few years. Yes, they all ding the formulaic conventions of that genre: rags-to-riches storyline?

Check. Commercial polish?

Yes. Self-congratulatory book?

A given, since the subjects participated in the project.

But the critics then say what makes it special. “The very air in the room seems to vibrate” as the show “roars through the up-tempo dance numbers,” says the Times, while the Tribune finds that Sergio Trujillo’s choreography “pays joyous and authentic tribute to the heritage of the Cuban people.” Noting the couple’s hits, including “Rhythm Is Gonna Get You” and “Conga,” the Post concludes, “If the Estefans’ musical remains pretty much by-the-numbers, at least those numbers really rock.” $30+. Thru Sun, Jan 7.

Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www.dpacnc.com. — Byron Woods

? y d n i e h t e v o L

us... t r o p p u s o esses wh in s u b e h t Support

! l a c o l S hop

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e Bu s i n e s s L a w UNCONTESTED In c o r p o r a t i o n / L LC / DIVORCE Pa r t n e r s h i p MUSIC BUSINESS LAW Wi l l s INCORPORATION/LLC WILLS C o l l e c t i o n s SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c

Brandon Cooke in Ward Theatre Company’s The Mound Builders PHOTO BY ALEXANDRA PETKUS SATURDAY, JANUARY 6–SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 18

THE MOUND BUILDERS

They don’t tend to mention this during grad school orientation, but it’s hard not to acquire a certain form of tunnel vision while working on an advanced degree. What’s more disquieting? As your field of vision narrows, sometimes your values and your interest in your fellow humans narrow as well. Take the two families of academics in Lanford Wilson’s 1975 drama, The Mound Builders. Anthropologists on an archaeological dig in the backwoods along the Mississippi River, they seem nice enough, at least at the start. But they’re so focused on their own intellectual pursuits and what the eighth-century Native Americans of the title left behind that they’re not terribly interested in the rural culture where they’ve set up camp or the immediate concerns and needs of the good ol’ boy who’s hosting them.

Wonder how that’s going to work out. Artistic director Wendy Ward directs her Meisnerinfluenced troupe in this psychological drama. —Byron Woods

WARD THEATRE COMPANY, DURHAM

Various times, $25, www.wardtheatrecompany.com

967-6159

(919) 967-6159

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com INDYweek.com | 1.3.18 | 31

page READINGS & SIGNINGS Boozy Poetry Night: Local poets read their work. Mon, Jan 8, 8:30 p.m. The Stag’s Head, Raleigh.

Robert Crais: The Wanted. Wed, Jan 10, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

Donna Everheart: The Road to Bittersweet. Tue, Jan 9, 7 p.m.

Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www.quailridgebooks.com.

Ashley Farmer: Remaking Black Power: How Black Women

screen Transformed an Era. Mon, Jan 8, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. regulatorbookshop.com.

See box, this page.

Henry Rollins: Travel Slideshow. $37-$150. Sat, Jan 6, 7:30 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

See p. 23.

LECTURES ETC. Angles: A Music Business Panel Discussion Series:

Wed, Jan 3, 8 p.m. Deep South the Bar, Raleigh.

DeepSouthTheBar.com.

Economic Forecast: Mark Vitner and Mark Yusko. Wed, Jan 3, 7 a.m. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

In the Wings: The Christians and Moliere’s Tartuffe: Discussion with the performers from PlayMakers Repertory Company. Mon, Jan 8, 7 p.m. South Regional Library, Durham. durhamcountylibrary.org.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 5

THE IN-LAWS Billed as “The FIRST Certified Crazy Person’s Comedy,” The In-Laws starts at absurd and hits the gas from there. The 1979 film’s high-concept plot—an uptight guy is drawn into the danger-filled world of a future in-law—has been redone many times, including a terribly flat 2003 remake with Michael Douglas and Albert Brooks. Accept no substitutes: while few might think of Peter Falk and Alan Arkin as a headlining comedy team, they achieve tremendous belly laughs. Falk’s rogue CIA operative calmly summarizes the danger they’re in as smoothly as Columbo doing an interrogation (and delivers an insane monologue about the “Guacamole Act” and children-stealing giant flies). Arkin’s straitlaced dentist is driven to increasing levels of panicked apoplexy as he’s thrown into danger again and again (the “Serpentine!” scene is a classic). And that’s before Richard Libertini shows up as the world’s worst dictator and there’s a firing squad singing “Trees.” Just watch and laugh. —Zack Smith

NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH | 8 p.m., $5–$7, www.ncartmuseum.org

SPECIAL SHOWINGS Durham Cinematheque’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2.: $5-$10.

Sat, Jan 6, 8 & 10 p.m. Durham Cinematheque,Durham.

I Called Him Morgan: Thu, Jan 4, 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham. durhamjazzworkshop.org.

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and Star Wars Epidsode VI: Return of the Jedi: Thu, Jan 4, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. www.thepinhook.com.

Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope: Wed, Jan 3, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. www.thepinhook.com.

OPENING MONDAY, JANUARY 8

ASHLEY FARMER: REMAKING BLACK POWER: HOW BLACK WOMEN TRANSFORMED AN ERA Ashley Farmer is a historian of African-American women’s history and radical politics in the AfricanAmerican studies department at Boston University. In her UNC Press book Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, she unspools a sweeping history of African-American women’s roles and contributions in the political and social quarters of the Black Power movement, drawing on a wide variety of artwork, manifestos, and essays produced by female members of the Black Panther Party, the Congress of African People, and other groups. Farmer complicates the narrative of these freedom fighters’ marginalization, showing how they drove and defined a movement in ways that were vital if underappreciated and developed new images of African-American womanhood in the process.

—Brian Howe

THE REGULATOR BOOKSHOP, DURHAM | 7 p.m., free, www.regulatorbookshop.com 32 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

Insidious: The Last Key—In the fourth installment of the supernatural horror franchise Insidious, parapsychologist Elise Rainier investigates a haunting in her family home.

Rated R.

N OW P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at indyweek.com.  Coco—This Day of the Dead-themed animated fantasy has one of Pixar’s

richest worlds and weakest stories. Rated PG.

to class but falters on race.

Rated R.

½ Darkest Hour—This Churchill biopic is bright and slight, but Gary Oldman turns in a tour de force performance as the UK’s iconic wartime prime minister. Rated PG-13.

½ The Man Who Invented Christmas—Charles Dickens and his famous A Christmas Carol characters come to life in this pleasant holiday surprise from across the pond. Rated PG.

 The Disaster Artist— James Franco does a suspiciously good impression of a bad artist, The Room writer-director Tommy Wiseau, but the point eludes us. Rated R.  Downsizing— Alexander Payne’s satire, in which Americans are shrunk in order to get a mini version of the good life, is something very rare: a film that doesn’t resemble anything we’ve seen before. Rated R.  Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle—You’d need an awful lot of nineties nostalgia to see this reboot as anything but a utterly generic jungle adventure. Rated PG-13. ½ Justice League— Uneven but much better than Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, this collision of Zack Snyder’s bombast and Joss Whedon’s wit actually kind of works. Rated PG-13.  Lady Bird—Greta Gerwig’s nostalgic comingof-age debut as a writerdirector is winning and alert

 Molly’s Game—You either dig Aaron Sorkin’s talkative style or you don’t, and he really lets it rip in this directorial debut about the high-stakes world of L.A.’s underground poker scene.

Rated R.  The Shape of Water—For better and worse, Guillermo del Toro’s fable of the love between a mute janitor and a strange undersea creature is like a children’s book for adults, beautiful but morally simplistic. Rated R.  Thor: Ragnarok—A stodgy, self-serious franchise springs to life with demigods delightfully out of their element. Rated PG-13. ½ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri— Maybe the Coen brothers could have pulled it off, but Martin McDonagh has tonal problems with the weighty themes and discordant plot of this vengeful-mother tale.

Rated R.

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RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER 9 PAPER RECYCLE THIS RECYCLE 1 9 THIS 6 PAPER RECYCLE THIS 4 9 2 7 8 PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER 5 6THIS 7PAPER RECYCLE 1RECYCLE 4THIS PAPER THIS PAPER 3 7RECYCLE 1 9 8RECYCLE 6 5THIS 3PAPER 4 RECYCLE 5 2 THIS PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER 2 RECYCLE THIS PAPER MEDIUM 94 RECYCLE THIS #PAPER RECYCLE THIS PAPER THIS PAPER su | do | kuRECYCLE this week’s puzzle level: RECYCLE THIS PAPER © Puzzles by Pappocom

3

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

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.

2

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2 1 3 6 9 8 7 4 5 If you just7 can’t 5 8 1 wait, 3 4 2check 6 9 out the current 4 6 9week’s 7 5 2 answer 1 8 3 6 2 5 9 8 1 4 3 7 key at www.indyweek.com, 3 9 4 2 6 7 8 5 1 and click “Diversions”.

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solution to last week’s puzzle

Page 24 of 25

34 | 1.3.18 | INDYweek.com

4

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30/10/2005

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DASHI IS HIRING!

back page

Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com

Dashi in downtown Durham is looking for back of house staff!

Apply to be a line cook, prep cook, or dishwasher.

Full time and part time positions available.

Submit your resume at www.dashiramen.com/working-at-dashi

DANCE CLASSES IN SWING, LINDY, BLUES, TAI CHI At ERUUF, Durham & ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

RICHARD BADU, 919-724-1421, rbadudance@gmail.com

deep dive EAT • DRINK • SHOP • PLAY

The INDY’s monthly neighborhood guide to all things Triangle Coming January 17:

Downtown Durham/Ninth & Broad For advertising opportunities, contact your ad rep or advertising@indyweek.com

THOUSANDS OF EYES ON YOUR AD EVERY WEEK

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