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Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill May 27, 2020

you’re making this guy riCh Raleigh tech CEO David Morken has a knack for being in the right place at the right time— including when a pandemic struck. P. 12

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May 27, 2020

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Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 37 NO. 18

CONTENTS NEWS 8

North Carolina’s voucher program doesn’t lead to academic progress, but we might expand it anyway. BY ERIN WILLIAMS

10 The pandemic has Raleigh leaders rethinking downtown spaces.

BY LEIGH TAUSS

11

Durham wants to loan small businesses $1 million. No one’s really happy about it. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

FEATURE 12

Everytime you call into Zoom, a Raleigh company gets a fraction of a penny.

The coronavirus has been very good for business. BY LEIGH TAUSS

FOOD 16 As local restaurants reopen, an uneasy transition begins.

BY SARAH EDWARDS

MUSIC 17

Broken Sound embodies the eternal afterlife of cassettes.

18

Jazz band DreamRoot spreads good vibes in weird times. BY DAN RUCCIA

BY BRIAN HOWE

CULTURE 19 The Mothership is closing, but its legacy will go on.

21

Freakshow cracks the virtual-theater problem.

BY BRIAN HOWE

BY BYRON WOODS

DEPARTMENTS 5 15 Minutes

D i s t i n c t i o n Wi t h o u t a Difference

T

o be clear: I’m not in favor of a rash reopening, though reopening quickly and fully would probably be good for this newspaper’s bottom line, at least in the short term. I worry that we are collectively wishing the virus away, pretending that if we act like it’s no longer there, it won’t be. This weekend, I drove an hour or so outside of the Triangle to go hiking; outside of the urban areas, there wasn’t a mask to be found. The pictures of the packed speedway in Alamance (not to mention the crowded lake in the Ozarks) have me convinced that we’re about to stupidly march ourselves into a second wave because we got bored.

And for the most part, I think Governor Cooper has handled an impossible situation about as well as anyone could have. By the metrics, North Carolina has outperformed most of its neighbors.

Just as important, he’s been steady and calm throughout. He charted a course and stuck to it. I could pick nits, of course, but seeing as how he’s been faced with lifeand-death decisions balancing a deadly pandemic and calamitous economic ruin, I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt—and to view those trying to make mountains out of molehills (heya, Dan Forest) as petty opportunists showing us their asses.

But there is one thing that arose last week that strikes me as nonsensical. When Cooper announced the move to phase 2, he drew a line between restaurants, which could open at half-capacity, and bars, which could not open at all. Breweries, wineries, and distilleries demanded clarity about which category they’d be lumped into. Within a day, the administration allowed them to open. Not bars, however.

That’s a bridge too far.

Which prompts the question: To a virus, what exactly is the difference between a brewery and a bar? Between a place that serves beer and wine and a place that serves beer and cocktails?

The concern, obviously, is crowds. But if all of these places were required to abide by the same social distancing rules—if nightclubs were forced to put spaced-out tables on the dance floor, for instance, and bars had to follow the same guidelines as restaurants—would there really be an additional risk?

What exactly is the justification for decoupling one class of businesses from their competitors? Maybe there’s a good reason. But I haven’t heard it.

7 A Week in the Life

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May 27, 2020

3

BACKTALK

On Friday evening, the state of North Carolina entered into phase 2 of Governor Cooper’s gradual

reopening

plan—

The UNC System needs to clean house—or get remodeled

BY T. GREG DOUCETTE @greg_doucette

except, that is, for Durham, which at first announced that it

was extending its stay-at-home order indefinitely, then said last week that it would remain in place until June 1.

JOHN WILSON says Durham’s action betrays its leaders’ hypocrisy: “This goes to show that, as always, the rich white people running Durham don’t care about the poor people of color in the city. They say, loudly, that they care, but they don’t in any way that matters. Their virus hysteria is causing immeasurable hardship for people who actually have to go to work for a living.”

“People are crazy if they let these people dictate what they can do,” writes BETTY WILLIAMS. “Yeah, ’cause we live in the United States of I Do Whatever the Fuck I Want and Consequences Be Damned,” replies PHIL BRADLEY. Phase 2 also made a distinction between restaurants and breweries (which are allowed to open at half-capacity) and bars (which are not).

“I’m not sure what keeping bars closed is supposed to accomplish when various other social spaces like churches and restaurants are open,” BRIAN PORTER writes. “Are infection numbers magically supposed to go down because people are not in bars? Churchgoers dwarf bar-goers in this state and many other places in the South.”

“Because people at bars drink, get drunk, and lose judgment,” responds MARK ELLIS. “[Breweries] are not bars,” writes WATT JONES. “There is a difference in licensing and how they operate. Bars typically serve food inside and have an on-premises license for alcohol and mixed drinks. Breweries, wineries, and distilleries typically do not serve food except for allowing food trucks outside. They also do not have on-premises mixed beverages. In a bar, you may end up with some half-wit drunk in your face spraying you with spit. I’ve never been in a winery, brewery, or distillery with a drunk falling all over you.”

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voices

Let the Sunshine In

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

L

ike many of us, I’ve spent most of the past couple of months quarantined with my significant other. And I discovered that she’s really into those home improvement shows.

You know the type: A family lives in the same place for years, realizes their house no longer meets their needs, and they either hire someone for a dramatic remodeling or buy a new place. One particularly common theme is the inevitable discovery, as work is underway on upgrading a house, that certain areas turn out to be even more rotten than originally thought.

It reminded me of the folks running our public university system.

This column originally started as a paean to The Daily Tar Heel, which just won a significant victory against UNC-Chapel Hill over withholding basic information about sexual assaults. After a very public rape scandal in 2013—following well-documented shenanigans in UNC’s student-run honor court—the university went out of its way to avoid disclosing any assault information to the public by claiming such disclosures were prohibited by a federal law known as FERPA. This, it turned out, was a lie: The federal law in question has no such prohibition.

And where FERPA doesn’t outlaw releasing the information, the state Supreme Court logically concluded, state policymakers can compel public universities to release it under our Public Records Act. But the very week the UNC System was having its teeth kicked in by the Supreme Court, yet another scandal popped up. Randy Ramsey, the chairman of the Board of Governors, advertises on his business website that he “is a graduate of Carteret Community College with a degree in marine propulsion.” That same language was copied into his bio on the university’s website.

This, it turned out, was also a lie: Carteret’s marine propulsion program only offers a multi-week certificate.

Reporter Pam Kelley with the Charlotte Ledger contacted the college for information about the discrepancy and learned that Ramsey only has a one-year diploma in marine diesel mechanics rather than the two-year degree he claims. When she contacted the UNC System office, the university tried to cover things up. Ramsey’s bio was quietly scrubbed, then, hours later, the BOG called a special meeting for the very next business day— moving up the election of its officers by two weeks so Ramsey could be re-elected before too many people learned he misrepresents his credentials.

It’s not the only recent scandal involving someone’s qualifications.

In mid-2018, the leading candidate for chancellor at Western Carolina University had the same sort of easily-found-on-Google misrepresentations as Ramsey. When now-former BOG member Tom Fetzer noticed, he hired a screening firm to confirm what Google already showed: The candidate had lied on their academic résumé, something that requires immediate disqualification under the UNC Policy Manual and also happens to be a crime. But rather than acknowledge that the selection committee got hoodwinked, the BOG pilloried Fetzer and the screening firm’s attorney, Peter Romary, with UNC general counsel Tom Shanahan claiming that Fetzer had given Romary stolen university property. (Disclosure: I’ve known Romary since I was on the Board of Governors.)

You might notice this has become something of a pattern for the UNC System. This past summer, as controversy swirled around the former chancellor at East Carolina University being falling-down-drunk in downtown Greenville, Shanahan hired the law firm Womble Bond Dickinson to “investigate.” In emails released months later, we learned the investigators deliberately waited to request security camera footage until roughly 7:00 p.m. on Friday, October 25, just before the tapes were slated to be automatically erased on October 26 under Greenville’s 30-day retention schedule. When the Greenville Fraternal Order of Police hired Romary to get the footage, Shanahan wrote a cease-and-desist letter that he promptly leaked to the media, as university leaders laughably insisted Romary ran an anonymous Gmail account “JohnQPublicAtECU.” This was a lie, too: The actual John Q. Public came to me for legal advice.

Then—literally days later!—we were all treated to what became the months-long saga of #SilentSham, where Chairman Ramsey and the Board of Governors leadership collaborated with Shanahan and that very same Womble Bond Dickinson law firm to manufacture a fake lawsuit, paying the North Carolina division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans $74,999 so the SCV could then “sue” UNC to get an additional $2.5 million payoff.

As UNC ponders the impact of its loss at the state Supreme Court and the coronavirus keeps policymakers indoors, they should take their cues from the occasional home improvement show. The next university president needs to, at a minimum, clean house—and if they don’t, the General Assembly should work on a full remodel, with a lot more sunlight. 2 Voices is made possible by contributions to the INDY Press Club. Join today at KeepItINDY.com.

T. GREG DOUCETTE is a local attorney, criminal justice reform advocate, and host of the podcast #Fsck ’Em All. He continues to be a pain in the UNC System’s ass. Follow him on Twitter @greg_doucette. For a comprehensive listing of media coverage of #SilentSham, visit SilentSham.com.

15 MINUTES Dale Folwell, 61

Is your grandmother’s life woven into your destiny? The Inevitable Past challenges the notion of who we are and why.

North Carolina State Treasurer

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

G WO R KB TI N R I TH E R ES C OOK W O UE T !

You were hospitalized with COVID-19 in April. Are you fully recovered?

Yes. I had a very intense and very serious case of COVID-19 that required a nearly six-day hospitalization. But I’m feeling fantastic. My stamina’s back up to me putting in the long hours that are required. About three and a half weeks ago, I found a free Egg McMuffin coupon on my desk that had expired while I was in the hospital, and it upset me a little bit because I don’t let coupons expire without using them. I feel like that when I was focused on something like that, then I must be 100 percent.

You were asymptomatic at first. How did you end up being hospitalized?

I ended up getting tested for COVID-19 because of somebody detecting something in my voice. After I was tested, a couple of days later, I went and met with my primary care physician. My primary care physician did more extensive bloodwork and X-rays, and since I have been racing motorcycles for 45 years, I always have an Ox meter. My primary care physician said, “If your oxygen level starts to fall to these levels, you need to go to the emergency room immediately.” And a day and a half after I had visited with him, that’s what happened. On Sunday morning, I went to the emergency room and was immediately put into the triage that was there for COVID-19.

What was your experience at the hospital?

All hospitals have been reconfigured as far as what door you go in and who can go in that door, and when you’re in the COVID unit that I was in, you don’t see or hear anybody else. And that’s what I experienced. As soon as I got to the emergency room, I very quickly was administered the cocktail that so many people have talked about over the last two months. The hydroxychloroquine and the Z-Pack.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE N.C. DEPARTMENT OF STATE TREASURER

How did that work for you?

Well, I’m standing here. Things got progressively worse through Sunday and through Monday. And then at about 2:00 a.m. on Tuesday morning, I woke up from a very deep sleep, a level of deepness I’ve never experienced in my life.

It’s not a nightmare—it was just a deep level of sleep, and the first thought that crossed my mind when I woke up was the scene from The Shawshank Redemption, and I said, “Dale, you’re gonna have to focus and get busy living.” From that point on, I started a monastic thinking about my breathing, where I was inhaling as if I was breathing in a whole bouquet of roses, and then I was exhaling as if I wanted to be around to blow out 62 birthday candles on my next birthday cake.

And it takes a lot of energy to do that and not let anything else enter your mind. From that point, my oxygen level started to increase, and the amount of oxygen that I was requiring, they started to scale that down.

Do you know how you contracted the virus?

I’d been to Utah before that to a community that had a population of 100. It was a father-son trip that I’d promised our son that somebody else set up, and I was with him in the same room for five days. I was in a Suburban for hours with five other people. Our son didn’t get sick, nobody in the vehicle got sick, and nobody at the lodge got sick. So, who knows where you got it, but I’m pretty convinced that I contracted it when I got back to Raleigh. W

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May 27, 2020

5

Q U ICKBA I T

What About Us?

States By % of Small Businesses That Received PPP $ (COVID Deaths per 1M Pop) 1. North Dakota* 25% (67) 2. South Dakota* 23.8% (54) 3. Nebraska* 22.5% (71) 4. Iowa* 19.75% (128) 5. Kansas 18.97% (70)

North Carolina’s small businesses didn’t get their fair share of PPP money

T

hrough the two rounds of the Paycheck Protection Program, Congress allocated more than $650 billion in (potentially) forgivable loans to help the country’s small businesses stay afloat while much of the economy was at a standstill. Through May 16, the program’s lenders had dished out 4.3 million approved loans worth more than $513 billion, according to the Small Business Administration.

(Disclosure: The INDY received a PPP loan for about $129,000.)

The Trump administration says the first round of the PPP has saved more than 30 million jobs, though there’s little independent analysis to confirm that. In any event, the program certainly hasn’t been a panacea, and, if consumers aren’t spending by the time its coverage period ends on July 1, it might end up being an expensive BandAid on a bullet wound.

But let’s put that sobering thought aside and focus on a more immediate question: Where did the money go? More precisely: Why didn’t more of it go to North Carolina?

According to data compiled by the website Business.org, there are about 913,400 small businesses in North Carolina. But just 11.9 percent of them—109,032—had received PPP funds by May 16, the date of the most recent SBA report. That percentage ranks North Carolina 48th in the U.S. It doesn’t get much better when you look at how much money our businesses received: about $12.2 billion, which works out to roughly $1,170 for every man, woman, and child in the state. That still puts us near the bottom of the barrel—and North Dakota residents got twice as much bang for their buck out of the program.

With that burr in our saddle, we went searching for patterns: 1) Which states’ small businesses were most likely to get loans? 2) Which states got the most money per resident? 3) Did any of it match the severity of the pandemic?

The answers: 1) Rural states. 2) States with high costs of living (plus, um, North Dakota). 3) Yes and no—the hardest-hit states tended to get more money, but they also tend to be high-cost areas, and a lower percentage of their businesses received loans.

There are a few plausible explanations, one of which sticks out: access to banks. The more financial institutions per capita, the more likely small businesses were to get PPP loans.

North Carolina is second-to-last in per-capita financial institutions. W

26. Illinois 14.73% (364) 47. California 12.64% (90) 48. North Carolina 11.94% (69) 49. Georgia 11.92% (165) 50. Maryland 11.84% (357) 51. Indiana 10.43% (284)

States By PPP $ Received / Resident (Total) (COVID Deaths per 1M Pop) 1. Washington, D.C. $3,069 ($2.17B) (584) 2. North Dakota $2,309 ($1.76B) (67) 3. Massachusetts $2,074 ($14.3B) (892) 4. Minnesota $1,952 ($11.01B) (145) 5. New York $1,943 ($37.8B) (1,484)

26. Oregon $1,621 ($6.84B) (34) 44. North Carolina $1,170 ($12.27B) (69) 47. Arkansas $1,089 ($3.29B) (36) 48. Mississippi $1,059 ($3.15B) (195) 49. New Mexico $1,056 ($2.21B) (135) 50. West Virginia $985 ($1.77B) (39) 51. Indiana $749 ($5.04B) (284)

% of Small Businesses That Received PPP $ in States with Highest Death Rates (Rank) 1. New York 12.78% (44) 2. New Jersey 14.55% (28) 3. Connecticut 15.73% (19) 4. Massachusetts 15.6% (21) 5. Washington, DC 14.2% (30) 6. Louisiana 14.56% (27) 7. Rhode Island 15.62% (20) 8. Michigan 12.79% (43) 9. Pennsylvania 13.96% (32) 10. Illinois 14.73% (26) 37. North Carolina 11.94% (48)

$ per Resident in States with Highest Death Rates $3500

% Received Funds in States with Highest Death Rates 100

$3000

75

$2500 $2000

50

$1500 $1000

25

$500 $0

NY NJ CT MA D.C. LA RI

MI PA

IL NC

0

NY NJ CT MA D.C. LA RI

MI PA

IL NC

Sources: Business.org, Worldometer (as of May 21), World Atlas, The New York Times, Small Business Administration (May 15). *No stay-at-home order

6

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE

5/20

GOVERNOR COOPER announced that the state will move into phase 2 of reopening on Friday night.

UNC System president BILL ROPER said the system’s schools would return to campus in the fall.

Former Raleigh Mayor TOM FETZER abruptly resigned his seat on UNC’s Board of Governors.

ANDREA HARRIS, who co-founded the North Carolina Institute of Minority Economic Development in 1986, passed away.

According to a U.S. Department of Labor report, more than 88,000 NORTH CAROLINA RESIDENTS—including 1099 workers—filed initial jobless claims the previous week.

The first case of a COVID-RELATED CHILDREN’S SYNDROME was reported in North Carolina.

N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill announced that they would begin and end the FALL SEMESTER earlier than usual to try to avoid a second wave of the pandemic.

North Carolina courts postpone deadlines and JURY TRIALS until August.

THE NATIONAL OCEANIC AND ATMOSPHERIC ADMINISTRATION predicted that 2020 would be a busy hurricane season.

5/23

While the rest of the state entered phase 2, Durham announced that it will keep its STAY-AT-HOME ORDER in place until June 1.

Former Wake County Register of Deeds LAURA RIDDICK, now in prison for embezzlement, has contracted COVID-19, her husband said.

ADAM SMITH, the husband of ReOpenNC leader Ashley Smith, posted on Facebook that he’s willing to kill people for the cause.

The General Assembly’s FISCAL RESEARCH DIVISION predicted that state revenues would drop by $4.2 billion.

North Carolina exceeded 1,000 NEW CORONAVIRUS DIAGNOSES in a day for the first time, owing primarily to increased testing.

Coronavirus outbreaks at MEAT-PROCESSING PLANTS in North Carolina will force farmers to kill 1.5 million chickens.

5/25

5/22

d goo

THE NORTH CAROLINA DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION announced that before the end of June, all 9,300 of its employees would be furloughed.

Raleigh city manager RUFFIN HALL laid out his proposed budget, which included a 2.2 percent spending cut, a hiring freeze, no Fourth of July celebration, and no tax increase.

GONZA TACOS Y TEQUILA’S Durham location and OAKWOOD CAFE in Raleigh announce that they will not reopen.

5/21

5/19

(Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

Donald Trump threatened to pull the REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION from Charlotte—literally the only city that wanted to host it—unless Governor Cooper promised to allow full attendance.

CORONAVIRUS HOSPITALIZATIONS hit a new high in North Carolina.

Durham Clergy United A week after conservative churches successfully sued Governor Cooper to force the state to allow churches to allow indoor services, a group of black pastors and allies affiliated with Durham Clergy United called a press conference in Durham to talk about why they wouldn’t be reopening just yet. The quick version, as described by Pastor Jerome Washington of Mt. Vernon Baptist Church: “Our worship is not confined to a building. As a matter of fact, we did not need the governor to tell us to close our churches. Our love for our people told us to close our churches.”

African Americans have been disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, they pointed out.

Calvin Brooks, who pastors the Mt. Zion United Church of Christ in Henderson, said his small church had already seen two deaths. “It is important that we use our platform as ministers to talk to our laypeople and get them to understand the seriousness of this virus, and for us to take to mind what the governor is saying,” he said. “We’re not looking to go back into services right now because we need to make sure we are safe.”

bad

Alamance County attorney Clyde Albright Look, we get it. You’ve been cooped up for weeks, you might have lost your job, your favorite bar is closed, and you’re tired of all these so-called experts with their so-called models telling you to wear a mask and avoid crowded spaces. What about your freedom? So when the owner of the Ace Speedway in northwest Alamance County announces that he’s got to open in open defiance of Governor Cooper’s executive order, packing in mask-less people from all over the state to watch cars race for $12 a pop, we get the urge to go. Besides, you’re making a statement: Don’t tread on me, Mr. Government Man. One man’s statement, of course, could be another man’s death sentence, and just because you want to pretend the inconvenient pandemic is over doesn’t mean it actually is. This is why the state grants the governor the power to forbid these types of gatherings in an emergency—so that the whims of the masses don’t lead to morgues full of corpses.

Except, it seems, in Alamance County, where county attorney Clyde Albright deemed himself both public health expert and constitutional scholar and decided that Ace Speedway could do whatever the hell it wants. If you look at pictures from the stands, you’ll see, well, white people, yes, but also plenty of obvious comorbidities—age, obesity, things that make people especially susceptible to COVID-19.

If any of them catch the virus, and if any of them die, their blood will be on Clyde Albright’s hands.

ul

f aw

Adam Smith Who would have imagined that the leader of the ReOpenNC movement is married to a wouldbe terrorist who boasts about his willingness to kill people to resist the “New World Order” that is forcing us to not die from a pandemic? Oh, right. Everyone.

In a string of Facebook Live videos posted on Friday, Adam Smith, the husband of Ashley Smith, said: “But are we willing to kill people? Are we willing to lay down our lives? We have to say, ‘Yes.’ We have to say, ‘Yes.’ Is that violence? Is that terrorism? No, it’s not terrorism.

[Editor’s note. Yes, it is, dumbass.] I’m not trying to strike fear in people by saying, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ I’m gonna say, ‘If you bring guns, I’m gonna bring guns. If you’re armed with this, we’re going to be armed with this.’”

The best part of this episode? This part from Raw Story, which broke the news: “At the outset of the final video, he interrupted his testimonial to accept a bag of fast food from a restaurant worker through a drive-thru window. ‘I believe God’s drawing a plumb line,’ he said. ‘And he’s wanting us to choose which side we’ll be on … Had to grab me a little grub—which of history we’ll be on.’”

Adam Smith, by the way, was part of Meal Team 6, the “Boogaloo” group of not-protesters (according to the Raleigh Police Department) that carried weapons around downtown and then ate lunch at Subway earlier this month. Of course he was.

KeepItINDY.com

May 27, 2020

7

N E WS

North Carolina Actual Spending on Voucher Program

A new report says North Carolina’s voucher program is an expensive mess. Republicans want to expand it.

BY ERIN WILLIAMS backtalk@indyweek.com

N

orth Carolina’s private-school voucher system is “poorly designed” for improving student outcomes, according to a new report from the Duke Children’s Law Clinic. But the state’s leading Republicans are pushing to vastly expand it anyway.

Earlier this month, Senator Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell County, the Senate’s deputy president, introduced a bill that would remove eligibility barriers to the six-yearold Opportunity Scholarship Program.

Gubernatorial candidate Dan Forest’s platform goes even further. It would make vouchers—currently limited to children of low- and moderate-income families—available to all students.

To fund this expansion, Hise’s bill says the voucher reserve fund would require “at least” an additional $10 million “each fiscal year.” Yet the bill appears to add only $2 million a year to what has already been allocated: $74.8 million in the 2020–21 fiscal year, growing to $144.8 million by 2027–28. Hise’s office did not respond to the INDY’s requests for comment.

The bill doesn’t seem likely to pass this year. COVID-19 relief efforts will probably consume the General Assembly’s short session, and already, House Minority Leader Darren Jackson says, Republicans “are openly speculating about billions in public education cuts” to offset revenue shortfalls.

(In January, Superior Court Judge David Lee ordered state leaders to better fund education to meet the state constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic education.” Senate leader Phil Berger responded that if judges want to dictate spending, they should run for the legislature.) In addition, Governor Cooper has been an outspoken voucher opponent, and Jackson says Democrats have enough votes to sustain a veto.

But passing it might not be the point.

8

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

Rather, the legislation offers Republicans an issue to campaign on this fall. When framed the right way, vouchers are popular: A January poll by the conservative Civitas Institute found that 67 percent of Democrats supported the program, and 78 percent of minorities said they would support pro-school-choice candidates.

“If you have a parent whose child is born in a zip code where the school just happens to be a failing school generation after generation, that parent should have a choice to send their kid to another school,” Forest said in a campaign video released last year.

(Forest’s campaign declined to comment, citing INDY columns that referred to Forest as an “idiot.”)

According to Jane Wettach, who authored the Duke Law report, that framing is misleading.

“The rhetoric was, ‘This gives parents whose children would be in failing public schools the choice.’ But that was never part of the program design,” she says.

Eligibility for the program, Wettach points out, has never been tied to a school district’s quality.

“It is not designed as an escape from failing public schools, it is just designed as parent choice,” Wettach says.

Right now, vouchers are restricted to students who have previously attended public schools and are dissatisfied; students renewing their vouchers; and students entering kindergarten or first grade, children of military parents, or children in foster care or who were recently adopted.

Hise’s bill eliminates the requirement that students first try public schools.

“The proposed expansion of eligibility completely decouples the voucher program from a family’s dissatisfaction with the public schools,” Wettach says. “It makes the

Total spending (in millions of dollars)

Choice Overload

50

40

30

20

10

0

2014-15

2015-16

2016-17

2017-18

2018-19

2019-20*

Year *as of March 2020

program purely a government subsidy for any family who prefers private school.”

“I think what you’re seeing is the pressure that the Republicans have, to put it bluntly, to make the vouchers more available to more of their political base,” says Pope “Mac” McCorkle, the director of Duke University’s Polis: Center for Politics.

If Forest’s proposal to expand vouchers to “every family in North Carolina” were adopted, the program would no longer focus on lower-income children who might be assigned to struggling schools; it would now include white suburbanites who want to send their kids to private and religious schools with the government’s help.

Since the Opportunity Scholarship Program began in 2014, 40,000 students have received vouchers in North Carolina— including more than 12,200 this year— costing the state about $49 million. But the program has come in well under budget because fewer students have used the vouchers than anticipated. From 2014–15 to 2017–18, for instance, almost $18 million went unspent. In the 2018–19 school year, the state had funds for 3,000 more vouchers than students who used them.

Meanwhile, about 92 percent of students who have used vouchers have done so at religious schools—about three-quarters of which, according to Wettach’s report, use “biblically-based” curricula that conflict with state standards and are under no obligation not to discriminate on the basis on religion, sex, sexual orientation,

gender identity, disability, or any characteristic other than race or national origin.

Both the underuse of vouchers and the popularity of religious schools are at least partially related to the fact that, even with vouchers, many secular, academically excellent private schools are still out of reach to middle and low-income families.

The maximum voucher amount, $4,200, isn’t enough to cover tuition at schools like Durham Academy or Ravenscroft School in Raleigh, which cost at least $14,000 for younger grades and up to $28,000 in high school.

If well-to-do parents had access to vouchers, however, the state would, in effect, begin subsidizing tuition at these elite institutions.

Such a program would certainly give parents more options. But it would also lead to less accountability.

Schools that accept vouchers in North Carolina do not have to produce data on students’ academic success. Unlike in other states with voucher programs, they’re also not required to be accredited, follow state curricular or graduation standards, hire licensed teachers, or conduct state end-of-grade evaluations.

“We are getting no data on how the students are doing, and the design of the program is such that we will never have any data,” Wettach says. “It is a lot of money that the state is spending without any way of knowing whether the students are being well served by it.” W

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May 27, 2020

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Raleigh

Into the Streets The pandemic has Raleigh officials rethinking downtown public spaces

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

I

n 2015, the question of whether bars and restaurants should be allowed to spill out onto downtown sidewalks became all-consuming in Raleigh. An ad that appeared in The News & Observer a week before the October election depicted a hunched-over man, leaning on a lamppost, seemingly seconds from puking. It ran with the instantly infamous caption, “Do we really want Raleigh to become drunktown?”

Times have changed.

For starters, Mary-Ann Baldwin—the city council’s biggest backer of downtown nightlife back then—is now mayor. But more importantly, the coronavirus pandemic has Raleigh’s leaders considering a program that could lead to the soft closures of downtown’s main drags to allow for more curbside restaurant and bar seating as well as expanded pedestrian and bicycle access.

Amid the state’s stay-at-home order, which was lifted last week, Raleigh residents had few options for recreation beyond the city’s sprawling greenway system, which left areas like Lynn Lake, Lake Johnson, and sections of the Neuse Greenway heavily trafficked. Concerns about crowding on the trails and a lack of social distancing left city officials wondering if the now-empty downtown could help ease the burden while also giving restaurants an opportunity to expand seating beyond their brick-and-mortar locations, which Governor Cooper has restricted to 50 percent capacity for at least the next month. (Capacity is based on indoor seating.)

In two unanimous votes last week, the council authorized its staff to analyze viable streets for shared uses and soft closures—meaning roads are not permanently blocked off—while also exploring options to increase outdoor dining.

The “shared streets” concept is nothing new. Oakland, Denver, Seattle, and even Charlotte have already implemented versions. Oakland used soft closures to transform streets into “bike boulevards” over 20 miles of the city. Charlotte has identified three corridors in which to 10

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

Downtown Raleigh

“It’s going to be crucial for us to act quickly and be flexible.” restrict traffic and expand multimodal access; it has five more streets under consideration.

In Raleigh, city staffers suggested analyzing the streetscape for areas already used by bicyclists to find locations with low speed limits and access to greenways, parks, and commercial areas. During a presentation last week, Baldwin wondered if there could be a connection between Chavis and Dix Parks. Council member Corey Branch asked if areas near schools with vacant parking lots could be considered as well.

Expanding outdoor dining is more complicated and could require changing the city’s existing ordinances or requesting permitting and insurance extensions from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission. If the city moves forward, it could mean fully closing streets to

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

allow restaurants to sprawl out their dining areas onto the sidewalk and into the street. Other options include targeting restaurants that already have outdoor dining, focusing on parking lots, or creating pathways around sidewalks to protect pedestrians’ right-of-way while also expanding available dining space.

No matter which route the city chooses, it will have to be handicapped-accessible, council member Nicole Stewart pointed out. And because no one knows how long the pandemic will last, Stewart urged her colleagues to get a pilot program off the ground quickly.

“It’s going to be crucial for us to act quickly and be flexible while working with our business owners across the city,” Stewart said.

Trophy Brewing owner David Meeker agreed. An avid longtime runner and bicyclist, he says sidewalks have been congested for the last few weeks, making social distancing impossible.

Meeker sees the pandemic as an opportunity to try something new and “take back the streets from cars.”

“In some ways we need to go out and do it,” he says.

“We might be running out of time; we don’t know how long this is going to last. It’s a game-changer for some businesses: outdoor seating is the best sign you can have, while businesses are reopening, to say to people, ‘Hey, we’re open. Come by.’” W

N E WS

Durham

Cash Poor Durham will loan its struggling small businesses $1 million. No one’s completely happy about it.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

D

urham City Council members voted unanimously last Thursday to create a $1 million loan fund to help the city’s small businesses recover from the COVID19 shutdown.

But some council members took issue with aspects of the program, while some business owners voiced frustration that it was a loan and not a grant program.

Last month, Raleigh approved a $1 million grant program; so far, more than 300 businesses have applied.

Why, they asked, should struggling Durham businesses have to take on more debt to get relief?

The answer, according to Mayor Steve Schewel, is that state law forbids Durham from giving public dollars to private companies. Raleigh has a charter provision— approved in a 1975 local act—that enables it to use public funds for socioeconomic programs that serve “the public interest and the well-being of the community and its citizens,” according to a city memo.

Durham’s charter doesn’t have a similar provision, city attorney Kimberly Rehberg told the council last week.

Ryan Hurley, who co-owns the downtown boutique Vert & Vogue and has lobbied the city for small business assistance, says establishing a grant program, rather than forcing businesses to seek loans, is critical.

“Early in the crisis, I recognized it was going to be a significant cash consequence for small businesses,” he says. “We have slim margins and few cash reserves. I knew that a loan program and additional debt wasn’t going to be a solution.”

Even with online commerce, Hurley says Vert & Vogue’s sales are 50 percent off. He received a loan through the Paycheck Pro-

“A loan program and additional debt wasn’t going to be a solution.” tection Program—albeit five weeks after he applied—and he’s managed to keep eight of nine full-time employees, although he’s let six part-timers go.

Hurley says he understands that the city is following the letter of the law. But Raleigh, he argues, recognized that its economy is in a state of emergency and found ways to help its small businesses.

“They took that position, which is the right one to take,” Hurley says. “Durham has not taken that position.”

While the city can’t give public money to private businesses, Schewel told the council last week, it can relax credit-score and collateral requirements for loans, which is likely to lead to a large number of defaults.

If few businesses pay the city back, loansversus-grants may end up being a distinction without a difference.

The recovery program, as described by Office of Economic and Workplace Devel-

opment director Andre Pettigrew, would distribute 10-year, low-interest loans of up to $50,000 to businesses with fewer than 25 employees and revenues of less than $2 million per year. Payments would be deferred for 12 months, and funds would go out by the new fiscal year, which begins on July 1.

The program would prioritize disadvantaged businesses that have no existing relationships with banks and that operate in seven neighborhoods that struggle with high poverty rates.

Several council members noted that Pettigrew did not recommend a certified development financial institution to administer the funds, and council member DeDreana Freeman said she was worried about getting funds to unbanked businesses.

In addition, the council looked askance at waiting until July to distributing the funds.

“Many of the temporary closures have become permanent,” Mark-Anthony Middleton said. “There are folks going out of business right now, as we speak.

How soon can we start cutting checks and getting this money in the people of Durham’s hands?”

Council member Jillian Johnson said the proposal did not focus enough on holding businesses accountable for ensuring that workers are paid well, provided with personal protective equipment, and have paid sick leave—“all the things that we know are even more important right now with the COVID-19 crisis,” she said.

Freeman argued that $1 million wouldn’t be enough. At least $500,000 should go to the “black and brown businesses who make up 5 percent of the city’s business community,” she said.

And the other 95 percent need help, too.

“This is our future tax base,” Freeman said. “If we are not going to be investing in our future tax base, then what are we going to have coming out of COVID?” There is some more money coming down the pike, however.

Duke University has pledged $1 million to support Durham’s small businesses.

Schewel told the INDY on Monday that university officials are now working out details about how this money would be doled out with the city’s staff. W

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May 27, 2020

11

e

ri g h

tim

t

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, e r c i g a h l p

In 1994, David Morken registered a domain name that was soon worth a fortune. His Raleigh company found a niche in the aftermath of the tech bubble. And when the coronavirus hit, it was primed to capitalize on our need for connection. BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

A

t any given moment during the business day, 5 million virtual meetings take place throughout the U.S. on platforms like Zoom or GoToMeeting. About a fifth of users call in with their phones instead of connecting over the internet.

When they do, a fraction of a penny goes to an under-the-radar Raleigh tech company called Bandwidth, which has amassed a nationwide Voice over Internet Protocol network of 70 million phone numbers, including the ones used by major virtual conference companies.

Before the coronavirus pandemic transformed open offices into viral vectors, just 7 percent of Americans worked from home.

By the middle of April, however, 316 million people in 42 states were living under stay-at-home orders. Birthday parties and church services went virtual, as did staff meetings and sales pitches and business strategy sessions.

12

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

More people were virtually conferencing than ever before. And more people were dialing into those conferences than ever before.

All of a sudden, Bandwidth was making more money than ever before.

The 20-year-old company never imagined profiting from mass misery. But that’s what’s happening. Since the market crashed in late February, Bandwidth has seen its stock price nearly double. The company’s market cap today is more than $2.6 billion, more than six times its valuation when it went public in 2017.

“It’s humbling,” founder and CEO David Morken says in an interview over Google Meet (another Bandwidth client). The fit, youthful-looking 50-year-old—a self-described “Jesus freak” who says he frequently crawls under his desk to pray—is sitting alone in a conference room in Bandwidth’s Centennial Campus headquarters sipping an Arizona iced tea. “It’s gratifying to see

the team rise up and achieve. It’s motivating us for the next step.”

When the world abruptly went remote two months ago, Bandwidth (and its shareholders) hit a morbid kind of jackpot. But it wasn’t blind luck. The company’s success is less a fluke than a byproduct of years of staying ahead of the curve—of spotting a need on the horizon and figuring out how to fill it.

More than anything, it’s the story of David Morken’s knack for being in the right place— and in the right niche—at the right time.

I

t began in a duplex in Park City, Utah.

Actually, it was a half-duplex. Morken’s parents lived on one side, while Morken, his pregnant wife, and their three young children lived on the other.

OK, really, it was a walk-in closet in a spare bedroom of a half-duplex, where Morken sealed himself off to make calls.

Five years earlier, in 1994, before the dot-com boom, Morken had registered the domain name bandwidth.com while studying law at Notre Dame. (As the original registrar, he paid nothing for it.) He’d read an article predicting that fiber-driven connectivity would herald a new age of economic growth.

He wanted to be part of it.

After graduation, Morken joined the Marine Corps and served as a judge advocate in Hawaii before returning home in 1999.

The first iteration of Bandwidth.com banked on its searchability. Businesses seeking higher-speed internet connections would land on Morken’s website, and he’d act as a middleman and connect them to services through the major telecom companies.

He was in the right place at the right time.

Bandwidth.com took off. Morken received more than 180 leads worth up to $2.2 million in the first month. Forbes took notice and profiled him, calling his registration of the domain name “visionary.”

Visionary or not, he wasn’t living a gilded life. He was hustling, maxing out credit cards, pulling all-nighters, and trying to close deals. It was exhausting. But after the Forbes article dropped that September, Morken caught his second lucky break.

It wasn’t the $1 million offer for the domain name (which he turned down) but a phone call from a North Carolina investor he’d never met. Henry Kaestner didn’t want to wrest control of Bandwidth.com from Morken. Instead, he offered to build the thing—whatever it was—together.

By 2001, Morken had relocated his family to North Carolina to take Kaestner up on his offer.

By then, the dot-com bubble had burst, and the Triangle’s tech landscape was nearly nonexistent.

“When we got here, it was like nuclear winter,” Morken says. “The fallout from the dotcom burst meant there weren’t many companies in our peer group, and there wasn’t any significant institutional capital. Investors didn’t really exist here.”

Bandwidth.com had no big investors to please. It had three employees and bankrolled itself with the money it made. Meanwhile, the bankrupted dot-com giants had invested billions in fiber-optic networks that were ripe for the picking. By 2003, Bandwidth.com had transitioned from middleman to direct sales, buying abandoned bandwidth in bulk from carriers and reselling it on the corporate marketplace.

“We had the last-mover advantage,” Morken said in a 2019 Business NC profile.

“The forest fire burns and this little green shoot pops up.”

The next big shift came in 2007, as Silicon Valley turned its attention to integrat-

David Morken

ing high-speed internet and voice software.

Bandwidth.com partnered with Google, powering what would become Google Voice while building out its own network.

This was a company of a dozen employees competing in an emerging field against AT&T and Verizon. But Bandwidth.com had an edge the major telecoms didn’t, Morken believes.

“We were using software; they were using hardware,” he says. “We were using the internet; they were focused on the last 100 years. We were an agile software platform on top of an IP network; they were working in the past.”

That momentum helped the company survive the 2008 economic crash, though not unscathed. Morken laid off 26 employees, a fifth of the company at the time.

As the economy recovered, Bandwidth. com expanded. Its first major investor, the Charlotte-based Carmichael Partners, came aboard in 2011. Over the following decade, the company steadily grew to more than 500 employees and amassed a massive VoIP network that included 911 providers and nationwide phone numbers.

In September 2017, in anticipation of an initial public offering, Bandwidth.com became, simply, Bandwidth. Two months later, valued at $400 million, the company went public, its shares selling on Nasdaq for about $20, with Google, Microsoft, Skype, and every major video conferencing platform in its client roster. In 2018, Bandwidth earned more than $200 million in revenue. By mid-2019, its market cap exceeded $2 billion. The company was, Morken said at the time, a “20-year overnight success.”

Then came the coronavirus. Calls over the voice network spiked 30 percent overall in March, with meeting-solutions clients like

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Zoom increasing usage by as much as 66 percent, according to Bandwidth’s VP of investor relations, Sarah Walas.

On Monday, Bandwidth closed at $111.97 a share.

L

ast weekend, the VoIP network Morken built serviced a more personal connection. With his daughter’s wedding plans canceled due to bans on gatherings, Morken moved the wedding to his backyard in Chapel Hill and streamed the service to wouldbe guests through one of his virtual conferencing platform partners. (He wouldn’t say which, so as not to incite jealousy.)

This, perhaps, offers a hint at the future as VoIP progresses beyond the world of business and into our homes and places of worship.

“The line has blurred for a lot of our customers,” Morken says. “There’s a mixture of personal and work uses of their platforms where there wasn’t before.”

The next step involves a new 40-acre, $70 million Raleigh headquarters at Edwards Mill and Reedy Creek Roads that will more than double Bandwidth’s current 800-person workforce to about 2,000 employees, with salaries averaging close to six figures.

The new HQ’s “beating heart” will be an on-site Montessori school, Morken says.

There will also be a gym with a basketball court for employees’ optional 90-minute workout lunch breaks.

Morken, who now has six children, has also put his money into his adopted hometown. In 2009, he and Kaestner—who has since left Bandwidth to become a managing partner at Sovereign’s Capital, a faith-based venture capital company—founded DurhamCares, a nonprofit that seeks to mobilize Durham churches, more deeply connect res-

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idents to the city in which they live, and spark investment in the community.

“I believe each person is fearfully and wonderfully made in the image of the creator and because of that are priceless,” Morken says.

“For me, that creator is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and his son, Jesus Christ.

And we are all called to be creative—to make stuff and do things for others that are not yet visible. This has been a great faith foundation in an inventive business.”

At Bandwidth, Morken preaches the gospel of work-life balance, including a mandatory phone embargo during vacations.

He brings in corporate chaplains once a week—completely voluntary, the company says—and gives employees the option to exercise or read books to earn bonus days off. Friday was one such bonus day. Normally there would be about 100 people in the office—most employees are still working from home—but it was a ghost town.

When the Google Meet interview experienced sound problems, Morken bounded onto a table, determined to fix the speaker on the ceiling himself. After a few minutes—a lifetime of dead air during an interview—he decided on a better course. He moved to another conference room.

In an odd way, that brief interlude summed up who Morken is better than how he describes himself: driven, determined, someone who sees what he wants and goes after it, the guy who jumpstarts a business out of a closet in his parents’ duplex and turns it into an empire. But he’s also nimble, willing to make adjustments, to move his family across the country and start a new life in an unfamiliar place, to switch his business model from middleman to seller when the market presented an opportunity.

Combine that with a little luck and a lot of faith—the impulse to claim a domain name in 1994, the prescience to reject a $1 million offer to chase a bigger, unseen fish—and you can see how Bandwidth keeps finding itself in the right place at the right time, and how that has become one of the company’s defining traits.

Morken is still eyeing the horizon for what’s next. Bandwidth began an international expansion in 2019, purchasing budding networks in London and Frankfurt.

Morken hopes the company’s next chapter “is a story that is printed in many different languages.”

But this chapter isn’t finished just yet. A world of Zoom meetings and Google Meet interviews and Skype calls will be with us for a while, Morken says. And as long as we crave connection in an era of social distancing—and as long as people keep using VoIP— fractions of pennies will keep getting added to Bandwidth’s bank account. W 14

May 27, 2020

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FOOD & DR I NK

The New Hospitality As local restaurants reopen, an uneasy transition begins

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

I

t almost felt normal on Franklin Street this weekend, the first since the shutdown that restaurants around the state were permitted to have some sitdown dining. On the sidewalks, pockets of people gathered at outdoor cafe tables.

But normal is relative. And the meaning of “hospitality” has also begun to change.

At Tandem Restaurant in Carrboro on Saturday night, one staff member was dedicated solely to sanitizing surfaces. As Motown streamed through the speakers, servers dressed in black waltzed outside— only one diner ate inside—nudging the doors with their knees or hips and gracefully balancing blue and orange dutch ovens.

Between the sounds of diners clinking glasses, there was a subtly soapy ambiance, as the staff made brisk trips to the sanitation stations placed around the restaurant.

Everyone had undergone new training. If this was not already evinced by staff caution, it could be discerned by the “Count on Me NC” certificate displayed prominently below the restaurant’s 100 percent sanitation score. Going forward, any restaurant complying with the North Carolina Restaurant & Lodging Association’s sanitation campaign will display such a sign.

The hospitality industry has always slightly resembled a ballet, and the new rhythm of dining appeared, on the second night of phase 2, to be a tense, tightly orchestrated affair.

Not that you could tell from the groups seated outside. The patio was buzzing. One couple celebrated an anniversary; others were on dates.

“It was like a Tuesday night on a Friday night,” says co-owner Emma Sabouh. “It’s 16

May 27, 2020

INDYweek.com

definitely better than the alternative of being closed.”

Sabouh opened Tandem in 2016 with her partner, chef Younes Sabouh, after years of working together in kitchens. Opening then was a risk rooted in a love of restaurant culture. Reopening now has been another leap of faith.

“You have to reinvent yourself in times like this so you can keep moving,” she says. “You know, we have so many people that needed their jobs back. We wanted to help them, too, hopefully at least provide them with an income. I doubt there is any profit for us.”

In North Carolina, as in other states across the country, the reopening question is fraught, and COVID-19 is by no means in the rearview mirror: On Saturday, the Department of Health and Human Services reported the highest one-day jump in cases yet—1,107.

But beyond acute epidemiological concerns, many restaurant owners say that operating at 50 percent capacity, as Governor Cooper’s executive order requires, just isn’t feasible.

At the end of April, 40 top restaurateurs around North Carolina—including Cheetie Kumar, Gray Brooks, Andrea Reusing, and Scott Crawford—signed an open letter to Cooper stating that a partial opening would harm independent restaurants. Reopening this way, the letter stated, would reduce demand for the takeout services that many restaurants are relying on to make payroll, if not a profit. Many of the restaurateurs have intimate dining rooms where six-foot distances are impractical or impossible.

Brendan Cox, the chef-owner of Oakleaf in Carrboro, says that weighing the restaurant’s survival alongside public and employee health has been agonizing. Increased

Tandem in Carrboro reopened this weekend under phase 2.

PHOTOS BY JADE WILSON

testing and contact-tracing would make him consider opening, he says, but he questions whether the public appetite for dining out will ever be the same.

“We knew that we would not be the first restaurant to reopen,” Cox says, “and we don’t believe that we will be the last one. My wife and I are having long and often circular conversations about what is morally and ethically right about reopening the restaurant. And I don’t think we’ve settled on an answer.”

Across the country, more than 30 states have already reopened restaurants for dinein service, or are in the process of rolling back restrictions. In North Carolina, those restrictions vary by county. In Durham, Mayor Steve Schewel has extended the stay-athome order until June 1. In Orange County, a softer reopening is at play: In contrast to the state’s cap of 10 people per restaurant table, the county is limiting tabletops to six (save for households).

When it comes to the fine-print choices—outdoor versus indoor seating, open versus closed windows, servers wearing gloves versus not wearing gloves—restaurants are largely left to make their own calls.

At Small B&B Cafe—a family restaurant located in a folksy Pittsboro farmhouse—ample outdoor space has given owners Lisa Piper and Dave Clark hope that they can safely serve guests without relying on indoor seating. While they have a small indoor dining area, they’re planning to reserve it for people with special needs and direct able-bodied guests to seats outside—until the weather turns, that is.

“If it rains, it’ll hose us,” Piper said cheerfully over the phone on Friday. Beside her, Clark was cooking the cafe’s first reopening dinner. “We’ll have to see how it goes once temperatures here reach 100 degrees. I don’t know what’s gonna happen, but we’re fully expecting that there’s going to be a second wave that’s going to turn around and box us.

So, you know, who knows?”

At Il Palio, a white-tablecloth Italian restaurant in Chapel Hill, an open floor plan has made spaced-out dining more feasible. Still, manager Annabel Butler says the restaurant is taking few chances. All tables are spaced at least 8 feet apart, and servers are wearing gloves in addition to masks. Hospitality no longer looks like giving diners whatever they want.

“As hospitality professionals, we really love saying yes to everything with the customer,” she says. “But we’re trying to transition our mindset into being more ‘no’ people because it’s keeping the safety of our employees and our guests. It’s a hard mindset, having to be like, no, we have to keep our distance.” W

M U SIC

M IS WE: (GHOSTS)

M IS WE/NIGHT BATTLES SPLIT 7”

[May 29; Broken Sound Tapes]

[May 1; Broken Sound Tapes]

Playing with a Full Deck

217 WEST MILLBROOK RD. 919-787-9894

Sexier than CDs, cheaper than vinyl, cassette tapes are today’s physicalformat fetish of choice

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

M Is We

I

f you still own a cassette deck, you either care about music so little that you haven’t updated your hi-fi since 1989 or you care about it so much that you’re immersed in the underground scenes where the obsolete format still reigns.

Carrboro’s Michael Wood, the sole proprietor of Broken Sound Tapes, falls in the second category. Armed with a couple of high-speed dubbers, he’s issued well over a dozen small-batch cassette releases—mostly post-punk, like Wood’s band, M Is We—in the last year and a half.

But as you can tell from the label’s two new releases, one on vinyl and the other digital, Wood isn’t doctrinaire about the format, any more than he is about the genre (this is a label that has released Shit Horse, after all). The point is that the cassette is a hands-on, personal, and most important, cost-efficient way of releasing music.

Now Wood works as a beer-and-wine buyer at Weaver Street Market, but he used to be a bar owner and concert promoter in Myrtle Beach. In the late ‘90s, he had a high-speed cassette dubber, and he thought of it when he wanted to release an M Is We cassette. Rather than hiring it out to a company with a minimum order requirement, why not make it himself?

“The expenses were not that high just to get another dubber,” Wood says. “I have a lot of friends in smaller bands, and people don’t have to commit to 100 tapes if I can do as little as five.”

Wood’s gear takes up one coffee table in his home, where he can dub on demand.

His runs top out below 300. He did 250 copies of Going Down for Shit Horse, the aforementioned no-wave blues-rock band, to sell at a show in New York. He also did 200 copies of Triangle, a compilation of local bands including Stevie, Personality Cult, and Sunny Slopes, whose wide-eyed, reverb-soaked dreampop Wood cites as an example of the label’s ideal. But he likes doing smaller runs because of the care that can go into each copy.

“I’ve found that the quality isn’t as good when I do high speeds in bulk,” Wood says.

“If I do a slower dub with cassette decks rather than my dubbers, I’m able to focus on the quality of the tapes.”

Last year, M Is We released Ghosts, an alternately majestic and frantic tape from which only the A-side was posted online.

This Friday, May 29, the B-side—an atmospheric reworking of the first side—will go up on Broken Sound’s Bandcamp as (ghosts).

And on May 1, Broken Sound released its first vinyl offering, a split seven-inch featuring M Is We and Night Battles. The former’s “What You Carry” suggests a timeline where Ian Curtis lived to sing for New Order, while the latter’s “Flat on My Back” is a burly, crashing anthem.

The first problem Wood confronted was how to retain the label’s DIY spirit while outsourcing production to a plant, Georgia’s Kindercore. The solution was to hire

PHOTO BY KENT CORLEY

them only to press the discs so that the bands could make the labels and cover art themselves.

The second problem was a little more intractable—is it weird to put out a record on a label with “Tapes” in its name? Wood decided to change it to “Broken Sound Records” on the physical release, to make it harmonious with itself.

Broken Sound is entwined with Brian John Mitchell’s stalwart experimental label, Silber Records, which put out the first M Is We album. Sometimes, the old friends share releases—Broken Sound will do the cassette, Silber the digital.

It’s also immersed in circles where tapes have the cachet that vinyl does in others.

We’ve reviewed a lot of cassette releases lately, from the post-punk of Cochonne, on Sorry State Records, to the underground techno of Binky and Faster Detail, on Hot Releases. The Mountain Goats recently went back to cassette roots, and DiggUp Tapes has been at it for years. The squiggly sound of fast-forwarding and the definitive click of a tape’s end have the same aesthetic richness as the crackle of a dusty groove.

“It’s the easiest and cheapest thing, and it’s so aesthetically appealing,” Wood says.

“Unlike all the mass-produced tapes you’d get in the ‘80s, we’re making all different colors, different tape sleeves and kinds of J-cards. I think that’s the appeal—back to cut-and-paste, hands-on making. It’s almost like an arts and crafts project for me.” W

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M U SIC

DreamRoot

DREAMROOT: PHASES

HHH1/2 [Self-released; May 8]

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

Joyful Jazz DreamRoot’s Phases is a healthful, holistic antidote to phase 2 absurdities and anxieties

BY DAN RUCCIA music@indyweek.com

W

hen the Durham jazz quintet DreamRoot named their debut album Phases, they couldn’t have imagined that, by the time they released it in May, the word would connote the grisly false choice between health and economics that elected leaders and oligarchs have foisted upon us.

That connotation couldn’t be more different from the one they intended, which is about holistic, groove-based healing. According to the liner notes, “phases” imply constant forward motion and evolution, the love of the journey, and other feel-good rhetoric.

To be honest, this kind of language usually triggers the klaxons on my BS detector, predicting a musical mush that goes nowhere in particular. But this record doesn’t do that.

Bassist Ittai Korman, drummer Theous Terryel Jones, keyboardist Joe MacPhail, trumpeter Lynn Grissett—who won a Grammy in Prince’s New Power Generation—and saxophonist/flutist/vocalist Serena Wiley play soul-inflected jazz that wouldn’t be out

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of place on a major stage the Art of the Cool Festival or on any given night at Beyu Caffe.

They represent one of the distinctive strains of the Durham jazz scene, melding R&B forms with modern jazz solos that all fit nicely into the length of a longish pop song.

Their melodies are hummable, and their solos are built around restraint with that melodic material. See, for instance, Grissett’s nicely understated solo in “Sundance,” which swirls outward from a ‘70s TV-theme melody. Clearly, they can also do more traditional jazz soloing, as they show on the more reaching moments of “Phase Is.” Roughly half of the tracks feature Wiley reciting poetry and Kerisha Roi singing, addressing concepts of healing alongside a healthy dose of romance. In “Stridin’,” they trade off a mission statement of sorts over a snapping midtempo groove in the style of Lauryn Hill: “We need / A little more wholeness / Love, strength, and balance / Are you up for the challenge?”

The vibe is relentlessly positive, and there’s definitely stuff here that toes the line of cheesiness. But there is something about DreamRoot’s earnestness—and the smart choice to make the record sound clean but not too slick—that makes it work.

If you want jazz that breathes with the rage of the times, listen to Who Sent You?, the latest Irreversible Entanglements album.

If you want something more soothing as North Carolina blindly barges into phase 2 of reopening while setting new daily highs for COVID-19 cases, these Phases might help. W

A RT

Sail Away The Mothership is closing, but COVID-19 can’t stop its legacy in Durham

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

T

he Mothership is permanently closing, a casualty of the COVID-19 crisis.

There’s no way to cushion the blow of losing one of Durham’s most-beloved businesses, which blended a coworking space, a local retail collective, and an empathetic philosophy into a one-of-a-kind operation that was more than the sum of its parts.

The Mothership offered homey, humane coworking space in an increasingly slick, technocratic city; gave a brick-andmortar home to local artisans otherwise relegated to websites and pop-up markets; enriched the city’s cultural life with everything from concerts to writers’ salons; forged its own model of cooperative woman-led business; and made it work for eight years, which might as well be 20 in Durham-development time.

But The Mothership’s legacy will go on—abstractly, yes, in the community bonds it forged, but also demonstrably, in the businesses it incubated that (we hope) will outlast it.

The Mothership has been in its mural-painted garage on Geer Street since 2017, but its story began in 2012, in another place, with another name.

First there was Mercury Studio, the coworking space that Katie DeConto and Megan Bowser opened on North Mangum Street. It was a charmed moment when scrappy art spaces could still get a foothold in the heart of downtown. Mercury became a key site in Durham’s nightlife, swapping art salons with The Carrack, which was then on Parrish Street.

And there was The Makery, a website that sisters Krista Anne, Sarah Rose, and Brita Nordgren founded to flash-sell handmade local goods. They gained visibility by winning six months in the “smoffice,” a tiny office on Main Street that the city funded to hype its start-up scene.

Mercury Studio had to move at the end of 2013, when the building it was in changed ownership. It reopened on Geer, where it hosted a pop-up market as a part of the Durham Storefront Project. It included up-and-coming local vendors such as Runaway, and its success inspired DeConto, who retained ownership of the coworking enterprise with Bowser, to start a second business with Krista Anne Nordgren: a retail showroom for local arti-

Megan Bowser, Krista Anne Nordgren, and Katie DeConto at The Mothership in 2017

sans called The Makery at Mercury Studio.

The symbiosis was completed in 2017 when the two businesses merged into The Mothership under the auspices of DeConto, Bowser, and Nordgren, clarifying brand confusion and bolstering financial sustainability.

The Mothership’s days on Geer Street were numbered from the start. They had an initial two-year lease followed by rolling six-month renewals at the discretion of landlord Alex Washburn, who had plans to redevelop the property. When we reported on the merger in 2017, they thought they were a few months away from moving out.

But two years stretched to six before the time came: The Mothership would have to move in early 2021.

Though rents in Durham were less manageable than ever, they had found two sympathetic landlords before, and they had earned the support of potential financial partners in the community. They were confident they could weather the transition.

“We were finding that standard commercial rent was completely out of our price range, but finding owners who believed in what we were doing is the way we were going to be able to continue,” Nordgren says. “Fortunately, we had those connections.”

Then COVID-19 came, and the gap between The Mothership’s old home and its potential new one grew too wide to ferry a community across. Unsure if they would even be able to reopen in the old space while trying to find a new one, they decided to officially close at the end of June.

FILE PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

“We didn’t want to close; we still really believe in the work we’ve done,” DeConto says. “But not having continuous business was a huge wrench in the works, and making big financial commitments isn’t at the top of anybody’s list now.”

“Especially as a community-membership model, to dissolve the community and then rebuild it would be a difficult task,” Nordgren adds. “And in terms of taking out loans or anything, we don’t really have any handholds at this point.”

In addition to dozens of vendors and coworking members, The Mothership had a staff of 12 that worked shifts in exchange for space. Though the founders say they kept the business in the black, they never got to the point of doing it full-time.

There are other coworking spaces in Durham, from American Underground and Provident1898 to—gulp—WeWork, though none of them are quite like The Mothership. And there’s nothing comparable to the retail showroom, which had more than 30 vendors when it closed.

“We wouldn’t exist if there weren’t people willing to take a chance on us, and so being willing to take a chance on other people is the joy of what we do,” DeConto says.

“When Mercury opened, there’s no reason anyone should have given us a lease. The store closing is going to have a huge impact on people who make ends meet selling their items in the store. Some people treated their booths as mini-storefronts and did really well. Sara Spissu really built a following.”

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May 27, 2020

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“ I’m sad, but those three women are so fiercely intelligent and professional and poised that I’m more curious about what they’re going to do next.”

S

pissu’s time as a vendor and staffer at The Mothership was instrumental in opening her own sprawling shop, Gibson Girl Vintage, on Chapel Hill Street in 2019.

Just a couple of years before, she’d been a Durham newcomer who sold vintage clothing and other items via Etsy, eBay, and local markets. She’d never been a part of a retail collective or a permanent space until she joined The Makery.

“It was a shot in the dark,” Spissu says. “I thought they were going to have extremely rigorous criteria, but that was not the case at all. I called, and Krista Anne was just as friendly as could be. Even through the phone, I could tell I loved this woman.”

Spissu says that having her own store was a longtime dream that risked remaining just that—a dream. But while working as many Mothership shifts as she could, she discovered that she both enjoyed and excelled at being a shopkeeper.

“It was a very encouraging experience, actually seeing people buying your things,” she says. “And when I was writing up my business plans, I could say, ‘I sold this amount out of this closet-size space. So imagine if I had a 1,700-square-foot space.’”

Spissu’s story illustrates one of the core principles of The Mothership—empowerment by example, or what DeConto calls “mentorship-lite,” with a willingness to dare and dream.

“Having people who’ve negotiated commercial leases and run spaces to bounce things off of, saying, ‘you can do it, you’ll do great!’ is a big confidence builder,” she says.

“Sara was super motivated; she came in with that dream and was able to gain more of the confidence and skills in the shop,” Nordgren adds.

Gibson Girl is far from alone among businesses and artistic enterprises that were nurtured, at least in part, in The Mothership. Others include The Zen Succulent and the Runaway brick-and-mortar store. Marcella Camara’s pop-up gallery, Young, Gifted, & Broke, and The Floor’s dance parties both had formative early events there.

The Mothership leaves Durham’s handmade-and-vintage marketplace better than it found it. DeConto and Nordgren remember when it was basically just them and Rock & Shop, but now there are craft markets almost every weekend.

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Still, those scattered markets don’t replace having a trusted centralized space that keeps regular hours, which DeConto says is less work and more profitable for vendors, especially beginners.

“The market for handmade has exploded times a million since we got started,” Nordgren says. “It’s been beautiful to see people really value this work, what these people bring to Durham. But there’s something about having a home where people’s items are accessible to be touched. We’d get a lot of people who’d seen things at markets, thought it over, and then come because they knew it was at The Mothership.”

The Mothership is hosting a closing celebration June 4–7. You’ll be able to submit memories to an online archive or visit the space during limited, social-distancing-enforced hours as the founders contemplate what’s next, for themselves, and for the brand, which has the potential to transcend physical space.

“We were all in our early-to-mid-20s when this started,” DeConto says. “Now that I don’t have to consider the survival of The Mothership with every professional choice I make, what does that mean? It was very unique work and I think it will be hard to find something that feels similar.”

“I do not know adult life without this,” Nordgren says. “The coolest part has been the ethics we just sort of made up as we went along, in terms of how we wanted to run the business and treat each other and our community. That has radically changed how I operate as a person and set a really high bar for how I need to exist in the world. It’s going to be hard to find a follow-up unless we make it ourselves again.”

The Mothership’s contributions to Durham are lasting and irreplaceable, and while the space is closing, it will take more than COVID-19 to block the connections it forged or the energies it set in motion.

“It’s not just a space and an opportunity, but a community they emboldened,” Spissu says. “Every person who helped me in the year leading up to opening my shop, I met at The Mothership. So I’m sad, but those three women are so fiercely intelligent and professional and poised that I’m more curious about what they’re going to do next.” W

STAGE

WOMEN’S THEATRE FESTIVAL: FREAKSHOW

Friday, May 29–Saturday, June 6, various times, $10 | www.womenstheatrefestival.com

Zoom or Bust Women’s Theatre Festival makes a power play to crack the virtual-theater problem in Freakshow

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

A

n actor’s phone dies during a tech rehearsal for the disturbing drama Freakshow, which the Women’s Theatre Festival opens this Friday, and rehearsal grinds to a halt.

Were this a normal stage production, the glitch would be a theatrical nonevent—a personal inconvenience and nothing more. But the phone’s camera is all that connects the actor, alone at home in Raleigh, to the production. Hers is one of 23 simultaneous feeds streaming through the two computers necessary to process the signals before the show goes online.

Stage manager Ali Ray is monitoring the incoming streams. She stays unflappable while crisply directing actors on Zoom to take down the feeds from their laptops, phones, and webcams, and then turn them on again in a certain order. Moments later, the show’s “grid,” now correctly sequenced, is restored and loaded into a powerful video-switching, design, and encoding application called OBS. Rehearsal begins again, and playwright Carson Kreitzer’s beguiling story of a traveling “freak show” at the dawn of the twentieth century unfolds.

After set designer Ami Kirk Jones’s circus tent miniatures set the scene, the suave, enigmatic ringmaster, Mr. Flip (Tori Grace Nichols), appears at the center of tech director Anthony Buckner’s intricate video design: an ever-shifting mosaic of windows, show posters, and cameos, set against the faded, jaded stripes of an oldtime big-top.

The screen fills with an outlandish cadre of performers, who surround Flip, each in their own sub-window. Clowns mug and preen as the diffident Human Salamander (Jordan Biggers) peers at us over the lip of a water-filled tub and the microcephalic Daniel (Clare Vestal) hums a tuneless song in his cage.

Then, in a Victorian picture frame, the group’s improbable leader emerges: the charismatic, manipulative Amalia, The Woman With No Arms Or Legs (Kariey Anne Smith).

The carnival’s undeniable main attraction deftly controls her surroundings with flashes of warmth and quick, worldly wit, which partly mask a chilly, calculating intellect.

Ultimately, these are Amalia’s only defenses against the world’s indifference, neglect, and randomness, and the darker impulses of the crowds who come to see her.

The 90-minute drama is a most improbable outcome for a theatrical production that, just two months ago, seemed doomed by the COVID19 pandemic. But as many other theater and dance groups went dark, the Women’s Theatre Festival kept finding ways to produce work.

In the absence of much other theatrical activity in the country, executive artistic director Johannah Maynard Edwards worked with her national network of women in theater to produce the Virtual Plays Club, a weekly series that ran through March and April, prior to production work on Freakshow. Edwards not only got Tori Grace Nichols and Jordan Biggers in Freakshow PHOTO COURTESY OF WTF permission from leading playwrights like Lauren Gunderson and Pulitzer laughing. “But there’s something to be said for meeting finalist Clare Barron to livestream virtual staged readings a historical moment with innovation, passion, and imagiof their works; the playwrights also agreed to participate nation. Every collaborator was able to say ‘yes, and’ as we in online public conversations after the shows. do in improv, and pivot their training into a new format, But the only way to salvage the flagship production of a new medium.” this summer’s festival was by taking it entirely online. That Despite the predictable snags of tech rehearsal, the involved devising ways for sequestered actors to rehearse resulting show suggests a mélange of genres. The poetic, online and coming up with the technical design necessary gritty gravitas of Kreitzer’s script echoes groundbreaking to coherently assemble them on the same screen.

TV series like Playhouse 90, which presented live weekLuckily, the stage manager and lighting designer of ly dramas by young literary lions like Gore Vidal in the Freakshow both had extensive backgrounds in online video 1950s. Buckner’s video mosaic of simultaneous points of production. Ray had learned the ins and outs of Zoom as view recalls Peter Greenaway films like The Pillow Book. a stage-management technician at the University of KenAnd of course, there’s live theater’s sense of risk—the tucky, and Buckner had produced online educational video knowledge that anything could happen, at any moment, programming for N.C. State University. to make tonight’s performance unforgettable and unique.

With Jones and co-directors Rowen Haigh and Rachel It’s heightened by the fact that the tightrope being walked Pottern Nunn, they came up with an approach that could is not only artistic but also technological. conceivably translate a stage play into a hybrid of genres WTF will broadcast five live performances of Freakand technologies that would work online. show. It debuts at midnight on Friday, May 29, followed In the process, a theater company transformed itself, in by a Saturday show at 8:00 p.m. and a Sunday matinee two short months, into an ad hoc video-production unit at 5:00 p.m. Then it returns at 8:00 p.m. next Friday and that could roll with the punches of live performance. OBS Saturday. Buy at ticket for $10 at womenstheatrefestival. should help minimize lags and glitches, but nothing’s cer- com to receive a private link. tain on this uncharted terrain.

One thing hasn’t changed: “Seating” is limited. Due to “OBS and Zoom weren’t designed for this, and Car- publisher and playwright contracts, each show’s audience son’s play clearly wasn’t designed for this,” Edwards says, will be capped at 99. W KeepItINDY.com

May 27, 2020

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P U Z Z L ES

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su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

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 5.27.20

solution to last week’s puzzle

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HISTORY TRIVIA: • On May 28, 1900, a total solar eclipse occurred, and Wadesboro in Anson County was determined as the best place in North America to view the eclipse.

Scientists from preeminent astronomy programs traveled to Wadesboro to observe the eclipse.

• On May 29, 1831, a citywide fire ravaged Fayetteville.

The fire took more than 600 buildings, including hundreds of homes, 105 stores, a school, 2 banks, and 2 hotels.

Courtesy of the Museum of Durham History

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