INDY Week 5.03.17

raleigh 5I 3I 17

SOMETHING

STINKS A landfill’s neighbor complained to Wake County officials. Now the landfill’s attorney wants her to shut up.

By Thomas Goldsmith

p. 8

Artists with Disabilities Unite p. 20

Women Waging War p. 22

I Am Groot! p. 24

6 In hi twee also

8 For y ing a lawy

11 Mor duce Janu

16 A fin mus

20 Mos com The

24 Gua mor self-

DEPARTM

5 Back

6 Tria

8 New

15 Food

16 Mus

20 Arts

26 Wha

29 Mus

33 Arts

2 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK | RALEIGH VOL. 34, NO. 16

6 In his first hundred days in office, Donald Trump tweeted 518 times (11 of which were deleted). He also made 488 false or misleading statements.

8 For years, Betty Brandt Williamson has been fighting a private landfill’s expansion plans. The landfill’s lawyer wants her to shut up.

11 More than fourteen hundred bills have been introduced since the General Assembly convened in January. Many never saw the light of day.

16 A fine new crop of releases from Triangle-area musicians range from Big Star to rising stars.

20 Most wartime dramas ignore the role of women in combat, but a series of three plays at Raleigh Little Theatre bucks that trend.

24 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 avoids the sophomore slump by doubling down on humor and self-mockery.

DEPARTMENTS 5 Backtalk 6 Triangulator 8 News 15 Food 16 Music 20 Arts & Culture 26 What to Do This Week 29 Music Calendar 33 Arts & Culture Calendar

Betty Brandt Williamson has fought a Wake County landfill’s expansion plans (see page 8).

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

On the cover: DESIGN BY SHAN STUMPF

INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 3

Raleigh Durham | Chapel Hill

PUBLISHER Susan Harper EDITORIAL

EDITOR IN CHIEF Jeffrey C. Billman MANAGING EDITOR FOR ARTS+CULTURE Brian Howe DESIGN DIRECTOR Shan Stumpf NEWS EDITOR Ken Fine STAFF WRITERS Thomas Goldsmith,

Erica Hellerstein, Sarah Willets

MUSIC EDITOR Allison Hussey ASSOCIATE ARTS+COPY EDITOR David Klein FOOD EDITOR Victoria Bouloubasis LISTINGS COORDINATOR Kate Thompson THEATER AND DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods RESTAURANT CRITIC Emma Laperruque STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Alex Boerner, Ben McKeown CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS

Drew Adamek, Elizabeth Bracy, Timothy Bracy, Spencer Griffith, Corbie Hill, Jill Warren Lucas, Sayaka Matsuoka, Glenn McDonald, Michaela Dwyer, Neil Morris, Angela Perez, Hannah Pitstick, Bryan C. Reed, V. Cullum Rogers, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Zack Smith, Chris Vitiello, Patrick Wall, Baynard Woods INTERNS Megan Howard, Nijah McKinney, Noah Rawlings

PRODUCTION+DESIGN

PRODUCTION MANAGER Christopher Williams GRAPHIC DESIGNER Steve Oliva

OPERATIONS

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backtalk

Side Eyes Cydni Patterson read Michaela Dwyer’s assessment of the Durham Independent Dance Artists’ recent bookings—specifically her twoand-a-half-star review of Alyssa Noble and Allie Pfeffer’s What You Want—and, “with all the side eyes that I can muster,” offers this response: “I realized that the reviewer must not have seen the same show. They expertly displayed and dissected the burden of balancing the soul-edifying experience of creating and expressing yourself and the occasionally soul-crushing responsibility to generate revenue to fund these creative pursuits and basic living necessities.

“I do not know the background of the initial reviewer, but I definitely have some concerns with their review. There was not a lot of space given to the beauty behind all of the nuances of their performance. The flow of the performance spoke to the hard work and discipline of the entire cast. The function of art, and arguably life, is to be able to communicate your perspective to an audience. I was the audience member who did not have a lot of experience with that particular performance art, but the core themes of that performance resonated with me. I understood what was being said, without there needing to be a lot of dialogue.

“As for the A word [‘appropriative’] that was arbitrarily thrown in that review, girl bye. I am a black woman. I’ve seen my aesthetic, mannerisms, and experiences be used as a reason to denigrate my value and then celebrated when they are mimicked by others. This was not a Pepsi-quality, boxer-braid-style performance. This was a well-thought-out and welcoming performance by artists who utilized their body as a medium, in a field that is not super-inclusive to a lot of us other’d folks. No shade, no tea, but anyone who has to question the decision to dance seductively with a broom, whilst listening to Usher, just does not have the range to make the judgments that were made in this review. The way that the appropriation comment was so casually used was very reflective of how folks of color have

constantly been treated by society. We are not a prop to be used for your personal gain. Do not use us to throw shade at them.

“The whole point of the performance was to highlight the weight of living out two warring realities. The ability to speak the language of a society that was built off of our exploitation, while maintaining the sequined-lined joy, glitter, and glam of staying true to our authentic selves, is a prerequisite to surviving and thriving in a black body. That fluency comes at a cost, and one of the expenses is the time that I could possibly have for anyone using a struggle of my community and other communities of color to throw unprovoked salt. Zero percent of me is here for that.

Try again.”

Brannon White, meanwhile, read our coverage on how beer and wine wholesalers gave more than $53,000 to lawmakers and were able to successfully kill an effort to allow breweries to selfdistribute more of their product. He was not amused: “And this is why we have the government we do. Money, plain and simple, buys votes. If you give enough of it, you can get whatever you want. That’s why there should be term limits and time-gap requirements between serving in an elected seat and becoming a lobbyist.”

Finally, commenter Barbara 2 objects to the Durham City Council’s plans, which we first reported last week, to offer zero-interest loans to some homeowners whose property taxes have risen because of city revitalization projects: “Since when is it the government’s responsibility to loan money for people to pay their taxes (which the government determines)?

Can’t everyone get a loan to pay their taxes, or are certain populations cherry-picked? Who is going to get taxed higher in order to pay for these loans? I think we all know: the other taxpayers. Where’s the ‘equality’?”

“We are not a prop to be used for your personal gain.”

Want to see your name in bold? Email us at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our Facebook page or indyweek.com, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek.

INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 5

triangulator ANATOMY

FAILURE ( Trump’s First Hundred Days ) of

CAVERNOUS HOLE WHERE HIS HEART SHOULD BE: Trump has backed

massive tax cuts for the wealthy while seeking cuts to Medicaid and HUD (potentially including Meals on Wheels); signed executive orders targeted refugees, specifically those from Syria; and cracked down on immigrant communities.

THUMBS: Trump tweeted 518 times, 11 of which were deleted, according to Politico. His last tweet of the first hundred days: “Mainstream (FAKE) media refuses to state our long list of achievements, including 28 legislative signings, strong borders & great optimism!” His most used hashtag, according to Axios: #MAGA. The most frequently used hashtag describing his first hundred days: #100daysofshame.

HANDS: Trump signed 32 executive orders and 28 bills into law. About half of those laws rolled back Obama-era regulations, but none was a major piece of legislation. Of the 10 legislative promises Trump made in his 100-day contract during the campaign, only one—the failed Obamacare replacement—has been introduced in Congress.

Graphic by Shan Stumpf

6 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

BRAIN:

“I thought it would be easier,” President Donald J. Trump said on Day 98. On Day 100, his approval rating was 42 percent, according to Gallup, the lowest mark at this juncture in the history of polling.

MOUTH: Trump made 488 false or misleading statements, according to The Washington Post’s fact checker.

EARS: Trump’s advisers include or have included: Stephen Bannon, the former CEO of the alt-right website Breitbart; Stephen Miller, a Duke alum who palled around with white supremacist Richard Spencer; Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a racist who lied under oath about his contacts with Russia; Michael Flynn, who resigned as national security adviser amid a scandal over his contacts with Russia; and Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism aide and former Breitbart editor with ties to a far-right, anti-Semitic Hungarian group.

SPINE: According to Politifact, Trump has flip-

flopped on whether NATO was obsolete; on whether he’d have time to golf as president; on whether he’d label China a currency manipulator; on whether he’d tear up the Iran deal; on whether he’d release White House visitor logs; on whether he’d attack Syria; on whether he likes the Export-Import Bank; on making cuts to Medicaid, which he now favors; and on “draining the swamp,” which he filled with the billionaires, donors, and former politicos he once decried.

LEGS: States visited: 11 (none west of the

Mississippi). Foreign countries visited: 0. Weekend trips to Mar-a-Lago: 7. Days spent at a Trump property: 31. Golf outings: 19.

FEET: Trump has trampled both norms and (quite likely) the Constitution’s foreign emoluments clause, refusing to divest his business interests and also using his office and the taxpayer’s dime to advertise his properties. Because Trump has refused to disclose his tax returns, we don’t even know the full extent of his conflicts of interest.

+GOOD FAITH

Wake County commissioners called out Chapel Hill developer Daniel Eller Monday for his continuing push to evict residents from his Forest Hills Apartments in Garner. In addition, all seven commissioners promised to personally spend time helping the low-income residents find new homes.

“If the landlord is listening, I advise him strongly not to start proceedings,” Commissioner John Burns said at Monday’s board meeting.

Residents of the complex are again in turmoil after Eller posted notices last week indicating that they had to vacate

by April 30 or face eviction—an apparent turnaround from an agreement announced by Wake officials last month, in which Eller agreed to let the residents stay on until June.

Officials and advocates started asking questions in March, when Eller first told Forest Hills residents they’d have to leave

by April 1 or pay market rents that were many times the subsidized rents most pay.

After an outcry, Eller backed down, telling Wake County commission chairman Sig Hutchinson that residents could stay until June 15 at subsidized rates.

The notices he sent to residents last week made no mention of that extension, however.

Eller maintains that his company has acted in good faith and that plans haven’t changed. “We have gone out of our way to be reasonable and accommodating, but we have a fiduciary responsibility to pursue

the course that best protects our interests in the property, including our legal right to regain possession of the apartment units,” Eller told the INDY in an email Thursday.

However, in an email to Wake officials, Eller wrote that those who had been told to leave by April 30 would reach the end of their leases on that date and would not be allowed to make further payments. Those who stayed without paying would see their legal status change and would become eligible for eviction. Residents who spoke during Monday’s public hearing—some shedding tears of frustration—said the complex is now refusing to accept rent.

“This notice is sneaky, dirty, and underhanded, and it shouldn’t have happened,” says community activist Octavia Rainey.

+THE MAYOR & THE DALAI LAMA

If all goes to plan, Madame Mayor will deliver Raleigh’s greetings to His Holiness in mid-May, along with an invitation.

That is, Mayor Nancy McFarlane has booked a trip to India, at her expense, and will bring the Dalai Lama the many dozens of prayer flags that people inscribed Sunday.

A low-key afternoon event at the budding Oak City nexus of Dix Park was organized

by McFarlane (courting the be-here-now vote in this fall’s election?), along with Raleigh Denim founders Sarah Yarborough and Victor Lytvinenko and Bida Manda co-owner Vansana Nolintha. “We really do hope that he will come and visit us,” said

McFarlane, who has invited the Dalai Lama for a 2018 visit.

The trip to Dharamsala won’t be the first meeting for McFarlane, who encountered the Dalai Lama at an event in Kentucky.

Protocol required that she not address him but only stand nearby and await a reaction.

“All of a sudden he grabbed my hand and said, ‘Let’s get a picture,’” she recalled.

Last year, a Raleigh group called the Dalai Lama Initiative Committee, including McFarlane, came together to bring the leader of the world’s Tibetan Buddhists to town. Initial response to the invitation was positive, according to the city’s press office.

+RIP, BINKER

Few reporters in North Carolina have the gravitas of Mark Binker, who covered state government for WRAL for five years before his recent move to The News & Observer’s N.C. Insider newsletter. Binker, who died suddenly Saturday at the way-too-damnyoung age of forty-three, was a dean of the state press corps—smart, dogged, fair, and universally respected. He was the best of us. There will be a service at the Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh at three p.m. on May 12. If you’d like to support the wife and two sons he leaves behind, a YouCaring fundraising page (bit.ly/2oTwmC4) has been set up.

As of Tuesday morning, 171 supporters have raised nearly $11,000. triangulator@indyweek.com

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

This week’s report by Jeffrey C. Billman and Thomas Goldsmith.

PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS

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indynews Cease and Desist?

FOR YEARS, BETTY BRANDT WILLIAMSON HAS BEEN FIGHTING A LANDFILL’S EXPANSION PLANS. NOW THE LANDFILL IS THREATENING TO SUE HER INTO SHUTTING UP.

BY THOMAS GOLDSMITH

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

T

Your Week.

Every Wednesday. indyweek.com 8 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

he owner of the Shotwell Landfill in southeastern Wake County really, really wants Betty Brandt Williamson to shut up. In fact, David W. King Jr. so badly wants Williamson to stop complaining to county officials about his long-controversial dump that his lawyer, from one of North Carolina’s most influential law firms, recently sent her a letter that insists, “This has to stop”—or else.

The April 10 letter, from Poyner Spruill partner Keith Johnson, was sent to Williamson, a landfill neighbor, via certified mail and copied to King, two state environmental regulators, and three Wake County environmental and planning officials.

“While you certainly have the right to communicate with such authorities,” Johnson wrote, “you do not have the legal right to continue to make false statements and to

present false information to them or anyone else about Shotwell’s operations or Mr. King. Your communication of false or misleading information is in fact actionable.”

In legalese, “actionable” means Shotwell is claiming a basis to sue Williamson for voicing her concerns about the landfill to the local government. At least one other area landowner, who asked not to be named, also received a threatening letter from Poyner Spruill.

King, who bought the landfill in 2005, has maintained that he’s made every effort to comply with regulations and to reach out to neighbors of the landfill, which was founded by a different owner in 2000. That’s the same year that scenic nearby land near the intersection of Mial Plantation and Smithfield roads, with several buildings that date from the nineteenth century, was placed on

the National Register of Historic Places.

In the years since, subdivisions have dotted the countryside not far from the Johnston County line, and Shotwell has acquired a wealth of new neighbors. Also during those years, Shotwell has repeatedly approached the Wake County Board of Commissioners to request that its agreement with the county be amended to include more land and to accept more kinds of waste.

Williamson, along with dozens of neighbors, has addressed the county commission about at least two of those requests, in 2011 and 2016. In both cases, the panel denied Shotwell the chance to expand its coverage area, and on one of those occasions, the types of waste it can receive. Speakers at the public hearings reported smells arising from the dump, waste seepage into nearby

creeks, traffic confronting big trucks on narrow Smithfield Road, and inadequate coverage by a berm designed to shield the landfill from view.

In addition, commissioners discovered in 2011 that Shotwell was separately seeking a state permit to accept industrial waste, after then-Shotwell attorney David York had told commissioners that he wasn’t asking them for a change in the waste stream.

(York said later he didn’t intend to mislead the commissioners.) During a May 2, 2011, meeting, then-commissioner Joe Bryan referred to Williamson’s efforts as a “David and Goliath” conflict.

Shotwell has received frequent visits from state regulators throughout its history, many prompted by reports from neighbors. Several years of state reports were summed up in a 2014 overview by the engineering firm Smith Gardner Inc.: “Beginning in 2011, Shotwell Landfill received warnings and 11 cited notices of violations to date.” The report details 2011 and 2012 violations for receiving unacceptable waste, 2013 violations for site conditions, and a 2014 notice of violation for problems including seepage into a stormwater ditch.

A March complaint from Williamson, cited in the Poyner Spruill letter, concerned the presence of a dump truck at property King owns next to the landfill—raising the possibilities of unauthorized unloading at the facility and a zoning violation. The state investigated the complaints and found that, while the truck was indeed there, there was no basis for violations.

Williamson hired Raleigh lawyer Ed Gaskins after receiving the Poyner Spruill letter.

“Ms. Williamson will continue to report to the regulatory authorities suspected violations of the terms and conditions imposed on the operation of the landfill as appropriate to her civic duty as a nearby landowner and her right under the First Amendment,” Gaskins writes in an email.

“We have responded privately to the letter from counsel for the landfill to that effect.”

In an interview, Gaskins makes the case that state and local regulators benefit from having citizens point out potential violations. Even if the person making a complaint submits information that doesn’t pan out, that citizen is protected from litigation, he argues. “For someone who has legitimate interest in a topic, there is protection for that person even if what they think has happened is not accurate,” Gaskins says.

Per Gaskins’s advice, Williamson declined to comment.

Johnson also declined to comment or to make King available for an interview. “We’ll let the letter speak for itself,” Johnson said

last week.

UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Victor B. Flatt, the codirector of UNC’s Center for Climate, Energy, Environment, and Economics, reviewed Johnson’s letter for the INDY. To Flatt, the letter is an example of a SLAPP, or a “strategic lawsuit against public participation.” A term coined in the 1990s, SLAPP describes a means, typically used by larger businesses, of threatening people who question their operations in public forums. Often the threat of a lawsuit is enough to stop the speech when the citizen cannot afford legal representation against a company with deep pockets.

“Silencing citizen complaints and protest is the whole purpose,” Flatt says. “The letter received by Ms. Williamson is the prototypical SLAPP suit.”

The age-old practice of trying to intimidate people for speaking out has become so prevalent in recent decades that jurisdictions including California, Texas, and Washington, D.C., have strong anti-SLAPP laws, which create a higher bar for bringing suit in these kinds of case and can result in defendants recovering legal fees. North Carolina does not have an anti-SLAPP law.

“Generally speaking, this is a tactic that people use to get people to shut up and go away,” says Raleigh lawyer Hugh Stevens, a First Amendment expert who has represented The News & Observer, the INDY, and other news organizations. “If [Williamson] was acting in good faith, she should be OK.” The Poyner Spruill letter maintains that Williamson’s complaints to the state and county have put unnecessary strain on regulators who have had to respond to “false or misleading information.”

A Wake County environmental manager, however, says that Williamson’s communications have not been disruptive, because most landfill regulations fall under state law.

Meanwhile, Jamie Kritzer, a spokesman for the state Division of Environmental Quality, says that Williamson’s repeated complaints, while sometimes bearing fruit, have often repeated earlier contentions and have sometimes drawn resources away from other areas requiring attention. In the big picture, though, DEQ welcomes additional sets of eyes, or additional noses, to help regulators detect environmental problems.

“I want people to understand that, as regulators, we recognize the value of citizen involvement and citizens that are active in their community,” Kritzer says. “We don’t ever want to discourage anyone from bringing us a complaint. We just encourage them to bring us good, factual information to back it up.” tgoldsmith@indyweek.com

final round of voting open now!

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10 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

L

ast Thursday night—11:59 p.m. on April 27, to be precise—marked the legislature’s crossover deadline, an odd, decades-old tradition that every two years incites self-inflicted chaos on North Carolina’s House and Senate. Crossover is the point at which bills must pass one chamber or the other in order to remain viable for the remainder of the legislative session. As of last Thursday, more than fourteen hundred bills had been filed since the General Assembly convened in January, though many of them never saw the light of day.

Wednesday and Thursday saw a marathon of hearings that ran well into the evening. Several significant pieces of legislation were rammed through at breakneck speed, often with very little discussion and sometimes with votes changed after the fact, because politicians didn’t realize what they were voting for.

With the dust settled, the INDY has identified eleven bills that beat the deadline and are worth keeping a close eye on. If they make it into state statute, they’ll have the potential to affect immigrants, minorities, the environment, the free press, and more.

!

R E V O S S O CR OLITICS— P A IN L O R A C H EK IN NORT E W ION TO T T S N IE E Z T A T R A C Y A P THE O NEED T U O Y S L IL B N E V AND ELE OWARD , A N D M EG A N H ICA HEL

BY KEN FINE , ER

LERSTEIN

HOUSE BILL 330: CivPro/Qualified Immunity for Auto Accident SPONSORS: Justin Burr (R-Montgomery, Stanly), Chris Millis (R-Onslow, Pender) STATUS: Passed the House April 27, 67–48 WHAT IT DOES: Exempts drivers who exercise care when they strike protesters who are blocking traffic on a public road or highway from financial liability.

WHY IT MATTERS: Imagine Martin Luther King Jr. marching across a bridge in North Carolina and being hit by a car. Under HB 330—which came in response to the protests that engulfed Charlotte last year following the police shooting of Keith Lamont Scott— the driver, if he could show that he exercised care, could not be sued for damages. The bill fails to address how intent would be determined. The passage of this bill comes after House Bill 249, which would have labeled some protesters “economic terrorists” and charged them with felonies, died in committee. But antiprotest legislation in the age of Trump isn’t just a North Carolina thing. At INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 11

least sixteen other states have entertained similar legislation designed to discourage people from taking to the streets.

SENATE BILL 343: Increase Teacher Supplement/Electronic Notice SPONSORS: Trudy Wade (R-Guilford), Wesley Meredith (R-Cumberland), Dan Bishop (R-Mecklenburg) STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 25, 30–19 WHAT IT DOES: Allows governments to post public notices online instead of in newspapers.

WHY IT MATTERS: What’s the big deal?

Let city and county governments save some cash. There’s just one problem. Those notices bring much-needed revenue to smalltown newspapers, so what’s to stop a city or county government from holding that potential advertising revenue over the heads of publishers and pulling the money should watchdog journalism appear in their respective pages? According to the Salisbury Post, cosponsor Senator Andrew Brock of Mocksville responded to criticism of the bill by the N.C. Press Association and others by saying, “We used to have a town crier that would stand on the corner and shout public notices.

There wasn’t much outcry when the newspapers put him out of business.” Looks like Brock wants to party like it’s 1909.

HOUSE BILL 335: Vacancies/NC Sup Ct/Ct of App/Superior Ct/DAs SPONSORS: Justin Burr (R-Montgomery, Stanly), Kyle Hall (R-Rockingham, Stokes), Jason Saine (R-Lincoln), Dana Bumgardner (R-Gaston) STATUS: Passed the House on April 26, 70–48 WHAT IT DOES: Limits the governor’s power to appoint judges.

WHY IT MATTERS: The governor—in this case, the sponsors’ political foe, Roy Cooper—could still appoint judicial replacements for the state Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals; however, those appointments would have to be selected from a list of three candidates recommended by an executive committee of the political party with which the vacating member was affiliated when elected.

Let’s break this down. If the vacating member was, say, a Republican, the executive committee would be three Republicans, thus ending the idea that to the victor go the spoils. Or in this case, the idea that the people who voted for a governor deserve to have judicial vacancies filled by that governor.

HOUSE BILL 351: Utilities/Rate Base/Fair Value Determination SPONSORS: Sam Watford (R-Davidson), 12 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

Jeff Collins (R-Franklin, Nash) STATUS: Passed the House on April 26, 89–30 WHAT IT DOES: Authorizes water and wastewater public utilities to use fair-market value when determining rates WHY IT MATTERS: The bill would allow municipalities to sell their water systems to private companies for a profit, leaving customers to pick up the tab through increased utility rates. Generally, municipalities sell their water systems to a private company because they cannot afford to update the infrastructure required for safe drinking water.

Yet private companies are notorious for not taking on the upkeep, either. In addition to incentivizing privatization for municipalities, the bill establishes that the fair value at which the municipality sells must be determined by two appraisers, one of which is hired by the municipality.

SENATE BILL 486: Uniform Voting Hours Act SPONSORS: Andrew Brock (R-Davie, Iredell,

Rowan), Warren Daniel (R-Burke, Cleveland) STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 26, 34–15 WHAT IT DOES: Voting hours can only be extended at one precinct if they are extended at all precincts.

WHY IT MATTERS: SB 486 would essentially prevent the state and county boards of elections, as well as state courts, from extending voting hours in a particular precinct for any reason unless voting hours are extended for every precinct statewide. Think about that for a second. It’s an illogical solution to a problem that already has a logical one, which is extending voting hours on a case-bycase basis. It basically means that if Durham County, for example, experiences technological malfunctions during its next election (as was the case in 2016), the precinct experiencing those problems would be prevented from extending its hours unless hours are extended at every precinct in the state.

HOUSE BILL 496: Fair and Nonpartisan Ballot Placement SPONSOR: Bert Jones (R-Caswell, Rockingham) STATUS: Passed the House on April 25, 84–24 WHAT IT DOES: Changes the order in which political candidates are listed on election ballots.

WHY IT MATTERS: The bill would reorganize the order in which political candidates are listed on North Carolina’s ballots, putting candidates in alphabetical or reverse-alphabetical order rather than by the incumbent governor’s political party. It goes without saying that this bill only came about after

Democratic governor Roy Cooper eked out a win over Republican Pat McCrory in November. With a Democrat at the wheel, no way are Republicans going to let his candidates be listed first—which is where candidates in low-profile elections want to be.

SENATE BILL 656: Electoral Freedom Act of

2017

SPONSOR: Andrew Brock (R-Davie, Iredell,

Rowan)

STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 26,

49-0

WHAT IT DOES: Changes the number of signatures required to form a new political party WHY IT MATTERS: For once, this feels like a win for all of us. Want to start a new political party? Want to make it easier to get an independent on the ballot in North Carolina, a state that has traditionally been unkind to third parties? This bill would get that done.

HOUSE BILL 527: Restore/Preserve Campus

Free Speech

SPONSORS: Chris Millis (R-Onslow, Pender), Jonathan Jordan (R-Ashe, Watauga) STATUS: Passed the House on April 26, 88-32 WHAT IT DOES: Requires UNC schools to punish protesters who disrupt public events or interfere with somebody else exercising free speech.

WHY IT MATTERS: This bill is, ironically, an attempt to limit free expression on campuses by arguing on behalf of “free speech.” Coming in response to protests against the UNC Board of Governors, the bill would require all public universities to punish anyone who “interferes with the protected free expression rights of others”—meaning protesters or hecklers. Under the law, the board of governors would have the discretion to determine what exactly is “disruptive” and the schools would be required to teach freshman about free speech policies during orientation.

SENATE BILL 145: Government Immigration

Compliance

SPONSORS: Norman Sanderson (R-Carteret, Craven, Pamlico) STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 26, 34-14 WHAT IT DOES: Prohibits UNC universities from becoming “sanctuaries” for undocumented immigrants and strips funding from local governments that identify as sanctuary cities.

WHY IT MATTERS: Following in the footsteps of President Trump, the state Senate seeks to withhold funding from local governments that defy state immigration policies, especially the ban on sanctuary cities. Listing the punitive measures as “incentives to comply,” the

bill denounces any identification document that has not been authorized by the General Assembly. Local governments are not allowed to accept any such document as proof of identity or residency. If they do, the General Assembly and attorney general would then be able to leverage funding to force local governments to comply. (This could include taxes from natural gases and scrap tire disposal, beer and wine taxes, telecommunication taxes, and city street funding.) According to The News & Observer, Wake County could potentially lose $3.9 million if it violated the 2015 ban on sanctuary cities. Here’s the kicker: any person can submit a complaint to the attorney general about their local government violating these laws.

SENATE BILL 531: School Boards Can’t Sue

Counties

SPONSORS: Tommy Tucker (R-Union), Bill Rabon (R-Bladen, Brunswick, New Hanover, Pender) STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 26, 37–11 WHAT IT DOES: Repeals the statutory authority for a local board of education to sue county commissioners for insufficient funding.

WHY IT MATTERS: Under North Carolina law, local school boards have no taxing authority; instead they get their money from county commissions. Right now, if school boards feel the counties are overly stingy, they can take them to court. That’s happened four times since 2009, according to WRAL. But if SB 531 passes, it won’t happen again. Under this bill, if a local school board determines it cannot function on the amount of money allocated by county commissioners, the board will simply be out of luck.

SENATE BILL 434: Amend Environmental

Laws

SPONSORS: Norman Sanderson (R-Carteret, Craven, Pamlico), Bill Cook (R-Beaufort, Hyde, Gates, Camden, Currituck, Dare, Pasquotank, Perquimans) STATUS: Passed the Senate on April 24, 31-17 WHAT IT DOES: Among other things, it repeals the ban of plastic bags in the Outer Banks.

WHY IT MATTERS: In 2009, in an effort to fight littering that could be hazardous to wildlife, the Outer Banks passed a ban on plastic bags. SB 434 seeks to repeal it. Instead of a ban, this bill’s proponents contend that a voluntary recycling program will reduce plastic bag pollution just as effectively. Many local businesses in OBX have opposed the bill, saying it would hurt tourism and marine life. backtalk@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 13

Adults with ADHD Do you experience difficulties with the following?

Making careless mistakes Difficulty completing work Disorganization Forgetfulness Restlessness Impatience

final round of voting open now!

Voting open through May 7!

Vote for your favorite finalists!

Healthy adults aged 18 to 45 may be eligible for a study on how ADHD medication affects behavior.

Best Of Winners announced in our June 7th issue

Compensation is available.

Call for more information: (919) 684-7601

WANT ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR BUSINESS? Please contact your INDY Week representative or advertising@indyweek.com

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indyfood

al nd ng Good for the Goose THE GOLDEN GOOSE FOOD TRUCK SERVES AUTHENTIC AMERICAN-CHINESE FOOD, NOT INAUTHENTIC CHINESE FOOD w!

THE GOLDEN GOOSE

703 Rigsbee Avenue, Durham 5:30–midnight Wed.–Sun. 919-972-8659 www.goldengoosedurham.com

BY EMMA LAPERRUQUE

ay 7! ists!

In the Hunan province of China you’ll find General Tso’s museum, General Tso’s hotel, General Tso’s elementary school, even General Tso’s liquor. But there’s no General Tso’s chicken. That sticky-sweet, unced deep-fried dish that most Americans associate with Chinese food? It’s not—well, not ue really—Chinese food.

TION ON And, to the proprietor of the Golden SINESS? Goose food truck, that’s the whole point.

Executive chef Isaac Deboer started the e or venture last July as a pop-up, hosted by om Picnic. The truck was based in Greensboro its infancy, where general manager com during Freddie Gentilie lived at the time, before settling in Durham in February.

Deboer hopes that the truck will serve as a springboard for an eventual brickand-mortar, where the menu can expand past the practical limitations of their current kitchen. (The truck was originally designed to serve burgers, so it has no wok ranges.)

“The goose is a simple concept,” its website reads, “stemming from the idea that Chinese food has asserted itself as part of American cuisine.” Or, as the dictionary puts it, a golden goose is “a continuing source of profit that may be exhausted if misused.” Remember Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (the 1971 one, not the Johnny Depp one)? Veruca Salt gets greedy about Wonka’s golden geese (“I want it now!”), only to fall down a garbage chute that leads to a furnace.

In the easy interpretation, America is Veruca and Chinese food is the golden goose. American culture gluttonized Chinese culinary traditions and earned the “inauthentic” (read: bad) reputation that American-Chinese is often saddled with.

But that couldn’t be what the truck is getting at, right?

The other interpretation flips Veruca on her head: American-Chinese food isn’t inauthentic Chinese. It’s authentic American-Chinese, not a consolation prize, not second place. Rather, the cuisine’s acces-

The Golden Goose food truck’s dan dan noodles sibility, ubiquity, and popularity is all culinary gold.

If a fusion style lives somewhere long enough, it outgrows its parents’ home and finds its own place, sets its own rules, and eventually adopts its own recipe canon.

The Golden Goose’s concise menu embodies that concept. There are crab claw rangoons—deep-fried and cream cheese-filled, dreamy with a dead-cold IPA—stir-fried noodles, and chicken. Lots of chicken. Wings. “Strange Flavor Chicken”—that is, cold-poached, with a Sichuan dressing. Sesame, as expected. And, of course, General Tso’s. I order this first.

It’s a Friday night, breezy with starry skies. Surf Club, where the cayenne-colored truck parks on Wednesday through Sunday nights, is stretching at the seams, like pork-fried rice in a takeout box. There is beer drinking and bocce playing, rowdy groups of friends and whispery first dates.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

If businesses hinge on location, location, location, the Golden Goose doesn’t even have to try.

I’m told five minutes for my chicken, but it’s closer to fifteen before they track me down amid the crowd. In the meantime, I stare at the photo-illustrated menu, which pays playful homage to the original golden goose: the American-Chinese food takeout joint.

The General Tso’s stares back. The picture features craggy, crunchy chicken. Spicy, sweet sauce. It shimmers, even glows, hugging the dark meat’s nooks and crannies, kissing the broccoli florets, and surrounding the mound of white rice like a moat around a mountain.

Or, it doesn’t.

The General Tso’s I am served has no crag and no crunch. Its sauce is as thick as water. Its rice is dry, in an old-rice kind of way. And the $9 portion is so small—

six half-bite hunks—that I sideeye the dog wandering around the bar, wondering if he got to my dinner first. My friend and I bicker over our smacked cucumbers, half because they’re garlicky and good, half because we’re hungry.

But my fortune cookie offers some advice: “Four basic premises of writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, and humanity.” Taking that as a sign, I go back a week later to try the General Tso’s again. This time, the sauce is thicker and punchier, and my portion is precisely twice the size of the first one.

If the Golden Goose has a consistency, it is inconsistency. For nine dollars—the menu’s default price—you’ll either leave stuffed like an egg roll or head over to Pie Pushers for a second dinner.

If you’d rather the former, try the St. Paul sandwich. In this Missouri “classic,” egg foo yung is sandwiched between a white, squishy bun, piled with char siu pork shoulder, and smothered with spicy mayo. It’s the best thing that could happen to you when you’re drunk.

The glass noodles, with a coconut-y sauce and some sad, neglected tofu, are almost as hearty and filling. But you’ll spend as much time untangling the noodles as you will eating them.

Opt, instead, for the smaller dan dan noodles, a Sichuanese staple typically consisting of wheat noodles dressed with chili oil and black vinegar, topped with ground meat and sometimes vegetables.

The Golden Goose’s take features a fivespice twang and pickled mustard greens that, like a good hot sauce, wham-bam through the fat with a one-two punch of vinegar and heat.

It is this sort of shimmer that makes me think that the truck may stay gold after all. food@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 15

indymusic

BOMBADIL

Saturday, May 6, 8 p.m., $18–$20 The ArtsCenter, Carrboro www.artscenterlive.org

MIPSO

Saturday, May 6, 8 p.m., $18–$30, 6 and under free North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh www.ncartmuseum.org

Next Levels FROM BIG STAR TO RISING STARS, FIVE NEW RECORDS FIND TRIANGLE ARTISTS EXPLORING BROAD NEW TERRITORY

BOMBADIL

Fences Ramseur Records 3.5 stars In early 2015, Stuart Robinson, keyboardist, vocalist, and founding member of Durham folk-pop outfit Bombadil, left the band for a second time—and, it seems, for good.

But the band—now a trio of Daniel Michalak, James Phillips, and Stacy Harden— hasn’t been sweating it much. Instead, they've been focusing on creating Fences, a new LP that explores themes of moving on.

Opening number “What’s So Great About You,” is a quintessential breakup track, with the band asking, “What’s so great about you? Forget it, all that we’ve been through.”

Bombadil immediately doubles down in the next song, “Not Those Kind of People,” with lines like, “We’re not those kind of people, the ones that speak no evil” sung over mellow handclaps and twinkling piano. The gentle folk instrumentals and Michalak’s light voice barely mask the anger of the 16 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

lyrics on those introductory tracks. It’s clear the band was bitter during the songwriting process, but even without Robinson, Bombadil still sounds like itself.

On Fences, Bombadil turned away from self-production, instead enlisting veteran John Vanderslice, who’s worked with the likes of Spoon, the Mountain Goats, and Strand of Oaks. Having written and demoed the LP in Littleton, Massachusetts, in January 2016, the band recorded the final songs in the fall in San Francisco with Vanderslice at the helm. The final version of Fences is all first takes, and all of its songs are gleaming. That, too, was the result of Bombadil exploring new territory. The band called on friend Nasir Bhanpuri to analyze the old Bombadil catalog to figure out the band’s most successful songs and what audiences loved the best, using data from streaming platforms. Armed with that information, the band created a streamlined, cohesive folk-pop album, more stripped-down and quieter than 2015’s Hold On. It is, by design, peak Bombadil.

Despite its opening shots, Fences closes with a sunny outlook. On “Perfect,” Bombadil imagines what a future would look like within a new (although nonmusical) relationship, daydreaming about kids’ names and interior design. It’s the kind of conversation you have with best friends, predicting what life will look like down the road. “I can walk away if I have to,” Michalak assures on the record's final track, “No Snow in the Valley,” marking closure. But fortunately for Bombadil, it doesn’t look like they’ll have to. —Kat Harding

MIPSO

Coming Down the Mountain Self-released (4 stars) Considering that 2015’s Old Time Reverie set Mipso atop Billboard’s bluegrass chart and netted the band a performance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, the Chapel Hill quartet should be strapped in for a meteoric ascent fueled by its fourth album, Coming Down the Mountain. Where Reverie enriched Mipso’s relaxed folk-pop formula with instrumentation that reached beyond its string band origins, the record required attentive listening to reap the full rewards of hooks that unfolded slowly. Though Mipso remains a largely restrained outfit, Coming Down the Mountain’s diverse charms are immediately apparent, and Mipso delivers them with verve.

From the outset of Coming Down the Mountain, Mipso meshes lush textures with clever songwriting and effortless hooks.

The title track begins with steel guitar and a shuffle beat, laying the foundation for an alluring vocal and melody from fiddler Libby Rodenbough.

She has described the song's pastoral imagery as an allegory for checking out of,

then slowly rejoining society. Rodenbough wrote the song before last fall’s election, but it feels particularly relevant now. While Rodenbough was the band’s secret weapon on Reverie—her first album with Mipso as a full-time member of the band—her role has elevated to that of a show-stealing star here.

She wrote some of the album’s most intriguing tracks, including the arresting “Cry Like Somebody,” which offers a gorgeous pairing of Wurlitzer organ with mournful harmonies.

Even in more familiar territory, Mipso has simply grown better. “Hurt So Good” is a jaunty toe-tapper with killer four-part harmonies. Guitarist Joseph Terrell’s homespun lyricism portrays a bittersweet but ultimately ill-fated relationship as “a dozen kisses and a dozen licks” or “a slip-n-slide ride on a minefield.” Rodenbough’s fiddle and Jacob Sharp’s mandolin entwine with each other to score the wistful romanticism of “Train Down The Line,” accompanied by a clip-clop rhythm that appropriately suggests a locomotive as bassist Wood Robinson finds a rhythm section partner in drummer Dan Westerlund.

Mountain sees several guest appearances that add memorable details without taking away from the brilliance of what Mipso’s core quartet has accomplished with the help of producer Brad Cook. Sharp’s contrasting vocal turn on “Hallelujah” is highlighted by barely-there flourishes of electric guitar from Josh Oliver. Mandolin Orange’s Andrew Marlin similarly adds subtle accents of banjo on “My Burden with Me,” allowing the soft, sweet, three-part harmonies to shine.

Closing on a dark note, the haunting, eerie mood of “Water Runs Red” fits the album’s overall sense of cautious optimism. While Mountain is filled with tender revelations about home and growing older underscored with a slight sense of apprehension and regret, it also shows Mipso moving forward with confidence.

—Spencer Griffith

When OG Senpaiii simply sticks to a formula—a few ethereal samples and a drum loop repeated ad infinitum—the record flounders. But when he sticks his neck out for songs that are inventive, deliberate, and attentive to detail, he thrives, creating captivating soundscapes and headspaces all his own. —Noah Rawlings

OG SENPAIII

[Headspace] Raund Haus Records The opening three tracks on OG Senpaiii’s debut LP, [Headspace], are built by taking an ethereal melodic sample, reversing it, and overlaying it with a simple 4/4 drum loop. The approach works to pretty average ends: the songs establish a mellow foundation, but they aren't aren’t particularly captivating. Opening track “PEMDAS” would function as a nice, blissful-but-glitchy intro, but it wears out its welcome about halfway through. The next two numbers, composed of vast, swimmy samples oscillating between a small handful of notes, are never dynamic enough to demand much attention.

Fortunately, [Headspace]’s weak beginning feels more like a false start, yielding to progressively more interesting territory that explores a more disorienting and expansive musical realm. OG Senpaiii redeems himself with “Additup,” wherein a tinkly synth sample flutters beautifully alongside free-jazz cymbal hits, then melds into a mellow, handclap-driven groove with wind chime samples providing a wistful texture. It’s dreamy without being deadbeat, conveying dynamism without disruption.

“Joy ride the (space) whip” makes for an excellent complement, driven by a distorted drum riff that evolves wildly into what sounds like a new age religious tape, ornamented with goofy synths swirling in space over a punchy kick drum. The rest of the record follows en suite, taking unexpected turns, getting weirder, looser, and more daring by the second. “Imouttahere” is a fun, catchy tune based on rapid synth arpeggios, while closing track “Zoomin’” powers [Headspace] to an exciting finish with the most aggressive beats on the record.

SYLVAN ESSO

What Now Loma Vista Recordings In his 2007 book Love Is a Mixtape, rock critic Rob Sheffield explained why he considers the synth-pop duo to be his favorite musical pairing. To him, the classic form works as a symbiotic relationship. The shy producer, lurking in darkness behind the synth, is too reserved to sing songs himself. He needs the human flair of a larger-than-life vocalist, who in turn needs a “cerebro-electro henchman” to deliver sparkling sounds. Together, they electrify the audience and achieve stardom. Durham duo Sylvan Esso built its career on this approach. With the wry single debut of “Hey Mami” in 2013, Sylvan Esso emerged as a genre-bending folk-electro curiosity, odd and lyrically incisive and inextricably linked to each other’s talents.

Producer Nick Sanborn’s scruffy IDM beats proved a nice minimalist foil for vocalist and onetime Mountain Man member Amelia Meath’s wispy delivery. Together, they shot to national popularity, countless retail playlists, and engendered fevered anticipation for their second release. Yet as we also know, indie fame is famously fickle. They could have easily become a onealbum wonder, a “former buzz band” punch line. Fortunately, that isn’t what happened.

A better track-for-track album than the duo’s self-titled 2014 LP, What Now proves Sylvan Esso has plenty of charisma and interesting musical ideas left in the can. As always, the INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 17

music’s br subversio easily dig gle “Radio clocks in bouncy gl barbed ob good suc current a music lan song to tr it’s a smar Elsewh mentary t memories ode to the ionship, b cifically, M listening t ist Phil E In genera tronic sou quite reac moderate folky side van slow these son backgroun and Mea palettes, a a long, s

VARIO

Thank Y Big Sta Concor (4 star

Contendi gerous g rock trad more sin abandone First rele 18 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

and beautiful journey through the rapidly fracturing psyche of a young Alex Chilton. Originally tracked in 1974 but left to languish for years and relegated to piecemeal reissues, Third (alternatively known as Sister Lovers), largely junked the riotously infectious garage pop of the first two Big Star releases in favor of diaristic, slow-moving chamber folk so lovely and painful that it can be as difficult to listen to as it is impossible to turn off.

Despite, or possibly because of the album’s boundless influence, the recalcitrant Chilton never embraced Third during his lifetime, and the songs were largely left unperformed. Thank You, Friends: Big Star’s Third Live…And More is a remarkably successful effort to redress that shortfall, a lovingly rendered document recorded last year at the Alex Theater in Glendale, California. The live recording features a cast of Big Star-besotted heavy hitters, including Mike Mills, Jeff Tweedy, Ira Kaplan, and band leader Chris Stamey.

The first of the two-disc set features a well-chosen amalgam of pre-Third Big Star tunes, including Tweedy’s standout take on the deep-soul classic “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and a stunning reading of the timeless teen-yearning ballad “Thirteen” by the ascendant Trianglebased star Skylar Gudasz. Those familiar with the Big Star story will be gratified by the touching two-song tribute to Chilton’s band mate and sometime bete-noir, the late Chris Bell, which closes the concert’s first half on a note of stage-setting To advertise or featurepoignancy. a pet for adoption, It’s a credit to Stamey and his assemplease contact eroberts@indyweek.com blage that the second part of the program is not an uncomplicated listen. Third is a gorgeous album consisting of nearTo advertise orpain, feature pet ly unbearable psychic and a uncomfor adoption, please contact promising vocal performances like those by eroberts@indyweek.com Big Star drummer Jody Stephens on “Blue Moon” and Robyn Hitchcock on the art-damaged “Downs” pull no punches in representing the lacerating underbelly of Chilton’s vision. Still, in keeping with the celebratory nature of the occasion, album closer “Thank You Friends” reimagines the original’s bitVARIOUS ARTISTS ter sarcasm as an appropriately affirmThank You, Friends: ing ensemble piece, conferring the joy of Big Star’s Third Live…And More Chilton’s genius on a rapturous audience.

Concord Bicycle Music While Chilton himself may never have (4 stars) made peace with the haunted corridors of Third, this wondrous tribute finally Contending with legend is always a danbrings his tortured, humane vision to the gerous gambit, and few albums in the stage in a manner he would have surerock tradition possess a deeper lore or ly—if perhaps begrudgingly—appreciated. more singular pull then Big Star’s half—Timothy Bracy abandoned, fully astonishing third album. music@indyweek.com First released in 1978, it’s a harrowing

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music’s breezy sing-song aesthetic belies its subversion, cloaking acidic commentary in easily digestible pop nuggets. Take first single “Radio,” which, in classic Top 40 form, clocks in at a smooth 3:30. Under the song’s bouncy glitch-pop exterior, it seethes with barbed observations (“Now don’t you look good sucking American dick”) about our current attention economy and PR-driven music landscape. While it’s far from the first song to try the “woke” radio single conceit, it’s a smart, memorable attempt.

Elsewhere, What Now eschews social commentary to search for specific feelings and memories. “The Glow” is a twitchy, nostalgic ode to the pleasures of music and companionship, both publically and privately. Specifically, Meath recalls dreamy memories of listening to The Microphones, whose vocalist Phil Elverum is mentioned in the lyrics.

In general, What Now aims for a bigger electronic sound, and while Sylvan Esso never quite reaches gaudy big-room EDM, it’s a moderate turn away from the band’s floaty, folky side. There’s still some classic Sylvan slow jams, like “Rewind,” but some of these songs might be hard to play in the background of say, a coffee shop. Sanborn and Meath have expanded their creative palettes, and they look to be settling in for a long, steady ride. —David Ford Smith

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RECYCLE THIS PAPER

indyart

Ready and Able ARTS ACCESS FLIPS THE STANDARD LINE ON ARTISTS WITH DISABILITIES BY CELEBRATING THE ART, NOT THE DISABILITIES

BY KIM LAN GROUT

T

he title “A Series of Fortunate Events” seems obvious and kitschy. I hear it, I learn that it’s organized by people with disabilities, I see what they did there. Proud and disabled myself, I’m initially skeptical that the Arts Access showcase “celebrating disability” throughout May will be any different from all the other valiant attempts to evoke a sense of pride in and about a life not chosen, but merely tolerated, and sometimes hardly sustained.

I, too, am guilty of perpetrating “disability awareness,” efforts to let the world know who we really are and what disability really looks like. I know from experience that events like this tend to turn out as a lot of preaching to the disabled choir, and as an inspiration-porn gif for everybody else. As I prepare for my interview, I’m already wondering how to politely back out of attending any of the five events in the showcase, which begins with remarks

by North Carolina First Lady Kristin Cooper and includes an art exhibit, an authors’ panel, theater and music performances, and a documentary screening.

But then I meet Betsy Ludwig, executive director of Arts Access. For more than three decades, the Raleigh nonprofit has worked to make existing art and venues accessible to people with disabilities. The organization’s focus is not necessarily to change the built environment for people with mobility disabilities, but rather, to bring people with disabilities (PwDs) into the art world and accommodate their disabilities so they can enjoy the art.

Say a patron and her caregiving family want to attend a performance at DPAC but need seat assignments near a family restroom, not necessarily in the accessible seating area. Arts Access works with DPAC to make that happen. Should some20 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

Doug Kapp

PHOTO COURTESY OF ARTS ACCESS

one who is blind need audio description of an exhibit at a museum that doesn’t already provide it, Ludwig is the one to call.

A Series of Fortunate Events might sound like one of those events where people who live with disabilities are encouraged to “buck up, little campers,” while typically able communities around us get a chance to be “aware” of us and offer their guilty support. But, as Ludwig explains it, it’s not a celebration of disability, but rather a celebration of beautiful, impactful art made by folks with disabilities.

“It’s the art that drives me. We’re advocating for the arts,” Ludwig explains, spelling out a subtle but important difference.

The fortunate events we are encouraged to celebrate are not the obstacles overcome along our disability journeys; that’s a story I’ve heard and written too many times.

Rather, we celebrate the events and people

A SERIES OF FORTUNATE EVENTS

Thursday, May 4–Wednesday, May 31, $10–$40 Various venues, Raleigh www.fortunateevents.org

that lead a PwD to create good art, compelling content, and a marketable product.

It’s about the teachers, parents, siblings, and influential art and artists who led Doug Kapp to the stage, Chris Hendricks to a recording studio, and Kelly Bouldin Darmofal to author panels. As Kapp, one of the performers in the May 11 theater showcase at Raleigh Little Theatre, tells other PwDs who are hungry to create and experience but feel that their disabilities are roadblocks: “There’s a place for you.

The barriers are of your own making.”

Hendricks elaborates on how A Series of Fortunate Events flips the disabledartist narrative. “So often, the affliction or condition comes before the output,” he says. Many times, when someone who lives with a disability accomplishes something—anything—it elicits an entire cloying disability-awareness celebration. That act is old and tired.

“But the emphasis here is on the art,” Hendricks goes on, “and I think that makes us feel valued, taken more seriously as artists, because the art is placed in front of the affliction.”

Ludwig was careful to make this distinction when inviting organizations to sponsor, but that can be a hard sell. When “disability” and “art” occur in the same sentence, organizations are often inclined to view the pairing as charity.

But for Ludwig and the showcase’s artists, art is life, which is why she insists all the artists get paid for their work—a novel idea for many organizers and art patrons. Ludwig explains that these artists don’t need your support with their disabilities. They’re not participating in this series to make people “aware,” though, of course, the events will model ease of access and inclusive practices, contradicting any notions event planners might have that people with disabilities are high maintenance.

“That was the easiest part,” Ludwig says with a shrug. Now comes the hard part. “I hope the artists sell stuff. I hope they get exposure. And I hope that people with disabilities come away knowing that the arts are welcoming and are trying to include them. But if they don’t show up and ask [for accommodations], then [venues] will think it is not needed.” arts@indyweek.com

FORTUNATE EVENTS VIP KICKOFF RECEPTION

Thursday, May 4, 6–9 p.m.

Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh Sneak peak of Ultralight exhibit, meet-and-greet with the artists, comments from First Lady of North Carolina Kristin Cooper.

AUTHORS READING

Sunday, May 7, 2–4 p.m.

United Arts Council, Raleigh R.V. Kuser, Kelly Bouldin Darmofal, and Barton and Megan Cutter will discuss their books and what it means to write your own narrative as a person living with disabilities.

Moderated by Piedmont Laureate Mimi Herman.

HOUSE CONCERT

Thursday, May 11, 7–9 p.m.

The Paramount, Raleigh Castle Wild, featuring North Carolina native and singersongwriter Chris Hendricks and electronic producer Andre DiMuzio, performs in the home of local accessibility advocate Alex McArthur.

THEATER SHOWCASE

Monday, May 22, 7–9 p.m.

Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh Theater performances featuring artists with disabilities who range in age and performance style.

FILM SCREENING

Wednesday, May 31, 7–9 p.m.

The Cary Theater, Cary Tommy! The Dreams I Keep Inside Me, a documentary about adults with autism and the jazz world, directed by Rodrigo Dorfman.

Shelby Scattergood’s “Popcorn” (top) and Eduardo Lapetina’s “Searching for the music in us” (bottom) are on view in Ultralight at Visual Art Exchange.

INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 21

indystage

WOMEN AND WAR

Friday, May 5–Sunday, May 28 Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh www.raleighlittletheatre.org

Theater of War

A SERIES OF PLAYS AT RALEIGH LITTLE THEATRE CHALLENGES NARROW, OUTDATED IDEAS ABOUT WOMEN IN COMBAT

BY BYRON WOODS History remembers a number of women warriors beyond Joan of Arc. There’s Fu Hao, China’s first recorded female general in the thirteenth century BCE; Amage, who successfully defended Sarmatia eleven hundred years later; and Amanirenas, who stopped the Roman conquest of Kush.

But most stories of women in wartime have never been told. That’s partly because they traditionally unfolded on the home front, where women maintained domestic order when conflicts favored their armies, or became spoils of war—as chronicled in Euripides’ The Trojan Women and the Book of Deuteronomy—when conflicts did not.

Women’s roles in armed conflict have broadened dramatically over the last century.

Even before they were allowed to join groundcombat forces in 2016, thousands served in combat-support roles in Iraq and Afghanistan that put them directly in harm’s way.

Theater largely hasn’t caught up with them; most wartime dramas still focus on the men at the supposed tip of the spear. This prompted Raleigh Little Theatre to seek out three works for a “Women and War” series this month: plays about the experiences of women on the home front, women in the field, and one woman placed by technology in both at once.

Taken together, these three works challenge our ideas about where combat takes place and where it ends. They also show us that the spear of war has a thousand tips, some of them pointed at those who serve and the families who support them.

Many of the forty-six women who auditioned for the Vietnam-era drama A PIECE OF MY HEART (May 5–21) had military experience, according to director Mia Self.

Conversations with them have challenged the N.C. State University professor’s longheld assumptions about the military and the people who serve.

“It’s felt like conversations with artists,” Self says. “It’s not just a job for them; it’s a mission, an identity, and a commitment to bettering the world.” The ambivalence she 22 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

their voices,” Self says. Her first reading of the script left her in tears. “There’s no way I can do this,” she recalls thinking, before thinking again: "There's no way that I can't."

The viability of every military family rests on two questions. How do you enter a relationship knowing that you’re going to spend a lot of time missing and worrying about someone—and knowing they might not come home? And what happens when our government doesn’t keep its promises to families?

Documentary playwright Mike Wiley made DOWNRANGE: VOICES FROM THE HOMEFRONT (May 26–27) from a 2014 series of workshops with military spouses from Fort Bragg. As he read other plays on the subject, Wiley noticed that most of them dealt with things like A Piece of My Heart PHOTO COURTESY OF CURTIS BROWN PHOTOGRAPHY post-traumatic stress disorder or suicidal husbands. found in Shirley Lauro’s script, adapted from “They were mostly about the service mema book of interviews by Keith Walker, was ber, not the spouse,” Wiley says. borne out in the wartime accounts Self elicHe learned how notice of a coming ited from her cast. deployment, or the lack thereof, affects fam“Instead of unquestioning commitment, ily relationships, and what happens on the there’s a sense of internal conflict about the day the soldier leaves, the day after, and over purpose of war,” she says. “The intent is the months that follow. As Wiley and colto lift everybody up, make the best choices leagues Lynden Harris and Kathryn Hunterand do the most good in the world. But then Williams spoke with the spouses of active, you’re confronted with day-to-day actions retired, and deceased soldiers and the partthat feel counter to that mission, and that ners of wounded veterans, an unusually interact with public policy and their position nuanced portrait came into view. as peacemakers.”

“Their everyday lives aren’t a soap opera,” The play’s six women—nurses, officers, Wiley says of military spouses. “There are and a USO entertainer—go to extremes in so many depictions out there that are so far their attempts to cope with combat serfrom the truth.” vice. “There’s a profound vulnerability in In a computerized age, work isn’t all that

can follow you home. War can, too. Michelle Murray Wells wanted to restage her solo production of GROUNDED (May 27–28), about a female fighter pilot dealing with new psychological pressures after a pregnancy shifts her to the drone squad, because she refused to be grounded herself.

She’d been busier than usual in recent months, finding a new venue for Sonorous Road Productions, starting renovations and a Kickstarter campaign to fund them, and juggling classes and productions with the company's managing director (and her husband), Josh, at their present building on Oberlin Road—all while completing the last trimester of her own pregnancy.

But recovering from childbirth has taken longer than she expected, and she’s still not sure how she’ll execute the calisthenics demanded of the Air Force fighter pilot she’s played twice before, three weeks from now. But, given her ties to George Brandt’s psychological drama, there was no saying no.

“I’ve seen firsthand how women are affected by the military,” Murray Wells says.

“When Josh deployed to Iraq, it was a really hard year in my life. I wanted him to be there with me, but suddenly I had to share him with the rest of the country.” So she got involved and, as Josh’s battalion’s Family Readiness Coordinator, received a Commander’s Award for Civilian Service for organizing volunteers to help families meet unexpected challenges during deployment.

The protagonist in Grounded confronts some of the challenges explored in the other two productions. After her identity as a fighter pilot is taken from her, the coping mechanisms she uses to deal with marathon drone-flight missions slowly begin to fail.

Her family’s well-being is threatened as the boundaries of combat grow blurred.

That fact will not surprise the women who’ve long encountered war, either by proxy or up close. But, with an increasing number of them in combat, it’s high time the rest of us got the news. bwoods@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 23

indyscreen

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 HHHH Opening Friday, May 5

Watch This Space

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2 DELIVERS OEDIPAL DRAMA AND SPACEFARING MAYHEM WITH KNOWING PANACHE

BY BRIAN HOWE Guardians of the Galaxy was a clattery rocket zipping around on a tank full of silly, self-aware, spacefaring fun. Hurling likable every-bro Chris Pratt into the midst of an alien super-team alongside a murderous raccoon and a talking tree, the movie was a grand but breezy respite from ever more leaden superhero blockbusters. With as much zest in the script as in the visual effects, its loving mockery—of superhero movies, of sci-fi tropes, of itself—was so well pitched that “more of the same” didn’t sound like a bad deal.

That’s what we get in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, where the plot is a little more cumbersome but the jokes have even more gusto, as the budding franchise settles into its role as the soulfully meta annex of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The cheekiness begins in the opening sequence. As a garishly expensive CGImonster battle unfolds, the camera loses interest and zooms in on a tree-like being with a three-word vocabulary (“I am Groot!”) as he pratfalls on the edge of the battlefield. Groot was regressed to a sapling at the end of the last movie, and he provides an unabashed squee-factor here—this adorable baby mascot bumbling through panoramic dangers, adding a microcosmic vantage to the movie’s sweeping ones.

After changing from thieves to galaxy defenders in the first movie, the Guardians are established under the leadership of half-Earthling Peter Quill (Pratt), if not entirely reformed. Rocket, the raccoonlike creature, steals some batteries from a eugenically perfected, gold-skinned race called the Sovereign and all hell breaks loose. But the ensuing ruckus is spindled by a more intimate story.

We know from the first movie that Quill’s dad was a spaceman who abandoned him and his Earth mom, but nothing more.

When that suddenly changes, Quill is a little skeptical, as you might be if your longlost dad showed up claiming to be a living planet called Ego who made himself a body 24 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

If Peter Quill's father is Ego, then Rocket Racoon is Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2's id. to experience humanity. (That body is Kurt Russell, who can somehow still play young Kurt Russell in flashbacks.)

The astropolitical conflicts and factions that buffet our heroes through space are byzantine and remote, but the emotional stakes are clear and present. There’s Quill’s repressed romance with Gamora, a sort of reformed alien-kung fu assassin; Gamora’s unbalanced rivalry with her insane cyborg sister, Nebula; and, of course, Quill’s paternity problems.

Ego convinces Quill that their separation is the fault of Yondu, the space pirate who sort of enslaved and sort of raised him, and they start to bond. Father teaches son how to shape raw energy into a ball with his hands and they play catch. (Damn, and I thought it was cool when my dad taught me woodburning.) This was a missed opportunity to use Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle.” The era and tone would be spot on, because the film reprises the device of scor-

ing cosmic battles with an “Awesome Mix” heavy on minor seventies pop from Quill’s childhood Walkman. Of course it does—the last one somehow caused a compilation including Rupert Holmes’s “Escape (The Piña Colada Song)” to go platinum. In 2014.

What else? We roam over ravishing landscapes that blend Star Wars and Oz, sail around in a spaceship that looks like Ikea designed the inside of an egg, pirouette through skies filled with psychedelic astronomical events, and glut our 3-D glasses on lushly sparkling particle effects. The hulking, scarified Drax is a bit less of a straight man this time around, passing that role to Ego’s assistant, an empath called Mantis, so Drax can deliver dialogue more along the lines of, “I have famously huge turds.”

Sly Stallone shows up to shout gravel in a few scenes, and you have to wonder how much they paid Hasselhoff for a split-second cameo that exists solely to call back a joke from the first film.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARVEL STUDIOS

But that’s the kind of enterprise Guardians Vol. 2 is, hitting all the big beats with an irreverent twist. Even the Sovereign’s stately grandeur is played for laughs. Director James Gunn especially skewers the otiose somberness endemic to modern sci-fi in an understatedly hilarious scene involving an awkward march down a handcranked red (well, blue) carpet.

The Sovereign’s leader, Ayesha, looks exactly like an Oscar statuette. That’s probably not in the stars for anyone outside of technical categories here, as the movie is neither profound (siblings compete and reconcile, sons need father figures) nor subtle—need we think too hard about the Oedipal implications of a conflict taking place on a father called Ego’s actual body?

No, but no matter. The humor is there, as is the emotion and the spirited wonder of comic books, so oddly rare in the selfserious superhero flicks they've unleashed. bhowe@indyweek.com

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5.3–5.10

Loretta Lynn

PAGE

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

PHOTO BY DAVID MCLISTER

SATURDAY, MAY 6

FREE COMIC BOOK DAY: KEVIN EASTMAN

Hooray! Hooray! Free Comic Book Day! The happiest day of the year! Sorry, I sing that every year. As usual, the first weekend in May brings a new superhero movie (Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, reviewed on page 24) and a bunch of giveaway comics from major publishers. Many local shops have FCBD events on Saturday, including Capitol Comics, Foundation’s Edge, Fight or Flight Comics, and Enterprise Comics in Raleigh and the three Ultimate Comics stores in Raleigh, Cary, and Durham. Ultimate Durham has the biggest draw, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cocreator Kevin Eastman.

From 11 a.m. until 1:30 p.m., he’ll sign two items for $25 (and you get a store-exclusive TMNT comic), with the proceeds supporting childhood cancer research. Of course, if you don’t want to shell out for Eastman (see what we did there?), local creators like Tommy Lee Edwards and Richard Case will be available free of charge, as, of course, will a ton of great comics. —Zack Smith ULTIMATE COMICS, DURHAM 11 a.m.–1:30 p.m., $25, www.freecomicbookday.com 26 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

MUSIC

FRIDAY, MAY 5

LORETTA LYNN

Does Loretta Lynn even need an introduction? She’s the most awarded female country artist and the only woman to win an ACM Artist of the Decade award. Her latest record, Full Circle, is her thirty-fifth studio album, and it’s full of everything you hope for in a Loretta Lynn LP. It’s a wonderful mix of new heart-wrenching tunes and old classics—a rerecording of “Fist City” is there and, boy, does that song still impress—and Lynn will follow it up with Wouldn’t It Be Great this September. Lynn is an artist for whom “legend” is an understatement; she’s arguably made some of the most defining country albums of the past fifty years. Incorporating a Nashville sound and a Bakersfield attitude, the coal miner’s daughter has rocked country’s boat countless times (Two words: “The Pill”) and continues to do so at age eighty-five.

—Annalise Domenighini CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM 8 p.m., $70–$236, www.carolinatheatre.org

STAGE

ON ICE

SATURDAY, MAY 6

Dinner and a show, with drinks afterward—plans for a promising Saturday night, right? Raleigh arts collective Seed Art Share intrepidly incorporates all three in this collection of four one-acts, based on four drinks, by local playwrights. The kicker? The group will be staging them during a miniature bar crawl down Hillsborough Street. The night starts with Allan Maule’s “A Spicy Pepino” over dinner at Gonza Tacos Y Tequila, then segues to Jubala Coffee for Rebecca Bossen’s “Iced Coffee, Five Cubes.” Somewhere near the NCSU Bell Tower, look out for Aya Wallace’s “Holding Still,” before Ian Finley’s “A Perfect Negroni” is served, with a twist, at WXYZ Lounge. The ticket price includes dinner and the shows.

—Byron Woods HILLSBOROUGH STREET, RALEIGH 5 p.m., $50, www.seedraleigh.org/on-ice

STAGE

SATURDAY, MAY 6

RABBLE & TWINE: THE MESOPLANETS

ART

Where were you when Pluto was demoted? (Wistful sigh.)

It’s been more than ten years since the icy baby planet was booted from the solar system and recategorized as a dwarf planet. This weekend, however, the self-termed creative collective Rabble & Twine, composed of wife-husband duo Anna Seagrave and Luke Selden, aims to change our minds about Pluto yet again by exploring its new home within the Mesoplanet neighborhood. The Mesoplanets, which bolsters Seagrave’s movement and Selden’s sound and projections with a host of interdisciplinary performers, is the sixth offering in Durham Independent Dance Artists’ third season. Expect multimedia vignettes inspired, per Rabble & Twine’s whimsical, show-specific website, by Fluxus, Black Mountain College, and planetary mythology.

—Michaela Dwyer LIVING ARTS COLLECTIVE, DURHAM 7 p.m., $12, www.mesoplanets.org

FRIDAY, MAY 5

123 ART STUDIOS OPENING RECEPTION

Out in the forests of Chatham County lies 123 Art Studios, a renovated barn that has transformed, over the last few years, into a working and display space for area artists. The poplar-paneled charm of the interior, which is markedly indifferent to the spatial neutrality cultivated by urban galleries, should make a warming home for the nine artists in this new exhibit, which runs through May after a daylong opening reception. Despite the rustic setting, the show promises more than a healthy share of the expected paintings: there’s also Mayan inspired mixed-media work (Zoe Allison Rockingbear), steel sacred geometry (Joseph Asterito), raku pottery (Colleen Black Semelka), digital prints (Francis Shepherd), and even neon glass (Nate Shaeffer). —Brian Howe 123 ART STUDIOS, PITTSBORO 11 a.m.–7 p.m., free, www.facebook.com/123artstudios

SATURDAY, MAY 6

EIGHTH BLACKBIRD & WILL OLDHAM

Before picking back up with Music in the Gardens in June, Duke Performances goes out on a high note for its regular season, offering a compelling evening of music from contemporary music collective eighth blackbird and Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s Will Oldham. The program opens with two pieces written specifically for the ensemble: Nico Muhly’s Doublespeak is a dark, sparkling piece that evokes fantasy imagery, while Murder Ballades, penned by The National’s Bryce Dessner, is an instrumental amalgam of folk songs.

The ensemble also performs Frederic Rzewski’s Coming Together, the foundation of which is a portentous letter from Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica Correction Facility in New York, just a few months before the bloody riots at the prison in September 1971. The group brings a fascinating tension to the piece, and Oldham’s delivery of the narration makes it outright chilling at times. Buckle in for an intense, rewarding evening of songs. —Allison Hussey DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM, DURHAM 8 p.m., $10–$42, www.dukeperformances.duke.edu

Jody Cassell and Lindsey Perry in The Mesoplanets

PHOTO BY LUKE SELDEN

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

ADAM’S RUN AT ARCANA (P. 29), BJ BARHAM AT THE POUR HOUSE (P. 32), BOMBADIL AT THE ARTSCENTER (P. 16), CORY DOCTOROW AT FLYLEAF BOOKS (INDYWEEK.COM), MAMMA MIA! AT DPAC (P. 34), MIPSO AT N.C. MUSEUM OF ART (P. 16), OTHER NATURE AT LUMP (P. 33), A PIECE OF MY HEART AT RALEIGH LITTLE THEATRE (P. 22), A SERIES OF FORTUNATE EVENTS AT VARIOUS VENUES (P. 20), JON THOMPSON AT SO & SO BOOKS (P. 36), THE WINGS OF THE DOVE AT NCMA (P. 35) INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 27

final round of voting open now!

Voting open through May 7!

Vote for your favorite finalists!

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SARA WATKINS 5/5 ADRIAN BELEW POWER TRIO W/ SAUL ZONANA ($26/$30) 5/7 CREED BRATTON W/ CASEYMAGIC ($15)

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W/ HOT ROD CIRCUIT ($21/$23) 5/23 TIGERS JAW W/ SAINTSENECA, SMIDLEY ($16/$18)

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5/8 THE BESNARD LAKES W/ THE LIFE AND TIMES ($12) 5/10 TWIN PEAKS

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MELVINS ($20/$22) 8/28: SHABAZZ PALACES ($17/$19)

10/7 LANY ($20 ADV/ $23 DAY OF SHOW) 11/7 THE STRUMBELLAS

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CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM

5/3 CLAP YOUR HANDS SAY YEAH W/ LAURA GIBSON ($16) 5/5 MELODIME W/ MATT HIRES, ANTIQUE HEARTS ($10/$12)

5/7 LETTERS FROM THE FIRE W/ KALEIDO ($12/$14)

ORWELLS ($18/$20) 6/7 BROODS ($20/$22) 6/15 ABBEY ROAD LIVE!

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W/ CHROME PONY, POST ANIMAL ($15)

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WITH DJ GON AND DJ FM (LATE SHOW, 10:30 PM, 21+, $7) 5/13 GREG HUMPHREYS

ELECTRIC TRIO

W/ DYNAMITE BROTHERS ($12/$15) 5/16 JENNIFER CURTIS & CFS

UPPER SCHOOL BANDS

+ DEX ROMWEBER & JEN CURTIS 5/17 THE DEER 5/18 CORY WELLS W/ DRISKILL, ANNE-CLAIRE ($6/$8) 5/19 HAAS KOWERT TICE ($12/$15)

KINGS (RAL)

5/3 ANDY SHAUF W/ JULIA JACKLIN ($13/$15)

5/28 MOONCHILD ($12/$15)

5/10 RUN RIVER NORTH W/ ARKELLS, COBI ($15/$17)

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RED HAT AMPH. (RAL)

6/1 GRACE: A TRIBUTE TO JEFF BUCKLEY ($10)

6/3 DELTA RAE W/ LAUREN JENKINS ($25/$28)

6/6 THE

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MIPSO

W/ THE VELDT, HAPPY ABANDON

5/12 STRUTTER: A TRIBUTE TO KISS

5/15 WARPAINT ($20)

LAKE STREET DIVE

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5/20 SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS

5/9 X 40TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR ALL ORIGINAL MEMBERS! W/ SKATING POLLY ($20/$23) 5/10 SLOWDIVE W/ CASKET GIRLS ($36/$39)

TH 6/22 @SHAKORI HILLS

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music

5.3 –5.10

SATURDAY, MAY 6 FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

WWW.INDYWEEK.COM

CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Bracy (EB), Timothy Bracy (TB), Zoe Camp (ZC), Annalise Domenighini (AD), Kat Harding (KH), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Charles Morse (CM), Noah Rawlings (NR), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS), Patrick Wall (PW)

WED, MAY 3

CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Clap Your Hands Say Yeah; 8 p.m., $16–$18. • THE CAVE: Juan Huevos, 9 p.m., $5. • KINGS: Andy Shauf; 8:30 p.m., $13. • KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Tea Cup Gin; 5:45 p.m., $5–$20. • POUR HOUSE: Clang Quartet, 80lb. Test; 9 p.m. • THE RITZ: 21 Savage; 8 p.m.

• SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH): Flower; 7 p.m. • SLIM’S: March and Beauty; 9 p.m., $5.

THU, MAY 4 Local Band Local Beer: Sound System Seven SEVEN UP There are actually eight people in Sound System 7: two guitarists, one bass guitarist, one keyboard player, one drummer, and three horn players. Add ’em all up, and what do you get? A ska band, of course—in this case, one with a bent toward the genre’s pre-rocksteady origins, at least.

With Absent Lovers (sci-fi-indebted new wave), Stammerings (radio-ready rock), and Cosmic Punk (indie rock). —PW [POUR HOUSE, $3–$5/9 P.M.]

Zone Lee IN THE Thanks to a syrupy ZONE sing-song cadence that suggests Fetty Wap robotripping, North Carolina emcee Zone Lee hits a pleasing, if unoriginal pocket in rap.

Fortunately, his beat choice is nice and his eye for slick visual presentation sweetens the deal.

The glossy video for “Lurking” weaves a steamy mid-budget tale of luxury and romance. It even ends with a “to be continued,” an audacious stunt for a two-and-ahalf-minute promo video. —DS [THE PINHOOK, $10–$12/7:30 P.M.] ALSO ON THURSDAY DEEP SOUTH: Black Map, I Was Totally Destroying It, The Pseudo

Cowboys, Minor Stars; 8:30 p.m., $10. • MOTORCO: Mono, Holy Sons; 9 p.m., $13–$15. • RUBY DELUXE: Animal Weapon, Tin Foil Hat, Tide Eyes; 8:30 p.m. • SLIM’S: All Hell, Suppressive Fire, Salmonella; 9 p.m., $5.

FRI, MAY 5 Adrian Belew Power Trio 6-STRING Adrian Belew has KING always been a different kind of guitar hero, whose unique vocabulary reimagined soloing in blocks and shards of sound and left typical string-bending solos looking anemic. David Bowie poached him from Frank Zappa, and his signature guitar noises became a key element of Talking Heads during the peak of the band’s popularity before he went solo. His power trio will showcase his inimitable prowess.

Saul Zonana opens. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE, $26–$30/8 P.M.]

The Bucking Mules OLD On their new album TIMEY Smoke Behind the Clouds, The Bucking Mules offer a hefty clutch of songs—seventeen!—that are all satisfying old-time numbers. They’re just as fitting for dancing as they are for sitting on the porch, tapping your toes, and sipping a beer. The band celebrates the album’s release with Kay Justice and Alice Gerrard in the opening slot. —AH [NIGHTLIGHT, $12/8:30 P.M.]

Grody Jones GRODY, The first known use MAN of the word grody, says Merriam-Webster, was in 1965, but it came to prominent usage in the early eighties as a Valley Girl locution for disgusting or revolting. It befits the Knightdale trio Grody Jones, which plays grungy, grimy, scab-ridden alt-rawk. It’s grody to the max.

Divine Treachery and Origin of Disease open. —PW [THE MAYWOOD, $8/9:30 P.M.]

JSWISS WORKIN’ Chapel Hill’s No9to5 9 TO 5 crew reunites at Deep South with JSWISS in the headlining slot, backed by the full band Phantom Pop. His most recent release, No Music EP, is a jazzy blend of old school hip-hop, soul, and R&B. J Rowdy opens.

—CM [DEEP SOUTH, $6/8:30 P.M.]

Mingo Fishtrap SOUL & Austin’s Mingo FUNK Fishtrap has spent more then two decades spreading levity with spirited Cajun-inflected R&B and gospel. While the band’s winsome, horn-driven take on American roots music works just fine on record, its real magic lies in its energetic, crowd-pleasing live performances. —EB [LINCOLN THEATRE, $12/8:30 P.M.]

Saving Space Showcase: Mature Fantasy REAL Mature Fantasy’s LIFE? single from this past fall, “Lentils,” follows the line, “We had lentils for dinner” with “We’ll find God in time.” It’s a humorous juxtaposition of the quotidian and epic. And even if the humor goes unnoticed by the singer (the earnest vocal delivery gives such an impression), the song carries a sentimental charm, articulating daily events and epiphanies. Al Riggs & The Big Sad and Fluorescence open, and all proceeds benefit the Southern Poverty Law Center. —NR [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Shakori Hills Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance SPRING This venerable TIME family-oriented musical festival located on a farm in Pittsboro has become something of an area institution since beginning in the early aughts.

In gathering a wide mix of roots,

RHYMES WITH OPERA: ADAM’S RUN Interesting things happen when you take opera out of the opera house. Stripping away the grand trappings, the huge orchestras, the intricate sets and choreography, artists can tell different kinds of stories at different scales. It allows for a rebalancing between the singers and instrumentalists, composer and audience, drama and time.

One of the most intriguing musical events of 2016 was Hopscotch, an opera strewn about dozens of sites across Los Angeles, with the audience driven from one location to the next. Its fragmentary story was audacious, its use of space inventive.

While Rhymes With Opera hasn’t yet put on anything quite that ambitious, this New York-based collective has a similarly adventurous approach toward reconceiving opera for the twenty-first century. Since its founding in 2007, Rhymes With Opera has premiered seventeen new operas of all shapes and sizes, in all conceivable spaces. While cofounder George Lam was finishing his Ph.D. in composition at Duke, Durham was treated to periodic performances in the old Bull City Headquarters, unfinished warehouse space in Golden Belt, and various bars and clubs around town. Each opera was unique, from a meditation on tobacco’s role in Durham history (written by Lam) to an abstract listing of numbers by Thomas Limbert. Since then, the company’s repertory and reputation have only grown—to the point PHOTO BY JANETTE PELLEGRINI where it was featured on the cover of Opera News this past August.

So it’s exciting to see the ensemble come back to Durham for a free screening of its most intricate project yet, Ruby Fulton’s video opera, Adam’s Run. It’s not a live production, but a work specifically designed for video broadcast. Set in a climate change-addled future where the wildly unpredictable weather is a fulltime obsession, the dark comedy tells the story of two TV hosts with diametrically opposed ideologies: the existentialist Julie Shore (Elisabeth Halliday) and the Reverend Billy Noble (Robert Maril), a televangelist and reality show host who is building an ark. When the two meet, they unexpectedly fall in love. The story is told through their various shows as well as a series of new magazine flashbacks by producer Dana Daring (Bonnie Lander).

Fulton’s music is widely varied mix of styles from pulsing minimalism to neobaroque flights of fancy to dissonant counterpoint, an apt complement for the various competing narratives that librettist Baynard Woods explores. The film, directed by Connor Kizer and shot by Rachel Dwiggins, is a hallucinogenic swirl, highlighting the protagonists’ contradictory realities. —Dan Ruccia ARCANA, DURHAM

I

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THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER

string band, country, and traditional music acts, the festival has become a fixture in the schedules of numerous repeat performers, like headliners Donna the Buffalo, which has performed at nearly every iteration. This year’s lineup features big names like Rainbow Kitten Surprise, area stalwarts like Dex Romweber, Holy Ghost Tent Revival, and Big Fat Gap, along with activities like yoga, a drum workshop, and Paperhand Puppet Intervention. The festival runs through Sunday. —DK [SHAKORI HILLS, $27–$114/ VARIOUS TIMES] ALSO ON FRIDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Groove Masters; 7 & 9 p.m., $15. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Harper and Midwest Kind; 9 p.m., $8. • CAROLINA THEATRE: Loretta Lynn; 8 p.m., $69.50. See page 26. • CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Melodime, Matt Hires and the Antique Hearts; 8 p.m., $10–$12.

• IMURJ: Samuel Gerweck; 7-8:30 p.m. N’KOGNiiTO; 9:30 p.m. • LOCAL 506: Drunken Prayer, Reese McHenry; 9 p.m., $6–$8. • POUR HOUSE: Los Acoustic Guys, Bakalao Stars; 9 p.m., $7–$10. • THE RITZ: Trial By Fire; 8 p.m. • SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH): Leisure McCorkle; 7:30 p.m. • SLIM’S: Hardworker, Say Brother, The Minks; 9 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Erie Choir, Nathan Oliver; 8:30 p.m., $6.

SAT, MAY 6 Don’t Be Mean to People: A Concert for the ACLU of N.C. DO GOOD A cavalcade of mostly folk-rocking locals will take over Durham’s Ponysaurus Brewing Saturday night in the name of social justice.

Hiss Golden Messenger headlines, with a resurrected Megafaun, plus Mount Moriah, Loamlands, and rapper Shirlette Ammons, Expect some other guests to jump in, too.

—AH [PONYSAURUS BREWING, $20–$25/5 P.M.]

Band Together Main Event: Ben Folds KEY Formed in the wake PLAYER of 9/11, the Triangle-based Band Together is a nonprofit that harnesses the power of music to promote positive social change. The organization’s main event this year will feature Ben Folds, one of the

Triangle’s most identifiable and celebrated musicians. He’ll bring his deep catalog of piquant pop and his piano, and that will suffice.

With The London Souls and The Travers Brothership. —DK [RED HAT AMPHITHEATER, $20–$150/5 P.M.]

Shannon McNally SUBTLE New York’s Shannon SONGS McNally is gifted singer-songwriter whose foremost attributes include a subtle, sophisticated lyricism and an insinuating and utterly characteristic vocal rasp. While two decades of strong work have earned her a devoted following, McNally’s talent hasn’t yet reached the mass audience she deserves. —EB [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $17–$20/8:30 P.M.]

Mom & Dad NOT Punk doesn’t have to PARENTS be aggressive and scary! In fact, if you take the clear-cut chord progressions of punk, sand the edges for a bit of R&B smoothness, and deliver the vocals in a country music, feel-good fashion, you get something surprisingly appealing.

You get Mom and Dad: punk rockers who tried a little tenderness. With Cosmic Punk.

—NR [KINGS, $5–$8/9 P.M.]

Punk Rock Smackdown 6 PUNK This sixth punk-rock PLATTER donnybrook tastes many of the colors of punk’s rainbow: folk-punk (Everymen), classic SoCal punk (Poison Anthem), ska-punk (Madd Hatters), anthemic hardcore punk (Snake & the Plisskens), thrash punk (Gorbash), surf-punk (Blood Red River) and, uh, thrash punk again (Few Good Things). —PW [POUR HOUSE, $8–$10/7 P.M.]

Wale STILL Embattled by years KICKIN’ of creative identity crises, internal conflicts with label mates, and an almost damaging spat with J. Cole, Wale still commands respect from a loyal legion of fans who appreciate the art in his frailty. Phil Ade opens.

—CM [THE RITZ, $25/8:30 P.M.]

the next bes plate-spinni swimming i HARD If you want to SWINGIN’ understand why N.C.harmonies a fretwork. Th Central has become a jazz powerhouse, you need look no the Luminee remarkably further than Ira Wiggins. As director of jazz studies, Wiggins racket they spends most of his time leading fall’s White F NCCU’s large ensembles, so this is [NEPTUNES a (relatively) rare chance to hear him with his own combo. —DR Creed B [BEYÙ CAFFÈ, $12/7 & 9 P.M.]

Ira Wiggins

OFFICE MATE THE ARTSCENTER: Bombadil, Grass Roots Claire Hitchens; 8 p.m., $18–$20. See whom no cr page 16. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: only a die-h Roger “Hurricane” Wilson, Fat Bastard member of, Blues Band; 8 p.m., $8. • THE CARY in 1969. But THEATER: Sirens of Spring; 8 p.m., the band’s A $20. • THE CAVE: North Elementary, “Midnight C Holy Golden, Clyde Boomer; 9 p.m., $5. featured the • DEEP SOUTH: Flimsy, Veronica of the day, a V, Mirror7; 9 p.m., $8. • IMURJ: Bratton—w Orlando Parker, Jr.; 2:30 p.m. Eye late-career r d’Neau; 4 p.m. Cypher Univercity; playing a fac 6:30 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: The Office— Sprinter Metalfest; 8 p.m., $8–$10. • the last laug LOCAL 506: Cereus Bright; 9 p.m., —DK [CAT’ $10. • MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC HOUSE: Katharine Whalen, Chambe Nathan Golub; 8 p.m., free. • NC MUSEUM OF ART: Mipso, River of the T Whyless; 8 p.m., $18–$30. See page 16.

• NIGHTLIGHT: Proto Futuro 2; 10 OH, p.m., $5. • SLIM’S: Eyes go Lightning, MOTHER Sunndrug, Drunk on the Regs; 9 p.m., 2016–17 sea $5. • UNC’S MEMORIAL HALL: Orchestra o two compos Better is Peace; 8 p.m., $10–$25. on the Staba century hym suffering du Both Rossin their operat Baked render that OOZING Sludgy rock bands of colors. — [CAROLINA OUT are honest. They name themselves things like Sleep, Bongripper, Weedeater, or Baked, Rhianno giving you a pretty clear idea of what they sound like from the SOLO get-go. But Baked has more SWERVE surprises in store than you’d the Carolina expect. Songs like “Midnight Rhiannon G Junkie” embody sludge tropes of scattershot slow, fuzzed-out guitars, but toying with “Two-Thousandths” is a sweet and more. T country ballad that makes you it up with Fr appreciate Baked’s outside-the- another stro box eclecticism. With Sam Leidig. feels more c —NR [THE PINHOOK, $8/8 P.M.] focus works “We Could stunning in Branches Amythyst K [UNC’S MEM REACHIN’ Without a time $10–$79/7:3 OUT machine, it’s impossible to imagine what it’d sound like if Stevie Nicks sang in Spoon an indie pop band rather than a group of brooding rockers.

BIG & California quartet Branches offers LITTLE art-damage current inca ALSO ON SATURDAY

SUN, MAY 7

the next best thing, with lush, plate-spinning arrangements swimming in three-part harmonies and dynamic acoustic fretwork. They stomp and strut like the Lumineers, but the tantrum is remarkably fine-tuned: a sterling racket they perfected with last fall’s White Flag. —ZC [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $7/9 P.M.]

Creed Bratton OFFICE Creed Bratton was a MATE member of The Grass Roots, sixties hit-makers whom no critic took seriously and only a die-hard fan could identify a member of, until he was kicked out in 1969. But time has been kind to the band’s AM gold hits like “Midnight Confessions,” which featured the finest session players of the day, and the Toronto-born Bratton—who has enjoyed a solid late-career resurgence since playing a facsimile of himself on The Office—seems to be having the last laugh. With Caseymagic.

—DK [CAT’S CRADLE, $15/8 P.M.]

Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle OH, For its final MOTHER performance of the 2016–17 season, the Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle offers two composers’ competing takes on the Stabat Mater, a thirteenthcentury hymn about Mary’s suffering during the crucifixion.

Both Rossini and Verdi draw on their operatic backgrounds to render that agony in a broad mix of colors. —DR [CAROLINA THEATRE, $30/3 P.M.]

Rhiannon Giddens

groove-merchants, Spoon has charted a remarkable and profoundly unlikely trajectory in becoming an indie rock institution.

Through it all, the signature theme of the band’s music remains an entrenched ironic remove, with frontman Britt Daniel lodged in the role of world’s most ambivalent rock star. Tennis opens. —EB [THE RITZ, $27.50/8 P.M.]

Time Out of Mind BOB’S YR Coming a year after UNCLE the platinum seventy-fifth, seventy-sixth birthdays aren’t usually a big deal, but, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, “Bow down to him on Sunday/ salute him when his birthday comes.” To celebrate the birth of the reluctant Nobelist, some of the area’s most passionate and capable admirers of Dylan, including members of the Johnny Folsom Four, Ben Folds Five, Six String Drag, Arrogance, The Backsliders, and the Connells, will unite for a tribute through song.

—DK [KINGS, $12/8:30 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY ARCANA: Bob Funck; 7 p.m., free.

• CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Letters from the Fire, Kaleido; 8 p.m., $12–$14. • IMURJ: Justin West Band; 4-5:30 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Live/Dead ‘69; 8 p.m., $18.50–$50. • POUR HOUSE: Dababy, Bash Waliss, Tuwo, Mel Major; 9 p.m., $15–$20. • REBUS WORKS: Joe Westerlund, Joseph O’Connell, and Mickey Mills; 4 p.m., $10–$12. • SLIM’S: Wasted Theory, Gringo, Bad Blood; 7:30 p.m., $5.

MON, MAY 8 Besnard Lakes

SOLO With 2015’s SWERVE Tomorrow Is My Turn, the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Rhiannon Giddens delivered a scattershot solo LP that found her toying with pop, folk, gospel, jazz, and more. This year, she followed it up with Freedom Highway, another strong-spirited record that feels more cohesive. Its sharper focus works well, as on songs like “We Could Fly,” which are stunning in their quiet power.

Amythyst Kiah opens. —AH [UNC’S MEMORIAL HALL, $10–$79/7:30 P.M.]

OH, In March, Besnard CANADA! Lakes released its EP The Besnard Lakes Are the Divine Wind. An earthy, experimental, psychedelic vibe permeates the two tracks, making the EP a slightly darker and more down-to-earth addition to the band’s discography than last year’s A Coliseum Complex Museum.

Think Arcade Fire meets Electric Light Orchestra. The Life and Times open. —AD [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $12/8 P.M.]

Spoon

Tech N9ne

BIG & From its early-nineLITTLE ties beginnings as art-damaged post-punks to its current incarnation as stylish

INDIE For the past year, LIFER mainstream media has been abuzz about Chance the Rapper’s independent success, but

Tech N9ne drafted the blueprint of independent success in hip-hop and has maintained success without pandering to mainstream trends. His Strictly Strange tour stop includes Brotha Lynch Hung, Krizz Kaliko, and more. —CM [THE RITZ, $11/8 P.M.] ALSO ON MONDAY

WE 5/3

THE CAVE: Overlake; 9 p.m., $5.

• POUR HOUSE: Ajeva; 9 p.m. • QUAIL RIDGE BOOKS: NC Master Chorale; 7 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Lord Redbyrd; 10 p.m.

TH 5/4

TUE, MAY 9

FR 5/5

SA 5/6 SU 5/7 TU 5/9

BLUE WED: THE SPOONBENDERS W/ IAIN HADGRAFT NASH STREET RAMBLERS DUKE STREET DOGS HARPER & MIDWEST KIND DOUBLE HEADER: ROGER “HURRICANE” WILSON CD RELEASE PARTY/ FAT BASTARD BLUES BAND TBS 1ST SUNDAY JAM: PAUL URBAN/ PORK PIE HAT TUESDAY BLUES JAM

Reckless Kelly REDNECK With grungy riffs, GRUNGE Reckless Kelly—who originated in Bend, Oregon, but have been in Austin, Texas, for the past twenty years—managed to create a universal country sound on 2016’s Sunset Motel. The band has come a long way since 1998’s fiddle-heavy Milican, beefing up its sound with Bakersfield country and Southern California rock influences. Blue Water Highway open. —AD [MOTORCO, $25/8 P.M.]

Smino ST. Dispense with the LUNATIC Nelly jokes, because St. Louis rapper Smino deserves better. On this year’s Blkswn, the Midwest rap ambassador suavely blends future funk and tasteful soul into his raps. Many of his songs seem to shimmer in the same nostalgic glaze Chance the Rapper cooked with on last year’s Coloring Book, and occasionally he colors within Chance’s lines a little too closely. Otherwise, though, he

TH 5/18 TH 6/1 FR 6/2 SU 6/4 TH 6/15 WE 6/28 SA 7/1 FR 7/7 SA 7/15 WE 7/19

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A Lot Like Birds WEIRD If post-hardcore were CORE a deck of cards, California collective A Lot Like Birds would be the joker. It’s a band of noisemakers who torch their genre’s contemporary framework—straight-shooting melodic progressions, predictable chord changes and breakdowns—with a collective, shit-eating grin. No sound’s off-limits in the group’s quest for chaos: from horn skronks to furtive springs, operatic high drama to spoken-word intrigue, A Lot Like Birds sounds like a little of everything, served up in a compact, leaden vessel. Hearts Like Lions, Owel, and Household open. —ZC [LOCAL 506, $13–$15/7 P.M.]

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keeps his craft artful. —DS [KINGS, $12–$15/9 P.M.]

X MARKS Arguably the THE SPOT greatest band to emerge from LA’s legendary punk scene of the late seventies, X made classic records that were a visionary melding of William Burroughs and Eddie Cochran.

While co-leader John Doe has more recently turned his attention to more modest singer-songwriter fare, he and Exene Cervenka are reuniting the old band on the occasion of its fortieth anniversary.

Stalwart classics like the tech and trade-fearing “The New World” remain fascinatingly prescient and continually relevant. Skating Polly opens. —EB [CAT’S CRADLE, $20–$99/8 P.M.]

ALSO ON TUESDAY THE CAVE: Brad Cole; 9 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: BJ Barham, Charly Crockett; 9 p.m., $20–$25. See box, this page. • RUBY DELUXE: Copula; 11 p.m. • SLIM’S: Friendship, al Riggs; 9 p.m., $5.

WED, MAY 10 Yolanda Rabun THE Yolanda Rabun’s VOICE vocal gift made itself known early on, and it has continued to serve as a guiding force for her even as numerous other talents as a songwriter, bandleader, and even lawyer, have emerged. Onstage, she serves up a repertoire of soul, jazz, and R&B informed by her heroes like Billie Holiday. —DK [KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE, $5–$20/5:45 P.M.]

Run River North FOLK POP This ascendant LA-based five-piece traffics in melodic-synth rock and stylish folk-pop which varies little in tone and tempo, situating the band somewhere in the commercially promising and artistically barren region between the Killers’ heart-on-sleeve mood storms and the Pavlovian-uplift of The Lumineers. —EB [KINGS, $15–$17/8:30 P.M.]

Slowdive DREAM Slowdive’s lasting ON influence on indie rock—not to mention shoegaze and dream pop, the subsects in which it typically operated—cannot be fully calculated. The band built a wall of noise from immaculate and elusive melodies, thoroughly weaved and latticed so no one instrument or voice was

given special billing. Twenty-two years after its last album, Slowdive’s new LP strips back and evolves past the sound that once defined the band, not recycling but distilling Slowdive’s strengths with crystallized potency. With Casket Girls. —PW [CAT’S CRADLE, $36–$40/8 P.M.]

Twin Peaks NO Twin Peaks’ LYNCH freewheeling garage rock isn’t, as David Lynch’s Agent Dale Cooper put it, both wonderful and strange—it’s just pretty darn wonderful. Last year’s Down in Heaven is marked by a casual insouciance, which puts the band in the company of Black Lips and mid-seventies Stones. —PW [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $15/8:30 P.M.]

TWINS TECHNO The three songs on SHIFTS TWINS’ most recent release, Never Know Yourself, form a mixed bag of techno tracks. Each song is driven by steady bass drum thumps, but each to a vastly different effect. Opener “Tassel,” feels like a conventional house track, but it’s succeeded by the freaky, noise-inflected “Suggestion,” which makes the sultry third song, “Feeling,” sound all the sultrier by way of contrast. —NR [THE PINHOOK, $7/9:30 P.M.]

J. Roddy Walston & the Business BLUES One evening several ROCK years ago, while tickling the keys with his band The Business on a boat in New York City, J. Roddy Walston decided there was no better way to end the set than to hurl his piano stool out

of a window, off the ship, and into the East River; Remarkably, no one was injured in his stunt, and so the roots-rock crew rages on, fueled by an insatiable thirst for troublemaking and a reverence for the blues that runs so deep that it sometimes just makes you want to throw a stool. —ZC [MOTORCO, $18–$22/8 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY THE ARTSCENTER: Triangle Jazz Orchestra; 7:30 p.m., $5. • THE CAVE: Juan Huevos; 9 p.m., $5. • LOCAL 506: The BellRays, Cosmic Punk; 9 p.m., $15. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Thick Modine, Atomic Buzz; 10 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: The Steppin’ Stones; 9 p.m., $8–$10. • SLIM’S: Noctomb, Malevich, Trudge; 9 p.m., $5.

TUESDAY, MAY 9

BJ BARHAM For the past four summers, American Aquarium leader BJ Barham has taken a short solo run through the Southeast to give his road warrior band a couple of weeks off before festival season ramps up. This summer will be a significantly lengthier undertaking: with fifty-three shows in just under two months, he’ll traverse forty-eight states and Washington, D.C., on the heels of an early April announcement that the rest of American Aquarium’s current lineup—together since 2014—would leave the roots-rock outfit following the departure of guitarists Ryan Johnson and Colin DiMeo earlier this year.

“I know the timing seems extremely convenient,” Barham admits, while explaining that this tour has been in the planning phase since he found out former drummer Kevin McClain was taking June off for a cross-country bike trek, more than a month before he first caught wind of any changes in membership. American Aquarium won’t go away, either. Barham has plans to head back out with a revamped iteration—“version 13.0,” he jokes—on a full band tour beginning in September.

“These solo tours are fun for me because if someone in the crowd yells out a song off The Bible and the Bottle, the rest of the band might not know it but I still do,” Barham says, explaining that he might PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

32 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

normally only have a third of American Aquarium’s ninety-two-song catalog at his disposal. “This allows me to go back and pick those other songs up and see what still works and what doesn’t.”

While Barham acknowledges he’s in the middle of a few rebuilding months as he pieces together the next lineup of a band that’s already cycled through twenty-six members over a decade, he’s also using the time to reflect on the band’s past.

“American Aquarium has kind of always been a vehicle for my songs and that’s not going to change,” he says. “Most of [the most recent members] joined in their midtwenties, so this was just a matter of priorities shifting as they got older. Looking back on it, I ran them too hard. We were playing two hundred fifty to three hundred shows a year for a decade, and I didn’t give them enough time off to be normal human beings.”

Barham won’t be slowing down much, though. He’ll hit the studio this fall with his new crew to record American Aquarium’s ninth album, Things Change.

He says the recent “chaos” has reignited his creative energy, and he plans to begin road-testing a few new songs on this tour, aiming to release the LP early next year.

—Spencer Griffith THE POUR HOUSE, RALEIGH 9 p.m., $20–$25, www.thepourhousemusichall.com

art

5.3 – 5.10

OPENING

SPECIAL All Matterings of EVENT Mind: Transcendent Imagery from the Contemporary Collection: With Molly Boarati, assistant curator from the Nasher Museum of Art. Mon, May 8, 7 p.m. South Regional Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.

SPECIAL Cultural Fabric: EVENT Quilts and portraits by Keith Allen and Alan Dehmer. May 9-Jun 4.

— FRANK Member Artists Talk: Thu, May 4, 6-8 p.m.

FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www.frankisart.com.

SPECIAL Fly Raleigh: EVENT Paintings by Sean Kernick. With DJ Triple B. Friday, May 5, 6:30-9 p.m.

Personify, Raleigh.

SPECIAL A Moment in Time: EVENT Paintings by Angela Nesbit and Sharon Bass. May 8-Jun 17.

ArtSource Fine Art Gallery, Raleigh. www.artsourceraleigh.com.

SPECIAL Nine Artists EVENT Show: Thru Jun 5.

Reception: Friday, May 5, 11 a.m. 123 Art Studios,

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ART FRIDAY, MAY 5

OTHER NATURE/ LOG AT LUMP This First Friday brings a pair of worthwhile opening receptions at Lump, which is plunging boldly onward in 2017 under the new leadership of Kelly McChesney.

In Other Nature, curated by Orvokki and Jerstin Crosby, artists from New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Chapel Hill explore our mediated relationship with the natural world through a variety of mediums, from video to collage, as you can see in Ippis Halme’s verdant, verge-of-abstraction “Untitled (the Green Jungle).” Also, the ongoing Lump residency by LOG, which the INDY reported on recently (“How Green Was My Gallery,” March 29), unveils the last in a three-part series of conceptual exhibits. Data Plan for a Preserving Machine is a group show featuring Elizabeth Ferry, Takashi Horisaki, and William Paul Thomas, and it’s your last chance to see LOG at Lump before it decamps in search of the kind of untraditional space it was born in. Other Nature runs through June 24, while LOG sticks around through May 27. —Brian Howe

“Untitled (the Green Jungle)” by Ippis Halme is on view in Other Nature. PHOTO COURTESY OF LUMP

Pittsboro.

SPECIAL Vitamin O: EVENT Photography by Alicia Stemper about the people of Orange County, N.C. May 3-Jun 1. Reception Wedesday, May 3, 5-7 p.m.

Chapel Hill Public Library, Chapel Hill. chapelhillpubliclibrary.org.

ONGOING LAST Ansel Adams: CHANCE Masterworks: An artist is not always the best person to assess his or her own work, but in the case of Ansel Adams, the great photographer of the American West, the king of the coffeetable book, we’ll make an exception. Adams called this “the Museum Set,” the ultimate expression of his legacy. These forty-eight masterworks, taken in

locations like Glacier National Park, Yosemite, and Monument Valley, speak to Adams’s monumental purity of vision. Thru May 7. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. —David Klein John Beerman and Conrad Weiser: Oil paintings and raku. Thru May 17. Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh. www.leehansleygallery.com.

Beyond the Front Porch 2017: Exhibition of work by twelve senior undergraduates. Thru Nov 12. Duke Campus: Center for Documentary Studies, Durham. www.cdsporch.org.

But if the Crime is Beautiful...: Gilded sculpture, images, and photographs by Lauren Kalman. Thru May 14.

Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Collecting Carolina: 100 Years of Jugtown Pottery: Pottery.

Thru May 29. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Collections: Leah Sobsey. Thru Sep 30. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham.

LUMP, RALEIGH 6–9 p.m., free, www.teamlump.org

School. Thru May 21.

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

Discover Your Governors: Thru Aug 6. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Color Across Asia: Thru May 13, 2018. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www. ackland.org.

Durham Public Schools Student Art Show: Thru May 25. Northgate Mall, Durham. www.northgatemall.com.

Color Song: Paintings by Margie Sawyer and mixed media collage by Dawn Rozzo.

Thru Jun 1. Little Art Gallery & Craft Collection, Raleigh. littleartgalleryandcraft.com.

Filaments of the Imagination: Group show by Threads, a textile study collective. Work on view includes quilting, shibori, indigo dyeing, weaving, beading, book making, silk painting, mixed media, and embroidery.

Thru May 13. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Cuba Now: Photography by Elizabeth Matheson. Ongoing.

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

The Darkroom: Photography.

Fundraiser for a darkroom at Cedar Ridge High

Flora and Fauna: Mixed media. Thru May 14. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

www.ackland.org.

Fluid: Paintings by MyLoan Dinh. Thru Oct 15. Durham Convention Center, Durham. www. durhamconventioncenter. com.

LAST Food Isn’t Just for CHANCE Eating: Paintings

by Sharon Barnes. Thru May 6. Bulldega Urban Market, Durham.

Friends & Family Show: Thru May 14. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. www. scrapexchange.org.

Glory of Venice: Renaissance Paintings 1470–1520: Thru Jun 18. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncart museum.org.

Will Grossman Memorial Photo Competition Show: Photography by winners of the competition and selected INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 33

submissions. Thru May 14.

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

Half the Sky: Sculptures by Jan-Ru Wan. Thru Jun 1.

Sertoma Arts Center, Raleigh. parks.raleighnc.gov.

Images of Sound: Photographs by Rodney Boles and Frank Myers. Thru May 19. Miriam Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www. raleighnc.gov/arts.

In Conditions of Fresh Water: The term “environmental racism” has existed since the eighties, and the problem has existed for much longer. But it took the water crisis in Flint, Michigan, to wake the nation to the idea that marginalized communities are routinely subjected to inferior, often dangerous environmental conditions. Clean water and wastewater treatment are still lacking in places like Alamance County, imperiling the health of residents and the security of the land. This exhibit is a collaborative project by Torkwase Dyson, a Duke visiting artist, and Danielle Purifoy, an attorney/ environmental scientist, that explores this phenomenon in depth through interviews with residents of two rural, historically black Southern counties, including Alamance, that have been victimized by this insidious form of institutional neglect for decades. Thru Jun 3.

Duke Campus: Center for Documentary Studies, Durham. www.cdsporch.org. —David Klein LAST Judy Keene: Color CHANCE Search: This is the first significant showcase of Durham-based painter Judy Keene’s work, but it’s undergirded by her long background in museums and art history. Primarily working in oil on linen canvases, Keene brushes and knifes opaque and transparent forms of varying thicknesses into earthily textured, evanescent crags. Keene mingles the influence of abstract impressionist colorfield painters—some of whom, like Keene, studied with Shirley Blum, including Mark Rothko and Ellsworth Kelly—with a cool patina of Old Masterly precision.

Keene’s abstractions abut the border of the real; her Canyon Series harks back to her 34 | 5.3.17 | INDYweek.com

travels through the American West as a child in the 1950s, when her father’s work as a prospector fed an abiding geological interest. Thru May 6. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. www. cravenallengallery.com.

—Brian Howe Locomotion: The Railroad and Subway in Art, 1870-1950: Original prints. Thru May 19.

Adam Cave Fine Art, Raleigh. www.adamcavefineart.com.

Looking South: Photography

by Eudora Welty. Thru Sep 4.

NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

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

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

Not Like It Was: Paintings and mixed media by Gayle Stott Lowry. Thru May 27.

Crocker’s Mark Gallery, Raleigh. crockersmarkgallery. blogspot.com.

LAST Nuestras CHANCE Historias, Nuestros Sueños/Our Stories, Our Dreams: Documenting the experiences of Latino farmworkers in the Carolinas.

Thru May 7. Historic Oak View County Park, Raleigh. www.wakegov.com/parks/ oakview.

Parallel Play: Paintings by Ellie Reinhold, sculpture

by Jason Smith, pottery by Evelyn Ward. Thru May 22. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. www. hillsboroughgallery.com.

Peace of Mind: Art Quilts: Fiber art by Christine HagerBraun. Thru May 12. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Project Reject Is Underway: Site-specific installation by Jeff Bell and Megan Sullivan.

Thru May 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Pleasant Places: Digital paintings by Quayola. Thru Aug 13. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum. org.

A Sense Of...: Photography.

Ongoing. Roundabout Art Collective, Raleigh. www. roundaboutartcollective.com.

Stories from the Heartland: Paintings by Rachel Campbell Thru May 25. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Textiles in Tiers: Trudy Thomson, Sandy Milroy, and Rose Warner. Thru May 25. National Humanities Center, Durham. www. nationalhumanitiescenter.org.

Time Will Tell: The Ackland Art Museum features the works of UNC-Chapel Hill’s MFA class of 2017, which comprises artists Luke Firle, Wayne Marcelli, Joy Meyer, Vanessa Murray, Emily J. Smith, Louis Watts, and Lamar Whidbee. Their work varies significantly in medium, form, and subject matter: Marcelli and Whidbee often work through political ideas via figurative painting, while Meyer and Watts frequently employ nonobjective or multimedia representational techniques.

The title of the exhibit has a winking double meaning, as each artist explores his or her individual relationship to time—and each makes a case for a prospective career. Thru Jun 5. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland.org.

—Noah Rawlings Untold: Paintings by Jane Filer. Thru May 21. Tyndall Galleries, Chapel Hill. www. tyndallgalleries.com.

You + Me: Photographs from various artists. Thru Sep 4.

NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

food

Derby Day: 143rd Annual Kentucky Derby. Hats and gloves encouraged. Brunch 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m., tea 2:304 p.m., three-course dinner 5:30-6:30 p.m., Run for the Roses 6:34 p.m. Sat, May 6. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

Gala Brunch: Catered

by Laplace. Live music

by JazzTones. House & grounds tours, lawn games. $60. Sun, May 7, noon-3 p.m. Historic Moorefields Estate, Hillsborough.

stage OPENING

ONGOING

A Piece of My Heart: Play.

May 5-21. Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh. www. raleighlittletheatre.org. See story, p. 22.

Anything Goes Late Show: Saturdays, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

CAKE Comedy Tour: Standup with Carrie Gravenson (Carolines on Broadway), Abbi Crutchfield (host of truTV’s You Can Do Better), Kaytlin Bailey (Sirius XM), and Erin Judge (Last Comic Standing, Comedy Central). $25. Fri, May 5, 7:30 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. www. kingsraleigh.com.

The Harry Show: Ages 18+.

Improv host leads audience in potentially risque improv games. $10. Fri & Sat, 10 p.m. ComedyWorx Theatre, Raleigh. comedyworx.com.

Golden Age ft. Rachel Kiel: Improv with special guest Rachel Kiel. Music and comedy.

Presented by Mettlesome. $5.

Fri, May 5, 10 p.m. The Shed Jazz Club, Durham.

The Mesoplanets: Dance by Rabble & Twine. A series of vignettes about the solar system. $12. Sat, May 6, 7 p.m.

Living Arts Collective, Durham. www.livingartscollective.com.

Scott Thompson: May 4-6. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Katt Williams: Comedy. $52-$125. Sat, May 6, 8 p.m.

PNC Arena, Raleigh. www. thepncarena.com.

Marjorie Prime: If you were born in 1977, like playwright Jordan Harrison (who also writes for Orange Is the New Black), then you’ll be eightyfive in 2062—the age of the title character in Harrison’s unsettling drama, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. Even if we’ve sorted out Alzheimer’s disease by then, you still may find yourself experiencing some problems with your memory, and, given the deaths of friends and family members, some depression would be understandable. But don’t worry. Technology will have developed the Prime, a lifesize replacement that can be fashioned to look like, and house, the memories of anyone—including you.

Director Jeff Storer takes us to a likely near future, with a cast

FRIDAY, MAY 5–SUNDAY, MAY 7

MAMMA MIA! FAREWELL TOUR Show of hands, please: How many of you were ever seduced—successfully, at least—to a song by Abba? Sure, the Swedish band’s antiseptic bubblegum pop licks are still highly infectious earworms to this day. (Take a chance on me. You’re welcome.) But make-out music? Hardly, even in their heyday in the seventies. Be that as it may, hijinks ensue in this smash stage musical when a girl secretly invites three men who might be her father to her wedding on the Greek island of Kalokairi, where she was conceived twenty years before (presumably to a different soundtrack).

After topping worldwide sales of $2 billion in tickets, the eighth-longest running show—on Broadway and the West End—is calling this its farewell tour. Hurry. —Byron Woods DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DURHAM Various times, $35–$150, www.dpacnc.com

including Lenore Field, Derrick Ivey, Marcia Edmondson, and Michael Brocki. $5-$20. Thru May 13, 8:15 p.m. Manbites Dog Theater, Durham. www. manbitesdogtheater.org.

—Byron Woods LAST  Revival: CHANCE Annual camp meetings and tent revivals were “the spiritual pinnacle of the year” in Appalachia, writes scholar Michael Ferber, “and participants [worshipped] with both greater enthusiasm and less restraint than in their home churches.” That’s the case in Ward Theatre Company’s new theatrical work, a “cultural and musical collage” in which the jubilance and fervor of a mountain tent revival in 1959 is flipped into rap, rhythm and blues, and gospel songs. We’re not certain if we were moved by something holy or by the naked needs of the humans before us—needs that were met in some cases and not in others. Perhaps they’re one and the same, in the end. Still, we can report, without doubt, that we were moved. $25. Thru May 7. Ward Theatre, Durham. wardtheatrecompany.com.

—Byron Woods

screen

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW

SCREEN

FRIDAY, MAY 5

THE WINGS OF THE DOVE For a generation of teens in 1997, The Wings of the Dove served as an introduction to the psychological intricacies and repressed passions of Henry James—and to full-frontal nudity, courtesy of Helena Bonham Carter. Look, art house cinema was very educational before the Internet. And, prurient memories aside, Bonham Carter gives one of her best performances in an Oscar-nominated turn as a young woman who manipulates her penniless lover (Linus Roache) into marrying a sickly heiress (Alison Elliott) to inherit her fortune. The moody adaptation by screenwriter Hossein Amini and director Iain Softley, who also helmed another nineties cult favorite, Hackers, upstaged concurrent, higher-profile adaptations of the James novels The Portrait of a Lady and Washington Square. Anyone who complains James is dry should see this film. —Zack Smith

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

Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e SEPARATION Mu s i c Bu s i n e AGREEMENTS ss Law UNCONTESTED In c o r p o r a t i o n / L LC / DIVORCE Pa r t n e rMUSIC s h i pBUSINESS LAW Wi l lINCORPORATION/LLC s C o l l e c t i o n s WILLS

967-6159 (919) 967-6159

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com

The Wings of the Dove

PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA

SPECIAL SHOWINGS Movie By Moonlight: Surprise film. Thu, May 4, 8:30 p.m.

Dorothea Dix Campus, Raleigh.

Shadows of the Sixties: Sat, May 6, 2 p.m.

Garner Performing Arts Center, Garner. www. garnerperformingart scenter.com.

O PEN IN G The Dinner—Oren Moverman (Love and Mercy) directs Richard Gere and Steve Coogan in a drama about politics, tragedy, and how

far parents will go to protect their children. Rated R. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2—Marvel’s rascally spacefaring heroes, including a sentient tree and a talking racoon, return for more interstellar hijinks. Reviewed on p. 24. Rated PG-13.

A LSO P LAYI NG The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at www.indyweek.com.  Beauty and the Beast—This live-action remake is an effective piece of fan service but certainly won’t replace the animated classic. Rated PG.

½ Free Fire—The premise of a crime-gonevery-wrong in a 1970s Boston warehouse promises fun but winds up like reheated nineties Tarantino, not on par with director Ben Wheatley’s usual talents.Rated R. ½ Get Out—Jordan Peele of Key & Peele’s directorial debut is Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner crossed with a racially charged The Stepford Wives update. It’s also one of the best things to happen to the horror genre in twenty years.

Rated R. ½ Gifted—Marc Webb’s story of a child math prodigy caught in a custody

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. MUSIC•NEWS•ARTS•FOOD INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com | 5.3.17 | 35

battle isn’t a particularly original film, but it’s heartfelt and accomplished—a very good story, very well told.

Rated PG-13.  Going in Style—This “comedy” from “filmmaker” Zach Braff feels familiar: three old friends, played by actors in their golden years, reunite for one last bank heist. The jokes are tame (and lame) and the film hinges on the accumulated good will of Morgan Freeman, Alan Arkin, and Michael Caine. Rated PG-13.

Who are you again? Read our review of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 on p. 24.

½ Hidden Figures— This true story of three black women triumphing over racism and sexism in the 1960s space race has a TV-movie softness but powerfully portrays bigotry and courage. Rated PG.

½ Kong: Skull Island— Set before 2014’s Godzilla, Legendary Entertainment’s reboot makes Kong’s origin story feel like Apocalypse Now meets Starship Troopers. Rated PG-13.  La La Land—Damien Chazelle reunites Gosling and Stone for a breezy jazz musical with Technicolor charm. Rated PG-13.  The Lego Batman Movie—Cranking up the Jokes Per Minute with an astonishingly high success rate, this animated film blends over-the-top laughs aimed at youngsters with countless gags for adults. Rated PG.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MARVEL STUDIOS

page READINGS & SIGNINGS Edward Balleisen: Fraud: An American History from Barnum to Madoff. Fri, May 5, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www.regulatorbookshop.com.

Joseph Bathanti & Al Maginnes: Double poetry evening. Sat, May 6, 7 p.m.

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

Boozy Poetry Night: Local poets read their work. Second Mondays, 8:30 p.m. The Stag’s Head, Raleigh.

Noah Benezra Strote: Fascism and How to Overcome It: A Conversation. Tue, May 9, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

David Blevins: NC’s Barrier Islands: Wonders of Sand, Sea, and Sky. Wed, May 10, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www.regulatorbookshop.com.

Teresa Howell: That Church Life. Free. Sat, May 6, 3 p.m. South Regional Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.

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PAGE MONDAY, MAY 8

Benjamin Ludwig: Ginny Moon.

Thu, May 4, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Kate Moore: The Radium Girls. Tue, May 9, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Richard Peck: The Best Man. Thu, May 4, 5 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Kumarini Silva: Brown Threat: Identification in the Security State. Mon, May 8, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www.regulatorbookshop.com.

Kelly Sokol: The Unprotected.

Free. Wed, May 3, 7 p.m.

Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www.flyleafbooks.com.

John Trump: Still & Barrel: Craft Spirits in The Old North State.

Wed, May 10, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Lauren Wolk: Beyond the Bright Sea. Wed, May 3, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

LECTURES, ETC. The Children, The Children: Rabbi Joseph Polak: Luncheon and presentation on his autobiography and experiences during the Holocaust. Free-$10. Sun, May 7, 12:30 p.m. Beth El Synagogue, Durham. www. betheldurham.org.

From A to Zine: Communitybuilding workshop with Tristin Miller. Sun, May 7, 1-5 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www.regulatorbookshop.com.

Second Annual Teen Literature Festival: With authors Jen Hubbard, Stuart Albright, and Scott Reintgen.

Sat, May 6, 1-4 p.m. Southwest Regional Library, Durham. www.durhamcountylibrary.org.

Silas House and Sam Gleaves: Southern Cultures quarterly Appalachia Issue, featuring a call & response performance by author Silas House and musician Sam Gleaves plus food prepared by Sheri Castle. $10+. Thu, May 4, 5:30 p.m.

Love House and Hutchins Forum, Chapel Hill.

JON THOMPSON, STEPHANIE ROGERS, & KERRI FRENCH “If every event touches every other event … then nothing is inconsequential and history/ is both what we are and what we are becoming,” Jon Thompson puts forth in “Writing History.” A poetry professor at N.C. State who also edits its excellent online journal and press, Free Verse, Thompson has sought the linkages between place and person, landscape and lineage, and past and present in books including After Paradise, Landscape with Light, and, last year, Strange Country, which set its slanted but lucid sights on the prodigious, protean contradictions of America. In this reading at So & So Books, Thompson is joined by Stephanie Rogers, a New York-based UNC-G alum who has thrice been included in Samovar Press’s Best New Poets anthologies and will read from her debut collection, Plucking the Stinger; and Kerri French, whose forthcoming book, Every Room in the Body, won the 2016 Moon City Poetry Award.

—Brian Howe SO AND SO BOOKS, RALEIGH 7 p.m., free, www.facebook.com/soandsobooks

½ The Lost City of Z—David Grann’s exceptional book about early-twentieth-century Amazonian exploration is rendered unexceptional by staid filmmaking, simple characterizations, and an uncritical perspective on the heroic colonialism presented by historical adventure films such as this. Rated PG-13.

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