INDY Week 5.29.19 by Indy Week

: IDE INS

ION ECT GS SIN RTI DVE LA CIA SPE

T EA

pd dee •D

ive

RALEIGH 5|29|19

•S

•P

Y LA

POISONED ROOTS

NORTH CAROLINA’S PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITIES WERE BUILT ON WHITE SUPREMACY. THAT LEGACY STILL LINGERS. BY JORDAN GREEN, P. 12

RPD: TRUST US, P. 6

CITY COUNCIL: GO AWAY, P. 7

RALEIGH PRIDE: DON’T FORGET, P. 10

2 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK RALEIGH

VOL. 36, NO. 22

DEPARTMENTS

6 In 2018, the Raleigh Police Department investigated forty-nine internal affairs complaints. Twenty-nine of them led to discipline.

6 News

7 Raleigh’s new Airbnb rules prove the city council simply doesn’t listen.

23 Food 25 Music 27 Arts & Culture

8 The internet was supposed to be the great activism equalizer. North Carolina proved it wasn’t.

30 What to Do This Week 32 Music Calendar

10 Cities across the U.S. celebrate Pride Month in June. Fifty years after Stonewall, Raleigh’s going to give it a try.

37 Arts & Culture Calendar

12 Wake Forest University’s endowment was financed in part by a donation of enslaved people. But it didn’t allow black students until 1962. 25 “Personal Levee,” a track on Solar Halos’ new album, was inspired by a National Geographic image of flooding in Louisiana. 26 Discover Durham hired rapper J. Gunn to create a Durham anthem for the city’s 150th birthday, then pushed back when they got a rap song. 27 Long-running public performance series SITES is ending, but its afterimage will linger on Durham’s developing downtown for years to come.

Foundation is publishing a book to celebrate its first decade (see page 24).

On the cover

PHOTO BY KEITH ISAACS

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE OLIVA

Alzheimer’s Research Study

Researchers at Duke University are studying a medication that may help people with Alzheimer’s disease improve their memory and their ability to think and to reason. We are looking for participants for this research study who: • Are between 55 to 85 years of age • Have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease • Have a caregiver who is willing to attend all study visits Qualified individuals are invited to participate in a no-cost investigational medication research study in Alzheimer’s disease. Compensation may be provided for qualified participants. Call us to schedule a no-cost evaluation to see if you qualify for this study. Please call 919-684-7752 for more information.

Pro00093318

INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 3

upfront

Keep It Smart. Keep It INDY.

RALEIGH’S BUSINESS COMMUNITY NEEDS HIGH-QUALITY LOCAL JOURNALISM. I’M PROUD TO BE AN INDY PRESS CLUB MEMBER. BY ZACK MEDFORD YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

INDYWEEK.COM 4 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

’m Zack Medford, a graduate of N.C. State, an owner of Isaac Hunter’s Hospitality, and a proud member of downtown Raleigh’s business community. I want to tell you why I think having a free and independent news outlet like the INDY is so important—both to my businesses and to the city they call home—and why you should visit KeepItINDY.com today to join the INDY Press Club. The most important thing: Independent journalists are our first and last line of defense against government and corporate corruption. In recent years, the INDY uncovered hundreds of thousands of dollars in shady campaign donations to North Carolina legislators by the pork industry (“Hogwashed,” a three-part investigative series in summer 2017). The INDY shined a spotlight on lawsuits alleging that Duke University tried to cover up sexual abuse at a camp for chronically ill children (“A Cabin in the Woods,” January 29, 2019). The INDY exposed that Thomas Farr misled the Senate Judiciary Committee about his role in Jesse Helms’s efforts to prevent black people from voting, which helped cost Farr a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary (“The Return of the Segregationists,” January 3, 2018). Powerful, impactful journalism like this isn’t free. It isn’t even cheap. If we don’t support it, it will vanish. And we can’t afford to lose it. The INDY helps people figure out how to vote. It shows us where our taxes go and why they’re going up or down. It calls out malfeasance and teaches us about social ills in our community that need fixing. As a small business owner, the INDY has also had a direct effect on my life. When the Raleigh City Council tried to ban outdoor drinking in 2015, the INDY spent countless

resources covering the entire process and detailing the council’s hypocrisy. Without the INDY, we’d have closed the doors to Paddy O’Beers years ago, and you would never have been able to enjoy a cold beer outside Isaac Hunter’s Tavern on a sunny summer day. The INDY is still fighting the good fight. Recently, they’ve been unveiling the real reasons behind our current city council’s plan to destroy short-term rentals like Airbnb (see page 7)—telling us exactly what our local officials are up to. They’re not afraid to call it like it is. The INDY tells us what is going on in our community. It tells us what we can do this weekend, how we can spend our money locally, and what new businesses are opening. It introduces us to the brilliant or wacky or odd or compelling characters making an impact in our community. Reading the INDY makes you smarter, funnier, and gives you creative things to talk about while you’re sipping a beer at Isaac Hunter’s Tavern or wearing your Sunday best at church. Local news makes your community safer and better informed. The best part of the deal is that the INDY comes to you free. But free doesn’t pay the bills, and free can’t be sustained forever. For the price of a couple of Starbucks lattes a month, you can join me as a member of the INDY Press Club and help keep independent local journalism viable in the Triangle. There’s no better deal on the planet, and few more important. Do it. Keep it free. Keep it INDY. Zack Medford is a co-owner of Isaac Hunter’s Hospitality, which operates Parliament, Coglin’s Raleigh, Paddy O’Beers, and Isaac Hunter’s Tavern. He also owns The Great Raleigh Trolley.

Raleigh Durham | Chapel Hill PUBLISHER EDITORIAL

Susan Harper

EDITOR IN CHIEF Jeffrey C. Billman ARTS+CULTURE EDITOR Brian Howe STAFF WRITER Leigh Tauss ASSOCIATE ARTS+CULTURE EDITOR Sarah Edwards FOOD+DIGITAL EDITOR Andrea Rice EDITORIAL ASSISTANT Cole Villena THEATER+DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods RESTAURANT CRITIC Nick Williams CONTRIBUTORS Amanda Abrams, Jim Allen,

Elizabeth Bracy, Timothy Bracy, Jameela F. Dallis, Khayla Deans, Michaela Dwyer, Spencer Griffith, Howard Hardee, Corbie Hill, Laura Jaramillo, Kyesha Jennings, Glenn McDonald, Josephine McRobbie, Samuel MontgomeryBlinn, Neil Morris, James Michael Nichols, Emily Pietras, Marta Nuñez Pouzols, Bryan C. Reed, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Zack Smith, Michael Venutolo-Mantovani, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu, Patrick Wall INTERNS Lena Geller, Thomas Martin

ART+PRODUCTION

PRODUCTION MANAGER Christopher Williams ART DIRECTOR Steve Oliva

CIRCULATION

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Brenna Berry-Stewart DISTRIBUTION Laura Bass, Richard Lee,

Marshall Lindsey, Gloria McNair, Timm Shaw, Freddie Simmons, Hershel Wiley

ADVERTISING

DIRECTOR OF SALES John Hurld MARKETING EXECUTIVES Kathryn Cook,

Sarah Schmader, Hanna Smith CLASSIFIEDS ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Amanda Blanchard

WWW.INDYWEEK.COM

P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 DURHAM 320 East Chapel Hill Street, Suite 200 Durham, N.C. 27701 | 919-286-1972 RALEIGH 227 Fayetteville Street, Suite 105 Raleigh, N.C. 27601 | 919-832-8774 EMAIL ADDRESSES

first initial[no space]last name@indyweek.com DISPLAY ADVERTISING SALES advertising@indyweek.com RALEIGH 919-832-8774 DURHAM 919-286-1972 CLASSIFIEDS ADVERTISING 919-286-6642 CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2018 INDY WEEK

backtalk

Of Meat and Politics We recently published the INDY’s first annual Almanac of Food & Drink, a comprehensive guide to local gluttony. (You can pick one up for free at hundreds of locations all over the Triangle—if they haven’t been snatched up—or check it out online at indyweek.com/guides/almanac.) The magazine opens with Jeffrey C. Billman’s editor’s note on how precarious the world feels these days and how food and drink can offer both a respite from the chaos and a connection to eons of human history. Mrs. Horton, who picked up the Almanac while she was in town for her husband’s medical treatment, writes to express her disappointment: “Food is not political. It is not racist. Food is something that builds bridges and opens up opportunities for inclusiveness and conversations. Food brings comfort, joy, happiness. We celebrate with food. We mourn with food. But upon reading the opening paragraph of your note from the editor, your words did the opposite of what I think your magazine is meant to do. It was so negative and not inclusive at all. Your political opinion was so evident. Why was that needed, I do not know. Food is meant to bring people together, and your article did not do that at all. Donna Allison, meanwhile, says the Almanac gave the non-carnivorous short shrift: “I picked up this magazine hoping to get a total picture of what is available for dining out in the Triangle, but was disappointed to open it and find it heavily meat-biased. The first description on literally every restaurant has a meat focus; the joys of eating meat from exploited baby animals, in particular, such as lamb and calves’ liver, escape me totally. Thank you for the one page toward the back, where you have listed vegetarian restaurants and those that offer vegetarian options. There are other restaurants listed, such as Cosmic Cantina, that offer vegetarian options; why not mention the vegetarian items on the restaurants’ menus also? “There are a significant number of vegetarians in the Triangle; please keep us more in mind in the future.” In last week’s food section, Nick Williams reviewed M Tempura, acclaimed chef Mike Lee’s third Durham restaurant.

“I cannot wait for history to look down upon these hateful turds.”

Sara Perron Gregory writes: “Thanks so much for commenting on the ventilation system issues. While my meal was amazing, I had to dry-clean my coat and still didn’t completely get the smell out of my clothes for several washes. This will prevent me from going back until this issue is resolved.” In Soapboxer last week, Billman argued that the wave of anti-choice laws making their way across the country wasn’t about abortion but about control. On Facebook, Lee Vernon Woehlke responds, “Poor women. Can’t even murder their own children. What’s this country come to?” Ronny Nause has a somewhat different take: “What a fucking debacle. The GOP knows no shame. I cannot wait for history to look down upon these hateful turds with the shame and scorn they deserve.” “Because I’m pro-choice,” writes Anne Havisham, “that means I will not tell a ten-year-old that she needs to give birth to a child who looks like her stepfather. It means that I will not tell a survivor what to do if she is impregnated by the man who raped her. It means I am opposed to forced abortion and forced sterilization. It means that I recognize that even soughtafter, enthusiastically welcomed, prayedfor pregnancies can go horribly wrong. I will not tell a woman who has just found out she’s five weeks pregnant but needs a few weeks to determine if there is a potentially fatal defect that she must decide now whether to continue or terminate her pregnancy. I will not tell a woman to choose between continuing her pregnancy and beginning chemo. I know these decisions are not simple, and many times are not easy, and that’s also why I’m pro-choice.” Want to see your name in bold? Email us at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on indyweek.com or our Facebook page, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek. INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 5

indynews

Just Trust Us

RALEIGH POLICE DON’T WANT CIVILIAN OVERSIGHT. THE CITY MANAGER REFUSED TO LET COUNCIL MEMBERS HEAR OTHERWISE. BY LEIGH TAUSS

n December, Raleigh’s Human Relations Commission unanimously recommended that the city council create a civilian police review board that has both investigative and subpoena powers. But last Tuesday, when the council heard a long-awaited presentation from the city staff on what Raleigh’s oversight board could look like, the HRC’s recommendation was conspicuously absent. As it turns out, the city manager’s office decided that the council—and the public—didn’t need to hear what the HRC had to say. Instead, human relations director Audrea Caesar told council members that civilian oversight boards are ineffective and recommended a hybrid model that would combine city staffers with civilians. Other possible alternatives included improving the internal affairs process and better community engagement. Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown opposed the independent board, too, telling council members it could hinder police operations and wouldn’t offer a “be-allend-all” guarantee of accountability. “At what point does performance become so restricted that officers cannot do their jobs?” Deck-Brown asked. “They are the ones running toward danger at the risk of their own lives.” Police are already held accountable through the department’s accreditation process, Deck-Brown said. And in 2018, police used force in only 379 out of 375,900 encounters. The oversight board, she suggested, would be a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist. Perhaps that’s true. But as reform advocates point out, you’ll have to take Deck-Brown’s word for it. In Raleigh, as elsewhere in North Carolina, the police disciplinary process is incredibly opaque. Under state law, the public can’t access 6 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

The options the city’s staff presented to officers’ personnel files to see what misthe council last week fall well short of what conduct they’ve been accused of or discithe protesters and other advocates say is plined for. If an internal affairs complaint needed: an autonomous board with teeth. is sustained, residents aren’t told how an “If they implement any of these plans, officer was punished. If the complaint is it will be a slap in the face to the activists rejected, there’s no recourse—and no way who have been trying to create a board with to access records—short of a lawsuit. real accountabilIn 2018, the ity,” says Dawn Raleigh Police Blagrove, direcDepartment tor of the Caroliconducted forna Justice Policy ty-nine interCenter. nal affairs The HRC voted investigations. for a civilian Twenty-nine board that would were sustained, have access to resulting in police personnel discipline. files, could invesIn the last six tigate citizen weeks, Raleigh complaints, and officers have could influence shot two men, discipline. one fatally. Both “I think we appear to have need one,” says histories of menHRC member tal illness. Keith KarlsOn May 19, son. “There’s too Michael Anthomany instances ny Hendricks Jr., of police shootwho was holding ings and other an airsoft gun, problems in the was shot in the city without abdomen; he suraccountability to vived. On April the citizens.” 22, an officer After its vote shot and killed Raleigh Police Chief Cassandra Deck-Brown in December, Soheil Mojarrad, COURTESY OF THE CITY OF RALEIGH the HRC asked who the police to present its recommendation to the say was brandishing a knife. Because the city council. But the city manager’s office officer did not turn on his body camera, refused, according to the HRC’s meeting there’s no footage of that encounter. minutes from February 14. HRC chairman Calls for an oversight board have grown Chris Moutos said there “has never been a since Mojarrad’s death. Three weeks ago, time when HRC was denied access to the protesters with the Police Accountabilcity council,” according to the minutes, and ity Community Taskforce took over a city asked council member David Cox for help. council meeting to demand action.

(Cox did not respond to a request for comment. City manager Ruffin Hall could not be reached Tuesday.) Moutos says he emailed the report to the entire council in February; however, council members Nicole Stewart and Corey Branch say they didn’t see it until late last week, three days after the staff ’s presentation. That presentation made no mention of the HRC’s recommendation. And neither it nor the HRC’s minutes referencing it are available on the city’s website. The city’s position is that a civilian board is impractical because it would require the General Assembly to change the law—which is why nothing like it exists in North Carolina. If state law didn’t change, Deck-Brown told the council, the board wouldn’t have access to personnel files. Without those files, it couldn’t take into account an employee’s history when making disciplinary decisions. The hybrid model, Caesar said, would have limited access to restricted information. On the downside, “internal processes tend to lack the transparency that the community desires,” according to the staff presentation. But without transparency, Moutos says, you’re left trusting the city staff to be neutral. That renders the model ineffective. Blagrove says the city should be willing to challenge the legislature. “Because it hasn’t been done is not an excuse not to do it,” Blagrove says. “We should be leaders in the state on forwardfacing policies especially as it relates to police accountability. The fact it hasn’t been done before, if anything, should incentivize our leaders to get this done.” After the presentation, the council voted to have its staff look into improving community engagement. ltauss@indyweek.com

news

The Council of No

HERE’S THE PROBLEM WITH THE RALEIGH CITY COUNCIL’S DRACONIAN AIRBNB RULES BY LEIGH TAUSS

losing the book—for now—on what has often seemed like an interminable five-year debate, the Raleigh City Council passed strict regulations on short-term rentals like Airbnb last Tuesday. Starting January 1, whole-house rentals will be illegal throughout most of the city, and residents will only be permitted to rent a maximum of two rooms in their home to a maximum of two adults at a time. Moreover, those rooms cannot have a separate kitchen or privacy from the main dwelling, and homeowners must be living onsite. Those violating the new rules will accrue fines of $500 per day. (Exempt from the whole-house ban are five mixed-use districts, mostly downtown, where hotels are already allowed.) Rental owners will be required to obtain a $176 permit that must be renewed every year for $86. It’s hard to describe how foolish this is. As Airbnb noted in a press release before the vote, it has seen 60 percent year-overyear growth in North Carolina, and taxes on its rentals pumped $24 million into state and local coffers last year. But Raleigh’s rules crack down on the very things that make the service popular: Short-term rentals offer privacy and space, and whole-house rentals can accommodate more people than fit into hotel rooms. Want to bring in the whole family for graduation? Right now, you can rent a North Raleigh townhome that sleeps six for $169 a night. Come January, that will be illegal. The bigger problem, though, is that the council simply refuses to listen. It’s been more than sixteen hundred days since the city cited Gregg Stebben for renting out his home on Airbnb, then decided to stop enforcing its Airbnb ban while it crafted regulations. There have been countless meetings and public hearings since. Each time, a vast majority of residents urged the city to adopt rules that, while reining in abuses, would allow

them to rent their homes to generate extra income or give their families an affordable place to stay when they visit. The council didn’t care.

markets and large tourism economies, short-term rentals have driven up housing prices. In response, several cities are tightening their rules.

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE OLIVA

What council members cared about were the horror stories they heard from a handful of residents who said their neighborhoods were being ruined by renters taking up street parking or throwing loud parties. Never mind that, since 2014, the city has only received thirty-seven complaints about Airbnbs, of which just twenty-three were deemed valid—about four a year. To be sure, Airbnb has been a mixed bag in some cities. In cities with tight housing

But while that’s a convenient excuse for the Airbnb-phobic city council, that’s not the problem in Raleigh. The city isn’t a tourist destination—Airbnb’s biggest surge is graduation weekend—and Raleigh’s housing prices are skyrocketing because of the predominance of single-family zoning and the city’s reluctance to increase the housing stock by adding density. Rather, Airbnb disrupts the status quo. And like other disruptions to the status

quo—electric scooters, accessory dwelling units, mobile retail—the council’s instinct is the same. No. In this case, council members Dickie Thompson and Stef Mendell have argued that neighborhood opposition has led to the city’s crackdown. But that opposition has been almost invisible throughout the debate. “If there are that many people in Stef Mendell’s district and that many people in Dickie Thompson’s district that are opposed to this, where are they?” Stebben asks. “We’ve never seen them.” At a public hearing on May 7, for example, twelve people addressed the council on short-term rentals. Eleven spoke against the city’s proposed rules. The council delayed its vote on the regulations for two weeks because Thompson wasn’t there, and the proregulation camp needed his vote. As it turned out, Thompson had ideas to add: Allowing four adults to stay in a house, as was originally proposed, was too much, he argued. He suggested two. On a 5–2 vote, the council agreed. Nicole Stewart and Corey Branch—not coincidentally, the only council members under the age of fifty—dissented. The public never got a chance to weigh in. Not that it would have mattered. Those regulations didn’t cover wholehouse rentals. They were still illegal in most of the city, but there weren’t plans to enforce the ban, as council members were still working on those rules. But immediately after the vote, Mendell moved to begin enforcing the whole-house ban along with the other rules on January 1. And while violators were initially going to be fined $100 a day, council member Kay Crowder thought that wasn’t enough: She asked for $500. Again, the council agreed, with only Stewart voting no. Again, there was no public input. ltauss@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 7

news

How the Left Lost the Internet

USING NORTH CAROLINA AS A CASE STUDY, DUKE ALUMNA JEN SCHRADIE’S NEW BOOK ARGUES THAT CONSERVATIVES HAVE AN INHERENT DIGITAL ADVANTAGE BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

arack Obama made it look easy. His 2008 campaign employed sophisticated digital tools and targeted mobilization strategies the political world didn’t fully understand and his adversaries seemed too stodgy to handle. The years that followed saw the Arab Spring and European anti-austerity protests and Occupy Wall Street, all branches of leftist (or liberal) activism with roots online and in social media. For a fleeting minute, this looked like the future: young, engaged, and egalitarian. The internet was going to be a great equalizer— leveling the playing field between moneyed elites and the rising masses. More than that, progressives assumed, it favored those most adept at utilizing and shaping technology—the young and the educated. In other words, themselves. By 2016, though, this utopian fantasy had been laid bare: Donald Trump, Brexit, far-right populist, nationalist, and illiberal movements in Europe and beyond, all of which also germinated online. Progressives blamed Russian interference and the proliferation of fake news. But as sociologist Jen Schradie argues in her new book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, that’s not the real story. The real story, she writes, is that the dynamics of digital activism aren’t all that different from those of traditional activism, and conservatives have the same advantages online that they did before the internet: time and money. If anything, she writes, the web has tilted this balance further in their direction. Schradie, who graduated from Duke in 1989 and spent more than a decade as a documentary filmmaker before going to grad school, reached this conclusion after spending several years on the ground in North Carolina in the early part of this decade—just as a state that appeared to be going blue took a hard-right turn— encamping with groups on the left and 8 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

right as they campaigned for and against proposals to allow state employees to collectively bargain. Ultimately, she found an “uneven digital terrain that largely abandoned left working-class groups while placing rightwing reformist groups at the forefront of digital activism.” Schradie, who will be at Quail Ridge Books Friday evening, spoke to the INDY from France, where she’s an assistant professor at The Paris Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po. This conversation has been condensed and edited for print. INDY: Why did you choose North Carolina for your case study? JEN SCHRADIE: I was in Northern California at UC-Berkeley, and because I wanted to choose a political issue that attracted both the left and the right, as well as groups from different social classes and different kinds of organizational structures. Because I was in Northern California, it’s really hard to find an issue that attracted the far right there, just around the San Francisco Bay Area. There just weren’t a lot of conservative groups. I went to Duke. I stayed in North Carolina and was a documentary filmmaker and also became involved with a lot of the political issues that were happening at that point. I already knew about the collectivebargaining issue in North Carolina. Just a few years earlier, before I started this research in 2011, the state had just barely tipped over to Obama. And so it was this purple state, and as I was doing my research in 2012, Obama lost it by a hair. So it really was the perfect mix of having both the left and the right very active in the state. Your book presents a counternarrative to the idea that the internet is a naturally progressive medium. I’m wondering what your preconceptions were going in. [In 2011], Time magazine had “The Protester” as the Person of the Year, and the

Jen Schradie description was really about what a lot of the media were calling Twitter and Facebook revolutions. And these included not only the very well-known Occupy Wall Street, but also what was happening in Wisconsin with the takeover of the statehouse. And this was on the heels of the Arab Spring, and the [anti-austerity] Indignados Movement in Spain, etc. So, you have this image of digital activism as being the tool for radical left activists. What I really wanted to do was delve into what a wider spectrum of groups

was actually doing. I expected some social class differences, but even I was surprised at the extent of the digital inequality. But what I did definitely learn as I went along is what, at the time, people were slowly starting to talk about: this idea of filter bubbles. The hyper-focus [among journalists and academics] was on these left-wing activist movements, these very digitally visible movements. But meanwhile, underneath the radar, was a highly sophisticated group of conservative

activists—some with a lot of resources and more elite, but some very grassroots and organic—that were engaging online. So [with] the filter bubble, it wasn’t just that we were making claims about digital activism and being that egalitarian tool. We were also not really paying attention to what was happening with groups that were focusing on very, very different issues. And what I found in the process is not only that conservative groups with more resources and more vertical structures were using the internet more, but that how they used it was also very different.

getting as many people to participate in this very egalitarian way. The internet was just one tool to enable that to happen. But when I talked with conservative activists, their eyes would light up. They were so much more excited about how [the internet] could counter what they viewed as the disinformation of the mainstream media. They felt really alienated, and they really felt like it was their way to deliver the truth.

You write about labor groups in eastern North Carolina that had no web presence at all. We tend to think of liberal groups as having sophisticated internet machines. It’s fascinating, even talking to some conservative activists who themselves were really engaged online and were very sophisticated and still didn’t even recognize their own digital power. In many ways, that surprised people with Donald Trump’s election or even the 2014 election in North Carolina. I think people were really surprised at this infrastructure that had been brewing for a long time. I think North Carolina is a really good example of what was happening nationally: You had that really strong ecosystem of grassroots conservative organizations working in sync with conservative media. And it’s not just Fox News or even Breitbart, but a much broader spectrum, and locally. What did conservatives get about the internet that progressives didn’t? There are a couple of [areas where] conservatives really have got the advantage. One is that they have this ecosystem of information that they were able to share, re-share, etc. So you have resources there. And it’s not just funding; it was also time. Tea Party activists, in particular, tend to be older or retired. So they really had time to dedicate to the work of digital activism. It takes a lot of effort. But there’s also the piece of purer political ideology that works to the advantage of conservatives. In very simplistic terms, conservatives tend to focus on freedom. Progressives tend to focus on fairness. There was another difference related to this ideology. When I talked to activists on the left, they were very concerned with

You reference the late economist Mancur Olson’s theory about collective action— that it’s irrational to participate, so those with a certain level of comfort are more likely to commit time and resources to do so—and the notion that this idea applies to something as basic as posting articles online. That’s an interesting way of looking at Olson’s research fifty years after he did it. While the cost of participation is so much lower with [the internet], the problem is that not everyone has those same disposable tools or time to come to the table. Certainly, over time, more and more people adopt. But the problem is that if you don’t have those resources, it’s a constant struggle. And it’s not just the tools. It’s new platforms that are being introduced. It’s a moving target.

JEN SCHRADIE

You wrote that, while a lot of people were shocked when Trump won the election, you weren’t. Why? When I first started to present my preliminary results around 2014, I would talk about the general findings that you and I have been discussing, and, especially among more leftist scholars and activists, they were very wary. They were like, “What are you talking about?” They didn’t disbelieve my data, but I think they just couldn’t come to terms with the fact that conservatives were more active online. And for me, it wasn’t just this idea now that that’s being promoted. It wasn’t just fake news or people being duped by Trump or what I think is kind of the narrative now. There was this groundswell of support that really has been growing for a long time, even before 2009, but really with the birth of the Tea Party movement. People on the ground were organizing extensively. I could see that they had a much better digital footprint that wasn’t separate from what was going on but really reflected the political organizing that was going on. Is there something in the messaging that the left should be taking from these conservative groups, which were so focused on Obama and national issues like the Affordable Care Act and are now focused to a large degree on supporting Trump? Being as catchy as possible without diluting your message is essential with social media. And it’s not just the words; the images are huge. They’re so important, and especially if we think about the movement toward Instagram in particular and other more [visual] mediums—images, memes, GIFs. That’s what people are sharing. That’s what people are laughing about. That’s what people get really angry about. It’s a powerful way to convey your message. Last question. You did a lot of this research several years ago. The internet changes very fast—platforms change, algorithms change. The book’s coming out now. Do you think the fundamental premise of the book has been affected by the changes in how the internet works today versus eight years ago? I think it’s even more dramatic and apparent now than it was before. I don't think the digital activism gap has gone away. jbillman@indyweek.com

May 31, 7 p.m. | Quail Ridge Books 4209 Lassiter Mill Road, #100, Raleigh | quailridgebooks.com

RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE

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

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

INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 9

news

A Proud Legacy

ON THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF STONEWALL, RALEIGH GETS ITS FIRST PRIDE MONTH BY COLE VILLENA

E Your week. Every Wednesday.

INDYWEEK.COM 10 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

June 1 and will benefit the LGBT Center of arly on June 28, 1969, New York Raleigh, aims to create a sense of awareness City cops raided the Stonewall Inn, and inclusivity through family-friendly a club in Greenwich Village that events, concerts, and parties, and visible was owned by the mob and offered refuge support from local businesses. to the LGBTQ community (and sold liquor without a license). Raids weren’t uncommon, but usually bent cops tipped off the bar first. Not this time. The police arrested thirteen people—staff for selling bootlegged booze, customers for violating laws on “gender-appropriate” clothing. But patrons and neighbors didn’t disperse. Instead, they gathered outside and watched a cop club a woman over the head as he forced her into a paddy wagon. She cried out. They responded, launching bottles and stones at the police. When the cops holed up inside the Stonewall, the crowd set it on fire. (Firefighters put it out.) A riot ensued—and the uprising became a catalyst for the gay rights movement in the United States. The first large-scale pride parade took place one year later. Ever since, June has been Pride Month in most of the U.S.—but not in Raleigh. Durham and Raleigh both host Pride parades in September, and for nearly a decade, Out!Raleigh has drawn thousands downtown in May. But there’s never been a ILLUSTRATION BY STEVE OLIVA month-long Pride observation in the City of Oaks. On that fiftieth anniversary of The organizers say they don’t want to Stonewall, that’s changing. supplant Out!Raleigh or the parade in Sep“I think that this is something Raleigh tember. Instead, they want to create someneeds,” says Videri Chocolate Factory thing that coexists with these events. general manager Roxanne Lundy, the Lundy got the idea from a visit to New York brains behind Raleigh Pride. City during Pride month. Everything “was Along with Trey Roberts of WakeUP decked out” for Pride, she says. “I couldn’t Wake County and Josh Lamm of Raleigh believe that Raleigh didn’t have that.” Provisions, Lundy has spent the last She first reached out to the Center to several months organizing the monthlong create a Pride-themed chocolate bar, then, celebration. Raleigh Pride, which kicks off

with Lamm and Roberts, began contacting downtown businesses to encourage them to put on their own Pride-themed events and help raise money for the Center. The idea quickly gained traction: Mayor Nancy McFarlane offered her personal support. Tito’s Vodka has pledged to match donations to the Center up to $10,000. “We have no direct hands in a lot of these events,” Lamm says. “They really were just super supportive of what we were trying to do.” Some examples: Runologie will host the Run for Love 5K on June 1. Alamo Drafthouse has weekly Pride Screenings, with a portion of proceeds going to the LGBT Center. City Market will feature a Pride-themed Night Market. Several venues will hold panel discussions about everything from entrepreneurship to sexual health to the hospitality industry. There’s a chance to meet Raleigh City Council candidates on June 23 at Videri. Concerts, drag shows, and night parties round out the slate. But for all the celebrations, the organizers are careful not to overlook the history. The month’s marquee event—the Opulence Ball, June 22 at VAE Raleigh—will celebrate the Stonewall activists and the late Martha P. Johnson, a transgender woman who was celebrating her twenty-fifth birthday the night the riots broke out and helped instigate the resistance to the police that night. (She later co-founded Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which helped young and homeless trans women of color.) “None of what’s accepted now should come at the cost of history,” Lamm says. “None of that should be forgotten just because things are easier for certain individuals at this point.” cvillena@indyweek.com

SATURDAY, JUNE 15 N O O N â&#x20AC;&#x201D; 4 P M

E L G N A I R T e h t f o BEST

H S A B 2019

MUSIC

VENDORS

FREE

AND

OPEN

THE

PUBLIC

HOSTED BY

AT KIDS ZONE PRESENTED BY

BEER

PRODUCTION SERVICES PROVIDED BY SONIC PIE PRODUCTIONS INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 11

THE PAST ISN’T EVEN PAST North Carolina’s most prestigious universities were built on white supremacy. Its legacy still lingers. B Y J ORDAN G REEN

n 1836, the estate of Edenton planter John Blount was donated to the two-year-old Wake Forest College, with the proceeds designated to support “poor and indigent young men destined for the ministry.” The bequest included land and, when Blount’s widow died in 1859, fourteen enslaved people who were auctioned for $10,718, the equivalent of about $330,000 today. For the first 128 years of its existence, this institution—whose endowment was financed in part by black bodies—excluded black students. And when Wake Forest University finally admitted a black student in 1962, he was Ghanaian, not African American. The university’s troubled history with race burst into the open in February—the same time Virginia governor Ralph Northam faced a scandal over appearing in blackface in the eighties—with the revelation that the university’s dean of admissions and an assistant dean of admissions had posed with the Confederate flag as students in the 1980s. During one of two public apologies, dean of admissions Martha Allman said she didn’t think that much about what the flag signified in 1982, when she took part in a group photo as the “sweetheart” of the Kappa Alpha Order fraternity. (She was engaged to a member.) “I was not politically active,” Allman told administrators and faculty in April. “I was not engaged in discussions about diversity, nor involved in issues of social justice. In retrospect, I’m ashamed of that lack of awareness, but it’s true. I read applications and I meet new students, and I’m aware that there are a lot of students who become aware in their youth, and for others it just takes longer.” Many of Wake Forest’s black students, who comprise 9.4 percent of the student body, say there’s never a time on campus when they can avoid thinking about race. “It seems like my blackness is something that other people need to figure out how to navigate in academic and social settings,” says Kate Pearson, a rising sophomore. “My blackness is something I have to wear on my sleeve, which is exhausting.”

12 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

ake Forest is part of a troika of elite universities in North Carolina, alongside the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Duke University, that have outsize influence in state politics, business, medicine, and law. They’re renowned research institutions that feed hospital systems and influence cultural discourse through highly regarded faculty. The three have produced U.S. presidents, senators, governors, and judges: Richard Burr and Jesse Helms (Wake Forest); Governor Cooper, former governor Jim Hunt, U.S. Representatives David Price and Virginia Foxx (UNC); former president Nixon and Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller (Duke), among others. In particular, UNC-Chapel Hill— mythologized as a “light on the hill”—has held a reputation as an engine of progress in North Carolina. As former governor Terry

Sanford observed in a 1990 interview, most of the state’s leaders had come from Chapel Hill, which “had that concept of how to make the world better as a function of the university.” Compared to the nation’s other topranked universities, these are relatively diverse institutions. Among U.S. News and World Report’s Top 30 Universities in the U.S. in 2017, Duke has the fourth-highest percentage of African American students, Wake Forest has the fifth, and UNCChapel Hill has the ninth—the highest ranking among public universities in that elite group. But these are still predominantly white institutions. At each school, as of 2017, black students comprised less than 10 percent of the student body, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, though they accounted for more than 21 percent of the state’s population. Graduation at Wake Forest

PHOTO BY JERRY COOPER

For many black students, enrollment at these schools offers access to resources they wouldn’t have at historically black colleges, but comes at a steep psychological cost. Growing up in North Carolina, Jerry J. Wilson watched his two eldest sisters attend mostly white schools in the UNC system, only to drop out. Another set of sisters attended HBCUs and graduated. “When it was my turn, I got a strong nudge from my parents to consider an HBCU,” Wilson says. He chose Fayetteville State University, which offered him the best financial aid package. Wilson is now a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education. “When I got here to Carolina, things were very different from Fayetteville State: programs, scholarships, study abroad, and facilities,” Wilson says. “So much, so many more resources than I had access to at Fayetteville State. I remember being in awe, like, wow. “That’s why I go back to this notion of democratic equality, what it means for the flagship institutions to have all these resources, yet have this disparity when it comes to enrollment by race,” he continues. “Because the reality is it’s not just what you know, it’s also who you know, and what type of resources you have access to. It is the case that students at other universities may be receiving a wonderful education, but how well they’re able to take advantage of their opportunities is outside of their control. In terms of opportunities for research, we have Nobel laureates on the faculty at Chapel Hill. That means something for young people who are applying for other opportunities and are interested in a certain topic or need an introduction or a research apprenticeship.” Aries Powell attended mostly white K-12 schools in Delaware but wasn’t prepared for the intensity of whiteness at Wake Forest. “It’s pervasive, in-your-face violent whiteness,” says Powell, who uses gender-neutral pronouns. “Wealthy, elite whiteness. I’m solidly middle class. I’d always gone to school with people making similar amounts of money. I had a lab partner, and he was like, ‘I’m going to drop out.’ I’m like, ‘What?’ He said, ‘It’s no problem. My dad owns a potato chip company. I’ll just go work for him.’” While Powell describes Wake Forest as an “adversarial place” academically and socially, they, too, acknowledge several advantages: They received a full-ride scholarship, ducking $200,000 of debt. The university paid for two study-abroad experiences, sending Powell to Cuba and Ghana. And undergrads with the requisite GPA or LSAT scores are automatically admitted into Wake Law.

hile UNC-Chapel Hill is a public university and Wake Forest is not, their histories of race track closely together. At UNC-Chapel Hill, slavery also played a clear role in establishing the university: Enslaved persons literally built the facilities. The first public university in the United States, UNC-Chapel Hill—which was chartered in 1789 and opened in 1795—excluded black people for the first 156 years of its existence. And then it integrated only because it had to. In 1951, a federal court ordered the university to admit five black graduate students under the “separate but equal doctrine,” because the state didn’t adequately fund medical and law programs at black institutions. Four years later, UNC-Chapel Hill admitted three black students, all graduates of Durham’s Hillside High School, to comply with Brown v. Board of Education. Five years later, in 1960, there were still only four black freshmen. UNC’s website tells a flattering version of what happened next. While there were just 113 black students in 1968, “after a major recruitment initiative, 138 professional and 946 undergraduate students were enrolled in 1978. The university has become a national leader in this area.” Like other prestigious schools, UNC-Chapel Hill has made public commitments to increasing diversity over the years. In 2000, for example, the Minority Affairs Review Committee declared this goal “a fundamental prerequisite to both educational excellence and the university’s ability to serve all the people of the state.” However, black enrollment at UNC-Chapel Hill actually plateaued in the late nineties, then began to drop in 2010, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. UNC spokeswoman Kate Luck says changes in federal reporting guidelines account for a 1.5 percentage point decline between 2009 and 2010. Even so, the percentage of black students at UNC-Chapel Hill fell to 8.5 percent by 2017. Similarly, N.C. State—the state’s largest public university, with more than thirtythree thousand students—saw black enrollment top out at 10.4 percent in 2000 and fall to 7.2 percent by 2017. Duke University, founded in 1838, didn’t admit a black graduate student until 1961 and black undergrads until 1963. Black enrollment at Duke increased from 6.5 percent in 1990 to 10.6 percent in 2004, fell to 8.3 percent in 2010, and rebounded to 9.5 percent in 2017. In the late seventies, as public institutions like UNC-Chapel Hill were making strides in increasing black enrollment, INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 13

BLACK ENROLLMENT COMPARED TO N.C. POPULATION SOURCE: National Center for Education Statistics

25%

20%

15%

10%

Wake Forest found itself under pressure to become more diverse. Herman Eure, one of the university’s first two tenure-track black faculty members, created the Office of Minority Affairs in 1978. Martha Allman was a freshman that year. After graduating in 1982, Allman went to work as an admissions counselor at her alma mater, then became the undergraduate admissions director in 2001. In that role, in 2008, she instituted test-optional admissions to reduce barriers for black and brown students, making Wake Forest the first Top 30 university to do so. Under her leadership, the share of students of color in Wake’s undergraduate programs has risen from 14.8 percent in 2007 to 22.9 percent in 2017. During her second public apology for posing with a Confederate flag in college, Allman boasted that “Wake Forest’s nonwhite student population has now grown to over thirty percent.” University spokeswoman Katie Neal says Allman’s figure accounts for international students. But the share of black undergrads has barely budged—from 6.8 percent in 1990 to 7.5 percent in 2017, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Higher numbers of students of color in graduate programs push African-American 14 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

representation across all levels up to 9.4 percent, still well below African Americans’ 35 percent share of the population of Winston-Salem. Nate French, who heads Wake Forest’s Magnolia Scholars program to support first-generation students, says the reason for African Americans’ under-representation is straightforward: “It’s a poor K-12 preparation program. We can’t recruit students if they’re not prepared to come out of high school. I think the report last year in Winston-Salem is that only twentyseven percent of African Americans hit third-grade proficiency. That number’s not going to go up exponentially by the time they get to twelfth grade.” Meanwhile, high-achieving students of color—or, for that matter, low-income or rural students—are highly sought-after by higher-profile recruiters. “I think all the schools—and I’ve been out on the road recruiting for Wake— you’re trying to beat the bushes to find students,” French says. “But if you find one or two or three—and this is red or yellow, black or white—if you find the kid that can get into Wake, they can get into Carolina, they can get into State. Everybody’s going for that student, so there’s a lot of competition there.”

20 11 20 12 20 13 20 14 20 15 20 16 20 17

199 0 199 1 199 2 199 3 199 4 199 5 199 6 199 7 199 8 199 9 20 00 20 01 20 02 20 03 20 04 20 05 20 06 20 07 20 08 20 09 20 10

0% uring their first year at Wake Forest, Aries Powell took part in a historic simulation set in Greenwich Village in the 1910s and ’20s. The story was about labor, says Powell, but the class’s white students shifted the narrative to class— and Powell was the only African American among them. Powell used the word “Negro,” wanting to be historically accurate, a decision they quickly regretted as their counterparts began using the word with relish. “The white students ran wild with it,” recalls Powell, who graduated May 20. “I said, ‘Can we stop? This is a little much.’ The professor made me plead my case, and then put it to a vote.” Beyond the everyday racism that Powell experienced, more overt and outrageous examples are legion at Wake Forest. Among those that have made the news in the last five years: A bucket of urine was placed outside a black Muslim chaplain’s office. A white fraternity invited guests to dress like performers in a rap video. The night of Donald Trump’s election, white students ran around campus yelling the N-word. A white student called her black resident adviser the N-word. A student’s Instagram post called for a wall separating Wake Forest from the HBCU WinstonSalem State University.

“Everyone in your classes could be incredibly racist,” Powell says. “Your roommate could be incredibly racist. The thing that’s so hard is the consistency.” Asked what Wake Forest is doing to combat racism on campus, vice president for diversity and inclusion José Villalba points to a workshop that includes discussions on “multicultural competence” and “microaggressions” that all first-year students are required to attend. Like Wake Forest, Duke University has had its own episodes of racial tension. Last year, vice president Larry Moneta made news after his complaints about rap music at an on-campus coffee shop got two baristas fired. Earlier this year, Megan Neely, a graduate director in the university’s medical school, stepped down following a backlash that emerged over an email she wrote admonishing Chinese students to speak English “100% of the time.” And in 2014, executive vice president Tallman Trask III allegedly called a black parking attendant a “dumb, dumb, stupid [N-word]” after striking her with his Porsche, leading to days of student protests in 2016, after a lawsuit brought the incident to light. Gary Bennett, Duke’s vice provost for education, told the INDY in a statement that the university is “constantly working to cultivate a climate in which free expression is encouraged, and one that is characterized by mutual respect, appreciation for difference, and inclusivity.” For Jerry J. Wilson, being one of the few black grad students at UNC-Chapel Hill often means feeling that his academic interests are devalued. “For us in the school of education—for me and the other students of color—it’s trying to find scholarship with which we identify,” he says. “A lot of us prefer more critical work, work that challenges dominant narratives, work that aims to transform oppressive systems. There are few faculty in the school of education that take that approach.” He’s not alone. In November, under pressure from students—including Wilson— the university published a two-year-old survey in which nearly two-thirds of black or African American students and staff said that they felt “isolated in class because of the absence or low representation of people like me,” The Daily Tar Heel reported. As evidence of UNC-Chapel Hill’s progress in increasing “underrepresented minority enrollment,” spokeswoman Kate Luck says that 8.6 percent of first-year students at UNC-Chapel Hill identify as African American, the highest percentage among U.S. News and World Report’s top twenty-five public universities.

SOURCES: Rankings by U.S. News and World Report, 2019; all other data from the National Center for Education Statistics, 2017.

TOP 30 UNIVERSITIES RANKED BY AFRICAN AMERICAN REPRESENTATION

% Af. Am.

NAME (Rank) Location

% Students of Color

Rank

EMORY UNIVERSITY (21) Atlanta

43.3%

VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY (14) Nashville

35.9%

JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY (10)

12.3%

40.3%

FREE

WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY (27)

24.5%

TO BE FEARLESS.

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY (22)

33.7%

TO HOLD THE POWERFUL ACCOUNTABLE.

WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY (19) St. Louis

38.0%

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY (3) New York City

46.9%

UNC-CHAPEL HILL (30)

33.2%

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (30)

52.4%

FREE

8.2%

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY (1) Princeton, NJ

45.3%

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA (8)

43.1%

TO TELL THE TRUTH.

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (22) Los Angeles

56.0%

TO CELEBRATE AND CRITICIZE.

14 7.8%

BROWN UNIVERSITY (14) Providence, RI

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA (25)

10.1% 10.0%

Baltimore

DUKE UNIVERSITY (8) Durham

9.5% 9.4%

9.4% 9.2% 8.7%

8.5%

8.4%

8.1%

7.9%

7.3%

Winston-Salem

Washington, DC

Philadelphia

Charlottesville

43.8%

16 22 32 26 24 12 28 8

13 18 4

45.2%

14 29

CORNELL UNIVERSITY (16) Ithaca, NY YALE UNIVERSITY (3) New Haven, CT

43.6%

18 7.2%

HARVARD UNIVERSITY (2) Cambridge, MA

42.2%

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY (10)

17 7.2%

TO ADVOCATE FOR THE MARGINALIZED.

32.1% 48.6%

7.2%

TO BE A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS.

11 17

FREE

39.7%

TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE (12) Hanover, NH

40.8%

FROM CORPORATE INFLUENCE.

RICE UNIVERSITY (16) Houston

51.4%

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (3)

42.6%

23 5.6%

STANFORD UNIVERSITY (7) Stanford, CA

52.8%

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY (25)

UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGANANN ARBOR (27) MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (3) Cambridge

7.0%

6.8% 6.7%

6.2%

5.6% 5.2%

26 5.1%

Evanston, IL

Pittsburgh

TUFTS UNIVERSITY (27) Medford, MA

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIALOS ANGELES (19) UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME (18)

5.0% 4.1%

29 4.1%

30 2.6%

31 2.5%

32 1.3%

South Bend, IN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIASANTA BARBARA (30) UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIABERKELEY (22) CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY (12) Pasadena

21 9

NO PAYWALLS, NO SUBSCRIPTIONS.

19 7

54.1%

31.9%

51.3%

33.5%

FREE BECAUSE OF YOU. KEEP IT FREE. KEEP IT INDY.

64.8%

25.2%

60.7%

Join the INDY Press Club at KeepItINDY.com.

63.7%

53.8%

INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 15

But if you include all undergraduate and graduate students, three of those top public universities—the University of Maryland, Rutgers University, and the University of Georgia—have a higher representation of black students than UNC-Chapel Hill’s 8.5 percent, according to an analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data. Even Carolina’s level of diversity is under assault from those who consider it affirmative action. A group called Students for Fair Admissions sued the university in 2014, claiming that the UNC’s consideration of race in admissions “equates to a penalty imposed upon white and Asian-American applicants.” The group has filed similar lawsuits against Harvard University and the University of Texas at Austin, which are expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

n February, members of the Wake Forest’s Anti-Racism Coalition took over a forum on inclusivity hosted by Villalba. But while they called attention to Allman’s picture with the Confederate flag, their concerns and demands went further. They demanded a dedicated space for the Black Student Alliance, a “zero-tolerance policy” for acts of white supremacy, transparency in the bias-reporting process,

additional black counselors to support black students, and the removal of monuments and building names that commemorate Confederates and eugenicists.

that a commission on race, equity, and community will convene in September. Black student activists at Wake Forest say that increasing diversity isn’t their

“We had make this administration afraid of us. This campus does not cater to or care about black students.” In addition to the Allman’s two apologies, the administration responded by designating a lounge at Kitchin Hall for the Black Student Alliance. “We had to literally shut shit down to get that,” Powell says. “We had to make this administration afraid of us. This campus does not cater to or care about black students.” The university has also pledged to review its bias-reporting system, and President Nathan O. Hatch announced

top priority. There’s too much bigotry to ask new black students to join them. “The [black enrollment] stat is depressing and disgusting, but the fewer students of color, the better, as a matter of harm reduction,” Powell says. “This campus has the potential to be a great place for black students. We are at the beginning of a long path. We are a long way from black students being safe and OK here. I don’t want to tell black students to be here to enlist them in my war. I understood that

I was taking on this work when I came here.” Meanwhile, at UNC-Chapel Hill— which, unlike Duke and Wake Forest, often finds itself at the mercy of state politicians—black students and faculty are pushing forward amid uncertainty over the future of Silent Sam, with the UNC Board of Governors’ recent announcement that a decision over the fate of the Confederate monument will be delayed indefinitely. “We spent half a million dollars protecting a Confederate monument,” says William Sturkey, an assistant professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill. “We do not have a historian of slavery at Carolina. One of the messages that conveys is that several hundred people who volunteered to fight for North Carolina when it left the United States are more important than the thousands of people who were slaves who were connected to the university, hereby privileging one race over another. That’s a choice we make in 2019.” backtalk@indyweek.com A version of this story originally appeared in Triad City Beat. Disclosure: The author was employed by Wake Forest University in fall 2017 to lead an independent study.

Your week. Every Wednesday.

NEWS • ARTS • FOOD • MUSIC INDYWEEK.COM 16 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

deep dive EAT • DRINK • SHOP • PLAY

s associated with the Chapel Hill music scene as Cat’s Cradle is, the legendary venue actually lives in adjacent Carrboro, the little mill town that, years ago, became an intimate haven for musicians and artists. (Chapel Hill got too rich.) Carrboro’s where post-grads settle down to push strollers and ride bikes through a few teeming blocks of suburb-shrouded streets crowded with local restaurants, bars, clubs, and shops. Where discerning UNC undergrads venture to escape from campus. Where hipsters, hessians, and hula-hooping hippies mingle painlessly. Everyone in Carrboro thinks it’s ridiculous that it’s been called “The Paris of the Piedmont,” but everyone also knows why it’s called that, as the town has a distinct blend of charm and grit, art and heart, that you can’t find anywhere else in the Triangle. —Brian Howe

ACME FOOD & BEVERAGE CO.

110 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-929-2263, ACMECARRBORO.COM

Though all Trianglers can use a refresher on our ever-shifting commercial landscape, this guide is going to be especially useful if you’re visiting or new to the area, and maybe even to the South. Might as well get oriented with a twenty-year-old Southern-food institution, right? At Acme Food & Beverage, Southern staples don’t get fused and abused—“Damn good food” is their simple maxim—but they sure do clean up nicely, in an unflashy upscale style. Chef-owner Kevin Callaghan chases seasonal ingredients and nostalgic flavors through brunches and dinners laden with cast-iron skillet cornbread, tomato pie, pecan-crusted fried chicken, and overnight-smoked pork. Craft beers and shrubby signature cocktails hold down the right side of the ampersand in a place where fine dining’s not fancy. Put on your cleanest Carhartt and you’ll be fine.

ELMO’S DINER

200 NORTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-929-2909, ELMOSDINERCARRBORO.COM

Ah, Elmo’s, the proverbial diner with a phonebook-size menu that includes at least an approximation of every dish under the sun.

CARRBORO

EAT

kitchen, but the burritos, stuffed with house-prepared ingredients, are the size of a fat baby’s arm.

AKAI HANA

206 WEST MAIN STREET, 919-942-6848, AKAIHANA.COM

For sushi in Carrboro, proceed directly to Akai Hana, a welcoming and communal room where bright, fresh nigiri, sashimi, and rolls are longtime local fixtures. And not to worry, there’s plenty of udon and tempura for the sushi-squeamish. Dare you try the sushi burrito?

GLASSHALFULL

106 SOUTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-967-9784, GLASSHALFULLCARRBORO.COM

Abandon all hope (of not going broke), oenophiles who enter here. Part wine shop and part wine bar, Glasshalfull maintains a twenty-five-bottle list drawn heavily from France, Italy, and the U.S., and behind its deceptively Germanic-sounding name (sound it out) hides a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant good enough to get it listed in Eat instead of Drink, with all the cheese, charcuterie, and seafood you can shake a Bordeaux glass at.

JADE PALACE

103 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-942-0006, MYJADEPALACE.COM

If you want unfussy, standard American Chinese takeout, Jade Palace has it. They’ve had it for a long time. We’ve all been eating it, and we probably will forever. (Psst—dine in and ask your server to go off-menu for more authentic fare.)

AMANTE GOURMET PIZZA

NAPOLI

If you see people carrying medium-thick slices around Cat’s Cradle, this is probably where they came from.

This is a food truck with a permanent address, and it’s one of Carrboro’s best. The maniacs behind Napoli managed to shove a wood-burning pizza oven into a truck. It can blaze up a hand stretched Neapolitan pie made with tomatoes and flour from Italy in two minutes flat. Fior di Latte, every damn day.

300 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-929-3330, AMANTEPIZZA.COM

CARRBURRITOS

711 WEST ROSEMARY STREET, 919-933-8226, CARRBURRITOS.COM

At this local legend, tattooed rock musicians serve speedy Mexican comfort food (but not fast food) in a bustling, intimate room with a sliver of aggressively contested patio seating. The dishes don’t come out looking like there was a cheese explosion in the

101 SHORT STREET, 919-667-8288, NAPOLICARRBORO.COM

NEAL’S DELI

100 EAST MAIN STREET, SUITE C, 919-967-2185, NEALSDELI.COM

Does anyone remember when Open Eye Café was tucked in the little Neal’s

Deli space before it moved into the latte warehouse next door? Damn, I’m getting old. Always bustling at breakfast, Neal’s is a great little deli that serves old-school fare with a new-school vibe. There are always hot and cold sandwiches for lunch, but show up early on Sweet Potato Biscuit Wednesdays before they run out.

MONTERREY MEXICAN RESTAURANT 104 N.C. HIGHWAY 54, UNIT FF, 919-903-9919, MONTERREYCHAPELHILL.COM

Fusion schmusion, sometimes you just want the Mexican restaurant you know: Mexican staff and ownership, strip-mall location, bright colors in dim rooms, big, laminated menu pages listing dizzying combinations of tacos and enchiladas and burritos and chalupas, infinite free baskets of chips and pitchers of salsa, melted white cheese in a bowl. Welcome to Monterrey.

OAKLEAF

310 EAST MAIN STREET, 984-234-0054, OAKLEAFNC.COM

This casual but sophisticated farmto-table restaurant moved from bucolic Pittsboro to Carrboro, inching toward urbanity. It’s pure foodie bait. A mercurial seasonal menu swirls with rich fare like roasted chicken with foraged chanterelles and bigeye tuna crudo, often gussied up with almost comically rarified ingredients. What’s an espelette pepper? Is “burro fuso” food? Do you have to go out to the potato patch to claim your “freshly dug potato?” Only one way to find out.

ONE FISH, TWO FISH POKE 370 EAST MAIN STREET, #140, 919-240-5532, ONEFISHTWOFISHPOKE.COM

The American fad for poke has fully arrived in the Triangle. One Fish, Two Fish was one of three poke palaces to open in less than a year. You can munch on tuna nachos and handcut lotus roots for an appetizer, then find out what the fuss is about with a $10 bowl of poke fusion beyond fish, with pork, chicken, and vegetarian options.

5.29.18 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 17

Your birth. Your health. Our commitment. Individualized, compassionate, holistic care from adolescence to senior years. Please call or visit us online: 919.933.3301 • www.ncbirthcenter.org

212 West Main Street • Carrboro, NC 27510 (919) 942-4048 • www.nccraftsgallery.com

Open 7 days a week! Find us on Facebook and Instagram

Best Place to Buy Locally Made Art in Orange/Chatham County

Massage • Acupucnture • Moxa • Gua Sha • Chinese Herbs Carrboro Community Bodywork 401B W Weaver St • Upstairs

Healing Happens To book your appointment please visit carrborocommunitybodywork.com Kim Calandra, L.Ac. | Amira Glaser, L.Ac. Austin Dixon, L.Ac. | Abby Papendieck, LMBT | Sheila Delhagan, LMBT

C O F F E E , T E A & B O TA N I C A L S

Where All Paths Meet Carr Mill Mall OasisCarrboro.com 200 N Greensboro St • (919) 904-7343 18 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 5.29.18

PIZZERIA MERCATO 408 WEST WEAVER STREET, 919-967-2277, PIZZERIAMERCATONC.COM

The term pizzeria is a bit of a misnomer. Yes, Mercato expertly chars Neapolitan-style pies using ingredients from the farmers market across the street. But it’s really an upscale restaurant, founded by chef Gabe Barker, who brings the same locavore spin on Italian tradition to pastas and salads, too. Forget takeout; sit down ounty for a nice date and drink sparkling Lambrusco and green decanters of water in an elegantly roughshod postindustrial room that’s noisy and lively but not overwhelming.

com

PROVENCE

203 WEST WEAVER STREET, 919-967-5008, PROVENCEOFCARRBORO.COM

If Carrboro is the Paris of the Piedmont (it’s not), then this is the Paris of the Paris of the Piedmont. Provence has been planted on Weaver Street since Charles de Gaulle was a child. There were probably still textile mills in Carrboro when it opened. Traditional in its presentation—read: kinda fancy—it still has that shaggy, patio-loving Carrboro vibe, and it brings a local, seasonal focus to French Mediterranean cuisine. If you want escargot, go.

RISE BISCUITS DONUTS

310 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-929-5115, RISEBISCUITSDONUTS.COM

Some of the Triangle’s favorite biscuits and donuts: not just for strip malls anymore.

SPOTTED DOG

111 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-933-1117, THESPOTTEDDOGRESTAURANT.COM

Spotted Dog isn’t the best restaurant in Carrboro. It’s not the trendiest, and it’s definitely not the newest. But it’s my favorite because of its wide-ranging menu—as friendly to veggies and vegans as carnivores—its unpretentious vibe and earnest dog décor, and its sheer consistency in the wedgeshaped island between Weaver Street Market and the Orange County Social Club. For me, many a night out begins here, with faux-chicken wings or a

sprout-laden veggie burger at the bar, or maybe a tempeh-laden salad and potato soup on the patio.

TANDEM

200 NORTH GREENSBORO STREET, #1A, 919-240-7937, TANDEMCARRBORO.COM

This relative newcomer has earned local acclaim for its elegant surf and turf entrées. Upscale but not snobbish, the restaurant’s globalist menu is full of surprises, from a bone marrow appetizer to mushroom risotto, Moroccan lamb shank to open-faced ravioli.

TOM ROBINSON’S SEAFOOD 207 ROBERSON STREET, 919-942-1221, TOMROBINSONSEAFOOD.COM

Located behind All Day Records, this shack is your pipeline to super-fresh N.C. seafood—salmon, shrimp, and mussels, along with less familiar croakers and mullets. Bring cash and be prepared to carry out your prize in a sheet of newspaper.

VENABLE ROTISSERIE BISTRO

200 NORTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-904-7160, VENABLEBISTRO.COM

Did you know that Carrboro was called Venable (after a UNC president) for a couple of years when it was first incorporated in 1911? Know you now. This “elevated casual” bistro combines classic Southern dishes with Asian and Latin influences and—wait for it— fresh, local ingredients, which you’ve noticed by now is a Carrboro must. The signature dish is a Cobb salad topped with roasted rotisserie chicken.

DRINK

B-SIDE LOUNGE

200 NORTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-904-7160, B-SIDELOUNGE.COM

After dinner at the Venable, head next door to this cozy wood-paneled lounge for warm vinyl on the stereo, solid wine on tap, adventurous cocktails, and tapas that are designed, like the space, to foster good times among friends.

BELLTREE

100 BREWER LANE, 984-234-0572, FACEBOOK.COM/BELLTREESPEAKEASY

Though it’s pretty new, Belltree wants you to feel like you’re somewhere old.

It’s styled as a Prohibition-era speakeasy, with period décor and a stealthy location behind a carwash. But it upgrades era-appropriate fare to modern craft-cocktail standards. Yes, there will be egg whites and activated charcoal.

BOWBARR

705 WEST ROSEMARY STREET, 919-967-9725, FACEBOOK.COM/BOWBARR

Call it Orange County Social Club 2.0. Like its predecessor, Bowbarr is your classic townie indie-rocker bar—a dim yet colorful, grungy but comfy barroom full of trucker caps and tattoo sleeves; a wee courtyard where smokers make their last stand; strong, affordable, no-nonsense cocktails; and PBR cans supporting a pyramid of choicer beers. A pre- or post-Cradle-show must, it’s also home to a vintage photo booth.

CARRBORO BEVERAGE COMPANY

102 EAST MAIN STREET, SUITE A, 919-942-3116, FACEBOOK.COM/CARRBOROBEVCO

Though humble in footprint, this crumbly brick building houses a towering assortment of beers, with a knowledgeable, friendly staff drawing numberless North Carolina brews, exotic imports, and interesting specialties. Taste from the taps and then grab a bottle to go.

GRAY SQUIRREL COFFEE COMPANY 360 EAST MAIN STREET, #100, GRAYSQUIRRELCOFFEE.COM

This artisan coffee roaster and espresso bar has a cleaner, more modernist vibe inside than Open Eye’s and Looking Glass’s mix-and-match living-room aesthetics. Focusing on precision and service more than volume, Gray Squirrel roasts small batches and serves a narrow menu. Take a half-pound of beans home or let expert baristas bring out the best in them for you.

LOOKING GLASS CAFE 601 WEST MAIN STREET, 919-967-9398, LOOKINGGLASSCAFE.US

Looking Glass started as the place you’d go if Open Eye was too crowded. As that became more and more often the case, Looking Glass built its

own dedicated first-choice base on the strength of its service and its more spacious outdoor seating.

OPEN EYE CAFE

101 SOUTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-968-9410, OPENEYECAFE.COM

Open Eye (disclosure: I worked there back in the day) is a lodestar of local cafe culture, for both its longevity and for its seriousness about coffee, with owners who judge barista competitions and fly around the world to meet suppliers. The staff, though casual in affect, is drilled in arcane espresso arts; whatever you order, you’ll get a fine traditional cup. It’s also huge and often packed—some people basically live there—so it’s a great place to meet and mingle, except at peak laptop hours, when it can look like a weirdly homey coding boot camp.

ORANGE COUNTY SOCIAL CLUB 108 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-933-0669, FACEBOOK.COM/OCSC.CARRBORO

I still have my original membership card to OCSC. It’s dated June 21, 2002. (Yikes! That’s a lot of drinking.) That’s the kind of devotion this eternal townie watering hole inspires. OCSC succors a mix of ancient fixtures and new-blood college students, with friendly bartenders shouting over Archers of Loaf on the jukebox, a pool table, a smoky back patio, and decades’ worth of local-music-scene sweat grimed into its creases. What more could you want?

THE STATION

201 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-918-3923, STATIONCARRBORO.COM

This watering hole and live-music venue in a historic train station draws an eclectic, low-key crowd with its eclectic, low-key local band bookings. Unpretentious and almost pitchblack inside, it’s a good place to chat intimately with the one you came with rather than look for someone else. The drinks are just fine, the craft beer selection is better, and classic ’cue awaits at the adjoining CrossTies restaurant. 5.29.18 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 19

MORE FROM OUR ADVERTISERS CARRBORO COMMUNITY BODYWORK

401-B W WEAVER STREET (UPSTAIRS) CARRBOROCOMMUNITYBODYWORK.COM Find healing at Carrboro Community Bodywork & Acupuncture. Holistic healthcare with Acupuncture, Massage, Moxibustion, Gua Sha, and Reiki. Talented practitioners with fifteen years plus experience, a serene environment that allows for total relaxation and easy to book appointments. Schedule online. Come get your Zen on!

IN DOWNTOWN CARRBORO COMMUNAL SPACES AVAILABLE

THE OASIS CARRBORO

VISIT PERCH-COWORKING.COM

FIFI’S

Designer Consignment Boutique

Fifi’s of Carrboro is open and now accepting SUMMER consignment 7 days a week Mon-Sat 10am-7pm Sun 1-5pm NO APPOINTMENT needed 370 East Main Street Suite 130 Carrboro (919) 240 -4946 1000 W. M ain St. Durham (919) 806-3434 2028 Cameron St. Raleigh (919)803-5414

INSIDE CARR MILL MALL, 200 N. GREENSBORO STREET SUITE A5 919-904-7343; OASISCARRBORO.COM Oasis serves organic French-press coffee & tea including a variety of 3 healing botanicals: CBD, Kava, & Kratom offering an alternative to addictive painkillers, alcohol & more. By night, Oasis is an environment for entertainment, connections & inspiration. We host films, live music, & presentations on life-affirming topics including holistic health, environmental issues, indigenous wisdom, sustainability, social justice, etc. Events are free! #OasisCarrboro #OasisAtCarrMillMall #OasisApothecary #OneLove #LiveAuthentically #6YearsStrong #OnlyInCarrboro #CarrMillMall #ShopSmall

PERCH

106 S GREENSBORO ST E PERCH-COWORKING.COM Perch is a boutique coworking space designed to inspire productivity and creativity. Yoga, mindfulness, community lunches, and coaching are just a few of our events. What to try us out? We offer a FREE half day trial visit at the communal table.

WEAVER STREET REALTY

116 E MAIN STREET 919-929-5658 WEAVERSTREETREALTY.COM Weaver Street Realty combines business with ecology and offers an alternative way of approaching real estate; integrity driven, inclusive, protective of land and community resources.

WOMEN’S BIRTH AND WELLNESS CENTER

Yoga Shala Carrboro SURPLUS SIDS international MILITARY SURPLUS costumes military antiques 309 E Main St Carrboro, NC 27510 20 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 5.29.18

Looking for your tribe? Dedicated expert practitioners teaching ANCIENT movement arts… COOPERATIVELY working together to SERVE… at Carrboro’s only teaching co-op: Yoga - QiGong - Aikido Very Beginner to Very Advanced Join us! Yoga Shala Carrboro Carrboro, NC • 919.704.5365 yogashalacarrboro.com

930 M.L.K. JR BLVD #202, CHAPEL HILL 919-933-3301 NCBIRTHCENTER.ORG Women’s Birth & Wellness Center is North Carolina’s longest-operating freestanding birth center, and an independent, private, non-profit practice supported by patient fees and the generosity of donors. We believe that every person has the right to a standard of excellence in their healthcare, to be treated with respect for human dignity and cultural preferences, and to be an active partner in their healthcare.

YOGA SHALA CARRBORO

309 W. WEAVER ST., SUITE 300 (2ND FLOOR) 919-704-5365 YOGASHALACARRBORO.COM The Yoga Shala Carrboro is the area’s only expert teaching cooperative offering ancient movement arts. A school where spiritually-driven students and service-oriented instructors connect, the Shala holds various styles of masterfully taught yoga from very beginner to very advanced, as well as basic QiGong and Aikido for kids. All welcome!

TO BE FEATURED IN A FUTURE DEEP DIVE, CONTACT YOUR REP OR ADVERTISING@INDYWEEK.COM

STEEL STRING BREWERY 106 SOUTH GREENSBORO STREET, SUITE A, 919-240-7215, STEELSTRINGBREWERY.COM

Named in homage to the region’s blues and bluegrass heritage, Steel String stands out in a crowded local beer scene. You know where what you’re drinking came from because the brewery is right there in the taproom, glassed in but enticingly near. It has a little patio if you don’t mind basically sitting in a parking lot. Goses, grisettes, and saisons, oh my.

VECINO BREWING CO.

300 EAST MAIN STREET, SUITE C, 919-537-9591, VECINOBREWING.COM

Rising from the ashes of YesterYears Brewery, this revamped spot serves craft beer, wine, and food. It favors heavy IPAs and hearty sandwiches, like the one with braised beef short rib and mac ‘n’ cheese on ciabatta.

SHOP

ALL DAY RECORDS

112 EAST MAIN STREET, SUITE A, 919-537-8322, ALLDAYRECORDS.COM

If you’re looking to buy or trade a deep slab of techno vinyl or a harsh noise cassette, this is the spot. (You can shop new vinyl, too.) The selection is curated by serious heads who also run nearby Nightlight, the experimental-music club in Chapel Hill. All Day is an electronic-and-noise-music haven in a lingeringly rock-besotted town. Essential.

CARRBORO FARMERS MARKET

301 WEST MAIN STREET, 919-280-3326, CARRBOROFARMERSMARKET.COM

It can be easy to forget that North Carolina is a farming state until you drive outside the Triangle—or just visit the Carrboro Farmers Market, which draws farmers from a fifty-mile radius to the town commons on Saturday mornings and Wednesday afternoons.

CARR MILL MALL

200 NORTH GREENSBORO STREET, 919-942-8669, CARRMILLMALL.COM

Inside a historic cotton mill with gleaming, restored but intact wooden floors,

Carr Mill Mall arranges local and family-owned boutique jewelers, clothing shops, a toy store, restaurants, and more in a sepia photograph of the mill town of yore. Guaranteed to make older kids say, “This is a mall?” and younger ones say, “What’s a mall?”

GLENN’S TATTOO SERVICE

705 WEST ROSEMARY STREET, SUITE A, 919-933-8288, GLENNSTATTOOSERVICE.COM

If you’re new in town and want to assimilate, you need a tattoo and/ or piercing. (If you’re older and want to blend, get something in colors that look faded, like you’ve had it since you were eighteen.) Head directly up the stairs on West Rosemary into Glenn’s, where an experienced, gruffly friendly staffer can tat or pierce you up with that ineffable local touch.

SURPLUS SID’S

309 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-942-7127, FACEBOOK.COM/SURPLUSSIDS

Part military surplus, part costume shop, part junk shop, part thrift store—you never know what you’ll find among the old furniture and uniforms and gas masks and whatever. Its long existence is inexplicable. The last time I went, I bought a broken suitcase. It’s like that.

WEAVER STREET MARKET 101 EAST WEAVER STREET, 919-929-0010, WEAVERSTREETMARKET.COOP

Basically “Whole Foods, but local,” Weaver Street is Carrboro’s co-op grocery store and food bar. Most of all, it’s a central community space. On its biggish downtown lawn, always crowded in nice weather, there’s music, there are dogs, children run wild, people demonstratively hula hoop and do tai chi. You’re probably reading this there.

WOMANCRAFT GIFTS 360 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-929-3300, WOMANCRAFTGIFTS.COM

Featuring goods from more than seventy artists, WomanCraft has something for everyone, whether it be patchwork and sewing or ceramics and jewelry, and the added benefit of supporting local female artists and artisans.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

PLAY

CAROLINA NORTH FOREST

302 N.C. HIGHWAY 54 WEST. 919-918-7364, TOWNOFCARRBORO. ORG/347/ANDERSON-COMMUNITY-PARK

Straddling Carrboro and Chapel Hill, Carolina North Forest offers 750 acres of woodlands, with ample off-road trails popular with hikers, runners, and cyclists. The Carrboro side has a dense trail network hemmed in by Bolin Creek.

ANDERSON COMMUNITY PARK

Among its fifty-five acres of leafy trails and spacious lawns, Carrboro’s largest municipal park also offers horseshoe pits, a fishing pond, picnic areas, a playground, and a leashfree zone for your canine friend, not to mention baseball, basketball, and tennis courts.

THE ARTSCENTER

300 EAST MAIN STREET, SUITE G, 919-929-2787, ARTSCENTERLIVE.ORG

Few venues can claim they’ve hosted local photographers’ prints, turntablist Kid Koala, and Tibetan Buddhist monks in the same building (albeit separately). But The ArtsCenter showcases all that and more. The calendar is loaded with camps and classes for kids and adults, but it’s also full of local and national performances, from Americana and jazz to theater and comedy.

122 MUNICIPAL DRIVE, CHAPEL HILL, 919-883-8930, CAROLINANORTHFOREST.UNC.EDU

CAT’S CRADLE 300 EAST MAIN STREET, 919-967-9053, CATSCRADLE.COM

The landmark nightclub, famous for hosting your favorite indie band before they blew up, is practically a prerequisite for lists like these. And, yes, it’ll always be that storied club where Nirvana and Public Enemy played back in the day. But with an expanded showroom and a great-sounding second venue in its Back Room, the Cradle is still a consistent home for the nationally renowned and local talent you’ll brag about seeing decades from now. 5.29.18 • SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION • 21

ind

DURHA ITS OW

deep dive EAT • DRINK • SHOP • PLAY

The INDY’s monthly neighborhood guide to all things Triangle

Coming June 26:

HILLSBOROUGH

For advertising opportunities, contact your ad rep or advertising@indyweek.com 22 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

Your Week. Every Wednesday.

sque settl slun Suliman, Jeddah’s tea. This their po American it’s also se whose fa There, as countries you’re off Conversa They Daallo La spiced bla Indian c pepper, ca warming even tho Suliman l “I reme want to d it over ic this is so Suliman t later, that Siegel Jeddah’s they’ve s tea blend countries the Amer Somalilan and in loc They pla mortar in they mee by May 31 $500 shor Jeddah Old Worl much abo the thoug be is anot “Café c and unwe

indyfood

The Tea of Life

DURHAM EMBRACED JEDDAH’S TEA. WITH THEIR NEW DOWNTOWN TEAROOM, ITS OWNERS WANT TO RETURN THE LOVE. BY LAYLA KHOURY-HANOLD

“What do we have to lose at this point?” and later in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where Siegel says. “That has to be eradicated and squeeze past a Moroccan ottoman and Siegel asked one day. “Let’s do what we she fled due to civil unrest. Jeddah’s Tea remind people, hey, it’s just a cup of coffee, settle onto a floor cushion at a lowwant to do.” is named for her—Jeddah means “grandit’s just a cup of tea. Most of the people slung table. Morgan Siegel and Wael They wanted to do tea. mother” in Arabic—and her face is on the in the world drink coffee and tea every Suliman, the wife-husband team behind Last year, they borrowed $250 from Sielogo. Siegel, who grew up in the Bay Area, day, and this isn’t something that will be Jeddah’s Tea, offer to make me a cup of gel’s mother to pay the vendor fee for Durrecalls her mother’s pantry brimming with reserved for the tech bro with a laptop.” tea. This isn’t surprising, as I’m visiting ham’s Juneteenth Celebration, their pop-up tearoom at the then scraped together every penny American Tobacco Campus, but to rent a truck, cooler, beverage it’s also second nature for Suliman, dispensers, and a tent. They didn’t whose family is from Somaliland. recoup their costs, but they met a There, as in other eastern African powerful advocate in city council countries, tea is the first thing member DeDreana Freeman, who you’re offered in someone’s home. suggested the city could be recepConversations begin over a cup. tive to their business. They suggest the signature Though they were living in Daallo Latte, a traditional Somali Southeast Raleigh, Siegel says, spiced black tea that calls to mind “Durham was more willing to pick Indian chai, redolent of black us up off the ground and say, ‘You pepper, cardamom, and ginger. The can do this.’” warming spices shine through, Freeman introduced them to even though the drink is iced. Downtown Durham Inc., which Suliman loves it that way, too. helped facilitate their first pop“I remember on a hot day, I didn’t up at The Pinhook in September. want to drink it hot, so I poured Since then, they’ve worked the it over ice. I remember thinking, pop-up circuit and promoted this is so good, I should sell this,” their wholesale business, landing Suliman tells me. “Seventeen years products at East Durham later, that’s exactly what I’m doing.” Bakeshop, People’s Coffee, and the Siegel and Suliman launched Durham Co-Op. Jeddah’s Tea last June. Since then, In December, they went all in they’ve sold iced tea and custom on Jeddah’s Tea. Suliman gave tea blends—highlighting tea from notice at both of his jobs, and the countries underrepresented in Wael Suliman and Morgan Siegel, the owners of Jeddah’s Tea, and their kids PHOTO BY ANNA CARSON DEWITT family moved to Durham. To turn the American tea market, such as the brick-and-mortar dream into a reality, tea from her travels. The couple even met In countries like Morocco, teahouses Somaliland, Senegal, and Egypt—at events Suliman’s mother co-signed the lease over a chance cup of chai in Berkley in 2014; serve as a hub where people from all walks and in local businesses around the Triangle. at 123 Market Street. And though they they got married a few months later. of life gather to discuss community issues. They plan to open their first brick-andhaven’t opened, Siegel geeks out discussing In 2015, seeking a better quality of life, It’s in this vein that the couple aspires to mortar in downtown Durham this July—if the educational workshops she’ll host, Suliman suggested moving to Raleigh, near create a place where people can “disconnect they meet their $20,000 Kickstarter goal exploring different countries’ cultures his mother in Wake Forest. At the time, to connect.” The aesthetic will fit the by May 31. (As of Tuesday, they were about and traditions, histories and struggles, all with two young children (including one bill; Jeddah’s will partner with Nomadic $500 short.) through tea. from Siegel’s previous relationship) and Trading Company to furnish the intimate Jeddah’s Tearoom will be modeled after “That doesn’t mean [the conversations unattainable daycare costs, Siegel stayed space with Moroccan poufs, Turkish rugs, Old World teahouses. As such, it will be as are] always super comfortable,” Siegel home while Suliman worked two fulland Eastern European antiques. much about creating an inclusive space as says. “But over a cup of tea, everyone is time jobs. Two years later, with Siegel now Tea is a meaningful part of Suliman’s and the thoughtfully crafted teas. What it won’t more relaxed, your body language is more juggling three kids and Suliman burning Siegel’s personal lives. Suliman’s maternal be is another co-working hub. relaxed, and everybody is level.” out—yet still living below the poverty line— grandmother owned a tea, spice, and incense “Café culture here tends to be exclusive food@indyweek.com the couple hit their breaking point. shop in Hargeisa, in northern Somaliland, and unwelcoming to many demographics,” INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 23

MAY

FR 31 FADE TO BLACK

(A TRIBUTE TO METALLICA) 7:30p JUNE

SA 6/1 • 7:30P

JOANNE SHAW TAYLOR

W/ THE BUZZARDS BAND

FR 7 JUSTIN WEST W/ PINE BOX SA 8 TH 13 FR 14 SA 15 SU 16 WE 19 TH 20 FR 21

DWELLERS / KAYLIN ROBERSON / TAN SANDERS AND THE DERELICTS 7p GTOPIA FEATURING: AJ MITCHELL, SASHA SLOAN, AUSTIN BROWN 7p TECH N9NE 6:30p THE BREAKFAST CLUB 8 PM NIGHTRAIN (GNR TRIBUTE) & THUNDERSTRUCK (AC/DC TRIBUTE) W/ THE FIFTH 7:30p NAILS W/ MISERY INDEX / DEVOURMENT / OUTER HEAVEN 6p THE RECORD COMPANY 7p SCRANTONICITY (A WORKPLACE COSTUME & DANCE PARTY) 6:30p THE STRANGER – BILLY JOEL TRIBUTE FEATURING MIKE SANTORO 7p LIQUID STRANGER 8p

FR 28 SA 29 “TRAP APOLLO”

PRESENTED BY BSE / NEMON MARCUS / TJ LEAK / BRINT CITY 9p

CO M I N G S O O N

7/5 THE CLARKS 7p 7/6 SECOND HELPING:

THE LYNYRD SKYNYRD SHOW 7:30p

7/10 THE NEW MASTERSOUNDS 7p 7/13 GRASS IS DEAD & SONGS FROM THE ROAD BAND 8p

7/16 CHARLEY CROCKETT 8p 7/18 LATE SHOW- UM AFTER PARTY. DOOM FLAMINGO 10:30p

7/19 GREENSKY BLUEGRASS

AT KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE 5:30p

7/19 INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE:

A SAUCERFUL OF PINK FLOYD W/ EYEBALL 7:30p

7/20 LONG BEACH DUB ALLSTARS

W/ AGGROLITES / MIKE PINTO 7:30p COSMIC CHARLIE 8p

8/2 8/3 BENNY “THE BUTCHER” 8/9

W/ ADAM BOMB/CAPRI/ CEEZ PESO & THE BUFFET BOYS 8p STEPHEN MARLEY W/ DJ SHACIA PÄYNE & CONSTANCE BUBBLE 9p MOTHER’S FINEST 7p 12TH PLANET 8p

8/10 8/17 8/21 BERES HAMMOND – NEVER ENDING

W/ HARMONY HOUSE SINGERS 7p

8/23 JIVE MOTHER MARY

W/ BROTHER HAWK / BIGGINS / SIXTEEN PENNY 7:30p METAL POLE MAYHEM 8p BRENT COBB AND THEM 7p BLACK UHURU 8p

8/31 9/15 9/20 9/28 DREW HOLCOMB & THE

NEIGHBORS W/ BIRDTALKER 6:30p

9/29 NOAH KAHAN 7p 10/4 JIMMY HERRING AND THE 5 OF 7 7:30p

10/5 PERPETUAL GROOVE 8p ADV. TICKETS @ LINCOLNTHEATRE.COM & SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS ALL SHOWS ALL AGES

126 E. Cabarrus St.• 919-821-4111 www.lincolntheatre.com 24 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

food

FOUNDATION ANNIVERSARY PARTY May 29, 6 p.m. 213 Fayetteville Street, Raleigh 919-896-6016 | foundationnc.com

10 Years, 15 Steps

THE RALEIGH BAR FOUNDATION CELEBRATES A DECADE WITH A BOOK ABOUT ITSELF BY MICHAEL VENUTOLO-MANTOVANI

ou’ll only notice the red glow on Fayetteville Street—the neon sign directing you down fifteen stairs that lead to a tight basement that used to be a crawlspace before a builder and an architect decided to realize their vision for what a cocktail bar could be. There, you’ll find an intimate and expertly designed establishment that, over the last decade, has become a bedrock of the downtown Raleigh drinking experience. In the spring of 2009, Raleigh-based builder Will Alphin and architect Vincent Whitehurst opened Foundation. They’d been working together on a renovation of 213 Fayetteville and became intrigued by the foundation work they encountered during the building’s excavation, which began in 2006. As they dug through the craggy rock, they wondered what could fill the space below the space they were tasked with renovating. The exposed brick and stone, as well as the wooden beams running across the ceiling, suggested one thing: a bar. Neither had a background in mixology, but they had an interest, and they saw a chance to bring a nascent scene to Raleigh—and to be at the forefront of DTR’s renaissance. From the outset, Alphin and Whitehurst decided that Foundation would focus on locally sourced cocktails and beers and wines native to North Carolina. Alphin’s logic: “You don’t go to McDonald’s if you are in Mexico. You want that authentic local thing that you can’t get anywhere else.” Ten years on, Foundation, which barely holds fifty people, has become a fixture on Fayetteville Street. To mark the anniversary, the owners compiled FOUNDATION: The First Ten Years, 2009–2019. Something of a coffee-table (or, perhaps, a bar-top) book, it celebrates what Foundation has meant to its owners, its staff, its barflies, and the city at large, and seeks to tell the bar’s story through the tales, legends, and whiskey-tinged memories of the people who know it best.

PHOTO BY KEITH ISAACS, FROM FOUNDATION: THE FIRST TEN YEARS, 2009–2019

Alphin describes the book as “a high school yearbook that meets an issue of [celebrity chef David Chang’s food and literary magazine] Lucky Peach.” With contributions from several Raleigh staples, FOUNDATION paints a picture of a bar that is more clubhouse than company, more refuge than rathskeller. “From falling in love to grieving a loss, Foundation has always been a friend and canvas for life’s sacred moments,” writes Brewery Bhavana co-owner Vansana Nolintha. “I’m a better person for those fifteen steps to Foundation,” writes Fullsteam founder Sean Lilly Wilson. Tales of a twice-broken heart by an anonymous contributor, brief musings on the bar’s role in blossoming love affairs with bourbon, and simple stories of endless subterranean nights litter FOUNDATION’s pages, along with a

collection of the poems the bar began including in its menus in 2013 and a smattering of essays by local writers. Beyond the memories, FOUNDATION includes recipes of popular drinks and a cheeky rundown of the bar’s drink options, listed alphabetically. It’s also packed with both professionally shot photos and pictures snapped on phones by imbibers, artwork created by the bar’s staff and regulars, and hand-drawn cocktail-napkin doodles. If anything becomes evident over the book’s pages, it’s how bars often become so much more than a place to get a drink, how they become part of the very fabric of not only the cities in which they exist, but of the people who call those cities home. More than an homage, FOUNDATION is a reminder that our favorite places—those willing to accept us at our best and our worst—are always there waiting for us. food@indyweek.com

indymusic

SOLAR HALOS

Saturday, June 1, 9 p.m, $10 Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro www.catscradle.com

Solar Return

ON ITS LONG-AWAITED SECOND ALBUM, A PEDIGREED HEAVY ROCK TRIO KNOWS THAT NATURE IS METAL AS FUCK BY BRYAN C. REED

ature is metal, as many popular internet memes suggest. But nature’s brutal, titanic forces aren’t exclusive to predators hunting prey or fighting for territory; most of them are invisible to cameras. “I’m always fascinated with geography,” says Nora Rogers, singer and guitarist of the Chapel Hill-based heavy rock trio Solar Halos. Her lyrics are strung with images inspired by nature’s most awesome and devastating forces: Tectonic plates tear continents apart, floods devastate lowlands, mountains rise in the ocean’s depths. “I love the way the ocean seems calm, but there’s this awesome, really raw stuff going on underneath,” Rogers says. Natural phenomena have inspired the band, named after the interaction between sunlight and ice crystals suspended in the atmosphere, since it formed seven years ago. Rogers—a veteran of local acts Curtains of Night, Horseback, and Object Hours—is joined by bassist and singer Eddie Sanchez (Fin Fang Foom, Bellafea, The Love Language) and drummer John Crouch (Caltrop, Horseback). A collection of demo recordings presaged Solar Halos’ self-titled 2014 debut and introduced the band’s patient, nuanced approach to heavy rock, mixing elements of doom metal, heavy psych, and post-rock. However promising Solar Halos was, Coiled Light, the follow-up the band released in April, exceeds expectations. An assured, controlled album, Coiled Light moves with seismic force, with the band managing restraint, even as dynamic riffs gather into massive swells. Opening track “The Living Tide” embodies this sensibility. Rogers and Sanchez pull resonant chords into taut phrases while Crouch lunges against the decay. Rogers sings of “The push, the pull / The gain, the loss,” describing tidal forces and, in a way, the band’s own approach to songwriting. JJ Koczan, who premiered “The Living Tide” on the doom-centric blog The Obelisk,

zeroed in on the seeming contradictions in Solar Halos’ swirling bombast. “You know, usually when you think of something landing like a brick, it’s not a positive image,” he wrote on his blog. “Like the thing—whatever it is—should be flying. Well, Solar Halos land like a brick even as they fly. It’s a dual-persona that’s writ large all over their upcoming second full-length, Coiled Light.” That dual persona is practically embedded in the process. “There is this sense that even though we’re in control of what we’re doing, there might not always be an end goal,” Rogers says. “That’s what makes it exciting, and you’re almost letting the song dictate what it needs.” Writing for the album stretched over three years before the band recorded it in 2017 with Kris Hillbert at Legitimate Business in Greensboro; the intervening time has been spent working to find a label. (The Danish imprint Cursed Tongue ended up answering the call.) Even with a disciplined rehearsal schedule, songwriting for Solar Halos is a detail-oriented process. “We write collaboratively, and we tend to jam on something [until] two or three parts come together really seamlessly and easily, so we start feeling this false sense of, like, ‘Yeah, this’ll be done soon,’” Rogers says. “And then it takes months before we finish because we’ll hash out every possible idea any one of us suggests. It takes a lot of tinkering.” That tinkering, through months of jam sessions, scratch recordings, feedback, and trial and error, leads to a deliberate sensibility. “When we were recording with Kris [Hillbert], after we had tracked a few songs, he was like, ‘This is a lot more proggy than I remember,’” Crouch laughs. “I’m not sure if that was really a conscious thing or not, but it’s certainly a matter of jamming on a part and trying to push it in different directions.” It’s that restlessness and constant challenging of parameters that makes Solar Halos so hard to pin down. Instead of

John Crouch, Nora Rogers, and Eddie Sanchez are Solar Halos. PHOTO BY LINDSAY METIVIER working against templates of influences or genres, Rogers says of the writing process, “You need to establish the frame of mind and the contrasts of spaciousness and patience and hecticness.” Lyrics emerge in the same way. “We always write the music first, and then I’ll listen for what images the song evokes and write the lyrics around that,” Rogers says. “Or I’ll see a striking photograph or piece of art and kind of hold that in my mind.” “Personal Levee,” another standout on Coiled Light, was inspired by a National Geographic image of flooding in Louisiana. Some homes had built levees around their property, effectively protecting the residents from the worst of the floodwaters. “You create this bubble to hide yourself, but looking at the image, I was imagining it apocalyptically,” Rogers says. “I imagined, ‘What if you build this stuff to protect yourself, to save yourself, and then the water recedes and you have indeed saved yourself and your family, but everything else around you is decimated, and you’re alone?’”

Intentionally evocative and ambiguous, Solar Halos’ lyrics match the pacing of the music, setting a mood more meditative than declarative. Without an obvious narrative or blunt didacticism, even potentially political songs such as “Personal Levee” raise more questions than they answer and leave much to the listener to interpret. “This batch of songs was written over the course of maybe three years, and that was during some significantly changing times,” Crouch says. “Sonically, and even with the lyrics, I get the impression of these powerful forces and things that are happening out beyond our reach. It can be a frustrating or liberating thing.” It’s in those dualities—frustration and liberation, salvation and isolation, darkness and light—that Solar Halos dwells. The titanic forces at work within their songs aren’t as obviously brutal as the images of bodily violence that tend to run rampant in heavy music. But these forces, like the songs themselves, are all the more powerful for their mysteries. music@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 25

music

Black and Proud and Glorious?

DISCOVER DURHAM HIRED J. GUNN TO MAKE AN ANTHEM FOR THE CITY, AND HE DID. BUT YOU WON'T BE HEARING COMMUNITY CHOIRS SINGING HIS VERSION THIS SUMMER. BY CHRIS HEAVENER

arlier this year, Discover Durham, the publicly funded tourism-development authority that’s coproducing the city’s sesquicentennial celebration with the Museum of Durham History, hired local hip-hop artist J. Gunn to assemble a group of musicians and create a Durham 150 song. But Discover Durham ultimately declined to release the track unless Gunn made changes to the song’s hip-hop format and a lyric about the city being “black and proud.” According to Discover Durham, the idea originated when Durham Mayor Steve Schewel saw a video of twelve thousand people singing “Al Kol Eleh (For All These Things)” in a stadium in Tel Aviv. The song is a rumination on taking the good with the bad, thanking God “for all these things, for the honey and for the sting,” and was being used to celebrate Israel’s seventieth anniversary. Schewel urged Discover Durham to commission something similar for Durham’s 150th birthday—an anthem to represent all Durhamites and uplift the city’s history. Meanwhile, J. Gunn was having a moment. A year earlier, he’d had a blistering feature on G Yamazawa’s “North Cack,” which garnered more than a million views on YouTube and became the de facto North Carolina hiphop anthem. In January, as Discover Durham considered artists for the song, Gunn met with CEO Shelly Green and CMO Susan Amey, who showed him the “Al Kol Eleh” video and explained their vision. “I thought it was a great idea,” Gunn told the INDY. “But my response was, ‘Yeah, we should do it, but we can’t try to mimic this Israel anthem. We can’t make it a jingle. It needs to be soulful, it needs to be real, it needs to be for Durham, by Durham.’” Discover Durham asked for a song that would incorporate Durham-based artists from multiple genres to create a “timeless” piece of music that reflected the city’s values and was easy to sing along with—a Bull City “We are the World.” There were no stipulations about lyrical content, though Discover 26 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

J. Gunn FILE PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN Durham reserved the right to make minor changes to the song. Gunn gathered a roster of ringers from different walks of life and musical genres—Phil Cook, Mavis Swan Poole, and LoverBoy Vo—and got to work. Poole recalls the in-studio process as nothing short of spiritual, likening it to the African-American church experience. She says she called friends and family and told them, “‘I’ve never experienced this, this is crazy.’ It was one of those things where, when I left, it didn’t leave me. For a few weeks, it played in my head, it played in my heart.” They finished the bulk of the track in a few nights, and they all felt it included a wide range of perspectives about what it means to live in Durham in an era of drastic change and possibility. They called the song “I Choose Durham.” Gunn was so excited that he sent the track to Green in the middle of the night. The next day, she wrote back, saying she liked it but had some feedback. At a subsequent meeting, she said she felt like the hip-hop focus precluded the song from reaching a broad range of people.

“I wanted something that could be sung and performed by all walks of life in Durham,” Green says. “And I’m not sure rap fits that category. I’m coming at this from embracing as many people in Durham as we can. Multi-genre, multi-age. A jazz song or a country song or any song that was one specific genre would have been just as problematic as hip-hop.” Gunn said he’d consider it, but ultimately, he told Green he didn’t see how it being rap affected sing-ability. Green replied that it wasn’t just the genre, but a certain lyric that didn’t feel inclusive to her. In the opening verse, Gunn rhymes: “Beautiful Durham, black and proud and glorious / Gritty and grime, still we shine so notorious.” Green asked Gunn to change the lyric “black and proud,” which, at first, he refused to do. “I want to be as inclusive as possible,” Green says. “Let’s talk about all Durham people, so everyone can participate in this song. ‘Black and proud’ without mention of any other ethnic groups was too limiting. The phrase could have stayed in if there

were mentions of other groups of people in Durham elsewhere in the song.” For his part, Gunn saw the lyric as a crucial facet of Durham, not something exclusive. “When I say ‘black and proud and glorious,’ it’s not as much about me as a person or the black community, it’s about one of the most unique things about Durham, our rich black history,” Gunn says. “Durham’s a town that would explicitly say that and wouldn’t beat around the bush and give you this rainbow narrative.” Though Green says she thought she made the proposal clear from the start, she got even more specific in early May, after Gunn added some choral music that she didn’t think mitigated the issue of the song being too complicated for amateur performers. Discover Durham wanted a song with eight to sixteen bars that church and school groups could memorize in an afternoon. In the interest of getting his team paid the remaining balance on the job, Gunn capitulated and recorded a new version, with the majority of his rhymes omitted, including the lyrics “black and proud and glorious,” and an extended singalong verse added. This is likely the version that Discover Durham will release to be performed by pop-up choirs this summer, culminating in a performance at DPAC in November. Green says that Discover Durham owns the rights to the song but plans to put it in the public domain as soon as it’s unveiled, and that Gunn will then be free to release his version as well. “My main issue is, it’s not that they don’t like the song,” Gunn says. “To me, that’s a much more productive conversation. But if you’re saying you love it, it makes you feel good, but you’re concerned white people may be offended by a line that says ‘black’ in it, I have an issue with that. Who is this song really for? Is it for you? For these three people in this office? And the Mayor? Or is it for Durhamites?” music@indyweek.com

indystage

SITES: A FINALE

Saturday, Jun. 1, 8–10 p.m. $20 suggested donation PS37, Durham www.sitesinthecity.com

Sites to

Behold

STEPHANIE LEATHERS’S PERFORMANCE SERIES IS ENDING, BUT IT LEFT AN INDELIBLE MARK ON A DEVELOPING CITY BY BRIAN HOWE

Stephanie Leathers PHOTO BY KIM GRAY

ecause life is such a first-person experience, I’d have guessed that when the long-running SITES series finally ended, my strongest memories of it would be performing in it, as I did for four hours over two nights at Gibson Girl Vintage in March. But now that the time has come, as founder and organizer Stephanie Leathers prepares for the final SITES show this weekend, I find that what I remember most are two performances she was involved in. One was in the fall of 2017, when Leathers, a dancer and choreographer, spent four hours exploring Arcana with a clump of rope, having spontaneous interactions with unsuspecting patrons, as Tom Rau performed an ambient soundscape. The other was a year before, when Leathers and three other dancers gave an unauthorized, improvised performance around and upon the fences and barricades of the One City Center construction site. For a series aiming to draw attention to Durham development by placing experimental performances in public spaces, it was something akin to a visual mission statement. Each new version of Durham risks overwriting the old, but those performances froze the city as it was at those moments in my mind. These aren’t just my favorite SITES

moments—they’re some of my most memorable Durham moments, when I felt I saw and understood something about the city. After more than seven years (the series, formerly called Sunday SITES, developed gradually enough that it’s hard to pin a start date), SITES found itself in a city transformed, in which it had activated most of the spaces it could. Leathers is retiring the series after this weekend’s finale at PS37 on Foster Street, where she’ll perform a two-hour endurance work with music by Rau and projections by Krista Anne Nordgren. In addition to furnishing me with so many piercing Durham memories, the SITES show I did with my electro-poetry band, Streak of Tigers—our first performance in our current incarnation—was a catalyst, giving us something specific and unique to work toward and a respected platform through which we were offered other shows by attendees. That’s my personal testament to what SITES did for Durham, one that many artists who participated have their own version of. To send off the series, we collected a couple more stories and asked Leathers to reflect in an exit interview. SITES may be over, but we trust we’ll see its afterimage for years, both in the spaces it indelibly touched and the possibilities it opened for the next wave of artists.

INDY: Why was it time to wrap up SITES? STEPHANIE LEATHERS: It had run its course. Durham is in a place now where it feels like time to take a breather and acknowledge all the expansion that has happened. SITES has been in the places it needed to inhabit. We spent time there, drew awareness. It’s time to look back and see what SITES has done and acknowledge the people who’ve been involved. Organizing something like this is hard and time-consuming and often thankless, and you’ve been doing it for years. I wonder more what kept you going than why you’re stopping. It’s being in awe of all the artists in Durham, visual artists, music makers, dancers, choreographers, poets. I’ve always wanted to bring these people together in the same space at the same time, in spaces that are unfamiliar, drawing attention to those unseen spaces. That’s motivated me, seeing varied artists in different spaces and sharing that with the community. SITES was always attuned to development without making any claim that it could stop it. Instead, it was about not letting our attention slip away from it. Do you feel it did that? Yes, everything is just going to keep on going in terms of development in Durham, but SITES has left a mark in certain places that are high-rise buildings or condos now. When I went to the artists and asked them to be a part of it, they had specific things they wanted to focus on and spaces they wanted to inhabit, and they’ve done that, and I’ve done what I wanted to do. Even if those spaces don’t have art in them now, surely SITES played a role in conditioning artists, audiences, presenters, and

MEMORIES OF SITES “What struck us the most was the unbelievable support we felt from Stephanie. She chose us because she wanted to get us out to be seen by more people. That was really flattering. By finding atypical performance spaces, she challenged us to engage with space and audience in unique ways and discover what would happen. We performed under the stairs at the Accordion Club and were lit by flashlights, and we performed at the Visitors Bureau in a long corridor where others walked through. We also performed in front of the Central Park School in their sound garden. Jude changed the soundprocessing aspect of her soundscapes according to the sites. Jody explored constricting spaces, emotions, and movements at the Visitors Bureau and exactly the opposite in the sound garden, dancing with the breeze, leaves, and water. At the Accordion Club, she danced with her own shadow, which was not previously planned. Stephanie’s documentation with her photographs and films demonstrated how much she honored each performer. They were rivetingly unique.” —Jody Cassell and Jude Casseday, SITES performers “I've been a frequent SITES collaborator, often creating a bed of sound or music that Stephanie or other dancers can interact with (and vice versa). On a personal level, SITES performances highlight two things in art that I cherish: freedom and exploration. I'll never forget the moment when we were performing in Arcana when someone in the audience just stood up spontaneously and started mimicking Stephanie's movements. For about ten minutes, they moved in lockstep around Arcana, at one point even sharing the weight of a chair that they dragged behind them with rope. It was a beautiful spontaneous moment; it felt like the world was glowing. When I am performing with SITES I always feel like I am live-scoring this amazing story. And that, like Durham and its development, I don't really know what is going to happen next, but that something beautiful and amazing will happen if we are able to have the right conversations, both as a city and as artists while we are performing.” —Tom Rau, SITES performer

business owners to see experimental performance in unusual public spaces. Other people are doing that work, too, but SITES has been such a consistent presence. Yeah, totally. I feel like artists have been reaching outside of the boundaries of the proscenium environment and experimenting in public spaces. Not that SITES started INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 27

that, but I think it was an influence, and it’s going to be really awesome to see how the community expands that in the future. In terms of what you thought SITES could ideally be, are there shows that stand out? Oh, gosh. Every single one of them. Anna Barker gives me chills when I watch her dance, and she performed in the pool at the skatepark. The energy and time and effort and the way she engaged with the space, you could feel it vibrating. It was very touching, because the landscape around her is the condos being built on Foster Street, towering above her, and she’s moving in this intricate space. She’s struggling at times. A lot of people came [intentionally] to see that, but it was also like, “Yeah, this is what SITES is about,” because people were stopping who had no idea what it was, and there were skaters in the park asking questions. It brought the community together for a short period of time, and they were able to witness something beautiful. It existed, but it’ll never happen again, and I will always think of that performance when I walk by the skatepark. And hopefully, the people who witnessed it remember it the same way, as a part of Durham’s history that was artistic and positive. And there was a performance at Golden Belt by Ashlee Ramsey that I really wish everyone could have seen, because she used every inch of that building, and it’s no longer there. It’s a brewery now. That was such a special piece of Durham, because there were dance performances there before— more a proscenium environment, but a place where people would present work. To see it being torn down and setting the stage for the development about to happen there, and to see Ashlee using every inch of the space, took my breath away. For a couple of hours, she did it alone, with one other person there. The two I remember most vividly were ones you were in. There was the one at Arcana with Tom Rau, where you had these interesting social interactions, and one in the construction around One City Center, where you were climbing the fence. Those respectively drew attention to the social and physical landscape of the city. Right, there’s also a way in which SITES was about breaking the rules a little bit. But also, it was about members of the business community allowing us to use their space for free. The Fishmonger’s building, I was able to use that thanks to Matt, who said, “Here’s the key, take it away.” It’s like, people in Durham do that kind of thing. bhowe@indyweek.com 28 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

stage

THE COMMONS

Thursday, May 30–Saturday, June 1, $5 CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio, Chapel Hill www.carolinaperformingarts.org

Common Cause

THE COMMONS IS A NEW KIND OF ARTS FESTIVAL AND A NEW KIND OF CRITICISM FOR A NEW WORLD BY BRIAN HOWE

he INDY takes pride in holding the line for deep, serious arts criticism in a fast, click-driven world that threatens to make it an endangered species. But criticism is changing—for the better— as the cultural hegemony it was built upon erodes. As a range of previously neglected or suppressed artistic and critical voices enter the fray, the age of dispassionate authority is waning, and the age of invested perspective is dawning. As a progressive paper, our job is to advance by careful but persistent degrees, to update and refine journalistic standards without hastily abandoning them. But if we could leap ahead to where we see criticism going, rather than pushing just ahead of its curve, what might it look like? Enter The Commons Crit, a collaboration between the INDY and The Commons at Carolina Performing Arts, a new residency program and festival created by CPA postdoctoral fellow Alexandra Ripp. Trained as a critic and dramaturg, Ripp is also the primary editor on Commons Crit writing. The Commons offers residencies and performances for three local performing artists or groups—Eb. Brown, Daniel Coleman, and Joie Lou Shakur; Justin Tornow; and Megan Yankee—that were selected by a review panel of local artists, scholars, and curators, both institutional and independent. The residency portion (May 7–29) provides the performing artists with free studio space at CPA’s CURRENT ArtSpace + Studio; work-in-progress feedback sessions with one another, CPA staff, and invited guests; and written responses by embedded writers, which are being published in a special section on the INDY’s website throughout the entire process. It all culminates in the Commons Festival at CURRENT this Thursday through Saturday, which features full public showings of the work developed in the residency—Yankee on Thursday evening, Tornow on Friday, and Eb. Brown and company on Saturday, with each showing costing $5—alongside

public workshops and events designed to foster dialogue about performance and criticism in the region. After the festival, each embedded writer will moderate a post-show discussion with the audience, and a second writer, who has not been embedded in the process, will also write a response to each performance in order to provide a critical counterpoint.

“If we could leap ahead to where we see criticism going, rather than pushing just ahead of its curve, what might it look like? Enter The Commons Crit.” The 2019 Commons Crit writers are Victoria Bouloubasis, Michaela Dwyer, Stephanie Elizondo Griest, Don Holmes, Danielle Purifoy, and Chris Vitiello. The Commons Crit doesn't just aim to treat criticism as an art form. It also tests several hypotheses about criticism: It should not always be beholden to a coverage model;

critics should have the space and freedom to experiment; critics and artists are allies, not adversaries; process deserves as much attention as product; and subjects have valid ideas about who can authentically understand, respond to, and represent their work as they conceive it. Underlying all these premises is the belief that art and criticism symbiotically serve the public interest and have value deeper than entertainment and commerce. Traditionally, the work of art happens in private, and then a critic sweeps in at the end to pass judgment. Traditionally, critics are expected to write in certain models, for certain ends, and are selected primarily for their expertise rather their cultural perspective. But what would happen if the critics were chosen with input from artists about whom they were trying to reach? What if the critics were along for the whole ride, focusing on the gestalt of labor and experience, not just the commercial and aesthetic merits of a finished product? What if they had equal investment in the creation and “success” of the piece? What would that do for artists, audiences, readers, and critics? The Commons Crit, partitioned off from our regular criticism, is an attempt to find out, and we’re very pleased with the results so far. Look for the critical writing on our site now through the week after the festival, and make sure you see at least one of The Commons performances to get a full perspective on this radical experiment in art making and documentation for the new world just coming into view. bhowe@indyweek.com A note on ethics: The INDY had no role in selecting in the artists included in The Commons, though it did help to select the writers and conceptualize the critical-writing side of the project. The writers are being paid for their work via CPA. Neither the INDY nor arts editor Brian Howe received compensation of any kind for the collaboration, which does not influence our regular coverage decisions regarding CPA.

stage

Little White Lies

A COMPLEX STUDY OF CULTURAL APPROPRIATION WITH DIRECT RELEVANCE TO THE TRIANGLE BY BYRON WOODS

hite could so easily have been a one-sided satire of relatively easy prey: a white male who behaves badly when his art is excluded from a major exhibition. But in the sharp-toothed production closing Bulldog Ensemble Theater’s notable first season, North Carolina native James Ijames’s 2018 drama ventures beyond the facile bashing of a strawman. By its chilly ending, with a final twist that seems lifted from Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone reboot, a play initially framed as a sitcom becomes a merciless interrogation of privilege, power dynamics, and racial exploitation in the curatorial relationships that structure high art in the United States. At the outset, Gus (Jordan Clifton), a young gay painter with a penchant for minimalist white works on canvas, learns that he isn’t eligible for a major museum exhibition because it won’t include any work by white men, who already make up most of the museum’s holdings. When its curator, his old friend Jane (an over-the-top A.C. Donohue), bluntly tells him, “If you were black and female … it would be perfect,” Gus takes the unintended hint to an extreme: He hires an African-American actor, Vanessa (Monèt Noelle Marshall), to develop and perform a fictitious artistic persona. Then, he submits his work under her name. But what begins as an obvious takedown of a “reverse racism” protest takes on deeper, multiple dimensions. Ijames and director JaMeeka Holloway-Burrell probe the long-term elements and consequences of gay cultural appropriation—or “racial tourism,” as Vanessa calls it—of AfricanAmerican folkways: “It’s like, ‘Let me play double-dutch with the black girls on the playground ‘cause they make me feel all empowered and fierce … but without the burden of actually being a black girl.’” But despite their differences (and Gus’s clear cluelessness), the pair crafts a mercurial character named Balkonaé, who quickly takes on a life of her own,

Burritos-Tacos-Nachos-Housemade Salsa-Margaritas! 711 W Rosemary St • Carrboro • carrburritos.com • 919.933.8226 DOWNTOWN CARY

ad Monèt Noelle Marshall PHOTO BY ALEX MANESS threatening to overwhelm them both even before her supposed artwork is accepted. The Triangle has also struggled with the issues Ijames raises in his work. Marshall’s authoritative performances as Vanessa and Balkonaé echo the pointed questions she has posed over the past year about how African-American artists and their work are valued, in her incisive “Buy It/Call It” performance trilogy. But when Jane plans to permanently acquire all that Gus and Vanessa have created, White also brings into question the distance between a culture’s curators, its jailers, and the impresarios who once placed the likes of Sara Baartman on display for paying audiences. Step right up? arts@indyweek.com

Wine. Cider. Drafts. To advertise or feature Beer. a pet adoption, 120 E.for Chatham Street please contact advertising@indyweek.com

Neighborhood Restaurant + Bar 160 East Cedar Street

WHITE

 | Through Jun. 9

Various times, $10–$20 The Fruit, Durham www.bulldogdurham.org

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 29

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK 5.29–6.5

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5

FLORENCE AND THE MACHINE

“Ecstacy is all you need, living in the big machine,” sang John Rzeznik of Goo Goo Dolls (which, as it happens, is coming to Walnut Creek in July). British arena-indie standard-bearer Florence and the Machine has never been the sort of triple-A band to convincingly sell bliss via its expensive, center-lane James Bond theme music, but even the edgiest potshot could never dismiss vocalist Florence Welch’s raw spark. Whether she’s singing about eating disorders or tragic breakups, she belts out every confession with the volatile force of a 737 engine. On last year’s High as Hope, the band swapped out its rotating carousel of triple-A producers for Lana Del Rey producer Emile Haynie and a who’s-who assembly of guest spots, including Sampha, Jamie XX, and Kamasi Washington. As always, the Machine’s reserved baroquepop stylings may frustrate those who like their rock stars belligerent, but the sheer talent shines. With Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats. —David Ford Smith WALNUT CREEK AMPHITHEATRE, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m., $35+, walnutcreekamphitheatre.com

Florence and the Machine

PHOTO COURTESY OF REPUBLIC RECORDS

THROUGH SUNDAY, JUNE 16

PIPPIN

The year is 1972, and the idealism and optimism of the sixties has faded; racism persists, the never-declared Vietnam War slogs on, and Hunter S. Thompson is chronicling the cynicism of a presidential campaign that will immortalize the word “Watergate” in his book Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. Meanwhile, on Broadway, director Bob Fosse, composer Stephen Schwartz, and playwright Roger O. Hirson debut a dark, satirical musical in which a guileless medieval everyman—the favored son of Charlemagne—seeks fulfillment and authenticity on a walkabout through the worlds of military conflict, politics, hedonism, religion, and art, as many were doing in the culture of the time. Raleigh Little Theater artistic director Patrick Torres directs a mix of veterans and newcomers, including Jesse Farmer, Deanna Richards, Douglas Kapp, and Rebecca Johnston, in a coming-of-age tale that fuses introspection with commedia dell’arte and vaudeville to interrogate the artifice of theater, too. —Byron Woods RALEIGH LITTLE THEATRE, RALEIGH | 8 p.m. Thu.–Sat./3 p.m. Sun., $15–$28, www.raleighlittletheatre.org

30 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

FRIDAY, MAY 31

HOOTIE & THE BLOWFISH

Returning to full-time touring after a decade-long hiatus that coincided with Darius Rucker’s successful pursuit of a solo country career, Hootie & the Blowfish is simultaneously celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of its breakthrough and teasing its first studio album since 2005, due later this year. Despite Cracked Rear View’s pervasive pop-rock appeal, the band was often maligned by critics and hipsters, even as it continued to consistently churn out jangly, melodic tunes with sturdy hooks and honest, heartfelt writing. Hell, Rucker was bold enough to call out the Confederate flag that flew over the South Carolina State House—along with the trite “heritage not hate” excuse—on the first verse of “Drowning,” a single from Hootie’s 1994 debut. Meanwhile, opening act Barenaked Ladies still rolls out a greatest-hits collection in concerts, despite the 2009 departure of co-leader Steven Page, who sang lead on many of their early hits, and regular releases of new material since. —Spencer Griffith WALNUT CREEK AMPHITHEATRE, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m., $86+, www.walnutcreekamphitheatre.com

RECYCLE THIS PAPER Hootie & The Blowfish PHOTO

SATURDAY, JUNE 15

COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

SATURDAY, JUNE 1

BEAVER QUEEN PAGEANT

Fur-Eddie Mercury. Fur Pelton John. Saturday Night Beaver. Just when you think the punishment can’t possibly get any worse, Durham’s Beaver Lodge Local 1504 digs a little deeper— or lower—in time for it annual fundraiser for the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. Imagine an Animal Planet version of RuPaul’s Drag Race, in which contestants with groaninducing names (like this year’s Beavel Knievel and Genie Tailyah) do skits in outlandish beaver-based costumes to be judged on talent, evening wear, and a nearly intangible quality known as “wetland.” It’s a silly, ludicrous send-up of beauty pageants—and an enterprise that has raised over $150,000 to date for the ECWA. Bring lawn chairs and money for the food trucks (and to bribe the judges, who’ll give the crown to the contestant who generates the most votes in cash). Then brace for this year’s mid-show musical extravaganza: a tribute to founding father (and Broadway baby) Alexander Damilton and his frenemy and assassin, Hair-n Furr. Get it? —Byron Woods

N O O N — 4 P M

GLE BEST of the TRIAN

H S A B 2019

FREE

AND

OPEN

THE

PUBLIC

HOSTED BY

AT KIDS ZONE PRESENTED BY

DUKE PARK, DURHAM 4–7 p.m., free, www.beaverqueen.swell.gives

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

THE COMMONS AT CURRENT (P. 28), DIALI CISSOKHO & KAIRA BA AT HAW RIVER BALLROOM (P. 32), SAM MAZANY AT GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB (P. 39), PARADISO READING SERIES AT NIGHTLIGHT (P. 38), RUN OF THE PICTURE AT RUNOLOGIE (P. 40), SEEK RALEIGH AT DIX PARK (P. 37), SOLAR HALOS AT CAT’S CRADLE (P. 25), SITES AT PS37 (P. 27), WHITE AT THE FRUIT (P. 29)

MUSIC

VENDORS

BEER

PRODUCTION SERVICES PROVIDED BY SONIC PIE PRODUCTIONS

INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 31

music SUNDAY, JUNE 2

DIALI CISSOKHO & KAIRA BA For the past decade, kora player and singer Diali Cissokho has called North Carolina home. Hailing from a long line of Senegalese musicians and storytellers known as griots, Cissokho made the transatlantic move to Pittsboro with his wife almost ten years ago. Shortly afterward, he formed the band Kaira Ba with the aid of native Piedmont musicians John Westmoreland, Jonathan Henderson, Austin McCall, and Will Ridenour. Together, they blend the traditions and rhythms of West African music with subtle timbres of the American South. While comparison has been drawn to other notable Senegalese griots, such as Baaba Maal or Youssou N’Dour, the fusion of polyrhythmic percussion, plucky electric guitars, and sprinkles of pedal steel and electric organs makes for a much more individualistic, accessible sound. In essence, Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba makes dance music that bridges the continental divide. Jonathan Scales Fourchestra opens for the quintet. —Sam Haw

HAW RIVER BALLROOM, SAXAPAHAW | 8 p.m., $15, www.hawriverballroom.com

Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

WED, MAY 29

NIGHTLIGHT: Cliff Hale & The Grand Ole Ospreys; 7 p.m.

THE CAVE: The Figgs; $5 suggested. 9 p.m.

THE CAVE: Stem Cells, Dad’s Day Off; $5 suggested. 9 p.m.

POUR HOUSE: Solar Bear, Chris Larkin, Augurs; $6-$8. 9 p.m.

GIBSON GIRL VINTAGE: The Happening; free. 6 p.m.

KINGS: Charlie Parr & Phil Cook; $20. 8 p.m.

SLIM’S: Pullover, Sportsmanship, The Dead Bedrooms; $5. 9 p.m.

KINGS: Body Talk: Robyn Dance Party; $5-$40. 10 p.m.

THU, MAY 30

KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Peter Lamb & the Wolves; $5. 5:45 p.m. LOCAL 506: It Looks Sad., Haybaby; $10-$12. 9 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Joe Baiza, Jason Kahn, Crowmeat Bob, Jil Christensen, Dougie Bowne; $8. 9:30 p.m. 32 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

ARCANA: John Ray Trio; 8 p.m. BLUE NOTE GRILL: Celebration of NC Songwriting: Alice Gerrard, Wyatt Easterling, Kirk Ridge, Abby Davis; 7 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Hardworker, Magnolia Collective, CaseyMagic; $10. 8 p.m.

KINGS:

Stevie

[$10, 9 P.M.] North Carolina trio Stevie, which will release its debut album later this year, creates soft-hearted songs that smack of aughties pop like Widowspeak as well as the leisurely lo-fi of Flying Nun Records. The show also features the eccentric concept prog-rock of

Raleigh’s Flash Car and indiepop songster Minor Poet. —Josephine McRobbie KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Travis Tritt, Charlie Daniels Band, The Cadillac Three; $40-$75. 6 p.m. LOCAL 506: Nanner Head, Safe Word, JD Power & The Associates; $6. 9 p.m. MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: N.C. Symphony: The Music of Pink Floyd; 7:30 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Night Battles, Ceremony; $8. 10 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Local Band Local Beer: Black Surfer, Tired of Everything,

Brutal Jr, The Rocknroll Hi Fives; $5. 9 p.m. SLIM’S: Henbrain, Spirit System, Absent Lovers; $5. 9 p.m. ST. MATTHEWS EPISCOPAL CHURCH: Mallarme Chamber Players; $25. 7:30 p.m.

FRI, MAY 31

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: The Sh-Booms; $12. 9 p.m. THE CAVE: Charles Latham, Wigg Report, Whatserface; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. COASTAL CREDIT UNION MUSIC PARK AT WALNUT CREEK: Hootie & The Blowfish, Barenaked Ladies; $86+. 7:30 p.m.

1845 ORANGE COUNTY HISTORIC COURTHOUSE: Attractions Band; free. 6:30 p.m.

KINGS: Animalweapon Album Release with Foxture, Janxx, DJ Luxe Posh; $10. 8 p.m.

ARCANA: Queen Bee and the Honeylovers; $11-$15. 9 p.m. CARRBORO TOWN COMMONS: Chatham Rabbits, Alexa Rose; free. 6:30 p.m.

LINCOLN THEATRE: Fade to Black: A Tribute to Metallica; $10. 8:30 p.m. THE MAYWOOD: Imperfect Son, Veronica V, Bruteus; $10. 9 p.m.

FR 6/7 @RED HATE AMPHITHEATER SU 6/2 @CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM SU 6/2

THE DISTILLERS

THE MYSTERY LIGHTS TH 5/30 HARDWORKER, MAGNOLIA COLLECTIVE, CASEYMAGIC FR 5/31 THE SH-BOOMS W/ BLOOD RED RIVER ($12)

FR 6/7

FRENSHIP SA 6/1 ABBEY ROAD LIVE (BEATLES TRIBUTE) (2 SHOWS- 4 PM & 9 PM)

SU 6/2 THE DISTILLERS W/ STARCRAWLER($28/$30) FR6/7FRENSHIP W/GLADES ($15/$17) SU 6/9 THE LEMONHEADS, TOMMY STINSON ($25/$28) MO 6/10 GNASH W/ ANNA

CLENENDING

TU 6/18 SEBADOH W/ WAVELESS ($18/$20) WE 6/19 ABIGAIL DOWD / ISABELL TAYLOR (DUAL ALBUM RELEASE SHOW) ($7/$10)

TH 6/27 PARACHUTE W/ BILLY RAFFOUL ($20/$23)

SU 6/2 THE MYSTERY LIGHTS W/ FUTURE PUNX ($12/$14) WE 6/5 CAROLINE SPENCE W/ WHISPERER FR 6/7 JACK WILLOW ALBUM RELEASE SHOW

W/CHRISTIANE AND MKR SA 6/8 MATT ANDERSON W/ERIN COSTELLO ($15-$18) WE 6/12 EARTH W/HELMS ALEE ($15) TH 6/13 DYLAN LEBLANC W/ ERIN RAE ($12/$15) FR 6/14 EILEN JEWELL ($15/$18) SA 6/15 DANTE HIGH W/ MOLLY SARLE SU 6/16 LOS COAST

TU 7/9 YEASAYER W/ STEADY HOLIDAY ($27/$30)

MO 6/17 CULTURE ABUSE ($15/$18)

FR 7/12 THE LOVE LANGUAGE:

TH 6/20 JOSH ROUSE ($20)

CELEBRATING THE 10TH ANNIVERSARY OF THEIR SELF TITLED DEBUT. FEATURING THE ORIGINAL LINEUP ($14/$16) MO 7/15 ATERCIOPELADOS

TU 7/16 BILL CALLAHAN ($22/$25) SU 7/21 THE GET UP KIDS W/ GREAT GRANDPA ($22/$26)

WE 7/24-SA 7/27 MERGE RECORDS 30 YEAR CELEBRATION TH 8/1 DONAVON FRANKENREITER ($20/$24) WE 8/7 MENZINGERS W/ THE

SIDEKICKS, QUEEN OF JEANS TH 8/8 NEUROSIS W/ BELL WITCH AND DEAF KIDS SU 8/11 BLACK JOE LEWIS & THE HONEYBEARS ($15/17) MO 8/19 PEDRO THE LION / MEWITHOUTYOU ($25/$27)

TU 8/27 ELECTRIC HOT TUNA W/ ROB ICKES & TREY HENSLEY ($45/$50)

FR 6/21 NIGHT MOVES W/ COMPUTER SCIENCE SA 6/22 MARK LEE (OF THIRD DAY) WE 6/26 KRISTIN HERSH ELECTRIC TRIO ($18/$20) FR 6/28 COMMUNITY CHORUS

PROJECT SUMMER SHOWCASE SA 6/29 TAN & SOBER

GENTLEMEN, TUATHA DEA, VIRGINIA GROUND SU6/30 DOCTOR SIG W/ NITE BEAST ($10) SU 7/7 WAND W/ DREAMDECAY ($13/$15) SA 7/13 COLD CREAM, DE()T,

SNEAKERS AWARD

SU 7/21 TIJUANA PANTHERS AND TOGETHER PANGEA W/ ULTRA Q MO 7/22 PRINCE DADDY & THE HYENA W/RETIREMENT PARTY, OBSESSIVES

FR 9/13 WHO’S BAD

WE 7/31 GABBY’S WORLD, BELLOWS W/ JENNY BESETZT

SU 9/15 PENNY & SPARROW

TH 8/1 SCHOOL OF ROCK

MO 9/16 CAT POWER

SA 8/3 DELHI 2 DUBLIN

W/ CAROLINE SPENCE

WANDERER TOUR 2019” WE 9/18 TINARIWEN ($30/$33)

Your Week. Every Wednesday. indyweek.com

SA 6/1 SOLAR HALOS RECORD RELEASE SHOW W/ MAKE, MOURNING CLOAK

ALLSTARS

MO 8/5 KYLE CRAFT &

SHOWBOAT HONEY

TH 9/19 SNOW THA PRODUCT

TH 8/8 ANDREW BELLE ($15/ $17)

SA 9/21 WHITNEY W/ HAND HABITS

TH 8/15 ILLITERATE LIGHT ($12/$14)

FR 9/27 RIDE

FR 8/16 SIDNEY GISH

TU 10/1 MT JOY

FR 9/6 BENJAMIN FRANCIS LEFTWICH ($15/$18)

SU 10/6 BUILT TO SPILL- KEEP IT LIKE A SECRET TOUR ($28/$32) MO 10/7 LUNA PERFORMING PENTHOUSE W/ OLDEN YOLK WE 10/16 MELVINS AND REDD

KROSS W/ SHITKID

SU 10/20 THE BAND CAMINO

TUE 10/1 THAT 1 GUY WE 10/2 B BOYS TH10/3 BLANCO WHITE SA 10/5 TYRONE WELLS W/ DAN RODRIGUEZ ($17/$20)

W/ VALLEY

WE 10/9 ELDER ISLAND

WE 10/23 OH SEES

W/PRETTIEST EYES

TU 10/15 MIKE WATT & THE MISSINGMEN ($15)

FR 10/25 STIFF LITTLE FINGERS

FR 11/15 BLACK MIDI ($13)

SA 11/16 GAELIC STORM

SA 11/16 THE BLAZERS ‘HOW TO ROCK’ REUNION

W/ THE AVENGERS

FR 12/6 OUR LAST NIGHT

LAKE STREET DIVE & WOOD BROTHERS ARTSCENTER (CARRBORO) TH 6/27 THE SPILL CANVAS BOTTLE OF THE RED TOUR KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE (CARY)

SA 9/21 MANDOLIN

ORANGE W/MOUNTAIN MAN LOCAL 506 (CHAPEL HILL) SU 7/21 COVET W/ VASUDEVA AND HOLY FAWN

RHYTHMS LIVE MUSIC HALL

2020 CHAPEL HILL ROAD SUITE 33 • DURHAM, NC 27707 FRI 6/14

THE HEATERS

SAT 6/15

MARCUS ANDERSONS LETS GO CRAZY SHOWTHE MUSIC OF PRINCE

CAROLINA THEATRE (DUR)

TH 9/26 JOSH RITTER & THE ROYAL CITY BAND W/ SPECIAL GUEST AMANDA SHIRES DPAC (DUR)

FR 11/22 AND SA 11/23 (TWO NIGHTS) SYLVAN ESSO "WITH" / PLUS MOLLY SARLE (OF MOUNTAIN MAN)

FRI 6/21

GOOD ROCKIN SAM

SAT 6/22

FR 5/31 THE CONNELLS W/ LEISURE MCCORKLE ($20/$25)

JOHNNY WHITE AND THE ELITE BAND (JOHNNY WHITE RLMH MUSIC ACHEIVEMENT AWARD)

WE 6/12 REMO DRIVE W/ SLOW PULP, SLOW BULLET ($15/$18)

GOOD ROCKIN SAM

MOTORCO (DUR)

TU 7/16 HOP ALONG W/ KISSISSIPPI ($17/$20)

SUN 6/30SUN 6/30

FR 7/19 SUMMER SALT W/ DANTE ELEPHANTE, MOTEL RADIO MO 7/29 WE WERE PROMISED JETPACKS ‘THESE FOUR WALLS’ 10TH ANNIVERSARY W/ CATHOLIC ACTION ($16/$18)

SU 9/15 BLEACHED ($15/$17) MO 9/30 GENERATIONALS

RHYTHMSLIVENC.COM

KINGS (R AL) WE 5/29 AN EVENING WITH CHARLIE PARRANDPHIL COOK NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART

FR 6/14 STEEP CANYON RANGERS WITH CHATHAM RABBITS SA 6/22 TRAMPLED BY TURTLES WITH DEER TICK TU 7/2 COURTNEY BARNETT SA 7/13 ANDREW BIRD WITH SPECIAL GUEST TIFT MERRITT

TU 7/23 BRUCE HORNSBY AND

THE NOISEMAKERS/AMOS LEE SA 7/27 JOHN BUTLER W/ TREVOR HALL

TRIO+

WE 8/7 AN EVENING WITH

LYLE LOVETT AND HIS LARGE BAND SA 8/24 OLD CROW MEDICINE SHOW TH 8/29 CHAKA KHAN SA 8/31 MIPSO W/ BUCK MEEK SA 9/14 SNARKY PUPPY WE 9/25 RHIANNON GIDDENS AND FRANCESCO TURRISI RED HAT AMPHITHEATER (RAL)

FR 6/7 LAKE STREET DIVE/

THE WOOD BROTHERS THE RITZ (RAL)

(PRESENTED IN ASSOCIATION W/ LIVENATION)

MO 6/10 LOCAL NATIVES W/ MIDDLE KIDS

FR 10/11 EXPLOSIONS IN THE SKY 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR SA 11/23 CAAMP HAW RIVER BALLROOM FR 11/8 BIG THIEF W/ PALEHOUND ($20/$23)

CATSCRADLE.COM  919.967.9053  300 E. MAIN STREET  CARRBORO INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 33

6/5 THE SINGING OUT TOUR WITH HEATHER MAE AND CRYS MATTHEWS 5/31-6/2

HELVETICA PRESENTED BY ONE SONG SITTING PRETTY: A LIVE RADIO SHOW

6/1-2

PRESENTED BY ODYSSEYSTAGE

Get tickets at artscenterlive.org

FRI

5/31

SUN

6/2

MON

6/3

TUE

6/4

Cat’s Cradle presents THE CONNELLS Leisure McCorkle Crank It Loud Presents Crank It Loud Presents AARON WEST & THE ROARING 20’s

AARON WEST & THE ROARING 20’S

Primitive Ways and SommerKill Booking present DEICIDE, ORIGIN Jungle Rot, The Absence, Suppressive Fire and Edge of Humanity

RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE

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

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

FRI

SAT

6/8

SUN

THE NEW RESPECTS Apollo LTD / James William

6/9

WED

6/12

POUR HOUSE: Toubab Krewe, Jonathan Scales Fourchestra; $12-$15. 9 p.m. SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS RALEIGH: Tired All the Time, Lazaris Pit; 7 p.m.

BLUE NOTE GRILL: Willfest: Will McFarlane & Big Shoes; $15-$20. 8 p.m.

Tomas C (Magic City Disco) Purple Note Durham: Celebrating the Life of Prince Through Jazz Plus After Party: A King & A Prince

34 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

THE PINHOOK: Alley Seventeen, Pajama Day; $10. 8 p.m.

SAT, JUN 1

MARK FARINA

Also co-presenting at The Carolina Theatre of Durham: Criminal LIVE SHOW (on Oct 5th)

NIGHTLIGHT: Break It Up 2: Lady Fingers, PlayPlay, GRRL, One Duran; $8. 10 p.m.

THE STATION: The Gone Ghosts, Ophelia, Katie & Sean Hayes; 8 p.m.

MARK FARINA Tomas C (Magic City Disco)

COMING SOON: Remo Drive, Maimouna Youssef,The Crystal Method, Remember Jones, Young Bull, Kooley High, Cavetown, Damien Jurado, She Wants Revenge, Mystery Skulls, Hop Along, Chris Webby, Summer Salt, Dan Baird & Homemade Sin,The Rock*A*Teens, Escape-ism, Myq Kaplan,We Were Promised Jetpacks, Cowboy Mouth,Tessa Violet, Kindo, Supersuckers, Sophomore Slump Fest, BoDeans, Sinkane, Bleached, flor, Boy Harsher, Genrationals,The Way Down Wanderers, Kero Kero Bonito, Blackalicious, Warbringer, Sonata Artica, Russian Circles, Nile, Mikal Cronin

MOTORCO: The Connells, Leisure McCorkle; $20-$25. 9 p.m.

SLIM’S: Plateau Below, To Julian, Green Aisles, Whisperer; $5. 8 p.m.

THE NEW RESPECTS

Dan Ariely and Ovul Sezer: Irrationality meets Comedy DAN ARIELY and OVUL SEZER: Irrationality meets Comedy Cat’s Cradle Presents REMO DRIVE Slow Pulp / Slow Bullet

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

SHARP NINE GALLERY: Jim Ketch Swingtet; $20. 8 p.m.

Apollo LTD / James William

6/7

Caroline Spence performs at Cat’s Cradle Back Room on Wednesday, June 5.

Present this coupon for

Member Admission Price (Not Valid for Special Events, expires 01-20)

919-6-TEASER for directions and information

www.teasersmensclub.com 156 Ramseur St. Durham, NC

An Adult Nightclub Open 7 Days/week • Hours 7pm - 2am

TeasersMensClub

@TeasersDurham

CAT’S CRADLE: Abbey Road LIVE!; $12-$15. 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Solar Halos Album Release Show with MAKE, Mourning Cloak; $10. 9 p.m. THE CAVE: Gabbie Rotts, Cosmic Punk, Girl Werewolf; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. CHAPEL OF THE CROSS: Cantari; 7:30 p.m. ENO RIVER UNITARIAN UNIV. FELLOWSHIP: Jazz Vespers Music & Worship Service; free. 4 p.m. FIRST PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH: First Presbyterian Church of Durham & St. Philip’s Episcopal Church of Durham Choirs: Requiem & Cantique de Jean Racine; 3 p.m.

KINGS: Kooley High, Hot at Nights, Clear Soul Forces, King Draft & Swank; $12-$15. 9 p.m. THE KRAKEN: Randy Steele; 7 p.m. KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: NC Symphony: A Space Spectacular; $35-$38. 7:30 p.m. LOCAL 506:

THE RITZ: LANY; 8 p.m. SHARP NINE GALLERY: Steve Cardenas, Keith Ganz Quartet; 8 p.m.

SUN, JUN 2 ARCANA: Hard Drive Album Release; $10 suggested. 7:30 p.m.

Orange County Rape Crisis Center Benefit

CAT’S CRADLE:

[$15–$30, 8 P.M.]

[$28-$30, 8 P.M.]

Three of the Triangle’s most powerful voices offer intimate solo performances at this fundraiser for the Orange County Rape Crisis Center. Lydia Loveless pulls no punches while previewing material from her forthcoming album, and early peeks indicate it’s as direct as anything from her hard-hitting catalog. Meanwhile, Reese McHenry captures lightning in a bottle on blustering, bluesy tunes with classic pop sensibilities, while Jess Klein’s clear, lilting vocals soar atop her introspective folkish musings. —Spencer Griffith

Coral Fang, The Distillers’ last full-length record, found the Australian-American punk band buffing out its rough edges for a sparkling sheen that leaned more toward mid-nineties alt-rock than early punk. The single “Man vs. Magnet,” released when the band reunited last year, picks up where Coral Fang left off: ringing guitars, pounding drums, snarling attitude, a whole lotta angst. —Patrick Wall

LINCOLN THEATRE: Joanne Shaw Taylor, The Buzzards Band; $13-$20. 8 p.m. THE MAYWOOD: One for Gregg: Idlewild South & Friends, Four Easy Pieces, Gone Ghost, Two Trains Running; $10-$13. 9 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: Rager Tour: Kev-O, Matty Butz, NoHesi; 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Louis York & the Shindellas; $12-$15. 9 p.m. RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: St. Paul and the Broken Bones; $20+. 6 p.m.

The Distillers

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: The Mystery Lights, Future Punx; $12-$14. 8 p.m. DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER:

blackbear [$35+, 8 P.M.]

Nothing says industry plant, culture vulture, or pop panderer more than a Justin Bieber, Linkin Park, and Mike Posner collaborator using his white leverage to propel his solo career, chock full of pasty, easy-stream, Billboard alt-R&B songs moaning for apathy. But hey, twenty-eight year-old Matt Musto, or

heavy blues rock. As bassist Alexis Fitzgerald has said, “Our music isn’t set up to be a specific idea of something, but freedom—freedom and fun and family.” —Josephine McRobbie POUR HOUSE: Sub-Radio, Thirsty Curses, Year of October; $7-$10. 9 p.m. SHARP NINE GALLERY: Durham Jazz Orchestra; $10. 7 p.m.

WED, JUN 5 THE ARTSCENTER: Crys Matthews & Heather Mae, JJ Jones, Joe Stevens; $20. 8 p.m.

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM:

Caroline Spence [$10-$12, 8 P.M.]

Caroline Spence chased her gorgeous 2017 LP Spades & Roses with this month’s Mint Condition, an album which spotlights her soul-searching songwriting by setting her gentle, delicate pipes in lean, elegant arrangements. Graced with an Emmylou Harris guest appearance, the title track is a perfect example of how her reflective lyricism balances detailed imagery with vivid storytelling aimed for universal appeal—in this case,

contrasting a well-worn book with love that hasn’t lost its luster. —Spencer Griffith THE CAVE: Clark Stern & Chuck Cotton; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. COASTAL CREDIT UNION MUSIC PARK AT WALNUT CREEK: Florence and the Machine, Nathaniel Rateliff & The Night Sweats; $35+. 7:30 p.m. KINGS: Awen Family Band, Xylem, Innerspace; $12. 9 p.m. THE PINHOOK: Nine Fingered Thug, Savage Knights, Corina Mortis; $7. 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Freddie McGregor & the Big Ship Band; $25-$30. 8 p.m.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

INDYWEEK.COM

The New Respects perform at Motorco on Tuesday, June 4. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

blackbear, has capitalized on this schtick—heard at length on his most recent release, the draining Anonymous LP— long enough to craft songs fit for concert halls such as DPAC and festivals alike. His is a tough battle between emo and ego where only the gullible survive, and feelings are supposed to be fun. —Eric Tullis HAW RIVER BALLROOM: Diali Cissokho & Kaira Ba, Jonathan Scales Fourchestra; $15-$17. 8 p.m. KINGS: Joy Again; $10-$12. 8:30 p.m. MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: Raleigh Ringers; $22. 3 p.m. MOTORCO: Aaron West & The Roaring Twenties; $20-$23. 7 p.m. NCCU’S BN DUKE AUDITORIUM: Black Music Month Celebration: Gateways Brass Collective, NCCU Alumni Vocal Ensemble, Joy Harrell Goff, Bump Youth Choir; $25-$50. 4 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Expansionpack: Konvo, Madison Jay, Sk the Novelist, Bleu. X Seph.Dot; $7. 8:30 p.m. POUR HOUSE: The Freeway Jubilee, Tennessee Jed; $8-$10. 9 p.m. SERTOMA AMPHITHEATRE: Carolina Brass Band Festival; free. 2 p.m.

MON, JUN 3 THE CAVE: Full Bush, The Muslims; $10 suggested. 9 p.m. MOTORCO: Deicide and Origin, Jungle Rot, The Absence, Suppressive Fire, Edge of Humanity; $25-$30. 6:30 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Sunday Girl, Zipper, Corvid Swarm; $10-$12. 8:30 p.m.

TUE, JUN 4 THE CAVE: Ordinary Madmen, Justin Kalk, Truck Doggie; $5 suggested. 9:23 p.m. KINGS: Blackfoot Gypsies; $10-$12. 8 p.m. LOCAL 506: The Second After, Come Clean, Some Antics; $10-$15. 7 p.m. MOTORCO:

The New Respects [$13-$15, 8 P.M.]

Three siblings and their cousin make up Nashville’s The New Respects. Armed with the comfortable familiarity of family and a simple rock setup of guitar, bass, and drums, they run the gamut genre-wise, from tense disco bops, to expressive funk and soul, to

Lydia Loveless performs at Local 506 on Saturday, June 1.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HIGH ROAD TOURING

INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 35

FIRST FRIDAY JUNE 7th 6PM-9PM 230 S. Wilmington St. Suite 105, Raleigh, NC

Join us for a pre-release listening party of

BOULEVARDS new album

YA D I G !

Clothing and Gear presented by

Napoleon Wright II Becauseus

“Extreme times call for extreme creativity”

Plus DJ

- Jeremy Blair

and INDYCast Recording Live Onsite 36 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

art

5.29–6.5

submit! Got something for our calendar? Submit the details at:

https://indyweek.com/submit#cals DEADLINE: 5 p.m. each Wednesday for the following Wednesday’s issue. QUESTIONS? cvillena@indyweek.com

FRIDAY, MAY 31 & SATURDAY, JUNE 1

SEEK RALEIGH

Before Raleigh’s new Dix Park made its bones as an arts venue with the smashing success of the Dreamville Festival in April, art was already percolating there last summer, when Dix Park Conservancy and Raleigh public art director Kelly McChesney collaborated on a few pop-ups. But those promising test balloons have nothing on the bounty coming to Dix Park from Raleigh Arts this weekend. SEEK Raleigh consists of twenty temporary art installations and performances that “bring alive the history and significance of our Dorothea Dix campus through puppetry, sounds, structure, illumination, and performance art” in a family-fair atmosphere. The offerings include performances from the Black on Black Project, illuminated sculpture by Jonathan Michael Davis, video art by George Jenne, an interactive puppet installation by Jeghetto, sound art by Felix Obelix, a found-object installation by Tift Merritt (!), and so much more. You can visit the Dix Park website for exact times, but we recommend just diving in to explore. —Brian Howe

DOROTHEA DIX PARK, RALEIGH 5 p.m. Fri./3 p.m. Sat., free, dixpark.org

George Jenne: “Turpentine Movie Night” PHOTO COURTESY OF DIXPARK.ORG

OPENING Art At The Cottage: Open air art show. Sat, Jun 1, 10 a.m. Mosaic Artist, Apex. whimsicalrobyn.com. Cary Gallery of Artists: Creative Diversity: Group show. May 31-Jun 25. Reception: May 31, 6-8 p.m. Cary Gallery of Artists, Cary. carygalleryofartists.org.

All the Pop: Thru Jun 2. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. Keith Allen, Ben Hamburger, Kaidy Lewis, Carolyn Rugen: Thru Jun 8. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. Ancestry of Necessity: Group show. Curator, April Childers. Thru Aug 24. Reed Bldg, Durham.

John Parkinson & Mary Kircher: Furniture and tapestries. Jun 1-30. Reception: Jun 2, 2-4 p.m. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. preservationchapelhill.org.

Annual Photography Show: Riverside High School student exhibit. Thru Jun 2. West Point on the Eno, Durham.

ONGOING

Ellie Brenner: Backyard: Mixed media. Thru Jun 14. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. scrapexchange.org.

150 Faces of Durham: Photos. Thru Sep 3. Museum of Durham History, Durham.

Kennedi Carter: East Durham Love: Photos. Thru May 30. Golden Belt, Durham. durhamartguild.org. Garry Childs, Jude Lobe, Pat Merriman: Be in Touch: Thru Jun 23. Reception: May 31, 6-9 p.m. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. Allison Coleman, Gabriella Corter, Angela Lombard: Thru Jun 27. Artspace, Raleigh. Beyond Despair: An Environmental Call for Art: Work from 33 artists about, including, and referencing the environment. Thru Jun 22. National Humanities Center, Durham. vaeraleigh.org.

Wim Botha: Stil Life with Discontent: Mixed media. Additional work on view at 21c Museum Hotel. Thru Aug 4. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Bull City Challenge: Group show. Thru May 31. Bull City Art & Frame Co, Durham. Kathleen Deep: Still: Mixed media and photography. Thru May. The Centerpiece, Raleigh. Durham Art Guild Members’ Showcase: Group show. Thru Jun 8. Durham Art Guild, Durham. durhamartguild.org. Charles Eneld: Upcycled: Upcycled Haitian art. Thru Jun 29. Triangle Cultural Art Gallery, Raleigh. triangleculturalart.com.

Byron Gin & Andy Farkas: Paintings and prints. Thru Jun 1. Adam Cave Fine Art, Raleigh. adamcavefineart.com. Kate Gordon: Juggling Chainsaws: Paintings. Thru Jun 2. The Carrack Modern Art, Durham. thecarrack.org. Rachel Goodwin: Look Through This: Mixed media. Thru Jun 29. Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Durham. horseandbuggypress.com. Bryant Holsenbeck & Kathryn DeMarco: We the Animals: Sculpture and collage. Thru Jun 29. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. cravenallengallery.com. Dawn Hummer: By Her Hands: Thru Jun 2. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. pleiadesartdurham.com.

I AM A MAN: Civil Rights Photographs, 1960-1970: Thru May 31. Center for the Study of the American South, Chapel Hill. south.unc.edu. John James Audubon: The Birds of America: Ornithological engravings. Thru Dec 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Jim Kellough: Vine Paintings: Thru Oct 10. Durham Convention Center, Durham. durhamarts.org. Stacey L. Kirby: The Department of Reflection: Multimedia. Thru Aug 4. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. ackland.org. Eric Kniss: Sifting: Thru Jun 8 VAE Raleigh, Raleigh. vaeraleigh.org. INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 37

art

page

CONT’D

Left-Handed Liberty: Outsider art. Thru Jun 23. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds: Synchronized silent video installation. Thru Sep 8. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. Michela Martello: Consequential Stranger: Illustrations. Thru Jun 1. Artspace, Raleigh. Joy Meyer: A Few Hours After This: Paintings and video. Thru May 30. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org. Chris Musina: Paradise: Paintings. Thru Jun 2. Oneoneone, Chapel Hill. oneoneone.gallery. N.C. Artists Exhibition: Juried group show. Thru Jun 9. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. ralfinearts.org.

New Faces of Tradition: Documenting North Carolina’s Young Artists: Documentary portraits. Thru Jun 30. Reception: May 30, 6 p.m. Rubenstein Art Center Gallery 235, Durham. artscenter.duke.edu. Oops! Happy Accidents: Art based on accidents. Thru Jun 2. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. Our House: Durham Arts Council student-instructor exhibit. Thru Jul. 6 Durham Arts Council, Durham. Susan Harbage Page: Borderlands: Documentary photos and found objects from the US-Mexico border. Thru Jul 28. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu.

Pop América, 1965-1975: Latin American pop art. Thru Jul 21. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu.

Cher Shaffer: Art from the Holler: Folk art. Thru May 31. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough.

Portraying Power and Identity: A Global Perspective: Thru Jan 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com.

Katie Shaw: Residency. Thru May 31. Artspace, Raleigh artspacenc.org.

[re]ACTION: Artistic renditions inspired by scientific images. Thru Jun 23. Golden Belt, Durham. V L Rees: I Love Paris: Paintings. Thru Jun 29. V L Rees Gallery, Raleigh. vlrees.com. reNautilus: Thru Jul 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com. Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris: Their World Is Not Our World: Video installation. Thru Jul 7. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Smelt Art & Skittles Inaugural Exhibit: Sixteen local artists. Thru Jun 29. Smelt Art & Skittles, Pittsboro. Southern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off: Interactive sculptures. Thru Oct 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Kirsten Stoltmann: I am Sorry: Thru Jul 31. Lump, Raleigh. lumpprojects.org. Tilden Stone: Southern Surreal: Furniture. Thru Sep 8. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Eun-Kyung Suh: Lost and Preserved: Sculptures. Thru May 31. VAE Raleigh, Raleigh. vaeraleigh.org.

5.29 5.31 6.1 6.2 6.3

Rick Atkinson The British Are Coming 7pm Jen Schradie The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives 7pm Under the Tree Storytime 10:30am Stories on Sunday 10:30am Sundry Poets with Jo Taylor, Beth Copeland, Tina Barr and Iris Tillman Hill 2pm Mz Linda’s Toddle Storytime 10:30am

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

Cheryl Thurber: Documenting Gravel Springs, Mississippi, in the 1970s: Photos. End date TBA. UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library, Chapel Hill. Lien Truong: The Sky is Not Sacred: Multimedia. Thru Jun 22. Artspace, Raleigh.

www.quailridgebooks.com • 919.828.1588 • North Hills 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh, NC 27609 CHECK OUT OUR PODCAST: BOOKIN’ w/Jason Jefferies

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c Bu s i n eDIVORCE ss Law UNCONTESTED In c o r p oBUSINESS r a t i o n / LLAW LC / MUSIC Pa r t n e r s h i p INCORPORATION/LLC Wi lls WILLS C o l l967-6159 ections (919)

967-6159

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com

38 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

William Paul Thomas: Disrupting Homogeny: Portraits. Thru Jul 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com.

Ely Urbanski: Layers: Monoprints. Thru Jul 6. Durham Arts Council, Durham. Christina Lorena Weisner: Explorations: Science sculptures. Thru Jul 28. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Tim Williams: Pure Pigment: Paintings. Thru May 31. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org. Within the Frame: Photos. Thru Jul 7. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Page Taggart’s Or Replica PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 5

PARADISO READING SERIES Paige Taggart writes dreamlike poems that seem to spill over the bounds of text: There’s a narrative heart, to be sure, but like John Ashbery’s meandering mandate that “the longest way is the most efficient way,” Taggart’s poetry seems as concerned with musicality and emotional animation as with linear narrative. This emphasis makes her a fitting headliner for Chapel Hill’s new Paradiso Reading Series, organized by poets (and INDY contributors) Laura Jaramillo and Marta Núñez Pouzols. The inaugural event kicks off with an evening of poetry attuned to the “sonic dimension of language” and “questions about subjectivity.” Taggart, who works as a jeweler in Brooklyn, is the author of five chapbooks and two fulllength collections, Or Replica and Want for Lion. Joining her are Carla Hung, a poet and cultural anthropology graduate student at Duke, and INDY arts editor Brian Howe; the evening will conclude with a DJ set by Alex Chassanoff. —Sarah Edwards

NIGHTLIGHT BAR & CLUB, CHAPEL HILL 8 p.m., free, www.nightlightclub.com

READINGS & SIGNINGS Rick Atkinson: History The British are Coming. Wed, May 29, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Laura King Edwards: Memoir Run to the Light. Mon, Jun 3, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. flyleafbooks.com. Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tyree Daye: Poetry reading. Wed, May 29, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. regulatorbookshop.com.

Peter Guzzardi: Emeralds of Oz. Sat, Jun 1, 11 a.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. Gillian McDunn: Middle grade novel Caterpillar Summer. Sat, Jun 1, 2 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. Jen Schradie: The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives. Fri, May 31, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Jason Torchinsky: Robot, Take the Wheel. Tue, Jun 4, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. flyleafbooks.com.

stage

OPENING

Agatha Christie’s Go Back For Murder: University Theatre. Play. $15-$26. May 30-Jun 2, 7:30 p.m. NCSU’s KennedyMcIlwee Studio Theatre, Raleigh. theatre.arts.ncsu.edu. Cats: Musical. Jun 4-9. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com. Enparejados el Show: Sat, Jun 1, 9 p.m. Meymandi Concert Hall, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com. Helvetica:: OneSong. Play. $10. May 31-Jun 2. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org. The House of Kanautica Fundraiser: Benefit for Kanautica Zayre-Brown. With poets Tommi Hayes, Saint Jay, and Nathaniel Bush, Body Party drag performer Asia, and musician Asa. $10-$15. Slim’s, Raleigh. Jun 1, 7 p.m. Junk: Theatre Raleigh. Play. Jun 5-16. Kennedy Theatre, Raleigh. theatreraleigh.com. Jesse Kalal: Comedy. $5. Thu, May 30, 6:30 p.m. The People’s Improv Theater, Chapel Hill. thepit-chapelhill.com. Lilith Flair: Drag showcase. $5. Wed, May 29, 8 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh. rubydeluxeraleigh.com. NC’s Funniest Person: Comedy competition. $10. Jun 4-5. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy. com. Pippin: Musical. May 31-Jun 6. Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh. raleighlittletheatre.org.

FRIDAY, MAY 31

SAM MAZANY As a co-producer of the long-running Dangling Loafer comedy showcase as well as the host of the late-night Boat Jail showcase at Kings, Raleigh’s Sam Mazany is a central figure in the local stand-up scene. He’s also opened for big names on tour (Andy Woodhull) and at home, at Goodnights Comedy Club (Dave Attell, Demetri Martin). So it’s high time Goodnights let him headline, as it does this weekend. “It’s my home club,” Mazany told the INDY. “I started there almost five years ago, and the upstairs ‘Anything Goes’ room that I’ll be headlining was where I had my first booked spot. It’s crazy to have gone from a three-minute guest spot to having two headlining shows.” The early one’s already sold out, indicative of this first-time headliner’s local draw. Mazany says he’s rising to the occasion with a set he’s been building toward for five years. He’ll be joined by local favorites Mike Mello, Brandy Brown, Vishal Krishnasami, and Mark Brady. —Brian Howe

GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB, RALEIGH | 8 & 10:30 p.m., $12, www.goodnightscomedy.com

Sam Mazany PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

ONGOING The Legend of Georgia McBride: Honest Pint Theatre. Play. Thru Jun 2. 7:30 p.m. William Peace University’s Leggett Theatre, Raleigh. honestpinttheatre.org.

Andrew Santino: Sat, Jun 1, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com.

The Sunday Show: Standup comedy. Eric Dadourian, Dan Gill, David Venhuizen, Matt White, and host Jeremy Alder. Free. Sun, Jun 2, 7 p.m. King Street Bar, Hillsborough.

Sitting Pretty: OdysseyStage. Live radio play. Jun 1, 8 p.m. & Jun 2, 3 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

White: Bulldog Theatre. Play. Thru Jun 9. Durham Fruit Company, Durham. bulldogdurham.org.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

INDYWEEK.COM

food & drink Ronald McDonald House Burger Classic: Benefit for Ronald McDonald House. Classic 1950s burger shack menu, Fullsteam Brewery and East Durham Bake Shop, and live music. Sat, Jun 1, 11 a.m. Eastcut Sandwich Bar, Durham. eastcutsandwich.com. INDYweek.com | 5.29.19 | 39

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS Blue Sunshine: Cinema Overdrive series. Mon, Jun 3, 8 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. The Chance to Live & I, Destini: Documentaries. Panel to follow. Free. Thu, May 30, 5:30 p.m. UNC’s FedEx Global Education Center, Chapel Hill. global.unc.edu. Evil Dead 2: Wed, May 29, 2 p.m. and 9 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Feeling Through: Panel discussion to follow. Free. Fri, May 31, 2 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com.

N OW P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at indyweek.com.

Ghost Story & Gothic: Retrofantasma Film Series. $10. Fri, May 31, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org.

 Amazing Grace—A dazzling testament to the Queen of Soul at the height of her career. Rated G.

Isle of Dogs: Saving Grace dog adoption event. Vendors, music, dog arts and crafts, and more. Sat, Jun 1, 6:30 p.m. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

 Captain Marvel—Brie Larson is an intergalactic fighter questioning who she is. Rated PG-13.

Little Darlings: $7. Wed, May 29, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. Royal Opera House: Faust: Sun, Jun 2, 2 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Skyscraper Souls: Moviediva Film Series. $7. Wed, Jun 5, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. The Ties the Bind: Local Premiere Series. Documentary. Q&A with director Diana Newton to follow. Free. Fri, May 31, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. The White Crow: $10. Fri, May 31, 2 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. 40 | 5.29.19 | INDYweek.com

OPENING Godzilla: King of the Monsters—A heroic cryptozoological agency is up against a slew of new monsters; luckily, they have monster-facing maverick Millie Bobby Brown in the mix. Rated PG-13. Ma—Don’t cross Ma, a lonely lady played by Octavia Spencer who just wants to buy the teens some alcohol and hang out! Rated R. Rocketman—In a year of musical biopics, there obviously has to be an Elton John one. Rated R.

 Hail Satan?—A funny, compelling portrait of a group that’s pushing the limits on just how far a prank can go. Rated R. ½ John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum— A bloody, Buster Keaton-esque ballet meets Sam Peckinpah. Rated R. ½ Long Shot—The sex jokes and political satire both sag in this Seth RogenCharlize Theron rom-com. Rated R.  Tolkien—All the dots between The Lord of the Rings and the author’s life are connected in a strangely dispiriting biopic. Rated PG-13.

THURSDAY, MAY 30

RUN OF THE PICTURE How many dreams can one man chase? In Raleigh filmmaker Evan Kidd’s short documentar, Run of the Picture, the answer is at least two: movie-maker, and Olympic track and field star. Kidd’s film follows Johnny Dutch, a Triangle athlete and filmmaker whose goals to make both the Olympics and zombie movies spans years of highs and lows, in which his dreams are often within sight—and often yanked away at the last-minute. Kidd’s short, equally funny, tragic and inspiring, is available on Amazon Prime Video; but to learn more about the improbable-seeming story behind it (and to buy a pair of running shoes, should you feel inspired) you can meet him and Dutch at a public screening at Raleigh’s independent running store, Runologie. The event will be followed by a Q and A; bring a lawn chair or blanket, as seating will be limited. —Zack Smith

RUNOLOGIE, RALEIGH | 7:30 p.m., free, www.runologieraleigh.com

Still from Run of the Picture PHOTO COURTESY OF ROCKSET PRODUCTIONS

indy classifieds employment HIRING PT ADMIN ASST. Durham environmental justice nonprofit NC WARN is hiring a part-time administrative assistant. NCWARN.org for more info. Women, people of color, LGBTQ encouraged to apply.

housing

services financial services

DO YOU OWE MORE THAN $5000 in tax debt? Call Wells & Associates INC. We solve ALL Tax Problems! Personal, Business, IRS, State and Local. ìDecades of experienceî! Our clients have saved over $150 Million Dollars! Call NOW for a free consultation. 1-855725-5414.

home improvement AFFORDABLE NEW SIDING!

Bolinwood Condominiums Affordability without compromise

Convenient to UNC on N bus line 2 & 3 bedroom condominiums for lease

www.bolinwoodcondos.com • 919-942-7806

Beautify your home! Save on monthly energy bills with beautiful NEW SIDING from 1800Remodel! Up to 18 months no interest. Restrictions apply 877-731-0014

NEED A ROOMMATE? Roommates.com will help you find your Perfect Match today! (AAN CAN)

body • mind • spirit

BATHROOM RENOVATIONS EASY, ONE DAY updates! We specialize in safe bathing. Grab bars, no slip flooring & seated showers. Call for a free in-home consultation: 844376-0084

To adopt: 919-403-2221 or visit animalrescue.net

Princess Dixie Violet

ENERGY SAVING NEW WINDOWS! Beautify your home! Save on monthly energy bills with NEW WINDOWS from 1800Remodel! Up to 18 months no interest. Restrictions apply 888-676-0813

misc. LUNG CANCER? AND AGE 60+? You and Your Family May Be Entitled to Significant Cash Award. Call 844-299-2498 for Information. No Risk. No Money Out of Pocket.

is a sweet

919-416-0675

and friendly dog!

www.harmonygate.com counseling/ therapy STRUGGLING WITH DRUGS OR ALCOHOL? Addicted to PILLS? Talk to someone who cares. Call The Addiction Hope & Help Line for a free assessment. 888-537-9106

holistic health

medical services A PLACE FOR MOM The nation’s largest senior living referral service. Contact our trusted, local experts today! Our service is FREE/no obligation. CALL 1-888-609-2550

new age

for sale auctions

AUCTION: Historic Manteo, NC HomeGardens. 400 Uppowoc Av. Tax Val $703K. WILL SELL at or above $325K! June 15. Mike Harper 843-7294996 (NCAL 8286) www. HarperAuctionAndRealty.com for details.

BANKRUPTCY AUCTION: Bankruptcy Auction of Vehicles & Landscape Equipment, Online Only, Begins Closing 6/25 at 2pm, Vehicles, Mowers, Trimmers, Blowers, and Much More, ironhorseauction.com, 800.997.2248, NCAL 3936