INDY Week 12.11.19 by Indy Week

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RALEIGH December 11, 2019

S C I T I L P O

R U I N S

E V E R Y T H I N G A story about Nancy, who happened to be mayor BY LEIGH TAUSS, P. 8

2 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK RALEIGH VOL. 36 NO. 48

DEPARTMENTS

6 The new Raleigh City Council got more done in one day than its predecessor did in two years.

6 News

7 Over the last seven years, there’s been a 900 percent increase in complaints about working conditions that the state Department of Labor has declined to investigate.

20 Food 22 Music 24 Arts & Culture 30 What to Do This Week

8 Lots of politicians say they’re not politicians. Nancy McFarlane really wasn’t one, for better or worse.

33 Music Calendar 37 Arts & Culture Calendar

20 With her new tea shop, Preeti Waas is giving downtown Raleigh something it didn’t know it needed. 21 Hundreds of years ago, pretty much all beer was sour. 22 Durham rappers Swank and King Draft were building strong on their own, but 9th Wonder’s Jamla Records turned them into a dynamic duo. 24 The U.S. Department of State’s Next Level program for global hip-hop diplomacy grew out of Mark Katz’s Beat Making Lab at UNC. 26 Raleigh filmmaker Sam Cox found documenting a monastery in West Virginia so moving that he converted.

Preeti Waas’s café is your new DTR power-lunch go-to (see page 20) PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

On the cover

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 3

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INDY VOICES

Noble Sentiment

We <3 Anarchy

CONFEDERATE WORSHIPPERS ARE SAD THAT KIDS WILL MISS THE CHRISTMAS PARADE. REALLY, REALLY SAD. BY BARRY SAUNDERS

o you know how we’ve been covering this shady-ass deal in which UNC’s Board of Governors, for no discernible reason, gave the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans Silent Sam and $2.5 million to care for it? Well, you’ll be shocked to learn that a certain kind of reader is very unhappy with us. Joseph B. Longino Jr. writes: “‘Confederate fetishists’ and ‘white supremacist insurrection.’ Come now. Journalism? You’re no more interested in truth and honest public discourse than the McCarthyists of the 1950s.” Lisa Rudisill was certain that we wouldn’t publish her comments: “I am certain that with your obvious total support of the anarchy party, Antifa, and the mob action at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, you will not print my comments on the settlement reached with the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I just want you to know that you do not provide a news service, but a brainwashing service to the public if you don’t give plain-old news. At Chapel Hill, the school of journalism teaches to report objectively, don’t they? So why doesn’t anyone do that anymore?” She was so certain we wouldn’t publish her letter that she left a much longer comment on our website, which we’ve excerpted here: “You are obviously full of unfair venom for what you do not understand. Are you a North Carolina native? North Carolina did not want to join in the war, but when Lincoln asked them to kill their brothers to the north and to the south in Virginia and South Carolina, they chose not to help him but to draft their own sons to oppose his will. Believe me, friend, at least one hundred men both North and South died for every single slave who ever died under slavery. “Grow up, people! Quit bellyaching about alleged injustices. The price has been paid over and over and over for whatever injustices you believe were done to you. I support leaving Silent Sam in its very place. Reaching a deal is unacceptable to me. Keep the money. Put the statue back where it rightfully belongs. Control the crying babies.” Want to see your name in bold? Comment: indyweek.com Email: backtalk@indyweek.com Facebook: @IndependentWeekly Twitter: @indyweek

BARRY SAUNDERS is a former News & Observer columnist. He publishes thesaundersreport.com. NEXT WEEK: T. GREG DOUCETTE, a local attorney, criminal justice reform advocate, and host of the podcast #Fsck ’Em All.

his wasn’t what Don McLean had in mind when he sang about “the day the music died,” but it fits. Wake Forest and Garner both canceled their Christmas parades this year, meaning there’ll be no back-bending drum majors, no strutting horn players or baton-tossing majorettes, no Santas tossing candy at tykes lining the parade route. (Say, what’s with the scrimping Saint Nicks who only toss two lollipops at a time when they see dozens of clamoring kids and adults waving frantically from the sidelines? As kids, we used to chase after Santa’s float yelling, “Why so frugal with the fructose?”—although in words more colorful than any candy cane he had in his bag.) Now, where was I? Oh, yeah: Wake Forest and Garner. Both municipalities canceled their parades when people protested the presence of floats honoring groups that celebrate ancestors who went to war with the United States government. Officials said they weren’t sure they could ensure public safety. For those of us of a certain age who grew up in small-town North Carolina, the annual Christmas parade was a huge deal, and canceling it would have broken our hearts. Were there Sons of Confederate Veterans or Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy floats in Rockingham’s parades? If so, we never noticed. What did we care about some old, gray-bearded men riding on a raggedy float and pining for romanticized faded glory? At that age, we were more focused on catching as much free candy being tossed by Santa as we could.

Some of us were also too busy trying to slip a note to Santa—Oh, so I’m the only one?—apologizing for stealing that baseball out of the Woods 5 and 10 Cent store (chill, I took it back), or we were following the Leak Street Tigers marching band under the exquisite direction of Mr. Lewis Broadnax. See, it wasn’t Christmas until you saw the Leak Street High School Marching Band that had two—TWO—consecutive drum majors named Larry Diggs. Both were the high-steppingest, back-bendingest drum majors God ever made, and if you want to start a twohour argument, just ask someone who attended Leak Street which Larry Diggs was better. The Rockingham Christmas parade was, every year, the most integrated the city—nay, the county—ever got. At a time when the downtown movie theater made us climb a rickety fire escape and sit in the balcony to watch a flick, bands from all-white high schools marched and played in front of or behind bands from all-black schools, and I don’t recall a single racial incident. That’s not to say there never was an incident: Who can forget the year my twelve-year-old buddy John created chaos along the parade route when he went into the five-and-dime, five-fingered a pack of straight pins, and gleefully began popping the colorful balloons festooning floats and held by little kids. Someone would ask, “Where’s John?” and then we’d hear a balloon pop or a kid scream, and we knew he was nigh. The main attraction of the Rockingham Christmas parade was the Morrison Training School drill team.

The impeccably pressed uniforms, the shiny boots and helmets, the precision with which they marched—and the admiring oohs and aahs they inspired— almost made getting a five-finger discount on a two-dollar baseball and being sent to reform school worthwhile. Almost. As for the worshippers of the Confederacy, if they want to honor an ancestor’s treason by naming all of their children “Beauregard” or “Nathan Bedford Forrest”—or by erecting a statue or flying a flag—we say, “More power to ’em.” As long as it’s on private property. But don’t expect the rest of us to join in or subsidize your remembrance. Don Scott, commander of the Col. Leonidas L. Polk Camp No. 1486, a Sons of Confederate Veterans group, told The News & Observer that he “feel[s] so bad for the children” who won’t get to see a Christmas parade. “If it were up to me personally, if it came down to being in the parade or having it for the kids, I would choose the latter.” What a noble sentiment. What magnanimity. What bull. If the sons of—er, uh—veterans were really as concerned about the children as they profess to be, they’d have fallen on their daddies’ swords long ago and voluntarily pulled out of the parades. backtalk@indyweek.com INDY Voices—a rotating column featuring some of the Triangle’s most compelling writers—is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Visit KeepItINDY.com for more information. INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 5

indynews

The Council of Go

RALEIGH’S NEW LEADERS GOT OFF TO A FAST START. THEIR REAL CHALLENGES LIE AHEAD. BY LEIGH TAUSS

he newly seated Raleigh Council got more done in its first meeting than its predecessor did in two years. The real question is, will it be able to keep up the breakneck pace when it comes to addressing more challenging issues like affordable housing? In a series of swift motions last week, all unanimously approved, the council voted to begin loosening restrictive regulations on accessory dwelling units, short-term rentals, and electric scooters, issues that lingered for months or years under the previous council. If the board—swept into office in October on an aggressive pro-growth platform—follows through and makes good on its campaign promises, it will nix a requirement that forces residents to petition neighbors for the right to build backyard cottages and instead allow them to build ADUs by right throughout the city. It will also legalize renting whole houses on Airbnb and other services (enforcement has been suspended while new rules are vetted) and permit more than one scooter company downtown. But the council didn’t stop there last week. It reorganized committee assignments by returning the Growth and Natural Resources Committee to a body of four instead of five. Two years ago, the previous council’s five-member anti-development majority usurped then-mayor Nancy McFarlane’s traditional appointment prerogative and put themselves on that committee, giving them a final say on development issues. While those five could create a consensus among themselves, they also moved at a snail’s pace, and key initiatives lingered in the committee for months or longer. Four of the five are no longer on the council. Nicole Stewart heads the new GNR committee, while Corey Branch will lead Transportation and Transit. Newcomer Jonathan Melton will chair the Economic Development and Innovation Committee. Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin will helm the Safe, Healthy, and Vibrant Communities Committee—renamed from the Healthy Neighborhoods Committee, a not-so-subtle indication that the main priority will no longer be protecting neighborhoods from growth. The public also got a glimpse at how Baldwin will run meetings—and not for the best. In the public comment period on Tuesday night, she authoritatively enforced a poorly conceived decorum rule approved by the previous council earlier this year that forbids residents from speaking directly to individual council members. Not only that, 6 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

The new Raleigh City Council PHOTO BY COREY BRANCH but she arbitrarily expanded the rule to forbid constituents from even mentioning the names of individual staff members—in this case, Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown. After the INDY criticized the mayor for enforcing this rule last week, Melton posted on Twitter that the council will look into changing it. Some of the most sweeping changes came during a lengthy session on Tuesday night, when the council increased zoning for several parcels, which could add more than a thousand housing units throughout the city, most concentrated in a series of up-to-twenty-story mixed-use developments off South Saunders Road near Dix Park. Compared to the previous council, which would endlessly debate setbacks and traffic impacts, watching these rezoning requests sail through was almost surreal. Even David Cox, the lone holdover from the GNR 5, seemed on board. But the council’s biggest test is yet to come. Baldwin promised to move forward with ambitious bonds to address housing affordability and the first phase of Dix Park, what she dubbed Raleigh’s “moonshot” during her swearing-in address.

If it lives up to its moniker, the moonshot will have to be at least as big as the $95 million affordable housing bond that passed in Durham in November. (Baldwin has invited Durham mayor Steve Schewel to give a presentation on the bond and Durham’s housing plans, including Expanded Housing Choices—Durham’s plan allow increased density in single-family neighborhoods near downtown—at a council workshop on December 17.) More important than the housing bond’s dollar amount is how the council will try to achieve its goals. Will it seek to increase zoning and encourage density in existing neighborhoods or hoard land near transit corridors, concentrating affordable housing along bus lines off Capital Boulevard and New Bern? Will it focus on rental housing or affordable homeownership programs, like in College Park? And will it move as swiftly on those measures as it did last Tuesday, or stall under the weight of its ambitions? “This initiative will set the stage for the Raleigh of the future and determine what our city will become over the next decade,” Baldwin said at her swearing-in ceremony last Monday. “It’s our moonshot. Something we, as a city, must do.” ltauss@indyweek.com

news

The Ugly Underbelly

DURHAM SERVICE WORKERS SHARE STORIES OF POVERTY WAGES AND POOR WORKING CONDITIONS— AND AN INDIFFERENT STATE LABOR DEPARTMENT BY THOMASI MCDONALD

ast Thursday, nearly two-dozen Durham service workers, some dressed in their work uniforms, descended on the Community Family Life & Recreation Center in Lyon Park to share stories of employers that make billions while paying them pennies, and yet steal the skin of that coin from them, sexually harass them, and create unsafe work environments. They stood resolute at the podium, relaying their struggles to feed their children, keep a roof over their heads, and—though some are seriously ill—afford health care. Their testimonies offered evidence of the Bull City’s ugly underbelly. The city’s prosperity has garnered national recognition, often overshadowing the challenges faced by service workers and community artists who were attracted to the inclusiveness in Durham’s DNA but who are now finding it increasingly difficult to live here. “We are here tonight because workers’ stories are powerful,” said Cierra Brown, a McDonald’s worker and a moderator of “Working in Durham: A People’s Hearing,” which was organized by NC Raise Up/ Fight for $15. One of those stories came from Devin Evans, who showed up in a gray T-shirt and cap, both bearing a McDonald’s logo. Evans said that, despite his long hours as a cashier, he enjoys his job. Prior to working at McDonald’s, he said, he worked at a fast-casual chain, where, at age seventeen, he had to contend with a “touchy boss” who rubbed his leg, pressed up against his body, and showed him inappropriate pictures during and after work. Evans left that job, but not before learning that at least fifteen other teenagers were subjected to sexual harassment by the manager, who threatened to fire them if they complained. Wanda Coker says she’s worked at Burger King, where she’s now an assistant manager, for two decades. “It took me twenty years to get to fifteen dollars an hour,” Coker said.

Wanda Coker PHOTO COURTESY OF FIGHT FOR 15 She struggles with diabetes and kidney failure that requires her to be on dialysis three days a week because she needs a kidney transplant that she can’t afford. As a consequence of “a low paycheck to live on, [no] health benefits or paid sick days, my reward is a pile of bills I can’t afford to pay,” she said. Nigel Williams now works at Chick-fil-A, but he used to work at McDonald’s, where he says he was regularly burned by “old, faulty equipment.” “But we still came in and put in the work, [despite] the burns, and we need more money,” Williams said. “It’s really hard to save when you’re paid low wages every day, and you’re [living] check to check.” Allan Freyer, the director of workers’ rights at the NC Justice Center, told the group that it’s important to see the big picture when discussing poverty wages, wage theft, sexual harassment, and unsafe workplace conditions.

“All of these problems are tools used by big, highly profitable corporations to squeeze workers’ paychecks, to break workers’ power, so that they can make more money for themselves and their investors,” Freyer said. “One way we see it happening is that workers today make sixteen billion dollars less in their paychecks than they did in 2004.” He continued: “For poverty wages, two-thirds of the folks working at minimum wage are women. In North Carolina, women make about eighty-two cents for every dollar that white men make. For women of color, it’s sixty-two cents. It will take women of color more than a hundred years to catch up to white folks with the wages that they earn.” And while minimum-wage workers are supposed to be protected from wage theft by state law, one out of ten workers actually makes less than minimum wage—and for those who rely on tips, three of ten do.

In addition, Freyer said, over the past seven years, there has been a 900 percent increase in working-conditions complaints that have not been investigated by the N.C. Department of Labor. The workers say they want at least $15 an hour, but they also want to form a union to collectively bargain with area businesses. A union, they say, would give them the means to push back against employers who brush aside their grievances and retaliate against them for complaining. The city council members at the hearing—Javiera Caballero, Jillian Johnson, and Mark-Anthony Middleton—voiced support for the workers. While the city is prohibited by state law from raising the city’s minimum wage, the council recently approved a living wage for city employees and established a workers’ rights commission. The wage increase for city employees, Caballero said, “sets the tone and expectation of what we expect for other employers in Durham. I think the bare minimum should be fifteen dollars.” Freyer pointed out that there are actions local governments can take to help workers. For instance, if a private business receives public funds but gets even one complaint about wage theft, sexual harassment, or unsafe working conditions, it shouldn’t “get a dime of public money.” City officials can also target wage thieves for criminal prosecution by referring cases to the district attorney. Freyer suggested that Durham service workers might draw more blood by filing complaints with the city’s new workers’ rights commission than with the N.C. Department of Labor, which has had an adversarial relationship with workers. Instead, the commission can file those complaints on their behalf. The NCDOL might be more apt to respond quickly, he said, especially if faced with the prospect of unwanted media attention. tmcdonald@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 7

PART I. ‘PEOPLE LIKE YOU BECAUSE YOU’RE NORMAL’

C S I T I L O P

R U I N S

E V E R Y T H I N G A story about Nancy, who happened to be mayor BY LEIGH TAUSS

t was the least-polished speech of her career, but Nancy McFarlane didn’t care. Twelve years of public service had drilled into the preternaturally shy, introverted Raleigh mayor a deliberative oratory style: Hit the important notes. Be personable but authoritative. Thank the right people. Hold that smile long enough to satisfy the camera’s flash. But there were no cameras at Brewery Bhavana that night. It was late November, one week before she’d leave office. Under the low lights in the back of the downtown restaurant, Manhattan in hand, draped in an elegant blue shawl, surrounded by two hundred friends and allies, McFarlane did something uncharacteristic, at least to those outside her inner circle. She let her guard down. She rambled. She blushed, her green eyes shining. She smiled broadly, accentuating the lines of her cheeks. She laughed. She was obviously buzzed. “Van’s been feeding me Manhattans all night, so this is a problem,” she said, referring to Bhavana owner Vansana Nolintha. The crowd laughed. “You deserve it!” someone shouted. “It’s been twelve years of craziness—but also support,” she replied. More than anything, McFarlane seemed relieved, like a weight had been taken off her shoulders. The bullshit was finally over.

N PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

8 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

ancy McFarlane never aspired to be mayor. She was never drawn to the title or the pomp and circumstance. For that matter, she never aspired to build a multimillion-dollar pharmaceutical company, either. She did those things because opportunities presented themselves, and she took them. That’s what you do when you’re smart and driven, when you’re the kind of person who sees a problem and instinctively wants to fix it—not talk about fixing it or brag about

fixing it once it’s fixed, but fix it and move on to the next thing that needs to be fixed. McFarlane ran for mayor in 2011 and sought re-election three times for that reason: to get stuff done. Most of her tenure was defined by her low-key leadership, building off the momentum the city gained under her predecessor and mentor, Charles Meeker. She gently guided Raleigh into a new era, from a sleepy Southern capital to an adolescent big city with big-city things—a bustling downtown, a shiny new train station, an ambitious plan for Dorothea Dix Park. McFarlane was proud of those things. But they weren’t the keys to her success. As her daughter Katie Thompson put it at Brewery Bhavana: “People like you because you’re normal.” That is, she was a neighbor, a mom, a businesswoman. She wasn’t a politician. She never saw her office as a stepping-stone to something else. Of course, lots of politicians say they’re not politicians. But McFarlane really wasn’t one, and she had no desire to be one. She was just Nancy, who happened to be mayor. This proved to be a blessing and a curse. McFarlane wasn’t the kind of mayor who uses a bully pulpit to advance a vision and rally supporters to her banner. Rather, she was reserved and strategic, saving her punches for backroom negotiations, always focused on results. That helped her improve relations with Republicans on Jones Street and broker the Dix Park deal, but it later left her vulnerable to council members willing to exploit her perceived weakness, even those she considered friends. In 2017, at the start of what would be her final term, a five-member anti-development coalition—including longtime friends Russ Stephenson and Kay Crowder—staged a sort-of coup to strip her of powers so they could dominate the council’s agenda, leaving McFarlane out in the cold. Backroom negotiations, it turns out, only work when your colleagues are willing to negotiate. This year could have broken her. Her body broke; a spinal injury led to six months of surgeries and agony, three in a hospital gurney on a couch in her kitchen. Decadeslong relationships unraveled. The city council became a viper’s nest. And in late February, Crowder accused McFarlane’s husband, Ron, of verbally and physically assaulting her following a confrontation at a Dix Park event. Not long after, McFarlane announced she wouldn’t run again. The way McFarlane tells it, she didn’t succumb to bitterness, nor did she crumble. She did the harder thing.

She let go. “Don’t let this become part of your identity,” McFarlane told me recently. “Because you’ll either lose and get crushed, or it will be that much harder to walk away.”

PART II. ‘THIS GODFORSAKEN PLACE’

n the car ride from Richmond to Raleigh, McFarlane cried the whole way. That’s how her daughter tells it, anyway. But Katie Thompson was a oneyear-old strapped to a car seat in the back of their dark blue Toyota Corolla station wagon. It was 1984, and Ron had to move to move up at his pharmaceutical company, which had given him a choice of cities—Chicago, Raleigh, Columbia, Maryland, a few others. They liked the Maryland suburbs, but that was too expensive. Raleigh was close enough to their families in Virginia to make sense. But McFarlane didn’t want to go. She had a nice life in Richmond. She was a city girl who grew up in Arlington, Virginia, and she worried she’d be bored or, worse, out of place. But she loved Ron. So she reluctantly found herself in a second-floor Brentwood apartment sandwiched between two floors of hard-partying N.C. State students, with no friends and no job. This wasn’t the life she imagined growing up on Ohio Street in the sixties, when she babysat for Representative David Pryor and dreamed of becoming a surgeon. She had a scientific mind and was fascinated with anatomy, how the body’s systems worked together, and how to fix them when they didn’t. As a senior at Yorktown High School— her classmates included journalist Katie Couric, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and astronaut David Brown, who died in the Columbia disaster—McFarlane had been given an aptitude test. If the test taker were a boy, the results said, he should be a doctor, architect, or engineer. A girl? A teacher, bank clerk, or X-ray engineer. That’s stupid, McFarlane thought. Perhaps she took it as a challenge. McFarlane doesn’t talk about her undergraduate years, nor does she say why she won’t talk about them. She skips over that part of her biography, to where she transferred to pharmacy school and beelined toward a career she that hoped would be fulfilling while still giving her the flexibility to raise a family. Being a pharmacist, it turns out, requires problem-solving and following directions. McFarlane excels at both. But it was also a crash course in public relations—in dealing with people at their worst or most vulINDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 9

nerable or most aggravated—for the shy twentysomething. “Being a drug-store pharmacist was the best prep for being the mayor,” McFarlane says. “Part of it was very much a lesson in, everybody’s got shit. Whoever walks through the door, they usually don’t feel good, and they take it out on you.”

cFarlane’s first few weeks in Raleigh didn’t go well. She remembers standing in line at Big Star with diapers and peanut butter in her kart and only $12 in her checking account. There were no open positions at the hospital, so she’d taken a position at Kerr Drug. The first day, they’d sat her down in front of a computer she didn’t know how to use. She ended up dragging a typewriter out from under the desk to print prescription labels, left that night, and never returned. One day, anxious to get out of the house, she left the baby with Ron and headed to the downtown library. As she was walking down Fayetteville Street, then a pedestrian mall, she saw a man walking toward her. He dropped his pants to his ankles. She rushed back to the car, got home, and told Ron, “Pack! I am not living in this godforsaken place!” Slowly, things got better. Maybe it was the autumn leaves or the night she saw Mikhail Baryshnikov dance at the performing arts center. She got a job working nights at Raleigh Community Hospital. Katie entered preschool a few years later. The McFarlanes started making friends. They met a developer named Dickie Thompson, who later served on the city council with her. They befriended Thomas Crowder, another future council member, who later designed the renovation for their home in Greystone Village. McFarlane met Roxie Cash at work and helped her school board campaign. She got involved with Katie’s school. When Katie entered second grade, Lead Mine Elementary School opened, but there were no picnic benches or trees. Where would the kids eat? This was a problem that needed to be fixed. McFarlane found someone to donate the wood and a business to build the benches. A few weeks later, Lead Mine Elementary had picnic benches. In the world of school volunteering, there’s always more to do—more events to organize, campaign signs to draw, problems to fix. For McFarlane, helping made Raleigh feel like home. And if Raleigh was going to be home, it needed to be the best Raleigh possible—not for her, but for her 10 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

now three children, two girls and a boy. After decades of working in pharmacies, McFarlane branched out. In 2002, she founded MedPro, a niche company that provides medical infusions, with just a handful of employees. The business took off, lifting the McFarlanes out of the middle class. (Twelve years later, they sold MedPro for $52 million, after giving 20 percent of the company’s stock to their employees.) In 2003, McFarlane became president of the Greystone Homeowners Association, just as new developments inundated nearby lakes with stormwater runoff, creating a layer of grease so thick geese could walk on it. This, too, was a problem that needed to be fixed. McFarlane took her complaints to City Hall. At the time, downtown was just beginning its revival, but the council was deadlocked in a clash between Democrats and Republicans, unable to move forward on projects like the second phase of reopening Fayetteville Street, as well as the Hillsborough Street Renaissance plan. The Democrats needed an ally in District A, the long-held Republican stronghold in the northern section of the city. They thought McFarlane, who was unaf-

filiated, could be the tie-breaking vote. She had access to money and well-connected friends, thanks to her advocacy in school board races and for her neighborhood. She decided to run. Hers was the closest race in 2007. But she beat incumbent Tommy Craven that year with 54 percent of the vote and soon joined her friends Thomas Crowder and Russ Stephenson on the council. Soon after, the Fayetteville and Hillsborough projects passed. “The logjam got broken,” Meeker says. “Her election made the difference.”

III. ‘YOU DON’T TRY TO BLUFF’

s the story goes, in March 2011, Meeker called McFarlane and fellow council member Mary-Ann Baldwin, told them he was stepping down that year, and said, “Either of you could be the next mayor. Now work it out.” McFarlane says this wasn’t the first time Meeker had broached the subject. Three years earlier, he’d assessed her interest in the top job. She wanted nothing to do with it. She’d only been on the council a year—what did she know about being mayor? Then the recession hit, and Meeker decided to stick around. By 2011, however, he was ready to get back to civilian life.

Baldwin was pugnacious, never one to back down from a fight. But she turned Meeker down—her mother was ill, and it wasn’t the right time. As for McFarlane, she was largely unknown outside of her district. She was the council’s quietest member, more a listener than a leader. But with her campaign coach, Perry Woods, she’d improved as a public speaker over the last three years. Maybe, she thought, she was ready. She was. She bested her Republican opponent with 61 percent of the vote. For the first year, McFarlane jokes, everyone thought Meeker was still mayor. Indeed, for the first few months, she often sought his advice—“What do I need to know about this project?” She’d ring up former mayor Thomas Bradshaw, too, and ask him to explain bond financing. During a visit to New York, she called then-mayor Michael Bloomberg and peppered him with questions. She peppered everyone with questions. “She didn’t mind calling someone up and saying, ‘I don’t know a thing about this. Can you help me?’” Ron McFarlane says. “And that’s how you get better on things. You don’t try to bluff your way through it.” McFarlane also crafted a leadership style that would characterize much of her time in office. With a few exceptions, council meetings were efficient to the point of being dull. There was little drama. Most votes were unanimous. This was by design. McFarlane met individually with council members before meetings, brokering outcomes to head off heated discussions on the dais. She became skilled in the art of dealmaking, most effective in the backroom or a late-night phone call. As long as things got done, she didn’t care who got credit. McFarlane, however, has gotten credit for Dix Park. Raleigh had been eyeing the 325-acre campus of Dorothea Dix Hospital, which the state had owned for more than 150 years and had used as a mental hospital and then a hub for the N.C. Department of Health and Social Services. In the heart of the city’s core, McFarlane and many others imagined the sprawling fields as the city’s central park. They just needed the state to hand over the keys. Eleven months before McFarlane became mayor, Republicans had taken control of the General Assembly, bringing with them not just right-wing policies but also an overarching disdain for North Carolina’s increasingly liberal cities. Getting them to play ball wouldn’t be easy. Throughout 2012, McFarlane met with

GOP leaders to try to hash out a deal. But in an election year, her efforts hit a wall. Only after the election, when Democratic governor Bev Purdue was a defeated lame duck, did McFarlane get what she was after: In her final month in office, Purdue signed a lease agreement giving Raleigh the rights to Dix Park. Republicans weren’t happy, arguing that the state wasn’t getting enough for prime real estate. Months after Governor Pat McCrory took office, bowing to pressure from Republican lawmakers, he halted the agreement. Here again, McFarlane was faced with a problem that needed to be fixed. She didn’t give up. Through countless meetings with lawmakers and the governor’s office, she got close to McCrory, a former Charlotte mayor who understood how transformational a project like this could be for a city. It took two years, but eventually, she convinced him—or, put another way, she wore him down through sheer relentlessness, showing up again and again until he gave in. Either way, in 2015, his office agreed to a new deal, and Republican lawmakers didn’t try to stop it. “I don’t think anybody has any idea what I did to get that park,” McFarlane told the INDY in 2017. “They don’t need to know.”

“Don’t let this become part of you identity. Because either you’ll get crushed, or it will be that much harder to walk away.”

IV. ‘A WORKING COUNCIL MAJORITY’

n 2013 and 2015, McFarlane faced just token opposition. But in 2017, attorney Charles Francis vigorously campaigned against her, portraying her as aloof and out of touch, especially with African American residents being displaced by gentrification. For the first time in her political career, McFarlane didn’t secure a majority in October, albeit barely. Francis called for a runoff. McFarlane beat him soundly. McFarlane’s campaign compiled extensive opposition research on Francis that year—his lobbying work, his relationship to a pyramid scheme, his family’s real-estate dealings—but never used it. (It didn’t leak until Francis’s second bid for mayor in 2019,

when a third party gave it to the INDY.) Perhaps McFarlane simply didn’t think she needed to use it. But most politicians would have gone for the kill regardless, especially when they were being attacked. McFarlane didn’t. It’s not her style. She likes to build bridges, not command fear. Soon, that would come back to haunt her. An hour before the council’s first meeting in December—where McFarlane, by tradition, would announce committee assignments for the next two years—her friend Russ Stephenson came to her office. With Stef Mendell’s election, he told her, there was a new coalition that was going to push through its own slate of committee assignments. He was going to join them. So, too, Kay Crowder, who had taken her husband

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Thomas’s seat when he died in 2014. They would join Mendell and David Cox. Behind her back, they’d hatched a plan to name themselves to the Growth and Natural Resources Committee, where they could effectively dictate the council’s development decisions. (Dickie Thompson—whom McFarlane had recruited to run for her former District A seat, and who voted against the coup—joined them on the committee and voted as part of the anti-development bloc.) This, Stephenson insisted at the council meeting that night, would be a “working council majority.” A divided council would be ineffective. To McFarlane, it as a knife in the back, but she barely put up a fight. What good would it have done? The “working majority” quickly turned dysfunctional. Proposals languished in committees for months, sometimes more than a year. Rezoning debates dragged on over tedious things like setbacks and landscaping. Development was met with furious resistance while the city’s affordability crisis deepened. When the council did act, it placed draconian restrictions on accessory dwelling units, short-term rentals, and electric scooters. It was, in a sense, cruelly ironic. McFarlane had risen to power from the ranks of neighborhood advocates. Now the neigh-

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INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 11

borhood advocates had turned on her, casting her as a pawn of big developers. McFarlane was frustrated and isolated, unable to work deals, unable to fix problems. As plans for Dix Park’s development were finalized, she started thinking about walking away. Then things got worse.

n early 2019, McFarlane noticed a pain in her back, but she figured that with some exercise, she’d work through it. That wasn’t the case. At a wine tasting in Chapel Hill soon afterward, the pain became so unbearable that she walked out, went to her car, and lay on her stomach to get relief. A few days later, she was in the emergency room. Soon after that, on February 5, she was undergoing surgery for a herniated disc in her spine. The day after her surgery, the city unveiled the Dix Master Plan at a swanky event at the Raleigh Convention Center, which offered an interactive tour of the park through light displays and renderings on cardboard cutouts adorned with picnic benches, a swing set, and astroturf. Hundreds of the city’s movers and shakers attended, schmoozing over miniature hot dogs. Had McFarlane not been incapacitated, this would have been a moment of triumph. But she wasn’t there, so Kay Crowder emceed the event in her place. She stood in a circle of light in the center of the room, remarking on how much she enjoyed the spotlight and thanking people involved in the project—the city manager, the Dix Park Conservancy, each and every city council member present. But not Nancy McFarlane. Not the woman who had lobbied day in and day out for two years to make it happen. Ron McFarlane watched, boiling with rage. He couldn’t understand what he’d just seen. The Crowders had been their friends for thirty years, and now Kay had gone out of her way to slight Nancy—a woman who never cared about taking credit—when she’d just gotten out of surgery. He pulled Crowder aside. He yelled at her. He placed his hand on her shoulder. He shook her. He yelled some more. A man tried to intervene. Ron yelled at him to “leave us alone.” Three weeks later, Crowder told The News & Observer that Ron had “verbally and physically assaulted” her. She said she was still “very shaken by the experience.” In a statement to the media, McFarlane said that Ron was stressed from her surgery and “expressed to Council Member Crowder how upset he was in a way that I believe was too strongly worded.” After their years of friendship, McFarlane contin12 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

Nancy McFarlane with Roscoe

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

ued, she hoped they could put the incident behind them. Two weeks after that, McFarlane announced that she wouldn’t seek re-election. McFarlane underwent two more surgeries on her back. For months, she was confined to a hospital gurney in the kitchen, staring out the window at the oak trees and watching episodes of Say Yes to the Dress until her mind felt like Jell-O. She didn’t return to work until August.

When she did, Kay Crowder and her ally Stef Mendell told their secretaries to cancel any future meetings with the mayor. They’ve barely spoken since.

V. ‘POLITICS CAN RUIN A GOOD IDEA’

t’s McFarlane’s house, but it’s really Greg Poole’s. The original Dix Park visionary designed it, repurposing stone from Wakefield Plantation for the fireplace and its

wood for the exposed beams that reach up to the lofted ceiling. It’s a nice place, of course, elegant even, but it’s not the ritzy estate you’d expect from a multimillionaire. Inside, it’s cluttered—not dirty, but a normal-people amount messy; their grandkids’ toys are scattered across the floor. The backyard is densely wooded and exquisitely landscaped. There’s a massive porch that hooks around the house, where people gather when they throw parties or concerts. (Ron is a musician.) The McFarlanes have added their own touches: a custom mural of Dix Park in the dining room, with a small painted figure of Poole walking the path and a little illustration of their dog Kamuy. In the front hallway are remnants of the City Hall office McFarlane had cleaned out a few days earlier: boxes of file folders, photos that hung of the walls, a copy of a John Lennon drawing, a photo of her with Barack Obama, a psychedelic Peter Max painting of downtown. This is the first time I’d seen her in jeans and sneakers. She’d hesitated before opening the door and stared at me as if to ask, “Am I really doing this?” McFarlane has always been a private person, fiercely protective of her family. Letting someone into this sanctuary—not quite a stranger, but worse, a journalist— has to be unnerving. This isn’t the kind of thing she does. We go into the kitchen, where she’s mixing dough for sugar cookies in a flour-stained red apron. McFarlane takes a pharmacist approach to baking, following a recipe like filling she’s a prescription. She mixes me a much-too-sour whiskey-cranberry cocktail, and we settle into her couch in the back of the kitchen, where months before she lay recovering from multiple surgeries. She cradles her dog Roscoe’s face in her hands, and when she moves, he gazes up at her in subtle protest. Here, an admission: As I reported this story—as I spent many hours with McFarlane over the course of several weeks—I came to genuinely like her as a person, or at least to appreciate her in a way I didn’t when I covered her as a reporter does a public official. She’s funny and quick-witted. She’s brutally honest and can be incredibly blunt (off the record, anyway). She’s not calculating or plotting her next move. She’s just Nancy. For hours, we talk, vent, and shower her dogs with affection.

spent the last few weeks of McFarlane’s term pondering a question: What makes an effective mayor? Raleigh’s system, of course, isn’t designed for strong mayors.

“When you are here for the right reasons, your identity isn’t caught up in it.” The Raleigh mayor is, more like the chairman of a board of directors, setting policy and overseeing a manager who acts as an executive director. Aside from a few traditional privileges and ceremonial roles, she is one of eight votes on the city council. But what the mayor has is a platform from which to articulate a vision, set an agenda, and rally residents to her cause. This has never been McFarlane’s strong suit. Hers is a quieter form of leadership, working behind the scenes. That’s not to say McFarlane didn’t notch real accomplishments: Dix Park, the train station, the city’s economic development, downtown’s maturation—these are big deals. In many ways, Raleigh grew up on her watch. But you could also argue that Raleigh coasted the last eight years. It coasted in the right direction, but it coasted all the same. The city was well-managed, tech companies came, national magazines took notice, people flocked here, and that was good enough. McFarlane saw problems, and she tried to fix them. But the city rarely stepped out of its comfort zone. Meanwhile, the housing affordability crisis deepened, and the gap between Raleigh’s black community and the rest of the prospering city widened. Then, McFarlane lost control of the council, a coup abetted by close allies. A more pugilistic mayor could have fought harder the last two years, but it probably wouldn’t have amounted to much. And heading off the insurrection would have required McFarlane to be something she’s not: a politician—someone a little ruthless, someone willing to throw her weight around to get the council she wants. That’s not who she is. Instead, she’s someone who believes—as she repeated throughout our conversations— that “politics can always ruin a good idea.” And that’s why people like her. This is the catch-22 of Nancy McFarlane.

n October, Mendell lost her re-election bid by one of the largest margins in city history. Crowder and Stephenson lost, too. Of the council members involved in the 2017 coup, only David Cox was left standing. Led by Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin, the council sworn in last week acted swiftly to undo many of its predecessor’s policies. For

McFarlane, that had to feel like vindication. And perhaps it made her abdication a little bit easier. “She was here to get things done,” says Baldwin, who sometimes clashed with McFarlane in their decade together on the council, mostly owing to starkly different leadership styles. “When you are here for the right reasons, your identity isn’t caught up in it. It’s just a role you happen to play.” “People run for office because they either want to do something or be something,” adds Perry Woods, who ran McFarlane’s campaigns. “Nancy certainly qualifies as someone who wanted to do something. She did this because she loves her city. She’s done her service.” It’s taken its toll, says former council member Bonner Gaylord, likening it to the frog that lets itself boil in slowly boiling water. “Expectations and the weight of the role— over time, it kind of cooks you,” Gaylord says. “I think she’ll feel a huge burden lifted off her shoulders when she walks away.” She won’t walk far. McFarlane has been added to the board of the Dix Park Conservancy, where she’ll help oversee the park’s transformation. She’s been asked several times to seek higher office—in particular, to run against Senator Thom Tillis next year—but that’s not in the cards. She’s done with politics, she says, and she doesn’t think she’ll change her mind. At her last council meeting, she called her five-year-old granddaughter to the dais and let her bang the gavel. Later that week, McFarlane lit the Christmas tree and rode in the city’s parade—formalities she didn’t care for at first but came to enjoy. It was a whirlwind of emotion culminating in the party at Brewery Bhavana. She meant it to be a thank-you to her supporters, but the spotlight she never sought was on her. Her time as mayor hadn’t been easy. But it’s hard not to look back on it through rose-colored glasses. She’d seen the city through tremendous change. Downtown was busier than ever. Raleigh was on the map in a way it wasn’t before. And, of course, she’d brokered an ambitious project for the next generation and the ones to follow—a park where her grandchildren and perhaps their children will play. Maybe the bullshit was worth it. ltauss@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 13

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HOLIDAY

gift guide

RUNAWAY Headwear $30 | Hoodie $65 | Socks $14 Runaway is back with a new temporary retail pop-up shop for the holidays. New limited edition apparel and goods will be available Dec. 7-28, many of which are in-store exclusives, urging folks to come by in-person to connect, shop and experience DURM®. Runaway Pop-Up Shop | 359 Blackwell Street, Downtown Durham NC. www.runawayclothes.com

14 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 12.11.19

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12.11.19 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 15

HOLIDAY gift guide

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16 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 12.11.19

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12.11.19 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 17

HOLIDAY gift guide

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18 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 12.11.19

LETTERS BOOKSHOP Durham-based writer and illustrator Emily Wallace has your holiday gift-giving covered with this book for everyone – the driver in search of supper and superlatives, the tourist who cannot resist pulling over for every historical marker and roadside stand, and the kid who just wants to gawk at a peach-shaped water tower. 313 W Main St, Durham, NC 27701 www.lettersbookshop.com

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12.11.19 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 19

indyfood

CHEENI

227 Fayetteville Street, Raleigh 919-421-1774 sugarandspicekit.com/cheeni-raleigh

Power Lunch

AT PREETI WAAS’S NEW RALEIGH CAFE, A SLAB OF CHILI CHEESE TOAST AND A CUP OF CHAI MAKE FOR AN INSPIRED LUNCH PAIRING BY LAYLA KHOURY-HANOLD

n October, if you’d asked Preeti Waas to introduce herself, she’d have told you she’s an adjunct culinary professor at Wake Tech who owns two smallbatch food companies, Sugar and Spice Kitchen and Jolly Good Jams. There’d be no mention of aspirations to own a restaurant. Yet on November 2, she opened Cheeni, an Indian-inspired tea shop serving chai, coffee, and tiffin (light snacks) on the ground floor of the Poyner YMCA. By saying yes to a surprise opportunity and tapping into her Indian roots, Waas is giving downtown Raleigh what it didn’t know it was missing: a tea shop that doubles as a quickbite spot, where a cup of chai and a slab of chili cheese toast make for an inspired lunch pairing. When the Poyner Y found itself with a vacant cafe space a couple of months ago, it reached out to Wake Tech and came across Waas’s bio; seeing that she taught a culinary boot-camp course and had experience running her own food businesses, it approached her about taking on the project. The two previous tenants had been coffee shops, and the Y was amenable to new ideas. To determine what niche she could fill, Waas employed old-fashioned market research. She stood outside the Y and polled gym-goers on what was missing. Their answer: food. That’s when the Indian tea-shop idea clicked. In India, tea shops are known as much for their chai as for their tiffin, so much so that Waas uses the terms “snack shop” and “tea shop” interchangeably. And tiffin are all about quality ingredients and providing sustenance. “Americans serve too many empty-calorie snacks,” Waas says. “In India, it’s more than that. Every bite is supposed to provide what you need for that time of day.” Cheeni’s menu is well-suited to deliver on that premise, whether you’re grabbing a superfood smoothie or açai bowl to 20 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

Left: Preeti Waas. Right: Indian filter coffee. PHOTOS BY JADE WILSON

refuel post-workout or vegetable puffs as an afternoon pick-me-up. The puffs read like samosas—puff pastry stuffed with a tangy-savory mix of potatoes, carrots, and green beans seasoned with turmeric and coriander—but they’re baked instead of fried, and flakier, too. The vegetable puffs are worth a try, especially since they’re rarely found on Indian restaurant menus. But as Waas will tell you, any self-respecting Indian snack shop must sell chili cheese toast, which is billed as “Indian street style” under the menu’s Toast Bar offerings. (Chili in this equation means peppers, not the kind better suited to topping cheese fries.) Waas had hoped to import Amul cheese, a beloved Indian brand of cheddar-esque processed cheese,

but upon discovering a shortage, she created her own blend. The cheese is liberally layered atop thick slices of sourdough from lucettegrace, topped with sliced green chilies, then broiled until golden and bubbly. You’d do well to pair it with a cup of masala chai, which Waas brews daily by steeping black Indian tea leaves in milk, water, and freshly ground spices. To determine the spice blend, Waas looks to the Ayurvedic diet principle of maintaining the body’s balance between hot and cold; this time of year calls for a warming mix of fresh ginger, cardamom, fennel seeds, and Tellicherry peppercorns. The coffee is top-notch, too. Waas, a self-described coffee snob, anchors the menu with South Indian filter coffee, in which finely ground imported coffee, redo-

lent of chicory, is brewed into a thick, syrupy concentrate and combined with steamed milk and sugar. The result is a rich, full-bodied coffee without any bitterness. If you prefer drip coffee, Waas pours a custom blend from Oak City Coffee Roasters. Though Waas felt she took a risk by doing something different, she had an inkling that the concept could work in downtown Raleigh. So far, the reception has been affirming. “People now come in on their lunch break and get their snacks, and they settle wherever they want in the lobby,” she says. “They sit there, they eat, and they chat. They’re spending their lunch hour in the lobby of the YMCA.” food@indyweek.com

food

The New Old Way

TROPHY’S EXPANSION PUT A SOUR TASTE IN OUR MOUTHS, AND WE LIKE IT BY LEIGH TAUSS

our beers are trendy, of course, but they’ve been around forever. Before humans figured out how to industrialize the process and produce “clean” beer, it was all but inevitable that batches would become contaminated with lactobacillus, a bacteria that produces lactic acid and results in a sour taste. And if one barrel became infected, those nearby would sour, too. So hundreds of years ago, pretty much all beer was sour. In recent years, craft brewers started experimenting with souring beer intentionally, producing interesting and often unusual results. “We went through the last century trying to process and sterilize, and now we’re reaching back into those leather-bound books, back into history for some of those more traditional styles,” says Les Stewart, the head brewer at Trophy Brewing Company. (Disclosure: David Meeker, a co-owner of Trophy Brewing, is the nephew of Richard Meeker, who owns the INDY.) Leaning into this idea, Trophy Pizza + Brewing opened its long-awaited expansion at 827 Morgan Street last month with a new taproom highlighting its sour collection. There’s more seating, more pizza ovens, and an expanded menu with newly added Detroit-style pizza, wings, and arancini. The sour beers are stored in seven massive wooden barrels called foeders that can hold nearly seven hundred gallons. Production of wort, the base beer, starts at Trophy’s Maywood location and is trucked over to Morgan Street, where fresh local fruits and spices are added to create unique lines. Then it sits around in the foeders for anywhere from two months to two years as it ferments. The process bears more resemblance to natural wine than most beers, and includes the use of terroir—the natural elements that can influence a beverage’s flavor, such as soil, minerality, and other environmental factors.

Where

T O E AT AND DRINK THIS WEEK

SCOTT CRAWFORD HOSTS STEVE PALMER AT CRAWFORD & SON Dec. 15, 5 p.m. 618 North Person Street, Raleigh 919-307-4647 crawfordandsonrestaurant.com, $50 Steve Palmer’s new book, Say Grace: How the Restaurant Business Saved My Life, chronicles the restaurateur’s journey in sobriety in a substance-heavy industry. At this warm Sunday-style supper, Palmer joins Scott Crawford for a meal and conversation. The menu includes spirit-free cocktails, and tickets come with a signed copy of the book. All proceeds go to Ben’s Friends, a food-and-beverage support group for those struggling with addiction.

From left: Cory McGuinness, Les Stewart, and Chris Powers “It’s the new old way,” says Cory McGuinness, who heads Trophy’s sour and wild beer lines. “Taking those parts that worked, but being able to sour beers in a more modern way.” The mainstay of the collection is the Golden Sour, a no-frills sour fermented in a sauvignon blanc wine barrel. It’s light, carbonated, and very drinkable. It’s also just the beginning—Trophy plans to add different fruits and spices to create more sours from this base. Another staple is Loner, a blush-colored pomegranate kettle sour that’s produced using a more contemporary method. It’s a Berliner Weisse with a higher alcoholic content than usual (6.4 percent) with tart, bright, citrus notes. From there, the beer journey gets weirder. There’s a Kvass called Shot Through the Heart that smells exactly like freshly baked bread. And indeed, it is bread.

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Boulted Bread created a special rye loaf as the base grain for this line, a technique that originated in Eastern Europe around World War II, when resources were low and bread was just about the only thing to make beer with. It’s a cloudy golden concoction that tastes mostly like beer, but with a bready aftertaste. And then there’s When the Smoke Clears, a Grätzer, which almost overpowers the nose with herbal smoke, like burning smudge. They don’t just put wood pellets in the beer, but they smoke the wheat used to ferment the sour to infuse the smoky flavor. Smoke and sour beers make a strange marriage, but it would probably pair well with a gouda pizza. It’s not their most popular line, the guys admit, but that’s the beauty of their sour expansion. They can make whatever weird stuff they want. ltauss@indyweek.com

OPEN NOW: DELI EDISON 630 Weaver Dairy Road, Chapel Hill 919-279-7700, deliedison.com On Monday, the new fast-casual dining concept from Dan Obusan, Sam Suchoff, and Pete Wagner opened in the former Bagel Bar space in Chapel Hill. Don’t worry: In this friendly, checkered-floor eatery, you can still grab a fresh bagel on the go, alongside deli-style sandwiches, hot dogs, pizza, and roasted veggies. OPEN FOR LUNCH: POOLE’SIDE PIES 428 South McDowell Street, Raleigh 919-803-8660, ac-restaurants.com/pooleside What’s for lunch? Starting last week, you can count a slice of Ashley Christensen’s pizza as a weekday option. Poole’side, which has only served dinner since it opened in September, is now open from 11:00 a.m.–2:00 p.m. Wednesday through Friday. Think pizza, but also a lunch menu with hearty, inventive features like a kale-and-tomato soup and openfaced meatball sandwiches. —Sarah Edwards

INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 21

indymusic

Signed and Delivered

HOW 9TH WONDER’S JAMLA RECORDS TURNED TWO DOPE SOLO ARTISTS, SWANK AND KING DRAFT, INTO A FORMIDABLE DUO BY KYESHA JENNINGS

n November 7, super-producer 9th Wonder flooded social media with a surprise announcement: He had signed Durham’s Swank and King Draft to the dream-team roster of his Raleigh-based label, Jamla Records, which would drop the sequel to their first collaborative album, TwoFive to Jersey, at midnight. The announcement came in the form of a teaser video that previewed “69 < 96,” the first track of TwoFive 2 Jersey: The Sequel. The video’s aesthetic matches the song’s gritty narrative. Swank and King Draft meet in what appears to be an abandoned warehouse, sporting ski masks and trading bars, their hunger and unity evident. From the production to the lyrical content, the eleven-track surprise album is perfectly crafted, and it would never have happened if two multi-talented MCs who came up as solo acts hadn’t found their separate paths crossing at Jamla. Still, if you’re a close follower of Triangle hip-hop, it was one of those surprises that seemed inevitable. Over the past several years, Swank and King Draft have both released individual projects, headlined shows, performed at Durham’s Beats n Bars Festival, and gained national attention as finalists in BET’s rebooted “Freestyle Friday” competition. Their affiliation with Jamla also began individually. In 2014, while he was enrolled in 9th Wonder’s hip-hop course at North Carolina Central University, King Draft released his first album. The rollout impressed his professor so much that 9th asked for a copy and, according to Draft, dubbed it one best demos he’d ever heard. Swank, the visionary behind the artwork for Rapsody’s critically acclaimed second album, Eve, came around in a creative role about a year later. He also co-directed the remarkable video for her single “Nina,” which pays homage to the multiple layers of the beauty of Blackness. 22 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

King Draft and Swank at Carolina Soul Records The two first found themselves paired while working with 9th, each landing placements on his Zion III beat tape and his compilation 9th Wonder Presents: Jamla Is the Squad II, both released last year. Sitting on a couch at Carolina Soul Records in downtown Durham, Swank and King Draft are visibly excited yet humble about the signing. The number of vinyl

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

records on display that feature tracks 9th Wonder produced underlines the significance of the moment, which feels more like fate than coincidence. The new signees admire each vinyl in awe. They both entered their relationship with Jamla with no set expectations. “It was just more of, they’re providing me with the opportunity, so I’m going to

come in and work,” Swank says. “Whatever they needed from me, I was always open and willing to shoot whatever, whenever. It was just a blessing for it to end up the way that it did.” Though Swank and King Draft had been building their careers individually, the idea of them becoming a group was a running joke on the Jamla team. The positive response

to their pairing on Zion III led to their joint album-length debut in May, TwoFive to Jersey. (The title was a nod to their hometowns, Littleton, North Carolina and Plainfield, New Jersey.) Though not an official Jamla release, the album featured production and support from the Jamla squad. The Sequel is far more cohesive in sound and content. The album has a nostalgic feel, but the vibe remains up-to-date as King Draft and Swank address issues relatable to Black men in their twenties. Without coming off as preachy, they bare their internal thoughts, rapping about the everyday struggles of growing up in small towns, navigating monogamy and relationships, choosing a path free of violence, and redefining what it means to be a man. In an era when hip-hop hasn’t shied away from spewing degrading lyrical content about Black women, these HBCU graduates celebrate their beauty. The incredible production is led by The Soul Council, Jamla’s team of in-house producers. It positions King Draft and Swank as hip-hop classicists at heart, setting them apart from today’s mumble rappers. The new Jamla signees rap rap, gimmick-free, and they complement each other lyrically and sonically. It’s easy to compare their cadence and delivery to Little Brother, but the acknowledgement of any similarities to the hip-hop veterans is only a nod that the budding duo is heading in the right direction to one day be included in a list of iconic hip-hop pairings. “I’ll take that as a compliment,” King Draft says. “I think Phonte is one of the best rappers.” Hip-hop has a history of building dream teams, from Bad Boy, Roc-a-Fella, and Young Money to the contemporary sounds of Dreamville and TDE. With every star-studded team, though, there comes the risk of someone being overlooked. Luckily, King Draft and Swank are students of the culture who care deeply about hip-hop’s lineage and, more important, understand the significance of longevity in an industry full of trends and shifting sounds. “I never wanted to be a superstar,” King Draft says. “I think the same way. I never came in looking to be Jay-Z or Kendrick Lamar,” Swank says. Instead, their goal is to be as skilled as the greats while following the career trajectories of the likes of Dom Kennedy, Wiz Khalifa, and Curren$y—those who found their lane, identified their fan base, and capitalized on it. One of the most impressive feats of the album is how it allows space for everyone to be a superstar, from the producers to the guests to Swank and King Draft themselves. music@indyweek.com

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126 E. Cabarrus St.• 919-821-4111 www.lincolntheatre.com INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 23

indypage

hop—how some of lyrics?—b art form

Frenemy of the State

UNC PROFESSOR MARK KATZ BUILT A GLOBAL HIP-HOP AMBASSADORSHIP AND THEN GAVE IT AWAY BY BRIAN HOWE

“N

o commodity is quite so strange as this thing called cultural exchange,” Louis Armstrong sang in The Real Ambassadors, a 1962 musical about the U.S. Department of State’s postwar adventures in musical diplomacy. As one of the jazz musicians whom the U.S. deployed to countries such as Asia, Africa, and the Soviet Union, Armstrong was intimately familiar with the contradictions inherent in serving the interests of a racist state with music set against it. Fifty years later, the U.S.’s global musical language has changed from jazz to hip-hop, but that central conflict is as pointed as ever. Mark Katz, a prominent hip-hop scholar and a music professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, has been in the thick of it for twenty years. In 2011, after a decade of hip-hop academia, Katz cofounded Beat Making Lab with producer Stephen Levitin (aka Apple Juice Kid). A hip-hop workshop for UNC students, it grew into a broader vision after a professional connection led Katz, Levitin, Pierce Freelon, and filmmaker Saleem Reshamwala to take the program to a youth center in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2012. Reshamwala’s video about the experience was picked up by PBS, and Beat Making Lab started traveling around the world, partnering with local NGOs and other institutions to embed American hip-hop artists in underserved communities. After offering two-week intensives—not just in music production and other hip-hop art forms, but also in entrepreneurship and conflict management—they would leave their equipment and lasting connections behind. The project’s organic cultural diplomacy became official in 2013, when Katz founded Next Level, which essentially continues Beat Making Lab, but with more artists and on a federally funded scale. “Pierce emailed me and said, ‘Hey, Mark, there’s this call for proposals from the State Department that looks just like Beat Making Lab,’” Katz says by phone, recalling how he got the grant. “Fast-forward to now, and their most recent residency was in Mongolia, which I think was country number thirty-two.” Katz documents his journey with Next Level in his new book, Build: The Power of Hip Hop Diplomacy in a Divided World (November 4, Oxford University Press). Academic in form yet conversational in tone, it’s built around scores of interviews with hip-hop artists from many countries. Even more striking is how soul-searching it is, as Katz delves into the risks and paradoxes of using hip-hop for state interests and the role of his own white privilege. 24 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

Mark Katz PHOTO BY DEUS KAJUNA

We spoke with Katz about the difference between conflict resolution and conflict transformation, the sweet spot where the government’s interests overlap with those of artists, and why, after spending six years building Next Level, he decided the best thing he could do for it was to step away. INDY: You write about using Next Level for confliction resolution—or “conflict transformation,” as you call it. What is that, as opposed to resolution? MARK KATZ: If you go back to the history of hip-hop, it’s a form of conflict transformation. It’s a set of art forms that

Another k with is ha of hip-hop mentally Yes, that thorny iss hip-hop d hop bein exploited ly, and w U.S. impe Part of our own artists go who tells of Next L of the pr at the St willing an In a sen The U.S. da of pro and prot Next Lev da, whic through h odds with we’re kin Departm with com governm artists ar develop t have life don’t mea have inte carefully

What’s in academic and partl diplomac with your Why was it, instead academic I think it a white m gives voice to marginalized, underserved, and oppressed privilege communities, very explicitly used as alternatives to vio- position lence, to joining gangs. It’s always been a tool for channel- cy. There ing aggression, anger, or just the turmoil that exists in all of the hip young people into art. The reason we use “transformation” have. Bec instead of “resolution” is that we’re not peacekeepers or known u mediators. It’s a broader concept about addressing the access to conflict that everyone has in their lives, and not trying to I think eliminate it, because that’s not possible, but channeling hop fans it into something positive and constructive. It may seem tity mat like an odd thing to people who don’t know a lot about hip- shouldn’t

hop—how can it be used for peace, given some of the themes that come up in the lyrics?—but it’s actually very organic to the art form and culture. Another kind of conflict your book deals with is harnessing the revolutionary energy of hip-hop to work for a state that it’s fundamentally set against, in some ways. Yes, that’s one of the most complex and thorny issues that we face, trying to promote hip-hop diplomacy. How do we avoid hiphop being co-opted, hip-hop artists being exploited? I take that concern very seriously, and we clearly don’t want to be tools of U.S. imperialism. It’s a careful negotiation. Part of the way we address it is, we have our own organization. It’s not that these artists go out with a foreign-service officer who tells them what to do. The leadership of Next Level is all hip-hop artists, alumni of the program, who are talking to people at the State Department about what we’re willing and not willing to do. In a sense, we have overlapping agendas. The U.S. State Department has its agenda of promoting U.S. values and interests and protecting American citizens abroad. Next Level has a slightly different agenda, which is building global community through hip-hop. But they’re not actually at odds with each other. In an interesting way, we’re kind of using each other. The State Department is using hip-hop to connect with communities that don’t like the U.S. government but love hip-hop. The hip-hop artists are using the State Department to develop their craft, build community, and have life-changing experiences abroad. I don’t mean “use” in a cynical sense, but we have interests we can both serve if it’s done carefully and respectfully. What’s interesting is that this is partly an academic book about cultural diplomacy and partly a book that critiques cultural diplomacy—and itself, with you reckoning with your whiteness and relative power. Why was it important to bring that into it, instead of treating it as a results-based academic book? I think it would be irresponsible for me, as a white man who has a certain amount of privilege and authority, to pretend that my position is irrelevant to hip-hop diplomacy. There’s a reason I got this grant and one of the hip-hop artists I work with wouldn’t have. Because of my connection to a wellknown university and my identity, I have access to funding that other people don’t. I think it’s important for people, hiphop fans or academics, to know that identity matters and that power structures shouldn’t be invisible. That’s not just appli-

cable to Next Level. The concept I talk about, the “zone of ambiguity”—that is everywhere. I think of it when I go to meetings at UNC and we talk about Silent Sam and the history of slavery at the university. We all deal with this in our daily lives; the State Department isn’t an outlier. I’ve been asking about the ideas of the book at the risk of making it sound less narrative than it is. You interviewed 150 people in many different countries. Did you gather all of this in the course of your work with a mind toward writing a book? When I was awarded the grant, I immediately saw this as a research opportunity. My first interviews for this book happened in the first residency of Next Level. I’m getting sent around the world, funded, to interact with hip-hop artists, and I knew I should treat it not just as a program I needed to manage, but as an incredible opportunity to learn about hip-hop around the world.

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The book takes us into the Trump age. How did the changeover from Obama change the nature of doing hip-hop diplomacy in, say, Muslim countries? We were in Tunisia shortly after the election, and everywhere I went, people would tell me, “I don’t like your government and what they’ve done to my country over the years, but I love American culture and I love hip-hop.” Most of the places we went were not friendly to Trump and, oddly enough, it created almost a stronger bond, in solidarity against Trump and what he represented in terms of Islamophobia, anti-immigration, misogyny, and so on. Why did you step down from Next Level last year? I’m still part of the organization as founding director, but as I started to hire artists who had participated to help run the program, I saw that the best thing I could do was create the opportunity for Next Level to be run solely by hip-hop artists. I brought in Junious Brickhouse, an amazing dancer and historian and teacher, as associate director, and then he became co-director, and now he’s the director. I intentionally stepped away to be more in a support situation. This gets back to my position in the world: I don’t think I, as a white man, should be taking up space when others can and should be. This whole project got me thinking very deeply about power relations, and I tried to bring that home and think about it in terms of myself, how I’m participating in power asymmetries or making them invisible. bhowe@indyweek.com

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NEW MEN

Thursday, Dec. 12, 7 p.m., free Visual Arts Exchange, Raleigh vaeraleigh.org

Holy Holler

RALEIGH FILMMAKER SAM COX SET OUT TO MAKE A DOCUMENTARY ABOUT A RUSSIAN ORTHODOX MONASTERY IN RURAL WEST VIRGINIA. HE WOUND UP CONVERTING. BY SARAH EDWARDS

n theory, the idea of parting with your iPhone and moving to a remote hamlet to tend bees and experience spiritual fervor is an appealing one, especially in 2019. In practice, the actual requirements of monkhood—dying to oneself and leaving behind sex, substances, and careers—is a commitment that has always been radical, regardless of the century it takes place in. It’s a choice that captured the attention of the filmmaker Sam Cox when he learned of the existence of a Russian Orthodox monastery tucked away in a remote holler of West Virginia. Cox, who grew up Pentecostal in Raleigh, had left organized religion behind after college, feeling that it didn’t address contemporary “tensions.” His winding spiritual journey—through competitive professional years in New York City, a psychologically grueling stint at a farm outside Pittsburgh, and a move back to his hometown—led him, in 2017, to the All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Raleigh. There, he learned of the Holy Cross Hermitage in West Virginia, where some twenty monks live and work, having committed to a life of prayerful asceticism until death. After receiving permission from Archimandrite Seraphim, the head abbot at the monastery, Cox made numerous trips to West Virginia between 2017 and 2019. With unprecedented access, he chronicled the story of Father Justin, a new monk preparing for the tonsuring ceremony, in which he would take his final vows. The result is New Men, a forty-nine-minute documentary that Cox directed, produced, and edited. Watching the monks gather eggs, mend fences, and murmur prayers among sweeping panoramas of the Appalachian mountains, it is easy to forget that these scenes are not taking place in ancient times. Central spiritual questions, though, have a way of staying in amber. By the completion of the film, Cox had converted to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 26 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

or mind. We’re so mind-centered in the West—everything is either intellectual or emotional. That’s the only two modes people have.

A monk of the Holy Cross Monastery in New Men. Before New Men screens at VAE Raleigh on Thursday, December 12, we spoke with Cox about how he discovered and got access to Holy Cross Hermitage and the appeal of monasticism today. INDY: How common is a monastery like this in the United States? SAM COX: There are about thirty or so. A community like this is pretty rare—there are probably twenty-five or so monks, which is large for a monastery. Most of them are American converts to the Eastern Orthodox church. In 2017, the abbot gave permission for five monks to speak publically. Did they speak to multiple people or just you? I was the only one. Visitors can go there— you could go there and be a pilgrim if you wanted to, but they’re not going to open up to you about their lives. I was going there over a year and a half for multiple days at a time. I probably lived there for six weeks, just participating in life without filming. I was there for about six months total.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SAM COX

What’s a monastic schedule like? They pray the Jesus prayer, which is “Lord Jesus Christ Son of God, have mercy on the sinner,” constantly throughout the day. There’s the morning service that’s from five to seven, and then you can go back to your cell from seven to nine and do whatever you want—more prayers or readings or just preparing. From nine to twelve is morning work period; twelve to one-thirty is lunch, then one-thirty to five is afternoon work period. Five-thirty is dinner and six-thirty is compline [an evening prayer service], and then they’re done by seven-thirty or eight. After nine is silence.

How did you get them to open up? I mean, I think it was an act of God. Because that’s, like, high level. Lower level, the abbot said, “I can see that you’re serious and authentic about this.” I showed the abbot a film I had made about the All Saints Orthodox Church, and he really liked it. I’m hoping this can open up more doors—that people can see this and trust that I’ll be respectful.

What’s your hope for the film? I hope that it reaches an audience outside of the Orthodox community. My target audience is not Orthodox people; it’s people like myself who are asking spiritual questions and dissatisfied with contemporary life and feel like something is wrong with it. My hope is that it reaches those people and kind of expands their palette of options.

Did you ever think about joining? Yeah. It’s a very compelling way of life. I think you’d be hard-pressed to spend that much time there and not be deeply drawn to it.

You’ve talked about feeling like the Protestant Christian church is unable to address contemporary tensions. What is different to you about Orthodoxy? The depth of it, the scope of how they understand a human person, is vast and mystical and matches the complexity of being human. If you’re not struggling, you’re not Orthodox. I think the spiritual struggle is the Eastern Orthodox experience. And that’s the only way it can be, because the world has problems. So there’s hope in that realism. sedwards@indyweek.com

I think a lot of Americans have an innate suspicion of religious sects. I converted about a year into the project. I became Orthodox. Being there helped me overcome my suspicion of religion. I realized it’s not an ideology you have to subscribe to; it’s a way of life that applies to people regardless of their intellect

deep dive EAT • DRINK • SHOP • PLAY

THE OUTPOSTS 17 HOURS IN PITTSBORO It’s 6:00 a.m., and the sun has just risen. The pines are shrouded in fog, and nobody is on the roads. I drink my first cup of coffee at home while I lace up my shoes. I take my time, because that is authentically possible in Pittsboro. There are no interstates here, no highrises—just four thousand or so folks, a handful of restaurants, and a compact downtown. If you crave hustle or a city that is always buzzing, this is not that. This is a town with a true circadian rhythm. By 7:00 a.m. I’m a mile in or two into my run. My route of choice starts at the popular paved trail around Central Carolina Community College’s Pittsboro campus and takes me into town, where I run past the historic courthouse, the Chatham Arts Council building, and the YMCA. I pass Sweet Bee Caffe and City Tap, S&T’s Soda Shop, and Postal Fish Company. I know who lives in a lot of the houses I pass. My kids know their kids. My run completed, Phoenix Bakery is the source of my second cup of coffee—and breakfast. The beer bread muffin is rich and savory and filled with quality cheese. Some days, I meet my friends here, and we talk music, film, TV, politics, and life in general. Midmorning, I see what deals I can find. I’m partial to secondhand stores, and Pittsboro is great for that, from our PTA Thrift Shop to our Habitat Home Store. There’s Screaming for Vintage for more curated retro décor, while Circle City Books and Music packs a wealth of used books and records into a relatively small storefront. Lunch happens at Michoacán Mexican Grill—no question. Before this restaurant’s summer 2019 opening, Michoacán had been Pittsboro’s best food truck. While I can’t speak for its carnivorous menu, I can say that its vegetarian offerings are consistently diverse and satisfying. If the weather cooperates, the family and I are headed for the water. Just a few minutes east of town (and not far from Carolina Tiger Rescue), the Robeson Creek Canoe Launch allows easy access for paddlers headed upriver to the Haw or downriver to Jordan Lake. So far today, we’ve gone running and canoeing. So we’re hungry. If we’re being honest, I’ll be cooking supper. And the very, very Pittsboro experience is buying the ingredients. There’s Chatham Marketplace, our local co-op, and two recurring farmers markets for those looking for local flavor. It may sound Mayberry, but the other option, Food Lion, is one spot where I inevitably run into a friend or two each time I step inside. By now, it’s—I don’t know, 7:30 or 8:00 p.m.? Pittsboro nightlife is more like evening life, which is OK by me, and this is when it tends to start. We have Americana and rockabilly at City Tap and tribute acts and bands on legacy tours at the Pittsboro Roadhouse, but I’m partial to Oddco. It’s a cozy little hub of art, music, and overall funkiness run by the nicest people imaginable. If you’re into late nights, you can have them. Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Durham are just up the road.

HAW RIVER FARMHOUSE ALES PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA

MUST

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From the road, it looks like an unusually large and busy old-fashioned convenience store of the sort dotting country roads everywhere. But the Saxapahaw General Store is actually a social center of the creative community that has sprung up in the town’s old mill infrastructure. Yes, you can get gas. But you can also get great food rooted in local, conscious farming and a variety of goods from local producers and artisans. Its breakfast is among our favorites in the Triangle, whether you eat it at picnic tables inside or on the brick patio, before you walk down the steps of an outdoor amphitheater and emerge along the Haw River for a well-sated walk.

Me? I’m in bed before midnight and up with the sun. 12.11.19 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 27

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664 WEST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-542-4452 THEPHOENIXBAKERYNC.COM On any given morning here, you’ll find a cross-section of the town: hippie dirt farmers, cops, retirees, college instructors, families, journalists, and various kinds of professionals all queue up for caffeine and freshly baked treats. The food and coffee are satisfying, the vibe and the décor are comfortable and easy, and the company is world-class.

THE JOYFUL JEWEL

44 HILLSBORO STREET, PITTSBORO, 919-883-2775 WWW.JOYFULJEWEL.COM The Joyful Jewel sells work of local 170 artists. Often the only place you can find a certain artist’s work because the pieces take time-honed skill and often many hours to create, we have a variety of media for new art buyers and serious collectors.

EAT ALLEN & SON BBQ

5650 U.S. HIGHWAY 15-501, PITTSBORO 919-542-2294, STUBBSANDSONBBQ.COM If you’re looking for something reimagined and gussied-up, you’d better turn around and head back to the city. This landmark country pork palace does N.C. ’cue and fixins the oldschool way.

ANGELINA’S KITCHEN

23 RECTORY STREET, PITTSBORO 919-545-5505, ANGELINASKITCHENONLINE.COM Chef-owner Angelina Koulizakis-Battiste runs this anchor of Chatham County’s farm-totable community. If you’ve lived in Pittsboro for longer than six months without eating Angelina’s fusions of Greek and Southwestern cuisines, you’re doing it wrong.

CAROLINA CRAVINGS CO.

84 HILLSBORO STREET, PITTSBORO 919-444-2023, FACEBOOK.COM/ CAROLINACRAVINGSCO A cousin to Phoenix Bakery (see below) that operates out of Phoenix’s original downtown storefront, Carolina Cravings focuses wholly on sweets. Try the fudge. No, try the macarons. No, try the brownies. Hell, try everything.

28 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 12.11.19

REVERENCE FARMS CAFE THE HAW RIVER PHOTO BY ADAM DAVID KISSICK

THE EDDY PUB

1715 SAXAPAHAW-BETHLEHEM CHURCH ROAD, SAXAPAHAW 336-525-2010, THEEDDYPUB.COM The loud, low-slung communal barroom is a great place to meet people, and local farms pump fresh produce into pub food both Southern and European in character. A menu spanning N.C. trout cakes and pad Thai washes down with local beers and a long wine list.

THE FEARRINGTON HOUSE RESTAURANT

2000 FEARRINGTON VILLAGE CENTER, FEARRINGTON VILLAGE, PITTSBORO 919-542-2121, FEARRINGTON.COM/HOUSE If you’re going to blow rent money on a meal, you may as well do it in the gracious, sprawling farmhouse where one of the more celebrated restaurants in this part of North Carolina resides. A seasonally shifting menu fueled by on-site vegetable and herb gardens elevates farm-to-fork dining in a genteel hideaway outside of Chapel Hill.

FIESTA GRILL

3307 N.C. HIGHWAY 54 WEST, CHAPEL HILL 919-928-9002, FIESTAGRILL.US Some of the best authentic Mexican food in the Triangle awaits on an anonymous stretch of rural highway five miles west of Carrboro. Fiesta Grill is fresh and unassumingly good, and you can’t beat a lunch combination for $5.95.

GREEK KOUZINA

964 EAST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-542-9950, GREEKKOUZINA.COM If you’re into low-frills establishments that sell good food at a fair price, well, Greek Kouzina is exactly that: Spend a few dollars, wait a few minutes in the unassuming dining room, and receive consistently good falafel.

LEFT BANK BUTCHERY

1729 SAXAPAHAW-BETHLEHEM CHURCH ROAD, SAXAPAHAW 336-525-2092, LEFTBANKBUTCHERY.COM For those who want to eat meat responsibly, this butcher shop exclusively uses whole, healthy, local animals that were raised ethically and sustainably. Beef, pork, poultry, and fish are sold with a populist philosophy and prices to match.

K MICHOACÁN MEXICAN GRILL

440 EAST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-704-8751 What had been Pittsboro’s best food truck is now a brick-and-mortar, and we’re happy to have it. It’s been especially exciting to see the menu expand. For vegetarians and carnivores alike, the burritos and fajitas never let you down. And kudos to Michoacán for reusing an existing building (an old Pizza Hut) rather than building a new one.

6956 N.C. HIGHWAY 87, GRAHAM 336-525-2266 REVERENCEFARMSCAFE.COM If you find yourself in Graham, don’t forget this unique stop, where the farm and table could hardly be closer. A working polyculture farm serves its own meat and veggies, as well as those of other local farms and suppliers, in dishes such as meatloaf and mushroom risotto, bratwurst, and an “Oyster Mushroom Po’ Girl.”

THE ROOT CELLAR CAFE & CATERING

35 SUTTLES ROAD, PITTSBORO 919-542-1062, ROOTCELLARCHAPELHILL. COM/PITTSBORO We won’t hold it against the Root Cellar’s Pittsboro satellite for being part of the massive Chatham Park development, which, over the next decade or so, is going to reshape life in Pittsboro as we know it. After all, it’s become one of our default lunch spots, with the grits bowl alone bringing us back time and again.

DRINK

580 CRAFT BEER

354 EAST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-542-5431 580CRAFTBEER.COM With rotating taps and some fairly obscure selections on the shelves, 580 functions as both a snug little bar and a bottle shop for the beer nerd in ya.

THE CITY TAP

89 HILLSBORO STREET, PITTSBORO 919-545-0562 THECITYTAP.COM This watering hole serves all the essential roles of a small-town bar. Grab a sandwich for you and your kids? Ta-da: It’s a lunch spot with a patio. Meet a friend for a beer on a Tuesday evening? Ta-da: It’s a low-key, centrally located bar. Catch a rowdy rockabilly act or test out a new song at an open mic? Ta-da: It’s a venue with a full calendar.

FAIR GAME BEVERAGE COMPANY

192 LORAX LANE, PITTSBORO 919-245-5434 FAIRGAMEBEVERAGE.COM Thanks to a recent change in state law, this Pittsboro distillery now has a tasting room, where you can score cocktails, local ciders on tap and in bottles, as well as North Carolina wines. The Apple Brandy is pretty spectacular, tell you what.

HAW RIVER FARMHOUSE ALES

1713 SAXAPAHAW-BETHLEHEM CHURCH ROAD, SAXAPAHAW 336-525-9270 HAWRIVERALES.COM This little brewery brings Belgian style to the bucolic South, with an open tasting room and patio year-round. Foraged, rare, hyperlocal ingredients capture Saxapahaw in unique, funky glasses—hope you like beer with pine needles and stuff in it.

ROOST BEER GARDEN

2000 FEARRINGTON VILLAGE CENTER, FEARRINGTON VILLAGE, PITTSBORO 919-542-1239 FEARRINGTON.COM/ROOST Don’t let its size fool you—there’s a lot packed into this tiny building. A pizza oven cranks out woodfired pies, while beer taps offer excellent local beverages. Roots musicians hold down the porch, and all the seating is outdoors.

STARRLIGHT MEAD

130 LORAX LANE, PITTSBORO 919-533-6314, STARRLIGHTMEAD.COM For alcohol as distinctive as Pittsboro itself, get thee to the meadery. Starrlight’s meads vary by dryness, sweetness, and type of honey, to the point that you can match specific meads to meals or moods.

SHOP CHATHAM PTA THRIFT SHOP

400 EAST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-542-4070 CHATHAM.K12.NC.US Our favorite store in town is, well, just our humble little thrift store. But hey, it’s a nexus of uncommonly good finds.

CIRCLE CITY BOOKS & MUSIC

121 HILLSBORO STREET, PITTSBORO 919-548-5954 Circle City Books’ N.C. authors mural has become a downtown landmark. Inside, the shop is packed with fairly priced used books and a respectable record selection. (We’ve scored some great jazz and country here, not to mention a copy of Thriller.) For collectors, there are some rare records and early-edition and signed books as well.

CENTRAL CAROLINA COMMUNITY COLLEGE CAMPUS

764 WEST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-542-6495 CCCC.EDU/LOCATIONS/CHATHAM CCCC is a fine school, but it’s the milelong trail and disc golf course that give the Pittsboro campus a broader appeal. The paved footpath wends through woods, around the school’s working farm, and by a frog pond, which keeps the scenery interesting enough for anything from a family walk to a runner putting in a daily 5K. As if that’s not enough, Pittsboro’s library (which inhabits an architecturally striking eco-friendly building) is on this CCCC campus as well.

HAW RIVER BALLROOM

220 MARKET STREET, FEARRINGTON VILLAGE, PITTSBORO 919-542-3030, FEARRINGTON.COM/MCINTYRES-BOOKS It’s the closest independent bookshop to Pittsboro, and it’s on the same book-tour circuit as Quail Ridge, Regulator, and Flyleaf, which means McIntyre’s is responsible for bringing notable authors to Chatham on a regular basis.

1711 SAXAPAHAW-BETHLEHEM CHURCH ROAD, SAXAPAHAW, 336-525-2314, HAWRIVERBALLROOM.COM Imagine a venue the size of Cat’s Cradle with slightly more rustic booking proclivities— indie rockers like Guster, Americana giants like Gillian Welch, and their intersections, like the Mountain Goats. But, instead of being stuffed in a strip mall, it’s spread across three levels of a historic dye house floating high above the Haw River, its lanterns gently shining, like a landlocked lighthouse beckoning in all that country darkness. You’ve just imagined the Haw River Ballroom, the gorgeous music venue at the epicenter of Saxapahaw’s cultural life, adjacent to both the General Store and the Eddy Pub.

ODDCO

JORDAN LAKE

MCINTYRE’S BOOKS

684 WEST STREET, PITTSBORO 919-704-8832, REALODDSTUFF.COM There’s not another room like this. Oddco occupies a rescued 1951 Lustron—a prefab home with enameled steel walls—and is filled with fantastic prints, visual art, and t-shirts almost exclusively created by area artists. Oddco also keeps a steady calendar of interesting, worthwhile music and events, reflecting owners Tim Lee and Cristina Virsida’s ever-evolving sonic and aesthetic curiosity.

PLAY BYNUM FRONT PORCH

950 BYNUM ROAD, BYNUM 870-836-1030, BYNUMFRONTPORCH.ORG The Bynum Front Porch music series, which brings Americana bands to the stage beside the old Bynum General Store on Fridays in summer, lies at the junction of old Chatham and new, with a progressive-leaning crowd enjoying rural music beside a historic landmark in a quaint little country town.

280 STATE PARK ROAD, APEX, 919-3620586, NCPARKS.GOV/JORDAN-LAKESTATE-RECREATION-AREA Technically the lake is in Apex, but it’s right on top of us. A major part of the Pittsboro experience is getting a lake pass every summer and taking the kids swimming. You can also meet up with friends to go canoeing, either launching into the lake itself or from the Robeson Creek Canoe Launch, which is in Pittsboro. From the Robeson Creek put-in, you can choose to paddle upstream into the Haw River or downstream to the lake.

PITTSBORO CENTER FOR THE ARTS

18 EAST SALISBURY STREET, PITTSBORO 919-533-6997, PITTSBOROYOUTHTHEATER.COM The main attraction at this arts center and auditorium is the Pittsboro Youth Theater, but it also includes gallery space for exhibits by local artists, pop-up readings, concerts, corporate events spaces, summer camps, and more.

The

Showcasing over 170 local artists in a wide variety of media including pottery, painting, jewelry, ﬁber, glass and more. Offering frequent classes for the public in our gallery in art, writing and music. Join us twice a month for our in-house concerts!

44-A Hillsboro St. Pittsboro (919) 883-2775 joyfuljewel.com

Buy, Sell, and Trade - Rare, Used, and Unusual Books, Vinyl, and CDs

121 Hillsboro St. circlecitybooks@gmail.com P.O. Box 831 (919)548-5954 Pittsboro, NC 27312 Open 8 days a week

SATURDAYS IN SAXAPAHAW

1612 JORDAN DRIVE, SAXAPAHAW SAXAPAHAWNC.COM Each Saturday from May through August, here’s Saxapahaw’s own little farmers market, complete with a music series that skews toward Americana but is also full of surprises.

SHAKORI HILLS COMMUNITY ARTS CENTER

1439 HENDERSON TANYARD ROAD, PITTSBORO 919-542-1746, SHAKORIHILLS.ORG Mainly you’ll come to this seventy-twoacre property to get muddy at the Shakori Hills GrassRoots Festival of Music & Dance or cut the lawn at the Hoppin’ John OldTime and Bluegrass Fiddlers’ Convention, but it also hosts arts classes and youth programs throughout the year.

12.11.19 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 29

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13

PUBLIQUARTET One of the mottos of New York City-based chamber music ensemble PUBLIQuartet is the London Underground warning “Mind the Gap.” In PUBLIQuartet’s world, the phrase speaks to the power of making chamber music accessible to a wider audience, something they cultivated in early gigs at college house parties and coffeeshops. But “Mind the Gap” is also a creative practice, the art of connecting musical genres and time periods to unearth universal themes. The group’s repertoire includes compositions for string quartets by living composers, and arrangements inspired by canonical works of jazz and classical music. Flamboyant and non-dogmatic, the group use recitation, percussive tapping, and even metal whistles to punctuate and transition between musical worlds. PUBLIQuartet’s second album Freedom and Faith is grounded in how women composers have explored themes of spirituality and creative inspiration. It includes compositions by kindred activist-artist spirits Jessie Montgomery and Jessica Meyer, as well as tributes to Nina Simone and the twelfth-century mystic and polymath, Hildegard von Bingham. —Josephine McRobbie MOESER AUDITORIUM, CHAPEL HILL 8 p.m., $37, www.carolinaperformingarts.org

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 12

SUAH SOUNDS CHRISTMAS CAVALCADE

Suah Sound’s star-studded roster is reason enough to attend this holiday show, though it’s made even worthier as a benefit for the Orange County Rape Crisis Center, a non-profit which works to end sexual violence through support, education, and advocacy. “I’m very grateful for the work of OCRCC, which provides essential resources in our community for survivors and educational outreach that is necessary,” says Skylar Gudasz, who performs stunning solo material—with a guest appearance from Josh Moore—as well as selections alongside Rachel Kiel, Chessa Rich, and Steph Stewart as Madrigal Flute Quartet. Reese McHenry rattles the room with raw, rowdy garage rock propelled by her howling vocals and unshakeable hooks. Al Riggs emanates warmth while challenging listeners with their prolific and deeply personal songwriting. John Howie Jr. & The Rosewood Bluff, meanwhile, break from the studio to deliver a formidable dose of honky-tonk twang. —Spencer Griffith LOCAL 506, CHAPEL HILL 8 p.m., $12, ww.local506.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14

MARCO RAFALÀ, ISABEL WALSH, AND M DRESSLER

12.11–12.18

PUBLIQuartet PHOTO COURTESY OF CAROLINA PERFORMING ARTS 30 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

Stories about spirits and spooks are a dime a dozen, but stories by spirits and spooks? That’s a ghost of a different color. Not, we should hasten to add, that M Dressler, an associate professor of creative writing at Greensboro’s Guilford College, is a ghost, at least not as far as we know. But the point-of-view protagonist of her novel The Last to See Me is. Though she’s been dead for a hundred years, Emma still haunts a house on the Northern California coast in an alternate world where ghost hunters have mostly eradicated postmortem hanger-ons. There, she squares off against a ghost hunter who moves in after the last of the old family dies. Weaving together Emma’s life story with her fight for survival—or something like it—Dressler creates what Kirkus Reviews called “a gorgeous mystery of love that twists into curses;” read it now before the second novel in the series, I See You So Close, comes out in March 2020. At this So & So Books reading, she’s joined by novelist Marco Rafalà, the founder of New York City’s Guerrilla Lit Reading Series and the author of How Fires End; and Isabel Walsh, an MFA candidate in fiction writing at N.C. State. —Brian Howe SO & SO BOOKS, RALEIGH 6 p.m., free, www.soandsomag.org

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11

THE FILMS OF BILL FERRIS

In 2018, the Atlanta label Dust-to-Digital released the box set Voices of Mississippi: Artists and Musicians Documented by William Ferris, a three-disc release accompanied by a one-hundred-twenty page booklet of notes on the project (this thorough compilation, not surprisingly, won Ferris Grammys for “Best Historical Album” and “Best Album Notes”). The landmark release is the life work of the folklorist, historian, and beloved retired UNC professor, Bill Ferris, but the recordings represent only a portion of Ferris’s archives: beyond his writing and recording work, he has also produced fifteen documentary films. At this Dust-to-Digital event, a short program of Ferris’s films produced in Mississippi between 1968-1980 will be followed by a Q&A, as well as a conversation between Ferris and Center for Documentary Studies professor Tom Rankin. —Sarah Edwards THE CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM 6:30 p.m., $12, www.carolinatheatre.org

FREE TO BE FEARLESS. TO HOLD THE POWERFUL ACCOUNTABLE. TO BE A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS.

FREE TO TELL THE TRUTH. TO CELEBRATE AND CRITICIZE. TO ADVOCATE FOR THE MARGINALIZED.

FREE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. FROM CORPORATE INFLUENCE. NO PAYWALLS, NO SUBSCRIPTIONS.

FREE Bill Ferris PHOTO COURTESY OF DUST-TO-DIGITAL

BECAUSE OF YOU. KEEP IT FREE. KEEP IT INDY.

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO? BLUE VELVET AT HOLY MOUNTAIN PRINTING (P. 40 ), BULL CITY PRESENTS AT OKAY ALRIGHT (P. 38), EMMY BLOTNICK AT GOODNIGHTS (P. 39), LABOR OF LOVE: A BENEFIT FOR WBWC AT THE HAW RIVER BALLROOM (P. 33), LOST AND FOUND AT THE ACKLAND (P. 37), NEW MEN AT THE VISUAL ARTS EXCHANGE (P. 26)

Join the INDY Press Club at KeepItINDY.com.

INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 31

RHYTHMS LIVE MUSIC HALL

SA 12/14 @CAT’S CRADLE

Chocolate Lounge & Juice Bar

Fri 12/13 Sat 12/14 Wed 12/18 Fri 12/20 Sat 12/28 Tue 12/31

Chocolate Covered Comedy Neville’s Quarter Free wine tasting 5-7pm Alice Osborn River Otters New Year’s Musical Extravaganza

Music Performed from 6pm to 10pm Beer & Wine Served Daily Timberlyne Shopping Center, Chapel Hill 1129 Weaver Dairy Rd • specialtreatsnc.com

TH 12/12 TWIN PEAKS W/ LALA LALA AND OHMME ($18/$20)

FR 12/13 THE CONNELLS W/SURRENDER HUMAN AND LEMON SPARKS ($20/$23) SA 12/14 HORTON’S HOLIDAY HAYRIDE FT. THE REVEREND

HORTON’S HOLIDAY HAYRIDE

THE REVEREND HORTON HEAT W/ VOODOO GLOW SKULLS, THE 5678’S, DAVE ALVIN

12/27,28,29 CAT'S CRADLE

FR 12/13 @CAT’S CRADLE

THE CONNELLS

5/3, 2020 THE RESIDENTS ($30/$35) 5/5, 2020 ANDY SHAUF W/ FAYE WEBSTER ($18/$20) 5/11, 2020 BARNS COURTNEY ($22/$25)

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER W/LILLY HIATT ($26)

WED THU

12/12

THE MONTI STORYSLAM—MORTIFIED Redeye presents

GARCIA PEOPLES, DEEPER and SAMMUS

1/18, 2020 AMERICAN AUTHORS AND MAGIC

GIANT W/SPECIAL GUEST PUBLIC ($25/$28) 1/20, 2020 CRACKER AND CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN ($22/$25)

1/21, 2020 TOO MANY ZOOZ W/ BIROCRATIC ($18/$20) WE 1/22, 2020 MARCO BENEVENTO ($17/$20) 1/23, 2020 YOLA W/AMYTHYST KLAH ($20/$23)

FRI

1/25, OLD2020 THE ROAD TO S OUT PODCAST ($35)

12/13

STREET CORNER SYMPHONY SUN

12/15

Crank It Loud presents

THUNDER JACKSON with J. Timber

Motorco and The Sol Kitchen present FRI

12/20

SAT

ERIC ROBERSON THE WUSSES

12/21 Beauty Operators SAT

12/28

Pierce Freelon Fundraiser & Birthday Bash

M8ALLA, G YAMAZAWA, THE BEAST & Special Guest

NOW

WE 1/29, 2020 ANAMANAGUCHI ($18/$20) 1/30, 2020 YONDER MOUNTAIN

STRING BAND/TRAVELLIN MCCOURYS ($25/$30) FR 1/31/2020 BEACH FOSSILS ($18/$20)

2/1, 2020 JAWBOX W/HAMMERED HULLS ($28/$30) 2/14, 2020 THRICE,

MEWITHOUTYOU, DRUG CHURCH ( $26/$30) 2/15, 2020 COLONY HOUSE THE LEAVE WHAT’S LOST BEHIND TOUR W/TYSON MOTSENBOCKER ($15/$18)

12/29

SARAH SHOOK & THE DISARMERS with Severed Fingers

TUE

12/31 FRI

1/3

Raund Haus x Runaway NYE:

MADE OF OAK, KIR, OAK CITY SLUMS, CHAOS CONTROL, SWUNG, TONY G AND MORE Crank It Loud presents

INTEGRITY

Fuming Mouth / Raw Hex / Joy / Blood Ritual

COMING SOON: Art Alexakis of Everclear, Magic City Hippies, Michal Menert, Late Night Radio, Carbon Leaf, Beth Stelling, Blackalicious, Flamenco Vivo Carlota Santana, Grayscale, Hot Mulligan, Over The Rhine, Lost Dog Street Band,AJJ, Jason Ringenberg, Blockhead,We Were Promised Jetpacks, While She Sleeps, David Wilcox, Gnawa LanGus, OM, Little People, Ellis Dyson & The Shambles, Frameworks, Asgeir, Mdou Moctar, Black Atlantic, Caspian, Shannon & the Clams, Kevin Morby

32 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

WE 12/18 AN EVENING WITH SAM TAYLOE (TIME SAWYER) & MIKE RAMSEY ($10) SA 12/21 JON STICKLEY TRIO W/INTO THE FOG ($10/$12) FR 12/27 THE MERCH HOLIDAY PARTY : DJ VSPRTN

3/27, 2020 SOCCER MOMMY W/ TOMBERLIN ($18/$20) 3/28, 2020 ANTIBALAS ($18/$22) 4/3, 2020 SHOVELS & ROPE W/INDIANOLA ($25/$28) 4/7, 2020 ATERCIOPELADOS AND LOS AMIGOS INVISIBLES ($32/$35) 4/20, 2020 REAL ESTATE ($25/$28)

IN GRATITUDE: A TRIBUTE TO EARTH, WIND & FIRE

FR 1.24

NO QUARTER LED ZEPPELIN TRIBUTE

2020 CHAPEL HILL RD. DURHAM | 1-984-219-1594 | RhythmsLiveNC.com

FR 1/3, 2020 THE BLAZERS ‘HOW TO ROCK’ REUNION ($15/$18) SA 1/4, 2020 SUBLIMINAL SURGE / SNAKE SHAMING ($5) TH 1/9, 2020 SONG TRAVELER’S WRITER’S NIGHT W/SAM FRAZIER, ABIGAIL DOWD, AND WYATT EASTERLING ($20) SA 1/11, 2020 HEAT PREACHER & THE GONE GHOSTS W/TEXOMA ($7/$8) TH 1/16, 2020 QUETICO W/PHIL MOORE ($10) FR 1/17, 2020 MO LOWDA & THE HUMBLE W/ ARSON DAILY ($12/$15) SA 1/18 $ SU 01/19, 2020 CARRBORO DJANGO REINHARDT FESTIVAL

LOCAL 506 (CHAPEL HILL)

1/18, 2020 BAILEN

ARTSCENTER (CARRBORO)

3/24, 2020 JAMES MCMURTRY W/BONNIE WHITMORE ($22/$25) MOTORCO (DUR)

1/11, 2020 MAGIC CITY HIPPIES W/ARGONAUT & WASP ($17.50/$20) 2/11, 2020 WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS ($15/$17) 3/6, 2020 ELLIS DYSON & THE SHAMBLES W/DOWNTOWN ABBY AND THE ECHOS ($10/$12) 4/14, 2020 DEAFHEAVEN W/INTER ARMA AND GREET DEATH ( $25/$28)

TU 2/4, 2020 CHRIS FARREN, RETIREMENT PARTY, MACSEAL ($10/$12)

1/25, 2020 THE DEVIL MAKES THREE W/MATT HECKLER ($25/$30)

2/22, 2020 GARZA FT. ROB GARZA OF THIEVERY CORPORATION

WHERE THE MOON HIDES TOUR 2020 ($20/$23) 2/27, 2020 TODD SNIDER ($25/$28)

WE 2/11, 2020 BAY FACTION W/SUPERBODY ($12/$15)

3/24, 2020 JOHN MORELAND ($15/$18)

WE 2/19, 2020 BLACK LIPS ($15)

4/20, 2020 SHARON VAN ETTEN W/JAY SOM ($28/$31)

SA 2/22, 2020 TIM BARRY ($15) SU 2/23, 2020 SLOAN ($25)

FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

HAW RIVER BALLROOM

SA 2/8, 2020 SEERATONES ($13/$15; ON SALE 12/13)

TH 2/20, 2020 THE BROOK & THE BLUFF ($12/$14)

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY.

RITZ (RAL)

(PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION W/ LIVENATION)

FR 1/31, 2020 G LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE W/JONTAVIOUS WILLIS ($25/$30)

3/21, 2020 BEST COAST W/MANNEQUIN PUSSY ($25/$27)

SAT 1.11

SU 4/26, 2020 SAMMY RAE & THE FRIENDS ($12/$15)

FR 1/31, 2020 DAMN TALL BUILDINGS ($14/$17)

3/14, 2020 RADICAL FACE ($25/$28)

NYE CELEBRATION WITH THE MIGHTY MESSENGERS OF SOUL, DJ HEAVY, STANLEY BAIRD & CONSTANCE PRINCE

TU 4/21, 2020 KATIE PUITT ($10)

FR 1/24, 2020 ILLITERATE LIGHT W/CAMP HOWARD ($12/$14)

3/11, 2020 DESTROYER W/NAP EYES ($20/$23)

TUE 12.31

TU 3/24, 2020 STEVE GUNN, MARY LATTIMORE & WILLIAM TYLER ($20/$22) MO 4/6, 2020 MIGHTY OAKS ($12/$14)

2/18, 2020 DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS ($26/$30)

2/29, 2020 OF MONTREAL W/ LILY'S BAND ($17)

THE STRANGER BILLY JOEL TRIBUTE EXPERIENCE

TU 3/17, 2020 BAMBARA ($10/$12) SU 12/15 LYNN BLAKEY'S CHRISTMAS SHOW FT. ECKI HEINS, FJ VENTRE & MORE. OPENING: DANNY GOTHAM ($12)

FR 12/20 CHATHAM COUNTY LINE ELECTRIC HOLIDAY TOUR W/ BIG FAT GAP ($20/$22)

2/21, 2020 ARCHER'S OF LOAF ($25) OLD S OUT

FR 12.20

SU 3/1, 2020 HEMBREE

TU 1/21, 2020 TALL HEIGHTS W/ANIMAL YEARS ($15/$17)

OLD S 2/19, 2020 YBN CORDAE ($20/$22.50) OUT

MARCUS ANDERSON THIS IS CHRISTMAS WITH SHELBY J

FR 2/28, 2020 PALEHOUND ($13/$15; ON SALE 12/6)

2/17, 2020 KYLE KINANE THE SPRING BREAK TOUR($25/$28)

2/27, 2020 DAN DEACON ($15/$17)

SUN

W/SURRENDER HUMAN AND LEMON SPARKS

FRI 12.13

TU 3/8, 2020 DAN RODRIGUEZ ($15)

FR 1/10 & SA 1/11, 2020 - TWO SHOWS

12/11

ELECTRIC HOLIDAY TOUR W/BIG FAT GAP

TU 12/17 AD HOC PRESENTS DAUGHTERS/HEALTH W/ SHOW ME THE BODY($22/$25)

1/3,4,5, 2020 CAT'S CRADLE 50TH ANNIVERSARY SHOWS! 40+ BANDS INCLUDING: SUPERCHUNK, WHAT PEGGY WANTS, SORRY ABOUT DRESDEN, THE MAYFLIES USA, & MANY MORE.

RECENTLY ANNOUNCED: DEAFHEAVEN, REMEMBER JONES, AGAINST ME!

CHATHAM COUNTY LINE

HORTON HEAT W/ VOODOO GLOW SKULLS, THE 5678'S, DAVE ALVIN ($25/$28)

50TH ANNIVERSARY SHOWS! 40+ BANDS INCLUDING: SUPERCHUNK, WHAT PEGGY WANTS, SORRY ABOUT DRESDEN, THE MAYFLIES USA, & MANY MORE.

Get Tickets at our website or in person at the box office. T&TH 11AM–2PM and Event Days 11AM–showtime.

FR 12/20 @HAW RIVER BALLROOM

5/1,2020TENNIS W/MOLLYBURCH ($18/$20) THE CAROLINA THEATER (DUR)

TU 2/25, 2020 SHAUN MARTIN OF SNARKY PUPPY AND ELECTRIC KIF ($12/$15)

4/15, 2020 ANGEL OLSEN W/MADIDIAZ

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12.11–12.18

music

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13

LABOR OF LOVE Women’s Birth and Wellness Center (WBWC), North Carolina’s first non-profit freestanding birth center, was founded by firebrand Certified Nurse Midwife Maureen Darcey in 1995. Operating in a state regularly cited as one of the most restrictive in the country for midwifery, WBWC has not only persevered, it has become a model for how to run an independent center that maintains both strong relationships with local hospitals and a holistic space for low-risk patients to give birth. In addition to catching babies, the practitioners at WBWC provide prenatal care, sexual health education and screenings, and primary care, with all services inclusive of trans and non-binary patients. In celebration of WBWC’s twenty-fifth anniversary, the Pinhook curates this fundraiser for WBWC’s patient care offerings. The night includes performances by Loamlands, Molly Sarlé, Katharine Whalen, Rissi Palmer, Kamara Thomas, and Emily Frantz of Mandolin Orange. Sylvan Esso, hot off their ten-person tour showcase “WITH,” rounds out the bill with a DJ a set. —Josephine McRobbie HAW RIVER BALLROOM, SAXAPAHAW

6 p.m., $25, www.hawriverballroom.com

WED, DEC 11 CAROLINA THEATRE Robert Earl Keen, Shinyribs; $36-$66. 8 p.m. THE CAVE TAVERN rickoLus, Scott (From the Monologue Bombs); 9 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR Chris Boerner Residency; $8-$10. 8:30 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT Manas, Bowne Bowles & Wagg, Secret Boyfriend; $10. 9 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Root Shock; $10-$12. 8 p.m. THE RITZ Disco Donnie, Sugar Society; $21-$28. 7 p.m. SLIM’S DOWNTOWN Swim Down, Dead Friends, Paragon; $5. 9 p.m.

THU, DEC 12 BLUE NOTE GRILL Cosmic Country Band; 7 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE Twin Peaks, Lala Lala, OHMME; $18-$20. 8 p.m. THE CAVE TAVERN Little River Creek Police, Birds For Eyes; 9 p.m. CHRIST BAPTIST CHURCH Gloria for Brass and Choir; $10-$15. 7 p.m.

Molly Sarlé performs alongside Katharine Whalen, Loamlands, Rissi Palmer, Emily Frantz, Kamara Thomas, and Sylvan Esso at the Labor of Love concert benefit for the WBWC. PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

LINCOLN THEATRE Squirrel Nut Zippers; $20-$30. 8 p.m. MOTORCO MUSIC HALL Garcia Peoples, Deeper, Sammus; $12-$15. 9 p.m.

THE NIGHT RIDER Homepatients, Angels Can’t See, Ricky Brockway; $5. 8 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT 4th Room Entertainment; $10. 8 p.m. THE PINHOOK The Goodbye Party, Woodvamp; $8. 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Shame, Quetico, Durty Dub’s Tribute To Charley Pride; $5. 8 p.m. SLIM’S DOWNTOWN Yardarm, Coyote vs Acme, Gold Light; $5. 9 p.m. WAKE FOREST LISTENING ROOM Julian Davis, The Situation; $12. 7 p.m.

FRI, DEC 13 ARCANA The Mac McLaughlin Group; 9 p.m. BLUE NOTE GRILL Chicken Shack; $8. 9 p.m. CARY ARTS CENTER The Barefoot Movement Christmas; 7:30 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE The Connells, Surrender Human, Lemon Sparks; $20-$23. 8 p.m. THE CAVE TAVERN The Northbounds; 9 p.m. DUKE CAMPUS: DUKE CHAPEL Choral Society of Durham Christmas Concert; Fri: 8 p.m.; Sun: 4 p.m. $10-$22.

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CAT’S CRADLE Horton’s Holiday Hayride; Reverend Horton Heat, Voodoo Glow Skulls, The 5678’s, Dave Alvin. $25-$28. 7 p.m. THE CAVE TAVERN State of Uncertainty, Flesh Tuxedo, Spreadloves; 9 p.m. KINGS Frontside, Blanko Basnet, Zephyranthes, Like Mike; $10. 8 p.m. LINCOLN THEATRE Delta Rae, Alex Wong, Carrie Welling; SOLD OUT. 8 p.m. LOCAL 506

7th Annual Toys for Tots Benefit

For the seventh straight year, drummer Mike Glass rounds up his rock ‘n’ roll friends—with plenty of familiar faces—to raise some cash for local Toys for Tots campaigns. Carrboro vets North Elementary bring left-of-center rockers full of fuzzy riffs and power pop hooks while Chapel Hill rapper Juan Huevos spits surrealist bars over off-kilter beats. Dave Walker, Scriblin’, and Beau Bennett, and Jonathan Kea flesh out the bill. —Spencer Griffith [$15. 7:30 P.M.]

Elizabeth Cook performs at Pour House Music Hall on Friday, December 13. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST EAST CHAPEL HILL HIGH SCHOOL Voices: Sing We Noël; $25 7:30 p.m.

O’Connor will open at this Kraken throwdown. —Sam Haw

KINGS Balvin Bunny Bounce: A Latin Trap Party; $5. 10 p.m.

[8 P.M., FREE]

THE KRAKEN

LINCOLN THEATRE Delta Rae, Raye Zaragoza; $25. 8 p.m.

Charles Latham & the Borrowed Band

From his antifolk origins in the mid-aughts to the matured magnitude of 2017’s Little Me Time, Charles Latham has consistently produced charming alt-country brewed with pop sensibility and lyrical wit. For his next record, due in 2020, Latham has assembled a group of Triangle musicians that he’s dubbed the Borrowed Band. Magnolia Collective and Shannon

LOCAL 506 Thunder Jackson, Morning Eyes; $12-$14. 7 p.m. THE MAYWOOD Noctomb, Night Hag, Rale, Sleep Torture; $10. 9 p.m. MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL Holiday Pops: NC Symphony; Fri: 8 p.m.; Sat: 3 p.m. & 8 p.m. $75-$94. MOTORCO MUSIC HALL Street Corner Symphony; $15-$20. 9 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL

Elizabeth Cook

With the bewitching pipes of a classic country songstress

and an unfiltered attitude that rivals country’s most notorious outlaws, Nashville firebrand and Opry regular Elizabeth Cook’s razor-sharp songwriting balances bawdy humor with brutally honest confessionals and perceptive storytelling. Expect her to frequently interrupt this acoustic set for revealing—and often hilarious—stories from the road. Opener Andrew Leahey adds rugged, guitar-driven heartland rock. —Spencer Griffith [$16-$20. 8 P.M.] RHYTHMS LIVE MUSIC HALL Marcus Anderson, Shelby J; $31. 8 p.m.

SHARP NINE GALLERY Angela Bringham Trio; $20. 8 p.m. SLIM’S DOWNTOWN Basura, The Glorious Rebellion, SFG, MC Zach Bennett; $5. 9 p.m. WAKE FOREST LISTENING ROOM Mac, Juice; $15. 7 p.m.

SAT, DEC 14 WAKE FOREST LISTENING ROOM Mac, Juice; $15. 7 p.m. APEX FRIENDSHIP HIGH SCHOOL American Sketches; 7:30 p.m. ARCANA Kinda Nice, Clustersparkle; 7 p.m.

THE RITZ DOK2; $52+. 8 p.m.

BLUE NOTE GRILL Cool John Ferguson Band; $15. 8 p.m.

RUBY DELUXE Luxe Posh, Stormie Dae; 10 p.m.

CARY ARTS CENTER Holiday Pops! Concert; $25. 7:30 p.m.

THE MAYWOOD KIFF, Widow, The Hell No, Clang Quartet; $10. 7 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT Heartscape Landbreak, Kym Register, Romantic Animal; 7 p.m.

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SUN, DEC 15 BLUE NOTE GRILL Bulltown Strutters Holiday Throwdown; 5 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM Lynn Blakey, Ecki Heins, FJ Ventre, Danny Gotham; $12. 7:30 p.m. LINCOLN THEATRE Catfish Cooley; $22-$30. 8 p.m. LOCAL 506 Street Sects, Elizabeth Colour Wheel, Roseclouds; $12-$15. 8 p.m. MOTORCO MUSIC HALL Thunder Jackson; $12. 8 p.m. NC MUSEUM OF HISTORY Raleigh Flute Choir Holiday Concert; 2 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR John Saturley, Calapse; $7. 8 p.m. THE PINHOOK Russell Lacy; 2 p.m. THE PINHOOK SNMNMNM, Exit Mice; $10. 7 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Chris Larkin; 1 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Emily Musolino; 3 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Young Cardinals; 5 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Cultivated Mind; 7 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Shake It Like A Caveman; 9 p.m.

THE PINHOOK Chris Pureka, The Harmaleighs; $15-$20. 5 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Deck the Halls with Bands of Raleigh; The Bronze Age, Stranded Bandits, Space Angel, The New Aquarian. Donation suggested. 1 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Arson Daily, Juxton Roy, Foxture: Jonas’ Birthday Bash; $8-$10. 8 p.m.

THE STATION Ellis Dyson, C. Albert Blomquist, Pete Pawsey; 7:30 p.m. WAKE FOREST LISTENING ROOM Lowland Hum Present: Songs for Christmas Time; $15. 4 p.m.

SHARP NINE GALLERY Joey Calderazzo; $25. 8 p.m.

LOCAL 506 Frances Eliza, Secret Pool; $8. 7 p.m.

SLIM’S DOWNTOWN Biggins, Tan Sanders, The Derelicts, Tragic Magic; $5. 9 p.m.

NEPTUNES PARLOUR Polyorchard, Ghost Trees; $5. 8 p.m.

THE STATION Wall of Sound Winterfest Showcase; 5 p.m. THE STATION Rare Ocean, Snide, Henbrain, Brooklyn Maxwell; 8 p.m.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

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WAKE FOREST LISTENING ROOM Mel Melton, The Wicked Mojos; $10. 7 p.m.

MON, DEC 16 THE CAVE TAVERN John Ward Beyle; 9 p.m.

Charles Latham stops by the Kraken for a set on Friday, December 13.

TUE, DEC 17 CAT’S CRADLE

Daughters

At the start of this decade, it seemed that Daughters had broken up over recording disputes on their self-titled record. But in 2018, the noise band returned with You Won’t Get What You Want, an austere amalgamation of dreary lyrics, blaring synthesizers, math-y guitars, pummeling drums and fuzzed-out bass that draw on influences of artrock and post-punk. HEALTH opens. —Sam Haw [$22-$25. 7:30 P.M.]

THE KRAKEN Old Time Stringband Jam; 7 p.m. MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL Joy of The Season: NC Master Chorale; $29-$38. 7:30 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Clint Roberts, The Wonder Drug, Chessa Rich; $7-$10. 7:30 p.m. SHARP NINE GALLERY NCJRO; $20. 8 p.m. THE STATION The Peter Holsapple Combo Residency; 8:30 p.m.

PHOTO BY RUDI PETRY

WED, DEC 18 ARCANA Julia Finch; 8 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM Sam Tayloe (Time Sawyer), Mike Ramsey; $10. 8 p.m. THE CAVE TAVERN Upward Dogs; 9 p.m. ENO RIVER UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST FELLOWSHIP Jazz Vespers for the Holidays; 7 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR Chris Boerner Redsidency; $8-$10. 8:30 p.m. POUR HOUSE MUSIC HALL Frances Eliza, Secret Pool; $5-$10. 8 p.m. THE RITZ Tyler Childers; SOLD OUT. 8 p.m.

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. MUSIC•NEWS•ARTS•FOOD INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 35

12/21

BEAUSOLEIL CAJUN CHRISTMAS 12/14 12/19 12/20 1/24-26 2/9

TRANSACTORS IMPROV HOLIDAY MUSICAL HOLIDAY POPUP CHORUS CIRCLE 12 HOLIDAY SHOW “HELLO, I’M JOHNNY CASH” PRESENTED BY DAVID BURNEY JOAN OSBORNE

12.11

Meet and greet with Sheila Ogle 4:30pm

12.13

Bill Leslie Storyteller CD Release Event, 6:30pm Tim Barnwell Tide Runners: Shrimping and Fishing on the Carolinas and Georgia Coast 11am Mishpacha 2pm

12.14 12.15 12.16

www.quailridgebooks.com • 919.828.1588 • North Hills 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh, NC 27609 CHECK OUT OUR PODCAST: BOOKIN’ w/Jason Jefferies

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art

12.11–12.18

submit! Got something for our calendar? Submit the details at:

indyweek.com/submit#cals DEADLINE: 5 p.m. each Wednesday for the following Wednesday’s issue. QUESTIONS? spequeno@indyweek.com

OPENING 2019 Chatham Studio Tour Mixed media. Artists have open studio tours across the county. Dec 14-15. Chatham County. 2019 Durham Craft Market Holiday Craft Fair Mixed media. Over 60 vendors. Sat, Dec 14. 11 a.m. Durham Convention Center, Durham. African Sculpture and Holiday Market Mixed media. Sun, Dec 15. 12 p.m. Amina’s Gift African Art Market, Chapel Hill. aminasgift.org. Altered Chapel Hill Exhibit Reception Postcard collage. Fri, Dec 13. 6 p.m. Gallery 109, Chapel Hill. chapelhillarts.org.

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13

LOST AND FOUND: STORIES FOR VERNACULAR PHOTOS The collector Robert E. Jackosn’s eleven-thousand-plus vernacular photos—amateur photos taken by individuals that have ended up in thrift shops or on eBay or in a bin at a yard sale—come to us as objects without context. Jackson has been collecting vernacular photographs, some of them dating back to the late nineteenth century, for nearly two decades now; since 2017, UNC has been working with him to assemble a collection (Jackson, a UNC alumnus, has also exhibited his photos at Pace/MacGill Gallery in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among other museums). The exhibit opening coincides with the 2nd Friday ArtWalk in Chapel Hill and will run through January 12. Teeing up the month-long exhibit, the Ackland’s “context contest” invites viewers to submit captions and short stories in response to twenty of the seventy photos on display. Encountering lost photos like these—happy and tender moments filled with the flicker of birthday candles and innocuous private moments— evokes a kind of weird, bittersweet nostalgia. If imagination is an act of empathy, then filling in the blanks with these pictures feels like one good way to do these lost (now found) photographs justice. —Sarah Edwards

THE ACKLAND ART MUSEUM, CHAPEL HILL 5-9 p.m., free, www.ackland.org

A photograph from the exhibit Lost and Found: Stories for Vernacular Photos at the Ackland Art Museum. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ACKLAND ART MUSEUM

Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now Contemporary Indigenous art. Thru Jan 12. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. The Art of Giving painting, sculpture, photography, glass art, jewelry, turned wood, pottery & fiber art. Thru Dec 31. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. HillsboroughGallery.com. Art of Mental Health Mixed media. Thru Jan 24. Rubenstein Art Center Gallery 235, Durham. artscenter.duke.edu. The Art of Resistance Thru Dec 13. UNC’s FedEx Global Education Center, Chapel Hill.

Artwalk with CJ Howard Paintings. Fri, Dec 13. 6 p.m. Art Therapy Institute, Carrboro. facebook.com.

Art’s Work in the Age of Biotechnology Biotechnology: Shaping Our Genetic Futures With guest curator Hannah Star Rogers. Other exhibits at NC State Libraries and GES Center. Thru Mar 15. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu.

Holiday Candle Making Workshop Candle making. Fri, Dec 13. 5:30 p.m. Knox Street Project Space, Durham. facebook.com.

John James Audubon: The Birds of America Ornithological engravings. Thru Dec 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Opening Reception for Elf Market Gallery Artists Fri, Dec 13. 6 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

Scott Avett: INVISIBLE Paintings and prints. Thru Feb 2. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Winter Bazaar Art sale. Over 20 vendors. Sat, Dec 14. 10 a.m. NorthStar Church of the Arts, City of Durham.

John Beerman: The Shape of Light Paintings. Thru Jan 25. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. cravenallengallery.com.

ONGOING

Jaimon Caceres: Verdant Tranquility Colored pencil drawings. Thru Dec 31. Gallery C, Raleigh.

Artspace Holiday Market Holiday market. Sat, Dec 14. 11 a.m. Artspace, Raleigh. artspacenc.org.

Lety Alvarez, Pepe Caudillo, Allison Coleman Paintings. Thru Jan 25. Artspace, Raleigh. Anarchism and the Political Art of Les Temps Nouveaux, 18951914 Prints and graphics. Thru Dec 15. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu.

Conner Calhoun: Whispers from Wizard Mountain Drawings, paintings, and sculpture. Thru Dec 13. Lump, Raleigh. lumpprojects.org.

Kennedi Carter: Godchild Thru Jan 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com/durham. Cosmic Rhythm Vibrations Art inspired by music and rhythm. Thru Mar 1. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. Stephen Costello: Places Sculpture. Reception: November 16, 5-7 p.m. Thru Jan 25. Craven Allen Gallery Durham cravenallengallery.com. Rosana Castrillo Díaz: Trust me. You are t/here. Mixed media. Thru Jan 12. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. Encantada | Enchanted Thru Dec 20. Duke Campus: John Hope Franklin Center, Durham. Fantastic Fauna-Chimeric Creatures Thru Jan 26. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Festive 5 Points Mixed media. Thru Jan 13. 5 Points Gallery, Durham. 5pointsgallery.com. A Few of Our Favorite Things Mixed media. Thru Dec 31. Cary Gallery of Artists, Cary. carygalleryofartists.org. Fine Contemporary Craft Craft. Curated by Mia Hall. Thru Feb 1. Artspace, Raleigh. Coulter Fussell & Antonia Perez: Heirloom Quilts and mixed media. Thru Dec 28. Artspace, Raleigh. artspacenc.org. Hal Goodtree & Students: Photos. Thru Dec 15. Through This Lens, Durham. Holiday Exhibit Mixed media. Thru Jan 4. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. frankisart.com. Harriet Hoover, Vanessa Murray, Rusty Shackleford Thru Jan 5. Oneoneone, Chapel Hill. oneoneone.gallery

INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 37

arts

page

CO NT’D

Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Mexican Modernism Paintings. Thru Jan 19. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. Law and Justice: The Supreme Court of North Carolina, 1819- 2019 Artifacts, images, texts. Thru May 31. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. ncmuseumofhistory.org. Maria Martinez-Cañas: Rebus + Diversions Mixed media. Thru Jan 12. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. Material Mixed media. Thru Jan 3. Durham Arts Council, Durham. facebook.com. Eleanor Mills: Wildflowers of Crested Butte, Colorado Photography. Thru Apr 18. Duke Campus: Lilly Library, Durham. Momentum @ Hamilton Hill 2D and 3D art. Thru Dec 31. Hamilton Hill, Durham. Mystical Logical Mixed media. Thru Dec 13. Lump, Raleigh. lumpprojects.org. NC Chinese Lantern Festival Lanterns. 6 p.m.-10 p.m. every day. Closed Mondays. 20. Thru Jan 12. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. Neighbor to Neighbor: Disposable Diaries Photography. Thru Dec 28. Artspace, Raleigh. New Orleans Second Line Parades Photos. Thru Dec 31. Love House and Hutchins Forum, Chapel Hill. southerncultures.org. Nuevo Espíritu de Durham: New Spirit of Durham Personal stories and images. Thru Jan 5. Museum of Durham History , Durham. cityofraleighmuseum.org. Kelly Popoff: At Home With Our Histories Paintings. Thru Jan 3. UNC Campus: Hanes Art Center, Chapel Hill. art.unc.edu. Portraying Power and Identity: A Global Perspective Thru Jan 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com/durham. Property of the People: The Foundations of the NCMA, 1924-1945 Photographs. Thru Feb 9. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

38 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

QuiltSpeak: Uncovering Women’s Voices Through Quilts Thru Mar 8. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Emily W. Pease

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

Lynn Saville: Photos. Thru Dec 15. Through This Lens, Durham. throughthislens.com. Laura Lacambra Shubert: New Works Paintings. Thru Dec 29. Gallery C, Raleigh. galleryc.net. Southbound: Photographs of and about the New South Thru Dec 21 at Power Plant Gallery, Durham. Thru Dec 29 at Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh.powerplantgallery.com, gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Sydney Steen: Fault Lines Vignettes. Thru Oct 25. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com. Dawn Surratt & Lori Vrba: (en)compass Mixed media. Thru Dec 20. Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Durham. horseandbuggypress.com. Doug Tabb: What Did I Just See? Sculpture. Thru Jan 13. 5 Points Gallery, Durham. 5pointsgallery.com. Teens, Inspired: Home Poems, mixed media. Thru Jan 3. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. Cheryl Thurber: Documenting Gravel Springs, Mississippi, in the 1970s Photos. Thru Mar 31. UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library, Chapel Hill. ¡Viva Viclas!: The Art of the Lowrider Motorcycle Guest curator Denise Sandoval. Thru Feb 9. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh.org. What in the World Is a Grain Mummy? Egyptology and art. Thru Jan 8. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Jade Wilson: Trigger Warning Photography. Thru Jan 4. Golden Belt, Durham. Wintertide Oil paintings. Thru Feb 1. V L Rees Gallery, Raleigh. vlrees.com. The Writing On The Wall Writing. Thru Dec 14. VAE Raleigh, Raleigh. Woodcroft Pottery Sale Pottery sale. Sun, Dec 15. 12 p.m. Woodcroft Swim & Tennis Club, Durham.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14

BULL CITY PRESS PRESENTS The micro-press Bull City Press is known for curating its books and authors with great warmth and care; lucky us that we now have the opportunity to be pulled into that fold, in the form of a new monthly readings series in downtown Durham. Bull City Presents—an outgrowth of BCP founder Ross White’s illustrious house party reading series—will take place on the second Saturday of every month; this month’s installment features the writers Hannah VanderHart, Joanna Pearson, and Emily W. Pease. All three authors have recently released debuts, or will soon: the Durham-based Vanderhart’s first full-length collection of poetry, What Pecan Light, will be released with Bull City Press in the summer of 2020 (we can’t wait); Joanna Pearson, meanwhile, published her first collection of short stories, Every Human Love, earlier this year with Acre Books (Pearson also lives in the Triangle). Rounding out the evening bill is the Virginia-based Emily W. Pease, whose collection Let Me Out Here: Stories won Hub City Press’s C. Michael Curtis short story award, and was published earlier this year. This series is curated by White and the writer Ashley Nissler: Don’t sleep on it. —Sarah Edwards

OKAY ALRIGHT, DURHAM 7 p.m., free, www.bullcitypress.com

READINGS & SIGNINGS Tim Barnwell Tide Runners: Shrimping and Fishing on the Carolinas and Georgia Coast. Sat, Dec 14, 11 a.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Allan Gurganus A Fool For Christmas. Thu, Dec 12, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. regulatorbookshop.com. Sheila Ogle The Pink House, Circa 1830: A Love Story. Wed, Dec 11, 4:30 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. John Russell All the Right Circles. Sat, Dec 14, 9 a.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com.

LECTURES, ETC. Ellery Adams Sat, Dec 14, 1:30 p.m. South Regional Library, Durham. durhamcountylibrary.org. Christmas Ghost Stories Currently full. Sun, Dec 15, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Donald Davis Storytelling. Sat: 11 a.m.; Sun: 2 p.m. Dec 14-15. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. Bill Leslie Storytelling. Fri, Dec 13, 6:30 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

stage FRIDAY, DECEMBER 13

EMMY BLOTNICK I saw Emmy Blotnick perform a set in the back of a dark, slightly scary warehouse in Brooklyn in 2014 (this itself feels like the setup of an Emmy Blotnick joke), back when the comedian was just getting her start, and was instantly charmed. In the past few years, Blotnick has built an impressive late-night resume—she’s appeared on CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, CONAN, and on her own half-hour special on Comedy Central; she was also a staff writer on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert—but her sets still run on the same endearing nervous energy. Her jokes trawl familiar territory—online dating, anxiety, women’s magazines, the desire to have your Amazon searches make you appear more likable—but her spin on the material has a neurotic, slightly raunchy, and definitely hopeful uptick that doesn’t plunge you into nihilism, the way some comedic acts do. “Have you ever freaked out so hard you made a flow chart?” she asks, in one joke. Well, maybe (okay, yes, absolutely) but I’d never laughed about it until Blotnick framed the question in that genial, quavering way she has, which routinely puts audiences at ease. —Sarah Edwards

GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB, RALEIGH 10 p.m., $15–$23, www.goodnightscomedy.com

Emmy Blotnick

OPENING Basic Drag performance. $10. Dec 13, 10:30 p.m. Nightlight, Chapel Hill. nightlightclub.com.

Great Russian Nutcracker Ballet. Wed: 7 p.m.; Thu: 3 p.m. & 7 p.m. $31+. Dec 18-Dec 19. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org.

A Christmas Carol Musical comedy. Wed-Fri: 7 p.m.; Sat: 2 p.m. & 7 p.m.; Sun: 2 p.m. $37+. Dec 18-22. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com.

Gary Gulman Comedy. Thu: 8 p.m.; Fri: 7:30 p.m.; Sat: 7:30 p.m. & 10 p.m. $17$25. Dec 12-14. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

Durham Nutcracker Various dance types alongside traditional ballet. $12+. Dec 12-15. Walltown Children’s Theatre, Durham. walltownchildrenstheatre.org.

Jeghetto’s Variety Show Puppetry, poetry, and painting. $10. Sun, Dec 15, 6 p.m. The People’s Improv Theater (PIT), Chapel Hill. thepit-chapelhill.com.

Funny is Funny Comedy showcase. $10. Wed, Dec 11, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

Pete Lee Comedy. Thu: 7 p.m.; Fri: 7 p.m. & 9:15 p.m.; Sat: 6:30 p.m. & 9 p.m.; Sun: 7 p.m. $20+. Dec 12-15. Raleigh Improv, Raleigh.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COMEDIAN

Mary Poppins Musical. 2 p.m. & 6 p.m. $12. Dec 14-22. Sweet Bee Theater & Center for the Arts, Pittsboro. The Nutcracker Ballet. 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. showtimes. $19-$27. Sat, Dec 14, Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. The Nutcracker Ballet. Sat: 2 p.m. & 7 p.m.; Sun: 2 p.m. $42+. Dec 14-15. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com. The Nutcracker Ballet. Dec. 18-21, 23, 27-28: 7 p.m. Dec. 20-21, 23, 28-29: 2 p.m. Dec. 22: 1 p.m. & 5 p.m. $54+. Dec 18-29. Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

The Santaland Diaries Play. Dec 13-14. 19-21: 8 p.m.; Dec 15: 3 p.m. & 8 p.m.; Dec 22: 3 p.m. $27. Dec 13-22, Theatre In The Park, Raleigh. theatreinthepark.com. Saturday Night Sketch Show Comedy. $10. Sat, Dec 14, 9:30 p.m. The People’s Improv Theater (PIT), Chapel Hill. thepit-chapelhill.com. A Trailer Park Christmas Play. Dec 14-15. 21: 3 p.m. & 7:30 p.m. Dec 22 at 3 p.m. $25. Dec 14-22, NCSU Campus: Kennedy-McIlwee Studio Theatre, Raleigh. Transactors Improv Improv play. Sat, Dec 14, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

ONGOING

7:30 p.m. Fri; 10:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m., and 6:30 p.m. Sat; 1 p.m. & 5 p.m. Sun. $13+. Thru Dec 15. PNC Arena, Raleigh. thepncarena.com.

Camelot Burning Coal Theatre Company. Thu-Sat: 7:30 p.m. Sun: 2 p.m. Thru Dec 5-22. Burning Coal Theatre at the Murphey School, Raleigh. burningcoal.org.

FrUiTCaKeS Play. Fri & Sat: 8 p.m.; Sun: 3 p.m. $20-$22.Thru Dec 22. North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre, Raleigh. nract.org.

A Christmas Carol Musical. 7 p.m. Wed-Fri; 2 p.m. & 7 p.m. Sat; 2 p.m. Sun. $38+. Thru Dec 15. 7 p.m. Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

Funny is Funny Comedy showcase. $10. Wed, Dec 11, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

Cinderella Raleigh Little Theatre. Musical. $25-$31. Thu-Fri: 7:30 p.m. Sat: 1 p.m. & 5 p.m. Sun: 1 p.m. & 5 p.m. Thru Dec 22. Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh. raleighlittletheatre.org. Disney on Ice: Road Trip Adventures Ice skating. Showtimes: 7 p.m. Wed & Thu;

Ragtime Musical. Mon-Sat: 7:30 p.m.; Sun: 2 p.m. Thru Dec 16. Center for Dramatic Art, Chapel Hill. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Musical. Thru Dec 24, Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

INDYWEEK.COM

INDYweek.com | 12.11.19 | 39

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS

New Men Thu, Dec 12, 7 p.m. Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh. visualartexchange.org.

16MM Adventure Tue, Dec 17, 7 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. kingsraleigh.com.

The Nutcracker $12. Mon, Dec 16, 6 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh.

The Bloody Curse $1. Fri, Dec 13, 10 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Amelie $0-$6. Wed, Dec 18, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. A Christmas Story $3-$6. Thu, Dec 12, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. Dial Code Santa Claus $5. Wed, Dec 11, 9 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Elf $8. Thu, Dec 12, 11:50 a.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. The Films of Bill Ferris $12. Wed, Dec 11, 6:30 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. God Told Me To $7. Wed, Dec 18, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. Gorillaz: Reject False Icons $13. Mon, Dec 16, 7:30 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. Gremlins Mon: 7 p.m.; Tue: 9 p.m. $13. Dec 16-17, Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. The Grinch $3-$6. Thu, Dec 12, 2 p.m. & 9 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. The Grinch (2018) $13. Sat, Dec 14, 10 a.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. It’s A Wonderful Life Fri, Dec 13, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. It’s A Wonderful Life $8. Sun, Dec 15, 11 a.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation Mon: 9:15 p.m.; Tue: 7 p.m. & 10 p.m.; Wed: 10:30 a.m. & 7 p.m. $8-$13. Dec 16-18, 8 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh.

40 | 12.11.19 | INDYweek.com

Our Time Machine Tue, Dec 17, 6 p.m. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com/durham. Scrooged $13. Wed, Dec 11, 7 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. The Sting $5. Mon, Dec 16, 6 p.m. Rialto Theatre, Raleigh. newsite.ambassadorcinemas. com/rialto-theatre. White Christmas Sing-Along Fri: 7 p.m.; Sat & Sun: 2 p.m. &amp; 7 p.m. $10-$12. Dec 13-15, The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com.

OPENING Richard Jewell—Clint Eastwood reconsiders the story of Richard Jewell, a security guard falsely accused of bombing the 1996 Olympics. Rated R. Jumanji: The Next Level—This adventure comedy picks up where the 1995 flick left off. Rated PG-13.

N OW P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Unstarred films have not been reviewed by our writers. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—Audiences can’t get enough of the Mr. Rogers content, and for good reason. In this rendition, Matthew Rhys plays a jaded journalist assigned a profile of Fred Rogers, who is played by a perfectly-cast Tom Hanks. Rated PG. The Addams Family —In this star-studded Addams family installation, the macabre clan face-off with a reality television show host. Rated PG. Black and Blue—A rookie cop captures a murder by corrupt cops, in this timely thriller. Rated R.

Bridges—In this action thriller, the NYPD undergoes a manhunt so massive that police shut down all twentyone bridges leading out of Manhattan. Rated R. Charlie’s Angels—Producer and director Elizabeth Banks helms a new generation of the angels. Rated PG-13. Countdown—Apps may kill us all, and in this horror film, they do (the app in question is a countdown clock that predicts your time of death; not surprisingly, it may also be a killing mahine). Rated PG-13.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 14

Doctor Sleep—Stephen King sequel to The Shining. Rated R. Downton Abbey—King George V and Queen Mary pay a visit to the abbey and cause a flurry of activity in this spin-off of the television series. Rated PG. Frankie—Isabelle Hupert stars as an ailing matriarch in this sprawling family drama. Rated PG-13. Ford v. Ferrari—Matt Damon and Christian Bale star in a biographical sports drama about a legendary race. Rated PG-13. Frozen 2— In search of the origins of her powers, Elsa and her sister Anna strike out beyond their frosty homeland. Rated PG. The Good Liar—Sparks fly between an elderly couple who meet on a dating website. One of them, though, is a con artist. Rated R. Harriet—Kasi Lemmons stars in this biographical film about the heroic abolitionist Harriet Tubman. Rated PG-13. Hustlers—The true story of strippers drugging and stealing from Wall Street stock traders is the stuff think pieces are made of. Rated R. Jojo Rabbit—Black comedy about a German boy who discovers that his mother is hiding a Jewish girl in the attic. Rated PG-13.

BLUE VELVET Music has always been an integral part of the moviegoing experience. As far back as the silent film era, live musicians added sonic atmosphere to the actions on-screen. And live scoring remains a vital means of altering a film’s effects. Synth performer and composer Micah Moses has become something of a fixture in the Triangle, having performed live scores for screenings of The Shining and Dracula. At this screening, he adds layers of moody drones, tense melody, and undulating rhythm to make David Lynch’s unsettling neo-noir Blue Velvet all the more chilling. Samples of rehearsals he’s posted on social media suggest a score that will offer plenty of spacious atmospherics with a steady undercurrent of dark tension that suits the film’s twisting plot, while the timbre of Moses’ analog and modular synthesizers evokes the film’s eighties setting without feeling retro or derivative. Undoubtedly, the mood of Blue Velvet will be augmented by the live accompaniment. —Bryan C. Reed

HOLY MOUNTAIN PRINTING, RALEIGH 7 p.m., free, www.holymountainprinting.com Joker—At first, the buzz around this star vehicle for Batman’s greatest villain was all about Joaquin Phoenix’s intense turn in a role Heath Ledger made famous. But as more details of the plot have emerged, there’s been a justified backlash about what sounds like an antihero myth for violent incels. Rated R.  Knives Out— A powerhouse portraits of the tension between American oligarchy and America’s promise—and also one of the wittiest films of the year. Rated PG-13. —Neil Morris Last Christmas—An unlucky department store elf falls in love. Rated PG-13. The Lighthouse—Birds caw, fog looms, and waves crash in this hallucinatory horror film about two lightkeepers trapped in a remote lighthouse. A campy art house flick that will leave you paranoid about both seagulls and other people. Rated R. —Sarah Edwards

Maleficent: Mistress of Evil— Angelina Jolie was perhaps born to do many things, but surely playing one of Disney’s greatest villianesses is one of them. Rated PG.

Playmobil: The Movie— This riff on the Lego movie franchise has an all-star cast acting out a plot about a child who disappears into a Playmobil set. Not yet rated.

½ Marriage Story—An amicable split turns supernova when lawyers get involved. One of the best movies of the year (but maybe don’t watch with your spouse). Rated R. —Glenn McDonald

 Queen & Slim— A bad Tinder date turns into a nationwide manhunt after Queen and Slim kill a police officer in self-defense at a traffic stop. Rated R.

Midway—This WWII flick about Pearl Harbor and the subsequent Battle of Midway stars a fleet of hunks. Rated PG-13. ½ Pain and Glory—In this auto-fictional exercise, the director Pedro Almodóvar is honest about his life but guarded about his psyche. Rated R. —Marta Núñez Pouzols  Parasite—This highlyanticipated social satire from filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho is crammed with dark twists and intricate metaphors. Rated R. —SE

Terminator: Dark Fate— It’s like nothing after Terminator 2: Judgement Day ever happened as James Cameron returns to the fold of the classic sci-fi franchise. Rated R. Waves—An emotional movie about a suburban AfricanAmerican family navigating loss. Rated R. Zombieland: Double Tap—A heartland sequel to the 2009 cult classic. Rated R.

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

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this week’s puzzle level:

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

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages.” Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com solution to last week’s puzzle

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