Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill
August 7, 2024
Rents are rising and restaurants are closing as downtown still feels disconnected. Can the City of Durham act quickly enough to save local businesses from drowning? By Mike MacMillan, p. 8
How Durham’s occupancy tax will carry the city into the future. By Justin Laidlaw, p. 6
COPA’s last days. By Lena Geller, p. 18
6 A new law governing how Durham's hotel occupancy tax is allocated will support the visitors bureau and provide funds to build future projects. BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW
8 Restaurants are closing, rents are rising, and residents are moving to an unwalkable downtown. Can the city act quickly enough to save independent local businesses? BY MIKE MACMILLAN
11 A proposed development in Wake Forest across from Joyner Park is drawing ire from neighbors and environmentalists. BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL
13 On Country, Skylar Gudasz delivers an album about “time and power: the power of nature, of the ocean, of fire, of things that humans can’t control.” BY NICK MCGREGOR
15 Playlists have replaced criticism, in the hierarchy of music discovery—and we're all worse off for it. BY RYAN COCCA
16 Writers consider the legacy of North Carolina playwright Paul Green. BY FRED WASSER
18 Regulars bid goodbye to beloved Durham restaurant COPA. BY LENA GELLER
20 Incoming! New movies screening locally. BY GLENN MCDONALD
21 A new book by Durham activist and author adrienne maree brown considers how to navigate relationships with care. BY SHELBI POLK
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Two weeks ago, writer Lena Geller reported on a local restaurant owner’s use of a racial slur and the fallout that followed, including the restaurant’s staff quitting their jobs en masse. The story quickly went viral, and we received dozens of messages from readers expressing their support for the workers, shock that a white business owner would use the word in a professional setting, and disappointment at the situation overall. Some are excerpted below:
From reader LINDA BROWN, via email:
I am a black woman and much saddened by this article.
There was a teachable moment about a complex issue that got lost in this entire incident.
I would hope that all involved could come back together with a mediator and talk this out. If they are ever able to do so each will have a much deeper understanding of the issue and may be able to forge far stronger relationships.
From reader ANNE HAVISHAM, via Facebook:
She failed to understand that the word falls upon the brain and heart differently when it’s said with an -er suffix by white people and when it’s said with an -a suffix by Black people. In 2024, not knowing that is pretty unusual, I think.
Not knowing is a problem, not the problem.
She criticized—and repeated—a word that’s used by some Black folks as a kind of self-defense (“If we say a version of it within the circle, it might not hurt quite so much when it’s being slung at us from outside the circle”).
Instead of asking why and how that word was used, instead of seeking understanding, she assumed that she knew. She did not know.
The former staff’s solidarity is heartening. I hope they are able to find and/ or create the kind of teamwork in other workplaces that they’d enjoyed previously. May the affection and respect of their friends, families, colleagues, neighbors, and other allies help to heal what was inexcusably harmed.
From reader JOE LURIE, via email:
These type of issues are complex and hard to discuss, especially across multiple generations. I just hope everyone involved can stand back a bit and not lose sight of what a great thing they created at PLUM before it went sideways and try to find a little forgiveness in their hearts. It does seem to me that Lisa took responsibility for not expressing herself properly but with all of the emotions around the subject, it can be really difficult to get back to where your relationships were while continuing to run a business.
We also received some notes from readers attempting to understand the owner’s point of view and critiquing our framing of the incident and the events that followed. We’re excerpting a few here:
From RABBI JONATHAN GERARD,
via email:
Plum’s owner, Lisa Callaghan, is clearly not a racist—illustrated by her initial request to turn off a song repeatedly using the “N word.” What staff members then took offense at was
her defending her request to stop the offensive song, a defense in which she herself used the word she found offensive. And then, making matters worse, she proceeded that day and subsequently, to attempt to discuss with individual members of her staff why they were offended. How could this usage have offended the staff members and their co-workers, she wondered? Rather, it was an opportunity to have an adult conversation about why certain staff members were offended (such that they all eventually resigned in sympathy with the initial two who were upset).
It is one thing to use the N-word as a slur. It is not self-evident to me (nor, apparently, to Lisa Callaghan) what is offensive about using the word when one wishes to discuss the nature of the word’s toxicity.
From reader KATHERINE OLVETTI, via email:
I have known Lisa Callaghan since 1987 in a professional context. Lisa is a citizen who in all her personal and professional life has professed a deeply felt commitment to inclusivity, equal opportunity, and individual rights. I know as she set out to fulfill a life-long dream of founding a restaurant, it was a priority for her to develop a staff of diversity, create an environment of safety, and provide warm and hospitable service in an environment that
authentically reflected that sensibility.
The slant of your story fails to communicate how hard she worked to create such an environment. In addition, in her efforts to create opportunities for her staff, she routinely paid them above the required minimum fair wage in order to afford them a living wage. At her cost, she arranged health insurance for her employees, something few restauranteurs provide. Her response to offensive language in music that was playing in her enterprise did not reflect the values she held, and she appropriately objected.
On the whole, readers agreed the owner should have handled the situation differently. From MADELINE SEYHAN, via Facebook:
imo the full story is worse than the headline. Reciting the lyrics to complain is one thing, but the way she handled the response was insane: firing the black staff member who disagreed with her and then firing the head chef because he didn’t rush to her defense is childish at best, narcissistic at worse. Trying to pay the black employee effectively hush money in the hopes they will “speak positively” of them after being fired is wild too. I think that the unanimous quitting of all staff should also have served as a strong statement on her character, people don’t compromise their livelihood like that lightly.
The editor in chief role checks all the boxes: amazing colleagues, an invigorating work environment, a storied history of producing hard-hitting news, and the chance to shape INDY’s future.
Leading the INDY for the past nearly four years has been a great privilege, challenge, and adventure.
I’ve worked with so many talented editors, reporters, photojournalists, and creative folks, all supported by our indefatigable publisher and sales team. The INDY weathered the pandemic mostly intact.
The paper celebrated its 40th anniversary last year, and the INDY is in a stronger position than it has been in a long time after it began working with The Assembly We’ve won statewide, regional, and national awards for our work and have provided excellent free coverage of the Triangle, particularly Durham.
I’m happy to let you, our readers and supporters, know of a new opportunity to grow our team and expand our coverage and resources.
Raleigh, my home city, is growing expo-
nentially. After the general election in the fall, Raleigh will have a new mayor and possibly other new leaders. It’s also a city that’s still figuring out how to grow, with many exciting projects on the horizon and a new comprehensive plan in the works. We think Raleigh and Wake County need and deserve free, extensive politics and government reporting, coverage of growth and development issues, and deep looks at housing, education, the environment, and more. We want to bring the strong daily and enterprise reporting that the INDY is known best for in the Bull City to the City of Oaks.
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—Jane Porter INDY editor in chief
Durham’s elected leaders should protect waterways and communities from irresponsible urban sprawl.
BY SAMANTHA KROP backtalk@indyweek.com
that perweeks or so, coverage of the someone who position, is a welI feel, a its future. new opporteam and I’m being here, providing strong, the next of your
Waterways turn red when it rains in southeast Durham. This is no metaphor—locals coined the term “tomato soup” to describe the color of their creeks, which for years have turned shock-red from muddy runoff and sediment pollution from massive construction sites. As Neuse riverkeeper with the nonprofit Sound Rivers, I have spent years monitoring and documenting the impacts of sediment pollution from Durham’s development boom. Through water-quality sampling and aerial monitoring of construction sites in southeast Durham’s most rapidly developing areas, Sound Rivers has documented sediment runoff from massive construction projects polluting public waterways and resulting in levels of turbidity (a measurement of suspended sediment in a water column) at more than 20 times the state’s legal standard for surface waters.
This is why Sound Rivers, represented by Southern Environmental Law Center, is suing one multistate developer in federal court for violating the Clean Water Act. In a favorable and thorough decision, a recent court ruling rejected
the corporate developer’s motion to dismiss and greenlighted the lawsuit to move ahead.
Construction-related sediment runoff causes serious harm to aquatic ecosystems. Sediment muddies our rivers, blocks sunlight needed by plants and fish to survive, chokes out habitat, and challenges the very building blocks of aquatic life. Pathogens and nutrients also piggyback on sediment pollution, which can pose health harms for humans who come into contact with the water.
Perhaps most concerningly, construction pollution in southeast Durham not only impacts Durham’s creeks but also impacts Falls Lake—the drinking water source for over half a million people in Wake County. Aerial photographs from our watershed monitoring flights show mud from Durham development pouring into Falls Lake. Still, four of the seven Durham City Council members continue to deny the reality that sediment runoff from development sites is polluting our waterways.
At Durham City Council meetings, large rezoning proj-
ects that clear-cut and mass grade hundreds of acres of forested land into suburban sprawl are regularly approved in narrow 4–3 votes. In the recent Virgil Road rezoning case, council members downplayed and outright dismissed the well-documented sediment pollution problem in order to justify the approval of more than 500 acres of single-family sprawl, against a unanimous rejection of the proposal by the Durham Planning Commission.
These important decisions that will shape what Durham looks like for decades to come are often made late at night with few members of the public present. Instead of viewing muddy creeks as the inevitable outcome of growth, Durham residents should speak up about the continued loss of valuable natural lands to unchecked suburban sprawl.
Despite what some Durham elected officials may say, we can have housing development and clean, healthy creeks and surrounding ecosystems. While Durham’s sediment-pollution crisis stems from suburban sprawl, the city’s new Comprehensive Plan provides a blueprint for walkable, diverse, thriving communities that meet the needs of both residents and the environment.
As long as Durham’s council continues to approve irresponsible development proposals, it not only fails to implement the Comprehensive Plan’s vision but also fails its people and the future. Lend your voice to a growing movement calling for change by contacting Durham City Council and demanding that Durham’s elected leaders protect its waterways and communities from irresponsible suburban sprawl. W
Samantha Krop is the Neuse riverkeeper and the director of advocacy for the nonprofit Sound Rivers.
A new law governing how Durham’s hotel/motel occupancy tax is allocated will support the visitor’s bureau and provide funds to build future projects.
BY JUSTIN LAIDLAW jlaidlaw@indyweek.com
At a town hall presentation in April, Susan Amey, CEO of Discover Durham, the city’s tourism agency, asked the audience to consider Durham’s future.
“If we grew by the same amount in the next 25 years as we did in the last, Durham is going to be pushing 500,000 residents in our lifetimes,” she said. “So much of the vibrancy that Durham has has grown up over the last 20 years. So what do we need in the next 20 years? What’s the vision for what comes next?”
Part of that vision, according to Amey and city officials, includes an indoor-outdoor sports complex, a new convention center, more family-friendly attractions, and expanded greenways and parks.
These amenities could be on the horizon following the state legislature’s approval of a new bill this summer that changes how Durham allocates funds it collects through its hotel/motel occupancy tax. The bill also changes how much money goes to Discover Durham. But not everyone agrees that Discover Durham should be the entity that gets such a large portion of those funds in addition to getting to decide how to allocate them.
Unlike property and sales tax, which residents pay, visitors who stay in Durham’s hotels and short-term rental properties pay an occupancy tax of 6 percent, the maximum allowed under state law. Municipalities that collect occupancy taxes can reinvest those revenues to attract more visitors, helping to build the local economy without straining the tax burden on residents.
The state established uniform occupancy tax guidelines in 1997. Now, two-thirds of the occupancy tax collected—in most cities and counties, that’s 4 percent—has to be used for tourism promotion, and the other third can be used for tourism-related expenditures, things that attract visitors to a community like capital improvement projects.
But Discover Durham, which was formed in the 1980s as Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, was created before those guidelines were put in place.
“Over time, Durham has made some updates and chang-
6 August 7, 2024 INDYweek.com
es to the occupancy tax, but we’ve never gone through the process of just looking at the occupancy tax overall and aligning it with those state guidelines,” Amey tells the INDY
Until recently, Discover Durham could only use its funds for marketing and promotion, not tourism-related expenditures like a new convention center or a sports complex. This, some leaders felt, put the agency and the community at a disadvantage when attracting visitors compared with other municipalities across the state.
“As we look around, we see other communities are using hospitality-generated taxes to build all kinds of things, and that’s a part of developing attractions or infrastructure and programming,” Amey says. “And those things attract more visitors, but they’re also things that create quality of life for people who live here. It’s adding to the appeal of the community for our residents. And we wanted to be able to do that too.”
Discover Durham collaborated with the city and county to develop a plan for rolling out the tax adjustments, which needed legislative action at the state level to become law. The agency found a champion in state senator Mike Woodard, Amey says, who sponsored the bill and advocated for its passing in early July.
“We’ve all had these conversations,” Woodard says. “Susan, on behalf of Discover Durham, city and county officials, administrative officials, the county managers and their budget directors—we all sat down and went through what this is. We worked on it for well over a year.”
Currently, Durham allocates its occupancy tax funds in three ways.
One-third, or two percentage points, goes to Discover Durham for tourism marketing and promotion. Half of the occupancy tax, or three percentage points, is split between the city and the county for their general funds. The last percentage point first goes to pay off debt for the Durham Performing Arts Center (DPAC). After that, a portion is used to support the Museum of Life and Science. Anything left over goes back to Discover Durham.
Under the new bill, Discover Durham will receive a greater portion of those revenues, beginning in the next fiscal year: 3 percent, compared to 2 percent, to the city/county; and 1 percent to DPAC and the museum. Then, in the 2026–27 fiscal year, Discover Durham will receive 4 percent of tax revenues, while the city/county and DPAC will receive 1 percent each. Finally, in the 2027–28 fiscal year, Discover Durham will receive 5 percent of the tax revenues. The city and county will no longer receive any of the funds, and DPAC, the museum, and Discover Durham will continue to receive 1 percent. This final rate remains in place until April 2034.
Discover Durham recently published its 20-year Destination Master Plan, a vision for developing the city as a nationally recognized destination.
“We need a Durham for the future that reflects our community’s values and character,” Amey said at the town hall event in April when she presented the plan. “An individual might start a restaurant or a bar or a retail shop but doesn’t decide they’re going to build a convention hotel or a major sports facility. So as a community, we have to create that idea together and figure out how to move forward. We need to have a plan for how that’s going to be sustainable:
economically, socially, and environmentally.”
Many of the same items were featured in mayor Leo Williams’s State of the City address, suggesting that there is alignment between Discover Durham’s plan and city initiatives already set forth.
But not everyone is in agreement. City council member Nate Baker says the city, not outside organizations, should be spearheading these efforts.
“The Discover Durham plan was inspiring,” Baker says. “But it’s long-range planning.”
Baker says doing that kind of planning is the role of city governments and their planning departments.
“Where I feel conflicted is I am frustrated that the city, through our planning department, is not being more innovative, and that we are not the ones who are coming out with plans with those kinds of projects and inspiring people with our own longrange planning,” he continues. “Instead, we are effectively privatizing that by having an organization that is quasi-governmental.”
Amey says that communication and transparency are top of mind for Discover Durham through this process. The agency is launching a new nonprofit to house the work proposed in its Master Plan this fall. Similar to Discover Durham, the new nonprofit will have oversight from city and county officials and include representation from other community partners.
New projects, Amey notes, take 10 to 12 years to plan and build, during which time mayors and elected officials turn over and cycle on and off their governing boards.
”Elected officials, when they come into office, often come in with some of their own priorities, and you have to have continuity of vision when you’re going to do big projects that span multiple administrations,” Amey says. “Having this as a separate organization will help the community keep their eye on the prize, so to speak, and have this continuity built in for getting some of these projects done.”
While these long-term projects take form over the next decade, the city and county must continue to prioritize pressing issues like homelessness and education where funding from municipalities is a key ingredient. Baker says that even the smallest amount of funding adds up, and city leaders will have to find new sources to maintain their financial commitments to replace the loss of revenues to the city’s general fund.
“We debate endlessly, you know, sums of money like $100,000, $50,000, $10,000— and then all of a sudden, snap of a finger and millions of dollars are suddenly going to be reallocated from the general fund,” Baker says. “We have to make that up.” W
Rents are rising, restaurants are closing, and as new residents move in, downtown Durham still feels disconnected. Can the city act quickly and intentionally enough to save local businesses from drowning?
BY MIKE MACMILLAN backtalk@indyweek.com
There’s an old joke about an economist stranded on a desert island. Asked to imagine her escape, she says, “First, assume a rowboat.”
Right or wrong, there’s a belief among Durham’s downtown small business owners that the city government is making a similarly optimistic assumption about them: that there’s a rowboat, even as many find themselves underwater.
Indeed, some longtime Durham restaurants have been sinking.
According to Downtown Durham Inc. (DDI), downtown added 21 new merchants last year while 17 moved out or closed; several more have announced their closures or plans to relocate since then, including Cuban restaurant COPA, which opened in 2018 on West Main Street and had its final days last week (see story, p. 18), after filing for bankruptcy. Fullsteam announced it’s leaving its Rigsbee Street taproom after 13 years, Beyu Caffe and 321 Coffee recently shuttered, and mainstays Pompieri and Dos Perros made waves when they closed last year. For months, bar and restaurant owners have taken to city council chambers, and social media, to bring attention to issues they face: rising food prices, security concerns, and the cost of parking for both employees and diners.
“Without a renewed commitment from our local leadership, the downtown we all love and are so proud of will cease to exist,” said Nicole Thompson, DDI president and CEO, in an impassioned presentation to the Durham City Council in May. “The uniqueness and authenticity that has always been so important to Durham will die.” But it’s a complex problem that touches on both the
built environment and original design of downtown, and includes the cultural changes resulting from the COVID19 pandemic as well as a perceived need to enhance downtown amenities to draw in more tourists and foot traffic. City leaders say they’re working on it and expect to have the money to revitalize the area, but it will take time. As new development subsumes the fractured downtown core, some worry that what once made the city vibrant and unique—its independent local business community—will disappear beneath the waves.
In her 1961 work The Death and Life of Great American Cities, urban theorist Jane Jacobs wrote about four indispensable conditions necessary to “generate exuberant diversity” in an urban environment: short blocks, buildings that “vary in age and condition,” districts that serve multiple purposes, and a “sufficiently dense concentration of people” to bring it all to life.
Easy to say but hard to do, and the existing structure of many midsized U.S. cities is not conducive to creating these conditions. Durham is no exception.
“It’s made for cars,” says Andrew Whittemore, associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of City and Regional Planning, about Durham’s current downtown. “It’s not made for pedestrians, for a strolling experience or an organic shopping day out. It’s made for moving through it with your vehicle.”
Scott Page, whose Philadelphia-based firm Interface Studio DDI hired to help develop a blueprint for down-
town, concurs.
“We spent many years designing our downtowns to get people in and out as quickly as possible,” Page says. “That’s not how we should be thinking of it. We want people to come and stay and wander and explore.”
Once downtowns have a critical mass of around 10,000 residents they need to embrace the idea of becoming a neighborhood, says Page.
“Then there’s more people on the street and more customers to support retail,” he says. “Durham has that. Now it’s starting to think about how things are connected.”
Whittemore says before downtown Durham can draw in more development and residents, leaders need to fully rethink how people interact with the streetscape.
“For decades the only thing driving thinking in the public realm was how are people going to get here and park,” he says. “What’s missing is the street redesign, getting rid of the downtown loop and the couplets [two streets running in parallel in opposite directions]. That’s thinking from 50 years ago that was very misguided.”
There are ideas out there to fix the streets, according to Carl Rist, an at-large member of the Durham City Council who is in his first term.
“That’s definitely a priority,” Rist says, adding that the city is on a three-year plan to convert Roxboro and Mangum Streets to two-way streets. “That will be traffic calming and make them more accessible to pedestrians.”
Rist acknowledges the broader interest from residents and business owners for the council to take an active role.
“There was the sense that the previous council felt that downtown was in great shape,” Rist says. “The folks on this council are concerned about [its] vitality.”
Durham mayor Leonardo Williams has a personal stake in the success of downtown through his ownership of two restaurants, Zweli’s on Main Street and Ekhaya at the American Tobacco Campus.
“As a small business owner I feel what [DDI] is saying,” Williams says. But there’s a problem.
“We don’t have enough destination drivers [downtown]. We have DPAC, the Durham Bulls, the Carolina Theatre,” he says, but more is needed. And he’s thinking big.
“We have to redesign what our inner city looks like and consider capital projects that can bolster it,” he says. “Give me a hotel, 500 rooms, build a few other hotels, a convention center with 200,000 square feet where I can fit 4,000 people, and then let the Durham culture do its job.”
Urbanists cite the COVID lockdowns and the emergent work-from-home culture as the reason for declining foot traffic in cities. But those excuses are starting to wear thin, at least in Durham. If more people are living downtown and working from home, they’re still downtown and working, whether they’re in a traditional office or not. These new residents are to some
extent replacing the absent office workers. In 2019, there were 22,607 employees working in the downtown district and 4,331 residents. Four years later, the number of workers dropped to 19,524 while the number of residents rose to 5,802, according to DDI.
“Work from home is also work from the coffee shop,” says UNC’s Whittemore.
These residents need places to shop. They need the opportunity to round a block and find something interesting, as Jacobs suggested. But now, even as more people are moving into downtown Durham, many businesses are moving out.
Not surprisingly, given the high vacancy rate and “work from anywhere” ethos, new office construction has been anemic. No new space came online in 2023, according to DDI. A total of 829,000 square feet of new space has been announced, per the organization’s “2024 State of Downtown Durham” report. For perspective, there are about 4.6 million square feet of office space currently in the city center. Duke University, the city’s biggest tenant, has approximately 1 million square feet in and around downtown but plans to scale back. Overall office occupancy stood at 87 percent. Nationally, the rate was about 82 percent, according to a July report from data provider CommercialEdge.
Residential construction, on the other hand, has been robust, with 5,418 units completed by the end of 2023, including 868 in the last year. That’s up from 2,521 units in 2018; another 4,091 units are announced or under way, by DDI’s count. The number of residents in and adjacent
to downtown is expected to grow apace, from the current 9,000 or so to more than 19,000 over the next few years.
To support this population, there were 264 shops, restaurants, bars, and service businesses located downtown in 2023.
The Durham food scene is a major attraction for both residents and visitors, and the challenges these establishments face are worrisome. Storefront retail is another issue. Nationally, there are signs of a retail recovery. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more stores opened than closed last year, citing data from Coresight Research. The rate of available space fell to 4.8 percent, the lowest level in 18 years, according to another real estate firm, CBRE. But locally, recovery has been weaker.
“We need to improve the density of street level businesses and think about what the mix is,” says Susan Amey, chief executive of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We need policies that encourage the development of those businesses, to make it a place that people want to be.”
The challenge is to get the growing downtown population to interact more consistently with the city, says DDI’s Thompson.
“We [DDI] are really trying to focus on the people who live downtown,” she says. “We have a lot of restaurants, bars. We’re working hard on retail.”
Pedestrian traffic has begun to recover from its post-COVID lows. In 2019, there were 3.6 million office worker visits to downtown, according to DDI. That number fell to 1.9 million in 2022. Last year, it rose to 2.5 million. In June of last year, DDI launched the “It’s Your Neighborhood” program to introduce residents to local businesses, in part through a newsletter sent to residents in the 27701 zip code highlighting local businesses.
“We are intentionally getting in front of residents,” Thompson says. “Part of our initiative is to get into the lobbies and draw the people down and introduce them [to local business owners].”
Not designed for walking
Downtown Durham was never designed for the new live-and-work world.
“You have a lot of small households [downtown] that are wealthy, and you didn’t have that 100 years ago,” says Whittemore.
“People are attracted to other people,” says Nina Martin, an associate professor in the Department of Geography and
Environment at UNC-CH who relocated to the Triangle from Chicago. “It becomes a kind of virtuous circle.”
Conversely, fewer people on the sidewalks tends to beget even fewer people, draining the city of energy and making those who are out feel less safe.
Many of Durham’s recent arrivals are fleeing high-cost coastal cities in search of a more livable, midsized urban environment, according to Martin.
“They see Durham as a place that still has an authentic feel,” she says of newcomers.
That mostly rings true. Fully 70 percent of the city’s street-level businesses were started in Durham. Of those, 32 percent are minority owned, and 40 percent are women owned, according to DDI.
But all the new residential development threatens that early authenticity.
“A lot of [the new construction] does feel very cookie-cutter, the kind of development that could be anywhere,” Martin adds.
“People are worried that the city is losing its soul. Now is the time to take stock and come up with a vision for what is going to make Durham continue to feel unique and feel authentic”—something “that has some sense of history, a sense of place, that reflects values that aren’t just corporate values,” she says.
Discover Durham recently unveiled its 20-year master plan, while DDI expects to release its own blueprint sometime next year.
“We have a lot of plans,” Thompson says. “We need to sit down and decide what’s the priority?”
One challenge: significant proposals will require public-private partnerships. Fortunately, there is a history of those in Durham.
“[The city] has always been supportive of our work,” Thompson says. “We’d love to explore other ways we can take that partnership further around the part of better public spaces.”
Martin notes that some cities have programs to encourage business formation via working with landlords to make rents more affordable.
“The city needs to do something much more concerted to help attract retailers and find affordable spaces and to show them that there are people living downtown, that there is demand,” she says.
“We’ve heard loud and clear from downtown businesses that they are facing a crisis,” says council member Rist. “We need
to build consensus to take action. It’s a conversation we’re having. It needs to happen sooner rather than later.”
To the street design issue, Thompson says, “It’s not an easy solution, but it’s doable.
“[Now, the streetscape is] preventing more pedestrian-friendly development from happening,” she says.
One problem: the city does not own all the roads in question, meaning the state, which owns most of the largest roads, will have to get involved and lend its support.
Getting that support can be challenging, says Rist, as the city’s vision for the roads can differ from the state’s. But while that complicates matters, he believes it’s not insurmountable.
“If we had a plan for taking them over and maintaining them, the state would be happy to turn them over to us,” he says.
In an odd confluence, both aging baby boomers and younger generations are drawn to “walkable” cities.
“The younger generation is much less likely to own a car, and their age when they buy a car is later,” UNC’s Martin says. “They don’t want a car-oriented lifestyle.”
Downtown Durham is not especially big. It is less than a mile walking from DPAC on the city’s south side to Motorco and the old ballpark on the north. From Brightleaf Square to Golden Belt is 1.5 miles. But the transit is complicated by railroad tracks, Main and Chapel Hill Streets, and the downtown loop, among other obstacles.
$315 million excluding the land; the hotel would add another $225 million.
“Durham is the third largest city in the state, but we have the smallest convention center of any midsized city,” says Williams. “Rocky Mount has a larger convention center. We have to do better.”
The facility would potentially bring in as many as 4,000 people for events who, presumably, will be out shopping and eating every day, adding money to the local economy. It would create a revenue opportunity for the city via occupancy and sales taxes.
With these revenue sources, Williams says, “you can do things like better support affordable housing and build other assets” that don’t directly generate revenue but “create a better quality of life” for everybody.
One project that does appear to have steam is the Durham Rail Trail. If built, it will connect downtown to areas north and east along a former Norfolk Southern rail bed.
This, too, has been on the board for a while, but Rist says it is now closer to completion.
“As long as we pass this year’s budget and next year’s, we have the funds to do the rail trail,” he says.
The terminus at Durham Station is envisioned as a “destination.”
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Pockets of vibrancy are spread all around the urban core, but linking these spaces in a compelling way remains a major challenge.
Here again, there are plans, including a potential redesign of the Durham Freeway.
“There is engagement process on this idea of ‘How do we rethink [NC] 147?’” says Rist, who notes that the city has invested in a consultant to consider potential strategies. “There are federal dollars on the table for rethinking these freeways that went through communities and tore communities apart as they did in Durham. Other cities are ahead of us on that, but we’re trying to catch up. It’s a long-term fix.”
Mayor Williams is leaning heavily on his convention center plan. Various ideas are under consideration. One of the more ambitious, of which Discover Durham is a champion, includes 186,000 square feet of meeting space, nearly six times that of the current center. A new hotel to accommodate all these presumed convention goers is also on the table. The price of this new center is estimated to be about
There is general agreement that the city is approaching an inflection point.
Among DDI’s recommendations, as Thompson outlined at the May city council meeting: make employee parking cheaper and more accessible, establish policies around construction that allow contiguous businesses to continue to operate unimpeded, provide more support for outdoor dining, and reestablish the building and retail improvement grants that the city used a decade ago to encourage downtown development.
But those are looking increasingly like table stakes.
“Downtown’s success was founded on public/private partnerships, strategic investment, and supportive policies created by visionary public leaders,” Thompson told the council.
“That investment is worth too much— downtown is worth too much—to let it falter based on the mistaken belief that ‘downtown is done.’ A vibrant, successful downtown that is the primary economic engine of a thriving city does not happen accidentally or on autopilot.”
In other words, time to start rowing. W
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A proposed development in Wake Forest across from Joyner Park is drawing ire from neighbors and environmentalists.
BY CHLOE COURTNEY BOHL chloe@indyweek.com
Sixty-eight acres of wild, undeveloped forest located on Harris Road could soon be the site of Wake Forest’s next mixed-use subdivision.
Church Street Company, a Raleigh-based developer, is under contract to buy the property and put up high-density housing and commercial buildings on about 50 acres. There’s high demand for new housing options in the fast-growing town, but the plan has come under fire from environmental advocates and development-averse neighbors alike. Nearly 6,000 people have signed a petition to keep the property wild and undeveloped.
At first glance, the forested property across the street from E. Carroll Joyner Park doesn’t look like much. The young loblolly pines abutting Harris Road are unremark-
able. Go deeper into the woods, though, and pines give way to oaks, elms, hickories, beeches, sycamores, sassafras, and dogwoods. Beneath their canopies sprout native ferns and flowering shrubs. Newts, thrushes, salamanders, tree frogs, snakes, and box turtles call the forest home. A stream winds through the northern part of the parcel, flanked by a steep bluff and old-growth trees.
Local experts call the forest an “ecological jewel” and “some of the highest value biological lands in the Wake Forest jurisdiction.” Church Street plans to preserve about 20 acres as open space, but some neighbors say that’s not enough.
Wake Forest resident Angela DiPaolo founded the nonprofit Joyner-Harris Forest Conservation to advocate pre-
serving the land as is. Others object to the plan for nonenvironmental reasons: at a public meeting on July 9, many local residents in attendance told the developers they worried a new subdivision filled with “transient” renters would overburden their schools, roads, and emergency services.
The parcel’s fate is now in the hands of the Wake Forest planning board, which is reviewing Church Street’s proposal to rezone the land for mixed-use development. The planning board will send a report to the town’s Board of Commissioners, who will make the final decision this fall.
If the request is granted, Church Street will move ahead with its high-density housing plan, which involves the creation of some 400 units—about 300 apartments and about 100 town houses or cottage homes. If not, the group will build a 40-lot subdivision of single-family homes on the property instead—an alternative that doesn’t require rezoning and wouldn’t preserve any open space.
Wake Forest’s planning director declined to comment until the planning board completes its report, which is anticipated in September. Members of the Board of Commissioners also declined to comment.
Some in the neighborhood would welcome a 40-lot subdivision. At the neighborhood meeting, when a member of the Church Street team floated that option to attendants, the room broke out in cheers and applause.
“All we’ve really ever wanted to do is find a plan that the town would approve,” George DeLoache, a member of the Church Street team, tells the INDY in an email.
“Under the current zoning, we can do a subdivision with very expensive homes on large lots. If the rezoning fails, we will do just that.
“But this doesn’t seem to be the best use of the property,” he adds. “Not from our perspective, not—we believe— from that of the environmental advocates, and not from the town’s planners.”
The current owner, Jane Pate, agrees that Church Street’s plan to leave about 20 acres of the property undeveloped represents a good compromise.
“Our family really has been behind a compromise, to do something for the town that would be beneficial to everybody,” she says. “So, [we’re] trying to cobble together all of the interests: the town plan itself … the interests of the conservation group … and also the neighbors.”
The Harris Road development in context
In 2022, Wake Forest published a new community plan outlining its housing, development, and zoning priorities—which include the creation of more mixed-use, higher-density housing options. It also calls for an “enhanced focus on preserving open space [and] maintaining a lush tree canopy” and the creation of better public transit options.
The plan is a response to Wake Forest’s skyrocketing population: the town has grown from 14,000 people in the year 2000 to nearly 120,000 today, a 307 percent increase. The rapid growth calls into question how to accommodate new residents while preserving Wake Forest’s small-town character.
In 2023, the Board of Commissioners rejected an earlier version of Church Street’s development proposal for the Harris Road parcel because it didn’t align with the Community Plan. The original proposal called for 226 housing units on the property, a mix of town houses and single-family homes.
So Church Street went back to the drawing board and returned with a proposal for a 400-unit, mixed-use subdivision that the group believes will win the commissioners’ approval. In revising the plan, the team also made adjustments they hoped would appease the neighbors: about 20 acres of preserved open space that would include some of the most ecologically valuable forest; 50-foot forested buffers between the subdivision and the road; and a commitment that buildings would be a maximum of three stories tall and not rise above the tree line.
Environmental advocates call for complete preservation, town involvement
Local environmental advocates say that Church Street’s updated plan for the Harris Road property doesn’t go far enough to protect the site’s unique habitats and natural features. They would prefer that the town purchase it and designate it as a nature preserve or park.
DiPaolo, who founded the Joyner-Harris Forest Conservation, says she met with town officials and asked them to apply for grant funding to do just that.
“They basically told us they didn’t have the money to match the grant funding,” DiPaolo says. “So we’re hoping, with continued community pressure, that maybe they’ll be able to come up with that.”
DiPaolo also approached the Durhambased Triangle Land Conservancy (TLC), a nonprofit, to see if it might be able to help the town purchase the land. TLC was interested but unable to find a partner in either the town or the current landowner, Pate.
“TLC offered to work with the town and landowner to raise funds to try to purchase the entire tract or at least 40 acres of the highest-quality land,” says Leigh Ann Hammerbacher, TLC’s director of land protection and stewardship. “TLC would have used town funding to leverage county, state, and private funds to preserve the highest quality areas. Unfortunately, the town did not have a dedicated source of funds at the time to support the conservation project.”
Hammerbacher estimates the property is worth between $6 million and $7 million. DeLoache declined to share the terms of Church Street’s contract with Pate.
Joyner-Harris Forest Conservation also met with Church Street and urged them to preserve as much of the forest as possible, suggesting they develop only 20 acres of the least ecologically rich parts of the parcel.
Joncie Sarratt, a member of the Joyner-Harris Forest Conservation team, says that Church Street’s second draft of its rezoning proposal is disappointing. Fifty-foot forested buffers to block the subdivision from the road “is not a lot,” Sarratt says. “If you’re not at the height of summer, you’re still gonna see straight through. And that doesn’t further do anything to protect the wildlife … or the native plant species that are there that are going to be going through two to three years of construction, noise, and disruption.”
Sarratt characterizes Church Street’s decision to preserve the bluff and wetlands area on the north side of the property as a “false olive branch,” since the area has uneven terrain and would be difficult to develop.
“You’re claiming to be working with the town and to have environmental preservation in mind, but really what you’re giving us is an area that isn’t ideal for you either,” she says.
DeLoache defends Church Street’s plan for the Harris Road parcel.
“We can’t preserve all of the property, but we believe that our proposed preservation efforts are generous,” he writes. “We are protecting the portion of the property that our own environmental consultants and local advocates say is the most critical.”
“The one thing that seems to unite all of the folks who are opposed is their preference that the site not be developed at all,” DeLoache adds. “But that’s not an option.” W
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On her new album, Durham’s Skylar Gudasz charts the restless course and deep mythology of human desire.
BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com
Unfulfilled longing may be one of the greatest inspirations in human history. There’s Odysseus, wandering desperately for a decade as he tries to return home after the 12th-century BC Trojan War. There’s Lord Byron, whose romantic protagonists flung themselves across Europe in an eternal frenzy. There’s Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, who swore it was “the longing that matters” in his restless interpretations of Bach. Hell, even British author A. A. Milne had his most famous character, Winnie-the-Pooh, savor the anticipation of eating honey more than actually tasting it.
Skylar Gudasz crafts a similar sense of timeless desire on Country, a new album from the Durham-based songwriter out August 9 on her own label, Perseids Records. Nine intimate slices of indie rock, modern folk, and symphonic pop blur the boundaries between sky and earth, water and land, hidden pain and extroverted smile.
Lead singles “Fire Country” and “Truck” capture Southern-fried lightning in a bottle, while deeper cuts “Watercolor” and “Lovestorypastlife” chart the contours of human failure and natural calamity over crunchy guitars. But all of Country is grounded in Gudasz’s voice, which floats effortlessly between registers—whisper-thin at times, hauntingly resonant at others.
After proving herself in the mid-2010s with Big Star’s Third, a series of concert tributes to the band, and 2020 breakthrough album Cinema, Gudasz is now a decade deep into crafting her own cosmology.
Equal parts theatrical and earthy, Renaissance ideals crash into apocalyptic weather as Country’s songs shift seamlessly between tactile sensation and heady introspection. On the catchy chorus of “Truck,” Gudasz embodies the vibe perfectly, flipping between first- and third-person
perspectives: “What you looking for out there girl? / Wild as anything, I believe in everything.”
That hopefulness springs eternal for Gudasz.
“Despair is a luxury,” she tells the INDY on a hike in June to see hundreds of herons roosting along Ellerbe Creek in East Durham. “Who is it in service of for us to not have hope? Usually, it’s the powers that be.”
Under a warm breeze and summer swarms of bugs, Gudasz details her Quaker upbringing in an artistic, activist family, bouncing between literary annotations of her work and self-effacing jokes about working-musician struggles. On Country and in conversation, she also wrestles eagerly with difficult questions about human agency and social justice.
“People say, ‘Well, we created climate change, so we deserve whatever extinction is coming for us,’” she says, watching as herons take off and land. “That’s cynicism, and I don’t think we deserve that. We were born into this crisis.”
It’s a crisis Gudasz understands well. In Los Angeles, she knows she’s in “Fire Country”; on “Australia,” she laments a “borrowed country” ruined in the titular song by both a rich man’s arrogant hospitality and the island’s recent cataclysmic wildfires. On “Atoll,” she unpacks the devastation wrought in the South Pacific after World War II.
Stumbling down a YouTube rabbit hole while brainstorming ideas for Country, Gudasz was shocked to discover 1940s films created by the U.S. military. In these propaganda films, Bikini Atoll natives willingly abandon their home island so the military can test out hydrogen bombs and their subsequent nuclear fallout.
“It’s incredibly chilling because these U.S. military officers were creating a theater of war by asking the island chiefs, ‘Do you want to do something good for mankind?’”
Gudasz remembers. “It just totally fucked with me and the song came fully formed, as is—I wrote it in an afternoon.”
Gudasz says that kind of songwriting compulsion has been a hallmark of her artistic process for years. Counterintuitively, many of the global stories told on Country were written during the first two years of the pandemic, when travel wasn’t possible.
“I think my nervous system was catching up with the past few years of adventures I’d had in life,” she says. “That’s the magic of songwriting—things come out in a way you can’t really understand until later. Maybe your body has knowledge of things that your brain isn’t quite ready to conceptualize.”
That sense of place is deepened on the album’s final song, “No Body,” a baroque reflection of the maritime isolation of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. “Home is the shoreline,” she sings, before defying many of the misogynistic morals ingrained in epics like The Odyssey: “I am not the wife / I will not be waiting / I am not the woman / Confined to the island.”
That celebration of modern womanhood extends to “Outlaw” and “Mother’s Daughter.” On the former, Gudasz’s sharp lyrical focus is trained on a friend who makes the
bold choice to upend her life in pursuit of an artistic career. Laid over psychedelic mellotron and pop grooves from coproducer and close friend Ari Picker, it forms a one-two punch with “Mother’s Daughter,” another dissection of authority, gender, identity, and perspective.
But neither song is a stiff thesis statement: stylistically different, they both take corporeal pleasure in “swim[ing] naked with me ’neath the stars” and “colt legs in a cotton dress.” She credits the exquisite sonic palette of Country to collaborators like Picker and Jeff Crawford, who helped her record the album at their respective studios in Pittsboro and Chapel Hill, along with current bandmates Casey Toll, Chessa Rich, Matt O’Connell, and Nick Jaeger.
Also facilitating that creative flow: an old turquoise Epiphone Wildcat guitar she dug out of her parents’ closet on a trip home to see her parents in Virginia. Gudasz remembers her brother, Jason, teaching her how to play it as a kid.
“That guitar had all of this nostalgia built into it,” she says, staring off into the distance toward the kind of power lines she grew up near but wasn’t allowed to play under. “It was tied to that time and place in my life—people and feelings and surroundings. It sounds kind of woo-woo, but different instruments come with their own energy—and different places lead to their own songs.”
Musing on the multiple layers of meaning loosely tied into Country, she lands on nature as an anchor.
“During the pandemic, there was an instinctual move to be more tied to nature,” she says. “All those other things we’d created for ourselves in society had broken down. But we are nature, too. We can’t be distant from it. Before we were human, we were like fish—and at a certain point, we crawled out of the ocean.”
At this point in the conversation, it’s clear that Gudasz is operating on a more cerebral plane than your average working musician. Hopscotching across her artistic multitudes—collaborating with the writer Colleen Pesci on the zine Day Job Press, filming a suite of high-concept music videos for most of Country’s singles, performing at New York City’s West Side Fest in a play about the High Line public park—she credits artists like Mary Oliver, Gillian Welch, and Caroline Polachek as inspiration.
“Working in multiple mediums allows me to follow the impulse to create,” Gudasz says. “Writing songs is how I make sense of the world, but sometimes other things feel inspiring and intuitive.”
For Country, that expression came through in the visual identity of the album. While shooting a music video for “Loves-
torypastlife” at the Chicacomico Life-Saving Station in Rodanthe with collaborators Cameron Law and Sandra Davidson, the trio captured the drill team performing historical reenactments in the ocean. Sifting through still images after the fact,
they landed on one reminiscent of painter Andrew Wyeth and his depiction of the movement of bodies.
“It has that epic timelessness to it,” Gudasz says. “There’s so much longing present when you look at the ocean,” she says.
“It’s inherent to the human experience, even though it’s unplaced—like, ‘What am I longing for?’ Maybe it’s a longing you feel for home. But does that longing go away when you find a home, or return home? I don’t know if I have an answer to that.”
This leads into a discussion of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, who composed a series of sonnets about The Odyssey. One stanza marvels at Odysseus, the man who “in his exile wandered night and day / over the world like a wild dog.”
But in her artistic optimism, Gudasz sees that mythology as overly serious. Can’t our modern journeys be more enjoyable and less despairing? Philosophical, sure, but also pleasurable?
“It all comes from a place of playfulness and joy,” she says as we near the end of our hike. “How do we as humans go forward in our humanity, riding the waves of these changes that are inevitable?”
When asked to sum up the vibe of Country, she laughs, closes her eyes, then delivers: “It’s a summer record about time and power: the power of nature, of the ocean, of fire, of things that humans can’t control. Country as a concept of the land and the earth is not actually ownable. Maybe we can find a sort of freedom in that instead of just being frightened by it.” W
Playlists have replaced music criticism as the gateway for discovering new artists. We’re all losing because of it.
BY RYAN COCCA music@indyweek.com
Earlier this year, having transitioned out of a job I’d held for nearly a decade, I returned to music writing for the first time since 2018—contributing to this paper, as well as relaunching a long-lapsed North Carolina hip-hop-focused outlet called Super Empty
In the past six months, we’ve published a variety of pieces on regional artists: interviews, album and song reviews, event recaps, and more. For the most part, these are thoroughly researched, humanizing stories that train a spotlight on one or two acts at a time—the kind of publicity that, since time immemorial, has been highly sought after by up-and-coming artists.
But a few months ago, when I created a Super Empty playlist on Apple Music, it became abundantly clear that some long-standing paradigms around exposure had been turned on their head. For months, we’d run considered, long-form pieces on music from around the state, but it wasn’t until the creation of a simple, straightforward playlist that the fire emojis and email submissions really started to flow in. Clearly, it wasn’t 2018 anymore.
I’d returned to music writing with a hazy understanding that things would probably be different, I just wasn’t sure how. The playlist situation sharpened the focus: in 2024, a solo blurb or even full write-up is nice, but the real currency is being on a playlist, sardined between 30 other artists— no analysis, no backstory, no context.
I was genuinely glad with the response to our nascent playlist. But given the way playlist supremacy (or at least the root forces behind it) seemed interconnected with ailments across the music ecosystem, I also viewed the developments with as much skepticism as I did satisfaction. It seemed like an illustration of not just how far we’d come but what we’d lost along the way.
When I first started writing about music, it felt like the tail end of a golden era of music culture on the internet, one that today a certain subset of misty-eyed, 30-something music fans have come to refer to as “the Blog Era.” Eulogizing the phenomenon four years ago in Complex, blogger Tim Larew placed a historical marker at 2015, describing pre-2015 as a time when music journalism was still defined by “compelling stories and creative music vid-
eos being the center of attention” and post-2015 as the onset of “all-out meme culture, where sensational, viral content is usually the primary driver of views.”
My experience in Durham in late 2015 bore that out: with the broader algorithmic content machine not fully revved up yet, artists still viewed deep-dive storytelling and criticism as the best avenues to discovery. Within weeks of creating Super Empty, I was inundated with requests for written coverage of any kind. The reasoning wasn’t some sentimental, Spotlight-based affinity for the journalism industry (only in my dreams), it was pure pragmatism: though it was beginning to wane, these were still the places fans looked to for new artists and music to enjoy.
Quaint and anachronistic as it may sound today, online blogging and local arts writing were once, even in the not so distant past, highly influential. Those mid-2010s songs in my inbox would often turn into positive public reviews, but on the occasions when the feedback was less than glowing, online recriminations and shit-talking could quickly commence—conflicts that wouldn’t exist if no one thought the reviews in question mattered.
It’s true that at least part of the reason blogs and alt-weeklies had that audience—pure music discovery—has (mostly) been replicated by social media accounts and playlists. To put it mildly, ours is not a time in which people have suddenly lost the experience of being put on to new music (or old music they’ve never heard), or in which the art of curation has been lost. These things do exist, though often at the hands of massive platforms like Spotify and
Apple Music, whose business models demand that metrics like “hours listened” be prioritized over any kind of relationship or intimacy with what it is we’re listening to. With the framing, interrogation, and perspective that good criticism affords in shorter and shorter supply, music begins to feel more and more like a commodity, whittled down to a vibe rather than a full story.
I don’t mean to argue for the artistic merits of criticism itself—among many other defenses of the form, Hua Hsu’s 2016 New Yorker tribute to Village Voice columnist Greg Tate (and his ability to “theorize outward from his encounters with genius and his brushes with banality—to telescope between moments of artistic inspiration and the giant structures within which those moments were produced”) should be evidence enough. My motivations are more pragmatic, provoked by the undesirable downstream conditions emerging from our anodyne, overly optimized relationship with the art we should instead be messily and colorfully debating among ourselves.
Tangible examples of the real-world consequences are plain to see: a drop in attendance to local and regional live shows at venues already suffering from a pandemic slowdown; a loss of history, which, as the recent mass deletion of MTV News demonstrates, the internet’s infinite haystack will not save us from; and a loss of connectedness to our regions and communities—with cultural waymarks like Kyesha Jennings’s Hip-Hop 50 piece for INDY last year, or
Story continued on page 17
“Ahead of His Time, Yet a Man of His Time:”
Talking with Kathryn Hunter-Williams about North Carolina writer Paul Green.
BY FRED WASSER arts@indyweek.com
Paul Green was a literary giant. His lifelong home was North Carolina but he was a cultural force—a nationally known playwright, fiction writer, essayist, and teacher who was prominent in the first half of the 20th century. Yet he’s largely forgotten today.
A new book of essays, Paul Green: North Carolina Writers on the Legacy of the State’s Most Celebrated Playwright, coedited by Georgann Eubanks, executive director of the Paul Green Foundation, and Margaret Bauer of East Carolina University, explores some reasons for this, with essays by 11 writers, including Marjorie Hudson, Kathryn Hunter-Williams, Jill McCorkle, and Mike Wiley.
Paul Green was born in 1948 in eastern North Carolina’s Harnett County. His rise in the literary world was rapid: He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1927 for his Broadway play In Abraham’s Bosom, which had a mostly Black cast. In 1931, The House of Connelly was chosen as the first production of the experimental Group Theatre. He went on to collaborate with Richard Wright on a Broadway adaptation of the novel Native Son and received writing credit for all three glitzy Hollywood productions of State Fair
His longest legacy, The Lost Colony, first produced in 1937, is still running today at the Outer Banks every summer. His literary friendships—with Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Sherwood Anderson, among others— ran deep. A graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill, Green continued his career at the state’s flagship university, teaching philosophy and the dramatic arts. He died in Chapel Hill in 1981 at the age of 87.
Race was Green’s central theme and literary through line.
August 7, 2024 INDYweek.com
His plays are dramatic and engrossing. His fiction, essays, and letters are full of warmth and revelation. He was an advocate for civil rights and prison reform and an outspoken opponent of the death penalty. On the flip side, his writing for the theater now feels out of step. His Black characters sometimes seem built on stereotypes; the dialogue in his plays, an attempt to represent the vernacular of the Black South, is often clumsy and cringeworthy.
“These essays ask hard questions in a present-day context about Green’s relevance,” writes Eubanks in the book’s preface, going on to state that the book is not intended as a comprehensive biography but as an opening of a conversation about a man who was seen as “progressive, even radical, in his time” and whose artistic prominence as an American playwright has dimmed in recent decades.
In her essay on Green, Kathryn Hunter-Williams—chair of the Department of Dramatic Art at UNC-CH and a longtime member of Playmakers Repertory Company— struggles with Green’s contradictions, as I do. Ahead of the book’s August 6 publication, the INDY spoke with Hunter-Williams by phone about Green’s legacy.
INDY: You write in your essay that you would have a hard time bringing a Paul Green play to the stage today. What is it about his plays that don’t work for you?
HUNTER-WILLIAMS: I think they’re dated, and I think they’re limited in scope in terms of the emotional truth of Black Americans. I think he wrote from as truthful a place as he could. There may be writers who can adapt
them. There may be directors who see something that I don’t. There may be actors and actresses who understand those roles. I’m speaking strictly for myself—as an artist, I’m really interested in moving the conversation forward.
What was Paul Green trying to do in his stories?
I think he was trying to shine a light on humanity. I think he was a humanist, and I think he was trying to foster conversations that were difficult in his day and continue to be difficult today. I would imagine that he probably butted heads with a lot of the conventional thinking. I feel like he was so ahead of his time, and yet he was a man of his time.
I’m wondering if good intentions are enough. Shouldn’t he have known better?
We live in a very different world. I don’t know that I agree that he should have known better. I think he was doing the best that he could. I think he did what he thought was right. Paul Green was highlighting social justice issues, but his characters were limited.
In your essay, you name three Black playwrights—Mary Burrill, Eulalie Spence, and Angelina Weld Grimké. I’m sad to say I’ve never heard of them. You talk about the three of them in your African American theater class and you compare their work with that of Green. All three of those women were born in
Well, they’re sentiment writing from can American. perspective nation and bringing a ly from
Paul
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the late 1800s and were contemporaries of Green. How did their writing approach differ from his?
Well, they’re all products of the style and sentiment of that time period. They were writing from the perspective of being African American. They were writing from the perspective of not only facing discrimination and racism and violence but also bringing a voice of the community, truthfully from experience, into their work—which Paul Green just couldn’t do.
I think it’s time for someone to write a new full-length biography of Paul Green. There’s a lot of source material, a lot of rich material to work with. He functioned and did his type of creative work in the existing culture of racism and cultural narrowness. How he accomplished that is fascinating to me.
I do feel like he pushed the boundaries. He challenged people. And maybe this is my idealization of him, but I think if he was here with us today, he would probably be like, “OK y’all, what is happening? How are we moving backward?” I think he might also be a little bit like, “Yay, we’re finally starting to have these great conversations.” In some ways, we’ve moved so far forward. In some ways, we look like we’re trying to backpedal. W
Continued from page 15
Lawrence Burney’s True Laurels project in the DMV, happening less and less often. So what are we to do? We might start by soberly identifying arts journalism as yet another 21st-century tragedy of the commons—maybe another casualty of the increasingly atomized self-care era, one in which it’s hard to see the long-term value of anything that isn’t immediately gratify-
“Music begins to feel more and more like a commodity, whittled down to a vibe rather than a whole story.”
ing. A robust culture of criticism may benefit some more directly than others, but it serves all of us in one way or another—and as such, we all have a role to play in bringing it back.
For their part, artists have to supplement their promotional posts on social media— many of which, algorithms today being what they are, won’t reach many of their followers anyway—with outreach to the editors and writers of the legacy publications that still remain, as well as the upstart ones that have emerged to fill in the gaps. Fans need to forcibly detach themselves, at least for an hour at a time, from the content deluge of social media and sit with considered analysis of artists—work that may champion or challenge, but will always result in a deeper relationship to the material.
And maybe most importantly, those interested in contributing to the cultural conversation in ways that a playlist never could—adding their voices to the rollicking, raucous din alongside Tate and Hsu, Burney and Jennings—get involved! Reach out to a paper (like this one), or a website (like mine) and make it known that you’ve got something to say. If you have a passion for what you’re writing about and have your own way of saying it, I’m almost certain you won’t be turned away.
And in the meantime, we can all keep enjoying the playlists we love, just as long as we slip in some full albums in between. Which reminds me: I need to wrap this up—I need to refresh the Super Empty playlist in time for next week. W
Regulars say goodbye to Latin American restaurant COPA, an elegant stalwart of the downtown Durham dining scene.
BY LENA GELLER food@indyweek.com
At COPA, a meal could be leisurely and, to a certain degree, dramaturgical: a stiff aperitif, to start, followed by a succession of small plates, a slow-roasted showstopper, a coffee pot denouement, a dark rum resolution.
That is, if you wanted it to be. Patrons of the nuevo latino bistro, which closed permanently last week after six years on West Main Street in Durham, didn’t always opt for the full arc. In a downtown where nice restaurants are de facto DPAC pregames and where, as in many rapidly swelling American cities, the pace of life verges on anxious, the fact that one of COPA’s entrées explicitly took 45 minutes to prepare was enough to make some customers announce their orders at the host stand: “Hello, table for two, we’re getting the paella.” (“We’re excited, yes, and we don’t have a second to spare.”)
On the restaurant’s penultimate Saturday night of service, though, everyone seems down to lounge.
I’m here for dinner with my friend Gabi. She and I both worked in the front of house at COPA two years ago; she also worked for a time at Terra Sacra, the Hillsborough produce farm that COPA owners Roberto Copa Matos and Elizabeth Turnbull also own.
Familiar faces dot the tables around us. Copa Matos and Turnbull, who are married and at COPA acted as chef and, for several years, beverage director, respectively, opted against issuing a public announcement that the restaurant’s last day would be August 3, instead privately notifying regulars, friends, collaborators, and former employees a few weeks in advance. The result, at least this evening, is a clientele who sit at a low simmer, savoring the moment as they do the food.
Doug Addington, our server for the night, is savoring time with the clientele, too, lingering at nearby tables and chatting; at one point, patrons ask to take a photo with him. Not that we mind: When Addington finally makes it to our table, he offers a characteristic laugh and says, “Forgive me.” Then he grins, folds his hands together, and adds, all in one breath: “FatherforIhavesinned.”
It’s a reference we get, having worked with Addington: he spent a full career as a pastor before retiring and starting a new career in the restaurant industry at age 55. He met
Turnbull and Copa Matos as a customer of the couple’s previous venture, Old Havana Sandwich Shop, and has been with COPA since day one.
Addington’s position at COPA is technically head server and, as of the past few years, after Turnbull took maternity leave, beverage manager. But his role more closely resembles that of a general manager and he runs the entire front of house. He cares so much about the business and its people that you might assume he has a financial stake in it (he doesn’t). He put together the list of contacts who received advance notice of the closure.
“Most of them I did not know before I worked at COPA,” Addington told me, over the phone, two days before Gabi and I came in for dinner. “And now I have friendships with them.”
After we put in our drink orders, Gabi and I examine the dinner menu. It’s undergone some not insignificant changes since we left. The ropa vieja, a national dish of Cuba that was once exalted by News & Observer food critic Greg Cox, has been cut from the list of mains. The duck leg confit, previously served whole on a bed of refried beans and mushrooms, is now being shredded into tacos. There’s no paella.
We decide we’ll let Addington take the reins with the order. There are just two things we know we want, we tell him: the croquetas and the Cuban sandwich.
COPA opened in March 2018, less than a month after Turnbull and Copa Matos, who is Cuban, shut down their sandwich shop. Old Havana stood for seven years in a building just down the street from COPA’s future location. It was lunch-only and had a cult-like fan base.
Turnbull and Copa Matos did notify the public ahead
of shutting down Old Havana, disclosing in a release that the restaurant’s last day was imminent but that customers could rest assured that most of the menu would be available for lunch at their soon-to-be-open restaurant, COPA. Billed as “the nation’s first truly farm to table Cuban restaurant,” COPA would also serve a dinner menu inspired by Latin American recipes “that have been lost to time and memory,” the release described.
COPA had a rosy first few years. But the pandemic was hard on upscale restaurants, particularly ones like COPA that care about their staff. COPA paid employees even when the restaurant shut down at the start of the pandemic and, at the risk of putting off customers, implemented a 20 percent auto-gratuity immediately upon reopening to make up for the loss in tips (“People are notoriously low tippers on takeout,” Turnbull told the INDY in 2021). It kept not just a mask mandate but a vaccine mandate in place for months.
As stalwarts of the Durham restaurant scene, Turnbull and Copa Matos also spearheaded a number of efforts to drum up foot traffic on behalf of their business and others. They pressed the city council for a legitimate outdoor dining program and organized a Thursday night “small plates crawl.” But the traffic never came back. COPA couldn’t afford to stay open during the day, and dinner traffic fell off as well. The opening time bumped up to 5:30.
In April of this year, Turnbull and Copa Matos broke the news to customers that they were nearing foreclosure and needed to file for bankruptcy. A friend launched a GoFundMe on the couple’s behalf, citing “the variable rate loan offered by the Small Business Administration in an era when interest rates have skyrocketed” and “the sharp
increase in the cost of doing business due to rising prices and supply chain issues” as reasons that “the two of them urgently need legal assistance to hold off foreclosure.”
The GoFundMe raised $27,188— nearly double the stated goal of $16,000—but, Copa Matos told the N&O last week, it still wasn’t enough to sustain operations, given the consistent lull in traffic.
That’s why we’re here, marking one of the restaurant’s final nights.
The plates start coming. Addington chose well: Braised beef in mole. Shrimp in a frothy coconut curry sauce. A king-size empanada stuffed with potatoes and leeks. An off-menu bowl of succulent meat chunks and slaw that neither Gabi nor I have seen before; Addington calls it “Catalan lamb.” The Cuban sandwich and croquetas take the cake, but the lamb is a close third.
As we’re boxing up remnants of the meal, Copa Matos moseys over and offers to make us each a cocktail. We nod and he returns a few minutes later with glasses of amber liquid.
The drink is called La Diosa Negra. A blend of spiced rum, coffee liqueur, orange bitters, and Haitian vanilla, it’s topped off, tableside, with a cloud of Cuban cigar smoke that’s been trapped inside a mason jar.
“It’s a nice way to end a meal,” Copa Matos says. As he pours the smoke, we ask him if there are certain occasions when he feels compelled to smoke a cigar. He thinks for a while.
“The occasion is emotion,” he says.
There are a few factors required for him to smoke one, he adds. He needs to be either “pleased or concerned.” And he needs to have the time.
It feels like a natural close. We thank him.
“I have something else to say,” Copa Matos adds. “When I was in my twenties, I had a friend who would always say, ‘Good luck, bad luck, who knows?’”
“Sometimes, something very good happens,” Copa Matos continues, “but it turns into something very bad. And sometimes, something very bad happens. But afterwards, you say, ‘I’m so glad.’”
He smiles and steps back from the table. “So. Good luck, bad luck, who knows?”
He walks away. Then he comes back.
“Something else,” Copa Matos says. “A cigar goes very well with straight Peruvian pisco.” W
Buzzy coming-of-age film Didi, sci-fi flick Alien: Romulus, and other films playing in the Triangle.
BY GLENN MCDONALD arts@indyweek.com
Coming-of-age movies may be, on balance, my favorite kind of movies. When done properly, coming-of-age stories generate a universal compassion for the eternal plight of the adolescent, regardless of era or culture. We all remember those years. They’re rough!
Didi, the buzzy new indie hitting local theaters this month, is a semi-autobiographical story from first-time director Sean Wang. The film chronicles One Crazy Summer in the adolescence of California high schooler Chris and his loving but complicated Taiwanese family. Set in 2008, Didi features pop-punk bands and MySpace-era internet complications but also timeless dilemmas like Chris’s first kiss.
Didi won the Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, and Wang made some interesting choices to keep his story authentic. Most of the performers are first-time actors, several scenes were filmed in Wang’s childhood home, and he cast his real-life grandmother as herself. Also, look for the reliable Joan Chen as Chris’s mom. For a different riff on the coming-ofage theme, consider Between the Temples, the new comedy from prolific microbudget director Nathan Silver. Jason Schwartzman headlines as Ben, a struggling cantor who agrees to facilitate a late-in-life bat mitzvah for 60-something Carla (Carol Kane), his former grade school music teacher. Clearly, there’s some rich comic potential
here as Ben’s midlife crisis collides with Carla’s extremely delayed adolescent rite of passage. But the very funny trailer suggests that the film is aiming for something deeper than situational comedy. Silver’s film reads as a throwback of sorts—the sort of carefully observed character-driven comedy we used to see more often on the art-house circuit. Older movie nerds may sense some quantum connections with Hal Ashby’s great 1971 comedy, Harold and Maude
Meanwhile, sci-fi and horror fans will have a familiar decision to make this month with the release of Alien: Romulus, the latest installment in the wildly uneven xenomorph franchise. The first two movies in this series—1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens are stone-cold classics. Results have been infamously mixed ever since. Every new Alien movie is a roll of the dice. The new film exhibits some hopeful signs. Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez (the 2013 Evil Dead reboot) is a genuine talent, and he wrote his own script on Romulus, which is usually a good sign with franchise films. The story is reportedly set in the time frame between the first two movies, so we can pretend all the other movies never happened. But the thing that always keeps me coming back to this franchise is the series’s rich backstory and lore. The Alien movies inevitably orbit the sinister machinations of Weyland-Yutani, the fictional future megacorporation that operates with the
reach and power of a psychotic nationstate. This bleak vision of our future seems more prescient with each passing year. In fact, if you cross the first two Alien films with the early work of sci-fi author William Gibson, you’ll get a remarkably accurate picture of our current trajectory toward de facto corporatocracy here on planet Earth.
For those of us prone to a certain paranoia around this stuff, it makes for a very effective scary movie experience. See you at Romulus
For a lighter take on the dystopian
thing this month, look for the gonzo scifi action-comedy Borderlands with Kevin Hart, Jack Black, and Cate Blanchett. (Cate Blanchett?)
The Carolina Theatre in Durham is hosting the annual OUTSOUTH Queer Film Festival from August 8 through August 15, featuring a curated selection of shorts, documentaries, and feature films.
If you’re out Chapel Hill’s way, the Chelsea Theater’s summer classics series has a crazy good lineup for August, including new restorations of Blood Simple, Stranger Than Paradise, The Conversation, Brother from Another Planet, and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s immortal Three Colors trilogy. W
Durham author and activist adrienne maree brown’s latest book takes a look at navigating conflicts with care.
BY SHELBI POLK arts@indyweek.com
When the author and activist adrienne maree brown moved to Durham during the pandemic, one of the first things she did was befriend a tree in her backyard. The ritual, suggested by a friend, helped brown ground herself in the new space.
“Anytime people give me flowers, after a couple days, I would go lay the flowers out around the tree, adorn the tree. I put some bird feeders up in the tree so that everyone knew to come visit,” brown said on a recent Zoom call from a bright office. “It’s become quite a sweet little ecosystem back there over the time that I’ve been here. Every time I do any ritual inside, there’s a part of it that gets brought outside and left at the tree.”
That practice, of making the internal work you’re doing on and for yourself flow into the way you relate to the rest of the world, is central to brown’s latest book, Loving Corrections. This collection of 20 essays (and a few closing spells) is an encouragement that working on yourself—specifically with an openness to being corrected—is an important part of fighting for collective change.
brown has spent the last two decades facilitating organizing and movement work, and that career is central to her writing work. She’s edited and written seven essay collections prior to this one, including 2019’s Pleasure Activism, which was a New York Times bestseller. She’s also written two science fiction novels, and both her collections and her fiction are in conversation with great imaginative writers like Octavia Butler (whose Parables series, brown estimates, she’s read 85-ish times), Ursula K. Le Guin, and Audre Lorde. brown has also hosted several podcasts (she currently runs How to Survive the End of the World with her sister, Autumn) and appeared on dozens of others, including Krista Tippett’s On Being brown also facilitates movement meetings all across the country.
“Different organizations,” brown says, “would ask me to come and hold the space, hold the room, hold the meeting, set the agenda.”
Facilitating these meetings, brown began to notice a distressingly common pattern: when disagreements came up, people who shared a common goal would sometimes turn
on each other, gossiping about issues instead of directly addressing conflicts.
“We know how to go talk about each other, but we don’t know how to come talk to each other,” she says.
brown recalls one meeting in which a man consistently dominated the conversation.
“He was someone they all loved, we all loved,” she says. “But the way he was moving in the space was really out of alignment with everything we said we believed about equality, about sharing of power, about sharing this space.”
Everyone else involved—people with power and personal stakes in the organization—kept coming to brown, frustrated but unsure how to change the situation.
“As a facilitator, I don’t want to have to just be like, ‘Hey, here’s everything you’re doing wrong,’” she says. “I want to figure out ‘How do I help shift culture?’”
This—and countless other experiences—prompted brown to write about how to disagree well.
She’s been writing about strategic movement work for some time: in 2017, she published Emergent Strategy, a guidebook to help activists find new frameworks for movement work by looking to nature; ever since, she’s been curating a series of books on how to do movement work in this era.
“One of the aspects of emergent strategy that really mattered to me was this idea of ‘How do we relate to each other, and how do we relate to the earth in a way that actually makes sense and works for us?’” brown says.
The Emergent Strategy series includes several books on
the relationship work that goes into activism. Loving Corrections continues down that path in what brown calls a practice toward healing.
“All of those feel like books that brought us on the path towards this one,” she says. “Loving Corrections, for me, is ‘What are the ways we need to be in relationship with each other that allow us to course-correct and put ourselves back in alignment with each other and with the earth?’— before we have to reach a place of having a massive battle.”
If the subject matter sounds heavy, brown holds it gently; affirming her belief in the reality of these changes and noting her own growth as well as that of people like her mother, a white woman, whom brown has seen break down many of the structures that previously served her. The collection begins with an address to men—“mostly a note to straight, cis men”—encouraging them to listen to women and not to fear the “incremental demise of patriarchy” and a few essays that offer encouragement to generally privileged groups like white and abled folks. Other essays address social media users, weed users, or movement funders, asking them to be thoughtful with all of these tools and open to listening about their effects on the people around them.
“I see this work, this idea of Loving Corrections as a way of answering that long-ago problem and that longago question, which I saw happen so many times, which was: ‘Can we just say what we actually know to be true?’” brown asks. “‘Can we say it to each other in a way that fosters more connection, rather than less?’ And this, for
me, is strategic.”
Stepping back to consider the scale of the changes she suggests we can achieve makes things feel daunting. But brown’s strategy in our time of heightened emotion is to treat despair or fear as data.
“Watching the genocide play out in Palestine, I have been like, ‘I feel despair, I feel hopelessness, I feel sadness,’” she says. “I’m letting that tell me, ‘Oh, that’s something I really care about, being a part of people who don’t solve problems through violence. I really care about being a part of a global community. I really care about what happens to people who don’t have resources. I really care about reproductive justice.’ So much is unveiled about what I actually care about, because I feel so much grief—and then that grief also guides me to the next place.”
Despair can also lead to curiosity, which in turn guides her work.
“What would have to change for us not to be in this despair?” she says. “I think a lot of people who end up doing social change work, they’re rooted in heartbreak, and despair, and wanting something different for their family or community. I know that that is it for me. Each of these loving corrections, every single one of them, is rooted in real conversations.”
Facilitating movement work brought brown to the Triangle many times before she moved to the area from Detroit; a move she describes as “reverse migration.”
With family history from both sides tracking back to the Carolinas, she landed in town with a ready set of friends and collaborators. Four years later, unsurprisingly, she’s already involved with local activism.
“Durham is rich, rich, rich with people who are thinking about the future of the world and offering up tools and resources,” brown says. “If there’s a renaissance happening anywhere right now, I think Durham is it.”
One of those friends is Alexis Pauline Gumbs, another Durham-based writer and activist, who has contributed a book to the Emergent Strategy series. Gumbs and brown have been friends since their college days in New York (“We knew each other as babies, and hopefully we will know each other as elders,” brown says). This year, they’re releasing books on the same day, August 20, for the second time.
Gumbs’s book, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, is her sixth (not counting the contributions she’s made to two essay collections that brown edited).
“It’s an Alexa-style biography of Audre Lorde, which means it’s poetic and imaginative and beautiful and deep, and I think
it’s going to go really well with what Loving Corrections is all about,” brown says. The two are holding an event called Love Is a Promise, which will be moderated at the Hayti Heritage Center on August 15 by author Prentiss Hemphill.
“Our work almost always is in conversation and flowing back and forth,” brown says. “I hope that people come swim with us in these big ideas.”
(If you miss that event, brown will be talking to Thick author Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom on August 29 at Flyleaf.)
brown has been drawing parallels between sci-fi and movement work since the very first collection of essays she edited, Octavia’s Brood. That parallel continues to be a compelling lens through which to look at social change.
“When Octavia’s Brood came out, we said that all organizing is science fiction, because we’re trying to create a world that we haven’t lived in yet,” brown says. “I think Loving Corrections is like a bridge between this current inflammatory crossroads that we’re at towards a world in which we all can feel belonging—and we don’t have to feel like we’re constantly surrendering a right or sovereignty or safety or peace in order to belong.”
The conversations in Loving Corrections are clearly meant to be had between those working toward a common liberation, but brown doesn’t want us to write anyone off. Throughout the collection, she’s clearly wrestling with welcoming people with different or underdeveloped imaginings of the next versions of the world. How do you welcome people into movement work if there are some differences in the way you envision the future? How do you move past a competitive, binary view of who’s part of things?
In my favorite essay in the book, brown digs into her relationship with Ursula K. Le Guin and the noted sci-fi writer’s boundless imagination as a way to invite everyone into imagining a better world.
“We are in a battle of imaginations right now, where there are some people who imagine a world where we are all dominating each other, and where we’re really disconnected from the earth except as a resource we extract, and where everything is punishment and militarization and control and the accumulation of mass wealth for a few people,” brown says. “But there’s another thing that’s being imagined, and that is a world where we are actually sharing the resources, where there is an abundance for all people, where everyone gets the space to be who they truly are, and where people can feel safety and belonging and dignity.”
The editor in chief role checks all the boxes: amazing colleagues, an invigorating work environment, a storied history of producing hard-hitting news, and the chance to shape INDY’s future.
WED 8/7
MUSIC
Ally J on the Roof 7:30 p.m. The Durham Hotel, Durham.
Cosmic Chuckles Stand Up Comedy Night Mondays at 9 p.m. Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, Raleigh.
Iron & Wine 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.
The Palms / future.exboyfriend 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
SiR: Life Is Good Tour 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
STAGE
Cirque du Soleil: CORTEO Aug 8-11, various times. PNC Arena, Raleigh.
SCREEN
Summer Outdoor Movie Series: True Grit
8 p.m. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham.
THURS 8/8 FRI 8/9
MUSIC
Greensky Bluegrass 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Jazz Is Dead 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Pine Cone Bluegrass Jam 7 p.m. Riparian Provision Company, Raleigh.
Vagaries / Rabbit Fighter / The All Things 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Watchhouse / The Dead Tongues 7:30 p.m. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.
MUSIC
Aaron Johnson Quartet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.
Anthony Hamilton 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Bats & Mice / Sweet Home / Treasure Pains 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Crowmeat Bob’s Friendly Parasites / Emma DunlapGrube / Mike Isenberg 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.
Fireside Collective 7 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.
Taking Back Sunday 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Train / REO Speedwagon / Yacht Rock Revue 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
The Harry Show Fridays at 10 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
Hush Hush: Comedy Based on Secrets Fridays at 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.
Paperhand Puppet Intervention: Earth and Sky Aug. 9–Sept 29. The Forest Theatre, Chapel Hill.
Outdoor Films: Killing Romance 8:30 p.m. Joseph M. Bryan Jr. Theater in the Museum Park, Raleigh.
8/10
8/11 MON 8/12
311 7 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.
Amanda Anne Platt and The Honeycutters 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carborro.
Durham Parks and Recreation Presents: NiiTo 6 p.m. Southern Boundaries Park, Durham.
Lazer Dim 700 / 2Sdxrt3all 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Maren Morris 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
The Nichols-Templeton (TNT) Quartet 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.
Pure Pleasure / Overbite / Jupiter 2 7 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.
Ramón Ayala 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.
STAGE
Cold Brew Comedy Show 7 p.m. Lanza’s Cafe, Carrboro.
The Rocket Man Show 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Soliloquies of the Trees 10:30 a.m. The Cary Tree Archive, Cary.
SCREEN
Outdoor Films: Dreamgirls
8:30 p.m. Joseph M. Bryan Jr. Theater in the Museum Park, Raleigh.
DAD BOD 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.
An Evening with John Legend 7 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.
Hege V / Secret Monkey Weekend 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Lucky Daye 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Shallow Alcove / Noah Pope 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.
Greg Gutfeld 7 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Joshua Bassett 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Cosmic Chuckles Stand Up Comedy Night Mondays at 9 p.m. Flying Saucer Draught Emporium, Raleigh.
Naomi Westwater 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
TUES 8/13
WED 8/14
“An Artful Summer” Artist in Residence Series 6 p.m. JB Duke Hotel, Durham.
Comedy at Slim’s Dive Bar 10:30 p.m. Slim’s Downtown, Raleigh.
Dogstar 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons 8 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.
Leanna Firestone / Brye 8:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.
Monsters in the Mead Hall 7 p.m. Moon Dog Meadery and Bottle Shop, Durham.
PAGE
Frances Mayes: A Great Marriage 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.
The Tritone Subs Live 5:30 p.m. Guglhupf Restaurant, Durham.
Ryan Hanseler Quartet ft. Quiana Lynell 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.
Summer Outdoor Movie Series: Up 8 p.m. JB Duke Hotel, Durham.
Dr. Bacon / Hustle Souls / The Up and Up 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
The Lover Boyz 8 p.m. the Pinhook, Durham.
MUSIC
Beres Hammond 6 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Evan Bartels 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.
Glass Animals 7:45 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
Knives of Spain / Blake Hornsby / Tacoma Park 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.
Solomon Fox 7 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.
TK Kirkland 7:30 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
Trey Kennedy 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
ART
Hannah Joy Lehman’s Solo Exhibition 6 p.m. Durham Food Hall, Durham.
STAGE
The ComedyWorx Show Fridays at 8 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
Hush Hush: Comedy Based on Secrets Fridays at 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.
The Harry Show Fridays at 10 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.
MUSIC
Dan + Shay 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.
Ernest Turner Quartet with Stephen Riley 7:30 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.
Old Crow Medicine Show 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.
New Found Glory 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.
Andrew Bird / Amadou & Mariam 7 p.m. Joseph M. Bryan Jr. Theater in the Museum Park, Raleigh.
Air Supply 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.
Charlie Paso / Dogs on Shady Lane / Hemlock 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.
Jeremy “Bean” Clemons 8 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.
Rumours of Fleetwood Mac 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
STAGE
Comedy at Slim’s Dive Bar “Say It at Slim’s” 10:30 p.m. Slim’s Downtown, Raleigh.
Death of Cochise 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.
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© Puzzles by Pappocom
Difficulty level: MEDIUM
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.
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Associate IT Architect Director
Associate IT Architect Director, IQVIA RDS Inc., Durham, NC. Must telcom w/in NC. Define tech arch & facilitate tech evolutn on Data Mgmt & Biostat sys are integratd w/ suite of integratd cloud-bsd & inhouse SW prod, sys & pltfrms desgnd to make clin trials more effic. Salary Range: $162,595 - $210,000/yr. Reqs bach/mast in Comp Sci, IS, Comp Engg, Ind Engg/rel/equiv. Reqs 5 yrs w/ bach /3 yrs w/ mast of progressive exp as arch of cloud-bsd SW prod incl (w/bach 5 yrs / w/mast 3 yrs): sys SW/prod dev exp w/ a focus on arch; perfrm arch & dev in lead capcty; 3 yrs (if bach/ mast): desg cloud-bsd SW solns for AWS/Azure/sim envir; arch, desg & dev sys w/ Java/Python/R/SAS; use REST APIs, web servcs & GraphQL wrk to anlyze integrtn challenges & prov solns; arch & desg SPA w/ REACT/Angular JavaScript frmewrks. Reqs 5% US trvl on shrt notce. Apply: send res to usrecruitment@iqvia.com & ref#114008.
Project Coordinator (Wendell, NC) Must have Bach’s in Architecture or foreign equiv +1 yr exp as a project coordinator + knowl of AutoCAD, SketchUp, Lumion, Lightroom, & Photoshop, AIA Certificate in EIFS - Combining Performance & Aesthetics. Send resume to: FGA Associates PLLC, 11 S Main St, Wendell, NC 27591. ATTN: Mr. Gallucci.
Senior Software Engineer
Senior Software Engineer sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to work as part of Agile development squad to build/scale software tooling while ensuring that it continuously generates value for all application development teams. Minimum of Master’s degree or foreign equivalent in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Information Technology or rltd + 2 yrs exp in job offered or rltd occupations required. Employee reports to LexisNexis USA office Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates should apply via following link: https:// relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/relx/job/Raleigh-NC/ Senior-Software-Engineer_R79940.
Software Engineer II
Software Engineer II, F/T at Truist (Raleigh, NC) Deliver technically complex solutions. Perform system integration support for all project work. Lead & participate in the dvlpmt, testing, implmtn, maintenance, & support of highly complex solutions in adherence to co. standards, incl robust unit testing & support for subsequent release testing. Must have a Bach’s Deg in Comp Sci, S/ware Engg or related tech’l field +4 yrs of exp in s/ware engg or IT consulting positions performing/utilizing the following: in-depth knowl in info systems & ability to identify, apply, & implmt IT best practices; understanding of key business processes & competitive strategies related to the IT function; planning & managing projects & solving complex problems by applying best practices; & utilizing exp w/: C, Objective-C, Swift, & JavaScript; HTML & CSS; REST API, SOAP, XML, & JSON; SQL, SQLite, & MySQL; Xcode, Eclipse; iOS SDK; MS-Office, SourceTree, SonarQube, Veracode, IBM AppScan, & HockeyApp; CocoaPods & Swift Package Manager; Agile & Waterfall Methodologies; Git, Gitlab; macOS & Windows operating systems; Dsgn systems; & Dynatrace, Splunk, Blue Triangle. In the alternative, employer will accept a Master’s deg in related field + 2 yrs of exp in s/ware engg or IT consulting positions performing/ utilizing the aforementioned. Position may be eligible to work hybrid/ remotely but is based out of & reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Must be available to travel to Raleigh, NC regularly for meetings & reviews w/ manager & project teams w/in 24-hrs’ notice. Apply online (https://careers.truist.com/) or email resume to: Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com. (Ref Job# R0090813)
7/21/24 CROSSWORD SOLUTION
