INDY Week 5.18.22 by Indy Week

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FOR THEIR BIGGEST HOMETOWN EXTRAVAGANZA YET, TRIANGLE DUO SYLVAN ESSO TAKES IT OUT TO THE BALLPARK.

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Durham's newest City Council member Dr. Monique Holsey-Hyman. Story on page 8

VOL. 38 NO. 20

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

CONTENTS NEWS 6

The NCMA has plans to make its museum park greener, more sustainable, and able to support diverse wildlife again. BY JASMINE GALLUP

Meet Durham's newest City Council member Dr. Monique Holsey-Hyman. BY LENA GELLER

10 How much has been achieved so far under North Carolina's ambitious climate Executive Order 246? BY HANNAH KAUFMAN 12

Locals are doing the work to resettle Afghan refugees.

BY RYAN PELOSKY

ARTS & CULTURE 14

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Little Brother, Vagabon, Indigo De Souza, and many other musical luminaries gather for three days of musical excellence at the Historic Durham Athletic Park. BY NICK MCGREGOR Who is Anne Gomez? A short film offers one snapshot: defense lawyer by day, skronk rocker by night, round-the-clock hater of corn. BY BRIAN HOWE An interview with author Peter C. Baker about his debut North Carolina novel, Planes. BY CARR HARKRADER

THE REGULARS 4 Op-ed 5 Drawn Out & 15 Minutes 20 Culture Calendar

WE M A DE THIS P U B L I S H E RS

Contributors Madeline Crone, Grant Golden, Spencer Griffith, Lucas Hubbard, Brian Howe, Lewis Kendall, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Anna Mudd, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Harris Wheless

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May 18, 2022

BACK TA L K

Last week for the web, Lena Geller wrote about Carrboro Town Council member Sammy Slade’s failed motion in a council meeting to condemn “undemocratic spending” from super PACs in this year’s primary elections, particularly in the NC-04 congressional district race. Reader DAN COLEMAN had some thoughts on the move, which didn’t get a second:

If, as the Washington Post would have it, “democracy dies in darkness,” then Carrboro Town Councilor Sammy Slade deserves a lot of credit for shining a light on one of the most pernicious assaults on American democracy, that of the Super PACs unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision. Unstated by Slade is that the current controversy is in part spurred by the AIPAC Super PAC pouring huge sums into the NC-04 race. AIPAC is complicit in the growing darkness, supporting dozens of Republicans who have promoted Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election. Anyone who accepts their funds is tainted and complicit. Candidate Valerie Foushee claims that she cannot be bought. AIPAC is betting otherwise. Her claim is empty words, a candidate’s cliche. If she cannot stand today against those who fund the subversion of democracy, what will she stand for in Congress? If Foushee truly cannot be bought by AIPAC, let her pledge to stand for justice for the Palestinian people, to call out the crimes of Israel, and to be a vote, as well as a voice, for democracy, at home and abroad. On another note, Chapel Hill reader M. EGMAN did not appreciate last week’s cover photo and will never use the services of longtime advertiser and INDY Week attorney Bill Burton: Picked up your ATROCIOUS publication on display about 6 inches off the floor at Panera in Chapel Hill. Mentioned “6 inches off the floor” as this allows just about anyone at any age to see your front page. That front page picture (May 11, 2022) of a person holding up the “F&%K THIS” sign is APPALLING! I will make a list of your advertisers and NEVER use their services (do you get this Bill Burton and others?).

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OP - E D

Solving Food Insecurity What we can do when work doesn’t put enough food on the table BY JOHN LUMPKIN AND TROOPER SANDERS backtalk@indyweek.com

e live in an era when having a job is no longer a reliable measure of whether or not a person is in need, and soaring food prices are now adding to the challenge of putting healthy meals on the table. A recent Hunger Free America report found that, in the United States, one of the world’s wealthiest countries, 9.7 percent of working adults have difficulty getting enough food or having balanced meals due to a lack of financial resources. In North Carolina, that number was higher, at 10.9 percent. And the pandemic has made it even more clear that anyone can experience financial shocks. Food insecurity isn’t necessarily starvation. Sometimes it looks like working parents sacrificing a meal or food quality to ensure their children can eat. Other times, it looks like an individual with health issues struggling to afford the nutritious foods necessary to get better. The pressures of work, often multiple jobs, and caring for children and family members force low-income households to make difficult choices and rely on inexpensive fast-food meals and convenience foods, often loaded with salt, sugar, and preservatives instead of healthy meals featuring fresh fruits and vegetables. As a result, hardworking people living through minor setbacks can end up dealing with long-term health effects. The good news is that we already have an effective resource to help: the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly food stamps), known as Food and Nutrition Services (FNS) in North Carolina. These benefits average out to roughly just $1.40 per meal. However, this extra addition helps children to develop physically and intellectually; students to focus on coursework instead of hunger pangs; and adults to prevent or manage chronic conditions closely associated with malnutrition. The USDA recently increased the average SNAP benefit, a further step toward addressing the food insecurity people face today. Unfortunately, many who are eligible for SNAP benefits aren’t enrolled, either from lack of awareness, fear of stigma, or difficulties with the application process. Many individuals might assume they’re not eligible because they are employed and have never received federal assistance before. In North Carolina alone, an estimated 540,000 individuals are eligible but not enrolled in this vital program.

Investments to engage those households could transform many lives. Recent efforts by Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina (Blue Cross NC) and Benefits Data Trust (BDT) demonstrate how collaboration can be key to reaching these households. BDT and Blue Cross NC are working together to reach those potentially eligible for FNS/SNAP by mail or email or through direct contact with Blue Cross NC social workers to direct them to BDT’s contact center. Trained BDT specialists at the center walk eligible individuals through the complicated enrollment process, offering needed support with dignity and empathy to alleviate any fear of stigma from participation. These efforts focus on working North Carolinians—including Blue Cross NC members enrolled through the Affordable Care Act—who may struggle to make ends meet, despite having a job. Since the collaboration launched in 2020, Blue Cross NC and BDT have secured $8 million in FNS/SNAP benefits for more than 6,700 North Carolina households. Nationally, food insecurity is associated with an annual bill of $146 billion in direct medical costs and lost productivity, but there is hope. A growing body of research shows that FNS/SNAP recipients are healthier, miss fewer days of work, require fewer visits to a medical provider, and are less likely to skip necessary health care to put food on the table, compared to those who do not receive assistance. Over the course of a year, an adult with low income who participates in FNS/SNAP will incur roughly $1,400 less in medical care costs than someone who does not participate. Cost savings are even higher— $2,360 per person a year—for people 65 and older. Blue Cross NC and BDT’s partnership illustrates how the health-care industry can work with the nonprofit sector to increase participation in an underutilized resource like FNS/SNAP. Similar partnerships could improve health outcomes, reduce avoidable care costs, and elevate quality of life for North Carolinians. It’s crucial that organizations committed to the health and well-being of individuals and their communities intensify their commitment and expand their vision of who needs help. W John Lumpkin, MD, MPH, is the vice president of drivers of health strategy for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina and Trooper Sanders is the CEO of Benefits Data Trust.

DR AW N OUT BY STEVE DAUGHERTY

Can you tell me about your fight with cancer? In 2012, I was diagnosed with stage four metastatic colon cancer. My whole attitude about it was “If I have to give ground to cancer, I try to take it back.” So I worked a lot, through the whole chemo and radiation. My wife at the time was telling me, “You need to buy new clothes,” because I lost a lot of weight. And I said, “I’m not buying clothes for this cancer body.” It kind of ticked me off that cancer entered my life. I’m very sports oriented, and I treated it like an opponent. There were times when, if I couldn’t sleep, instead of just laying there, I’d go for a walk, three o’clock in the morning, because I just figured that’s something that I can control. I put a face on cancer. I talked to it, I cussed it out.

Raleigh

How did cycling fit into your life?

15 MINUTES Tom Vibert, 59 Cyclist and cancer survivor. Vibert will take part in the V Foundation’s Victory Ride to Cure Cancer this weekend. BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

Cycling was always something that when I could, I would ride. And if the treatment stopped me from doing it, I would always get back on the bike to kind of say, “It’s not going to stop me.” When I had the first chemo, I was like, “This is nothing.” I worked out, did some cycling. Then as you get around four or five doses of it in your body, you start having to give a couple of days to recover. Fatigue is big. I’d get back on the bike and I’d start getting my miles up and then something would happen … and all of a sudden you just stop and you’d be like, “Damn, I got to start over.”

How did you get involved in cancer research? After two years, [the cancer] got really bad. I was on a lot of pain meds, and I knew all these chemos were not working. We did radiation. That was not working. I knew I was in trouble when I couldn’t eat. I was like, “Man, we can’t keep going down this chemo road. This is ridiculous.” [But] there wasn’t anything else out there. In 2012, I had my biomarkers checked. It’s a genetic test to find out about your cancer. That’s how I got hooked up with Duke and a clinical trial, because they were looking for people with my biomarkers. Duke found me over in Greensboro and said, “Here’s an immunotherapy drug that’s approved for lung cancer and melanoma.” [I started] this immunotherapy for stage four colon cancer. [But at that point] I didn’t have much on the table anyway. It wasn’t good at all. So it found me at just the right time. It was a miraculous outcome with that clinical trial. Just amazing. The first treatment shrank the tumor more than any of the chemos had ever done. And now that drug is approved for metastatic colon cancer, like I had, for other patients. I just jumped into this research not knowing what the outcome was going to be, and it turned out to be huge. W INDYweek.com

May 18, 2022

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Raleigh

Green Vision Landscape architects have ambitious plans for Raleigh’s NC Museum of Art park. BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

bout a quarter mile south of the North Carolina Museum of Art’s main building, a muddy creek winds its way through a tangled forest. From a paved path, Rachel Woods, the director of the museum’s park operations, points to a pool of dark water surrounded by fallen branches and river rocks—the exit to a culvert running underneath the Reedy Creek Trail. “I kind of grew up in streams like that, playing in water,” she says. “It’s such an asset for our park that is not really accessible right now because it’s so eroded, the banks are so incised.” Even to my untrained eye, it’s clear the creek is not supposed to look like this. The water stands at the bottom of a two-foot trench, a deep channel floodwaters have carved. The creek banks are ragged and torn, exposing tree roots that dangle helplessly from the dirt. It’s like a gash in the skin of the earth. This unnamed creek is the focus of a multiyear project to restore the museum’s 164acre park, repairing damage done to the land in past years and preparing the landscape for the future stresses of climate change. The 200-page Museum Park Vision Plan also outlines how landscape architects will make the park self-sustainable, cutting down on the maintenance needed for things like trail repairs. “A landscape, to be sustainable, cannot require a lot of funding and labor over time. It’s just not maintainable,” says Woods. “We’re looking at restoring the site to what it would have been. I won’t see it in my lifetime, but I know what it’s gonna be over the long term.”

The water story At different times in history, the museum park land was used as a prison farm, mil6

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itary training camp, and part of NC State University’s veterinary school. Crop growing and cattle grazing left the land stripped of its natural grasses. Later, trampling by boots and tanks kept plants from taking deep root. The grasses that have taken hold in the park’s upper meadow today simply don’t have deep enough roots, says Martha Eberle, a landscape architect with Andropogon Associates, one of the companies involved in creating the park vision plan. Rains often run straight off the topsoil into the park below, washing sediment downhill, worsening water quality, and eroding areas downstream. “It’s not all that different than having an impervious surface, like concrete or pavement,” Eberle says. Part of the plan to restore the park includes planting warm-season grasses like wild rye and flowers like sunflowers and cornflowers in the upper meadows. These native plants have deep roots, Eberle says. “They’re capturing more of that stormwater and and allowing it to filter back down into the water table,” she says. “Then that is setting off all of these relationships in the soil that’s allowing for more things to grow. More plants means more carbon being stored, in the actual plants but also in the roots and in the soil.” The park vision plan also calls for expanding and protecting the park’s existing wetlands, and planting additional water species in the area that will help retain stormwater. Some paths will be rerouted to slope more gently down the hill and avoid biologically diverse areas. “Just looking, I can tell water stands here,” says Woods, pointing to a clutch of river oats next to a wooden bridge that arcs over House Creek. “The plant material is telling me this area wants to be a wetland.

An aerial view of the NCMA Park

PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA

The infrastructure [bridge] is in conflict with what the stream is trying to naturally do.” Expanding wetlands and stormwater detention is one of the most important parts of the plan. As climate change worsens, North Carolina has started seeing stronger and more frequent storms that lead to flooding of rivers, roads, and highways. “One of the main reasons we were brought in for the art museum project is that the landscape there is really feeling the effects of climate change,” Eberle says. Development around the museum and in Raleigh is putting additional strain on the landscape, she says. “There’s a lot more impervious services surrounding the museum,” Eberle says. “So that’s bringing faster and higher volumes of stormwater in. Just being out there on any day, you can see the impacts it’s having.” Improvements to the museum park will help mitigate flooding in House Creek and the Crabtree area, according to Woods. “Our whole site is falling toward downtown. Blue Ridge Road is like the ridgeline,” Woods explains. “So [we’re] looking at how to, along the way, do little rain gardens or wetlands that will [naturally] let that water immerse into the ground, replenish the water table.” At the heart of the project is the stream restoration, which involves moving dirt, removing fallen and dead trees and raising

the level of the stream channel that’s been eroded over time, says Eberle. Even there, however, the team plans to work sustainably, ensuring nothing goes to waste. “Any trees that have to be taken out or any trees that are already dead … we’ll repurpose those as structures in the stream restoration, or even milling up lumber for benches or signage,” Eberle says. “Any piece of a tree you can’t use, you build up these mounds of vegetation and let them decompose over time … in places that really need targeted soil building.”

Carbon conversion One of the long-term goals of the park project is to restore the park’s natural habitats, removing invasive species and cultivating native plants. That, in turn, will help pull more carbon out of the air, says Woods. “A lot of these plants that were native to the Piedmont region actually do a lot of carbon fixing,” Woods says. “They pull a lot of carbon out of the atmosphere and kind of store it in the ground.” Almost every aspect of the plan helps increase the park’s potential for storing and sequestering carbon. The stream restoration will help create new wetland areas where plants can grow. The planting of native grasses will improve the park’s soil quality and reduce the need for irrigation and maintenance, which costs energy.

The plan will ultimately add more than 12 acres of forest to the park and install small trees and shrubs along the forest edge, adding to the green space and reducing the amount of turf. Plans include expansion of the existing walnut tree grove and installation of a bald cypress grove. The process of restoring the park’s habitats will be a long one, however. Woods has already organized several community service days to take out invasive plants, but it’s an ongoing battle, she says. Ultimately, the work is worth it. After volunteers took out much of the park’s privet, an invasive plant that prevents even tree seedlings from growing, they saw some native species naturally return to the park. ‘We saw lots of species of fern, even several species of orchids coming up, all because they now have some room to grow,” Woods says. “It’s thrilling, to be honest. “It’s a lot of manual labor to do this work. So when you see those results of things we’ve planted … It’s just great to see the things you plant grow, and have that reward of ‘This is beautiful now.’” Restoration of these natural habitats will hopefully bring native wildlife back into the park, Woods says. It will take time—years—but the park should eventu-

ally be a biodiverse haven for songbirds, owls, ducks, otters, turtles, salamanders, and even beavers.

Inspiring change As new construction springs up around the museum and across the Triangle, Eberle is hoping the park’s environmentally friendly design will be an inspiration to developers, showing them how to work with the land. “It really comes down to what we call a regenerative design,” she says. “You’re not just coming in and plopping down a building. You’re coming in and trying to understand the systems and the networks that are in place within that site … the ecological networks of water and soil and plants and animals. It’s really about knitting those systems back together.” The Southeast has been a little slow to start using these concepts of environmentally friendly design, Eberle says. But as hurricanes sweep in, heat islands increase in temperature, and more people pour into Raleigh, they offer a promising solution to some of the area’s biggest problems. “I do think there’s a lot of room for improvement,” Eberle says. “Not every developer has a forest on their site they

can protect. But there are principles [of regenerative design] you can bring into any development or any property.” Meanwhile, museum staff plan to use the project to help educate museum and park visitors about nature. Hopefully, people will leave with a better understanding of the environment and how they can make some changes in their own backyard, Woods says. Expanded hands-on educational programs for everyone from elementary schoolers to ecology students at NC State are on the horizon. The coronavirus pandemic has given many North Carolinians a greater appreciation for green spaces, Woods says. Starting in 2019, the museum park saw an explosion of visitors, with a 23 percent increase in the number of vistors in 2021 over that year. In 2020, the park was just shy of a million visitors. “Having that kind of space for people to have serenity [is important],” Woods says. “That’s what we heard a lot from people, that they came to the park and they found peace and rejuvenation.” In an urban setting like Raleigh, it’s important for people, especially children, to get out into nature, Woods says. “Nature should be experienced,” she says. “It shouldn’t just be this sort of textbook [image] or elusive idea. It should be engaged with.”

Eberle, who also works on increasing social engagement with green spaces, agrees. One concept her company uses in design is biophilia, the innate instinct to connect with nature. “It’s the concept that people need to experience nature in their everyday life in order to be the healthiest people we can be,” Eberle says. “So how do we bring that into the hard, urban environment?” The overall goal of the project is to heal the park’s natural systems, create a more unified campus for the museum, and allow visitors to immerse themselves more deeply in nature, Eberle says. “This is such a beloved landscape in Raleigh,” she says. “I think the museum is really interested in making sure that that legacy is continued. You can see [the park is] being threatened right now. You can see how the streams are suffering. I think [museum staff] saw that and realized if they didn’t do something, that they were going to lose this gem they have.” W A free museum exhibit, To Be Rather Than to Seem, explores the history of the museum park and the new environmental vision plan designed by Andropogon Associates, Biohabitats, and WK Dickson. Work on the park, starting with the stream restoration, is expected to begin next year.

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May 18, 2022

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Durham

Heart of Service Meet Durham’s newest city council member Dr. Monique Holsey-Hyman. BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

ast Thursday, on her first morning as a Durham City Council member, Dr. Monique Holsey-Hyman pushed back her own travel plans to make time for a constituent. She was supposed to leave for New York at noon—she’d been asked to speak at one of Columbia University’s commencement ceremonies that weekend and still needed to figure out what she was going to say— but the constituent was asking for her help, and Holsey-Hyman is not one to decline a request for assistance. She could write her speech in the car, she decided. If you’re reading this, you’re experiencing the result of that first act of service: the constituent was me, and the request was for an interview. Holsey-Hyman was sworn in last Wednesday. The previous week, she was appointed to finish the term of former council member Charlie Reece, who resigned in March to move to Paris with his family. Twenty-one people applied to fill the at-large seat, and the council chose four exceptionally strong finalists—Nate Baker, an urban planner; Schnequa Nicole Diggs, a NC Central University assistant professor of public administration; Henry C. McKoy Jr., an NCCU business professor; and Holsey-Hyman, a professor of social work who teaches courses at NCCU and Walden University—and invited them for lengthy interviews. After 40 Durham residents spoke in support of their favored candidates at a public comment session, the council selected Holsey-Hyman in a unanimous vote. During my conversation with Holsey-Hyman, she comes across as she did during her interview with the council: confident, vulnerable, and for the people. She’s polished in appearance—curled hair, manicured nails, pearl necklace and earrings— 8

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but speaks with the air of a revolutionary, waving her hands and dropping one-liners in a thick New York accent (“When you cut us, our blood is red like yours,” she told the council during her interview). She answers most questions with a story; when I ask about the topic of her Columbia speech, for example, she first tells me about the student, Trina Nurse, who landed her the gig. Before Nurse went to college, she was living in a shelter and cooking on a hot plate with “one on her hip and one in the carriage,” Holsey-Hyman tells me. When Nurse got a scholarship to Columbia, Holsey-Hyman, who works as an external advisor for the university, took her on as a mentee; now, Nurse is graduating with a master’s degree in social work. “She always says I’m her inspiration, and I’m like, ‘No, you’re my hero,’” Holsey-Hyman says. Thirty years ago, like Nurse, Holsey-Hyman graduated from Columbia as a first-generation student with a master’s in social work. Her speech will be directed toward 2022 graduates who are the first in their families to complete a degree, she says, applauding their accomplishments while stressing that “being a first-gen person doesn’t define who you are.” Holsey-Hyman was born and raised in the South Bronx. When she was three years old, her parents divorced and her mother turned to public assistance programs to support her family. “I’m very humbled to say that I have humble beginnings,” Holsey-Hyman says. “My mother still remembers the first man who gave her a check.” Despite having limited resources, Holsey-Hyman’s mother always found activites for her four daughters; she would take them

Dr. Monique Holsey-Hyman

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

to the South Street Seaport to see free puppet shows, guide them through museums, and, most often, bring them along to meetings for public bodies like the the tenant board, the community board, the PTA, the borough council, and the city council. “That’s where I learned the importance of servant leadership and giving back,” Holsey-Hyman says. “[My mother] always said, ‘I’m gonna fight for what’s right.’” When Holsey-Hyman watched her mother speak in front of the city council, she says, it made her feel particularly empowered. During junior high, Holsey-Hyman was placed in a program for gifted students called S-P (“special progress”), which accelerated her schooling and allowed her to graduate high school at age 16. Before and after her stint at Columbia, Holsey-Hyman completed a bachelor’s degree in human services and sociology at the University of New York at Binghamton and an Ed.D. at Walden University. Holsey-Hyman performed the bulk of her fieldwork in New York. While she was still in school, she interned at Rikers Island, conducting needs assessments for incarcerated women who were separated from their children; upon graduating, she worked her way up the ranks of the Child Welfare Administration before becoming the director of intensive case management at Steinway Child and Family Services, a mental health organization in Queens.

The start of Holsey-Hyman’s career coincided with the beginning of the crack cocaine epidemic, and much of her work became centered around securing housing and facilitating mental health services for children with family members suffering from substance use disorder. At Steinway, she spearheaded the creation of the first case management program in the South Bronx, transforming a bodega into a community center that supported children who had Axis 1 disorders— anxiety, depression, ADD, drug addiction— as well as histories with child welfare. To launch the program, she secured funding from state and city offices of mental health and knocked on residents’ doors to get their buy-in. By leading this project, as well as a subsequent expanded program that offered 24-hour services for mental and physical health, housing, and case management, Holsey-Hyman says she learned “what it takes to get resources in a community.” In 2006, after one of her sisters died of breast cancer, Holsey-Hyman was seeking a change in both scenery and routine. She’d always wanted to become an educator, and she was drawn to Durham’s vibrancy, diversity, and arts scene (“I’ve seen more Broadway plays here than I’ve seen in New York,” she says). After landing a job as an assistant professor of social work at Shaw University, Holsey-Hyman bought a house

near Southpoint Mall and put down roots in the Bull City. During her 12 years at Shaw, and now at NCCU, Holsey-Hyman has gone to great lengths to invest in her students, both inside and outside of the classroom. “If they’re not in my class, I’m knocking on their door,” she says. “We need you to stay.” Though her tactics have earned her a reputation for being a “little crazy,” she says, they’ve paid off—she’s won over 25 awards and honors for her achievements as an educator, and at the public comment session for the at-large council seat, several of Holsey-Hyman’s former students took the podium to describe how she has changed their lives. One student, Allison Murrow, said she was “overwhelmed with trepidation” when she started the master of social work program at NCCU; she had recently entered recovery from substance use disorder and was struggling to see her own self-worth. “I was full of shame and guilt and had lost, in large part, the ability to believe in myself,” Murrow said. “Broken and afraid, I was fortunate to take one of Professor Hyman’s courses my first semester. She immediately began to pour hope and life back into me.” Through Holsey-Hyman’s support, Murrow became empowered to use her experiences to help others and is now employed as a social worker at an alcohol and drug center. “She’s a visionary with a heart of service,” Murrow said. “She believes in the future of this city and sees its youth as those who hold the key to its success.” Four days after speaking at the public comment session, Murrow graduated from NCCU with a master’s in social work. Beyond her professional work, Holsey-Hyman’s “heart of service” is evident in her civic engagement experience; she has held positions on the Durham Mental Health Board and a number of improvement teams for local public schools and currently serves on Durham’s Citizen Advisory Council and Board of Commissioners Social Service Board. “When people say to me, ‘What do you do for fun?’ I’m like, ‘I’m on the DSS board,’” Holsey-Hyman says, laughing. “But really, I get something out of helping people. That’s what makes me tick.” That’s why she applied to join the council, she says—she loves to help people, and she’s good at it. Holsey-Hyman’s top priorities for Durham are affordable housing, youth programming, and crime reduction. Her husband, stepfather, and younger sister are all current or retired police officers, and she says this proximity, paired with her social work experience,

has helped her to gauge the resources and initiatives needed to keep residents safe. She’s a strong proponent of community policing and believes law enforcement departments should have social workers on staff to deal with mental health and domestic violence that officers aren’t trained to handle. She also wants to increase resources for formerly incarcerated people who are reentering the community. During her interview with the council, Holsey-Hyman voiced support for Shotspotter, a gunfire detection alert technology that instantly notifies police of the location where a shot has been fired. Council members recently voted to bring Shotspotter to Durham as a pilot program, though the vote was divided; three dissenting council members shared deep concerns with how the technology has been deployed in other cities, citing an incident in Chicago where police shot and killed a 13-year-old boy after responding to a Shotspotter alert. Holsey-Hyman told me that she needs to do more research on the technology to assess how it might impact Durham but thinks it’s “amazing” that it can track gunfire with such precision. “I’ve lived in the projects,” Holsey-Hyman says. “It’s a culture; you’re not going to get people to tell you, ‘That’s where the shot came from.’ It would definitely help us to know where things are happening.” Councilman Leonardo Williams says the council couldn’t have gone wrong with any of the four finalists—he says he hopes that the other three candidates will run in the next election, especially Baker, whom he describes as a “wealth of knowledge”— but they felt that Holsey-Hyman’s set of skills would best augment the council’s existing expertise. Last winter, when Durham’s Braswell Apartments were sold to new owners and its tenants were given just 30 days to relocate, Williams says the council was unable to support the tenants who asked them for assistance. “The county takes care of social services, so all we could say was, ‘Oh, well, go to the county,’” Williams says. “That didn’t sit right with me.” The council wasn’t just in need of a social services expert, Williams says—“we were also missing a bit of tenacity.” When he listened to Murrow speak about Holsey-Hyman’s role in propelling her to success, Williams knew that this candidate had the tenacity he’d been looking for. “We tend to be a bit transactional,” Williams says. “But who’s gonna take the resources that we pull together and make them transformative? That’s what we were seeking.” W

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North Carolina

Executive Update What’s new with North Carolina’s most ambitious climate order? BY HANNAH KAUFMAN backtalk@indyweek.com

very year, once a year, the world comes together to celebrate the one thing that allows us to live and breathe: our planet. Last month, Earth Day arrived with its usual outpour of love. People planted trees, and social media overflowed with lightly-filtered photos of families posing in front of landmarks and sunsets. And while it is a day for appreciating the beauty of our oceans, forests, mountains, and deserts, Earth Day is also one for political action and environmental accountability. The year 2020 marked 50 years since Earth Day’s founding. By the time we reach 100 years, however, scientists believe that the impacts of climate change and increased natural disasters may transform this annual day of appreciation into a cry for help. Gov. Roy Cooper signed a new executive order in early January to address these effects of climate change in North Carolina, setting statewide goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and encourage green transportation. Executive Order 246 is the most recent of a series of orders passed over the last few years.

What are the goals of Executive Order 246? EO 246, or “North Carolina’s Transformation to a Clean, Equitable Economy,” contains ambitious goals: 50 percent reduction of statewide greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and net-zero carbon emissions no later than 2050. Now four months since the order’s release, it is important to revisit its goals and evaluate the state’s progress during a climate crisis that calls for immediate 10

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action, says Steve Kalland, who serves on an advisory committee for EO 246’s Clean Transportation Plan. “All of these kinds of changes take time, and [it has probably not been] long enough for most of this to actually register yet,” Kalland says. “The flip side is, the clock is ticking and we’ve got a lot of ground to cover, both to meet the goals in the executive order and to meet the goals necessary to avoid greater than two-degree temperature increase because of climate change.” One of the order’s main provisions is the NC Clean Transportation Plan, which gives the Department of Transportation (DOT) 15 months to create a viable plan for decarbonizing the transportation sector, reducing vehicle miles traveled, and increasing the availability of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) so that 50 percent of vehicles sold are zero-emission by 2030. In addition to this provision is a required greenhouse gas inventory to be updated biennially, a decarbonization pathways analysis that will identify potential paths to reduce emissions, and the appointment of a mandatory environmental justice lead within every cabinet agency. This order expands on the goals of past executive orders in North Carolina, says Dionne Delli-Gatti, the state’s clean energy director who helped create the Clean Energy Plan. “It builds on some of the efforts that date back to 2018 when Executive Order 80 started us on this course,” Delli-Gatti says. “This increases those goals to meet and keep up with the science, it increases the economy-wide targets and really tries to take a look at where we are and what we’ve been successful in and where there’s still gaps.”

Gov. Roy Cooper signing EO 246.

PHOTO FROM TWITTER

History of climate action in North Carolina EO 80 contains a Clean Energy Plan that encourages the use of clean energy resources like solar power and wind to create a resilient electric grid and a NC ZEV Plan with a goal of 80,000 ZEVs by 2025, Delli-Gatti says. While he has no doubt that the state will meet the ZEV goal set in 2018, this newest executive order ups that target significantly, says Brian Powell, director of communications at NC Conservation Network. “The executive order sets a goal of 1.25 million registered zero-emission vehicles by 2030,” Powell says. “This one is going to be more difficult, but the Department of Transportation thinks that we’re on track.” Although EO 246 tackles the issue of climate change head-on, the state’s attitude toward climate concerns was dramatically different only a decade ago, Powell says. “In August of 2012, the North Carolina legislature, which was controlled by a governor who was a Republican and supermajorities of Republicans in both houses, passed a law that said the state was not allowed to consider science around sea level rise when establishing coastal policy,” Powell says.

State government has grown in leaps and bounds since this stance of complete climate change denial, Powell says. In 2021, bipartisan law House Bill 951 was passed to address climate change, and a budget was signed to increase the state’s funding for storm resilience and other impacts of climate change. While this is all positive progress, Kalland says that not much tangible action has taken place since EO 246’s passing in January. “I think that [so far], all we’ve really done is get ourselves situated to really dig into the questions,” Kalland says.

Back to the original question: What’s happened since January? Much of the progress that has occurred so far has centered around forming the committees that will eventually create climate action plans, says Kym Hunter, a lawyer at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and an environmental representative on the Clean Transportation Plan’s board. “The Clean Transportation Plan Advisory Board has been set up and those sub-

“It’s going to take work to push forward and make sure that action happens in a more expedited time frame.” committees have been set up,” Hunter says. “But there hasn’t really been much progress made yet—we’re still in pretty early stages.” Although EO 246’s Clean Transportation Plan allowed the 15-month period of planning, Hunter says that that timeframe should be looked at like a race, not a deadline. “The governor’s office said when they passed the executive order that that did not mean they were going to wait 15 months before they actually did anything, but I haven’t really seen any signs from DOT that there is any kind of imminent action plan,” Hunter says. “So, I think it’s going to take work to push forward and make sure that action happens in a more expedited time frame.” Another EO 246 goal completed in late January was the updated greenhouse gas inventory, which showed that transportation emissions have overtaken energy generation emissions as the largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the state, Powell says. One of the biggest accomplishments to date was the recent appointment of an environmental justice lead in every agency. This required position isn’t just about checking a box, but it prioritizes accountability and transparency with underserved communities, says Mary Maclean Asbill, the director of the NC offices of the SELC. While all of the steps that have been taken since January are important, Asbill says there needs to be a push toward taking real action as soon as possible in order to reach the goals in EO 246. “I think it can be met by 2050, but the time is now,” Asbill says. “We can’t plan to make a plan and have too many work sessions—they’ve got to roll up their sleeves and get it done now. We don’t have a minute to lose.” W INDYweek.com

May 18, 2022

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North Carolina Sebghatullah Jalali and Shane Ellison of Duke Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic are assisting Afghan refugees with daunting legal challenges. PHOTO BY MILENA OZERNOVA

Resettling Refugees Away from the headlines, local groups help Afghan refugees adjust to NC life. BY RYAN PELOSKY backtalk@indyweek.com

ore than four million refugees have fled Ukraine since February, dominating headlines around the world. Yet closer to home, Afghans who fled during the US withdrawal from the country eight months ago are still arriving, and Triangle resettlement agencies are still helping evacuees build new lives. “I know that it seems like ancient history to the news cycles, but, for us, it’s daily life,” said Adam Clark, director of World Relief Durham. While the initial wave of hundreds of arrivals has subsided, arrivals continue. Despite strong community support, local resettlement workers face obstacles at nearly every turn. Afghan refugees face unique legal challenges, as many are not guaranteed permanent legal status in the United States. Short-term housing, permanent housing, and language-appropriate mental health counseling also remain critical needs. “Ukraine, in many ways, is making it easy to forget what just happened a few months ago. But, I think the community has not forgotten,” Clark said. When Kabul fell on August 15, 2021, professionals across the refugee resettlement community braced for an 12

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unprecedented surge in cases. More than 70,000 Afghans would flee the country for the United States in the months that followed. “We knew this would be a situation that has never happened before in the United States in the resettlement of refugees,” said Omer Omer, North Carolina field office director for the United States Committee on Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI). “Usually, it’s very structured, well organized. But this is completely out of plan.” Resettlement organizations found themselves heavily unprepared and underresourced for the influx of cases. The surge of refugees came on the heels of the Trump administration’s lowering of the refugee ceiling. President Barack Obama’s refugee ceiling for fiscal year 2017 was 110,000. President Donald Trump set the ceiling for fiscal year 2021 at 15,000, and last year, the United States accepted just 11,411 refugees. Then came the news in August and September that thousands of Afghan refugees were headed to the United States, including North Carolina. “The biggest challenge was the short timeframe. Most of the time, we know months ahead of time when a new

population is going to come. In some cases, we had 24 to 48 hours from notification to arrival of a new family to serve,” Clark said. Omer’s USCRI North Carolina field office first proposed it could take 100 refugees following Kabul’s fall. In the two months that followed, the office received over 260. Seven months after Afghans first began arriving in the Triangle, volunteer response remains strong, yet substantial challenges remain. When refugees first arrive, resettlement organizations look to be as welcoming as possible. “You want to ensure that they receive a culturally appropriate meal when they arrive,” Omer said. The next focus becomes short-term housing, followed by permanent housing. Durham volunteers have helped with both, Clark said. “The level of community support has been tremendous,” Clark said. “People offer their homes, their land, their cars.” Volunteers have furnished apartments for incoming families, buying furniture, decorations, appliances, and more. “We want to make the house just as perfect as we can,” said Nancy Cook, who prepares homes for Church World Service. Even so, long-term housing remains out of reach for many Afghan families. USCRI still houses about 25 percent of its refugees in hotels because permanent housing has not been available. “Being in the midst of an affordable housing crisis in our region and suddenly having such a large number of people to welcome is a challenge,” Clark said. Afghan evacuees also face daunting legal challenges as they attempt to secure their future in the United States. The United States granted the vast majority of recent Afghan arrivals humanitarian parole status, which allows individuals “who may be inadmissible or otherwise ineligible for admission into the United States to be in the United States for a temporary period for urgent humanitarian reasons or significant public benefit,” according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Service. Many of those Afghan parolees have a pathway to stay in the United States lawfully, through having American citizen family members or access to Special Immigrant Visas, which can grant permanent residence to evacuees who aided the United States abroad. More than 36,000 Afghans, however, lack these routes. Their only option for remaining in the country legally is to file for asylum by proving that they meet the definition of a refugee—until then, legally, they are considered “evacuees.” “I think many, many, many Afghan evacuees will meet the definition of a refugee,” said Shane Ellison, supervis-

ing attorney at Duke Law School’s Immigrant Rights Clinic. “But it’s a really long and difficult process to apply for asylum in the United States. If those asylum applications are not granted, then that 36,000 are at the mercy of Congress and the executive [branch].” Mental health care is another vital concern for local agencies. Afghan evacuees struggle to look ahead when their journeys to the United States come so quickly after encountering extreme trauma and violence. “These refugee families are coming fresh with traumatic experiences,” said Clark. Even in normal cases, where families spend years in the transition process, roughly 40 percent of refugees are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “Refugees may have been in a camp for years, or even decades, and it takes quite a long time to get to us,” Clark said, “In this case, it was very unique to have folks coming, being able to talk about fleeing from the Taliban just a couple of weeks ago.” The trauma branches from a variety of evacuee experiences: “They left their loved ones in Afghanistan, the house that they struggled for, they left all of these things just in a matter of two weeks. They have lived in camps, sometimes for months. There is a lack of information about life in the United States, so the expectation and the reality are two totally different things,” said Ahmad, a local Afghan resettlement worker who asked that his surname not be disclosed for the sake of his family’s safety. After months of settling families, local volunteer Marian Abernathy still sees refugees struggling with their trauma. “Most of the volunteers do not have the background or skills to provide that kind of trauma counseling or care. I think that’s a big need, particularly for providers who are speaking Dari and Pashto,” said Abernathy, a cochair of the social action committee at Durham’s Judea Reform Congregation. Establishing employment and routines can help refugees feel a part of American society, refugee resettlement workers say. With this, also, resettlement workers say the community has offered essential support: “Employment is not an issue, a long time ago, it was,” Omer said. Looking ahead, Ahmad says he hopes local residents will remember what Afghan refugees have endured as they continue to adjust to life in North Carolina. “If you see an Afghan with a different outfit or a different mindset, or if you see an Afghan who cannot speak your language, I would say please be patient with them. And please help them to the extent you can, because they need time to become part of the community.” W

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May 18, 2022

M U SIC

SYLVAN ESSO: THE GREATEST SHOW ON DIRT

Thursday, May 19, Friday, May 20, & Saturday, May 21, 7 p.m., $50 | Historic Durham Athletic Park, Durham

Historic Durham Athletic Park PHOTO BY DL ANDERSON

Field of Dreams Sylvan Esso spins a wild hometown idea into three nights of musical excellence at the Historic Durham Athletic Park. BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com

ylvan Esso’s recent achievements are the stuff of most bands’ fantasies: Strutting their red-carpet stuff as presenters and nominees at the 2022 Grammy Awards. Gracing both late-night and daytime TV with appearances on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Taping a debut for long-running concert series Austin City Limits. Launching an independent label, Psychic Hotline, and an in-demand recording studio, Betty’s. Yet bandmates Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn say their biggest dreams will come true this weekend during a three-night stand at downtown’s Historic Durham Athletic Park (DAP). Dubbed “The Greatest Show on Dirt,” the downtown extravaganza includes all-star support acts opening for Sylvan Esso, afterparties at three different venues, a Psychic Hotline pop-up shop at PS37, and exclusive baseball-themed merch from Oxford Pennant. It’s a decade in the making, Sanborn and Meath tell INDY Week over homemade cold brew on the back porch of Betty’s. 14

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“We headlined Hopscotch [in 2016], but obviously that’s Raleigh,” Sanborn says. “Then we did our night at Shakori Hills [in 2017], but that’s way out there [in Pittsboro]. Then we did two nights at DPAC [in 2019, on the WITH Tour], which was great, but it didn’t feel like our usual thing. Everything was almost the thing. But this feels like a culmination—like a true hometown show. We’ve been trying to play at the ballpark for years.” “Years,” Meath emphasizes. “I mean, James Brown played there! I would like to go on the record and say that I have always wanted to do our thing downtown. It seems like a really wonderful way to connect back to Durham.” The ballpark was originally built in 1926 as the wooden El Toro Park, where the Negro League team the Durham Black Sox played. In the summer of 1939, though, the nearby Big Bull Tobacco Warehouse caught fire and spread to the field. DAP’s storied concrete-and-steel grandstand was constructed shortly thereafter and began playing host to

the minor league Durham Bulls. In the late 1980s, Hollywood came calling with the cult classic Bull Durham starring Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon, causing Durham to become an old-school destination for fans of Southern minor league baseball—and the team to outgrow the park. In the 1995 season, the team moved across the railroad tracks to the Bulls Athletic Park. Since then, DAP has played host to the NC Central University Eagles baseball team and—anchored both by Old North Durham fixtures like King’s Sandwich Shop and the Blue Note Grill and by a growing bevy of Foster Street condos—remained a flagship Durham location. And Meath and Sanborn say that the location is everything for their triple-header. “You don’t even really need to buy a ticket,” Meath says with a smile. “You can just hang out outside the fence.” (Is she OK with the INDY printing that? “Totally,” she says.) “That was one of the big draws for us and what Amelia was pushing the whole time,” Sanborn adds. “When you do something in downtown Durham, it’s inherently just a block party. It’s not really about any one band or one person. It’s about a huge portion of the city coming together and hanging out.” Originally planned as a one-night celebration of the band’s 2020 album, Free Love, the pandemic postponement eventually worked in Sylvan Esso’s favor when their field of dreams expanded to two nights. After both of those quickly sold out, they added a third. “We wanted to do something big enough that there was nowhere else to be,” Sanborn says. “We were like, ‘How crazy can we make this? How can we make this something that has weight—that feels like a moment?’” The moon shot extends to the weekend’s openers: half who are North Carolina icons and half who are performers representative of broader indie excellence. “We made a list of all of the dream people that could open for us,” Meath says. “We love Little Brother, and they live in such infamy and lore here. We hung out with Phonte once and hit it off. Then we asked Yo La Tengo …” “And they both said yes!” Sanborn exclaims, finishing Meath’s sentence. “That never happens. We were shocked. Those two bands each seemed to exemplify what we were going after.” To round out each night’s triple bill, they then thought, “What about up-and-coming people who any of us would go see, wherever they’re playing, any night of the week?” Sanborn says. “So Indigo De Souza—another North Carolina artist who’s crushing it. And then our old friends Mr Twin Sister …” Returning the favor, Meath playfully cuts Sanborn off: “Who we adore.” Opening night on Thursday, May 19, features Cameroonian American multi-instrumentalist Vagabon and pop avant-gardist Gus Dapperton (sadly, Asheville native Moses Sumney had to cancel). An impressive after-party lineup includes touring rockers Palehound and GRRL at the Pin-

who filmed a video for their single “Numb” at DBAP in July 2021? “I was a big Little League guy,” Sanborn admits. “And I moved to Milwaukee after high school, so I loved the Brewers. It’s like a religion there.” Ditto for Meath, who grew up in Boston listening to Red Sox games on the radio with her mom and says she’ll strut her stuff in three different baseball-themed outfits this weekend. “I’m also a very snack-oriented person, so the snacks are my favorite part. Even now, when we go to Bulls games, I’m mostly there for the snacks … and to yell and scream, which people here do not do. The first time we went to a Bulls game together with a group of people, everyone was like, ‘What are you doing?’” With a hearty laugh, Sanborn adds, “Everyone was having a great time, and then it would be like, ‘Fuck you #11!’ She was a menace.” That intensity may not translate to Sylvan Esso’s recorded music, but anyone who’s seen Meath onstage knows she exudes a particularly powerful presence. That’s led to a lot of big opportunities coming their way, though Sanborn says that the pair turns down ones that don’t “feel like they’re part of the story we want to tell.” Instead, both agree that their sonic narrative is getting “wilder and weirder,” and new single “Sunburn” affirms it. Out May 19—just in time for the big weekend—it’s an exuberant ode to that most tactile of summer sensations. Sylvan Esso fires on all creative cylinders on the track, with Meath’s sensual lyrics and Sanborn’s skittering beats combining into an eminently danceable jam. “I feel most at home and the most creatively exploratory when it’s just Sandy and I,” Meath says, smiling as she uses her nickname for Sanborn and marveling at their “truly ecstatic” recent live performances. “There’s magic in being two people that play to so many—like a conductor of a sea of humans. It’s a dream.” Sanborn agrees, identifying this moment— new material, the growth of Psychic Hotline and Betty’s, the three-night festival—as the natural confluence of Sylvan Esso’s internal vision and external stimulation. “We’re in this phase where the umbrella just keeps getting bigger,” he says. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt more creatively fulfilled. It’s a natural thing to become more isolated the older you get—to have your circle get smaller. You have to actively work against that if you don’t want it to happen. But man, working against it feels really good.” Meath agrees. “Sylvan Esso is for everybody,” she says. “I want as many people to hear us as possible.” W

hook on Friday, before Greensboro Afropunks Black Haus precede a DJ set from Little Brother’s Rapper Big Pooh at Motorco on Saturday. “You gotta have an after party,” Meath chuckles. “That was always part of the plan.” “And part of the dream,” Sanborn adds. “There are going to be thousands of people downtown, so let’s put in a little extra effort and have the theme of the evening continue, even if it’s spread out.” He credits PS37 for jumping in to host and book three nights of local-centric after parties, with Raund Haus, Gemynii, and Queen Plz flexing their esteemed electronic chops. “That’s the thing we noticed the first week we moved here a decade ago,” Sanborn says. “Everybody, when they hear an idea that they think is cool, they say, ‘Hey, how can I help?’ There’s no feeling of competitiveness or ego. Everybody just wants to be part of a cool happening. That is so rare and awesome.” Will Sylvan Esso’s trifecta contribute to that Triangle tradition—and perhaps prove to younger artists the power of sticking to your sui generis guns? Meath and Sanborn both deflect the question, stressing the fact that Durham’s tight-knit musical tapestry predates them—and will certainly outlast them. “I’m honored to contribute to that community, but I want to constantly acknowledge the community that’s been here the whole time,” Meath says. “Durham is an incredible place to make art, but Black and brown people put Durham on the map—and are still fighting to make Durham what it is.” Sanborn picks up the thread: “What Little Brother built, what’s been going on forever at [North Carolina] Central [University], what J. Cole did with Dreamville, those are foundational aspects that allow people like me and Amelia to say, ‘Oh, I could do that.’ There’s such power in that. It allows everything to build in a way that feels permanent. No part of what’s going on here feels like a trend. It’s like a series of blooms in your garden. I feel truly lucky to be a part of it.” That scrappy humility continues to endear Sylvan Esso to local adherents, even as the band’s big-tent ambitions attract the attention of millions of global fans. Those fans have traditionally skewed younger and more electropop-centric, but the DAP festival promises to expand that audience— possibly even to the slightly older group of baseball enthusiasts who held the inaugural Sandlot Revival featuring six teams from around the Southeast at Historic Durham Athletic Park in April. So is baseball fandom acceptable for the eminently cool Meath and Sanborn,

Don’t miss your favorite band in town. Follow @INDYWeek on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram for breaking news.

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May 18, 2022

FR 5/20 @CAT’S @CAT’S CRADLE

DRY CLEANING W/ FAKE FRUIT

WE 5/18 @CAT’S @CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM

WE 5/18 @MOTORCO @MOTORCO

W/ BOYISH, HEART TO GOLD

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TH 5/19 @HAW @HAW RIVER BALLROOM

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VUNDABAR

REMO DRIVE

SA 5/21 @HAW @HAW RIVER BALLROOM

ANDY HULL

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BASS EXTREMES—

OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW

VICTOR WOOTEN, STEVE BAILEY, & JEFF SIPE

W/ GANGSTAGRASS

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DEHD

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TU 10/18

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FR 27 POSTPONED TO 6/29/23

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May 18, 2022

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NC SHORT FILM SHOWCASE

Saturday, May 21, 2 p.m., $5–$7 | North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh | ncartmuseum.org

Scorn on the Cob Defense lawyer by day, skronk-rocker by night, and round-the-clock hater of corn: Anne Gomez gets a quizzical portrait in the short film Niblets. BY BRIAN HOWE arts@indyweek.com

he first thing you must understand is that Anne Gomez hates corn. Hates, hates, hates, hates it. In fact, this is an understatement, like saying that a vampire hates garlic, that a slug hates salt. The mere presence of corn—the mere word— causes her whole body to shrivel, the revulsion puckering her animated face. Corn! She really just can’t stand it. If you found that paragraph curious, wait until you see Niblets, a wily yet sincere short film by Durham’s Douglas Vuncannon. After premiering at Shadowbox Studio in Durham last September and then hitting some far-flung festivals, picking up an award in Madrid, it’s screening in a block of local shorts at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Saturday afternoon. At a well-rounded 25 minutes, it’s one of the longer of the six films screening at the NC Short Film Showcase—others in the bunch run at six or nine minutes. Niblets does offer a fragmentary portrait of Gomez, from her young life to her longtime work in indigent criminal defense, but it makes no attempt to be thorough, and it draws no simple lines from her corn aversion to other themes. Leaving out the cob and showing us but a few kernels, it’s not just open to interpretation but almost defies it. This makes its toothsome flavor linger—especially if you know enough about Gomez to fill in some of the gaps. A traditional documentary would focus on Cantwell, Gomez & Jordan, the Durham experimental band in which Gomez played bass and saxophone with drummer Dave Cantwell and guitarist David Jordan. Their collisions of herky-jerky punk and free jazz, part of a lineage onomatopoeically known

as skronk rock, has 20 years of local music history writhing inside. But the only hint Niblets gives of this comes in one of its cleverest edits, which cuts between Gomez playing the sax and describing the textural quality of corn. Her words, as it happens, precisely describe her sound: “A bunch of little things that are going to get caught and squeak and move, ugh,” she says, indicating her teeth with wriggling fingers, one of which is in a brace that isn’t explained until more than halfway through. “It’s like, ‘creak, creak, creak.’” Gomez grew up in Middletown, an island in Rhode Island. In high school band class, her first instrument was the flute, which she was terrible at. “I just really didn’t get it,” she says via video chat. “It was a bunch of little dots on paper that you’re supposed to replicate and hopefully not mess up.” More predictive of her musical future was her friendship with Throwing Muses, an area band destined for alt-rock fame, who got her into clubs and started her immersion in punk. “One time, they handed me a hubcap and said I was a musician,” Gomez says. “I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m the one that drops the hubcap in the middle of the song!’” But it was much later, when she was pursuing a master’s degree in biological anthropology and anatomy at Duke, that she took up the bass, forging her own style in freedom from notated music. “I’d seen so many bands, and one thing that struck me a lot was that the bass player looked like they were going to sleep,” Gomez says. “With the hubris that I had as a 23-year-old, I was like, I can do better than that.”

Anne Gomez on the set of Niblets

PHOTO COURTESY OF DOUGLAS VUNCANNON

She was friends with Chris Eubank, local rock’s resident cellist, and he found her a bass and gave her a few lessons. Circa 1990, Todd Goss, who was putting together the primordial local indie band Blue-Green Gods, heard she was learning and asked her to join, because that’s how bands were formed then. Next, she played in the unforgettably named Special Agents of Her Majesty’s Secret Cervix, with Michelle Polzine and Shannon Morrow. Meanwhile, she pivoted to law school at UNC-Chapel Hill, graduating in 1997. When Cantwell, Gomez & Jordan formed two years later, she picked up the sax. “I always enjoyed tenor sax, especially John Coltrane,” she says. “I felt like it was an instrument where you’re more closely connected with the sound, that you can manipulate more than the bass.” In the 2000s, Gomez also played in Scene of the Crime Rovers, an experimental marching band led by Morrow, who spread the free-improv energy of Chicago all over the Triangle. That was her bridge to Vuncannon, who played in it, too. He had admired her stage presence in CG&J, and they became friends who habitually

took walks on the American Tobacco Trail. “One day, about five years ago, she started talking about the obsessive hatred she had for corn,” Vuncannon remembers, “and it seemed like the film came to me all at once. It’s a window into different aspects of her personality, and everybody who knows Anne agrees that she is endlessly interesting.” With music by an ensemble from the pair’s community, the finest point Niblets draws about Gomez’s corn aversion relates to her childhood, when she took control of her diet at age 16, becoming a vegetarian (and later, a longtime vegan) against her family’s objections. Meanwhile, the most drama comes through the inventive DIY set pieces, including one where, against all odds, Gomez’s head pokes out of a giant mound of yellow corn, with only her eyes visible, appearing deceptively calm. But whether or not Vuncannon convinces her to eat the gross-looking plastic gas-station cup of syrupy kernels is the closest thing Niblets has to a spoiler. This is an apt place to close, respecting a film that leaves so much to the imagination. W INDYweek.com

May 18, 2022

PAGE

PETER C. BAKER: PLANES

[Knopf; May 31]

his characters’ inner lives, the relationship between public and private secrets, and how he hoped to reimagine writing about North Carolina. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. INDY WEEK: What prompted this book—a debut novel with torture and renditions as the centerpiece? PETER C. BAKER: I had discovered previously that there was

already a small, growing handful of attempts at documenting the effects of torture in narrative journalism. There was a small body of movies and novels, many of which, because of how recently the events were, were following some of the same narrative conventions as of the journalism, like ripped from the headlines but adding more interiority. I already knew that I didn’t want to write something that was a novelized version of something you could read in a New York Times story or a legal brief or an ACLU page about a wrongly accused detainee. Nothing wrong with these templates, but because it was the template being used, and then repeated and repeated and repeated … there’s nothing wrong one by one. But then collectively, there is something wrong because it becomes a block. You can’t just use one narrative template to try to understand something. And especially for something that unfolds for 99 percent of Americans in faraway, almost imaginary places. That already feels a bit unreal. And you see that on TV, where everything feels a bit unreal. I wanted a different narrative template.

Author Peter C. Baker PHOTO BY JONATHAN MICHAEL CASTILLO

Shadow State

How did you decide on the structure of the book, with alternating chapters between North Carolina (with Mel) and Italy (with Amira)?

Peter C. Baker’s debut novel Planes centers on the CIA’s dark, real-life use of a rural North Carolina airstrip for renditions. BY CARR HARKRADER arts@indyweek.com

eter C. Baker’s debut novel had been on his mind for a while. But it wasn’t until he made a trip to Johnston County, North Carolina, while a creative writing student at UNC Wilmington, that the novel took off. This was 2011, and Baker was searching for an idea that would allow him to explore his “preoccupations” with the shadowy American security state of renditions and black sites (secret prisons run by the CIA on foreign soil) built up after 9/11. Reading Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, a nonfiction account of the Bush-era war on terror, he came across a sentence about the CIA using small, private airlines as shell companies to transport detainees to black sites. The central example was a rural airstrip in North Carolina. “I took out Google Maps and I was like, ‘This is not far away. I could be in town tomorrow!’” His research there—and, he mentions, from reading ongoing coverage in INDY Week—informed one of the main 18

May 18, 2022

INDYweek.com

characters of his novel: Mel, a well-meaning school board member in the fictional North Carolina town of Springwater. The other half of the book follows Amira, a young Muslim woman in Rome who is desperately trying to find out information about her husband, imprisoned in a black site in Morocco. Seemingly disconnected from each other, the two women’s lives slowly overlap as Mel discovers more about the isolated airfield close to her home. Baker was a teenager at the time 9/11 happened, and he says that he is interested in understanding not just the political but also the cultural ramifications of the attack’s aftermath. Television shows like 24 and movies like Rendition became part of a “weird feedback loop,” as he puts it, that influenced citizens and policy makers alike. And even more objective journalism about torture or rendition had its own limitations. Ahead of Planes’ May 31 publication by Knopf, INDY Week spoke with Carr about how he developed

I was doing research and talking to people in Johnston County and then shoehorning them through the tools of fiction. But then, as time passed, I would go and reread the old pages, and the pages that were lightly fictionalized, essayistic, “travelogue” me walking around were boring to me. The parts where suddenly the pages would be handed over to a storyteller, where they started saying something, made me go, “Oh this interesting. I should just take the plunge.” I had been deceiving myself by saying that if everything is told through one explicitly mediated narrator, then anything that rings false or inaccurate, I have a “get out of jail free” card. Because it’s not the author who got it wrong, it’s the narrator. And then I grew up. [Laughs.] How did you do research for the character Amira?

It’s very important for me, writing a novel, to give an experience that is truly something that would be very hard to do outside of the novel. As I was saying before, I did not want the main character to be a wrongly accused guy who ends up in one of these places and has a wellintentioned lawyer who’s trying to help him. Not because there’s anything wrong with those stories. But we’ve seen them and they’re owned by journalism. It’s a journalism story. It’s also a courtroom story. I had read a book called Shadow Lives that is, especially in America, essentially unknown, but it is an interview-based

consideration of primarily the wives of men who are being held in Guantanamo Bay and black sites and in UK prisons on counterterrorism charges. That was the beginning of finding my way to Amira. I wanted everything to be quotidian and everything to be very much in the flow of daily life—of dishes, of chores, of paying rent and saving money. So, extremely familiar in that way. But to some extent as unfamiliar as possible, without making a fetish out of that. Once I had Amira and Ayoub [Amira’s imprisoned husband], I started reading journalistic, ethnographic, sociological texts about immigrant communities in Italy and Muslim communities in Italy and cross-cultural marriages based in Italy. Psychological studies of torture survivors and torture survivors returning to families and arrangements that existed in pre-torture or pre-incarceration. Trying to saturate myself in that. With Amira and Mel, a lot is psychological. Most of what is happening is what they refuse to say, the secrets that they’re holding to themselves. Amira, in particular, says, “I like having something that I just know, to myself.” And that’s a bit how Mel acts as well. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say, but she’s having an affair.

I often do this thing that drives people crazy when I say it, but when I have a stack of books from the library, or I’m looking at a bookstore, I will turn to the last page to see what the last page feels like. And now for the first time, I feel a bit sensitive. In my head, there’s some imaginary ideal reading experience where no one knows anything about it. But yes, it’s unavoidable. It’s on the jacket. It happens very early [in the book] that Mel is having an affair. I mean, everyone makes their own choices. I don’t know the answer. I’m on the fence about it myself. I’m really proud of the Ayoub chapters. On the jacket, it doesn’t say that he’ll come back and you’re in suspense about even whether he’s alive or going to come back for maybe the first half of the book. And some of the reviews so far have given that away. Were you thinking about the resonances between the personal secrets, the kinds of things that people keep to themselves, and the more public secrets?

I don’t have a thesis or argument about the relationship between what we think of as quotidian secrets, the stuff of what’s often derided as domestic realism, and kind of geopolitical secrets. Other than my conviction that in some important sense, everything in life, whether it’s a daily household thing or not, is made out of the same material—which is life going

on, second after second. Everything has its dailiness, including things that we think of as rupturing daily life. War has its dailiness, war crimes have their dailiness, being president has its dailiness. Everything has its dailiness. This is what is in danger of being lost when we only have narrative art that touches on the geopolitical through spy thriller plots. It actually makes those things feel less real to us. Because statistically in the world, no one is an international spy. One in a million people are international spies. International spy fiction at its best very much recognizes the fact that international spies have their dailiness. John le Carré was doing that. I just wanted to find a way to have a novel that was just saturated in dailiness with the geopolitical to it. And shell corporations are the perfect way to do that because it’s a pretense. We’re not the CIA. We are a normal company doing normal boring business. People like Amira and her husband have been through a traumatic experience, needless to say. How did you stay true to keeping them as fully realized characters and not just examples of something terrible?

A lot of stories about these things that happen to people we often call “dehumanizing.” Including torture. That’s a well-intentioned attempt at acknowledging and reckoning with how horrible and serious these events are. But then there can be this strange twist, where—by saying, again and again, that someone who has been through something dehumanizing or been dehumanized—that story itself becomes part of a process of seeing them as less than fully human. There’s a documentary imperative to say what happened. But by just saying these horrible things that happened there’s a risk of voyeurism. There’s also a question of, What is the point? What are you doing? Are you just contributing to a narrative in which people who have had a certain set of experiences are just hardly damaged? So how do you answer the documentary imperative, while not going astray, despite your best intentions, with this set of problems? In the book, as I’m sure you noticed, there are no direct scenes of torture. There’s a scene of transit. There’s a scenic passage of the dungeon itself, but it’s all focused on a cat. Because there’s dailiness, even in those places. And then the only place that talks about torture methods, with things that you would have to include about them, is in a court filing or a documentary and in a piece of journalism, in a ripped from-the-

headlines movie, is there’s a brief description of Mel reading articles that contain source events, and it’s just a paragraph. That was obviously intentional and important to me. I don’t know how to put it into words. But I hope that does. That’s part of the intended effect of the book. Speaking of your research, have you been able to read similar letters [of the kind Amira gets from her imprisoned husband]? He writes about the boring goings-on in the prison, but parts are blacked out, so it leaves you wondering.

The stated rationale, and what people sort of expect by default, is that it’s only sensitive specific information that’s been blacked out [in these types of letters]. But, as you can see by looking at actual letters that lawyers make public, these censorship procedures and redaction procedures can themselves be an instrument of capricious cruelty. It helps to build this very painful cloud of uncertainty and not knowing. Is there a reason to set it in North Carolina, besides the original events taking place there?

I’m so glad that there seems to be some North Carolina–specific attention. I just wasn’t sure if there would be. And it wasn’t all that hard for me to imagine that if I simplified North Carolina to just one thing, people in North Carolina would be like, “No, no thank you. Not actually about us.” [Laughs.] But INDY Week was one of the outlets that was doing early coverage of these very events, which is acknowledged in the book. I’m really looking forward to people in North Carolina reading the book and hearing from people in North Carolina who read the book. I love North Carolina and I don’t often come across a narrative art that speaks to my particular experience in North Carolina. If you say to someone you are writing a novel set in a part of North Carolina, the set of associations that it triggers have to do with American regionalism, which I love. But there’s so much contemporary North Carolina not reflective of that. That’s not like that at all. So the novel is, in maybe a bit of a slightly too extreme way, absent of Southern touches.

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No one is making biscuits and we’re not talking about grandpappy’s moonshine and hooch. All of which is totally real. And happens. But wouldn’t necessarily happen in the exurbs of Raleigh.

Right, right! But North Carolina is also this. W

INDYweek.com

May 18, 2022

CULTURE CALENDAR

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

DEHD performs at Cat’s Cradle on Thursday, May 19. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

Project X: The Sequel $5. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. Shana Tucker Quartet $25. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham. Still Corners $16. Fri, May 20, 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Totally Slow $5. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham. Andy Hull $23. Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

music The Body $15. Wed, May 18, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Wed, May 18, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill. Music Bingo Wed, May 18, 7 p.m. The Oak House, Durham. Remo Drive $15. Wed, May 18, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro. Vundabar $18. Wed, May 18, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Sylvan Esso $50. May 19-21, 7 p.m. Historic Durham Athletic Park, Durham. Bass Extremes $30. Thurs, May 19, 8 p.m. Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw.

Blackwater Holylight $14. Thurs, May 19, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. DEHD $15. Thurs, May 19, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro. LIVE@Lake Raleigh: Shirlette Ammons Thurs, May 19, 5 p.m. Lake Raleigh, Raleigh. Mambo Swing Latin Cabaret & Burlesque $25+. Thurs, May 19, 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham. Mellow Swells Thurs, May 19, 7:30 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill. Prince Daddy & The Hyena $18. Thurs, May 19, 7 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Ray Wylie Hubbard $20. Thurs, May 19, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Restless Spirit $10. Thurs, May 19, 7:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. NC Symphony: Brahms Violin Concerto $44+. May 20-21, 8 p.m. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh. Dry Cleaning $17. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro. The HU: Black Thunder Tour $28. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh. The Jive Bombers Fri, May 20, 7 p.m. Flying Bull Beer Company, Durham. Sun, May 22, 7 p.m. Southern Village on the Green, Chapel Hill.

Joe Hero Presents: A Concert for Taylor—a Benefit for Musicares $10. Fri, May 20, 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh. Josh Rosenstein’s Luxury Comedy Hootenanny Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill. Larry Karan Fri, May 20, 7 p.m. Vecino Brewing Co., Carrboro. Official Sylvan Esso Afterparty $15. Fri, May 20, 11 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. Old Crow Medicine Show $51+. Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh. Patrick McGrew Trio Fri, May 20, 7:30 p.m. The Oak House, Durham.

The Band of Heathens $17. Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh. DJ Deckades Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Vecino Brewing Co., Carrboro. Doug MacLeod $20. Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

FRESH Sounds with Yolanda Rabun $45. Sat, May 21, 7 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh.

Sacred: Walking on Hallowed Sound $5. Sat, May 21, 9 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Girls in Geish: Mutiny Aboard $10. Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Tim McGraw: McGraw Tour 2022 $29+. Sat, May 21, 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

Girls’ Night Out: A Concert Benefiting the Kay Yow Cancer Fund $35. Sat, May 21, 5 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. The Greatest Show on Dirt: Official Afterparty $15. Sat, May 21, 11 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Queer Agenda! $5. Sat, May 21, 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Tracks Music Fest Sat, May 21, 3 p.m. CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, Chapel Hill. Walker & Royce $15. Sat, May 21, 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Kidd G $20. Sun, May 22, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh. Spanish Love Songs $17. Sun, May 22, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Live Jazz with Danny Grewen & Griffanzo Mon, May 23, 6 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill. Brian Horton Trio Tues, May 24, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Carolina Cutups & Friends Sun, May 22, 5 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

The Lumineers: BRIGHTSIDE World Tour $26+. Tues, May 24, 7:30 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

Extinction A.D. $10. Sun, May 22, 3:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

TERROR $22. Tues, May 24, 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Yolanda Rabun performs at Artspace on Saturday, May 21. PHOTO COURTESY OF ARTSPACE

Durham Blues and Brews Festival $20+. Sat, May 21, 5 p.m. Durham Central Park, Durham. Eric Williams Sextet $15+. Sat, May 21, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham. FlushFest $25 (suggested donation). Sat, May 21, 12 p.m. 711 Eno Street, Hillsborough. Fred P $25. Sat, May 21, 9 p.m. Nightlight Bar & Club, Chapel Hill.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR: INDYWEEK.COM 20

May 18, 2022

INDYweek.com

CULTURE CALENDAR “Josephine Baker” by Darius Quarles, who has a featured artist exhibit at 5 Points Gallery on Friday, May 20. PHOTO COURTESY OF 5 POINTS GALLERY

stage Emma $22. May 5-21, various times. Leggett Theater at William Peace University, Raleigh. Peerless $20. May 13-29, various times. Walltown Children’s Theatre, Durham. Hamilton $109+. May 17–June 5, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Early Access Downton Abbey: A New Era $10. Wed, May 18, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Triangle Academy of Dance Recitals $15+. May 20-21, various times. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Prom Night Film Series $6+. May 20-21, various times. The Cary Theater, Cary.

On the Banks of the Eno $15+. May 21-22, various times. Chapel Hill Courthouse, Chapel Hill.

Carolina Ballet: Giselle $27+. May 19-22, various times. Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

NC Dance Institute Summer Session Open House Sat, May 21, 12:30 p.m. North Carolina Dance Institute, Raleigh.

JP Sears $25+. May 19-21, various times. Goodnights Factory & Restaurant, Raleigh.

John Mulaney: From Scratch $34+. Sun, May 22, 7 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Future Stars of Comedy Thurs, May 19, 8 p.m. James Joyce Irish Pub, Durham.

screen

art

page

Mindful Museum: Outdoor Slow Art Appreciation Wed, May 18. 6 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Attractions and Distractions Fri, May 20, 8 p.m. Power Plant Gallery, Durham.

Radical Repair Workshop: Clothing Repair Sat, May 21, 10:30 a.m. The Nasher, Durham.

Guided Tour— Modern Black Culture: The Art of Aaron Douglas May 19-20, 1:30 p.m. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill.

Darius Quarles: Featured Artist Exhibit and Third Friday Reception Fri, May 20, 5 p.m. 5 Points Gallery, Durham.

Humber Lecture— Fault Lines: Artists in Conversation Sun, May 22, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Acid Rain Rooftop Video Art Screening Thurs, May 19, 8 p.m. Attic 506, Chapel Hill.

Family Friendly Tour Sat, May 21, 10:30 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Afterglow: Art by Jon Whiddon May 20–Sept. 8, various times. Hillsborough Visitor Center, Hillsborough.

Live From the Studio: Chieko Murasugi Sat, May 21, 1:30 p.m. Online; presented by NCMA.

Mindful Museum Workshop: Processing Ecological Grief through Art $26. Tues, May 24, 6:30. NCMA, Raleigh.

Artful Story Time Wed, May 18, 10:30 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh. South Writ Large Wed, May 18, 5 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. John Allore—Wish You Were Here Thurs, May 19, 5:30 p.m. Letters Bookshop, Durham.

Burial Ground: Uncut Version & Dr. Butcher, MD: Uncut Version $10. Fri, May 20, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. Museum Movie Night: Soylent Green $7. Fri, May 20, 5:30 p.m. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. Bike-In Movie: Together We Cycle Sat, May 21, 7 p.m. Oak City Cycling Project Back Lot, Raleigh.

Black Kung Fu Cinema: TNT Jackson $10. Sat, May 21, 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. NCMA CINEMA: NC Short Film Showcase $7. Sat, May 21, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh. Raleigh Film and Arts Festival Encore $10+. Sat, May 21, 1:30 p.m. LOTUS Cinemas, Raleigh. Watch Durham: A VERY Durham Film Screening Series Tues, May 24, 7 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

Kathryn Miles— Trailed: One Woman’s Quest To Solve The Shenandoah Murders Thurs, May 19, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

The Wilmington Ten: Violence, Injustice, and The Rise of Black Politics in The 1970s Sat, May 21, 3 p.m. Durham County Library, Durham.

David Wright Faladé—Black Cloud Rising Fri, May 20, 6:30 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro.

Maggie Shipstead— You Have A Friend in 10A Tues, May 24, 6 p.m. Online; presented by Flyleaf Books.

Judy Goldman— Child Sat, May 21, 3 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. The Museum Lives in Me Book Launch Sat, May 21, 11 a.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Teen Arts Collective: LGBTQIA+ $25+. Tues, May 24, 5 p.m. Eno Arts Mill, Hillsborough.

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May 18, 2022

P U Z Z L ES

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su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

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

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

May 18, 2022

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LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

EMPLOYMENT Sr Infrastructure Design Engineer (Durham, N.C.) Sr Infrastructure Design Engineer sought by NC Health Affiliates LLC in Durham, NC to plan and develop engineering designs in support of the implementation of MQ/IIB and other middleware solutions. Apply at jobpostingtoday.com Ref# 85962.

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May 18, 2022

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