INDY Week 3.09.16

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The Coward Pat McCrory, p. 6 “GiGi, Will the Police Shoot Me?” p. 9 The Happy Metal of SOON, p. 20 The Nanobots Are Coming to Get You, p. 24

CIrcUit Don’t breakER Fight It

Can a Duke grad's energy drink start-up make a billion-dollar industry healthy?

by Tina Haver Currin, p. 15

durham Superdelegates - Democracy is NOT a Plaything for the Elite ... pg 18 chapel hill Feminism, Solidarity and Socialism are Inseparable ... pg 25 3/21/16 Enough is Enough. ... pg 27 Join the Revolution. Bernie Sanders 2016

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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK | RALEIGH 6 Pat McCrory is too chicken to denounce Donald Trump.

8 Christian Laettner allegedly blew $5 million trying to buy the Memphis Grizzlies.

9 “I have a seven-year-old grandson. He always asks me, ‘GiGi, will the police shoot me?’”

13 We spend 30 percent less per student on higher education than we did twenty-five years ago.

15 A new Triangle-made energy drink, MATI, has scored top-seller status in regional Whole Foods stores.

18 Why would you go to Subway? Downtown Raleigh’s Linus & Pepper’s knows its sandwiches.

VOL. 33, NO. 10 DEPARTMENTS 6 Triangulator 8 News 18 Food 20 Music 23 Arts & Culture 28 What To Do This Week 31 Music Calendar 36 Arts/Film Calendar 41 Soft Return

20 “We’re going to forget it because we’re eating too many hot dogs and drinking too much beer.”

On the Cover: A memorial for Akiel Denkins

22 The city of Raleigh is paying $25,000 for a live-music TV show. Let’s hope it’s more than a vocal lesson in lip service.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

This page: The Southern at Linus & Pepper’s in Raleigh PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

NEXT WEEK THE TRIANGLE’S LAST INDEPENDENT VIDEO STORE TURNS OUT THE LIGHTS.

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 3

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Vivaldi’s Four Seasons

FRI/SAT, MAR 18-19 | 8PM WED, MAR 23 | 7:30PM

MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH Grant Llewellyn, conductor The North Carolina Symphony and the North Carolina Museum of Natural BES WED T SEATS Sciences present a NESD AY multimedia experience combining Vivaldi’s stirring Four Seasons with breathtaking images of nature across our state on the big screen.

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MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, RALEIGH Singer-songwriter John Ondrasik, best known by his stage name Five for Fighting, joins the North Carolina Symphony to perform fan favorites like “Superman (It’s Not Easy),” “The Riddle” and “100 Years.”

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4 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

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It suffices to say the Bernie Brigade did not cotton to our endorsement of Hillary Clinton last week. A few of them took out an ad (see page 2). Many emailed or tweeted angry missives or vented on our website. One accused us of making a rape joke (?).

Let’s dig in, shall we? “Clinton’s very significant weaknesses and lapses of judgment are glossed over in a mere three sentences, while her supposed strengths as a candidate are presented in the most conventional-wisdom, TV-talking-points-fashion possible,” writes Andy Magowan. “What was ‘Hillary’s role in pushing her husband’s White House leftward in an era that was hostile to lefties,’ precisely? Was it her enthusiastic support of the 1994 crime bill, which expanded the use of the death penalty and lengthened jail time? Was it her hard work rounding up votes for the welfare overhaul of 1996, which drastically increased the number of Americans living in extreme poverty?

Her advocacy for universal health care seems to have stopped soon after the defeat of her attempt to enact it in 1993. Now she receives huge donations from the corporations that worked to defeat the 1993 overhaul and she tells us single payer ‘will never, ever happen.’”

“With its current political endorsements, the INDY has ceased to serve as the voice of the progressive community in the Triangle,” adds Stewart W. Fisher. “We used to be able to count on the paper for serious political analysis and thoughtful endorsements that would promote progress in our community. No more.”

“I usually depend on the INDY to help me decide how to cast my vote,” writes Albert Studdard.

“Your weak-kneed dismissal of Bernie Sanders makes me wonder if I should bother again. Shame on you.”

And a few asked us to rethink our endorsements of Clinton and Donald Trump. “The appropriate word for my reaction to your endorsement of Trump is horrified,” writes Marianne Watson.

“I know you blast him in the endorsement, but this is a unique and dangerous election year. But you’ve gone on record as endorsing Trump. Please tell me you’re already regretting it.”

“The INDY has truly soiled itself,” adds Gerry Cohen. “You do have a day or two to reconsider before this Wednesday’s edition.”

Nah, we’re good, thanks. ● Want to see your name in bold? Email backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our Facebook page or INDYweek.com, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek.

Justin Tosco of Durham finds a moment to stretch before the start of the annual Florence Forth 5K/10K on March 5. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 5

triangulator +THE COWARD PAT MCCRORY

So there we sat last Thursday, mouths agape, watching as a major political party imploded in real time. For twenty incredible minutes, the GOP’s last presidential nominee bashed the guy likely to be its next one, calling him reckless and greedy, a fraud, a con man, a dangerous bully,, a demagogue, a harbinger of a failing democracy.

“He creates scapegoats of Muslims and Mexican immigrants,” former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney said of Donald Trump. “He calls for the use of torture. He calls for killing the innocent children and family members of terrorists. He cheers assaults on protesters. He applauds the prospect of twisting the Constitution to limit First Amendment freedom of the press. This is the very brand of anger that has led other nations into the abyss. … He’s playing the members of the American public for suckers.”

That’s an indictment that won’t be easy to walk back come fall.

Romney’s not alone, either: The Hill compiled a list of more than two dozen prominent Republicans—activists and talk show hosts, congressmen and former party officials—who’ve pledged to vote for a third party (they can’t stomach Hillary, after all) should The Donald become their nominee.

(Whether they stick to their commitment or not remains an open question, but the fact that such a list even exists is remarkable.)

Not on that list, however, was anyone from North Carolina.

The day before Romney’s speech, a spokesman for Governor Pat McCrory told the Winston-Salem Journal that “the governor will support the party’s nominee.” Then McCrory—once floated as a Trump running mate by none other than Ann Coulter—went on Capital Tonight and reiterated, “Yes, I will support the nominee, but I’m staying out of the presidential race.” He did fret about “the maturity level of the debates”—apparently he doesn’t like dick jokes—and “the lack of pragmatic solutions,” but that wasn’t enough to make him reconsider his commitment.

Like McCrory, Senator Richard Burr—who reportedly said (and then denied saying) that he’d vote for Bernie Sanders ahead of Ted Cruz—hasn’t endorsed but says he’ll back the winner. Senator Thom Tillis, meanwhile, has endorsed Marco Rubio—who, like Romney, labeled Trump a “con man”—but hasn’t said anything about #NeverTrump. (A spokesperson did not respond to our inquiries.)

6 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

gether dissimilar politicians. They’re both Chamber conservatives who’ve occasionally been distrusted by their party’s base. And so they’ve both felt compelled at times to pander to the far right, as Romney did in 2012 when he sought Trump’s blessing even after he promulgated the racist birther crap.

But at least Romney, when he saw his party’s train careening off the track, had the good sense to say something—and that’s more than you can say of McCrory.

Which leaves two possibilities: either McCrory thinks Trump is presidential material, or he’s too much of a coward to say otherwise. Neither paints him in an especially good light.

+BODY CAMS, DELAYED (AGAIN)

ILLUSTRATION BY SKILLET GILMORE

The state Democratic Party, of course, immediately tried to make this a thing, blasting out a statement that read, “Donald Trump would be a disaster as president and North Carolinians should be embarrassed that Governor McCrory would even consider helping him get there.”

We’re not sure “party hack supports party nominee” quite rises to the level of scandal. But there’s an interesting underlying question here: How far, exactly, does Trump have to go before party leaders disavow him? At this point, would anything constitute “beyond the pale”?

Or, for North Carolina Republicans, does party affiliation—wait for it—trump all else?

It’s worth noting that Romney and McCrory aren’t alto-

Among other things, the events on Bragg Street last week (page 9) brought to light that Raleigh is only now beginning to grapple with how to implement a body-camera policy for its police force. Meanwhile, Durham’s been trying to push through a body-cam policy for a year now, and it still hasn’t even ordered the damn cameras.

In mid-February, the Durham City Council was set to vote on ordering $366,000 worth of body cameras. But that vote got pushed back to March 7 due to concerns that the policy was insufficiently specific on things like privacy protection, maintenance of the videos, and how accessible videos would be to the public. It was agreed that council members Jillian Johnson, Charlie Reece, and Steve Schewel would put together some final recommendations, to be reviewed prior to the March 7 vote on the contract.

Those recommendations were released to the rest of the council last Thursday. The proposed new general order prevents using the footage to create a facial-recognition database; allows complainants to bring somebody with them to view the video (in previous iterations, only the complainant could view it); and stipulates that videos containing use of force and those that are the subject of citizen complaints will be held indefinitely.

The creation of some kind of citizen advisory panel that decides whether the release of certain videos is in the public interest is likely. But that’s outside the scope of the body-cam general order.

“There would have to be some kind of city council action

TL;DR: to create that committee,” Johnson tells the INDY. “But the way the current general order is written, it allows for that—the footage can be released by the city manager, the chief of police, or the city council.”

Just a day after the new recommendations were released to council, though, city manager Tom Bonfield announced—you’ll never guess—another delay. Now the body-cam vote has been postponed indefinitely. “While we’ve made significant progress on many of the issues, there are still a variety of factors that warrant further consideration before moving ahead,” Bonfield said in an email.

Bright side: the delay will give candidates for police chief—a position expected to be filled in April—an opportunity to weigh in. Downside: every day without body cameras increases the likelihood that something like what happened on Bragg Street will happen in Durham.

+POWER PLAY

In case our state’s self-proclaimed “pro-business” lawmakers doubt that clean energy is important to the state’s business leaders, the N.C. League of Conservation Voters decided to help them out.

Last week, the NCLCV convened a panel of North Carolina entrepreneurs at N.C. State’s JC Raulston Arboretum to discuss the benefits of the federal Clean Power Plan to the state’s industries.

“Climate change is arguably the greatest crisis that our nation and our whole world faces,” said Maria Kingery, CEO of Morrisville solar and energy efficiency company Southern Energy Management at a roundtable discussion at N.C. State’s JC Raulston Arboretum.

“There’s a perception that this is bad for business, but I think clean energy is the greatest business opportunity of our time.”

She says North Carolina’s leaders, including Governor McCrory and senators Thom Tillis and Richard Burr, are “missing the boat.”

The two other panelists—Eric Henry, president of sustainable T-shirt company TS Designs, and Beth Stewart, the head of sustainable fashion nonprofit Redress Raleigh—spoke about the challenges

they face in making the state’s traditional textiles industry more energy efficient and the role government plays.

Henry wants government to focus on big, long-term issues—like climate change—and leave short-term decisions to businesses.

“I see government as a partner,” Henry said. “I want it to look way out there, at where do we want to be one hundred years out? I don’t want it to be in the sandbox with us, only making decisions that matter six months from now.”

Recently, North Carolina’s legislature has dealt a series of blows to clean energy. It let lapse the state’s tax credit for renewable energy investments, and a bill to curtail the state’s renewable energy portfolio standards keeps popping up—and is expected to do so again in this spring’s legislative session. Those two policies have been credited with making North Carolina a solar leader in the Southeast.

“Tax credits and incentives level the playing field here, in a regulated monopoly state, as far as where our power comes from,” Kingery said. “We’re legally not allowed to compete with the utilities, so we have to partner with them to provide our service. So incentives are a really important way for us to be able to compete in the marketplace.”

Still, she added, regardless of what the legislature does, clean energy is here to stay.

Stewart added that you, citizen, can pick up the legislature’s slack simply by changing how you shop for clothes.

“Buy from consignment stores or vintage,” she said. “Buy locally, because it’s usually from a smaller company and hasn’t traveled around the world. Never, ever buy fast fashion. Look at the tags on your clothes to see where they’re made. And ask questions of the big companies, because the more questions they get, eventually, they’ll have to start responding.” l triangulator@indyweek.com This week’s report by Jeffrey C. Billman, David Hudnall, and Jane Porter.

THE INDY’S QUALITY-OF-LIFE METER -4

Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest proposes the Campus Free Expression Act to ban protests on college campuses. Also included in the bill is a new state slogan: “North Carolina—Where Words Don’t Mean Things.”

+1

Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane gives her State of the City address. Proving once and for all that Durham is the cooler city, no Montell Jordan–soundtracked montage precedes it.

-2

Young Raleighites criticize the city council for dithering on the bike share and Airbnb.

The council says it will get to it after figuring out where to park its velocipede.

-3

North Carolina’s ABC laws prevent a Hillsborough auction house from hosting the world’s largest auction of Pappy Van Winkle bourbon. Area moonshiners applaud the attempt to unyoke the state from the clutches of Big Bourbon.

-3

WRAL refuses to make a pit bull its “Pet of the Day.” Personally, we’re more scared of David Crabtree.

-2

North Carolina schools are having trouble attracting and retaining teachers, who are somehow unenthused about McCrory’s new “Apple a Day” plan—a plan to actually pay teachers in apples. “It’s all we can do,” McCrory shrugs.

+3

Bill Clinton stumps for his wife in Raleigh and calls the GOP debates a “grade-school playground fight.” He adds that, when he was in grade school, he preferred playing doctor.

-2

More than two dozen protesters are ejected from Donald Trump’s rally in Concord before it even begins. Because quashing dissent is the North Carolina way.

Right, Dan Forest?

PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS

This week’s total: -12 Year to date: -14 INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 7

indynews

Duking It Out

CHRISTIAN LAETTNER SUED HIS OWN BUSINESS FOR $10 MILLION. NOW HIS FORMER PARTNERS ARE SUING HIM.

BY DAVID HUDNALL Former Duke basketball star Christian Laettner was so reviled that the ESPN documentary about him, released last year, is literally called I Hate Christian Laettner. Somewhat paradoxically, in examining five specific qualities that made him so hateable—white, privileged, handsome, a bully, one of the greatest college basketball players of all time—the film ultimately succeeds in humanizing Laettner.

Probably wisely, the documentary avoids delving into Laettner’s side career in the business world. To do so would have been an awkward detour out of the exciting and accessible world of sports into the abstruse domain of real estate development and finance. It would also have interfered with

the narrative of Laettner as a winner.

As many Durhamites are aware, Laettner, his former teammate Brian Davis, and developer Tom Niemann were early arrivers in Durham’s downtown revitalization. In the late 1990s, they formed Blue Devil Ventures, which leveraged historical tax credits, HUD money, and other incentives to purchase five old tobacco warehouses. Blue Devil Ventures converted those properties into the West Village: 241 residential units and 36,000 square feet of commercial space.

That was the first phase. In 2002, the group began planning a second. It wanted to purchase seven more warehouses adjacent to the West Village. To buy all that property and

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transform it into lofts, retail, and office space, however, Blue Devil Ventures needed capital.

Davis knew an investment banker named Rhahime Bell, a managing director at Paine Webber. Another director, Peter Ghavami, as well as Gary Heinz (who worked under them), signed on to help finance the second phase.

They formed a developmental entity called BDV III. The entity consisted of Laettner, Davis, Niemann Capital, Heinz, Julie Britton (Ghavami’s wife), and RBell Holdings.

About those people: l Ghavami and Heinz were convicted in 2012 for a municipal bond-rigging scheme.

As employees of UBS, they got kickbacks while colluding with brokers to drive up the rates cities across the country paid to finance public projects. Heinz was sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison; Ghavami got eighteen months. l In 2007, Bell sued Blue Devil Ventures over a $200,000 loan. They settled out of court. l Laettner and Davis’s struggles over the last decade have been well publicized. They attempted, without Niemann’s help, to put together projects like the West Village in other cities such as Baltimore and Philadelphia. That didn’t go well. Nor did their bid to buy the Memphis Grizzlies, which ended with them losing $5 million of investors’ money, Niemann says. The recession didn’t do them any favors, either. In 2010, Laettner’s attorney said that Laettner had $10 million in assets and $40 million in debt.

And now a new lawsuit filed in January pits Niemann—who, since 2005, has led the Durham Housing Authority—and Heinz against Laettner, Davis, Ghavami, and Britton. Niemann’s version, as told in an affidavit, contains several tidbits about the breakup.

Eventually, he says, creditors began to recognize the West Village for what it was: the only real asset Laettner and Davis had. So, needing cash, Davis, Laettner, and Niemann agreed in

2011 to sell the first phase. The following year, however, Davis, Laettner, and Britton voted to remove Niemann as manager of BDV III. Then Laettner and Britton personally sued BDV III—their own company—over loans they claimed it hadn’t paid back to them.

Then, acting as BDV III’s managers, they opted not to fight the lawsuit. Laettner won a $10 million judgment. Britton got $1.5 million.

As the lawsuit puts it: “The practical effect was to wipe out any chance of repayment of the capital accounts of BDV III … and to insure that Laettner and Britton were paid more than what they were actually owed.”

Niemann says in his affidavit that he was never contacted by BDV III’s lawyer about BDV III’s decision not to oppose the judgments for Laettner and Britton. “To my knowledge, a meeting of BDV III was never convened to consider granting multi-million-dollar consent judgments to other members/managers of BDV III,” he says.

Niemann and Heinz’s suit asks for a voiding of Laettner and Britton’s judgments and a preliminary injunction on distribution of the money.

Laettner has other legal problems down in Florida. County records show his $4 million home outside Jacksonville was foreclosed on last year. Records also show his wife filed for divorce in August. Attempts to reach Laettner via his attorney were unsuccessful.

Last month, the entities that purchased the West Village from Blue Devil Ventures— Federal Capital Partners and Bell Partners— sold it to an Ohio firm for $187 million. With the commercial spaces at 100 percent occupancy and roughly 95 percent of the residential units leased year-round, the new owners are well positioned to make a mint. West Village is an undeniable success story in downtown Durham—just not for the people who dreamed it up. l dhudnall@indyweek.com

The West Village is an undeniable success story—just not for the people who dreamed it up.

Four Shots on Bragg Street IN THE WAKE OF AKIEL DENKINS’S DEATH-BY-COP, A LONG-OVERLOOKED SOUTHEAST RALEIGH NEIGHBORHOOD IS ON EDGE

BY PAUL BLEST AND JANE PORTER • PHOTOGRAPHS BY ALEX BOERNER

Akiel Denkins’s casket is carried out of the Bible Way Temple in Southeast Raleigh following his funeral on Friday.

H

ere’s what we know: shortly before noon on Monday, February 29, while attempting to serve a felony drug warrant, white Raleigh police officer Daniel Clay Twiddy shot and killed a twenty-four-year-old African-American man named Akiel Denkins near the corner of Bragg and East streets in Southeast Raleigh.

Beyond that, the details are hazy.

Many community members—most hearing the story second-, third-, or even fourthhand—say it went something like this: Twiddy chased Denkins; Denkins hopped a fence; Twiddy tried to hop that fence but fell down; onlookers started laughing at Twiddy; then, as one witness told The News & Observer, Twiddy “pulled his gun out and started shooting. [Denkins] got shot in the back.”

Twiddy’s version is quite different. In his telling, as reported in the preliminary “fiveday report” the Raleigh Police Department presented to the city manager last week, Twiddy—a former high school wrestler and CrossFit enthusiast—caught up to the fleeing Denkins. They wrestled. “As the struggle continued, Officer Twiddy observed Mr. Denkins start to pull a handgun from the front of his waistband and begin to move it toward Officer Twiddy,” the report says.

So Twiddy pulled out his gun and fired “multiple” shots, the report says. “After the first shots were fired, Officer Twiddy felt Mr. Denkins’ hand or arm make contact with his duty weapon. Officer Twiddy, fearing that Mr. Denkins was either going to shoot him or attempt to take his duty weapon, stepped back and fired additional shots at Mr. Denkins,” the report continues, “who still had the firearm in his hand. Mr. Denkins collapsed to the ground, dropping the firearm in the process.”

A preliminary autopsy found that Denkins was shot four times.

“We were sitting outside, having a nice day,” recalls neighbor Brenda Jackson. “The next thing I know, I hear bam! bam! bam! And I said, ‘Oh Lord, I’m going in the house.’”

Gunshots aren’t unusual in this section of Southeast Raleigh, a generally friendly but often underserved neighborhood where some houses sit in disrepair. Nor is it unusual to see a heavy police presence—usually white cops patrolling an almost entirely black neighborhood—to combat drug trafficking, the scourge of a community full of young people with little opportunity.

But drug dealers aren’t the cops’ only tar-

gets, people who live on Bragg Street say.

“They ride up and down this strip, they see what’s going on, and all they want to do is harass people—not only drug dealers, but innocent people,” says resident Al Hall. “And they expect people to respect them for that.

Nobody’s going to respect someone for taking an old man who can’t even walk, and because he’s drinking a little bit, let’s go and rough him up. Nobody’s going to respect that.”

So it’s no surprise that, in the wake of Denkins’s death, many residents don’t believe the developing official narrative. They also don’t believe Twiddy will be indicted or oth-

erwise held accountable. Instead, they see this incident as of a piece with the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Tamir Rice in Cleveland—cases where young black lives were snuffed out by the police.

“Even if [Denkins] ran or had drugs on him, you didn’t have to do all that to the man,” says neighbor Willie Alston. “The police could be a whole lot better than what they are, really.”

“I have a seven-year old grandson that I see every day,” adds Geraldine Alshamy, a member of the Police Accountability Community Taskforce (PACT), a volunteer group that INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 9

Raleigh Police Shootings, 2008–Present

formed last year. “He always asks me, ‘GiGi, will the police shoot me?’”

Justified or not, that distrust, and all the issues underlying it, is something the city will have to grapple with in the weeks and

racked up at least three convictions.

But the people who knew him well remember Denkins for his warm smile, his love of basketball, and his optimism. Denkins played in the basketball league at the nonprofit

Akiel Denkins was the seventh civilian shot by Raleigh police since 2008. Of the remaining six, five were AfricanAmerican, while one was white. In addition, in May 2014, Sergeant J.D. Malzahn accidentally shot Officer K.J. Barefoot while attempting to take a suspect into custody. The six accounts below are taken from public records.

April 4, 2008: Michael Lewis

White was fleeing police on foot in Southeast Raleigh. Officer B. Greenwood and other witnesses saw a weapon. Greenwood shot White twice; White survived.

August 5, 2008: Renford Butler,

who was from Durham, carjacked a vehicle near N.C. State. He slashed at an officer with a straight razor and then came for Officer J. Bloodworth, who shot him twice. Butler died a week later.

September 30, 2009: Justin Lamar Thomas fired a shot outside of a police station and then barricaded himself inside an N.C. State building. He pointed two handguns at the police; three officers shot at him. He was hit once but recovered.

October 21, 2010: Emmerli Wil-

coxson ran toward Officer D.C. Painter, who said Wilcoxson reached toward her ankle “as if she were retrieving something.” Painter shot her multiple times. Then Wilcoxson ran toward Officer P.D. Matthews, who shot her once. She survived; later she attempted to sue the city but lost.

November 23, 2012: Matthew Durwood Calton, a murder suspect, shot Officer M.M. Harmon. Harmon and Officer D.B. Moreland returned fire, striking Carlton, who survived.

December 17, 2014: Marcel Jordan, who has schizophrenia, assaulted an employee at the Family Preservation Services center on Barrett Road.

When he advanced toward officers with a pair of scissors, Officer S.C. Nziuki shot and critically wounded him.

—Paul Blest 10 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

Rolonda Byrd, Akiel Denkins’s mother, sits with family and friends during her son’s funeral. months—and years and decades—to come.

“When you have an issue like this, if you have alienated and excluded people and didn’t respect their culture, when you get a crisis, that comes back,” says Octavia Rainey, a longtime Raleigh activist. “It is all about creating trust. [City officials] are so caught up in change that they forgot about trust.

Trust will always give you the benefit of the doubt, and [the police] need the benefit of the doubt right now.”

“IT’S MAINLY WHITE COPS”

After the police tape was taken down and Denkins’s body moved last Monday afternoon, a crowd gathered at the scene. Some were angry, but most were just devastated by the loss of a young father of two they knew as having a good heart—“a sweet person, never cursed, good manners,” as resident Anissa McNair recalls—who got into the drug game only to provide for his family.

This wasn’t Denkins’s first run-in with the law. He had a lengthy criminal record dating back to March 2011. Court records show that Denkins was arrested more than thirty times in five years and charged with misdemeanors and felonies ranging from marijuana and cocaine possession to illegally carrying a gun to assault on a female. In that time, Denkins

outreach center Neighbor to Neighbor. He wanted to work in construction, says Royce Hathcock, who works at the center.

“He was a wonderful, warm personality.

He had this grin that people always talked about that was feisty and fun, and he was just a deep person,” Hathcock says.

By nightfall, that crowd had given way to a vigil, hundreds strong, marching from the scene of the shooting a few blocks to the Bible Way Temple, chanting “Black lives matter!”

One person held up a sign that read, “Fuck the Police.”

Despite the palpable tension, the Monday night protest was peaceful. There have been no riots or looting.

As North Carolina NAACP chairman Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II implored the community the day after the shooting, “This is not time to turn on each other. It’s a time to turn to each other.”

But that doesn’t mean they trust the police’s story.

“Witnesses have come forward to indicate that when the scene was blocked off,” NAACP lawyer and N.C. Central law professor Irv Joyner told the media Thursday, “that there was a ‘cleaning up’ of the shooting site.

That’s part of the anger that people have, that they were blocked out while there was a cleaning up of blood, a reshuffling of leaves

and other terrain around the shooting scene.

That’s where that concern comes from.”

Indeed, many residents are skeptical that the city will conduct the thorough investigation they’re demanding. “It’s going to be a justified shooting,” says Darren Lockett. “The cops are going to fix it up some type of way.”

That sentiment pervades the neighborhood.

Part of the problem is that not enough cops look like the neighborhood’s—or the city’s— residents. As a December N&O story reported, while people of color comprise about 40 percent of Raleigh’s population, they only make up 16 percent of the police force. At the time, Raleigh police chief Cassandra DeckBrown—the first African-American woman to hold that position—vowed to change that.

“When there’s a shooting or something happens like that, that’s when you see black police officers,” says Southeast Raleigh resident Ashley Murphy. “When they’re patrolling, it’s mainly white cops.”

Related to that, neighbors say, is what they describe as a pattern of harassment. For example, take this story, told by Kimberly Muktarian, the president of local group Saving Our Sons.

One day in August 2014, Muktarian’s son was pulled over by Raleigh cops, who claimed to smell a “strong marijuana odor,” according to court records.

“They searched and patted them down and then sat them down on the curb,” Muktarian says. “I teach in a prison, and I’m always educating my children on their rights, and my son begins to talk very educational to them, saying that they exhausted their probable cause.

“That makes them mad,” she continues.

“And when he adjusted the way he was sitting because he was on the ground for so long, they took him and slammed him into the ground, and two or three white cops just pounded on him and sat on him. My cousin said that all you could see was the tears rolling down my son’s face, because he couldn’t move.”

No marijuana was found, according to court records, but the police charged him with “attempting to flee on foot after being removed from a vehicle.” In order to avoid the possibility of jail time and losing his job if he lost, her son pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge.

Others report having similar experiences.

“You can’t even stand on certain streets without being harassed,” says a resident who asked not to be named. “I could be standing here talking to someone, and a police officer will pull over and search me for drugs. I don’t sell drugs, man. I go to work just like a normal person would.”

It’s not just in this neighborhood that African-Americans are more likely to be searched. University of North Carolina professor Frank Baumgartner tracked traffic stops and searches in major North Carolina cities from 2002–13. During that period, he found that African-American drivers in Raleigh are 62 percent more likely to be searched at a stop than white drivers.

As Baumgartner points out, that percentage approaches the disparity seen in Ferguson, a city that the U.S. Department of Justice sued last month for “routinely” violating its citizens’ civil rights.

But anger here in Southeast Raleigh isn’t just directed toward the police. There’s also frustration at city officials who many community members feel have had a remarkably inadequate response to Denkins’s death.

“WHERE’S COREY BRANCH AT?”

Coincidentally, the Raleigh City Council had a presentation on body cameras scheduled for its work session last Monday. As news of the shooting broke, the council abruptly ended its meeting (see sidebar, page 12).

The next day, Mayor Nancy McFarlane made brief remarks asking for “calm, patience, and prayers” from the lobby of City Hall.

“Any loss of life, regardless of circumstance, is heartbreaking, and we offer our sincere condolences to all of those involved,” she said. “We understand the need and desire of the community for information to be able to make sense of yesterday’s events.”

After that, she was quiet on the subject for almost a week. McFarlane and first-term

“I have a seven-yearold grandson that I see every day.

He always asks me, ‘GiGi, will the police shoot me?’” council member Corey Branch, whose district covers Southeast Raleigh and who is the council’s only African-American, declined multiple interview requests.

On Monday, however, McFarlane dedicated much of her State of the City address Monday to praising the community’s reaction to the shooting.

“One week ago, she said, “we faced a trage-

dy as a community. Many lives were changed.

And our community is changed. What I do know is no matter what you are thinking or feeling about this situation, we have to use the strength of those emotions to focus on making our community better. For us to come together as a community and move forward, I really believe the key is to really, really listen to each other.”

Though McFarlane attended Denkins’s funeral at the Bible Way Temple on Friday, she didn’t show for the vigils earlier in the week, which irked some residents. Sources tell the INDY that an assistant city manager reached out to them after the shooting, telling them that the mayor was worried her presence at the vigils would infuriate residents. These sources say the opposite is true.

“People by and large feel like they are thrown away and uncared for, and they need someone in power to make sure they know that’s not the case,” one source says.

Branch’s absence didn’t go unnoticed, either. “Where’s Corey Branch at?” one man exasperatedly asked a group of reporters outside of the Bible Way Temple on Tuesday.

“The people here elected him, we put him [on the city council]. Where is he?”

While community leaders did what they could to keep people calm, there’s a feeling among Southeast Raleigh residents that their elected officials should have been there.

“We did not elect [NAACP leader Barber], who is not from Raleigh, to come here and calm us down,” the source continues.

It’s long been clear that the city needs to do better by Southeast Raleigh. The question that no one has been able to answer is how.

Wake County commission chairman James West, one of that board’s two AfricanAmericans, says he hopes this tragedy will serve as a wake-up call to elected officials, putting them on notice that they must pay closer attention to these communities.

“It reminds us of a lot of the challenges and things that need to be done in the community related to prosperity and hope, that there are issues with jobs and with poverty that have to be addressed,” he says. “I hope we can form a grassroots community to try to make sure we can provide the opportunities that we all can enjoy, for all citizens of Raleigh and Wake County to be a part of the American dream.”

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“THERE NEEDS TO BE MORE TRUST”

On Thursday, Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman released the preliminary results of an autopsy. It found that Denkins had been shot four times—once in the chest, injuring his heart and lungs, once in the shoulder, and once in each arm— INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 11

but there’s a lot more that needs to be done.” though it’s not yet clear from which direction Specifically, Deck-Brown, who took over or the range from which he was hit. the RPD in 2013, has made an active effort Freeman told reporters that a medical to increase diversity. examiner had more work to do before mak“Better training could avoid this situaing those determinations. There’s also a postion, as well as the community having more sibility that the Denkins family will request power over this process,” adds PACT meman independent autopsy. ber Erin Byrd. “A lot of times [officers] get Speaking with the INDY on Friday, Joyner, off, and the community doesn’t have any the NAACP attorney, offered suggestions for power in this conversation.” ways the police could improve their relationPACT has proposed several policy changship with the community. es, including employing body cameras, estab“I don’t know if an incident like this can lishing a community oversight board with be prevented from happening again,” Joyner the ability to investigate and subpoena the said. “But I do know that there needs to be police, providing better interaction written search-conbetween police sent forms, and creand the commuating an internship nity. There needs program to recruit to be more trust. officers of color.

There’s a lot of “While the departanger in this comment won’t community that did ment on the positions not originate with taken by any particthe death of Akiel. ular group,” RPD It was something spokesman Jim that goes back Sughrue told the for years. Chief INDY in an email, “I Brown has done a Mourners hug outside the Bible Way Temple. will note that it has a lot to address that,

The Body-Cam Debate If Officer Twiddy had been wearing a body camera, as police officers do in eleven other North Carolina cities—soon to be twelve, if Durham adopts a policy it has been debating over the last several months—it’s likely the confusion and anxiety over what actually happened last Monday could have been avoided altogether.

Raleigh is taking steps in that direction. Notes from the presentation that was to go before the city council last week indicate that city staff expected body cameras to increase accountability, public trust, efficiency in investigating complaints, and quality of evidence collection, while reducing civilian complaints, officer and civilian injuries, and officers’ use of force.

That, in the staff’s view, would be well worth the $4 million to $5 million body cameras would cost the city over the next five years.

There’s nothing in the presentation that touches on one of the most crucial aspects of body-cam policy: under what circumstances the public gets to see the footage. That’s been the holdup in Durham, where the police want tighter controls on the videos’ release than some city council members are willing to enact. So it remains to be seen how transparent Raleigh’s eventual policy will be.

The city council plans to discuss body cameras at its March 15 meeting.

—Paul Blest and Jane Porter

longstanding record of listening to and learning from community members and community organizations.”

On March 10, PACT members will make their case for greater police accountability to the city’s Human Relations Commission—a meeting scheduled before Denkins’s death but now given new urgency.

“We want them to know that we’re here and what our proposals are,” Alshamy says.

“The police chief said over and over again that she wants to build relationships in the community, but there was such a lack of trust to begin with, and now there’s even more of a lack of trust in the community.” l backtalk@indyweek.com

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12 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

Former UNC president TOM ROSS reflects on his ouster and what comes next BY SAMUEL FELDBLUM

I

Man Mission The

and His

INDY: First of all: what are you doing now?

Tom Ross: I’m the Sanford Distinguished Fellow of

Public Policy at Duke, and I’m there a couple days a week, working on a variety of different matters.

They’ve asked me to participate in a leadership forum for people in North Carolina that are focused on the

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

n a stunning move last January, the University of North Carolina’s increasingly conservative board of governors requested Tom Ross’s resignation as system president. The board insisted the popular Ross had “served with distinction” and done an “exemplary” job since he was hired in 2010. It provided no reason for his dismissal beyond the need for a “leadership transition.”

The decision was widely panned as political— especially when, a month later, the board abolished three university-based centers, most notably Gene Nichol’s Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity.

In Ross’s place, the board hired Margaret Spellings, George W. Bush’s former secretary of education, whose position started March 1. She’s already come under fire from UNC students and faculty for her involvement with for-profit colleges and student debt-collection services, her references to students as “customers,” and past homophobic views. Meanwhile, Governor McCrory and the legislature have been advocating for a university system aimed overtly at getting students jobs upon graduation, not learning for learning’s sake. Academics in the UNC system have voiced concerns about the direction of higher education in the state.

Ross is now across the Triangle at Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy, and he remains a professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Government. Last month, the INDY sat down with Ross to ask his thoughts on his years at UNC, his current work on redistricting reform, and why the United States may soon no longer have the world’s top economy.

public policy arena. But, also, I’m looking at independent redistricting commissions around the country to see where those are working, how they’re set up, how they’re structured, what are the rules they use in drawing districts. To me, changing the way we do districting is really important to democracy.

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 13

Just recently in North Carolina, a couple of congressional districts were declared unconstitutional. Does that add urgency to your work?

Well, I don’t know that it adds urgency, because I think that those issues will be resolved well before the legislature could take action to create a commission. [Editor’s note: after this interview, the legislature redrew the map.] So I’m thinking about this more long term, because I think that we have to solve this problem not just in North Carolina but around the country, so that we can help restore people’s confidence in democracy and in our elective process.

Switching gears: While you were at UNC, did you have any particular focuses?

We went through a strategic planning process and adopted a comprehensive plan in early 2013, and it was focused in five particular areas. One of them was trying to increase the level of educational attainment in North Carolina, because I think all the evidence is the jobs of the future are going to require higher levels of education than they have in the past. And North Carolina is barely in the middle of the pack in terms of educational attainment compared to other states. We also had a major goal of focusing on academic quality, to ensure that the degrees we were awarding were of high quality. We were focused on working with the state to increase research in key areas to help build the economy, because the universities have a long, historic role of helping the state with its economic development. We looked at efficiency. And during my tenure, we reduced the cost of a degree by a substantial amount, about fifteen percent, and we increased the number of degrees that we were producing by eighteen percent.

What direction do you see the UNC system headed in now?

Well, I don’t really know what the direction is going to be.

Some of the comments that [Spellings] made publicly at the retreat of the board [recently] were very positive comments about being sure to continue to focus on access and affordability. You know, I don’t know yet where things will head.

I know that if you look around the country, there are some trends that are positive, and some trends that are really concerning, and I think we’ll just have to see how it unfolds.

It seems there’s less money coming into state school systems, which increases the pressure on everyone.

There’s no question that’s the case, but that’s not a recent trend. You go back twenty-five years, and you look at what we were spending in real dollars compared to now: we’re spending two percent more now than we were spending, but our enrollment has increased by sixty percent. So we’re actually spending about thirty percent less per student across the country on higher education than we did twenty-five years ago. This has been a long-term trend, and I think it is of great concern. I think we’re losing ground as a country, and I think we’ve got to pay attention or we’re going to find ourselves no longer with the world’s top economy.

14 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

Is that shortfall then made up by tuition increases?

That’s exactly what has happened. In North Carolina, for example, you go back to 2008, there’s been basically a ten percent shift. If my memory’s right: in 2008, seventy-two percent of the cost of a student’s education was paid by the state, twenty-eight percent by the students; it’s now sixty-two percent by the state, thirty-eight percent by the students.

The board of governors has been focusing on return on investment. Do you get the sense that that leads to curricular changes, thinking about higher education that way?

I think the first thing that one needs to do is look at the economic-impact analysis we had done last year. What you see is that the university, just the public university, amounts to six-point-four percent of the state’s GDP, so it’s a significant part of the economy. But you also see that for the investment the state makes, the return on investment is quite significant. The university brings in over one-pointtwo billion dollars in research funding, which creates jobs in North Carolina.

And you look, for example, at the cancer fund, the state’s investment in the cancer fund is returned fivefold in outside funding. And that doesn’t even take into account the discoveries that are made, and that life-changing new ideas and new products come out of research that’s done in the university.

But, in addition to that, there’s a lot of evidence that the more educated your population—there’s a lot of collateral benefits. Things like better health outcomes, lower obesity, and lower smoking rates among people that are higher educated, and that saves the state money. There’s less correctional costs, fewer people committing crimes that are higher educated. There is less use of welfare for people that are higher educated. So there are a lot of benefits to the state that aren’t even really counted in that economic-impact analysis.

percent of the jobs that they will hold haven’t even been invented yet. And we know that broad-based education is important in creating the kind of graduate that can communicate well and can think critically. At the same time, I think that kind of education is really important to help people think in an interdisciplinary way, because the world—the problems we’re facing are not field-specific.

There’s been a lot written recently about how higher education in North Carolina is being influenced by political ideology. Would you say that is happening?

I think that universities have historically been seen as nonpartisan. It’s important that they continue to be that way.

What people’s perceptions are now, it’s hard for me to comment on what other people might perceive. I think one of the biggest risks to universities, in terms of their reputation and their ability to be successful in the role that they’re supposed to play in society, is if they do become political institutions.

“We’re actually spending about 30 percent less per student than we did 25 years ago.”

Governor McCrory has said that the state shouldn’t be subsidizing courses in Swahili and gender studies because they’re less likely to lead to jobs. It has me wondering about the place of a broad, liberal arts-style education in the state system.

Well, I think that increasingly people understand that the role of the university, as I often put it, is to prepare people for their last job, not their first. And what I mean by that is we’re preparing people for lifelong learning and to be flexible and adaptable in a changing economy. The [U.S.] Department of Labor recently put out a study that [showed that] people who are now in high school or younger, sixty

Last question: What would you say is the purpose of higher education?

I think we have, as a public university, a very clear mission. Part of that is teaching and learning, where we’re trying to prepare students for their life. And that means creating students and graduates who can communicate well, who can think critically, who can understand and use data to solve problems, who can work in teams, who can live and work in a diverse global economy. Another part of our mission is research—it is the place where new ideas are born and where discoveries are made that can change human lives.

And then the third role, clearly part of the mission, is public service.

In terms of what’s important to the individual, the economic preparation for work is one component. I think there are other components of education. I think it’s fair to say that people who have the benefit of higher education oftentimes are in a position to understand and appreciate what’s going on in the world in some ways that maybe others can’t. They’re more likely to vote. They’re more likely to participate in the democracy. They’re more likely to be leaders. And I think that’s part of the role of education.

Almost to help people become their best selves.

Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it. But also—not only their best selves, but to put them in a position to thrive both economically and as human beings, and to help their community and their state thrive. l backtalk@indyweek.com

Sustainable EnErgy WHILE A STUDENT AT DUKE, TATIANA BIRGISSON LAUNCHED AN ENERGY DRINK COMPANY IN ORDER TO BATTLE DEPRESSION. NOW, MATI STANDS TO ALTER A MULTIBILLION-DOLLAR INDUSTRY.

BY TINA HAVER CURRIN

Tatiana Birgisson, founder of Durham’s MATI

T

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

atiana Birgisson still gets excited about the prospect of free pizza.

Sitting in her small square office in Durham, the twenty-six-year-old Duke graduate has recently returned from a luncheon hosted by American Underground, the downtown start-up incubator. She listened to some speakers and ate free food from a spread overflowing with rosemary potatoes, macaroni and cheese, and bruschetta. Her eyes light up as she tells me about the unexpected extravagance.

“It was the best catering I’ve ever had,” she says. The halfIcelandic, half-Venezuelan founder of the young energy drink company MATI brushes her dark hair from her eyes and flashes an assured smile. “I would have been good with pizza.”

Across the little room, a collection of bottles sits on a floating shelf. It’s the de facto timeline of her company’s three and a half years, from initial product mockup to the most recent iteration. The new ones are the same bottles found in Whole Foods and, come May, in four hundred Kroger stores across the mid-Atlantic region. A new distribution agreement with Anheuser-Busch means that Birgisson will soon deploy cases of her energizing tea to convenience stores, food truck rodeos, Publix, and Earth Fare. With their colorful branding and images of effervescent fruit, the bullet-shaped cans look like

standard-issue energy drink vessels. But what’s inside could alter the entire industry.

What started in Birgisson’s dorm room took the top prize at last year’s Google Demo Day, where entrepreneurs pitch their concepts to top investors. She is using a $100,000 personal investment from AOL cofounder Steve Case to open a thirty-thousand-square-foot production facility in Clayton this month, where she will produce her semisweet tropical-, cherry-, and citrus-flavored sparkling teas. MATI is already the best-selling energy drink in Whole Foods’ southeast markets. With the new manufacturing facility, Birgisson plans to produce thirty thousand cans per month.

The timing could barely be better, as beverages are evolving to reflect a society more in tune with where ingredients come from and what they do. First, there were the attempted soda taxes in cities such as New York, Philadelphia, and San Francisco (which now requires warning labels on ads for sugary drinks). Coca-Cola acquired Honest Tea in 2011, and it became a $130 million division of the empire. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention cites a 39 percent drop in added calories from soda since 2000. Boxed OJ is trading places with fresh-pressed kale juice, Diet Coke with coconut La Croix.

It’s here that Birgisson finds her sweet spot.

“I think MATI is well-timed, as younger people want to be able to work hard but not compromise by consuming unhealthy chemicals found in other energy drinks,” says Adam Klein, chief strategist at American Underground. He’s watched the company grow from within the walls of his organization.

“People are drawn to MATI because it’s a classic David-versusGoliath story. She’s taking on the big beverage brands that push unhealthy drinks and beating them with a superior product.” l l l

B

irgisson began making tea in her Duke dorm room in 2012. She suffered from depression as a mechanical engineering student and found the drink to be the kick she needed to get out of bed and into class. Birgisson drank tea in high school, but she couldn’t make the transition to coffee without the “bad habit of adding seven packets of sugar.”

She started brewing caffeinated black tea and wondered if other students might buy it. Market research told her, though, that drinkers were looking for something with more punch.

She thought she had the answer in yerbe mate, a plant with as much caffeine as coffee and which her friends often drank in Venezuela.

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 15

Katherine Gibbs, left, and Elizabeth Fischer unload samples of MATI at a Durham 5K. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

“It took just a few spoonfuls to discover yerba mate was not the solution. It was much too bitter and would require a lot of sugar,” she says. “I researched plants similar to yerba mate but without that bitterness. That’s how I discovered guayusa, yerba mate’s ‘cousin.’”

While Birgisson was experimenting with recipes, a university-sponsored entrepreneurship group called InCube recruited her. InCube provides mentees with the support to launch start-ups.

Before Birgisson joined, the eighteen members were all men. Until the program had a woman, it wouldn’t receive funding from Melissa Bernstein, a former Duke entrepreneur. The peers who encouraged Birgisson to enlist failed to tell her that starting a business was an InCube requirement.

They feared it would scare her away.

“There’s a gap between the number of female-led start-ups that are launched and the number that are funded,” says Lauren Whitehurst, cofounder of SoarTriangle, an entrepreneurship program that supports female innovators. She’s worked with Birgisson for the last two years. “Thirty percent of startups are female-led, but they get around five percent of the venture capital in this country.”

Despite the odds, Birgisson accepted the challenge.

“It was actually really fortuitous, because having something that I could build helped me get out of the funk that I was in,” Birgisson explains. “It’s really hard to motivate yourself to do schoolwork or the grind of day-to-day life when you have depression. I decided to turn this energizing tea into my business. The only motivation I found in life was in this little opportunity.”

These days, Birgisson shows no lingering signs of that former shadow. The experience has changed her, turning her into a budding young professional. She smiles frequently and speaks with practiced clarity, not succumbing to vocal fillers or pauses. It’s obvious that she’s practiced her diction, whethF_Ad_Indy2 (10 xin2.35).qxp_Layout 1 2/25/16 10:38 AM er in the mirror, the car, or during long exercises withPage her 1

fiancé, Jake Stauch.

“We went through her Google pitch, line by line, night after night,” he confirms.

Birgisson’s dark hair is shoulder-length, with a slight wave, and her small frame belies her physical strength. When she’s not working, she and Stauch climb rocks, both at local indoor gyms and outside, in the mountains. Birgisson has the sort of ropey musculature that allows for the bold moves needed to move up lengthy vertical stretches.

I marvel as she swings through complicated rock routes with grace. She is quick to give me advice and cheer me on, patiently talking me through the process of switching feet and maintaining balance on slick nubbins of purple plastic.

She does the same for strangers.

Birgisson first learned to love the outdoors during summers spent with her grandparents. Her parents visited New York just before she was born so that she would be an American citizen. After four weeks, they returned to her father’s native Iceland, where he was working on a medical degree.

Her parents moved every few years in pursuit of higher education; between them, they have five postgraduate degrees.

But time off from school was split between families in Venezuela and Iceland.

NC NEEDS CHARLES MEEKER. 16 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

Birgisson remembers growing up on two vastly different islands as “a child’s dream,” filled with horseback riding, fishing, and swimming. In Venezuela, she also got her first taste of entrepreneurship.

“My mom’s brother started a tourism business, so he rented banana boats and had trampolines in the ocean,” she recalls. “He’d take tourists on cruises, and I got to drive Jet Skis as a seven-year-old.

‘This is a job? This is amazing. Can I be an adult now? Can I be in charge?’”

Before heading off to college, Birgisson spent two summers working in Iceland. She clocked eighty hours a week and managed to put $9,000 in an Icelandic bank account with a 14 percent interest rate. In 2008, she shipped off to Duke, which she chose for its biomedical engineering program and her interest in making prosthetic limbs. From her dorm room, Birgisson watched the global economy tank. The banks in Iceland were nationalized, the majority of her savings lost. At the same time, her mother, who had finally earned her MBA and landed a job with Microsoft, was laid off in a massive cut.

“Those things were supposed to be stable and secure,” she says. “It made me realize that big institutions aren’t always trustworthy. That really laid the groundwork of thinking about entrepreneurship and relying on myself.” l l l

W

hile still at InCube, Birgisson continued tweaking her recipe for MATI as an afterschool exercise. She’d fill shot glasses with different tea and juice blends, which she and Jake would then analyze for flavor and potency. One night, Birgisson made eight variations. One of them kept the pair up until three in the morning.

“We were like, ‘This is it. Something here works,’” she remembers.

Birgisson settled on a formulation containing apples, lem-

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ons, cane sugar, peppermint, and tea. She’d brew MATI—a play on her nickname, Tati— in a large pot before selling the carbonated kegs to Durham-based companies Shoeboxed and Appia, as well as the Duke Innovation and Entrepreneurship office. When it came time to bottle the tea, Birgisson printed out labels on a sticker sheet and rolled them onto cans using a spray bottle. She squeegeed out the bubbles by hand.

“Watching her take an idea conceived in a college dorm to a full-blown business has been one of the highlights of my association with start-ups,” says Casey Steinbacher, who served as president of the Greater Durham Chamber of Commerce until last year.

“Entrepreneurship is never an easy path, but it has some especially unique challenges when you are a young female in the manufacturing arena. Her fearlessness is legendary—camping out in offices of major brands, confident she could pitch her product if given the chance.”

Once MATI began selling hundreds of cans per month in those area spots, Birgisson searched for ways to expand her market.

Despite leaving dozens of voice mails, sending emails, and even shipping samples to Whole Foods’ beverage buyer, the lines remained cold. In June 2014, Birgisson drove to Atlanta, walked into the Whole Foods regional office at eight o’clock and requested a meeting. A receptionist said the manager was booked for three weeks but that she could wait. At four thirty, she was escorted in.

Armed with sales sheets and a list of talking points, Birgisson wheeled in a cooler full of chilled MATI. Within five minutes, she had the green light to sell in the region, as well as an introduction to the distributor she still uses at Whole Foods.

“In some ways, Tatiana is very similar to many of the business owners we have dealt with over the years: smart, focused, goal-oriented, skilled in her field,” says Jim Lee, the property owner who negotiated the lease for MATI’s new manufacturing plant. “And then it changes—young lady fresh from college, building a million-dollar operation with no silver spoon in her mouth.” l l l

O

n the evening of February 26, Birgisson cut the orange ribbon hanging across the doorway of her manufacturing plant in Clayton with a pair of oversize scissors. She began to nudge about a hundred friends, family members, and customers in suits and sequins into the massive new space. Forklift paths marked with bright yellow tape accented the floor, and pallets of shiny MATI cans stretched toward the ceiling, filling an entire room.

She told me to check out the site’s laboratory, where her staff of seven will be able to quickly create and test new formulations.

MATI is the first company of its kind to have such a lab; the only others belong to the billion-dollar giants, like Red Bull and Monster.

Birgisson insists she’s less focused on aggressively carving out a market share and battling those behemoths than in creating a line of energy drinks that perform better, taste better, and are better for you. Still, she plans to produce a million cans of MATI by next year.

“Most young adults Tatiana’s age are struggling with their first job, buying a car, renting an apartment,” says Lee. “Tatiana surely has some of the same desires, but she and her crew are willing to do what it takes.

They are way too young to retire, so failure is not an option.”

Birgisson stands by the doorway and shakes hands or exchanges hugs with everyone she meets. The last time I saw her, we were sweaty and scrambling over brightly colored bouldering holds, our hands covered in chalk. Tonight I tell her that she looks like a small-business owner with her black A-line skirt and glittering eyelashes. She cradles a bouquet of roses and quietly replies that she feels like a fraud.

The line for food stretches the length of the wall across from the DJ, blasting Taylor Swift.

The table overflows with crostini adorned with tangy goat cheese and rosy beets. There’s gooey mozzarella and pine nut pesto next to stacks of cold cuts and wedges of Brie. For dessert, there’s a cake made in the company’s vivid colors, plus blackberries and fist-sized hunks of mango. Visitors nurse pints of craft beer or toast with mimosas made from Champagne and cherry-flavored MATI. They speak in Spanish and English, wearing big grins.

I must admit it was some of the best catering I’ve ever had. l Twitter: @tinacurrin

Want to know how it feels to swap coffee for MATI for a week? See www.indyweek.com.

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 17

indyfood

LINUS & PEPPER’S

126 S. Salisbury St., Raleigh www.thelocalicon.com/linus-peppers/

Subway Pass

BUCKING FANCY TRENDS, LINUS & PEPPER’S JUST WANTS TO MAKE YOU A GOOD SANDWICH

BY CURT FIELDS

Cookbook author, gourmand idol, and culinary award icon James Beard put it best: “Too few people understand a really good sandwich.”

Add Raleigh’s Linus & Pepper’s to the ranks of those who do.

What began as a pop-up shop last August beneath the arcade and bar Level Up has since morphed into a gem of an affordable lunch spot in an increasingly expensive downtown. Part of the budding restaurant group The Local Icon, which owns Level Up, The Architect, the soon-to-open “brewing-and-provisions” company Little City, and the forthcoming Virgil’s Taqueria next door, Linus & Pepper’s dropped the pop-up designation a little more than a month after opening. The change stemmed from an enthusiastic response to its sandwiches. After trying them all, I understand.

Linus & Pepper’s is small and welcoming.

Exposed brick and unfinished walls attest to the building’s age. You navigate past a handful of tables toward the counter, choosing from a large chalkboard that hangs on the wall, listing all the house specialties and options you can add to them.

You can choose among an assortment of breads, from sourdough and Texas toast to ciabatta and rye, and meats, including pork shoulder, capicola, and lunch-counter standards like turkey, ham, and beef. The accouterments are a tad overwhelming, really—romaine, tomato, bread-and-butter pickle, caramelized onion, horseradish sauce, giardiniera, roasted mushroom, and too many more to name. You can shape a personalized sandwich from this stock, but that DIY gluttony is best kept in the privacy of your own kitchen.

Instead, I explored the menu’s named favor18 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

A steamy sandwich: The Southern at Linus & Pepper’s PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

THE SOUTHERN: Fingerthick turkey slabs are piled atop one another, shaping an impressive tower that’s held together by white cheddar. Some shops use turkey that’s dry enough to crumble, like feta cheese, but you’ll find no such abomination at Linus & Pepper’s. This turkey is moist.

Strata of peppered bacon and balsamic-drenched tomatoes lend a tangy edge, while the subtle Mornay sauce, made of cream and cheese, helps add balance. Sandwiches at Linus & Pepper’s are generously portioned, but the Southern is the clear choice when you’re famished. ites, eating my way through the six sandwiches one by one—no, no, not in one sitting.

THE BIG CHEESE: With its white cheddar, Swiss, and smoked gouda, The Big Cheese oozes ooey-gooey goodness, arriving on your palate as luxurious comfort food. I had it sans mushrooms, as I didn’t want them to get in the way of the cheese combination. Indeed, the blend was delectable, taking the sandwich far beyond the standard grilled-cheese fare made from unwrapped, unremarkable slices that are far too common in American diners. Keep the caramelized onions; they add a touch of savory sweetness to the melted mix.

THE RUSSIAN: Similar to a classic Reuben but with a couple of key changes, The Russian features thick slabs of moist, flavorful, house-made pastrami. Melted Swiss oozes around the meat. The coleslaw, a Southern stand-in for sauerkraut, is an interesting

addition, and the warmth of the sandwich gives it a welcome wilted flavor. The Russian dressing that trickles through the sandwich is rich and fresh. Although a bit too much fat marred a few bites, The Russian at my table drew raves—and declarations of intent to order it on return visits. The quality of the pastrami shoulders the weight with ease.

Rye bread may seem like the obvious choice here, but Linus & Pepper’s leaves it up to you.

THE FRENCHY: The Frenchy is piled

high with so much tender, tasty beef that it spills out the sides. A generous veil of melted smoked Gouda weaves throughout the slices, pushing it past similar standards that favor Swiss or provolone. Caramelized onions, “horsey sauce,” and au jus complete the lineup. It’s juicy and more than a little messy. Or perhaps I was just overly enthusiastic in my consumption.

THE CUBANO: A long stretch of life spent in Florida supplied me with some seriously high standards for Cuban food, including the sacred sandwich.

I approached this offering of ham and pork shoulder in North Carolina’s capital city with understandable skepticism. But the pickles provided a satisfying crunch, and the assertive Dijon mustard slapped my taste buds and sometimes my sinuses. I had to remove a bit of ham that was too chewy to be enjoyable.

The sandwich is outside-Florida good, maybe even North Florida good. (You’ll only find South Florida good in Miami, so there’s no sin in falling short of this unattainable goal.) I’m not a believer in dipping sauces with Cubans, but if you must, the mojo sauce is better than most, with citrusy notes that add more flavor complexity.

THE ITALIAN: With its lines of red, green, orange, and white, The Italian is the prettiest creation at Linus & Pepper’s. It delivers

EAT THIS as much flavor as color. The Genoa salami, capicola, and ham are delicious, and the giardiniera—a chopped mix of pickled peppers, carrots, and cauliflower—adds a spicy kick.

Of these six sandwiches, it’s the boldest. ● ● ●

All of these sandwiches are nine dollars, not a bad deal in a city that seems to be experiencing as much growth in menu pricing as in luxury condos and apartments. That price is especially nice since it includes a side. It’s not much more than you’d spend at a Subway or at a fast food place for, frankly, a much less satisfying meal.

Be warned: the inclusion of a side makes Linus & Pepper’s a nightmare for the indecisive. The three excellent sides rival the sandwiches themselves. The coleslaw is creamy and neither too sweet nor too tart.

The house-made chips are crisp, more full of flavor than grease. Best of all is the potato salad, itself worth the trip to Linus & Pep-

JOSE AND SONS

327 W. Davie St., Raleigh www.joseandsons.com

Southern Accent

per’s. It boasts a bright, hearty mustard body with hints of lemon. The potatoes are soft enough to chew with ease but firm enough that it’s not some mushy, bland mess.

As if these staples and sides aren’t enough, the occasionally shifting menu includes some new options like a crab cake po’boy, a banh mi, and an “ABCDGLT,” a mix of avocado, bacon, chowchow, dilly goat cheese, lettuce, and tomato.

If you’re as resolute as I am, though, you should have no problem unequivocally saying that next time you visit, you’re getting the potato salad—or maybe the chips—with The Southern. Or The Frenchy. Or, if it’s a bad day, The Big Cheese.

As its popularity grows, perhaps Linus & Pepper’s will extend its hours into the evening.

It would be a great spot to stop by and fuel up before a night on the town or upstairs in Level Up’s arcade—and to give me more time to make my way through the choices again. ● Twitter: @BeyondBama

THE LONG ROAD TO COLLARD-WRAPPED TAMALES

BY GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN Oscar Diaz didn’t grow up with the foods of Southern comfort.

Diaz was the middle brother in a family of five, raised by parents who migrated to America from a small town in the Mexican state of Jalisco. He left Chicago and his father’s chauffeuring business, heading to culinary school (he quit) before shuffling between a few inspirational cooks at high-end restaurants in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. On a whim, he took a temporary gig preparing some suburban bistro for an unceremonious launch in North Carolina.

But five years later, Diaz is the co-owner and head chef of Jose and Sons, a downtown Raleigh staple whose raison d’être is mixing the Mexican foods of Diaz’s heritage with his adopted cuisine. The mission required research.

“I’d never seen grits. I didn’t know what a hush puppy was,” he says. “I started traveling around and going to eat in any small place I. I started buying Southern cookbooks. I had servers who were Southern, and I would ask them. I started throwing these ideas out.”

One of Diaz’s first—and most delicious— experiments was the collard-wrapped tamale,

FOOD TO GO THE TRIANGLE’S BEST FOOD EVENTS DIG THIS

With less than two weeks to go before spring becomes official, thoughts of digging in the dirt and eating what you pull from your own garden grow more vivid. The seventh-annual Dig In! conference, coproduced by the policy-shaping Advocates for Health in Action and kid-friendly zone Marbles, wants to share that feeling with your whole community. In a series of workshops, lectures, and an address by farming pastor and remarkable community leader Richard Joyner, the six-hour, fifteen-dollar event talks the principles, problems, and payoffs of urban farming. You’ll even be done in time for a late lunch. www.advocatesforhealthinaction.org

a staple of Jose and Sons’ lunch and dinner menus. Diaz cuts the stems from the broad leaves, forming circular flaps that he blanches.

He then adds a layer of masa, which he’s careful to make moist with extra water and pillowy with baking powder. Over the masa, Diaz adds one of two fillings: tinga, made by letting a vegetable mixture simmer with chicken, or a classic rajas, made by slowly reducing an assortment of peppers and pureed tomatoes. At last, he folds the layers like a traditional tamale and wraps the result in a banana leaf. After it steams for an hour, he peels the banana leaf away.

On first bite, humidity rushes from the leaf, like steam from a green geyser. The twice-cooked collard adds a hot, bright skin that gives way to the medley of masa and vegetables. It’s deceptively simple and a touch deceptive, too.

“The collard mimics that banana leaf color and look so well that, at first, people were taking the collard leaf off,” Diaz says. “That tells me it’s a good move—a really cool interpretation of a tamale.” gcurrin@indyweek.com

MUNICIPAL BOOZE

A partnership between an alcohol supplier and a city’s parks-and-recreation department might seem far-fetched, but Durham’s new series, Botany Bar Crawl, is an ingenious attempt to show agriculture at work in the Bull City. Ryan Sailstad, of the city’s outdoor recreation unit, says participants will learn from scientists and brewers alike about how their area brews of choice take advantage of local produce. Botany Bar Crawl launches March 13 at two p.m. at Bull City Ciderworks before skipping to Durham Distillery in April. The $5–$11 fee gets you the talk and tour, but a taste will cost you extra. When the city starts taking money for booze, Sailstad says, the laws get complicated. www.durham-nc.com/events This is a day of possibility for Durham food lovers. For breakfast, lunch, or brunch, you can rove the Triangle’s premier food trucks at the spring rodeo in Durham Central Park from noon until four p.m. Brooklyn’s fun-loving PitchBlak Brass Band provides the sound. (Why a local food event recruits out-of-town talent, however, is a bit mystifying.) Then, at five thirty p.m., Ricky Moore of the Saltbox will cook dinner for a lucky crowd at SEEDS’ new series, Fork Less Traveled. Look for other meals in the series to include top Triangle chefs, like Scratch’s Phoebe Lawless, who’s up for another James Beard Award. www.durhamcentralpark.org & www.seedsnc.org

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

FOOD TRUCK TO FARM TO FORK

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 19

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Happy Metal

BY CORBIE HILL

w/Unchained (Van Halen tribute)

Sa 19 STEEP CANYON RANGERS +

indymusic

We The Kings

At the end of the record-release party for Vol. 1, the debut by the heavy Triangle quartet SOON, the band opted to close with a cover. It was The Cure’s “Plainsong,” a decidedly nonmetal selection for one of the Triangle’s most alluring, aggressive new acts.

Still, the version was slow and heavy and crushingly loud, much like all of SOON’s music. His Gibson Firebird’s signal dripping with effects, guitarist Mark Connor transWed Mar lated the euphoric swells of the synth melody. Drummer Thomas Simpson attacked his kit, lit from the front by a strobe light. With his full beard and long curls, bassist Robert Walsh suggested a Germanic barbarian or a hard-touring classic rock veteran. Amid the cleansing wash of heaviness, he was the anchor, the center of the maelstrom.

When it was over, guitarist and lead vocalist Stuart McLamb glanced at the crowd from the Kings stage and said, “See you soon.”

Somehow, the statement didn’t seem like a joke. It sounded sincere and reassuring, like an airport farewell for a close friend. Vol. 1 is heavy and dense, fitting for its release on Swedish metal label Temple of Torturous. McLamb’s clarion vocals, though, cut through with surprisingly positive lyrics, making the mood brighter than that of SOON’s bleak metal label mates.

SOON is a natural mood enhancer, forged with hot dogs and beer and presented with an appropriate level of easygoing camaraderie. Music keeps the four members of this band happy, even normal, and their tunes communicate that need. This is mood music, sure, but not for sulking. SOON is somehow jubilant. Without an outlet, its members wouldn’t be.

“I don’t think I’ve ever not played in a band in my adult life,” says Walsh, sitting in the sun outside Carrboro’s Looking Glass Cafe. If it was the kind of thing he could quit, he says matter-of-factly, he would have.

It’s one of the first warm days in February, so Walsh, Connor, McLamb, and Simpson

take a table by the sidewalk. They range in age from the freshly thirty to forty-something. They look to be—and, in fact are—a motley crew. They’ve been in more Triangle bands than they can easily recall. Walsh was in the garage rock hounds The Spinns and now works in the psychedelic trio Bitter Resolve. Connor has played power pop with Bright Young Things and space rock with Left Outlet. McLamb and Simpson’s most 9 notable other band, The Love Language, has seen national buzz, though not in metal circles—it’s a summery indie pop outfit.

This compulsion to play in numerous bands, they say, keeps them busy and grounded. Connor and Simpson have dark memories of band-less eras.

“Mid-twenties, I was playing in one band.

It fell apart, and then I was going through other life shit—jaded, depressed, over it,” Simpson says. “I was homeless. I was living out of the back of a truck, going through that.”

Connor nods. He came to a similar realization that music was a lifestyle, and not something he could simply walk away from. He didn’t play in bands for a few years, and it left him rudderless.

“It took me a little while to realize, ‘Oh, I’m weird now. I’m drinking too much and I’m not going anywhere,’” Connor says. “I wasn’t really listening to music. I was disconnected from it.”

Simpson picks up the thought, as if it were his own: “As a result of the whole experience, I joined multiple bands. I compulsively joined as many bands as I could.”

Judah and The Lion

l l l

Three years ago, Simpson and McLamb were living together in a cottage outside of Chapel Hill. For years, McLamb had talked to Walsh about jamming, despite their wildly different tastes and approaches. Walsh is the archetypal punk-metal bassist—a hardliving, knuckle-tatted lifer who seems to cuss every fourth or fifth word. The Cary-raised

much like the Pixies, but Walsh, who heard “Or we’re going to forget it because we’re McLamb is a blue-eyed pop-rock crooner Kyuss in the song instead, wouldn’t let it die. eating too many hot dogs and drinking too with several records out through Merge.

Like the band’s mix of members, the sound much beer,” Walsh adds with a gravelly But over heavy drinking and outdoor grillhad roots in pop-rock and punishing metal chuckle. ing, McLamb, Walsh, and Simpson found a but was neither. There were three-part harNot long after the trio invited Connor, they middle ground. monies alongside chugging riffs, soaring chostopped simply jamming and started writ“It’s a weird mismatch,” Walsh says. “I ruses alongside concussive churn. ing; with a second guitarist, parts had to be would come over Sundays with hot dogs and “There’s no way it wasn’t going to be heavy assigned. At this point, it stopped being a get drunk and we just started jamming.” with as urgent and loud as you play drums,” strictly hot dogs-and-beer hang and inched Before long, it was happening every week; Connor says, nodding to Simpson. “Rob plays toward full-band status.

Sunday became “SOONday.” While melody pretty powerfully. Those two ingredients McLamb fiddled with different approachhad been secondary to Walsh in metal and would make you play loud and heavier.” es to heaviness. He came close to trashing punk bands, it suddenly became the focus.

Still, they were having too much fun to one such experiment, thinking it sounded too McLamb, on the other hand, was excited to embolden his guitar sound. He’d briefly been in the remarkable Raleigh metal project Grohg alongside Connor, where he got his first real taste for playing heavy and loud.

“That was the changing point, just from the Grohg rehearsals. Mark had helped me chain two Fender Bassmans together,” McLamb says, referring to a Fender amplifier celebrated for its volume and power.

The next day, he showed up to The Love Language’s practice and plugged into a Fender Deluxe Reverb, an amp designed for snap and not snarl. He missed the volume and the feeling.

“Damn,” he said. “It doesn’t feed back forever.”

McLamb’s role in Grohg was a supporting one, but it was enough to make him receptive to the Sunday trio jams. Back in Chapel Hill, the three summoned high-test riffs over galloping drums.

“Get a microphone now,” Simpson Moving on from hot dogs to barbecue, SOON is (from left, clockwise) Thomas Simpson, remembers saying. “We have to put Mark Connor, Robert Walsh, and Stuart McLamb. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER this down or we're idiots.”

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become serious or somber.

“It’s hopeful and positive,” says Walsh, whose other bands deliver pummeling, heartbroken punk-blues or dystopian spacemetal. “You can be slow but not be singing about the end of the fucking world.” l l l

Back at the Vol. 1 release show, Connor, Walsh, and McLamb stood side by side in the low stage light, opening their throats and bellowing affirmations with the same power that most metal acts put into harsh screams or animalistic growls. “We are on your side,” they howled in close harmony.

Later, they intone a single word, “rise,” over a crawling roar.

In Carrboro, Connor had said that he’s not responsible for anything else when he’s holding his guitar; it’s obvious his bandmates share this sense of relief and release. In the depths of these tunes, the members sported rapturous expressions. Between songs, Simpson stretched his arms and smiled with genuine pleasure.

“When you’re lifers and you’ve committed to enjoying playing music, you get together with your friends and it’s a compulsive thing—go jam, go play, see what happens,” Simpson says.

“Sometimes it’s just proximity,” Connor adds.

“It’s a little bit like prairie dogs,” Simpson says, mimicking one of the little animals poking its head out of a burrow and looking side to side.

“Who’s around me that can play?” l Twitter: @afraidofthebear

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music

Projection Screen

RALEIGH’S NEW LIVE MUSIC TV SHOW PREMIERES THIS WEEK. HERE’S HOPING IT HAS AN IMPACT.

BY GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN

Eleanor Hawthorne, the city’s twenty-sixseveral friends to join along onstage. The tapOn a Friday morning in late February, I year-old social media manager, and branded ing’s audience clapped along on command stepped into a television studio to watch the “Musician Loading Only” signs in front of and even sang a bit. When the band finished premiere of a pilot. downtown rock clubs. The Greater Raleigh its half-dozen songs, the members diligently Damien Graham, the City of Raleigh’s Convention and Visitors Bureau launched answered two questions about what made communications director, had invited the its online music calendar, “The Most Music,” Raleigh great—a tight-knit scene, walks media to the humble offices of the municiin early 2015, while the Downtown Raleigh around lakes, its “little big city” feeling. The pally funded Raleigh Television Network to Alliance followed with its mobile app—“your segment was warm and fuzzy enough to be see the start of a program he’d been pushpersonal guide to having a great time downa blanket. ing since his first days on the job last June.

Members of the city council, Graham told me two weeks earlier, had immediately approached him about boosting the network’s output, of making it a centralized beacon for stories of the community’s creativity.

One early idea: draft local musicians to perform on a live music show, much like Austin City Limits or NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert, and turn the concept into a local custom. Explicitly, the broadcast would give one band per month free publicity and a professionally captured performance that could then be shared for promotion and booking. Implicitly, the series, since dubbed Oak City Sessions, would give Raleigh some cachet, showing that the sleepy Southern capital’s recent great awakening depended heavily on local arts. In early February, before even seeing the pilot, the council Season & Snare, taping the pilot of Oak City Sessions PHOTO COURTESY OF RALEIGH TELEVISION NETWORK unanimously approved $25,000 for the first season of Oak City Sessions. town”—exactly a year later.

Oak City Sessions isn’t an original idea; sev“There’s a general excitement about the But amid needlessly, endlessly conteneral private groups, and even the students at things we can be sharing with the city,” Gratious debates about patio seating and downN.C. State’s WKNC-FM, have operated simiham had said, admitting excitement wasn’t town volume, public park usage and food lar setups with varying success during the necessarily the first word that came to mind truck parking, these moves have started to last decade. But it is an important and valuwith the network he inherited. “Through feel merely gestural. They’re like lip service able concept, because it shows that the city interesting video content, ramping up social to a bunch of people the city likes having not only acknowledges the existence of its media, and providing a behind-the-scenes around for credibility but in which it’s only citizens’ art but also its value. That is, the peek, we can describe some of the personaliwilling to invest so much capital. Share your presence of Oak City Sessions means there ties powering our city in a compelling way.” own bikes, kids. are enough good bands in Raleigh alone to So, that morning, three writers watched Bluegrass excepted, the most prominent sustain the program, so long as council memthe first episode of Oak City Sessions (set to musical uses of Raleigh City Plaza, from Oak bers sustain its funding. I, for one, hope it lasts debut on Raleigh Television Network and City 7 to Hopscotch, don’t receive substantial a very long time.

YouTube March 11) in the quiet and in the city support. A decade of talk about renting or The program seems part and parcel, too, dark. Shot in October in the City of Raleigh leasing unused city spaces for rehearsals or of a recent sequence of young-folks branding Museum, the pilot featured Season & Snare, even house-show-like concerts has produced initiatives by the city and its allies. There’s a pleasant chamber pop duo that had invited 22 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

nothing. Late last year, I connected a popular local band with the city officials who manage Meymandi Concert Hall and Memorial Auditorium, spaces that sit fallow for many days a year. The band wanted to play there, but the expenses were too high. The administration didn’t seem interested in cutting them a hometown deal. The group took its business elsewhere.

Band parking spaces are nice, and overdue, but, in the absence of an environment of support, they run the risk of turning into mere tokens. Tragically, it sometimes seems that Raleigh is attempting to build a city different from the one it is branding. When I ask Season & Snare singer Autumn Rose Brand—ostensibly, a model citizen when it comes to the city’s idea of local creativity—how many musicians she knows who live downtown, she can readily name only one.

On the way out of the Raleigh Television Network studios that morning, three city employees—one for every journalist who had watched the entire episode—asked if we wanted to take anything with us. Just outside the door, plastic bottles of Coca-Cola cooled in a neon pink bucket of ice, untouched. Tall bottles of water stood at attention, and two-dozen glazed doughnuts lay in neat little rows. The crowd, it seemed, had been smaller and certainly better nourished than the organizers had expected.

Someone took a bottle of water, so, to be polite, I surveyed the sugar-heavy spread. I reached for a green plastic cup, emblazoned with the city’s oak tree insignia and stuffed with a white pen, a green chip clip that read “City of Raleigh,” and a matching @-shaped paperclip that sported the city’s web address.

For an event based so much around image, and for an idea clinging so fast to a concept of cool, the branded plastic cup felt like the perfect takeaway. Stepping back outside, I hoped, over time, it wouldn’t be the only one. l gcurrin@indyweek.com

music

GARTH BROOKS

PNC Arena, Raleigh March 11–13, various times, $66 www.thepncarena.com

Lower Places

GARTH BROOKS RETURNED TO THE CHANGED INDUSTRY HE HELPED CREATE BY MAURA JOHNSTON tury. “This is where I take my stand/’Cause I can’t stand it anymore… lately I swear the machines are living the American dream,” he sings at one point. Coming from someone who helped build that very machine, his perspective is a peculiar one.

In the past, the release of Brooks’s albums had been events. By the time he returned,

PHOTO COURTESY OF NANCY SELTZER & ASSOCIATES

Imagining the modern country music landscape had Garth Brooks never existed is almost impossible. Would the hair be bigger, the gestures more grand? Would the rock tendencies be muted? Would bro-country be a thing, or would acoustics and pedal steels rule the roster?

Brooks showed the mainstream music industry that Nashville could flex serious commercial muscle, producing acts at the level of Guns N’ Roses and U2. He also shoved country’s love of big-tent arena rock ahead. His cover of Billy Joel’s “Shameless” preserved the piano man’s New York state of mind while making it palatable to country audiences, too. On the 1994 Kiss tribute Kiss My Ass, he covered “Hard Luck Woman” alongside the painted metallers themselves.

He was faithful to the form.

During Brooks’s temporary retirement, which began in 2000 and lasted until a 2009 Las Vegas run, his omnivorous take on country started to dig deep roots. The original version of his domestic-violence tale “The Thunder Rolls,” whose third verse focused on gun-fueled revenge and was deemed too hot for 1991 audiences, foreshadowed Miranda Lambert’s 2008 hit, “Gunpowder and Lead.”

The thrust of “Two Piña Coladas” should be familiar to anyone who’s raised a toast to the tune of Dierks Bentley’s “Drunk on a Plane.”

But the country music industry, like the wider system itself, didn’t stay the same without Brooks. It's become both leaner and larger since the days he moved millions, with stars like Luke Bryan and Kenny Chesney filling stadiums with the sounds and sights of beersoaked bacchanalias. Brooks titled his 2014 return to recording Man Against Machine. Its backstory focused on how the industry had changed since the release of his five-timesplatinum Scarecrow in 2001. He didn’t shuttle it to iTunes or Spotify, preferring instead to issue the digital version through his self-made digital music platform, GhostTunes. Interviews surrounding the album focused on how Brooks felt music had been lost in the technology-focused clamor of the twenty-first cen-

though, music’s middle class had flattened out, resulting in record sales a far cry from the days when his Chris Gaines grunge experiment could manage double-platinum status.

The news cycle, too, was more focused on releases from an increasingly small batch of artists. The album itself mattered less than the overall image. To wit, ask a randomly selected attendee at a Chesney concert the name of the breezy beachcomber’s latest album, and your odds are even between shrugs and almost-correct responses.

Man Against Machine did manage to go platinum, a long way from Brooks’s numbers during the go-go nineties. Still, he remains a huge star. His three-night stint at PNC Arena, which expanded from two nights minutes after tickets went on sale, cements that fact, as do his numbers in an era where streaming and diminished floor space are just a few of the factors taking a big bite out of people’s platinum stats. His days of selling enough newly minted albums to justify an imprint’s entire roster of up-and-comers might be over, but any kid who still has a chance to become a star in country owes much of it to Brooks. l Twitter: @maura INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 23

indypage

THE END: WHAT RELIGION AND SCIENCE TELL US ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE

By Phil Torres (Pitchstone Publishing, 288 pp.)

Apocalypse How?

NANOBOTS, BIOTECH, AND A.I. ARE THE NEAR FUTURE—OR THE END

BY BRIAN HOWE

INDY: How did you get interested in the apocalypse?

PHIL TORRES: I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical family; the philosophy was sort of Dispensationalist. There was always this background of eschatological expectation— lots of discussion about the Rapture. I have a vivid memory of being afraid Bill Clinton was the Antichrist. Eschatology is the heart of the major world religions. If you were to excise it, 24 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

there really wouldn’t be anything left. It’s the ultimate hope.

Around 2001, there was this new field, existential risk studies, that began to pop up in universities, notably Oxford and Cambridge. To an extent, their warnings are similar to those of religious people, but with a completely different basis— one in science and evidence. Apocalyptic tendencies go back at least to Zoroaster, two millennia before Christ. But since 1945 and the atomic bomb, when the possibility of secular apocalypse emerged on the world stage, there has been a proliferation of risks associated with biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence. So first I was drawn in by religion, and then, ultimately, fascinated by the possibility of human extinction where these scenarios are based on legitimate science.

Tell us more about existential risk studies.

We used to be haunted by improbable worstcase scenarios, like volcano eruptions, but the likelihood of extinction was quite low. Many say 1945—or, you could argue, before that, when automobiles were adopted en masse, burning fossil fuels—was the first big-picture hazard, and the fact that we survived the Cold War, a lot of scholars say, was luck. We entered a new epoch in which self-annihilation was a probability, and right behind it was climate change. Peering into the future, you can see the threat rising. Existential risk studies is focused on understanding these risks and determining strategies for eliminating them.

It’s necessarily partly speculative, but if feeling around in the dark is the best we can do, let’s do it. Now is the time to think as clearly as we can about these threats.

What are the existential risks of biotechnology and synthetic biology?

The primary danger is the creation of designer pathogens. Nature has a check on lethality;

mentioned beneficial things, but you could also print out weapons. This will enable individuals to acquire arsenals.

How is it different than 3-D printing?

3-D printing is also called additive printing; you feed it plastic and it builds an object. But this is about synthesizing the material from the atom up— plastics, metals, whatever. The other risk of nanotechnology is building immensely more powerful computers, which could feed into the danger of superintelligence. And one more risk involves autonomous nanobots rather than a nanofactory.

Phil Torres PHOTO BY ADAM GRAETZ

Humanity has long been obsessed with the end of the world. All of the major religions are built on eschatological bedrock; parsing the apocalypse as an act of God befitted a world threatened mainly by natural disasters. But as these metaphysical beliefs wane in the uniquely imperiled twenty-first century, we are waking up to a new, almost incredible, but very real set of threats to our species’ survival.

Instead of a volcano eruption or meteor strike, we have to worry—the day after tomorrow, if not quite today—about being wiped out by designer pathogens, subjugated by superintelligent computers, or mulched into gray goo by self-replicating nanobots.

Because these dangers emerge from our own godlike technological powers, we can no longer turn to a distant deity, or even something as vague as fate, for succor or recrimination. If the worst comes to pass, we’ll only have ourselves to blame.

Carrboro’s Phil Torres illuminates this fascinating, unnerving terrain in his new book, The End: What Religion and Science Tell Us About the Apocalypse. Torres, who specializes in existential risk studies, trained in philosophy at the University of Maryland and Harvard and in neuroscience at Brandeis. His learning fuels a book that is academically rigorous but accessible for a general audience, aided by his personal story of coming to a scholarly interest in the apocalypse through a religious upbringing.

The INDY recently sat down with Torres for a pleasant chat about humanity's extinction.

if it’s too lethal it’s not going to get to the next host, so there’s natural selection. But if you were to weaponize Ebola to make it more contagious, you don’t need selfish genes. You can give it properties it would never naturally acquire. Biotechnology is about modifying natural structures; synthetic biology is about creating structures. It allows you to create entirely new germs. It’s entirely plausible that the lethality of rabies, the contagiousness of the common cold, and so on could be consolidated in a single microbe. If effectively aerosolized, you could create a pandemic of unprecedented proportions.

What about nanotechnology?

One danger is the creation of nanofactories, which, theoretically, could be small enough to fit on your desktop. You feed it a really simple molecule and, moving the atoms individually, it would assemble objects. All the properties around us—transparency, hardness, softness— these are just built up combinatorily from the atomic level. So a nanofactory could build virtually any object: a new computer, clothes. I

Superintelligent nanobots?

Kind of the opposite, actually—these nanobots are really dumb. Rather than moving molecules around in a factory, these are microscopic robots you can program.

Imagine swallowing the surgeon so it can fix your heart. But the other possibility is nanobots designed to self-replicate.

You drop them on a table and they start manipulating its molecules to create clones. A terrorist with the ultimate suicide wish could release a swarm of mindlessly, exponentially reproducing micromachines and not implausibly turn the Earth to dust.

Scientists call this the “gray goo scenario.”

That’s an issue of extraordinary power and increasing accessibility, which also applies to biotechnology and synthetic biology.

The risks of nuclear weapons seem pretty self-evident.

The existential issue is primarily the creation

And what about the dangers of artificial intelligence, or superintelligence?

One is that electrons in circuitry move much faster than signals in our biological nervous systems. If you were to upload a mind— which would simply involve replicating the three-dimensional structure of the brain in a supercomputer simulation—virtually everybody agrees that you’d get a conscious mind, and there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t run many orders of magnitude faster than our brains. So immediately you’d have a quantitative superintelligence, looking out on a world moving so slowly it would look frozen.

It’s also possible you could modify the architecture of the mind so that it has access to thoughts that are inaccessible to us. Just as the dog can’t possibly comprehend the electron, there’s no reason to think there aren’t concepts we don’t have access to. This could enable a superintelligence to manipulate the world in ways we find baffling.

There’s the problem of a superintelligence whose values don’t align with ours. It doesn’t care about us or like us; it isn’t moral as we understand it. This may sound like an easy problem to solve, but it’s incredibly hard— how to instill values that don’t end up annihilating the human species. It may also be that the superintelligence doesn’t hate us but is just indifferent. It wants to harvest energy from the sun, so it covers the Earth with solar panels. Or it looks at you and goes, “You’ve got a lot of molecules I could use,” the way we bulldoze a forest to build a house.

Given the power a superintelligence would wield in the world, it could be incredibly dangerous. Our dominance on the planet is

entirely attributable to our intelligence, with a few enabling factors like opposable thumbs and bipedalism. If we lost our seat atop this pyramid of intelligence, it could be the best thing that ever happened to us, but, as Stephen Hawking put it, it could also be the worst.

There was a great article on these topics, “The Doomsday Invention,” in The New Yorker recently, where Bill Gates said that even if the chance of these outcomes is very small, they’re so dire that we’re morally obligated to take them seriously.

It follows that even with a very small probability, if the consequences are massive, it could still be a significant risk. Indeed, one of the most robust prognostications about these technologies is that they’re going to be immensely powerful, allowing us to manipulate the physical world from the level of the atom up in ways that are entirely unprecedented. Sir Martin Rees, one of the most respectable scientists in existential risk studies, has estimated that our civilization has a fifty-fifty chance of surviving this century.

PHOTO: THOMAS GRUBE

of firestorms, gale force wind conflagrations.

In Hiroshima, they were actually responsible for many of the deaths. If you were to have several of these burning on the planet at once, the soot they would release could potentially cause a nuclear winter, which results in global agriculture failures, starvation, and infectious disease.

go.ncsu.edu/organ “shrewd showmanship, dazzling technique” –SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE

Cameron Carpenter WITH THE MONUMENTAL INTERNATIONAL TOURING ORGAN

Saturday, March 19 at 8pm Stewart Theatre ■ 919-515-1100 SPECIAL TREAT: A pre-show conversation with Cameron, 7pm

“A terrorist could release a swarm of mindlessly reproducing micromachines and turn the Earth to dust.”

It seems there is a correlation with these technologies where potential risks increase with potential benefits.

Yes, without a doubt.

There’s a book called Abundance by Peter Diamandis that is the flipside of my book. He makes scientific, compelling claims for the benefits of these technologies. But I wrote this book because I feel that all these technologies are Janusfaced, and without understanding the challenges they pose, we could be more vulnerable. If we do face those challenges, I don’t think it’s crazy to anticipate a world that, from our present vantage, is utopian.

It’s quite possible that good things are in the future. But I wanted to write a book that didn’t succumb to panic or fatalism but was able to give greater visibility to risks people in the ivory tower are taking seriously. bhowe@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 25

indyscreen

A WAR Opening Friday

Sneaky Blinders

GOOD INTENTIONS LEAD TO MURKY ETHICS IN A WAR

Tobias Lindholm’s Oscar-nominated A War provides a measured account of its subject’s horrors, if such a thing is possible. Claus Pedersen (Pilou Asbaek) is a Danish soldier stationed in Afghanistan on a mission to eradicate the Taliban and rebuild local villages. The film captures the bifurcated nature of wartime: a daily life in which death is always looming and a family life thousands of miles away. Claus’s wife, Maria (Tuva Novotny), struggles to keep her children sane, but their father’s absence is visibly wearing on them.

A War is ostensibly an anti-war film that exposes the awful calculus of military occupation through handheld shakycamera realism, desaturated colors, and contemplative silences, but something is amiss in the high seriousness of its indictment. Asbaek and Novotny play Claus and Maria with great sensitivity and nuance, but they are continually hampered by a toominimal script.

Just when we come to understand Claus as a fundamentally decent soldier who is genuinely trying to help Afghani people and his fellow troops, he makes a terrible mistake, and it’s the hinge upon which the film turns 26 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

Fatigued in fatigues: A War

BY LAURA JARAMILLO

from a moral drama to a procedural one.

A War begins by asking whether or not war is moral, representing combat as extreme boredom punctuated by traumatic eruptions of violence. It ends by asking whether you should be responsible for war crimes you didn’t mean to commit. The second question begs you to identify, above all, with the good intentions of the soldier, which is easy to do.

Claus is kind, and his wife and children are clearly suffering without him. But identification makes it easy to forget that the soldier is one of many individuals engaged in a structural geopolitical conflict that produces untold amounts of civilian death.

Here, as in Lindholm’s 2012 film The Hunt, in which a good man is falsely accused of child molestation, the ethical murk from which the drama rises is a bit overdetermined. A War was critically lauded for eschewing the genre's usual heroics, but it's really about exoneration, not accountability. Lindholm’s tender, caring accused are ultimately vindicated as stoic heroes, never challenged for their complicity. In other words, as ever, the men are alright. l Twitter: @mtrlgrrrl

indystage

JACUZZI

Ward Theatre Company, Durham Through March 20, $25 www.wardtheatrecompany.com

J'accuse Jacuzzi

DURHAM'S WARD THEATRE COMPANY DEBUTS WITH THE HOTTEST SHOW––AND HOTTEST TUB––IN THE TRIANGLE

BY BYRON WOODS

In the Triangle, we’ve gotten used to seeking out bleeding-edge theater in the unlikeliest places. Cinderblock palaces, former mills or packing plants, rural farms and urban greenways, streets and alleys—all have served as hardscrabble venues for Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern, Bare Theatre, and Seed Art Share in recent years.

The location of the region’s current hottest show is equally unlikely: a nondescript suburban office park just off Farrington Road in southwest Durham. The aging beige buildings at 4905 Pine Cone Drive house a CPA, a family law firm, an insurance agency, and the Ward Acting Studio.

Its affiliated theater company is now staging a remarkable debut production, Jacuzzi, a psychological thriller by the New York playwright collective The Debate Society.

The studio is modest. Just off the foyer, a single row of twenty-seven chairs lines the edges and the far wall of a snug room. But your perspective shifts as an usher guides you to your seat across what looks like a Rocky Mountain vacation rental.

A mounted moose head stares out above a back door with windowpanes ringed with frost. A little steam rises from a bubbling hot tub, just off-center along the opposite wall. The room's intimacy heightens the Hitchcockian suspense.

When a partially frozen Bo (Ryan Fleming) stumbles into his family’s cabin the night before a reunion with his estranged father, Robert (Geoff Bowen), he’s surprised to find it—and the Jacuzzi—occupied by the mellow couple Helene (Emma Jo McKay) and Derek (Brandon Cooke).

Bo thinks they’re vacation renters who’ll be leaving the following morning, and he accepts their invitation to stay the night and share the hot tub and their brandy.

But you have to watch those assumptions, particularly while you’re boorishly spilling some of your family’s most damning indiscretions along Blowing smoke: Emma Jo McKay and Brandon Cooke in Jacuzzi with the hooch. By the time Robert arrives, Helene PHOTO BY ROBBIE WIGGINS and Derek’s identities have subtly changed—but of three of her company’s four members. For two of them, their agendas remain decidedly obscure.

Jacuzzi is their first show ever. Not to worry: you won’t be able It takes a dry sense of humor for a group of strangers to pick them out. to choose a first show whose main point is that you really But how do beginners get this good this quickly? Having a shouldn’t trust a group of strangers. Jacuzzi marks Wendy well-seasoned teacher helps. After graduating with a theater Ward’s directorial debut in the region, and the regional debuts

degree from Duke in 1981, Ward taught acting in New York for decades before moving to Australia in 2010. Concluding that she was “very American,” she relocated here in 2014.

Ward teaches the acting techniques of Sanford Meisner. Frequently called “the anti-Method,” they’re an alternative to Method acting, the most popular form of theatrical training in the U.S. Where Method emphasizes emotional memory, Meisner stresses interaction among actors in the present moment.

Ward recalls her first exposure to the Meisner technique in New York: “I was watching the work of my peers and asking, ‘How are they doing that?’

I had no clue; it was so real. It catapulted my work to another place.”

Ward has clearly seen her fair share of chillers.

Under her nuanced direction, McKay and Cooke skillfully deepen our unease with Helene and Derek’s inscrutable charade. Posing as the property caretakers for this over-privileged, under-ethical clan, they want to take care of every little thing: the food, the phone, and the only snowmobile that can escape the mountain. As Robert blithely spills even more family dirt in his mistaken effort to ingratiate himself, the pair keeps calmly collecting information. “[The Meisner training] is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done,” says Cooke, a student of Ward’s, who pursued his dream of becoming an actor only after earning a business degree from N.C. State. “There’s such a comfort in performing now.”

Nowhere is Ward’s dark, suspenseful stagecraft more delicious than when Robert, in an otherwise unlit room, kneels before the flicker of a TV, watching the end of a bullfight. Helene and Derek stand motionless in the shadows just behind him.

The chill sets in when we realize that the actors’ placement echoes the positions of the toreador and the bull.

I really can’t tell you what happens after that.

But I can say that, in an age of identity theft and other privacy concerns, these talented strangers remind us that the information we voluntarily divulge often does the greatest mischief. Paraphrasing Oscar Wilde, ultimately, only the ones we trust can betray us. l Twitter: @ByronWoods INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 27

03.09–03.16 FRIDAY, MARCH 11–SATURDAY, MARCH 12

TOBACCO ROAD DANCE PRODUCTIONS: IN CONCERT

KINGS, RALEIGH 9 p.m. Saturday/8 p.m. Sunday, $8, www.kingsbarcade.com

TUESDAY, MARCH 15

RICKIE LEE JONES

In 1980, when Rickie Lee Jones beat Dire Straits and The Knack for the best new artist Grammy, she’d already done a lot of living: broken horses, hopped freight trains, slept under the Hollywood sign. Jones, a Chicago native, had left home for the West Coast as a teen and lived a bohemian existence that fueled her songwriting. Pulling from jazz and Beat poetry, R&B and the Laurel Canyon, her hybrids united the grizzled spontaneity of drinking buddy Tom Waits with slick pop. “I like taking any kind of risk,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979. While she was referring to her penchant for 28 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

NAP EYES & CIAN NUGENT

On the new Night Fiction, Dublin guitarist Cian Nugent plays with customary grace. The notes of his electric guitar flicker like the flames of a dozen candles, while his touch on the acoustic suggests the ghost of Bert Jansch, luxuriating in some springtime meadow. Like many of his solo guitar predecessors, Nugent is now experimenting with singing, juxtaposing his coarse, hesitating Irish voice against his assured string work. It’s a fascinating lesson, a window into someone suddenly reshaping his entire approach.

Nova Scotia’s Nap Eyes depend almost entirely upon the words.

Signed to Chapel Hill’s Paradise of Bachelors, the quartet underpins the verbal eloquence of Belle & Sebastian with a roadhouse take

BY JOHN SEYFRIED

Silvia Sheffield PHOTO

On a seemingly unremarkable January Monday morning, many of us awoke to devastating news: David Bowie, the magnificently creative artist who shaped the face and future of music, had succumbed to liver cancer. His death shocked even some of his closest friends. To honor Bowie’s spirit and help battle the sickness that threatens us all, several locals will band together for a twonight benefit at Kings. On Saturday, the focus is Bowie’s music, with Noncanon, Deep PSI THEATRE, DURHAM Sleeper, Bright Young Things, and others 7 p.m., $13–$15, www.tobaccoroaddance.org tackling elements of Ziggy Stardust, Hunky Dory, and Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps).

They’ll even play some tunes from Labyrinth, Jim Henson’s 1986 film that featured Bowie as the Goblin King, alongside puppets. Proceeds frequenting dive bars and greasy spoons, she could just as from the first night go toward a yet-to-bewell have been describing the approach she would take in determined nonprofit that supports cancer patients. her music career. Her latest LP draws upon her current Sunday’s show benefits Jonathan King, a longtime friend of home of New Orleans, though she says it’s “made of my the club who was diagnosed with colon cancer in August imagination.” —David Klein 2015 and has been receiving lifesaving, noninsured CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM treatments in Mexico. (Read about it at www.

8 p.m., $37–$79, www.carolinatheatre.org teamjbirdjourney.wordpress.com.) His night includes some favorites from the Great Cover Up, including Waylon Jennings, The Whom, Cheap Trick, and variations on SATURDAY, MARCH 12 instrumentals from Bowie’s Low. —Allison Hussey

on The Velvet Underground’s perennial rock looseness. At the band’s best, the unexpected mix produces an inescapable frisson. With Northgate Syndicate. —Grayson Haver Currin THE PINHOOK, DURHAM 9 p.m., $8–$10, www.thepinhook.com

THURSDAY, MARCH 10

THE LOVE LANGUAGE & BIG THIEF This summer marks three years since the release of Ruby Red, the third album by the once perpetually busy The Love Language. In the interim, leader and lone constant Stuart McLamb has started a metal band (see page 20), made a metal album, and used the new band to hit the club circuit hard, as The Love Language once did. He’s largely reserved the flagship act for banner events, such as a headlining slot at the N.C. State Fair or at First Night Raleigh. But McLamb says new Love Language songs have at last started to arrive, and this humble club show, at the backwoods bar The Kraken, feels like the edge of a relaunch. The band splits the bill with Brooklyn’s brilliant Big Thief, whose upcoming debut LP, Masterpiece, is good enough to remind you that Saddle Creek Records still exists. In a voice gentle at the core but jilted by experience, Adrianne Lenker sings songs of emotional upheaval, PHOTO BY RONAN MCCALL

YES TO BOWIE, NO TO CANCER

Cian Nugent

SATURDAY, MARCH 12 & SUNDAY, MARCH 13

When seasoned modern dance choreographers nurture the Triangle’s up-and-coming dancemakers for seven months as they create new works, each party learns something, and so do their audiences. At the end of Tobacco Road Dance Productions’ second season of mentorship and dance dramaturgy in Durham, its annual concert features CJ40 Productions’ audienceparticipatory On Your Mark, a comical dance theater work. Jody Cassell premieres a solo. Silvia Sheffield unravels the art of knitting in String of Purls, and Gaby Soto-Lemus builds a psychodrama with Jenga blocks in Remarkable Thing. The concert also includes two new commissions by this year’s panelists, Alyssa Noble’s quartet about exhaustion and a dance film by Natalie Teichmann. —Byron Woods

Big Thief PHOTO

BY SASHA ARUTYUNOVA

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

while the dynamic power trio at her back serves as the musical cartographer for those feelings. The band slinks as if in sadness and then, at high volume, surges through it. Big Thief isn’t the sort of band destined for Kraken-sized spaces for long. —Grayson Haver Currin THE KRAKEN, CHAPEL HILL 9 p.m., free, www.thekrakenbar.com

THURSDAY, MARCH 10–SATURDAY, MARCH 12

JON LOVITZ More and more Saturday Night Live veterans seem to be making the leap to stand-up lately.

Longtime cast member Tim Meadows, who was supposed to be at Goodnights last month but canceled, has been touring comedy clubs, as has head-bopping Roxbury Guy Chris Kattan, who’ll be at Goodnights March 15. Now add Jon Lovitz to the mix. The late-eighties Not Ready for Prime Time Player has been honing his skills as a stand-up for the last decade. Like Meadows and Kattan, Lovitz started out in improv, ad-libbing with Kattan in Los Angeles troupe The Groundlings. But during his college days at UC Irvine, he used to do Woody Allen and Lenny Bruce bits in his dorm, and while at SNL, he was encouraged to do stand-up. Dude was just too nervous. Now, with enough years under his belt working clubs in L.A., he’s a full-fledged road comic. Still, don’t be surprised if he pulls out a bit of his old SNL shtick. Yeah, that’s the ticket. —Craig D. Lindsey GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB, RALEIGH Various times, $25–$33, www.goodnightscomedy.com

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO? GARTH BROOKS AT PNC ARENA (P. 23),

JACUZZI AT WARD THEATRE COMPANY (P. 27), PAINT-A-POOP AT THE N.C. MUSEUM OF NATURAL SCIENCES (P. 37), PRINCE RAMA AT THE PINHOOK (P. 31), UNBOUND AT THE CHAPEL HILL PUBLIC LIBRARY (P. 36) INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 29

TH 3/17 + FR 3/18

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS SA 3/26

MOUNT MORIAH SA 3/12 PENTAGRAM W/ COLOSSUS, KING GIANT AND DEMON EYE ($18/$22) SU 3/13 X AMBASSADORS W/ SEINABO SEY, POWERS UT SOLD O TH/FR 3/17/18 (TWO SHOWS!)

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS THAYER SARRANO $25/$28) FR 3/25 AARON CARTER ($15/$17)

SA 3/26 MOUNT MORIAH W/ ELEPHANT MICAH ($12) MO 3/28 JUNIOR BOYS W/ JESSY LANZA, BORYS ($15/$17) WE 3/30 THE WONDER YEARS W/ LETLIVE, MOOSE BLOOD, MICROWAVE TH 3/31 G LOVE AND SPECIAL SAUCE **($25 / $30) FR 4/1 DUNCAN TRUSSELL ($20)

WILSEN SA 4/2 DAUGHTER W/SO LD OUT TU 4/5 SEAN WATKINS W/ PETRA HADEN & JESSE HARRIS ($12/$15) FR 4/8 MAGIC MAN & THE GRISWOLDS W/PANAMA WEDDING ( $20) SA 4/9 THEY MIGHT BE

GIANTS SU 4/10 THE MOWGLI'S

TH 5/12 SCYTHIAN ($15/$17) FR 5/13 PARQUET COURTS ($13/ $15) SA 5/14 THE FRONT BOTTOMS W/ BRICK & MORTAR, DIET CIG ($17/$21) SU 15 BLOC PARTY W/ THE VACCINES ($29.50/$32)

WE 4/13 IRATION W/ HIRIE ($20) SA 4/16 ABBEY ROAD LIVE! ( 2 SHOWS, 4 PM, 9 PM!) MO 4/18 THAO & THE GET

DOWN STAY DOWN

W/ LITTLE SCREAM ($15/$17) WE 4/20 MURDER BY DEATH W/ KEVIN DEVINE & THE GODDAMN BAND ** ($15/$17) TH 4/21 EUGENE MIRMAN

& ROBYN HITCHCOCK ($25; SEATED SHOW)

FR 4/22 TRIBAL SEEDS W/ ANUHEA, E.N. YOUNG ($17/$20) SA 4/23 JOHNNYSWIM (ON SALE 3/11) MO 4/25 THE JOY FORMIDABLE ($16/ $18) TU 4/26 HOUNDMOUTH W/ LUCY DACAS ($18/$20) WE 4/27 FELICIA DAY ($20/ BOOK INCLUDED) TH 4/28 POLICAW/ MOTHXR ($16/$18) SA 4/30 THE RESIDENTS PRESENT: SHADOWLAND ($30/$35) WE 5/4 CHELSEA WOLFE W/ A DEAD FOREST INDEX **($18/$20)

TICKETS $20/ADV. ($23/DOOR)

Saturday, march 19 • 7:30pm

TH 5/5 PARACHUTE W/ JON MCLAUGHLIN** FR 5/6 STICKY FINGERS ($13/$15) SA 5/7 BOYCE AVENUE ($25)

Garner Performing arts Center 742 W. Garner Rd., Garner • 919.661.4602

GarnerPerformingartsCenter.com 30 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

SU 5/8 OLD 97S AND

HEARTLESS BASTARDS W/ BJ BARHAM (OF AMERICAN AQUARIUM) ($25)

TH 5/19 SAY ANYTHING W/ MEWITHOUTYOU, TEEN SUICIDE, MUSEUM MOUTH ($19.50/$23) FR 5/27 CARAVAN PALACE $20/$23 SA 5/28 !!! ( CHK CHK CHK!) W/ STEREOLAD ($15) WE 6/15 OH WONDER**($15/$17) FR 6/24 BLACK MOUNTAIN ($15/$17; ON SALE 3/11) TH 6/30 MODERN BASEBALL W/JOYCE MANOR ($19/$23) TU 11/22 PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT (PERFORMING "SUBSTANCE"/

BY JOY DIVISION AND NEW ORDER) ($25)

CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM

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WED, MAR 9 Witchaven

THRASH The unholy, FIRE hair-whipping Californians of Witchaven find the sweet satanic spot between good-times thrash and scabrous black metal. Lyrics of political unrest arrive in strangled croaks, sung as though by lungs of ash.

Meanwhile, the riffs that slice beneath are sharp and distinct, offering earworm bait for the protests up above. Pissed off enough to party about it, Witchaven is a righteous, redemptive band for this fretful political climate, with blast beats hammering through and bashing down your worries.

With Steel Bearing Hand, Nemesis, and Temple Crusher.

—GC [THE MAYWOOD, $7/8:30 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): All Dogs; 9 p.m., $7–$8. • THE CAVE: Campfires & Constellations, The Everymen; 9 p.m., $5. • KINGS: Diet Cig, Kississippi; 8:30 p.m., $8.

• LINCOLN THEATRE: Judah and the Lion, The Saint Johns; 8 p.m., $14. • LOCAL 506: Somos, Petal, The Superweaks; 7 p.m., $10–$12.

• MOTORCO: No BS! Brass Band, Grandma Sparrow; 8 p.m., $12–$14. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: The Gotobeds; 9:30 p.m., $6. • NIGHTLIGHT: Earthly, Abdu Ali, Juan Huevos, 3lon; 9 p.m., $7.

• THE PINHOOK: Random Encounter, Eight Bit Disaster; 9 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: Input Electronic Music Series; 10 p.m., free. • THE RITZ: Nick Carter; 8 p.m., $25. • SLIM’S: Horseskull, Chaosmic, Long Live the Goat; 9 p.m.

• SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: Mobb Deep; 9 p.m., $23.

THU, MAR 10 Castle Wild MORE Collaborative HOOKS songwriting duo Castle Wild meshes the vocals of local pop-rock veteran Chris Hendricks with the electronic arrangements of London-viaTokyo producer Andre DiMuzio.

Returning from a multi-year hiatus, Hendricks retains his

03.09–03.16 tendency for marrying big hooks to sappy lyrics. Now, however, DiMuzio’s invigorating contributions help set Hendricks apart from the crowd of likeminded acoustic singersongwriters. They release the Dreamkillers EP and perform as a five-piece. Eric Paul and Waking April join. —SG [DEEP SOUTH, $7/9 P.M.]

electronic talents you should know. Body Games’ Adam Graetz plays some of his solo material as Thefacesblur alongside Matt Stevenson’s dark house goulash and Calapse’s ambient IDM. Raleigh favorite Chocolate Rice spins in between sets, adding luxe dance flavor.

—DS [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $5/9:30 P.M.]

Local Band Local Beer: Hotline, Happy Abandon

ALSO ON THURSDAY

EIGHTIES When Raleigh REVIVAL art-punk outfit Oulipo changed its name to Hotline, the group smuggled in all the sonic trademarks the name might require, ditching the skronky sounds in favor of cleancut eighties sophistipop. The new tunes don’t knock quite as hard, but the clever compositions suggest capable hands.

Chapel Hill’s Happy Abandon opens; the band augments boilerplate hooky indie rock with shredding keyboard solos to add theatrical color. With Heartracer.

—DS [POUR HOUSE, FREE/9:30 P.M.]

Los Lonely Boys ROOTS When these Texas AND SIBS siblings first broke through to the big time in 2004, it seemed like a fluke for such a soulful roots-rock band to score a bona fide hit. But a dozen years and several albums later, it’s obvious that the Garza brothers’ band is anything but a one-shot deal. The Chicano trio hasn’t had an album out since 2014’s Revelation; released from the impetus to push a new product, Los Lonely Boys might wind up dipping deeper into their catalog on this run. —JA [CAROLINA THEATRE, $32–$80/8 P.M.]

The Revelers SUPER What do you get CAJUN when you put together members of Louisiana bands the Red Stick Ramblers and the Pine Leaf Boys? A group that can plant a Crescent City kiss on the Americana scene,

PHOTO BY SHAWN LACHAPELLE

music

CONTRIBUTORS: Jim Allen (JA), Grant Britt (GB), Ryan Cocca (RC), Grayson Haver Currin (GC), Spencer Griffith (SG), Allison Hussey (AH), Maura Johnston (MJ), David Klein (DK), Jeff Klingman (JK), Karlie Justus Marlowe (KM), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS), Chris Vitiello (CV)

THURSDAY, MARCH 10

PRINCE RAMA

Strange things seem to happen to Taraka and Nimai Larson, the sisters who, for the last eight years, have called themselves Prince Rama. Remember, for instance, the New York woman who, in 2013, tried to take a photo of two raccoons in Central Park? For a moment, the masked mammals posed before attacking her, wrapping around her legs and biting her ankles. She retreated into the Plaza Hotel and became a good-natured viral punch line. That was Taraka.

Similarly, the sisters say they began writing their excellent new album, Xtreme Now, a year earlier, while living in “a black metal utopian commune” off the Estonian coast. A schizophrenic spell prompted Taraka to experience life during the Middle Ages and 2067 simultaneously. In the future, she encountered a surrealistic world run by extreme sports. “I realized that time travel was possible via the gateway of extreme sports,” she has explained, “and I wanted to make music that would provide the score.”

If simply enjoying thirty-seven breathless, ebullient minutes constitutes time travel, then, sure, Xtreme Now accomplishes that aim. The once esoteric percussion-and-keys duo turns outward and embraces the wider world for these eleven songs, adding hooks and refrains that are bright enough to anchor hits on a parallel-universe FM dial, where Grimes is the biggest star in the world and Julianna Barwick is Delilah. The iterative piano and big lift of “Your Life in the End” feels like a popular Fatboy Slim production, transformed into a spiritual chant. The chirping vocals and percussive panoply of “Believe in Something Fun” form top-down road-trip music suitable for the Jetsons’ space cars, while the surprisingly aggressive bash “Xtreme Now Energy” is a jock jam that rivals Sleigh Bells’ best. Prince Rama have always been real explorers, unfettered by casual expectations of style and sound. On Xtreme Now, they pack that attitude behind triumphant songs—an extreme victory. With Secret Boyfriend. —Grayson Haver Currin THE PINHOOK, DURHAM 9 p.m., $10–$12, www.thepinhook.com with plenty of Cajun and zydeco touches peeking through. —JA [MOTORCO, $12–$15/8 P.M.]

The Steeldrivers GRITTY Though nominally a GRASS bluegrass band, at least according to a recent Grammy and multiple IBMA

nominations, The SteelDrivers spurn genre conventions and subvert traditional structures.

They suggest Southern rock twang via hard-driving strings.

Don’t expect high-lonesome harmonies, either—lead vocalist Gary Nichols fronts the quintet’s ace acoustic picking with a soulful, earthy voice that echoes red dirt instead. Taylor

Brashears, a 2014 contestant on The Voice, opens. —SG [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $25–$35/8 P.M.]

Matt Stevenson, Thefacesblur NU This show corrals ELECTRO several Triangle

THE CAVE: Band of Lovers, Empty Disco; 9 p.m., $5. • KINGS: Lazyeyes, Beverly; 8:30 p.m., $8–$10. • THE KRAKEN: The Love Language, Big Thief; 9 p.m. See page 28. • LOCAL 506: Lairs, Gabriel David, Mariane Ghazaleh; 8:30 p.m., $5–$7. • THE PINHOOK: Prince Rama; 9 p.m., $10–$12. See box, this page. • SLIM’S: Essex//Muro, Bethlehem Steel, Cold Sweats; 9 p.m., $5.

FRI, MAR 11 Conan LEGEND Liverpool trio OF LOUD Conan treats doom metal with an unwavering intensity that suggests the band is running a long-distance race.

For each song, the members find a tempo and a tune and simply push ahead with it, forgoing too many tangents or distractions on the quest to hammer any riff into any head.

The new six-song LP, Revengeance, is a loud look into that philosophy, with tube amplifiers buzzing and massive cymbals cracking beneath Jon Davis’s mantra-like melodies. Lightning Born—an exciting quartet including members of Corrosion of Conformity, Colossus, Demon Eye, and The Hell No firebrand Brenna Leath—makes its onstage debut. —GC [KINGS, $12/9 P.M.]

Deviant Septet DEVIL L’Histoire du soldat FIDDLE (“The Soldier’s Tale”) is one of Stravinsky’s more unusual pieces. Originally it was a theatrical work about a soldier who sells his fiddle to the devil. The music is scored for violin, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 31

Drug Yacht ANXIOUS The Daves—Heller, MEN Bjorkback, and Cantwell—of Drug Yacht use The Minutemen’s nervy post-punk as a launching point.

Songs twitch and twist with anxious energy, but the players put plenty of muscle behind the math rock. Reese McHenry’s excellent amalgamation of country, garage, and soul, The Second Wife, opens. Plus Francis Vertigo. —PW [NIGHTLIGHT, $7/9:30 P.M.]

Lexx Luthor DIO DAY! This birthday bash for Triangle metal fixture Tony “Dio” Leonard goes straight for the shout-along triumph. Raleigh trio Widow buttresses addictive choruses with sharp leads and no-nonsense rhythms, forgoing fanciness for time-tested function. Likewise, area institution Lexx Luthor has been turning hard rock stunts into sweaty parties for more than three decades, and the band typically seems to be having as much fun as the audience howling harmonies back at it.

Final Sign opens. —GC [POUR HOUSE, $8/9 P.M.]

Loud Boyz D.C. LOUD Lively D.C. quintet Loud Boyz straddles hardcore punk and garage rock, meaning they play either garage-rock speedballs with hardcore thrust or party-punk ragers with proto-punk jitters. While they share a city with Dischord, Loud Boyz stands apart from D.C.’s punk titans, hewing closer to 32 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO BY PATRICK HOELCK

and percussion. It abounds with strange, glistening harmonies, constantly shifting meters, and bizarre dances. The Deviant Septet is built around L’Histoire, and this concert will feature the full suite. The ensemble also plays a set of pieces by Duke University Ph.D. students, written during a yearlong residency. —DR [DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM, $10–$22/8 P.M.]

early-eighties SoCal skate punk.

Carrboro’s red-lined Flesh Wounds, who headline, make for an excellent pairing. Plus Pie Face Girls. —PW [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Mass Gothic Noel Heroux was 4 LIFE done with the compromises of band life. In 2014, he ejected from the pilot seat of Hooray for Earth and slowly built Mass Gothic, the solo pop rebirth he issued through Sub Pop in early February. These songs delight against dejection, with radiant keys, high harmonies, and pounding percussion turning rife emotional territory into a battlefield and playground. It’s an emphatic restart for someone who has rarely found a hook he cannot lift. With GSO and Kollin Baer. —GC [LOCAL 506, $8–$10/9 P.M.]

Owel 2005 If you came of LIVES musical age a decade or so ago, you may have nursed a soft spot for fey progressive emo outfits such as Codeseven on labels like Equal Vision. Owel’s vaguely erudite lyrics, twinkling piano, and high-register crooning fit snugly into that tradition, meaning you’ll either dig it or remember in horror that you used to own a striped hoodie. With Idlehands.

—DS [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $10–$12/8 P.M.]

Porches URBAN Deep-voiced and MOPING solemn-souled indie pop kid Aaron Maine has been a recent focal point of twee New York. He fronts his own project, Porches, and contributes to girlfriend Greta Kline’s Frankie Cosmos, too. Maine’s recently made a soft shift into hazy synthpop, an oddly pat lateral move that sounds a hell of a lot like chillwave. Philly’s Alex G provides more dependably excited support. With Your Friend. —JK [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $13–$15/8 P.M.]

of Van Morrison, Luke Rathborne is a heartfelt singer-songwriter. He adds some violin treatment and the occasional Jeff Buckley falsetto to lend variety to this familiar fare. Joy Again opens. —DS [MOTORCO, $9–$11/9 P.M.]

SUNDAY, MARCH 13

CEE-LO GREEN

Sunflower Bean

A good thing happened to Cee-Lo Green last week. On Thursday night, Kendrick Lamar dropped the eight-song surprise, untitled unmastered. One track, “untitled 06 | 06.30.2014,” paired the Compton emcee with the Atlanta soul-machine singer over bossa nova waves. The song stemmed from demo material Green worked on with producer Adrian Younge while Lamar was recording last year’s To Pimp a Butterfly LP. Green had forgotten about the material until Younge told him Lamar wanted it.

“His innovation is so apparent and so imperative,” said Green, the Goodie Mob and Gnarls Barkley star, in a recent interview. “I think he is making the blackest music there is at the moment. ‘Black’ meaning infinite possibilities. … I do consider him an ally and an extension of the collective efforts of Dungeon Family and the continuum of that consciousness. I’m almost like a proud surrogate father.”

Later this month, that Dungeon Family lineage becomes a movie star, when the documentary The Art of Organized Noize makes its Netflix debut. The film chronicles the sound, legacy, demise, and current comeback effort of the groundbreaking Atlanta production team Organized Noize, which soundtracked the rise of OutKast and Goodie Mob as core Dungeon Family members.

The film will likely show that one of the least surprising ascents from those elite ranks was Green’s. During a twentyyear span, he’s morphed from a tank-wearing Dirty South rapper to an eccentric soul star who sported a bird costume during a Grammy performance and was accompanied by a live cockatoo on The Voice. He’s also responsible for timeless soul-pop anthems like “Crazy” and “Fuck You!” and the milky soul ballads of five solo albums. But his latest, Heart Blanche, is lifeless, meaning simultaneous publicity assists from Lamar and Organized Noize arrive right on time. With Escort. —Eric Tullis

NAME The name FEINT Sunflower Bean conjures the image of something cute, perhaps a springtime sprout poking through the dirt.

But this New York trio isn’t quite so precious. Last year’s EP, Show Me Your Seven Secrets, was strong and driving, awash in reverb but not hiding beneath it.

This year’s Human Ceremony is urgent at times, but never aggressive. Cold Fronts open.

—AH [THE PINHOOK, $8/9 P.M.]

LINCOLN THEATRE, RALEIGH 8 p.m., $29.50–$45, www.lincolntheatre.com

PULSE Electronic Dance Party BASS Charlotte’s MindeliFACE xir cooks up gaming-inspired bass music that is far more clever and stirring than the name suggests. He labels his stuff “digital neon aqua funk,” which is an overstatement for moody, sample-heavy dubstep and glitch tracks. Rather than

naming, his real edge over the wubstep competition comes from his avoidance of pandering drops. Instead, he chooses to build subtle, complex structures of the “less is more” sort. —DS [LINCOLN THEATRE, $10/9 P.M.]

Luke Rathborne DUDE Borrowing from the SONGS anthems of Ryan Adams and the sweet nothings

The X-Rayons NO Pittsboro’s The WORDS X-Rayons play a brand of instrumental rock that draws from sixties surf and lounge rock but isn’t beholden to their tropes. Melding twang with kitsch, The X-Rayons’ instrumental pop-rock doesn’t need a vocalist for gravity. With sunny, psychedelic trio Lemon Sparks.

—PW [THE KRAKEN, FREE/9 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY THE CARY THEATER: Étú-Bmík; 7 p.m., $10–$20. • DEEP SOUTH: Eli Craig Band, Faith Bardill & The Back Row Saints; 9 p.m., $5.• THE MAYWOOD: Veronica V, Meatbox, Tortuga Stone; 9:30 p.m., $8 • PNC ARENA: Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood; 7 p.m., $75. See page 23.

• SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS: RBT, LMI; 7 p.m., free. • SLIM’S: Toke, Jerkagram; 9 p.m., $5.

SAT, MAR 12 Carolina Soul Records Spring Dance Party LET’S In January, Carolina DANCE Soul packed it in at The Pinhook for a dance party celebrating the grand opening of the online retailer’s brick-and-

mortar spot in downtown Durham. That and another iteration in February were so successful that Carolina Soul is bumping up to the much bigger Motorco. Carolina Soul’s DJs serve up the best slices of soul, funk, disco, and other danceable deep cuts. —AH [MOTORCO, FREE/9 P.M.]

Dentist NINETIES The dream of the CHARTS nineties is alive in Asbury Park, at least. The self-titled LP of New Jersey quartet Dentist would have slotted easily in any mid-decade college-radio playlist. These syrupy songs buzz and blur as if on an unending sugar rush.

—PW [SCHOOLKIDS, RALEIGH, FREE/7 P.M.]

Maple Stave LIKE V, as in Maple CLOCKS Stave’s fifth release, might as well stand for victory.

The LP finds the sinewy Durham trio in fine form, its meticulous math rock as poised and precise as ever. Greensboro’s The Bronzed Chorus plays crisp pedal- and gadget-driven post-rock, while Durham’s Wailin Storms delivers on the unrelenting promise of its name.

—PW [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $8/9 P.M.]

John Mayall BRIT As last year’s Find a BLUES Way to Care demonstrated, eighty-two-yearold John Mayall is still at the top of his form. Alongside his road band of the last decade, he channels Muddy and Lonnie Brooks, delivering originals that have just as much spunk as the covers. Live, you might mistake him for a roadie, scrambling around onstage moments before showtime, looking as scruffy as if he’d slept in the same clothes for the whole tour.

But when the music starts, the years fall away, from him and for the audience. —GB [LINCOLN THEATRE, $20–$25/8 P.M.]

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Rock rOuleTtE ShowcAse A FundraiseR BenEfiting Girls Rock NC! March 18th, at The Pinh k!

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Eight brand new bands of musicians, volunteers, and community members have formed for this show! They’ve spent seven weeks writing and rehearsing original songs while supporting and fundraising for Girls Rock NC.

Come support these phenomenal new bands and youth empowerment in the Triangle.

Featuring Stormie Daie, Superstar MC

and these amazing judges: Melissa York, Crystal Taylor, and Lori Glenn. Raffles, a food truck, pie-and-beer pairings and a dance party following the show at 11pm, featuring DJ PlayPlay and DJ Luxe Posh!

Depression anD insomnia stuDy You may qualify for a clinical research study being conducted by the Duke Sleep Disorders Center if you are: • between the ages of 18 to 65 • have symptoms of depression • have thoughts that life isn’t worth living • have difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up too early in the morning Physicians in the Sleep Center are studying whether a careful, controlled use of hypnotics will reduce suicidal thoughts in depressed participants with insomnia.

If you qualify for the study, all study medication, exams and procedures associated with the study will be provided at no cost to you and you will be compensated for your time and travel.

For more information, call 919-681-8392 and ask about the depression and insomnia study.

34 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

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Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead MURDER Sometimes MUSIC symphonic tie-ins pander in search of new audiences; other times, you get a good match, such as an orchestral reading of Lemony Snicket’s delightfully wicked kid’s book, The Composer Is Dead. Each section of the North Carolina Symphony comes into play in the murder investigation, with music by Nathaniel Stookey. —CV [MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, $23/1 P.M. & 4 P.M.]

Parker Quartet CZECH, It’s not every day PLEASE that you get to perform with a mentor. But that’s exactly what the Parker Quartet does with violist extraordinaire Kim Kashkashian.

She’ll join in the second half for Dvorák’s String Quintet in E Flat, written during his 1890s stay in Iowa. Like all of his so-called American works, this one engages deeply with American folk tunes. In the first half, the Parkers play Beethoven’s String Quartet, op. 95, a brief explosion of a work, and Augusta Read Thomas’ 2014 Helix Spirals, which celebrates the 1957 Meselson-Stahl DNA replication experiment. —DR [DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM, $10–$38/8 P.M.]

Pentagram STILL Know how you get RIFFIN’ a metal band name as good, simple, and sinister as Pentagram? You get in early.

Since the start of the seventies, arching singer Bobby Liebling has led an ever-amorphous lineup through his rudimentary doom. He’s persevered through personnel problems and personal addiction along the way, exorcising some of these issues in songs that plod through twisting riffs. After recent area visits from Voivod and Slayer, though, Pentagram may be the heavy legends you’re able to skip; last year’s Curious Volume was anything but, really.

The glow of the legend

outshines its substance. King Giant, Colossus, and Demon Eye open. —GC [CAT’S CRADLE, $18–$22/8 P.M.]

Persona #10 HOUSE Was Ingmar PARTY Bergman a fan of house music? Given his good taste, he would likely appreciate the refined palette of Nighlight’s Persona series. DJ’s Misha, K Soni, E Main, and others provide the tunes. Just try not to Shazam on the dance floor. —DS [NIGHTLIGHT, $7/10 P.M.]

Raleigh Blues Festival R&B RE- Enough already— TREADS this ain’t no blues festival. At best, the so-called Raleigh Blues Festival, now in its ninth year, is an old-school R&B revival, and even that is a stretch. Sir Charles Jones has plenty of seventies soul, suggesting the Chi-Lites backing Teddy Pendergrass. It’s too lush for the blues. Theodis Ealey says he always wanted to be Chuck Berry, but he comes across more like Clarence Carter, slipping away. —GB [MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM, $52–$77/7 P.M.]

Ira Wolf LOVELY The clear, lilting TRIPS voice of Americana singer-songwriter Ira Wolf meanders in and out of bluegrass, country, and Irish sounds. The songs can sometimes feel directionless, but they’re always lovely. The title track from her upcoming second record, Honest, applies some of the stand-out Celtic influences from her early work with a clearer sense of purpose.

—KM [THE CAVE, $5/7 P.M.] ALSO ON SATURDAY THE CAVE: Sound System Seven; 10 p.m., $5. • DEEP SOUTH: 21st Century Goliath, Last Call Messiahs, The Damndest Thing; 9 p.m., $8–$12.

• LOCAL 506: Parallel Lives, The Antique Hearts, Driskill; 9 p.m., $6–$8.

• THE PINHOOK: Nap Eyes, Cian Nugent, Northgate Syndicate; 9 p.m., $8–$10. See page 28. • PNC ARENA: Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood; 7 p.m.,

$75. See page 23. • POUR HOUSE: Urban Soil, Supatight; 9 p.m., $6. • SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: Moon Hooch; 9 p.m., $12–$15. • THE SHED JAZZ CLUB: Away Msg, Zoomo, Tony G, OG Senpaiii; 9 p.m., $5.

SUN, MAR 13 Armand & Friends Benefit for the Crees Foundation BENEFIT During the last BLUES three decades, Armand Lenchek’s guitar has slashed and burned for the Alkaphonics, Five Guys Named Moe, and Armand & Bluesology.

But for this outing, he’s raising money for biogardens and an agroforestry project for indigenous people in Salvación, Peru. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, DONATIONS/5 P.M.]

Chris Mann OF THE Two decade ago, VOICE Wichita-born crooner Chris Mann would have been inescapable on adult-contemporary radio. His ascent on The Voice was powered by Bocelli and “Ave Maria.” But the younging-down of culture hit pop music disproportionately hard—a shame for us, as Mann’s spectral presence would have likely caused some dancing in Walgreens aisles nationwide.

—MJ [CAROLINA THEATRE, $27–$52/8 P.M.]

MC Lars IT’S LIT, Hip-hop might be FAM mainstream enough to support Hollywood feature films, but it’s still known widely for the same old themes: guns, sex, drugs, misogyny. As a “lit-hop” artist, MC Lars takes that perception and flips it into something meant to be positive, educational, and empowering, as on the children’s book anthem “Never Afraid.”

Unfortunately, the substance of his messaging is often hard to get to, trapped beneath a thick layer of straightforward politeness. Mega Ran opens.

—RC [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $12/7 P.M.]

N.C. Master Chorale: L’Enfance du Christ ORAHector Berlioz, a TORIO madman of orchestral music, wrote a single oratorio, 1854’s L’Enfance du Christ, retelling chapter two from the Gospel of St. Matthew.

The work is a great piece of drama—it’s practically an opera—and is a little more straightforward musically than some of his other music. It doesn’t get performed all that often. For this concert, five fantastic local soloists join the North Carolina Master Chorale.

—DR [MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, $24–$32/3 P.M.]

Outlaw Ritual JUNK By day, this band ROCK bangs out acoustic tunes as buskers. On stage, the members turn things up, add a drummer, and wind up with a raw blend of garage rock, psychobilly, and whatever else your parents told you would rot your brain. With Hearts and Daggers. —JA [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Pinkwash HEAVY Pinkwash’s “Cancer HEALING Money” ends with a minute or so of buzzes, clicks, and wheezes—the sounds of the breathing machine used by guitarist and singer Joey Doubek’s mother as she was dying of breast cancer. As Pinkwash, Doubek and one-time Des Ark drummer Ashley Arnwine deploy minimalist, metal-inspired riffs as something of a Kübler-Ross’s stages of grief model. The pair obliterates anguish with full-force, maximum-volume catharsis. Bad Friends open.

—PW [THE PINHOOK, $7/8 P.M.]

X Ambassadors MANIC Semi-ubiquitous MIXES thanks to the placement of the mildly rebellious “Renegade” in a Jeep commercial, the Ithaca omnivores of X Ambassadors reveal wide musical interests on the breakthrough album VHS. While the record occasionally

gets too mired in the dour land inhabited by Imagine Dragons, its most exciting moments are as whiplash-inducing as a highlight reel from the days when videos dominated MTV’s daytime programming. Sinewy R&B segues into jittery jangles before bursting into anthems.

With Seinabo Sey and Powers.—MJ [CAT’S CRADLE, $20–$23.50/7 P.M.]

rock kingdom at this point—indistinct bands, mostly dudes, jockeying for attention, with guitars and lukewarm tunes in hand. Matthew and the Arrogant Sea fare better than some, thanks to some good melodies, but their middling material does little to separate them from a very vast pack.

With Shilo Gold. —AH [POUR HOUSE, $10–$12/9 P.M.]

ALSO ON SUNDAY

ALSO ON TUESDAY

LINCOLN THEATRE: Cee-Lo, Escort; 8 p.m., $29.50–$45. See box, page 32. • LOCAL 506: 3@3: But You Can Call Me John, Enera, Dan Mac and the Bullet; 3 p.m., free. • PNC ARENA: Garth Brooks, Trisha Yearwood; 7:30 p.m., $75. See page 23. • POUR HOUSE: The Letter Home; 9 p.m., free.

CAROLINA THEATRE: Rickie Lee Jones; 8 p.m., $37–$79. See page 28. • THE CAVE: AirCrash Detectives, It Was You, Ex-Norwegian; 9 p.m., $5.

MON, MAR 14 SNMNMNM RARE Anyone who’s been NERDOM to PopUp Chorus or its offshoot, Flash Chorus, knows music director Seamus Kenney loves indie rock and performing. He gets to revel in both when his clever, overqualified quartet SNMNMNM reunites for a rare gig. Distinguished by a tuba and electronics, the band left Rochester, New York, for LA during the nerd-pop-friendly early aughts that nurtured Ben Folds and Fountains of Wayne. The group split after grown-up priorities entered the picture. A Drink & Draw benefit spurred a reunion in 2014; tonight, VoirVoir, old buddies from the LA circuit now on the way to SXSW, provides the impetus.

Beauty World opens. —DK [THE PINHOOK, $8/8 P.M.] ALSO ON MONDAY CAROLINA THEATRE: Indigo Girls; 8 p.m., $37–$130. • POUR HOUSE: Motorbilly, Urban Pioneers; 9 p.m.

TUE, MAR 15 Matthew and the Arrogant Sea INDIE The handle “The FELLAS Arrogant Sea” could apply to much of the indie

we 3/9 CRANK IT LOUD PRESENTS SOMOS PETAL / THE SUPERWEAKS / JONAS SEES IN COLOR 7pm $10/$12 th 3/10 LAIRS / GABRIEL DAVID / MARIANE GHAZALEH 8:30pm $5/$7 fr 3/11 MASS GOTHIC / GSO / KOLLIN BAER 9pm $8/$10 sa 3/12 PARALLEL LIVES / THE ANTIQUE HEARTS / DRISKILL 9pm $6/$8 su 3/13 3@3: BUT YOU CAN CALL ME JOHN ENENRA / DAN MAC AND THE BULLET 3pm FREE mo 3/14 MONDAY NIGHT OPEN MIC 8:30pm FREE th 3/17 CURRENTS / CONVICTIONS / EXILES 7pm $10 fr 3/18 CARDIGAN PRESENTS LOVEDRUG YOUTH LEAGUE / MAGNOLIA / OCEANS 9pm $10/$12 sa 3/19 FOXING / O’BROTHER / TANCRED/ ADJY 7:30pm $12/$14 su 3/20 3@3: SOUND SYSTEM SEVEN SECOND HUSBAND / D.O.T.R. 3pm FREE mo 3/21 MONDAY NIGHT OPEN MIC 8:30pm FREE

WE 3/9 TH 3/10 FR3/11 SA 3/12 SU 3/13 TU 3/14

COMING SOON: MAL BLUM, HUDSON & HAW, INTER ARMA SADISTIK, THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, TV GIRL, MAGRUDERGRIND

www.LOCAL506.com

HERDED CATS BLACK DOG SYNDROME INDIVIDUALLY TWISTED DUKE STREET DOGS CLAPTONES TORNADO BLUES BAND ARMAND & FRIENDS BENEFIT FOR THE CREES FOUNDATION TUESDAY BLUES JAM

8PM 7PM 6-8PM 9PM 8PM $8 5PM 7:30PM

LIVE MUSIC • OPEN TUESDAY—SUNDAY THEBLUENOTEGRILL.COM 709 WAHSINGTON STREET • DURHAM

WED, MAR 16 Rusted Root GLOBE Nostalgia for the TROT nineties is more often than not accompanied by a wish for the return of that era’s pre-Starr Report optimism, especially for a genre-less Fruitopia. Rusted Root’s joyous 1995 megahit, “Send Me On My Way,” might be one of the best aural distillations of that attitude, its Mambazo-isms filtered through a Byrne-ian sense that anything could happen. —MJ [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $25/9 P.M.]

Songs from Downstairs FREE Rod Abernethy THINKIN’ returns to the depths of Neptunes a month after releasing Small Ideas, an assortment of song sketches.

Spanning fingerpicked folk guitar and soundscapes both ethereal and ominous, the set mines his experience as a songwriter, as a guitarist for area outfits like Arrogance, and as an award-winning composer of videogame scores. —SG [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $5/8:30 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY CAROLINA THEATRE: The Pink Floyd Experience; 8 p.m., $28–$89.

• THE CAVE: Sarah Mae Chilton, Hank and Brendan; 9 p.m.-midnite, $5.

• POUR HOUSE: Litz, Psylo Joe; 9 p.m.

FULL FRAME DOCUMENTARY FILM FESTIVAL APRIL 7-10, 2016 l DURHAM l NC WWW.FULLFRAMEFEST.ORG SCHEDULE ANNOUNCED MARCH 17 l TICKETS ON SALE APRIL 1 INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 35

art

03.09–03.16 LeFebvre. Thru Mar 12.

Through This Lens, Durham. www.throughthislens.com.

OPENING

ERIK CARLSON: UNBOUND (DETAIL)

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

A Show of Hands: Teddy Devereaux. Mar 10-Apr 3.

Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

SPECIAL Clothesline Musings: EVENT Art Inspired By the Clothesline: Mar 9-Apr 3.

Reception: Fri, March 18, 6-7:30 p.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

SPECIAL Modern Nature: EVENT Paintings inspired by nature by Becky Denmark and Ben Knight. Mar 10-Apr 9.

Reception: Thu, March 10, 6-8 p.m. ArtSource Fine Art, Raleigh. www.artsource-raleigh.com.

Naked: A visual celebration of the human form. Mar 10-Apr 3.

Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

ONGOING African American Quilter Circle Show: Thru Mar 19.

Hillsborough Arts Council Gallery, Hillsborough. www. hillsboroughartscouncil.org.

Americana: Textile & History as Muse: Robert Otto Epstein, Margi Weir, and David Curcio.

Thru Mar 26. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Art-Music FUSION: Dan Campbell. Thru Mar 23. Village Art Circle, Raleigh. www. villageartcircle.com.

Peg Bachenheimer, Jenny Eggleston, Brett Morris, Leslie Pruneau, and Susan Quint: Thru May 28. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Chisel and Forge: Works by Peter Oakley and Elizabeth Brim: Thru Mar 20. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

Coming Soon, Dot-to-Dot: Selections from the Gregg Museum of Art & Design. Thru Apr 23. Page-Walker Arts & History Center, Cary. www. friendsofpagewalkerorg.

Contemporary Landscape Paintings: Paintings by Nancy Hughes Miller. Thru Mar 22.

Cary Gallery of Artists, Cary. www.carygalleryofartists.org.

Janet Cooling: New paintings.

Thru Mar 27. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. www. chapelhillpreservation.com.

36 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

FRIDAY, MARCH 11

UNBOUND

Picasso once said that painting is just another way of keeping a diary, a judgment that could easily be extended to art as a whole. In UNBOUND, a town-funded, permanent video installation at the Chapel Hill Public Library that will be unveiled in a reception on Friday, Erik Carlson, who won the commission among more than two hundred proposals, has created a visual diary for the Southern Part of Heaven.

Photographs, stories, letters, recipes, and other mementoes that Carlson, who lives in Rhode Island, has collected in Chapel Hill over the past year, both in person and online, will be enshrined in four etched-glass screens placed throughout the library—portals through which to view a digital tapestry of a community in a constantly changing order. The exhibit suits a public library, mingling the stories of the town with the thousands on the shelves. —Sayaka Matsuoka CHAPEL HILL PUBLIC LIBRARY, CHAPEL HILL 7 p.m., free, www.chapelhillpubliclibrary.org

SPECIAL Nileena Pani Dash: EVENT Mosaics. Thru Apr 5.

Reception: Fri, March 11, 6-8 p.m. Carrboro Century Center, Carrboro. www.carrboro.com/ centurycenter.html.

Divided by Decades-Bound by Tradition: Art Alumae Exhibition: Works in oil and graphite by Janet Link and Sherry di Filippo.

Thru Mar 24. Meredith College Cate Center, Raleigh.

Drawn to Water: Robert L. Wood. Thru Mar 18. Cary Town Hall, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

Duke University Advanced

Painting Students: Thru Apr 9.

Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. www.cravenallengallery.com.

The Ease of Fiction: This exhibit extends the homeland introspection of CAM Raleigh show Failure of the American Dream, a video installation by Phil America that was filmed in a tent city in the shadow of Silicon Valley. The Ease of Fiction features paintings, drawings, and sculptures by four young, U.S.-based African artists who intimately navigate the facts, official narratives, and myths of two nations that see each other

in different ways. In “kindred,” Nigeria’s ruby onyinyechi amanze layers photo transfers and drawings in a luminous scene of wading birds, braided hair, and a leopard-headed gentleman of a colonial mien.

A similarly dreamlike mingling of the drawing room and the savanna can be seen in largescale scenes by Botswanan painter Meleko Mokgosi.

Rwanda’s Duhirwe Rushemeza’s sculptural paintings mimic deteriorating walls, while Egypt’s Sherin Guirguis slips around figuration into intricate patterns of hand-cut paper that unite the ancient Middle East with California modernism. $5.

Thru Jun 19. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh.org. —Brian Howe Elements: N.C. nature photography by Mike Basher.

Thru Mar 27. Nature Art Gallery, Raleigh. www.naturalsciences.org.

LAST Everyday Chaos: CHANCE Re-Collaging the Surface: Carlyn Wright-Eakes, Richie Foster, Harriet Hoover, Saba Taj. Thru Mar 13. Arcana Bar and Lounge, Durham.

Everyone’s Gone to the Movies!: Kevin Peddicord. Thru Mar 28. Busy Bee, Raleigh. www. busybeeraleigh.com.

Excavations from Nothingness: Harriet Hoover and Wendy Collin Sorin. Thru Mar 18. Miriam

Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www.raleighnc.gov/arts.

Failure of the American Dream: Installation by Phil America. $5. Thru May 8. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. www.camraleigh.org.

Fine Arts League of Cary’s 21st Annual Juried Exhibition: Thru Apr 23. Page-Walker Arts & History Center, Cary. www. friendsofpagewalker.org.

For What It’s Worth: Jeana Eve Klein. Thru Mar 21. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

From Frock Coats to Flip-Flops: 100 Years of Fashion at Carolina: Thru Jun 5. UNC Wilson Special Collections Library, Chapel Hill. www.lib.unc.edu/wilson.

Gristle Sausage: Sculpture by Michael A. Salter. Thru Mar 26.

Lump, Raleigh. www.teamlump.org.

Cinc Hayes: Mixed media. Thru Apr 30. Bond Park Community Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

Heralding the Way to a New World: Thru Apr 1. Duke Perkins Library, Durham. library.duke.edu.

Home in a New Place: Photography by Katy Clune, depicting an immigrant community in Morganton, N.C. Thru Apr 27. Center for the Study of the American South, Chapel Hill. www.uncsouth.org.

LAST Hometown CHANCE (Inherited): Photography by Moriah

I Want Candy: Stacy Crabill.

Thru Apr 14. Durham Convention Center, Durham. www.durhamconventioncenter.com.

If I Were You and You Were Me: Polymer clay and found object sculptures by Elissa FarrowSavos. Thru Mar 17. Gallery C, Raleigh. www.galleryc.net.

It’s All About The Story, Volume IV – Allan Gurganus: Artists respond to work by the Hillsborough author.

Thru Mar 20. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Raleigh. www. hillsboroughgallery.com.

La Sombra y el Espiritu IV - The Work of Stefanie Jackson: Thru May 13. UNC Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill. www. sonjahaynesstonectr.unc.edu.

Listening to Patience: Paintings

by Onicas Gaddis. Thru Mar 31.

Joyful Jewel, Pittsboro. www. joyfuljewel.com.

LAST Everyday Longitude CHANCE and Latitude: Explorations of Land and Sea: Paintings by Tony Alderman and Stephen Estrada. Thru Mar 12.

Durham Arts Council, Durham. www.durhamarts.org.

Made Especially for You by Willie Kay: One-of-a-kind dresses by the Raleigh designer.

Thru Sep 5. N.C. Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

SPECIAL Meet Our Heroes: EVENT Pop-up books by Durham Academy sixth graders.

Thru Apr 3. Reception: Thu, March 10, 5-8 p.m. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www. frankisart.com.

LAST Mixed Media CHANCE Journeys: Wax pencil drawings of circuses, carnivals, and travels by Benjamin Frey. Thru Mar 15.

Little Art Gallery & Craft Collection, Raleigh. littleartgalleryandcraft.com.

The New Galleries: A Collection Come to Light: Thru Sep 18.

Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu.

LAST New Year Show: Jeff CHANCE Bell, Kiki Farish, Heather Gordon, Warren Hicks, and Sallie White. Thru Mar 12.

On the Wild Side: Paintings by Nancy Smith. Thru Apr 24. The Community Church of Chapel Hill Unitarian Universalist, Chapel Hill.

Constance Pappalardo: Paintings. Thru Apr 30.

Umstead Hotel & Spa, Cary. www.theumstead.com.

LAST Past Tense/Future CHANCE Perfect: Seven artists using found objects.

Thru Mar 12. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. www. scrapexchange.org.

Petcasso: Animals in Art: Thru Apr 1. Litmus Gallery, Raleigh. www.litmusgallery.com.

Prismatic Atoms: Glass sculpture installation by Gretchen Cobb. Thru Mar 30.

The Qi Garden, Hillsborough. www.the-qi-garden.com.

PULL: If last year’s excellent Nasher show of prints is still embossed on your brain, then check out this new exhibit of work by modern printmakers.

Curated by Supergraphic’s Bill Fick and UNC art professor Beth Grabowski, the show features twenty-three international artists who work in everything from screenprinting to 3-D printing. Lynne Allen etches her Lakota Sioux family history on wood and deerskin, while Fick

Sedona Sunrise and Sunset: Oil paintings by Lori Leachman.

Thru Mar 26. Naomi Gallery and Studio, Durham. www. naomistudioandgallery.com.

Simple Ways: Folk Art by Leonard Jones: Paintings done with house paint on scrap metal. Thru Mar 17. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www.historichillsborough.org.

Southern Comforter: Abstract images of a down comforter

by Victoria Powers. Thru Mar 23. HagerSmith Design Gallery. www.hagersmith.com.

Spring Fever: Oils and acrylics

by Bekah Haslett and Margo White. Thru Mar 31. Local Color Gallery, Raleigh. www. localcoloraleigh.com.

Spring Forward: Thru Mar 26.

Tipping Paint Gallery, Raleigh. www.tippingpaintgallery.com.

SPECIAL Stitch Chat: Mixed EVENT media work by Pati Reis. Thru Mar 26. Artist talk: Thu, Mar 10, 6 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Sunrises, Reflections & Acadia: Michael Weitzman. Thru Mar 21. Herbert C Young Community Center, Cary. www. townofcary.org.

The Ties That Bind: Beverly McIver is a painter, originally from Greensboro, whose

THURSDAY, MARCH 10

guardianship of a sister with developmental disabilities was the subject of the HBO documentary Raising Renee.

McIver exposes another thread of her complex family life in these oil portraits of her father, whom she has gotten to know over the last decade. “I believe that I have fallen in love with my dad,” McIver writes. In her vibrant portraits of him at various ages, you will, too. Thru Apr 9. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. www.cravenallengallery. com. —Brian Howe Time Travels in NineteenthCentury Landscapes: There was once an established hierarchy of painting genres: Religious allegories at the top, still-life works and animal paintings at the bottom. It broke down in the nineteenth century, when landscapes were reinvented by artists with nostalgic idealism about the time before industrialization.

Painters like J.M.W. Turner created landscapes that toe the line between fantasy and reality, here and there, past and present, as can be seen in this exhibit. Thru Apr 3. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland. org. —Sayaka Matsuoka Treasures of Carolina: Stories from the State Archives: Thru Jun 19. N.C. Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Wild Ponies: Jennifer Miller.

Thru Mar 19. Eno Gallery, Hillsborough. www.enogallery. net.

PAINT-A-POOP

First we should stress that when the N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences says “the science of scat,” it’s not talking about Ella Fitzgerald. Then we should hasten to underscore that it’s paint a poop, not paint in poop. But you can’t gold-plate a turd: this is undeniably a time for tykes and weird adults to paint on plaster casts of crap. “The shape, size, and color of scat can tell us about the diet, behavior, and even health of an animal,” says the museum, so innocently. You have to be at least eleven to get your hands dirty, and those younger than fifteen need an adult in tow, presumably in case of giggle-related emergencies. Beyond an honorary doctorate in dung, you also get to take home your work of waste, whether whimsical or forensic. “Participants can create realistic-looking bear scat using dried nuts, seeds, and berries!” the museum cries. Oh, shit.

—Brian Howe NATURE RESEARCH CENTER, RALEIGH 6–8:30 p.m., $10–$15, www.naturalsciences.org

PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMNS

North Carolina’s Favorite Son: Billy Graham and His Remarkable Journey of Faith: Thru Jul 10. N.C. Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

offers a grotesquely blemished face that might have sprung from a Charles Burns comic.

Thru Mar 27. Meredith College Weems Gallery, Raleigh. www. meredith.edu/the-arts. —Brian Howe

PLASTER POOP

Light Art + Design, Chapel Hill. www.lightartdesign.com.

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 37

Cary Ballet Company & The 3D Project Spring Gala Showcase: Dance. $15–$18. Fri, Mar 11-Sat, Mar 12. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

Inis Cairde School of Irish Dance: Dance. Free. Sun, Mar 13, 3 p.m. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Chris Kattan and Friends: Stand-up comedy. $22–$30.

Tue, Mar 15, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Jon Lovitz: Stand-up comedy. $25–$38. Thu, Mar 10-Sat, Mar 12. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com. See p. 29.

Miss Nelson is Missing: Children’s theater. $11–$17. Fri, Mar 11-Fri, Mar 25, 7:30 p.m.

Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh. www.raleighlittletheatre.org.

Panoramic Dance Project: Dance. $5–$12. Mar 16-17, 8 p.m.

NCSU Stewart Theatre, Raleigh.

Tobacco Road Dance Productions: $13–$15. Fri, Mar 11-Sat, Mar 12, 7 p.m. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org. See p. 29.

ONGOING The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: $15–$20. Thru Mar 20. North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre, Raleigh. www.nract.org.

LAST brownsville song CHANCE (b-side for tray): Kimber Lee based this drama on a 2012 murder in Brownsville, a neglected neighborhood in Brooklyn. Twenty-year-old, college-bound boxer Tray Franklin Grant was killed during a gang conflict he had no part in. In the play, we meet him and observe the love and the losses that have taken place in his family—the bonds that have strengthened as well as those

 ½ Jacuzzi: Play. $25. Thru Mar 20. Ward Theatre, Durham. www. wardtheatrecompany.com. See story, p. 27.  ½ The Lion King: It sounded crazy when Disney announced it would make The Lion King a musical in the midnineties. But more than $1 billion in grosses later, in this touring production at DPAC, director Julie Taymor has it figured out. Right from “The Circle of Life”—probably the best-staged opening number in Broadway history—you know you’re in for something beyond special.

All the design elements, from Michael Curry’s puppets and masks to Garth Fagan’s dazzling choreography, blend together so seamlessly it’s like watching a 3-D movie (minus the glasses).

But the stagecraft doesn’t take over the show; it helps tell a rich story. Believe the hype. $39–$109. Thru Mar 20. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www.dpacnc.com. —Jeffrey Kare Tempest Fantasy: Paul Moravec composed his Pulitzer Prizewinning Tempest Fantasy after watching Patrick Stewart play Prospero in The Tempest.

When Carolina Ballet artistic director Robert Weiss adapted the work in 2006, his challenge was to keep up with Moravec’s daring, darting orchestration, which traces the flights of Ariel, Shakespeare’s famous air spirit, in the first movement. In subsequent sections, Weiss visualizes the composer’s portraits of the pensive Prospero, the roughedged Caliban, and lovers Miranda and Prince Ferdinand. $30–$68. Thru Mar 20. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

—Byron Woods

page READINGS & SIGNINGS Nazeeh Abdul-Hakeem: The Athaan in the Bull City.

Thu, Mar 10, 7 p.m. Durham Main Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.

Bill Dow: Discussing his organic farming memoir What I Stand On with Fred Broadwell. Thu, Mar 10, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Bart Ehrman: UNC religious studies professor Bart Ehrman has authored many New York Times best-sellers that briskly distill his findings about the Bible for a mass audience.

They include Misquoting Jesus, which showed how the Bible

has changed in translation, and Forged, which argued that some New Testament books were not by their stated authors.

Ehrman continues his mission to separate—respectfully, with the rigor of a scholar and the emotional nuance of a former evangelical—historical fact from religious fable in Jesus Before the Gospels, his latest book.

Wed, Mar 9, 3 p.m. UNC Bull’s Head Bookshop, Chapel Hill. www.store.unc.edu. — Sat, Mar 12, 11 a.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. www.mcintyresbooks. com. —Brian Howe John Shelton Reed: Barbecue: A Savor the South Cookbook. $30.

Sun, Mar 13, 2 p.m. PICNIC, Durham. www.picnicdurham.com.

Matt de la Peña: Discussing children’s books and YA novels.

Sun, Mar 13, 3 p.m. Durham Main Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.

Kit Wienert: With poetry collection Analogs of Eden.

Tue, Mar 15, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

LITERARY R E L AT E D In the Wings: Playmakers on Sweeney Todd: Mon, Mar 14, 7 p.m. Durham Main Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.

Topics in Jazz: Bebop and Beyond: Dr. Stephen Anderson.

5–$10. Tue, Mar 15, 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham. www. durhamjazzworkshop.org.

Adventures from the Appalachian Trail: Hikers Susan Levy and Rich Kurnik discuss their 2015 journey. Thu, Mar 10, 6:45 p.m. Levin Jewish Community Center, Durham. www.levinjcc.org.

OPENING FRIDAY

INGRID BERGMAN: IN HER OWN WORDS Ingrid Bergman was always focused on her next move, whether it meant hopping on a plane to shoot a movie or skipping the country to live another life. It was easy for her to bounce around, since her parents died when she was very young, making her a nomad. She went on to become Sweden’s It Girl, and soon, Hollywood came calling. Producer David O. Selznick introduced Bergman to Tinseltown elite, setting the stage for her iconic roles in Casablanca, Notorious, Gaslight, and others. She had a controversial relationship with Italian filmmaker Roberto Rossellini, among other marital scandals, which ultimately forced her to flee the U.S. for Italy for several years. As Bergman once said, she was considered “a danger for American womanhood—even my voice over the radio was supposed to be dangerous.” In his new documentary Ingrid Bergman: In Her Own Words, Stig Björkman chronicles this free-spirited life via 16mm home movies, diaries and letters (read by recent Oscar winner Alicia Vikander), and interviews with Bergman’s adult children, including actress Isabella Rossellini and American TV journalist Pia Lindström. Surprisingly, they harbor no resentments toward their mom for leaving their dads and going to live in another part of the world. “She was just too much fun to be with,” Lindstrom says.

“She went where the wind took her … I craved my whole life to have more of her.” With the nostalgic, sometimes elegiac way Björkman culls the material, you will, too. —Craig D. Lindsey THE CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM www.carolinatheatre.org

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38 | 3.9.16 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF MANTARAY FILM AB

OPENING

LAST  ½ We Are CHANCE Proud to Present...: When Camus said, “Create dangerously,” this wasn’t quite what he meant. While trying to devise a show about the conquered Herero tribe in southwest Africa, six college students face roadblocks including a one-sided written record that eclipses the victims.

But when a driven director goads them into confronting their (and our) problematic ethnic heritage, improv exercises spin out into something real—a confrontation across a present-day racial divide—before the harrowing conclusion. Recommended. $15– $44. Thru Mar 13. Paul Green Theatre, Chapel Hill. www. playmakersrep.org. —Byron Woods The Wolf: Children’s theater. $10–$15. Thru Mar 20. Kennedy Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

INGRID BERGMAN: IN HER OWN WORDS

stage

that have broken. $5–$20. Thru Mar 12. Manbites Dog Theater, Durham. www.manbitesdogtheater. org. —Byron Woods LAST The Hundred CHANCE Dresses: Play. $7–$13. Thru Mar 13.

Renaissance Centre, Wake Forest.

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10 CLOVERFIELD LANE • BROTHERS GRIMSBY YOUNG MESSIAH • PERFECT MATCH KUNG FU PANDA 3 • THE REVENANT • RISEN LADY IN THE VAN • STAR WARS • HOW TO BE SINGLE DEADPOOL • ZOOTOPIA • LONDON HAS FALLEN WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT • THE WITCH GODS OF EGYPT

SPACE ON THE SILVER SCREEN Space adventures have yielded numerous moments of unforgettable cinema, from the slo-mo amble of the first Apollo astronauts in The Right Stuff to Tom Hanks alerting Houston that he and his crew had run into a major snag in Apollo 13. In a panel discussion organized by NCSU film professor Marsha Gordon, the rich subject of “Space on the Silver Screen” will be surveyed through an impressively catholic assemblage of film segments, including a 1902 French silent film (A Trip to the Moon), an ambitious sci-fi work from 1950 (Destination Moon), cinematic royalty (2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Wars: Episode IV), and recent entries like Interstellar. The panel itself, which includes NCSU astronomer Patrick Treuthardt and Larry Silverberg, a professor of aerospace engineering, is impressive, too. Still, they’ll be screening a clip from the Tim Allen vehicle Galaxy Quest, so the discussion shouldn’t get too high in the sky.

—David Klein

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NCSU’S HUNT AUDITORIUM, RALEIGH 7 p.m., free, www.sciences.ncsu.edu/events

GEORGES MÉLIÈS: A TRIP TO THE MOON

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS

FROM SWASTIKA TO JIM CROW: Wed, Mar 9, 6 p.m.

UNC School of Law. THE LAST BARN DANCE: Tue, Mar 15, 7 p.m. NCSU Campus: DH Hill Library. www.lib.ncsu.edu.

LONGLEAF FILM FESTIVAL: Sun, Mar 13 & Mon, Mar 14.

NC Museum of History. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

MOVIES OF LOCAL PEOPLE: $5. Sat, Mar 12, 3 p.m. UNEXPOSED. durhamunexposed.tumblr.com.

THE ONE HUNDRED FOOT JOURNEY: Wed, Mar 9, 7 p.m.

Duke Campus: Griffith Theater. www.duke.edu.

ORNETTE, MADE IN AMERICA: Tue, Mar 15, 7 p.m. Nightlight. www.nightlightclub.com.

STRICTLY BALLROOM: $5-$7.

Fri, Mar 11, 8 p.m. NC Museum of Art. www.ncartmuseum.org.

OPENING 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE—The secret-shrouded “spiritual

capitalcabaret.com • 919.206.4040 • 6713 Mt Herman Rd • Morrisville (Located in Brier Creek, adjacent to RDU) sequel” to 2008 foundfootage monster movie Cloverfield. Rated PG-13.  ½ A WAR—See review, p.

26. Rated R.  ½ INGRID BERGMAN: IN HER OWN WORDS—See review, p. 38. Unrated.

THE PERFECT MATCH—A playboy’s world gets shaken up when he meets a woman who makes him believe that all relationships might not be doomed after all. Rated R.

A L S O P L AY I N G See our reviews of these films at www.indyweek.com.  ½ 45 YEARS—A lifetime of regret unravels between a comfortably married couple (Tom Courtenay and Charlotte Rampling) as their wedding anniversary arrives. Rated R.  ½ DEADPOOL—Marvel’s smartass semi-hero (Ryan Reynolds) revels in excesses of quips and gore. Rated R.  HAIL, CAESAR!— The Coen brothers offer a delightful satire of postwar Hollywood. Rated PG-13.

 LONDON HAS FALLEN— - $6 Lunch Special & No Cover Before 8pm Gerrard Butler stars as Mike Banning in this xenophobic, jingoistic terror-porn sequel to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen.

Rated R.  ½ THE REVENANT— Leo DiCaprio plays a historical fur trapper left for dead after a bear attack in the director of Birdman’s latest Oscar bait.

Rated R.  ½ ROOM—Adapted from an acclaimed novel, this is a cathartic exploration of the traumas of the love between mother and child.

Rated R.  SON OF SAUL—The horrors of the concentration camp blur in the background of a prisoner’s quest to bury a single boy in this excruciating Hungarian drama. Rated R.  STAR WARS: THE FORCE AWAKENS—J.J. Abrams successfully remixes Star Wars mythology for a new generation. Rated PG-13.  ½ THE WITCH—Robert Eggers emerges as an arthorror director to watch with a slow-burning tale that conjures the demon-haunted world of early English settlers from real accounts. Rated R. INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 39

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ASSOCIATE EDITOR The Sun, a nonprofit, ad-free magazine, needs an associate editor to edit text for publication, solicit new writing, evaluate submissions, and work with authors to develop and revise their work.

Visit thesunmagazine.org for details.

MANUSCRIPT READER The Sun, an independent, ad-free magazine, is looking for a part-time manuscript reader to evaluate fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions and determine their suitability for the magazine. If you live in the Chapel Hill area, are able to work 15 to 20 hours a week at home or in the office, and can make at least a two-year commitment, visit thesunmagazine.org for details. (No e-mails, phone calls, faxes, or surprise visits, please.)

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in desirable Glenwood South area of Raleigh on Boylan Ave. Local transit available, lots of choices for food and entertainment.

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rent/ elsewhere FAIR HOUSING ACT NOTICE

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All real estate advertised herein is subject to the Federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to advertise ìany preference, limitation, or discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.î We will not knowingly accept any advertising for real estate which is in violation of the law. All persons are hereby informed that all dwellings advertised are available on an equal opportunity.

For more information or assistance, contact Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Fair Housing Project at (855) 797-3247 or visit www. fairhousingnc.org.

BOOK YOUR AD • CALL LESLIE AT 919-286-6642 • EMAIL

CLASSY@INDYWEEK.COM

soft return

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

Missing Titles

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS WILLIAMS

THIS PAPER

In sixth grade, the local library left me in the lurch.

My first-ever English teacher assigned each student in her class a separate author. For homework, we’d read that writer’s work throughout the year and file periodic reports about what we liked or learned from each new volume. Mrs. Kendrick assigned to me Walter Dean Myers. Born in West Virginia but raised in Harlem, Myers wrote about civil rights and basketball, murder and death, going to war and coming back home. Perhaps the choice was random, or maybe my adolescent Southern drawl, love of history, and life on a farm a few miles away inspired her assignment.

In any event, I loved Myers. In a matter of months, I had read Fallen Angels and Hoops, Motown and Didi and Scorpions. The school year was only a quarter finished, but the little library at Harnett Central Middle featured no more Myers. If I wanted more titles, I’d have to find them.

That weekend, my mom drove me thirty miles north, to Raleigh’s Ridgewood Shopping Center. For the first time that Saturday afternoon, I walked into Quail Ridge Books, a store so big and bursting with books that my rural mind assumed there could only be one such wonder in the world. Mom handed me twenty dollars, and we left with The Glory Field, Myers’s story of an African-American family breaking beyond the vestiges of slavery. I finished it by the next week’s end. Soon, we headed back to Quail Ridge.

On Saturday, just as the sun began to press against the horizon, I walked into Quail Ridge on Wade Avenue for the final time. Three hours later, the staff would lock the door and start shuttling the stock to a new location, five miles away in the more ostentatious North Hills shopping center. A lease disagreement compelled the store, in the same spot for more than three decades, to skip another extension.

That evening, a dozen people browsed, all of us shushed with a near-funereal reverence, though the store was only relocating. Yes, we looked for titles we’d skipped, intending to take them home with a 25 percent discount, but mostly we just looked—at signed portraits of authors who had spoken there, at shelves from which we’d grabbed this volume or that, at the counter where we’d all gotten two-dozen recommendations.

I have a hard time selling, borrowing, or lending books; once I’ve read them, I want them around, as though they are paper plates in a lifelong suit of armor. (Yes, I still own The Glory Field.) I wonder, then, how it will feel to let go of a bookstore, the first one I ever loved and the first to suggest how much there was to know.

—Grayson Haver Currin gcurrin@indyweek.com

Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL

cLassy@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com| |3.9.16 3.9.16| |41 41 INDYweek.com

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For more information about the Black Cohosh Study, call 919-316-4976

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If you are a woman living in the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and take black cohosh for hot flashes, cramps or other symptoms, please join an important study on the health you cohosh are a woman livingbyinthethe Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area and(NIEHS). effects ofIf black being conducted National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences take black cohosh for hot flashes, cramps, or other symptoms, please join What’s required? an important study on the health effects of black cohosh being conducted • Only one visit to donate a of blood sample • QualifiHealth ed participants will receive up to $50 by the National Institute Environmental Sciences (NIEHS).

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in your own yard!

Mark N. Jensen • 919-528-5588 GardensToDieFor.com

Appliance installation/repair; Equipment, Plumbing and Electrical repair; Fencing; HVAC repair/installation; Preventative maintenance; Roofs/Gutters.

Profits support Pleasant Drive Animal Rescue. Call 919-904-9025 or email achfixit@gmail.com

Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL

cLassy@indyweek.com

For other local numbers:

FIND REAL GAY MEN NEAR YOU Raleigh:

(919) 829-7300 Durham:

(919) 595-9800 18+ www.MegaMates.com

Chapel Hill:

(919) 869-1200

www.megamates.com 18+

INDYweek.com | 3.9.16 | 43

CLASSES FORMING NOW

Programs in Massage Therapy, Medical Assisting, and Medical Office. Call Today!

THE MEDICAL ARTS SCHOOL

Raleigh: 919-872-6386 • www.medicalartsschool.com

ART CLASSES

Taught in small groups, ages 5-adult. www.lucysartstudio.com 919-410-2327

JEWELRY APPRAISALS

While you wait. Graduate Gemologist www.ncjewelryappraiser.com

BARTENDERS NEEDED MAKE $20-$35/HOUR

HELP KEEP DOGS WARM!!

Coalition to Unchain Dogs seeks plastic or igloo style dog houses for cold dogs in need. To donate, please contact Amanda at director@unchaindogs.net.

PSYCHIC MILLIE PALM/TAROT CARD READINGS

Clairvoyant Medium. 40 years experience.

Intuitive Psychic Readings, Communication with Loved Ones, Advice on Life and Love. I Help you solve problems! www.psychicmillie. com 919.942-1184/919-688-0310 Psychic Wallace Institute, 1418 S. Miami Blvd. Durham.

GLAMOUR MODELS NEEDED For film/print work. 919-949-8330

HAIR MODELS NEEDED

Male and female for color and cut.

Avant-garde styles and color. Email urbanfringemodels@gmail.com

HIRE THE BEST!

Find the best candidates for your job opening in the INDY! Employment ads start at 70 cents/ word/week. Call INDY Classifieds: 919-286-6642 or email classy@indyweek.com

Raleigh’s Bartending School 676.0774 www.cocktailmixer.com 1-2wk class

GOT A MAC?

Need Support? Let AppleBuddy help you.

Call 919.740.2604 or log onto www.applebuddy.com

LUTHER SHOFFNER & SON, INC.

Phone: 336-227-3781 Cell: 336-264-9755 Website: SHOFFNERHOMELAND.COM Home Repairs, Remodels, Installations & Assembly.

T’AI CHI

Traditional art of meditative movement for health, energy, relaxation, self-defense.

Classes/workshops throughout the Triangle.

Magic Tortoise School - Since 1979. Call Jay or Kathleen, 919-968-3936, or Lao Ma: 919-542-0688. www.magictortoise.com

FITNESS STARTS HERE! WORK OUT WITH US AT DUKE HEALTH & FITNESS CENTER.

Newly Renovated! Indoor/Outdoor Tracks, Saline Pool, Group Fitness, Strength/Cardio Equipment, Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, Personal Training, Nutrition & Weight Loss, Therapeutic Massage. Call Today! 919-660-6660 or www.dukefitness.org

919.286.6642

MYTHOLOGY and STAR WARS:

The Collaboration of Joseph Campbell and George Lucas

Druscilla French, PhD, Novelist/Cultural Mythologist Sat. March 12 FREE SALON, Chapel Hill Public Library, 3 – 5 pm Sponsor – C.G. Jung Society of the Triangle | JungNC.org

DANCE CLASSES IN SWING, LINDY, BLUES, CHARLESTON

ROWDY SQUARE DANCE!

At ERUUF, Durham & ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

RICHARD BADU, 919-724-1421, rbadu@aol.com

9PM Saturday April 2. THE KRAKEN. Chapel Hill. thekrakenbar.com FREE. Aaron Ratcliffe caller, w/ Five Points Rounders.

DECLUTTERING? WE’LL BUY YOUR BOOKS

STAND-UP COMEDY CLASS AT BURNING COAL THEATRE

We’ll bring a truck and crew *and pay cash* for your books and other media. 919-872-3399 or MiniCityMedia.com

Monday Nights, 7-10pm, $155. April 18-May 23, 2016, Final performance at last class. Call 919-834-4001 to register.

FEELING TAXED?

MARK KINSEY/LMBT

Need a convenient CPA? H. Lee Miller, CPA, CMA, MBA. 919-376-5584 lee@hleemillercpa.com www.hleemillercpa.com

Feel comfy again. 919-619-NERD (6373).

Durham, on Broad Street. NC Lic. #6072.

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Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com GARDENS TO DIE FOR

Find Peace, Beauty, and Abundance in your own yard! Mark N. Jensen. 919-528-5588 GardensToDieFor.com

IS IT HARD TO IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT WEED?

Do you want to stop, but can’t? We Can Help!

Marijuana Anonymous: www.NorthCarolinaMA.ORG 919-886-4420

WOOFSTOCK 2016 SAT. 4/2 BOOTH AMPITHEATRE

HOME REPAIR SPECIAL

COMING TO ASHEVILLE?

OLD FASHIONED HANDYMAN!

9AM-2PM.Register, form a team, join a team, donate! Early registration discounts. INFO: SPCAWake.Org Upscale Spa. private outdoor hot tubs, 26 massage therapists, overnight accommodations, sauna and more. Starting at $42. Shojiretreats.com 828-299-0999

Place an ad in the Professional Services section for 4 weeks, get 2 extra weeks FREE! Ads start at $19/week. 919-286-6642 or e-mail classy@indyweek.com Appliance installation/repair; Equipment, Plumbing & Electrical repair; Fencing; HVAC ; Preventative maintenance; Roofs/Gutters.

Profits support Pleasant Drive Animal Rescue. 919-904-9025 ACHfixit@gmail.com

TRIANGLEGAMENIGHT.COM Some places do karaoke. We do Game Nights. We bring 75+ board games to venues all around the triangle. Check out our free events.

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