raleigh 6|1|16
The Fight Over the Velvet Cloak Inn, p. 10 Endorsements for an Accidental Election, p. 12 Cooking with the President’s Chef, p. 20 Parsing the Curious Songs of Raleigh’s Al Riggs, p. 26
Lawmakers want to route millions more taxpayer dollars to religious schools that openly discriminate against LGBTQ students By Paul Blest, p. 8
BI K ES , B E ER & B E MUS E MEN T
B ES T D ESC RI BED BY
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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK | RALEIGH VOL. 33, NO. 22
6 Wake County has a great program to help homeless vets. Nobody knows about it. 8 The legislature wants to spend $135 million on vouchers. Some of it will go to schools that discriminate against LGBTQ students. 10 Neighbors think a developer’s plans for the storied Velvet Cloak Inn are ugly. 12 Renee Ellmers has produced an inkling of courage at least twice in her life. 16 The Carrack’s move might change the way you think about downtown Durham. 19 “It’s not like sitting in your pajamas at midnight, asking, ‘How do you plant your potatoes?’” 20 How unique is the Triangle’s food scene? One of its top chefs explains. 25 At An, a meal isa narrative. May every chapter be as good as the rhubarb cake. 26 Al Riggs has a peculiar process for writing songs, and it’s led to the great Blue Mornings. 29 Stacy Wolfson and Curtis Eller extract modern dance from Americana music in Never, Enough, Better, Nothing. 41 A tribute to Wes Phillips, an incredible Triangle musician.
DEPARTMENTS 6 Triangulator 8 News
Francisco Almaguer, the pastry chef at An, laughs while bringing the rhubarb cake out to the dining room. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER
30 What to Do This Week
12 Endorsements
33 Music Calendar
25 Food
37 Arts/Film Calendar
26 Music
41 Soft Return
29 Arts & Culture
On the cover ILLUSTRATION BY SKILLET GILMORE
NEXT WEEK: THE BEST OF THE TRIANGLE
INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 3
Orange County Animal Services OPEN HOUSE
Help us celebrate another successful year Saturday, June 4 • 12-4pm Cat Adop eding ti Pony Fe on Specials on Stati
d Free Foo Facility
Tours
Spay/Ne Surgery uter Viewings
CLAWS H aw Release k
1601 Eubanks Rd • Chapel Hill • 919-942-PETS (7387) www.orangecountync.gov/departments/animalservices
Raleigh Cary Durham Chapel Hill
Google’s mantra was “Don’t be evil,” but
GOOGLE CAN BE EVIL It pilfers parklands nationwide. savecarrborogreenspaces.org
PUBLISHER Susan Harper EDITORIAL EDITOR IN CHIEF Jeffrey C. Billman,
jbillman@indyweek.com MANAGING+MUSIC EDITOR Grayson Haver Currin, gcurrin@indyweek.com ARTS & CULTURE EDITOR Brian Howe, bhowe@indyweek.com STAFF WRITERS (DURHAM) Danny Hooley, David Hudnall STAFF WRITERS (RALEIGH) Paul Blest, Jane Porter ASSOCIATE EDITOR Allison Hussey, ahussey@indyweek.com COPY EDITOR David Klein THEATER AND DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS Tina Haver Currin, Curt Fields, Bob Geary, Spencer Griffith, Corbie Hill, Emma Laperruque, Jordan Lawrence, Jill Warren Lucas, Sayaka Matsuoka, Glenn McDonald, Neil Morris, Bryan C. Reed, V. Cullum Rogers, David A. Ross, Dan Schram, Zack Smith, Eric Tullis, Chris Vitiello, Patrick Wall, Iza Wojciechowska
ART+DESIGN
THE INDY’S GUIDE TO DRINKING BEER IN THE TRIANGLE
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backtalk
Anatomically Correct
If you work for a newspaper that has written critically about HB 2 and get an email from someone calling himself Dick Nibblerh, you can probably guess where it’s headed: “I’m confused by the backlash against the ‘bathroom law.’ If you have gender reassignment surgery, you can have your birth certificate changed to reflect your new gender. So the law only affects crossdressing freaks like Bruce Jenner, who chooses to have tits and a dick. Why hasn’t he had the surgery, does he like to tit-fuck himself?” We don’t know, Dick, but we’re gonna guess not. Cecil has a more constructive idea for those, like him, “who do not want our wives and daughters at risk”: “The transgender community can use single-room bathrooms that one person can lock behind, that have one access point. You see them in numerous places now, in malls, different stores, movie houses, etc. A law should be put on the books that requires businesses to install single-person restroom facilities, and that removes any discrimination. … For all the singers and bands that have left and did not play in North Carolina, I think they are very smallminded.” Finally, Elizabeth H. wants to “grouse a bit about your piece on the Outer Banks,” which appeared in last week’s Summer Guide. “Though I respect the fact that the author wants to take his dogs everywhere he goes, it seems to me that is likely the minority opinion among vacationers—no offense to his pets.” His pets are, in fact, offended. But go on. “It feels a little unfair to judge the selection of restaurants based on whether one can take their dog there. I personally do not want to have to eat with a slobbering dog nearby. I would guess there are more than a few vacationers who share that opinion. Similarly, I don’t want someone’s unleashed dog approaching me on the beach, disrupting my vacation, nor do I want to worry about pet waste on the beach. … I am wondering which vacation spots the author would recommend as adequately dog-friendly utopias where dogs can wander and frolic leashless, where most restaurants enthusiastically encourage dogs to take their place among diners? I want to know, because that is likely a place I want to avoid when planning my next vacation.”
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STILL 2 Study Auditory Hallucinations
• This research study is recruiting people with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who have auditory hallucinations. • The goal is to test whether low-voltage transcranial current stimulation can reduce the frequency and severity of auditory hallucinations . • Transcranial current stimulation has been well tolerated with no serious side-effects reported. • We are looking for people between the ages of 18 and 70 diagnosed with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder who experience auditory hallucinations at least 3 times per week. • You can earn a total of $380 for completing this study. If you are interested in learning more, contact: juliann_mellin@med.unc.edu
Want to see your name in bold? Email us at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our Facebook page or INDYweek.com, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek.
Justin Flores (center), vice president of the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, leads a group of labor rights activists to the office of state Senator Brent Jackson to deliver a petition calling on Jackson to end the retalliation against workers on his farm. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 5
triangulator +SENSING A PATTERN HERE
A few weeks ago, new UNC president Margaret Spellings appointed her first partisan hack to a leadership position in the school system: Cecil Staton, who, as a Republican member of the Georgia Senate, introduced voter ID laws and pushed for police crackdowns on immigrants. Staton will be paid $520,000 as the new chancellor of Eastern Carolina University. Last week, Spellings installed another loudly conservative voice in a top post. Andrew Kelly will be paid $245,000 per year to serve in a newly created position called “senior vice president for strategy and policy.” How conservative is Kelly? He was a research assistant at the American Enterprise Institute from 2002–2005 and returned to AEI in 2009 as a research fellow in education policy studies. He is also the founder and director of AEI’s Center on Higher Education Reform. The AEI, of course, is the big conservative think tank in Washington, D.C., that generated many of the brilliant ideas that became the failed policies of George W. Bush—in whose administration Margaret Spellings served as secretary of education. Time is a flat circle. So what sort of policies will the new VP of strategy and policy push? Here’s a clue: in a policy paper Kelly authored in 2015 for the Conservative Reform Network, he argued that PAYE, the income-based student-loan repayment system, is an abject failure, and he thinks “conservatives should pursue reforms that expand career and technical options.” And he told NPR last year, regarding the University of Wisconsin’s move to cut $250 million from its system, that eliminating state funding in exchange for more autonomy can be a good thing for a public university. Ask your friends in Wisconsin how that’s going. Kelly starts August 15.
+BULL CITY BULLSHIT
“They call it ‘Bull City,’ though, with the exception of a downtown statue, there are no bulls and there’s no evidence that there ever were.” That sentence begins Sunday’s generally pointless Guardian piece by Michael Keenan Gutierrez, a UNC writing instructor who lives in Chapel Hill, titled “A Postcard from Durham: Keeping It Dirty in North Carolina.” And, yes, our eyes are rolling, too. Right off the bat, Gutierrez refers to the story of how two Durham tobacco partners copped the bull logo from a jar of British mustard. That little bite of intellectual property became Bull Durham Tobacco. As time went on, the brand name stuck to the whole city, just like the scent of flue-cured tobacco stuck to residents’ clothes for many decades hence. According to Gutierrez, Bull Durham—both the tobacco and the 1988 movie—provide neat metaphors for the rapidly gentrifying Durham of today, “where myth and reality cross the street to avoid an awkward conversation.” Gutierrez writes about attending a Bulls game with his wife and struggling to avoid thinking about the movie, with clips being played on the big screen and spectators calling out lines from it. Note to the author: you’d be hardpressed to find any longtime Durhamites who recognize the city in that movie from anything but some of the locations. (The bar scenes were filmed at Mitch’s 6 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
Tavern in Raleigh.) So don’t over-read that movie thing. Whether we’re the highfalutin Northern transplants Gutierrez didn’t seem to notice in the crowd or the lily-white mustachioed dudes with the Southern drawls whom he did, we’ve just always thought it was cool a movie called Bull Durham about the Durham Bulls got made. And no, Mikey—can we call you Mikey?—Durham has never been reducible to the “rundown, backwater southern town of no repute,” as Gutierrez describes the film’s depiction. At times, in fact, the picture Gutierrez paints reminds us of the 2006 Duke lacrosse rape-accusation fiasco, when out-of-town media hacks told the world that Durham is just a rich white university surrounded by crime-ridden black neighborhoods. It wasn’t quite that simple then, and it sure as shit isn’t now. Gutierrez doesn’t realize it, but he provides his own rejoinder at the end. The scene takes place at American Tobacco Campus, where the writer is strolling leisurely with his wife after the game. They encounter an irritated man walking handin-hand with a screaming little boy. He writes: “My wife and I—trying our best at southern hospitality—smiled at the man, showing empathy with our eyes. The man stopped and said: ‘The fuck you looking at?’” Our thoughts exactly.
+MATH PROBLEMS
Few would argue that the Durham County Board of Elections botched the March primary. Voters across the county reported having to wait in line for several hours to cast their votes. Then, on May 5, the DCBOE announced that the State Board of Elections would be investigating a discrepancy discovered during an internal audit of the primary. Apparently, some provisional ballots—votes cast when there is a question about the validity of the voter’s eligibility—were mishandled by staff. Three losing candidates in the Durham County commissioners’ race—Elaine Hyman, Michael Page, and Fred Foster Jr.— formally protested the results. On Friday, the DCBOE held an emergency meeting to discuss these protests. It ended, somewhat improbably, with the DCBOE declaring that “it would not be unreasonable for the State Board of Elections to consider ordering a new primary for Durham County Board of Commissioners to address the public’s concerns.” A do-over primary would make sense, of course, if the math indicated that the mishandling of the ballots could have affected the out-
TL;DR: come. But, as the state and county boards have maintained, that is not the case. There are 759 potential votes up for grabs in the retallying of the county commission race. But the top vote-getting loser, Chairman Michael Page, trailed the last-place winner, newcomer James Hill, by over one thousand votes. Hyman and Foster are even further behind. Hill, not surprisingly, opposes the idea of re-do. “There is going to be minuscule voter turnout,” Hill says—especially since many students at Duke and N.C. Central would be on break during a summer primary. Simply put, more people would be disenfranchised by a lowturnout do-over than had their March ballots mishandled. And in addition to drawing fewer voters, special elections also cost a bunch of money. (The DCBOE declined to guess how much, since it’s unclear whether the re-do will be a standalone or be lumped in with an already-scheduled election.) That’s hard to justify, given that there’s no evidence suggesting the March results weren’t legitimate. So why do it? Hyman, who supports a new primary, says it’s about restoring confidence in the system. “When those of us who are candidates step out of that arena and run for public office and do not win, we still want to know the standing,” Hyman says. “Was I number seven, was I number eight, was I number six, or was I number five?” Ultimately, however, the decision lies with the SBOE, which was expected to render a decision on Tuesday afternoon, after the INDY went to press.
+DO RIGHT BY VETS
Wake County already has a program in place to match homeless veterans with housing. The problem is no one knows about it. Fresh off Memorial Day weekend, county commissioner Matt Calabria is working to raise awareness of a program he says could help end vet homelessness in Wake. The Wake County housing voucher
PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS
program places homeless and disabled people—disproportionately veterans—into privately owned housing. In return for their participation, the county guarantees these landlords that the rent will be paid on time and provides services to ensure stable housing placements. Under the program, tenants pay up to 30 percent of their incomes toward rent; the vouchers cover the rest. If a placement doesn’t work out, the county pays up to three months’ rent to allow landlords to find a new tenant or repair damage. All in all, it’s a pretty good deal—and similar programs have worked in New Orleans and Philadelphia, which claim to have mostly eliminated chronic veteran homelessness. “This is a great program for both landlords and tenants,” Calabria said in a statement. “Tenants receive stable housing that helps them get back on their feet. Landlords get to do a great service for our community while maintaining high occupancy rates and taking on minimal risk.” The program is mostly funded with federal grants—it cost about $230,0000 over the last two years, the county says—and since 1993, it has housed more than two hundred disabled veterans. However, nearly fifty veterans in Wake are still living in shelters because too few landlords are currently participating. “We have a strong effort in place,” Calabria added. “When I heard the only thing stopping us was that too few landlords knew about the program, my first thought was to see what we could do to raise awareness. If more landlords decide to give some very deserving folks a chance at a better life, they can make a major impact.” Interested landlords should contact David Harris, Wake County’s housing services program manager, at dharris@wakegov.com or (919) 212-8383. triangulator@indyweek.com This week’s report by Danny Hooley, David Hudnall, Aden Hizkias, and Jane Porter.
THE INDY’S QUALITY-OF-LIFE METER +3
Margaret Spellings says UNC will not enforce HB 2. Undergrads are welcome to eject the contents of their booze-soaked stomachs in whichever facility matches their gender identity.
+1
Art Pope forms a bipartisan group to suggest changes to HB 2. Phil Berger’s really interested in what you have to say, Art. Please make your checks payable to cash.
-2
The legislature considers rescinding a ban on dumping electronics in landfills. Next item on the agenda: ending recycling in our lifetime.
-2
The legislature moves forward with a bill to let Duke Energy off the hook for its coal-ash ponds. “All at once the moon clouded over/We heard a gurgling cry/A few seconds later/The captain’s helmet/ Was all that floated by.”
+2
The state prison system ends the broad use of solitary confinement. The state reserves the right to give naughty prisoners time-outs.
+2
The North Carolina-South Carolina border might soon be redrawn. “We’ll trade you Charlotte for Charleston,” says North Carolina.
+2
A Raleigh robbery victim runs over one of his alleged thieves. Meanwhile, Bobbie Sue took the money and ran.
-1
Wake County schools threaten to increase class sizes and decrease revenue for arts and sports if the county commission doesn’t increase their funding. Cutting art class will make time for the daily threehour roll call.
+3
UNC becomes to first unseeded team to ever win the NCAA lacrosse championship. Everyone is thrilled—except Mike Nifong, who breaks out in hives whenever he hears the word “lacrosse.”
This week’s total: +8 Year to date: -1 INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 7
indynews JOHN WILLIAMS FESTIVAL
FRI/SAT, JUNE 10-11 | 7:30PM Friday Concert Sponsor: Crabtree Valley Mall
Friday: music from Harry Potter Saturday: music from Star Wars, including The Force Awakens
THE MUSIC OF DAVID BOWIE
SAT, JUNE 25 | 7:30PM A full rock band joins the Symphony to explore David Bowie’s iconic music— including the hits “Space Oddity,” “Changes,” “Under Pressure,” “China Girl” and more.
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8 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
LAWMAKERS WANT TO ROUTE MILLIONS MORE TAXPAYER DOLLARS TO RELIGIOUS SCHOOLS THAT OPENLY DISCRIMINATE AGAINST LGBTQ STUDENTS BY PAUL BLEST
In 2012, the NCAA discovered that then-N.C. State basketball player Rodney Purvis had completed only eight core classes as a high school student at Raleigh’s Upper Room Christian Academy, half the required total for incoming student-athletes. Purvis, who graduated in a class of just four, was eventually cleared to play due to “unique circumstances” and later transferred to the University of Connecticut. Shortly after the NCAA investigation, Upper Room announced that it was downsizing to a K–5 school due to a “lack of funding.” In recent years, however, Upper Room has been buoyed by a state “opportunity scholarship” program that routes tax dollars to private, often religious schools. This year, it received $191,100 to fund forty-seven students’ tuition, accounting for nearly half of the school’s student body and making the school the program’s twelfth-largest beneficiary. But even that proved insufficient: in April, the school announced that it would close after this year. “It’s impossible to compete with a free education,” Bishop Patrick L. Wooden, an avowed anti-LGBTQ activist who has featured prominently at pro-HB 2 rallies, said in a statement at the time. It may be too late for Upper Room, but the General Assembly is now working diligently to make it easier for other private and religious schools to compete. And you’ll get to pay for it. In 2014, the state introduced opportunity scholarships, pitched as a means of letting low-income children in poorperforming schools escape to something better. One of twentyone such programs across the country, North Carolina’s voucher program provides up to $4,200 a year to students in households below the federal poverty line and pays 90 percent of tuition for students living at or barely above the poverty line. The program has come under fire since its inception. Under state law, voucher-funded schools don’t need to be accredited, and their teachers don’t need to be certified by the N.C. Board of Education. The schools can also create their own curriculum. While they have to provide some sort of standardized test, that test “could be the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills [or] it could be a test from 1950,” says N.C. Justice Center Education and Law Project director Matt Ellinwood. Or, as state Representative Graig Meyer, D-Orange, puts it: “We don’t have any way of knowing if the money is being used in schools that are even meeting the lowest possible standards for an acceptable education.” Critics like Meyer saw these vouchers as a way to undermine public schools and further privatize education. Some sued to overturn the law, but the N.C. Supreme Court’s Republican majority sided with the legislature. So this year, the voucher program paid nearly $13 million for more than
ILLUSTRATION BY SKILLET GILMORE
Tickets start at $28!
Hate in Your Name
three thousand students to attend 324 private schools—many of which, like Upper Room, are open about their discriminatory policies toward LGBTQ students, and all of which are largely unaccountable to taxpayers. Now lawmakers are going all-in. A bill moving through the Senate would add $10 million to the program every year, until the voucher fund reaches almost $135 million. Another bill, meanwhile, would modify a cap on the number of vouchers that can be awarded to students in kindergarten and first grade to just apply to kindergartners, which means more money will be spent on students who use the program for all twelve years. According to estimates from the N.C. Justice Center, these two bills will cost the state more than $128 million in the next five years. The bills, of course, are part of a larger effort to remake the state’s educational system. Other bills moving through the legislature right now include: a proposal to create an Achievement School District, which would allow charter school operators to take over troubled districts (an idea that has produced disastrous results in Tennessee); another to force public schools to share money from grants and private gifts with charter schools, but not the other way around; and a provision in the House budget to relax regulations on virtual charter schools, even after the state’s two pilot virtual charters both reported dropout rates of around 30 percent. “This is all part of a long-term effort to dismantle the public school system by diverting funding to unaccountable private schools that don't have to provide the same services as public schools,” says Logan Smith, communications director for Progress NC. “Government shouldn't be using taxpayer money to subsidize religion in the first place, but doing so at the expense of our public schools is especially problematic.” It’s even more problematic when that state-subsidized religion preaches discrimination against gay and trans students.
Several Raleigh schools that receive voucher funds have their school’s philosophy and/or handbook posted on their websites. At least four that serve high school students— Raleigh Christian Academy ($224,751 received in 2015–2016); North Raleigh Christian Academy ($83,742); Iron Academy ($16,660); and GRACE Christian School ($12,600)—explicitly say that students, or even their parents, being LGBTQ runs afoul of the code of conduct and is grounds for refusal of admission or expulsion. For example, the website of Iron Academy, an all-boys middle and high school, says that if “the atmosphere or conduct within a particular home is counter to or in opposition to the biblical lifestyle that the school teaches, the school reserves the right, within its sole discretion, to refuse admission of an applicant or to discontinue enrollment of a student.” The list of transgressions includes “practicing homosexual lifestyle or alternative gender identity.” Another two Raleigh high schools receiving voucher funds—Cardinal Gibbons ($11,490) and St. Thomas More Academy ($8,400)—are part of the Diocese of Raleigh, whose bishop, Michael F. Burbidge, supported Amendment 1 and vocally opposes the White House’s recent directive ordering publicly funded schools to provide transgender students access to bathrooms that conform to their gender identity. In a statement, Burbidge called that mandate “an attempt to coerce the public into embracing the federal government’s position regarding sexual identity.” According to Ellinwood, 70 percent of the schools participating in the voucher program are religious, and 90 percent of the state’s 3,595 vouchers went to religious schools this year. Since the participating public schools don’t receive federal funding, they aren’t prohibited from discriminating on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religion, wealth, disability, and gender identity. Nor do they have to abide by the Obama administration’s bathroom directive. (Last week, eleven states sued to challenge this mandate in federal court.) “This gets down to the lack of accountability in the program,” Ellinwood says, “where you really have no clue how many of these schools discriminate.” ● pblest@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 9
indynews
The Velvet Fog
NEIGHBORS THINK A DEVELOPER’S PLANS FOR THE VELVET CLOAK INN ARE UGLY, BUT THE CITY COUNCIL CAN’T HELP THEM EVEN IF IT WANTED TO BY JANE PORTER The ornate wrought-iron detailing and balconies reminiscent of homes in New Orleans’s Garden District—not to mention its location on the east end of Hillsborough Street, Raleigh’s historic thoroughfare—have made the Velvet Cloak Inn an icon since the early 1960s. It’s hosted countless weddings and events, housed famous guests, and served as Governor McCrory’s campaign headquarters as well as an informal space for late-night legislative sessions. But now Willie York’s pet project, named for the garment Sir Walter Raleigh laid in the mud for Queen Elizabeth, will likely be torn down to make way for 150 student-apartment units inside a sixstory, block-long, brick-stucco mixed box. The site has sat vacant for nearly a year, after owner David Smoot repossessed condos he’d sold to elderly and disabled tenants. After a deal with a Chicago hotelier for the property apparently fell through, an Atlantabased development company bought the two-and-ahalf-acre property. Peak Campus hopes to have the new building completed by next summer. Neighbors living in the adjacent Cameron Park, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, aren’t at all sold on the project, however. They don’t agree with Peak’s interpretation of the city’s development code, which has resulted in a six-story design on a site that they believe is zoned for five stories. They don’t believe that Peak has met the UDO’s landscaping requirements, and they think that the project skirts requirements for trees and a wide sidewalk. “Finally, but perhaps most importantly, the project simply lacks the quality we expect on one of Raleigh’s grander, more famous streets,” wrote Neil Riemann, president of the Cameron Park Neighborhood Association, in an April 5 letter to the developer and city staff. In other words, they think it’s ugly. In part because of its high-profile location, the project is the first major test of Raleigh’s newly adopted unified development ordinance. And it has exposed weaknesses in the way the new code is being applied, the biggest being that there are fewer opportunities for neighbors to engage with projects that don’t require rezoning, since site-plan proposals no longer go before the city council or any city commission. Instead, these projects only require staff approval to move forward. “We were able to provide some input [to the developer] because we’ve been doing this for a long time, but for most 10 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
The Velvet Cloak Inn
people in most neighborhoods, they are not even going to know this kind of thing is going on,” says Riemann. There are benefits to a public process, he adds, “particularly on things where you can’t really make rules, like ‘how does something look?’” Peak filed its original design plans with the city in March; since then it has made refinements based on feedback from city staffers and residents. The new design eliminates much
PHOTO BY JUSTIN COOK
of a large concrete wall across the front of the building, says Jonathon Barge, vice president for development for Peak Campus. The building’s façade was updated as well. “Our designs are evolving, and we are very early in the process,” Barge wrote in an email to the INDY. “We will continue to engage the community, listen, get input, and make adjustments as we move forward.” But Riemann says Peak has been unwilling to budge on the height issue. This is a foremost concern, because three properties that contribute to the historic character of Cameron Park—homes built in the twenties and thirties, each around thirty feet tall—are located just twenty-five feet from what would be the eastern wall of the new building. The structure would tower over them, creating an incompatibility that could lead to the eventual demolition of the homes. Peak says it designed the building to be several feet below the allowed height for the site’s zoning, and the bottom floor is actually a basement. City planning staff will make the ultimate determination on the height question in the next few weeks; the site plan is still under review, meaning staffers can still bring up any UDO-related issue with Peak. But under the UDO, when the planners make a decision, the city council’s hands will be tied. City council member Russ Stephenson says this isn’t ideal. He’s looking at ways “to bring site plans that have substantial impacts on surrounding contexts or in high-profile locations” before the council for review. “There’s also discussion that the Appearance Commission review upcoming site plans, to see how they’re panning out relative to the UDO’s intent and purpose,” Stephenson says. “Then we can have a more predictable process where everyone knows up-front what the expectations are and have a clear expectation of development built to UDO site-plan standards.” l jporter@indyweek.com
T:4.875”
Gallery Talk with Burk Uzzle Thursday, June 2, 6 PM (5:30 PM cash bar) Meet the celebrated photographer and southern native whose work is on view in Burk Uzzle: Southern Landscapes through September 18. 2001 Campus Drive, Durham I nasher.duke.edu/uzzle Burk Uzzle, Clear Cut Church, North Carolina, 2006. Archival pigment print, 44¼× 52¼ inches (112.4 × 132.7 cm). Courtesy of the artist. © Burk Uzzle. T:10”
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The Accidental Election YES, THERE’S ANOTHER PRIMARY. YES, YOU SHOULD VOTE. YES, WE’RE HERE TO HELP. THIS SECOND PRIMARY OF 2016 WASN’T THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY’S INTENT, BUT IT WAS ITS DOING. Earlier this year, with the March 15 primaries right around the corner, a federal judge ruled that the legislature’s congressional district maps constituted an illegal racial gerrymander. So the legislature had to redraw the maps and reschedule the congressional primaries for June 7. Because of the time crunch between June and November, there will be no runoff. Whoever earns a plurality of what will doubtless be abysmally low-turnout elections wins. And because of the way these districts are drawn—the new ones are no more competitive than the previous ones, though they’re less obviously influenced by race—in many places across the state, the primary is the only election that matters. To further complicate matters: in April, a divided N.C. Supreme Court let stand a lower court ruling that threw out a law passed last year allowing Associate Justice Robert Edmunds to run in a retention election rather than a competitive one— another judicial rebuke to the legislature’s partisan overreach. And because the congressional elections were moved around, so too was the primary for a Wake County Superior Court seat. It’s quite the cluster, isn’t it? Chances are you haven’t heard much about these races. That’s where we come in. Below you’ll find our endorsements for primaries in the Second, Fourth, and Sixth Congressional Districts, as well as the Supreme Court and Superior Court elections. We hope you find them useful. Again, there’s an election on June 7. Please vote. JOHN MCNEIL
U.S. Congress, Second District (Republican)
Renee Ellmers
U.S. Representative Renee Ellmers is, by no stretch of the imagination, good at her job. Elected in 2010 as part of the tea party wave, she’s your typical “rail against government spending” conservative who voted to keep defending the Defense of Marriage Act and, most recently, endorsed Donald Trump. And yet, possibly as a testament to just how bad the modern GOP is, Ellmers is a much better choice than either of her opponents, fellow U.S. Representative George Holding and failed U.S. Senate candidate Greg Brannon, a Cary ob-gyn. Ellmers broke with her fellow Republicans on a 2015 vote to roll back President Obama’s executive order on immigration. While handwringing over her opposition to “amnesty,” she rightly said the bill would negatively affect businesses in her district. Ellmers also did her part to derail a bill that would have banned abortions after twenty weeks. For these transgressions, Ellmers has been branded a RINO with a fury usually reserved for people like John Boehner. Before the districts were redrawn, she faced several primary opponents, including the Nation12 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
al Review-endorsed Jim Duncan. Once the General Assembly redrew her district, it became clear that the state’s Republicans had little affection for her: they shoved her into the same district as Holding, who is well known for his conservative leanings. Whereas Ellmers attached herself to the “establishment” wing of the Republican House caucus, Holding, a former Jesse Helms staffer who was elected in 2012 to represent the Thirteenth District, has been a reliable conservative backbencher. Ellmers has recently been attacked by Holding and the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity—which had never before spent money against a Republican incumbent—for being the only Republican to vote against an amendment that would have prioritized deportations of undocumented immigrants who committed sex crimes. In reality, Ellmers, along with the National Task Force to End Sexual and Domestic Violence and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, opposed the amendment because it would have reduced reporting of domestic violence. The third candidate, Brannon, has previously advocated a rollback of child labor laws and said that the Second Amendment includes the right to have a nuclear weap-
on. After the Sandy Hook shooting, Brannon said, “Senator [Kay] Hagan says we got to have a nice debate and discussion about what to do. See, that’s called a democracy, which is actually socialism, which is called ‘majority rules.’” All of that is wrong. Ellmers, at least, has produced an inkling of courage twice in her life—and has never proposed giving everyone access to nukes. It’s a ridiculously low bar to clear, but since we can’t say the same for Holding or Brannon, we endorse Renee Ellmers. Besides, if the Kochs hate her, she must be doing something right.
U.S. Congress, Second District (Democrat)
John McNeil
Raleigh attorney John McNeil is everything Second District Democrats could want in a candidate against Holding or Ellmers in November: smart, tough as hell, and staunchly progressive. A Marine Corps veteran who served in
the Gulf War, McNeil is a firebrand with a background that deflects all of the usual Republican attacks against Democrats. He’s a strong antiwar voice with the soldier’s résumé to back it up, something that could provide an interesting counter should he face either Holding or Ellmers, who both voted against the Iran nuclear deal last year. McNeil has strong views on Wall Street reform, income inequality, and health care, echoing Senator Bernie Sanders when he calls the Affordable Care Act “flawed,” though “an improvement over the old system.” He’s a harsh critic of the NRA and has all the right positions on civil rights, criminal justice, and climate change. McNeil is, suffice to say, a progressive through and through. Along with Ron Sanyal, McNeil filed to run against Holding in the Thirteenth District before the districts were redrawn; both filed to run in the Second this time around, even though they live outside the district. Sanyal has run for Congress before, in 2014, coming in third in the primary. His platform pushes jobs, public education, and a more equitable justice system—something he has in common with McNeil. He, too, supports moving toward
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EILEEN IVERS a single-payer health care system. Three challengers join McNeil and Sanyal: Jane Watson, Steve Hight, and Elton Brewington. Watson has an interesting connection to Sanders: the Vermont senator notes in his book that he recruited her to run for the Burlington City Council while he was the city’s mayor. Watson cites both Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren in talking about campaign finance reform, single-payer health care, and the country’s infrastructure failures. Hight, meanwhile, is a criminal defense attorney who brings a sorely needed perspective to criminal justice issues, talking about the need to “demilitarize our police departments” and advocating for the end of mandatory minimums. Little is known about Brewington, who lives in Clayton and says he works with minority students at a community college. We do know that he talks about ending corporate tax breaks and improving access to affordable health care, which are good goals to have. All five candidates seem to be on the same page on most issues, but we’re backing John McNeil. In our view, he’s most likely to give the Republicans a run for their money, even as a big underdog.
U.S. Congress, Fourth District (Republican)
Sue Googe
religious freedom and education, both stating that they believe in educational choice and reject Common Core. Googe is a Ron Paul-style libertarian who focuses on criminal justice reform and marijuana legalization, states’ rights to make decisions on abortion and gay marriage, and a simplified tax system. Kimball is an army veteran who believes in strengthening the military’s capabilities and backs legal immigration and a path to citizenship. Per her libertarian leanings, Googe says she believes in small government and, in the questionnaire she returned to the INDY, writes that the United States does not need to be “a self-funded world policeman.” She thinks securing American borders is the best way to defend from terrorist attacks, and she supports normalizing relations with Cuba and Iran. She wants to replace the Affordable Care Act with a single-payer system (which isn’t exactly orthodox libertarianism) and plans to support Donald Trump (who leans more toward authoritarianism than Ayn Rand), though she says she “would not be a rubberstamp for him in Congress.” Googe undermines her own anti-violence message by posing in a campaign photo with an assault rifle in one hand and a handgun in the other. But, overlooking this error in judgment, we have to endorse her over Kimball simply because she seems to have a better handle on the issues facing the country. We know more about what Googe believes in than what Kimball does—his campaign website addresses only national security, education, and immigration—and we empathize with her antiwar leanings and desire to cooperate with foreign powers over Kimball’s decidedly hawkish approach. Calling for criminal justice reform doesn’t hurt either. So we’re fine letting Googe be the Republicans’ sacrificial lamb this year.
No Republican will beat incumbent David Price in November. But two candidates, both with compelling personal stories, are giving it a go anyway. They are Sue Googe, a Cary real estate entrepreneur who immigrated to the United States from China in her twenties, and Teiji Kimball, a Durham minister who is of mixed African-American and Japanese heritage. Googe and Kimball have similar platforms in some respects, and, wisely, they both refrain from emphasizing contentious social issues that would alienate liberal and moderate voters in the Fourth District. They are most closeMARK WALKER ly aligned on the issues of
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U.S. Congress, Sixth District (Republican)
Mark Walker
Neither candidate in this Republican primary returned the INDY’s questionnaire, but here’s every-
JOSEPH M. BRYAN, JR., THEATER IN THE MUSEUM PARK 2110 BLUE RIDGE ROAD, RALEIGH INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 13
BECKY HOLT
INDY VOTING GUIDE ELECTION DAY IS TUESDAY, JUNE 7. CHATHAM COUNTY 919-545-8500, http://www.chathamnc.org DURHAM COUNTY 919-560-0700, http://dconc.gov/government/ departments-a-e/board-of-elections ORANGE COUNTY 919-245-2350, http://www.orangecountync.gov/ departments/board_of_elections/index.php WAKE COUNTY 919-856-6240, http://www. wakecounty.gov/elections
U.S. CONGRESS
U.S. Congress, Second District (Republican) Renee Ellmers U.S. Congress, Second District (Democrat) John McNeil U.S. Congress, Fourth District (Republican) Sue Googe U.S. Congress, Sixth District (Republican) Mark Walker
turned-pharmaceutical representative “is a constitutional conservative” who “believes in a republic, not a democracy.” He wants to immediately repeal Obamacare, as well as to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education. Hardin calls for an “immediate return to deportations” of immigrants in the United States illegally—a return from what, one might reasonably wonder—and is a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment and opponent of abortion rights. Walker may be ineffectual, and both candidates are ill informed. But Hardin is downright scary. Stick with the devil you know.
N.C. Supreme Court Associate Justice
Michael R. Morgan
The stakes for the N.C. Supreme Court race cannot be exaggerated. If it were up to the state’s ruling party—and it almost was—we wouldn’t even be having an election for that
N.C. SUPREME COURT
N.C. Supreme Court Associate Justice Michael R. Morgan
WAKE COUNTY SUPERIOR COURT Wake County Superior Court, District 10C Becky Holt
thing we know about them. Incumbent Mark Walker is a Baptist minister from Greensboro running for his second term. According to the Asheboro CourierTribune (which also wasn’t able to speak with Walker or his opponent), Walker is one of the more ineffective members of Congress. Of the twelve bills he sponsored during his first term, none of them made it out of the House; of 123 measures he cosponsored, just two became law. Walker sits on three congressional committees, including Homeland Security. He’s made some dumb remarks about lasering and blitzing “foreigners sneaking in with drug cartels” and said he would stand up to Obama if the president declared Sharia or martial law—which, um, no. (He later walked back those comments in the Greensboro News & Record, stating that he’s not a career politician and his comments were taken out of context.) And of course Walker supports HB 2. So Walker sucks. Unfortunately, Walker’s challenger, Chris Hardin, would not be an appreciable improvement. Besides lacking any experience in public office, the cop14 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
MICHAEL R. MORGAN seat. Instead, there would be a “retention election,” something lawmakers ginned up to protect Republican Justice Robert Edmunds and their 4–3 majority on the court. If voters gave him a thumbs-down, our Republican governor would’ve appointed a successor. Edmunds, given the legal option between a retention election and a regular one, opted for retention. But then a Superior Court panel threw out that retention law. The case went to the state Supreme Court, where, minus a recused Edmunds, the six justices split, and the lower court’s decision stuck. So here we are. And that should tell you all you need to know about Edmunds’s principles. But there’s a bigger reason he needs to go. Twice, he’s sided with the court’s conservative majority to allow the continued use of the racially gerrymandered legislative districts. With Edmunds on the court, the GOP
maintains its unshakeable grip on power in this state— even if, in a fairer form of democracy, it wouldn’t. As the only Republican in the Supreme Court race, Edmunds will certainly make the two-person runoff in November. Of his three opponents—two Democrats and one unaffiliated candidate in an ostenbibly nonpartisan race—we endorse Wake County Superior Court Judge Michael R. Morgan. Morgan, a Democrat with twenty-one years of experience on the superior and district courts, is highly rated by the state bar. His career in the courts and in the classroom as a law lecturer shows an impressive dedication to his profession and the community. He’s reluctant to talk politics and has criticized Edmunds for trumpeting his own conservative cred. Sabra J. Faires deserves an honorable mention just for filing the lawsuit that made this election possible. The politically unaffiliated Raleigh attorney says she’s running “to get politics out of our highest court.” We still prefer Morgan’s experience, but Faires definitely demonstrates a mission to serve the law, not “the agenda of a political party,” as she puts it. The other Democrat, Daniel Robertson, is a Davie County attorney and registered Democrat who served for six years as general counsel for Bank of the Carolinas. He tells the INDY that one motivation for running is “disgust with the infusion of politics into the judiciary.” He’s also the author of the 2007 self-published book Definitive Proof: The Secret Service Murder of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, which posits the theory in the title. (Four stars on Amazon.)
Wake County Superior Court, District 10C Becky Holt With seven years left in his term, Paul Gessner peaced out on his Wake County Superior Court post at the end of 2015. He’s now serving as attorney counsel for the Wake County Sheriff’s Office, a gig that allows him to double dip—collecting state retirement benefits while drawing a full paycheck from Wake County. Nice work if you can get it. Five attorneys have filed to succeed him on the bench. The primary on Tuesday is
nonpartisan and designed to whittle the race down to two for the election in November. Fun fact about Wake County Superior Court judges: all five of them are men. (Kendra Hill, a special superior court judge in Wake, is an exception, but she was appointed by former Governor Bev Perdue and is not required to live in the district.) A greater female perspective on the bench seems like a worthy goal. Even if that weren’t the case, though, we still think Becky Holt is the best pick to fill Gessner’s vacancy. As assistant district attorney in Wake County, Holt has successfully prosecuted several high-profile cases, including the 2000 fatal poisoning of UNC-Chapel Hill AIDS researcher Eric Miller and the grisly murder of Laura Jean Ackerson by Amanda and Grant Hayes. Holt notes that she has more experience than any of the other candidates. That is hard to dispute; she has been in the DA’s office for twenty-seven years. Karlene Turrentine worked to protect farmers’ rights at the Land Loss Prevention Project in Durham before starting her own firm. She has served as the attorney for Warren County since 2009, but has lately come under fire there for submitting legal fees dramatically higher than those of her predecessors. Hoyt Tessener, a personal injury lawyer in Raleigh, has had some scrapes with the law that give us pause. He was charged with assault in 2011 after punching a bar manager. (Tessener was found not guilty after it could not be determined who threw the first punch.) He also caused a disturbance in a Wilmington police station after his wife was pulled over for a DUI. Ronnie Ansley has run for and lost just about every position imaginable: lieutenant governor, U.S. House, N.C. Supreme Court, agricultural commission, and, in 2014, Wake County District Court judge. He has presented himself as a moderate in the past but is now talking about “personal responsibility” and “family values,” conservative dog-whistle phrases that give us the creeps. Likewise, Michael Denning, who has served as a Wake County District Court judge since 2010, boasts that he is “the only conservative choice.” No thanks. backtalk@indyweek.com
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PULLING UP STAKES
THE CARRACK’S CHANGE OF ADDRESS REDRAWS THE DOWNTOWN ART SCENE’S BORDERS BY BRIAN HOWE
D
urham Independent Dance Artists shows usually take place in nightclubs, art galleries, warehouses—anywhere but theaters. Ginger Wagg and Wild Actions’ AndAlwaysWhy (see sidebar) is no exception. Its premiere this week will also cut the ribbon on the Torus Building, a new space at 947 East Main Street. But already, Wagg is transforming the blank slate. At a recent preview, two performers scribbled furiously on a paper curtain. It bisected a long, narrow room with planked floors, like the deck of a ship; a high ceiling in the style of pressed tin; and traces of exposed brick that whisper of a layered history. Its likeness to another Durham gallery is striking, as if the Carrack Modern Art had been scooped out of its Parrish Street loft and poured into a street-level storefront. On one side of the curtain, a front door gestures downtown by way of Main. On the other, a rear door points down a flight of new wooden steps, through the courtyard of SPECTRE Arts and toward Golden Belt. This is significant. The room is a more than symbolic bridge between those poles, and Wagg’s temporary transformation of it foreshadows a lasting one. As of July 1, this tall, natural-light-filled gallery will be the new home of the Carrack, which is leaving its niche above Loaf bakery to ensconce itself within the artist colony growing in the Torus Building, the multi-studio facility Alicia Lange recently opened. Lange also owns SPECTRE Arts, a gallery that has worked alongside the Carrack to vitalize and diversify the Durham art scene. Rising rents and endless construction in the heart of downtown certainly played a major role in the decision by Carrack director Laura Ritchie to leave the roughshod loft where she grew her gallery into a local landmark. A snap reaction about big money pushing little art to the fringes is natural, and it’s partly correct. But the upshot is more complex and less gloomy than that. “This is not a story of how gentrification is destroying the Durham art scene,” Ritchie says. “It’s an exciting story of how we’ve out16 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
grown where we started.” Indeed, this a story about some of the most influential people in the art scene harnessing pressure to run away from something into momentum to run toward something better: a broader, more collaborative community in a more expansive space. In moving, the Carrack will consolidate ties with Lange and with Golden Belt in an effort to bolster the district as an arts community. In the process, it stands to dramatically shift the center of gravity in Durham’s artistic social life—and maybe even change the way you think about downtown.
T
he Carrack is celebrating its fifth anniversary in conjunction with its move, and it has weathered downtown’s sea changes well. When it opened, foot traffic on Parrish tended to stop at the Blue Coffee Cafe. The Carrack, alongside the likes of Bull City Burger and Monuts, helped change that. But since January, when the little park abutting Parrish turned into a gaping construction site for a skyscraper, it’s been 2011
all over again—except now Blue Coffee and Monuts are gone. We’ve seen other local businesses, such as Nice Price Books in Carrboro, wither when construction cut off casual stop-ins. But the Carrack had already become an intentional destination. It built its dedicated community by pursuing values—velocity, openness, diversity—that resonate in Durham. The Carrack runs its shows for uncommonly short two-week periods, drawing hundreds of artists into its ambit per year. It’s a lively event space, welcoming musicians, filmmakers, poets, and especially dancers, with many events from DIDA, Culture Mill, and Justin Tornow. And its most basic premise is artist empowerment: Ritchie basically hands them the keys and then lets them keep every cent of their sales. This high turnover and low bar to entry suits a quickly developing scene. More exhibits equals more receptions, the main way many engage with art shows, and the performances tap into communities outside of visual art. By creating an open space and
then making sure it stays full, Ritchie has galvanized powerful social energies. “There are so many galleries that charge you thirty-five dollars to submit two pieces and potentially get rejected,” says Saba Taj, who has had two solo shows at the Carrack, which she says distinguishes itself through “the autonomy they give their artists and the agency built into their framework.” “The Carrack realizes artists need money from sales rather than giving it to an institution that leaves a lot of people out,” she adds. In addition to a devoted audience, the Carrack had a sympathetic landlord, Harry Adams, at ASF Downtown. Its rent, though rising, isn’t as high as you might think— $1,300 a month in 2016, paid in a lump sum at the beginning of the year. In any case, the rent was within reach after the gallery doubled its fundraising to $30,000 in its Muse Masquerade at 21c Museum Hotel last fall. That was enough to add its first paid staffers in Janurary—Ritchie as executive director and Kerry Crocker as director of operations—to its roughly twenty volunteers.
GINGER WAGG & WILD ACTIONS: ANDALWAYSWHY
Thursday, June 2–Sunday, June 5, 8 p.m., $10–$20 The Torus Building, Durham www.gingerwagg.com
first solo show (The Valley, C. Neyland, July 5–16). But now, in one of the last remaining middle-class neighborhoods near downtown, the gallery has the chance to engage a community that is broader and more local. “I hope our programming continues to shift with the community around us,” Ritchie says. “I don’t know what will come from the people in the neighborhood, but we’ll certainly shift to accommodate what they want to see. And the appeal of being surrounded by other arts organizations, part of a larger collaborative effort that I think will have a lot of strength in how Durham changes, was worth giving up on the heart of downtown.”
S
The exterior of the new Carrack at 947 East Main Street So the Carrack could have stuck it out downtown. But Ritchie had been passively looking for a new space since the gallery opened, and actively searching for the last eighteen months. This was mainly because its famed accessibility had one glaring flaw— it wasn’t physically accessible to everyone. This came into sharp focus last year, when Ritchie wanted to present a show by Felicia Robinson, an artist with cerebral palsy. The Carrack’s bent flight of steep stairs, part of its charm, was impassable by wheelchair (though Robinson’s family, incredibly, once carried her up). In the end, Ritchie took the show to SPECTRE Arts. When the Torus Building came along, the accessible space she had patiently awaited appeared, in friendly hands and laden with new collaborative possibilities. “We’ve been able to do this at our own pace,” Ritchie says. “We’re strong enough as an organization to change locations and let that be a part of our growth, rather than a scary, disorienting shift. By moving out a little further, we can have an easier-to-stomach
PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER
price and be more intentional about how we share the burden of that cost with our neighbors in that arts district. I think that’s a more long-term solution.” The new Carrack is a little smaller than the old one, but it feels larger because of its more regular dimensions. Ritchie appreciates that it preserves the Carrack’s distinct aesthetic. But the plywood and drywall of the new space will be much easier to hang art on and patch than the old space’s impractical brick and plaster. “It checks all the boxes of that magical feeling you get in our current space,” Ritchie says. “It was important that it felt like the old Carrack in some way. It’s hard to put a value on that, but there’s something that happens to people when they walk in—a feeling. This space has that, too, and I walked into many that didn’t.” The Carrack’s mission to connect artists, particularly marginalized and emerging ones, with social and financial support remains the same. The first exhibit in its new space will be a recent art school graduate’s
cientific Properties broke ground in the Durham art scene when it opened the Golden Belt studio, gallery, and retail complex in a former textile mill in 2008. But it’s always felt stubbornly separate from downtown proper—though less so since SPECTRE Arts became a Third Friday destination and, more recently, The Shed brought in new nightlife. The Carrack could be just the tipping point the district needs. “I think the Durham art scene is shifting geographically and conceptually, and our move is a part of that broader shift,” Ritchie says. “We’re excited about helping continue to activate [the Golden Belt area] as an arts district.” Heather Gordon, one of the most active artists in Durham, is “not a joiner” by her own reckoning. She didn’t discover the Carrack until several years into its lifespan, when she decided she needed to make more connections to the art scene. “They’ve always been very good at sending out information, inviting and welcoming people, opening the door,” Gordon says. “I found a lovely place I could exist in because I didn’t feel like I had to be a member.” Gordon is the artist liaison at Golden Belt, where she has a studio. She says Scientific Properties CEO Gary Kueber gave her one directive: “make it cool.” She responded by filling its unused studios with pop-up shows and residencies, which have become Golden Belt’s main contact points with public life.
“I had spent a couple of years trying to get people to coordinate, but for the most part it didn’t work, because artists don’t function well in really large group dynamics,” Gordon says. “We started seeing a lot of artists leaving the space, mostly around money issues. I thought we needed to bring in the kinds of artists we want to see here and let them do whatever the hell they want.” Now Gordon is helping to coordinate the more intimate Torus Building. It represents more than the four artist studios separated from the gallery that will soon be the Carrack by a wall made of salvaged SPECTRE boards. “Me and [Alicia] were really hoping to get Laura to move to us,” Gordon says. “We could see that would pull a lot more community down to enjoy all the other things we had already built. Al just looked at me one day and said, ‘I’m making this building,’ and within a month, she had it done it. I’ve never seen anything like it.” The Torus is wreathed in an ambitious, if embryonic, vision of building the Carrack, SPECTRE Arts, and Golden Belt into a holistically healthy arts district—and then building it outward. The studios are administrated by Lange, who has owned the building since 2012 and was spurred to finally open it because of the new collaborative possiblities in the air. Otherwise, the specific roles of the people behind the Torus are as abstract and openended as its concept of community, which was developed in conversations among Ritchie, Lange, Gordon, SPECTRE employee Leif Gann-Matzen, and several others. "Heather came up with the Torus moniker, and it fit our vision," Lange says. "But vision is in the eyes of those who inhabit [the building] ... the artists that reside there as well as those who will come and participate." “Torus” refers not, as you might guess, to a bull, but to a geometric expression of circular flow. Gordon settled on the shape as she researched systems; it was about inner and outer balance among wholes and their parts. “The arts themselves, the administrators, the building owners, the people that come to see and share—all can exist in a balance in a toroidal system,” Gordon explains. INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 17
GINGER WAGG TEARS DOWN THE CURTAIN BETWEEN SPECTATOR AND STAGE AndAlwaysWhy, the “experiential live movement and music installation” that Ginger Wagg and Wild Actions will unveil at the Torus Building June 2–5, has been in development for three years. But in another way, it’s the piece Wagg has always been working toward. You might know Wagg more as a musician—in indie pop duo Veelee or experimental soundand-movement project Reflex Arc—than as a dance artist. But she studied dance at George Mason and then worked with companies on site-specific dance projects in Washington, D.C., before getting sidetracked by music when she moved to the Triangle in 2008. Her DIDA debut picks up that thread. The performance involves giant rolls of butcher’s paper, ping-pong balls, monologues, movement, music, and seven performers, two of them percussionists. That’s Wild Actions, aka local improv music mainstays Dave and Kerry Cantwell, who create a soundscape via Wagg’s audience-responsive graphic notation. In AndAlwaysWhy, viewers are participants, and the way they move through and interact with the space defines the performance. Interaction is one of the three I’s that run through all of Wagg’s dance work, along with improvisation and installation. “Getting an audience out of a dark theater in a chair where they feel like they can’t move has been part of my mission for a long time,” she says. It’s also a mission of DIDA’s, whose invitation to Wagg to submit a piece was the push she needed to complete AndAlwaysWhy. “It’s structured improvisation, but only a few things are set in stone,” Wagg says. “The magic of the mistake is essential to what I believe in and want to accomplish.” You also might call it structured collaboration. As the author of the piece, Wagg sets the conceptual bounds that her collaborators and audiences fill in. Sarah Honer, one of the piece’s
“There’s personal coherence, my own Ginger Wagg (far left) previews a flow. When I work with other Torus sequence from AndAlwaysWhy as members, I’m moving into a local social Carrack director Laura Ritchie system that also has a chance to have (center, red shirt) looks on. balance in its own toroidal flow.” PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER For Gordon, the goal is to nurture the large, sustainable community she needs to realize her large-scale project ideas. A xpanding how we think about healthy art scene requires versatility, and the downtown will be increasingly Torus represents a contrasting alternative necessary as the city center becomes to Golden Belt, not a challenger. Torus increasingly impenetrable. Ritchie cites the studios are a little cheaper, smaller, and Scrap Exchange’s move to Lakewood as an sparer. You get a shell with electricity—and example of the same proactive momentum an understanding that you’ll be enmeshed now driving the Carrack. in the district’s cultural life through exhibits And Golden Belt is less than a mile from and collaborations. the center of downtown. It’s on the Bull City “If this goes well, it will be an opportunity Connector, and it has copious free parking. for us to mutually empower each other, To underscore its accessibility, Ritchie will because there’s a synergistic wholeness lead a procession there on June 25. It begins to the system that doesn’t exist in Golden with a closing reception at the old space at 5 Belt,” Gordon says. “But that will require all p.m. and then heads down Main to the new individuals to have personal coherence. The space at 6:30, followed by a party with food, next six months are a testing period. … I’m drinks, and performances. excited to see where it goes.” It’s OK to be both excited to see the new space and sad to bid the old one goodbye. But,
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guides, was Wagg’s closest advisor. Liam O’Neill, another guide, wrote the monologue about Marina Abramović that began the preview we saw. Emily Withers and Katie O’Neil scribble whatever they feel on the paper, a centerpiece of Justin Blatt's set, which has as much presence as the performers. More than an answer, the piece is a question: What happens when certain boundaries between performers and audiences are removed? “I’m questioning the rules we assign ourselves or feel we’re being assigned in a performance space,” Wagg explains, “which sometimes traps a person into a smaller version of themselves. How do I do that for myself when I’m an audience member—experience what’s around me and inside me at the same time?” Wagg’s piece has a history with the Carrack, after holding a preview and a fundraiser there, so it’s apt that it has wound up in what will soon become the new Carrack. She's grateful to the Carrack's Laura Ritchie and the Torus's Alicia Lange for their commitment to her show. “I was searching for five months, and I held off creating a lot of the structure because I knew it was going to be site-induced,” Wagg says. “Just being in that building created much of the show, in a way.” As for your experience of the piece—well, it’s really up to you. After it’s set in motion, it’s mostly out of its creator’s hands, even as she performs in it. Wagg's only wish is that people stay from beginning to end. “If they do more interaction than that, great,” she says. “If they end up writing on a piece of paper or ripping some off, touching a drum— all that stuff is good. But that’s not for me to decide. There are so many ways to interact that for me to have a list of possibilities would not be respecting their ability to make their own decisions.” —Brian Howe
in a happy twist, you don’t have to start missing it until 2017 at the earliest. Saba Taj is a member of the Durham Artists Movement, a collective of people of color and LGBTQ artists. She learned the Carrack was planning to move because she’s involved in a group show slated for September. It gave her and Catherine Edgerton an idea that earned the approval of the rest of DAM: What if they could have their own space on Parrish? “I reached out to Laura, and there were some other plans in the works,” Taj says. “But she heard us, and she said, ‘This is right and needs to happen,’ and put her force behind our idea.” Ritchie arranged to sublet the last six months of her lease to DAM, which is currently raising funds (a benefit with live music and performances will take place at
406 North Queen Street at 4 p.m. on June 18). Starting July 4, the group will use the Parrish loft to highlight the work of artists who can be marginalized even in progressive spaces. Taj, who has been on Carrack jury panels, notes that, while it’s a welcoming space for people of color, very few tend to be among its many applicants. “What would it mean to set up a framework that breaks down those barriers of access?” she asks. “What would it look like to start a space with a clear intention of privileging exactly those voices? Those are things we’re thinking about specifically.” Come next year, the fate of 111 West Parrish Street is unknown. The rent will go up, and DAM is unlikely to stay, though it will probably be looking for another space. Whether it finds one in the dense city center or in some sparking new district, it’s the perfect grace note for the Carrack, which has always put its community first, as it begins an exciting new chapter—for itself and, maybe, for downtown. l bhowe@indyweek.com
FARM TO FORK SUSTAINABLE SUPPER Haw River Ballroom, Saxapahaw Friday, June 3, 6 p.m., $15–$35 www.farmtoforknc.com
FARM TO FORK PICNIC
Breeze Family Farm, Hurdle Mills Sunday, June 5, 4–7 p.m., $100 www.farmtoforknc.com
Crop Management FARM TO FORK IS AN EXPENSIVE DAY OF FOOD IN A FIELD––AND AN ESSENTIAL WAY TO RAISE THE NEXT BUNCH OF FARMERS Ross and Jillian Mickens take a breather at Open Door Farm.
BY GRAYSON HAVER CURRIN Jillian and Ross Mickens sit perched on a wayward assembly of sagging hay bales, plopped between the short, straight rows of the small rectangular plots on their fortythree acre farm in Orange County. It’s not yet eight on this Friday morning, but the Mickenses are already nearing their third full hour in the fields. Ross has been riding a red tractor, pulling an elaborate contraption that cuts rows into the ground and instantly rolls a tight sheet of shiny black plastic over the surface. Jillian walks behind him, using hand signals or, if he’s not looking, hoarse yells to warn him that the machine has misfired again. This happens about every ten feet. Jillian reaches down, pulls a clod of grass or a root from beneath the weed-
PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER
thwarting tarp, pitches it to the side, and motions him ahead. If all goes well, rows of eggplant, sweet potato, and squash will soon push through holes in the plastic. But for now, already covered in dirt and flush with the sun before many have begun the daily commute, Ross and Jillian seem content to stop and talk about, surprisingly, social media and streaming tutorials—the farmer in Winston-Salem who taught them about overhead sprinklers or the Maryland man who has offered some tips on kale production. “I talk to people all across the country through Instagram about farming,” Jillian says, smiling and blinking in the sunshine. “I don’t know how people farmed without YouTube. ‘How do you plow?’ Go to YouTube.” The Mickenses are thirty-two-year-old
high school sweethearts, together since they met in the lunchroom of their rural North Carolina school nearly two decades ago. They both graduated from N.C. State, after which Jillian earned a master’s degree as a dietician from UNC and Ross took a job as a computer engineer. After his early tasks in the fields, Ross still drives an hour into Research Triangle Park to work at Lenovo. Jillian stays home and runs the place with two part-time employees. This is the couple’s second year of working on what they call “Open Door Farm,” an abandoned parcel that once boasted rows of tobacco and wheat and that they found online. Since 2014, they’ve bulldozed saplings and cut into grassy expanses, restored a tiny farmhouse and even found a sprightly country dog, Charlie. Every day is an adven-
ture, a learning exercise in both teamwork and problem solving. “This is not like buying a house in the suburbs, where they just turn over every few years,” says Ross. “You’re here for a while.” The Mickenses are not only in the process of rebuilding one quiet, isolated farm, tucked from plain sight by a long driveway and a tall row of trees. They are also participating in a much larger process of adding youth and energy back into agriculture, a profession that U.S. Department of Agriculture studies INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 19
SAM KASS AND ANDREA REUSING Saturday, June 4, 6 p.m., $195 The Durham Hotel, Durham www.farmtoforknc.com
Season of Plenty
ANDREA REUSING TALKS THE BLOOM OF LOCAL FARMS AND WHAT MAKES NORTH CAROLINA AGRICULTURE UNIQUE BY EMMA LAPERRUQUE
Morning planting on Open Door Farm PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER continue to say is aging toward extinction. The pair had some help joining these ranks, too. In 2012, they attended a ten-week workshop at the “Breeze Farm Enterprise Incubator,” a program that guides aspiring farmers through the basics of small-scale sustainable agriculture. For the next three years, they worked a small plot at Breeze Farm, acquiring new skills in the field while learning how to take their yield to market. At N.C. State, the Center for Environmental Farming Systems, or CEFS, uses a farm in Goldsboro to nurture apprentices and interns in hopes that they, too, will become farmers. The agrarian equivalent of urban incubators like American Underground or HQ Raleigh, these spaces are rebuilding a farming infrastructure one small business at a time. By and large, for the last decade, they both have found funding through Farm to Fork, a oneday, three-hour, high-priced benefit where the wave of new local growers aligns with some of the region’s best chefs. “We write grants through projects we do and research that we do, but the way we fund working with young people as apprentices and interns to teach them how to farm is all through that picnic,” says Nancy Creamer, the CEFS director for nearly twenty years. CEFS has done essential work across the state not only in improving methods of sustainable food production but also in distribution and access. “If you didn’t grow up on a farm or have inherited land or inherited equipment, there’s almost no way to get into agriculture, unless it has this added value, like organic or 20 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
sustainable systems,” she says. “This event is about growing farmers, bringing young people in and giving them the skills to farm.” More than 250 students have passed through the program. Not all of them become farmers, Creamer admits, but that’s part of the plan—to allow people to experiment, to mess up, to determine if this is what they want to do. CEFS donates its crops rather than sells them, so the focus is on learning, not producing. “You have to be able to make a bunch of mistakes, or you’re going to lose your shirt. These programs allow people to mess up without risking their financial lives,” says Creamer. “We can allow students to practice. If they set up a cultivator and take out half of the plants, that’s not a big deal to us.” No matter how much information they can glean from podcasts and email exchanges, the Mickenses agree that such hands-on, interactive experience is essential. They talk, for instance, about one day adding cows to their expansive property. But Jillian admits she’s never interacted with a cow, never even touched one. They’d have to ask for advice, perhaps from some neighbors who raise cattle. “But how do you do that? They’re not on the Internet, so now we have to schedule something and drive over there and talk to them,” Ross says, laughing. “It’s not like sitting in your pajamas at midnight, asking, ‘How do you plant your potatoes?’” Jillian interjects: “I’m sure there’s a cow video on YouTube.” l gcurrin@indyweek.com
This year, Farm to Fork gets the presidential treatment. On Saturday, Sam Kass will team with Andrea Reusing for a five-course dinner at The Durham Hotel. Kass now works for Innit, a food tech start-up that helps home cooks work smarter, not harder; it’s the culinary equivalent of using a GPS instead of reading a map. Previously, he was the White House senior policy adviser on nutrition, the executive director of the First Lady’s Let’s Move! campaign, the gardener, craft brewer, and personal chef for the Obamas. And now, for $195, he wants to cook you dinner. Much like Kass, Reusing has made a name for herself by embracing and elevating local, seasonal ingredients and advocating for food policy change. When she opened Chapel Hill’s Lantern in 2002, she set out to reimagine Asian flavors through a North Carolina lens, leading to a lofty James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef Southeast nine years later. Reusing’s most recent endeavor at The Durham Hotel reinforces her commitment to neighboring farmers and producers. To eat Reusing’s food is to appreciate what our area offers. And when she's not in the kitchen, she serves on the boards of both the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) and the Chefs Collaborative. In anticipation of her collaboration with Kass, I spoke with Reusing about Farm to Fork, the local food scene, and spring cooking. INDY: When you opened Lantern in 2002, sourcing from nearby farms was one of the restaurant’s standout qualities. Since then, how have you seen the relationship between chefs and farmers in the area evolve? ANDREA REUSING: The local food scene here is different than anywhere else in the country. That comes from a number of different factors, but one is the long history of farmer-controlled farmers markets,
specifically the Carrboro market. Another reason is the complex, deep web of nongovernmental organizations that are in North Carolina working on agriculture issues, whether it’s Rural Advancement Foundation International in Pittsboro, Carolina Farm Stewardship Association, Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project in the west, and, of course, Center for Environmental Farming Systems. There’s all of this groundwork that doesn’t really exist anywhere else in the country that, in the early eighties, existed here. That’s the basis of the food scene today. If anything has changed in the last fifteen years, there’s just more of all the above. When we started Lantern, I had the sense I knew most people who were growing food within twenty, thirty miles of me on a commercial level. I could not say that anymore. I meet new people several times a week who are getting into farming. That’s, obviously, super exciting. It used to be that most of our seafood went up Interstate 95 to New York before it came back down here. We’re getting a lot more east-west distribution channels from the coast. When we opened Lantern, it was very hard to get local pork. I had to make an arrangement with a farmer, go pick up the pig myself in a borrowed pickup truck, bring it to Cliff’s Meat Market, and he would help me break it down. But that’s not the case anymore. Which local farm-to-table collaborations on the menu at Lantern and The Durham excite you right now? We use Chapel Hill Creamery’s pork at Lantern. They raise about seventy-five pigs a year for us, and that’s the main pork that we use. The pigs are fed a diet of some grain, but mostly whey that’s a byproduct from their cheese-making process. At Lantern, we use a lot of their cheese but not a ton, because of the nature of the menu. They make paneer
for us, and that’s a project that we’ve been doing with them for a long time. At The Durham, we use a lot of their aged cheeses for different things. Right now, we’re doing a fennel gratin with fennel from Ten Mothers Farm, which is a super new farm. For that, we’re using Hickory Grove cheese, which we’ve never used at Lantern because it just doesn’t fit with the menu. We’re also working on a project with Chapel Hill Creamery to use their older dairy animals in our beef program here at the hotel. They are just now, this week, taking a nineyear-old dairy cow to process for us to use at the hotel. Do you have a favorite springtime ingredient? I really love green garlic—the immature bulbs of garlic, before the skin gets papery. I love asparagus a lot, but I’m not an asparagus fetishist. I love this man who brings us aspar-
agus, and I love seeing him every year. I almost love seeing him more than asparagus. Asparagus is so ubiquitous it’s just not as interesting as other spring vegetables. A couple people are doing really great fava beans here right now, which is unusual. George [O’Neal] from Lil’ Farm is doing them. I love this green rhubarb that Four Leaf Farm does—a little rosy at the bottom, but it’s mostly green. We’ve been doing a lot of that—salted, raw, on top of pork. You don’t often see rhurbarb in the South, so that’s exciting. What do you do with the green garlic? Right now, we have it in a soup [at The Durham] that’s rings of green garlic in a broth made with rinds from Calvander cheese from Chapel Hill Creamery. It’s that principle of using Parmesan rinds in a stock. We make this bright green broth that’s really flavorful. Then we’re floating green garlic in it, along with green onion and peas and aspara-
Andrea Reusing at The Durham Hotel PHOTO BY LISSA GOTWALS
gus. It’s also got nettles and ramps in it. We’re squeezing out our last spring greens into that soup right now. Can you tell us a bit about the menu that you and Chef Kass are creating for your Farm to Fork event? It’s going to highlight some of the influence that Center for Environmental Farming Systems has been able to have on North Carolina agriculture in the last fifteen years. We’re going to be serving a lot of food that wouldn’t be here if not for CEFS. If you could cook one weeknight dinner for the Obamas, what would you make? Whatever Michelle was harvesting from the garden. l Twitter: @EmmaLaperruque
Your Week. Every Wednesday. indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 21
BANDIDO'S MEXICAN CAFE
#fresh #local #organic #21yearsinthemaking
SERVING THE TRIANGLE SINCE 1995!
BANDIDO’S MEXICAN CAFE
159 1/2 East Franklin St. • Chapel Hill • 919-967-5048 122 S. Churton St. Hillsborough • 919-732-8662 • www.bandidoscafe.com Serving the Triangle since 1995. Our salsa has garnered top honors in numerous salsa competitions. Serving traditional Tex-Mex as well as our own twist on Mexican. We were just named “Top 5 taco joints in the Triangle”. We have you covered with a location in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough as well as full service catering and a food truck.
BASAN BULL CITY SUSHI
359-220 Blackwell St • Durham • 919-797-9728 Mon-Thu 11 am-2 pm & 4-10 pm • Fri 11 am-2 pm & 4-11 pm, Sat 12-11 pm, Sun 4-9 pm • www.basanrestaurant.com
122 S. Churton Street Hillsborough - 732-8662 159 1/2 E. Franklin Street Chapel Hill - 967-5048
Basan’s modern Japanese cuisine, intriguing appetizers, entrees, unique sushi rolls, an extensive selection of sake and more, highlights the best of Japanese cuisine in upscale yet comfortable ambiance. Whether you’re stopping in before a show at DPAC, just craving sushi, or are planning a private event, we look forward to serving you soon!
www.bandidoscafe.com
Catering • Food truck
FIESTA GRILL Historic Five Points 1813 Glenwood Ave. 919-833-0226 Downtown Durham 810 W. Peabody St. 919-797-2554
www.lillyspizza.com
307 Hwy 54 West • Chapel Hill (At the intersection of White Cross Rd just 5 miles west of Carrboro) • 919.928.9002 • Open 6 days a week Tue - Sat 11am to 9pm • Sun 11am - 8pm • Closed Mons Offering a large menu of authentic Mexican dishes including Chicken Mole, homemade pork tamales, Chile Verde and Mojarra Frita (fried whole fish). Try chicken or shrimp with our delicious Salsa Poblana and so much more! (Many dishes not found in similar eateries.)
LILY’S PIZZA
1813 Glenwood Ave • Raleigh • 919-833-0226 810 W Peabody St • Durham • 919-797-2554 • www.lillyspizza.com Lilly’s Pizza has proudly served the Triangle since 1994. We are acclaimed for our award winning pizzas and salads. Our focus is to serve fresh,, locally sourced and organic foods which we make by hand daily. We appreciate our loyal customers and local suppliers.
THE NORTHSIDE DISTRICT
403 W Rosemary St • Chapel Hill • 919-391-7044 thenorthsidedistrict.com The Northside District name is a nod to the historical area of Chapel Hill. This neighborhood bar and restaurant serves food drawn from the ideas of Chef Michael Krock who bases his casual international dishes on the places he used to eat and hang out in his native Brooklyn. Dinner and cocktails served from 5pm and late night food is served every night until 2am. Karaoke Mons and Trivia Tues.
THE INDY’S GUIDE TO DRINKING BEER IN THE TRIANGLE
RESERVE NOW!
Deadline: June 15th Publication Date: July 27th Contact your rep or advertising@indyweek.com
See your restaurant here in our Wake County or Durham/Orange County zoned advertising section with great pricing options just for your business! For more info contact your rep or advertising@indyweek.com
FRESH. AUTHENTIC. DELICIOUS. Voted best Mexican Restaurant in Orange/Chatham 8 Years and Counting!
3307 NC Hwy 54, Chapel Hill 919.928.9002 • Fiestagrill.us 22 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
Whom did you vote for and why do you think they’re the Best of the Triangle? Send your comments to bestof@indyweek.com and they may be featured in our June 15th issue!
1912 Bernard St, Raleigh | (919) 977-3864 | cave1
INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 23
June 3rd • Comedienne
Barbara Carlyle Seen on Def Comedy Jam & Comic View
TJ’s, 4801 Leigh Dr. Raleigh • 919-672-1094 1 Show Only Doors Open at 8:30pm Show Starts at 9pm $10 Must Have ID No Athletic Wear
The INDY’s Guide to Dining in the Triangle
The INDY’s guide to Triangle Dining
ON THE STREETS NOW!
Oven-made Pies • Fresh Salads Sandwiches & Kabobs Catering (919) 847-2700 9650 Strickland Road, Raleigh Come visit our newest location:
1347 Kildaire Farm Road, Cary (919) 300-5586 www.sassool.com 24 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
*Food and beer will be sold by vendors onsite. *Bring your own chairs or blankets!
Please add into the add in the same area “Food and beer will be sold by vendors
indyfood
EAT THIS
AN
2800 Renaissance Park Place, Cary www.ancuisines.com
Perfect Punctuation the butterfat to rise to the top. He removes the top, leaving the sorbet with the essence of brown butter but without the richness or heaviness. The snowy confection braces the pastry’s intense sweetness. Delicate bursts of gingered tapioca pearls, dyed pink with a tart rhubarb syrup, dot the dish’s landscape, while ribbons of poached rhubarb and savory fennel pickled in plum wine and vanilla bean drape creamy braids of fromage blanc. A puree of pickled Japanese plums and dried apricots provides a slightly salty balance. Thin slivers of flax seed and sesame toast perch above it all, providing a cap of crunch to the underlying riot of flavors. “A surprise ending for you, no?” asks Almaguer. Indeed. And a surprising beginning, too: just before dessert arrived, there was a prologue, an amuse-bouche featuting a diminutive kusshi oyster. On the half shell, it luxuriated under a tiny orange serving of sorbet made from yuzu and kanzuri paste, a bold relish of Japanese chilies fermented in snow and aged for three years. The subtle brine of the mollusk and herbal notes of the delicate ice suggested some hidden heaven at the edge of earth and sea—really, a lot like An itself. l Twitter: @DoYouMuuMuu
Worth the travel: An’s rhubarb financier
For Francisco Almaguer, dessert isn’t just some indulgent, peripheral afterthought for the main event. “At great restaurants,” says Almaguer, “the dessert is the continuation of a climax, part of a carefully constructed experience that surprises and excites.” And An—the Cary fusion hub of Southern and Asian cuisines—is a great restaurant. As the pastry chef, the soft-spoken and thoughtful Almaguer is a vital component. An’s menu divides the courses into “chapters,” together forming a carefully constructed adventure. Almaguer has created a glorious denouement for An’s spring and summer narrative: the rhubarb financier with brown butter sorbet, fromage blanc, and pickled fennel. Named for its shape and color, a financier is a small French brown butter cake that resembles a gold bullion. The shortcake-like pastry is typically made with almond flour, but Almaguer uses pistachios instead, and slips the rhubarb into the batter. “Ah!” he says as I take a bite. “That’s the first surprise!” The slices of cake arrive hot, so that the fork slips easily through the crisp exterior and into the fluffy insides, emitting a rich, buttery aroma. The cake delights your senses even before your first bite. Beurre noisette sorbet provides the icy white foil. Almaguer lets the frozen dessert sit overnight, allowing
PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER
AT AN, A RHUBARB CAKE PROVIDES A COMPLEX MEAL’S PERFECT CLOSING BY ANGELA PEREZ
FOOD TO GO: THE TRIANGLE’S BEST FOOD EVENTS SAMPLER PLATTER
If you can’t make Farm to Fork this year, or if it doesn’t sate your appetite for sampling area eateries, Triangle Restaurant Week returns for the second of its dual annual spans June 6. Produced by an area marketing agency, Triangle Restaurant Week doesn’t necessarily provide an imprimatur of quality, but its open approach to programming does allow for wide variety. And a diner willing to do some research can find relative bargains at some of the area’s
best spots, from Garland and Watts Grocery to more. and Mateo Tapas. The extensive roster crisscrosses the region, and new lunchtime menus even allow you to take chances on extra options this year.
www.trirestaurantweek.com
CHEF & THE SCIENCE
The upcoming edition of the Museum of Life and Science’s popular series “Science of Eats” is sold out—well, almost. Before the event
officially begins at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, June 2, Kinston’s television star, Vivian Howard, will host a question-and-answer session and a reception at the museum. The $150 ticket includes admission to “Science of Eats,” a copy of Howard’s forthcoming book, and, most likely, a selfie with a real-life Southern celebrity chef who’s gotten very good at indulging the hoopla.
www.lifeandscience.org
ETC.
National Donut Day arrives Friday, June 3. Rise will be passing out free donuts at its new location in Brier Creek, while its other stores while donate 10 percent of the day’s sales to the Salvation Army. The Bull City BBQ Classic heads to The Scrap Exchange June 4, and a ten dollar ticket lets you sample a lot of ’cue.
www.risebiscuitsdonuts.com www.bullcitybbqclassic.org
INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 25
indymusic
Personal Journalist
26 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
Alone in a crowd: musician Al Riggs
We’re idling at the end of a cul-de-sac, and we couldn’t be more obvious. We’re outside of a big house at the end of a little neighborhood in Fuquay-Varina. The three-story brick home with the pond and the dock has been well kept, its paint bright and shrubs trimmed. Two cars are in the drive, and the owners are probably home. From the driver’s seat, though, the songwriter Al Riggs stares inscrutably at the suburban palace for several minutes. At last, he speaks. “Every dream I ever have that takes place in a house has taken place in that one,” says Riggs, his shaggy hair so blond it seems white. “I don’t know why.” Riggs puts the car in drive. The uncomfortable stop is finally over, and one of his childhood homes is in the rearview. Riggs swears he didn’t plan to show me where he grew up; he was just drawn to the street during our ride together. He seems sincere, too, just another twenty-three-year-old former suburbanite, parsing his childhood for deeper meaning. When Riggs looks at life, he comes away with stories to tell—lots of them. He’s a prolific songwriter, a musical storyteller who combines real-life narratives and elegant earworms at a staggering rate. Since recording his first album at nineteen, Riggs has released sixteen more, or four each year. His latest, Blue Mornings, may be his best, as Riggs deviates from the pent-up art rock of his past toward Leonard Cohen-meets-Magnetic Fields folk minimalism. These songs stem from a highly specific political and personal outlook. He sings about the last weeks of Rock Hudson. He nods to artist and activist Keith Haring in “Reagan Slain by Hero Cop.” He draws titles from local headlines. And though he seems an easy, gentle talker, he tells me before we meet that conversation is harder for him in person if he hasn’t already interacted with someone through Twitter or Facebook. Diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome in 2012, he’s a stalwart defender of social media. It helps him socialize. He writes directly from this distinct van-
PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER
RALEIGH SINGER-SONGWRITER AL RIGGS IS DEVOTED TO SHARING NORTH CAROLINA’S TOUGH STORIES FROM A PECULIAR, NECESSARY PERSPECTIVE BY CORBIE HILL
tage—a young, queer, progressive North Carolinian who won’t surrender his home to conservatives. It’s important to tell these stories from this perspective. “I usually start with one song and then I try to find the universe that song belongs to,” Riggs says. Riggs’s universe is multifaceted, and he never seems to stop moving. Today he woke up and ate one of the biggest breakfasts on the Waffle House menu. We ducked into Raleigh’s Schoolkids Records for music gossip before driving aimlessly through Wake County in his Nissan Versa. It’s an external and internal trip to nowhere, as Riggs regards familiar thoughts and county roads with no set desti-
nation. The more circles he drives, though, the more details he sees. The more details he sees, the stronger his songs are. At one point during our drive, he effectively summarizes his personal ethos with a traffic decision: “I guess I’m going to stay on this road.” Riggs grew up in Cary and Fuquay-Varina. His childhood lacks interesting stories, he says, just a typical suburban upbringing with two parents working for IBM. When he was midway through high school, the economy tanked. Mom lost her job. His grandfather died. The family moved to Apex. “It was just without warning,” Riggs says.
“One morning she got the email.” But she pivoted, reoriented, and followed her dream to a new job. He identifies with that, though he sees himself in his dad, who remains in motion until everything he set out to accomplish in a day is done. He is constantly building and tinkering with things around the house. Both Riggs and his father are uncommonly focused—one on housework, one on music. Riggs sounds content when talking about his mom and dad, but he wasn’t always this happy. As a kid, Riggs had no idea how to relate to anyone. He was always anxious and depressed. “Growing up, I was very loudly awkward,” he says as we pass by the North Carolina
Thu June 9 State Fairgrounds and Carter-Finley Stadium, known for crushes of people. “I was awkward in a way that my want to fit in would supersede my ability to fit in.” When he was twenty, he read David Byrne’s How Music Works. Byrne had diagnosed himself with Asperger’s syndrome, and Riggs wondered if he himself might be on the autism spectrum, too. He did some research and saw a doctor, who confirmed the suspicion. “It was out of blind curiosity that I decided to figure that out,” Riggs says. It was good to have an answer, a reason underlying the awkwardness, anxiety, and sadfor-the-sake-of-sadness feeling that defined his adolescence. It also helped explain how he looks at the world, particularly his acute awareness of his surroundings. As much as it freaks him out, he now seeks out shopping malls and other places with crowds to people watch. He can’t tune out the little details, the very things that drive his songs. Yet when it comes to making music, he’s not some minutiae-minded perfectionist. He actually prefers cheap gear and homemade sounds, which help him sidestep the gatekeepers of the music industry and open the frontier to sidelined groups. “There was an article on Pitchfork about GarageBand, and it was the case for and against GarageBand,” he tells me. Very little argument against the low-cost recording platform was given, except for the choice to spend much more money for some increase in quality. “All the pro-GarageBand stuff was from people of color and women and queer people. The audiophile types, from what I remember, were white men. You can kind of see where I’m going with this.” Riggs has used GarageBand extensively, even recording most of Blue Mornings on his iPhone. That populist approach suits the album’s pointed themes. Riggs had no idea he was making a political album until House Bill 2 passed the state’s legislature. Riggs doesn’t want to make a big deal out of his sexuality— he’s queer, so what?—but silence suddenly seemed unethical. Riggs was also working on Blue Mornings when Nancy Reagan died. He thought a lot about her silence while she was First Lady and her old friend Rock Hudson was dying very publicly of AIDS. The sidelines were no longer an option, and neither was abandoning North Carolina. Riggs had no desire to be like Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart, who loudly and melodramatically
left the state in 2012 and continues to bash it from a safe distance. As a young, queer kid seeking role models and guidance at home, Riggs had identified with the former Durham songwriter. He felt betrayed. “No hero gives up and moves somewhere else where they’ll be more comfortable,” Riggs says. “No hero does that.” He knew he had to look elsewhere for his role models, or behave the way he wished Stewart had. Riggs wants to tell the story of marginalized North Carolinians like himself from within his increasingly embattled home state. Rather than leave, he’s tightening his focus. “Everything is everything. Culture as a whole, especially local pride, has become as important to a lot of people as the person they’re going to vote for for president,” Riggs says. His song “Hattie Mae Williams Called Me Captain,” for instance, refers to the racially insensitive name proposed for a Durham restaurant that incited an area outcry. “Why would you let that part of history die—this little blip where for just a second we were all united against this bizarre name?” Riggs asks. Hyper-specific local lore like this, he says, becomes a part of the people who experienced it, part of a region’s identity. Why would you ignore it and write songs trashing, say, cell phones or Instagram instead? Rather, you should write what, and where, you live. As Riggs is about to leave the FuquayVarina neighborhood where he grew up, he stops again. This time, we’re sitting beside the front yard of a brick ranch house. He stares with slack-jawed wonder. A lightbulb-studded, diamond-shaped frame on the grassy lawn surrounds a cross. The Christian totem baffles Riggs. What does it mean? What is its purpose? I suggest that it looks like a Stargate, but either my joke falls flat or he’s zeroed in, shut off from every stimulus except the strange thing the universe has put in our path. He turns left out of his childhood neighborhood and makes it maybe a quarter of a mile before circling back. He stops and takes a picture of the yard structure—for a song idea, for album art, for something. He leaves again, headed nowhere and seeing everything. l Twitter: @afraidofthebear
www.lincolntheatre.com JUNE
We 1 Fr 3 Sa 4 Su 5 Th 9 Fr 10
OTM/LEK & UPTOWN FOAM DROP (18+ Show) 10p MIKE & DIO’S METAL SHOW AFTON MUSIC SHOWCASE 6p B.O.B. w/Scotty ATL/London Jae CRAIG XEN w/Lil Peep/Killstation
B.o.B.
Refe/Oak City Slums/HU$$EL/ 8p
Sa 11 LACUNA COIL w/Stitched up 6:30 Heart /9 Electric /Painted Wives
Su 12 BEANIE SIGEL/FREEWAY
Young Gunz/OK Chino/Terminator X
Mo 13 LA DISPUTE w/Des Ark/Gates Fr 17 CHRIS KNIGHT 8p Sa 18 JERRY JOSEPH & THE JACKMORMONS / BLOODKIN We 22 THE UNITY EXPERIENCE Fr 24 WHO’S BAD Legends are Forever
Sat June 11
MICHAEL JACKSON & PRINCE
JULY L Sa 2 PULSE: ELECTRONIC DANCE PARTY Sa 9 ILL DIGITZxDSCVRY 90’s Dance Su 10 TAIMAK - THE LAST DRAGON T h 1 4 BERES HAMMOND
w/ The Harmony House Singers
Fr 22 MARIANAS TRENCH + 7p Sa 23 THE BREAKFAST CLUB (80’s) We 3 Th 4 Sa 6 We 10 Sa 20 9-22 11-17
AUGUST
DIGI TOUR SUMMER ‘16 PERIPHERY - Sonic Unrest Tour US - THE DUO - JUST LOVE TOUR I PREVAIL w/The White Noise + 6p BJ BARHAM of American Aquarium PERPETUAL GROOVE STICK FIGURE
La Dispute Mon June 13
Fri June 17
Chris Knight Jerry Joseph & The Jackmormans
Fri June 24 Advance Tickets @Lincolntheatre.com & Schoolkids Records All Shows All Ages 126 E. Cabarrus St. 919-821-4111
Sat June 18 INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 27
music
LEYLA MCCALLA
Duke Gardens, Durham Wednesday, June 8, 7 p.m. www.dukeperformances.duke.edu
BENT STRINGS LEYLA MCCALLA’S POLYGLOT FOLK MUSIC MAY CHANGE YOUR PERCEPTIONS OF THE CELLO AND NEW ORLEANS BY ALLISON HUSSEY
Leyla McCalla: ”Every style of music has folk music in it, even when it’s noise or free jazz.” PHOTO BY SARRAH DANZINGER
PARENTING It’s a beautiful experience to watch someone become themselves and be part of their system that’s going to help them navigate this world. It’s a huge responsibility, but there’s also so much light. It’s like a big reflecting pool, but it’s also something you have no control over, because she’s just who she is. There’s a lot of overlap in those worlds, but they are separate. I like the way me and my husband are raising our daughter on the road. She’s super social. She’s comfortable around adults. She’s so musical. She plays this little ukulele and holds it correctly, and she’s not even two. FOLK Folk is kind of the root of all music, the people’s music. It’s the old songs that we’ve been learning for a long time or that we’ve known in our culture for a long time. They transform in the way that we perform them and interpret them and reappropriate their melodies and the stories. Every style of music has folk music in it, even when it’s noise or free jazz. It’s all kind of grounded in that history of oral tradition and people gathering. To me, the folk world is not so separate from other worlds. Culturally, it’s very different, because it’s pretty much a white-dominated genre of music, in terms of the music industry. But I don’t think that’s what it is at its core.
The sight or sound of a cello tends to conjure specific images of very formal settings—orchestras in concert halls, string quartets in parlors. But in the hands of Leyla McCalla, the instrument is finding fertile new territory with the help of old folk tunes. After a spell with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, the New Orleansbased McCalla issued her debut, Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes, in 2014. She explored her identity with tunes in Haitian Creole, plus the poetry of Hughes. Her voice and cello are perfectly matched, undulating through the same warm, mellow register. Her work there and on the new A Day for the Hunter, A Day for the Prey is graceful and airy. Those tender songs should float perfectly among the blooms of Duke Gardens. 28 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
NEW ORLEANS New Orleans is complex and beautiful and frightening. It’s a place of endless creativity and inspiration, fun, community. It’s a very segregated place, and that’s part of what we’re working through in our country—how to live with each other and how to integrate, and if that’s possible. I don’t know if I’d be doing what I do without having been in New Orleans and having that influence in my world. New Orleans really pushed me to connect with my Haitian heritage in a way that I don’t think any other place would have allowed. It opened me up to this whole world of music that is, in some ways, very specific, and, in some ways, very connected to American history and culture.
STRINGS They’re something that I like to pluck. I play cello and guitar and banjo. I’m doing the same thing, actually, on all of the different instruments I play. It’s all plucking and strumming and fingerpicking. When you add the bow into it, especially with the cello, it brings an entirely new world into the strings. I’ve learned so much about music just by being a cellist and figuring out how to make a beautiful sound—how fast your bow is moving, how much pressure is in the string, all the different dynamics. You could go on forever learning how to play and get different sounds just from one string. LANGSTON HUGHES Think about all the things that Langston Hughes had to go through and all of his life experiences, and how he persisted in making his art and speaking his truth. Through his work, he’s made black culture and racial issues very accessible to many people. He’s totally a humanist. I think a lot of his work is trying to understand human nature, why we’re here, and why we are grappling with the things that we are in society. I really see a lot of myself in that. l
indystage
NEVER, ENOUGH, BETTER, NOTHING
Friday, June 3–Saturday, June 4, 8 p.m., $10–$12 The Shed, Durham www.shedjazz.com
What Has Eighteen Legs and Really Cooks?
THE BIPEDS AND CURTIS ELLER’S AMERICAN CIRCUS BOOGIE DOWN THE LINE BETWEEN CONTEMPORARY DANCE AND AMERICANA BY BYRON WOODS You might suppose a performance by Curtis Eller’s American Circus already has about as much choreography as it can stand. The tall, lanky, high-energy songsmith with the ‘stache and the wiry hair bounces, bobs, and shakes his unpredictable way through his catalog of alternative Americana. Depending on the number, Eller leads his banjo like a dancing partner through a modified duck walk, a whirl, a tango, or a waltz, only to interrupt the proceedings with a Rockettes-style high kick to the side. “I’m usually going nuts,” Eller admits, “and the band all kind of satellites around what I’m doing. Over the years, my stage routine’s become so physically extreme that dancers come to my shows and ask me about it.” Durham choreographer Stacy Wolfson went much further than that. When she proposed a collaboration with her dance company, The Bipeds, she didn’t just want to use Eller’s music in an evening-length piece. She also wanted to incorporate his movements into the choreography, and this weekend, after eight months of work, Never, Enough, Better, Nothing will premiere at The Shed, the jazz club at Golden Belt. Wolfson remembers first thinking that Eller and the band’s moves were “kind of like Merce Cunningham—there were all these elements of surprise. The way they integrate movement into their performance is organic; it’s not something they do deliberately.” Wolfson’s initial reactions suggested balance as a theme: physical balance, life balance, and balance within relationships. But as the choreography emerged through improvisations to the band’s recorded songs, she began to focus on balance within families. (Eller and Wolfson each have children in the same public school.) She kept returning to how we’re affected when we’re out of balance in family interactions. “How it’s disorienting,”
Never, Enough, Better, Nothing PHOTO BY ALEX MANESS
she explains, “how it can be silly, who’s got your back and who doesn’t—all the emotions that arise from disequilibrium.” In songs like “Sweatshop Fire,” “Dry Lightning,” and “Thunder and Beehives,” Eller places relationship crises against a backdrop of deprivation, drought, or historical disaster. “It’s tragic material delivered for maximum comic potential,” he says. Though Wolfson thinks the songs suggest “a collection of short stories,” she was surprised to find that Never, Enough, Better, Nothing wound up seeming to tell a different, unified tale. “It’s formed a strange sort of narrative, a singular arc,” Wolfson says. “We didn’t plan for it to happen. It just did.” Initially, Wolfson’s performers were a bit tentative around Eller in rehearsal. “Then I told them, ‘You can push me, you can touch me, you can trip me’,” Eller says. “It’s like they needed a push: some different reason to get inside the collaboration.” The process has helped Eller, who never
"Musicians provide sonic harmony to what I’m playing. In this show, the dancers feel like visual harmony." had any formal dance training, discover new parallels between music and dance. “When I’m with musicians, they provide sonic harmony to what I’m playing,” he says. “In this show, the dancers feel like visual harmony. They seem to be harmonizing with one another when they dance, and when I sing to them, I feel like I’m harmonizing with them.” l Twitter: @ByronWoods INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 29
06.01–06.08 THURSDAY, JUNE 2
FRANK SOLIVAN & DIRTY KITCHEN
It should come as little surprise that Family, Friends & Heroes—the new album from D.C.-based bluegrass explorer Frank Solivan—opens with a blistering rendition of “Oh, Pretty Woman” before winding through takes on standards and hit singles alike. Surrounded by collaborators including Sam Bush and his own mother, the spirited mandolin player chases “Leaving on a Jet Plane” with “Wayfaring Stranger.” With his hotshot quartet Dirty Kitchen, Solivan has consistently tested the dividing lines between bluegrass and newgrass. The band packs dazzling solos into dizzyingly small spaces, funneling bluegrass’s love of dexterity into pop’s love of brevity. There are occasional psychedelic flourishes and dips into smoldering ballads, but, at its best, Dirty Kitchen harnesses the most urgent aspects of the fourminute rock song format and bluegrass’s technicality at once. It doesn’t hurt that Solivan keeps Mike Munford, one of the sharpest banjo players in the business, and fresh-faced guitarist Chris Luquette for company. Josh Daniel and Mark Schimick open this excellent edition of American Tobacco’s Back Porch Music on the Lawn. —Grayson Haver Currin AMERICAN TOBACCO CAMPUS, DURHAM 6 p.m., free, www.americantobaccocampus.com
THURSDAY, JUNE 2
THE EVERYMEN
Rock ’n’ roll is no longer the frontier of music, no longer the source of subversive power or bleeding-edge experimentation that it seemed to be for decades. But The Everymen, a squad of six energetic bandits split between North Carolina and New Jersey, don’t care. On the band’s second album, the new These Mad Dogs Need Heroes, they simultaneously summon the spirit of hardcore and the sound of Springsteen, the feeling of a gospel revival and the power of The Clash. The songs, shouted out loud by raspy leader Mike V and the soulful Catherine Herrick, are pointed and magnetic, embedded with hooks that stick on the first spin. If you miss the unbridled enthusiasm of The Hold Steady’s salad days, or the simple belief that rock music can feel urgent and important and forever young, The Everymen’s These Mad Dogs Need Heroes may be, well, heroic. SOON and Faults open. —Grayson Haver Currin LOCAL 506, CHAPEL HILL 9 p.m., $8, www.local506.com
30 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
SATURDAY, JUNE 4
ZOOCRÜ RECORD RELEASE
“A lot of people doubted that this album was going to happen,” says Alan Thompson, bandleader of the Durham-based jam-boy quintet Zoocrü. “When we started this, we were kids.” At last, though, the band is ready to release its debut, Lücid. Its first single, “Out of Reach,” features Durham-via-Detroit vocalist and emcee Myk’l Hanna delivering soul motivation over the smoky bass licks of Christian Sharp. An instrumental splurge of jazz funk comes from Zoocrü players Jonathan Curry (drums), Russell Favret (guitar), Howard Joyner (synths), and Thompson (sax). Compositionally, it rivals what has earned another airtight local soul outfit, The Foreign Exchange, worldwide respect, defying whatever jazz box Zoocrü may start to slip in. “Fusion before jazz,” says Thompson. “We weren’t interested in planning a style before we actually tackle the work. We went to the studio empty-handed and left with all of this sonic artwork.” They ain’t kids anymore. —Eric Tullis THE PINHOOK, DURHAM 9:30 p.m., $5–$15, www.thepinhook.com
SATURDAY, JUNE 4
BEAVER QUEEN PAGEANT
The very idea of a pageant—beauty or otherwise— seems increasingly like a vestige of a male-gaze-y past that many wish to leave behind. All the better that the Triangle boasts the Beaver Queen Pageant, which provides needed financial sustenance to the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association while celebrating the region at its most hair-down, tails-up casual. There’s no swimsuit or eveningwear segment, and the talent portion consists solely of the skill to transform oneself into a beaver in drag and win over the judges by any means necessary—bribery encouraged. Now in its twelfth iteration, the festival’s theme of “Dam! It’s the ’80s” seems to promise the sight of at least one human-size beaver augmented with epic shoulder pads and/or a mullet. With food trucks, the mellifluous DJ Frank Stasio as emcee, and free admission, this familyfriendly event gives pageants a good name. —David Klein DUKE PARK, DURHAM, 4 p.m., free, www.ellerbecreek.org
WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK SUNDAY, JUNE 5
20 YEARS OF HORSE & BUGGY PRESS (AND FRIENDS)
In this must-read retrospective, the past twenty years are an open book. That’s how long Dave Wofford has been letterpress printing art tomes, broadsides, bookmarks, and other paper pleasures—one at a time, by hand. He founded Horse & Buggy Press in Raleigh, but, for the past ten years, it’s lived at the Bull City Arts Collaborative, which Wofford cofounded, on Foster Street. The space has grown into Durham’s gallery scene, as was only natural. Rather than simply doing work for hire, Wofford collaborates with writers and artists to produce beautiful, minutely tailored books in small runs, their content ranging from abstract photojournalism to translations of Rilke. You can read them all in this exhibit at Cassilhaus, ensconced in a custom-made reading environment courtesy of various Horse & Buggy friends, including leather chairs by Scott Howell and tables by Al Frega. The exhibit also includes dozens of framed artworks and the debuts of two new book projects. This reception is your last chance to see the show in this intimate setting (RSVP to lastchance@cassilhaus. com for directions) before it moves to CAM Raleigh in mid-June. —Brian Howe CASSILHAUS, CHAPEL HILL 2–5 p.m., free, www.cassilhaus.com
THURSDAY, JUNE 2– SUNDAY, JUNE 26
THEATREFEST 2016 CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT
Frank Soilvan & Dirty Kitchen PHOTO BY CHESTER SIMPSON
Art by Jason Seale in 20 Years of Horse & Buggy Press (and Friends) | Installation view PHOTO BY FRANK KONHAUS
The Everymen PHOTO COURTESY OF BIG HASSLE
Murder used to be so ... genteel, back when it was the province of dowager sleuths, assassins with a diverting flair for cryptology, and fog-bound detectives, so easily led astray. This month, N.C. State’s annual Theatrefest serves Agatha Christie three ways, with three shows in rotating repertory. If you want classic Christie, there’s the fatal love triangle of The Hollow. If you want a satirical knockoff, there’s Something’s Afoot, a musical comedy. The bravest can opt for Tea with Agatha, a tea or dinner event ($50–$75) in which JoAnne Dickinson portrays Christie in a behind-the-scenes special effects tour with artistic director John McIlwee. Just remember, cyanide tastes like almonds. Bon appétit. —Byron Woods NCSU’S THOMPSON HALL, RALEIGH Various times, $6–$22, theatre.arts.ncsu.edu
WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?
ANDALWAYSWHY AT THE TORUS BUILDING (P. 18), THE BIPEDS & CURTIS ELLER’S AMERICAN CIRCUS AT THE SHED (P. 29), BLACK IRISH AT THE CARY THEATER (P. 38), BRONWEN DICKEY AND JOHN LANE TRIANGLE-WIDE (P. 39), FARM TO FORK AT HURDLE MILLS (P. 19), LEYLA MCCALLA AT DUKE GARDENS (P. 28), ALINA TAALMAN AT HORACE WILLIAMS HOUSE (P. 37) INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 31
we 6/1 th 6/2
6/17: SARAH SHOOK AND THE DISARMERS W/ BLUE CACTUS ($10/$12)
Oxymorrons / Konvo The Mutant
“These Mad Dogs Need Heroes” Album Release Show
The Everymen
FR 6/10
SØØN / Faults sa 6/4
DIRTY BOURBON RIVER SHOW
State Champion, The Kneads Knurr and Spell / Robes
su 6/5 mo 6/6 tu 6/7
3@3: Them Damn Bruners, My Mountains, Patrick Turner Monday Night Open Mic Tiny Moving Parts Prawn / Free Throw / Sinai Vessel
we 6/8 th 6/9
James McCartney
Season and Snare Murals / Twilighter Coming Soon: Wet, Kool Keith, Tony Furtado, Hunny and The Frights, Drivin’ N’ Cryin
www.LOCAL506.com
TH 6/9 TWO DOOR CINEMA CLUB W/
SOLD OUT
BAYONNE
FR 6/10 DIRTY BOURBON RIVER SHOW W/ ELLIS DYSON & THE SHAMBLES ($10/ $12)
TU 6/21
THE JAYHAWKS
6/25: DAYLIGHTS WASTING RECORD RELEASE SHOW W/ ADAM COHEN
SA 6/11 RAINBOW KITTEN SURPRISE W/
STOP LIGHT OBSERVATIONS ($10/$12)
SA 6/25
NEIL HAMBURGER
WE6/15OH WONDER W/LANY
SOLD OUT
SA 6/18 HGMN 21ST
FR 6/3
THE SOPHISTIKEYS: FINAL CONCERT
SA 6/4
THE MONTI SEASON FINALE
SA 6/25
7/87/24
10 BY 10 PLAYWRIGHT’S GALA BRICE RANDALL BICKFORD SA 7/30 “PARO” ALBUM RELEASE SA 7/16
WITH
W/ JENN SNYDER ($25)
WE 6/29 AESOP ROCK W/ ROB SONIC, DJ ZONE ($20) TH 6/30 MODERN BASEBALL W/JOYCE MANOR
JPHONO1 & EVIL ENGLISH
($19/$23)
STAY TUNED FOR OUR 2016-2017 SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT COMING IN JULY
FR 7/15 THE STRUTS ( $15)
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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
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TU 6/21 THE JAYHAWKS W/ FOLK LIKE ($22/$25)
7/9: CARDIGAN RECORDS 3 YEAR ANNIVERSARY SHOW W/ PROFESSOR TOON, GREAVER,YOUTH LEAGUE, BEAR GIRL, LAWW X BIGG, HUNDREDFTFACES ($10/$12)
FR 6/24 BLACK MOUNTAIN ($15/$17) SA 6/25 NEIL HAMBURGER & TIM HEIDECKER
JULY 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23 AT 8PM JULY 10, 17, 24 AT 3PM
7/2 THE HOTELIER ($12/$14) 7/5: JESSY LANZA W/ DJ TAYE 7/6: KITTEN W/ CLEAN SPILL ($14/$16)
TH 6/23 PERE UBU 'COED JAIL!'` TOUR... SONGS FROM 1975-'82
FESTIVAL OF NEW SHORT PLAYS
7/1: PINEGROVE W/ SPORTS, HALF WAIF ($10/$12)
ANNIVERSARY SHOW -- BOTH ROOMS:
WE 6/15 MANTRAS, GROOVE FETISH, @ THE PINHOOK FAT CHEEK CAT, BIG DADDY DYLAN LEBLANC LOVE, URBAN SOIL, GET RIGHT BAND ($17 ADV/ $20 DAY OF TU 9/20 OKKERVIL RIVER SHOW) ($18/$20)
“THE COOK, THE THIEF, HIS WIFE AND HER LOVER: REIMAGINED” 10 BY 10 IN THE TRIANGLE:
6/18:BIG DADDY LOVE, URBAN SOIL, GET RIGHT BAND 6/19: JOHN DOE ($17/$20) 6/21 THE STAVES W/ TREVOR SENSOR ($12) 6/24: SIBANNAC RECORD RELEASE SHOW W/ POISON ANTHEM, CAR CRASH STAR ** ($7)
TH 9/22 BUILT TO SPILL W/ HOP ALONG AND ALEX G ($20/$25; ON SALE JUNE 3) MO10/3NADA SURF ($17/$20) WE 10/19 BEATS ANTIQUE W/ TOO MANY ZOO'S, THRIFTWORKS ($26/$29) SOLD OUT
FR 11/5 ANIMAL
COLLECTIVE TU 11/22 PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT ($25)
CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM
6/1 HACKENSAW BOYS 6/3: BLACK MASALA W/ D-TOWN BRASS
SU 7/24 DIGABLE PLANETS W/ CAMP LO ($22/$25) 6/4JONATHAN BYRD ($15/$18) TU 7/26 SWANS 6/5: BAS W/THE HICS, RON SOLD OUT W/ OKKYUNG LEE ($20/$24) GILMORE,COZZ,EARTHGANG 6/9: SAM LEWIS ( $10/$12) SU 7/31 THE FALL OF TROY ($17/$20) 6/10 KRIS ALLEN W/ SEAN MCCONNELL ($15/$18) WE 8/3 BORIS (PERFRORMING PINK) W/ 6/11: THE GRAND SHELL EARTH, SHITSTORM ($18/$20) GAME (ALBUM RELEASE SHOW) W/ANNABELLE'S FR 8/12 THE JULIE RUIN CURSE, GABRIEL DAVID **($23/$22) ($10/$12) SA 8/13 RAINER MARIA 6/12: OZYMANDIAS W/ ($15/$17) STEELBENDERS, CASTLE WILD TH 8/25 LOCAL H (AS GOOD 6/13: POWERS ($10/$12) AS DEAD TOUR) TH 9/1 MELVINS ($20/$22) TU 9/13 BLIND GUARDIAN W/ GRAVEDIGGER ($29 - $60 FOR VIP)
6/14: JOHN PAUL WHITE ($15) 6/15 SO SO GLOS W/ BIG UPS, HONDURAS ($10/$12)
CATSCRADLE.COM ★ 919.967.9053 ★ 300 E. MAIN STREET ★ CARRBORO
**Asterisks denote advance tickets @ schoolkids records in raleigh, cd alley in chapel hill order tix online at ticketfly.com ★ we serve carolina brewery beer on tap! ★ we are a non-smoking club
7/11 DAVID BAZAN ($15) 7/16: HEGE V AND MICHAEL KELSH ($10) 7/19: THE GOTOBEDS AND ARBOR LABOR UNION 7/22:: JON LINDSAY W/ MATT PHILLIPS (BAND) & YOUNG MISTER 7/25: MARISSA NADLER W/ WREKMEISTER HARMONIES, MUSCLE & MARROW ($13/$15) 7/26: FEAR OF MEN ($10/$12) 8/6: OH PEP! ($10/$12) 8/12:ELIZABETH COOK($15/$17) 8/27: MILEMARKER ($12) LOCAL 506 (CH-HILL)
8/6: ELVIS DEPRESSEDLY/ TEEN SUICIDE/NICOLE DOLLANGANGER ($12/$14) CAROLINA THEATRE (DURHAM):
6/26 GREGORY ALAN ISAKOV & THE GHOST ORCHESTRA MOTORCO (DURHAM)
10/3 BAND OF SKULLS ($20/$23)
PINHOOK (DURHAM) 6/15 DYLAN LEBLANC ($12) NC MUSEUM OF ART (RAL)
6/10 LAKE STREET DIVE W/ HOLY GHOST TENT REVIVAL 8/13 IRON AND WINE HAW RIVER BALLROOM
6/11: HONEYHONEY W/ CICADA RHYTHM 8/12 PIEBALD
WED, JUN 1
Hackensaw Boys STRING Virginia’s HackenSURVIVAL saw Boys were mixing bluegrass and string-band folk sounds back in the nineties, before it was remotely cool. Their raw-boned sound has always set them apart from the pack, and with their first studio album in nearly a decade, they’ve got a lot to stomp and hoot about. —JA [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $15/8:30 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: The Spoonbenders; 8 p.m. • DUKE GARDENS: No BS! Brass Band; 7 p.m., $5–$10, 12 and under free. • HUMBLE PIE: Peter Lamb & the Wolves; 8:30 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: The Holland Brothers; 6:30 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: OTM, Lek and Uptown; 9 p.m., $15–$35. • LOCAL 506: Oxymorrons, Knovo the Mutant; 9 p.m., $8–$10. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: N.C. Symphony: A Rodgers & Hammerstein Celebration; 7:30 p.m., $30–$75. • MOTORCO: Ian Moore & The Lossy Coils, Pinto; 8 p.m., $12–$15. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Hotline, Laser Background; 9:45 p.m., $7. • THE PINHOOK: Tomboi, Band and the Beat, Rareluth; 9 p.m., $8. • POUR HOUSE: Youma, Blue Frequency, Joe Perrow, Sam Mazany, Kenyon Adamcik, Benjamin Malone; 9 p.m., $10–$12. • SLIM’S: White Cascade, Autospkr; 9 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Flesh Wounds, Life Stinks, Urochromes, No Love; 9 p.m., $7.
THU, JUN 2 Sarah Borges NEOOn Good and Dirty, TRAD the new EP from Sarah Borges, she shows that she’s still just as good at churning out rough-edged rock as she is at crafting earthy, post-Lucinda alt-country weepers. A preference for working with a great backing band doesn’t exactly hurt either, especially in a live setting. The Boston-bred singer has been known to cover everybody from NRBQ to Magnetic Fields, so
06.01–06.08
CONTRIBUTORS: Jim Allen (JA), Grant Britt (GB), Grayson Haver Currin (GC), Spencer Griffith (SG), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Angela Perez (AP), Bryan C. Reed (BCR), Dan Ruccia (DR), Eric Tullis (ET), Patrick Wall (PW)
Every semester, I teach Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual to my music writing class for several reasons. It provides a neat way to show how far pop journalism has progressed since the eighties, when Lauper’s boisterous solo debut was largely ignored by rock-obsessed men working for dailies. It’s also a fine exercise in dual retroism, with its callbacks to girl groups and Betty Boop, filtered through a DayGlo sensibility. But mostly I have my undergraduates listen because it’s one of the decade’s finest pop albums. Lauper flaunts an insatiable appetite for different musical styles, from the spiky new wave of “She Bop” to the wistful minimalism of the Prince-penned “When You Were Mine” and the widescreen balladry of “All Through the Night.” It feels fluid and joyful, like Lauper is figuring this all out as she goes along. Next semester, I might add a couple of tracks from Lauper’s new Detour to show how artists can successfully shape-shift even when their pop-cultural perceptions are set in stone. Detour is Lauper’s foray into country, with a track list that borrows from dusty jukeboxes of yore and a last-call vibe of fiddles and slide guitar. Lauper’s voice works well in the chicken-fried context. Her real-talk persona fuels the pathos of the rueful title track, while her interpretative talent adds a wallop to “Heartaches by the Number.” When Willie Nelson shows up to duet on his “Night Life,” the reasons for Lauper’s embrace of country become clear—their two voices, weathered but strong, tell stories about lives fully lived more deeply than any lyric ever could. Having contributed multiple entries to the American pop songbook, Lauper’s choice to revisit its older offerings represents a fiery grace that only cements her status as one of our true greats. —Maura Johnston
PRIME Raleigh’s annual PICKIN’ Pickin’ in the Plaza series kicks off this week with a headlining set from Hank, Pattie & The Current. The ensemble pulls traditional and progressive bluegrass styles into sharp new tunes. Kate Rhudy and Eric Scholz open with solo sets. —AH [RALEIGH CITY PLAZA, FREE/5:45 P.M.]
Mike & The Moonpies
ALSO ON THURSDAY 2ND WIND: 2 fer; 7:30-9 p.m. • AMERICAN TOBACCO CAMPUS: Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, The Josh Daniel/Mark Schimick Project; 6 p.m., free. See page 30. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Nash Street Ramblers; 7-9 p.m. • THE CAVE: Young Cardinals; Revolution, I Love You; Absent Lovers; 9 p.m., $5. • DEEP SOUTH: Frost the Realest, Silhouette Royal Entry, Rohan Da Great, Jon Muldrow, Ed Lewis, Rocy Balboa, Samson, DJ ProFluent; 10 p.m., $5. • IRREGARDLESS: Frankie Alexander; 6:30 p.m. • JOHNNY’S GONE FISHING: 15-501; 7 p.m. • LOCAL 506: The Everymen, SOON, Faults; 9 p.m., $8. See page 30. • MOSAIC WINE LOUNGE: Femme Fatal All Female DJ Night: DJ Vouis Luitton and Guests; 10 p.m., free. • PARK WEST VILLAGE: Bull City Syndicate; 6 p.m., free. • PIOLA: Chris Reynolds Trio; 6:45-8:45 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Local Band Local Beer: Stammerings, Drunk on the Regs; 9:30 p.m., free. • THE STATION: Eric Sommer, Tim Stambaugh; 7:30 p.m., $5.
WWW.INDYWEEK.COM
CYNDI LAUPER
Hank, Pattie & The Current
TEXAS Led by singer-songTWANG writer Mike Harmeier, Austin’s Moonpies love their classic country, though they favor a touch of old-school country rock, too. They’re naturals at both. They spend the bulk of their time out west, so grab ’em while you’ve got ’em. —JA [MOTORCO, $10–$12/9 P.M.]
FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR
SATURDAY, JUNE 4
thinking that you’ve got her act pegged at any point would probably be a delightfully grievous error. —JA [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $12–$15/8 P.M.]
PHOTO COURTESY OF WEBSTER PR
music
MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM, RALEIGH 8 p.m., $42–$80, www.dukeenergycenterraleigh.com
FRI, JUN 3
Boom Unit Brass Band
Black Masala, D-Town Brass
MODERN Boom Unit Brass MARCHES Band updates Crescent City customs. They tackle favorite brass band fare like “Li’l Liza Jane” or “Cissy Strut” one moment, then switch gears to take on Bruno Mars, Rage Against the Machine, or The Munsters theme the next. The octet— whose members have played in Archbishops of Blount Street and a host of university marching bands—recently launched a crowdfunding campaign to record its debut. —SG [THE STATION, $5/9 P.M.]
WORLD Where New Orleans OF HORN provides the stylistic foundation for most of the stellar brass bands playing the Triangle this week, it’s only one of many reference points for these adventurous outfits. D.C.’s Black Masala tosses together bounce with Balkan jazz, or punk with bhangra, with their cross-cultural work serving as fodder for diverse dance floors. Massive local ensemble D-Town Brass nearly matches the headliner’s freewheeling nature with horn-heavy hybrids of futuristic lounge, free jazz, tropicalia, and sophisticated swing. —SG [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $8–$10/9 P.M.]
The Forryst Bruthers SIDE STEPS
On keys and drums, respectively, Mark Simonsen and
James Wallace are two of the most talented session players in the Triangle. They’ve been sidemen in a number of roots-inclined bands, including Mandolin Orange and The Old Ceremony. Here, the buddies convene for their own night. They’ll play two sets together and promise country and soul music spun in between. —AH [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]
InAeona TWISTED On last year’s Force SHOUTS Rise the Sun, the complicated Boston trio InAeona suggested that the border between alternative-rock radio and extreme metal could be both imperceptibly small and damnably wide. The band’s songs build outward from enormous hooks, broadcast by the dramatic
and beguiling Bridge Laviazar— perfect bait for the FM dial. What’s around it, though, is a dense web of power electronics and prog rock, black metal and industrial, demonstrably difficult for the mainstream side of the dial. With Moon Tooth, Kindler, and Anamorph. —GC [SLIM’S, $8/8:30 P.M.]
N.C. Symphony Summerfest: Gershwin & Jazz with Joey Alexander MONK’S Indonesian jazz MOOD pianist Joey Alexander has an unrivaled origin story about playing a Thelonious Monk tune by ear the first time he touched a piano. After hearing him in 2014, Wynton Marsalis brought him to New York. This INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 33
Reed Turchi & The Caterwauls SLIDE Tempering the FORTH penchant of his defunct blues-rock trio for incendiary stomps, Reed Turchi’s new outfit The Caterwauls uses an array of American roots idioms as springboards for forward-thinking enterprises. “Drawn and Quartered” even suggests Beck’s funky, post-modern eclecticism. Though Turchi’s slide still stars in live settings, pianist Heather Moulder’s gentle vocals provide a welcome foil to the Memphis-viaAsheville licks. Parallel Lives leader Nick White and DRISKILL round out the bill. —SG [MOTORCO, $10–$12/9 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY 618 BISTRO: Randy Reed; 7-9:30 p.m. • ARCANA: Super Secret Dance Party; 9 p.m., $5. • THE ARTSCENTER: The Sophistikeys; 7:30 p.m., $5–$10. • BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Mint Julep Jazz Band; 8 & 10 p.m., $8. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Wilsfest VI: Will McFarlane, Armand Lenchek, Danny Gotham, Carter Minor, Joel Sugarman; 9 p.m., $10. See box, this page. Duke Street Dogs; 6-8 p.m., free. • BYNUM GENERAL STORE: Nashvilifiers; 7 p.m., free. •CARRBORO FARMERS MARKET: John Dee Holeman, Harvey Dalton Arnold; 6:30 p.m. • CIRCA 1888: Peter Lamb & The Wolves; 8:30 p.m. • DEEP SOUTH: Flimsy, Go Go Hero, Autumn To May; 9 p.m., $5. • HONEYSUCKLE TEA HOUSE: The Doug Largent Trio; 7 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Jyl Clay; 6:30 p.m. • JOHNNY’S GONE FISHING: Christopher Adkins; 7 p.m. • KINGS: Oak City Slums, Panther God, Pat Junior, Axnt, Drozy, Away MSG; 9 p.m., $5. • THE KRAKEN: The Arcadian Project, Pretend I’m a Genius; 8 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: FoamDrop; 10 p.m., $15–$20. • THE MAYWOOD: Attracting the Fall, Raimee, Extinction Level Event; 9:30 p.m., $8. • MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC 34 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
HOUSE: Juliana Finch; 6:30 p.m., free. Pete Pawsey’s Variety Showcase; 8:30 p.m., free. • NORTHGATE MALL: The Beauty Operators; 6:30 p.m. • THE PINHOOK: Dreaming of the 90s Dance Party; 10 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: Rumpke Mountain Boys, Gang of Thieves; 8 p.m., free. • ROCK HARBOR GRILL: Bruce Clark Trio; 9 p.m.-midnite, free. • SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH): The Dapper Conspiracy, Christian Enojado; 7 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Marimjazzia; 8 p.m., $10–$15. • SLIM’S: DJ Lord Redbyrd; 9 p.m. • SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: Corvette Summer, Dirty Remnantz; 9 p.m., $7.
SAT, JUN 4 J.R. Bohannon WARPED Both as Ancient WAX Oceans and under his own abbreviated name, Brooklyn’s J.R. Bohannon seems to illustrate the shapes and sights of American landscapes by bending some of its usual musical forms. His work for solo acoustic guitar tucks busy tufts of notes into small spaces, then lets them unfurl in beautifully riverine motion. You want to take shelter in Bohannon’s meditative pieces, to regard them with the solace of a still life. As Ancient Oceans, he amplifies that feeling with elliptical improvisations around rustic themes, as if cutting bleary-eyed dubplates from some forgotten cosmic country classic. With Gabriel Birnbaum. —GC [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]
Jonathan Byrd FOLK Jonathan Byrd’s HERO range as a purveyor of American roots music is practically intimidating; across his career, he’s flirted with bluegrass bustle, embodied country crooning, and turned self-made folk heroes into new anthems so well that it’s hard to hang his hat on any one genre. He can stun solo, with a voice that instantly indicates a reliable narrator, or take charge of a full band, as on 2014’s remarkable You Can’t Outrun the Radio. —GC [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $15–$18/8 P.M.]
Songwriters Guild of America slow-motio credit at age seven—deliver of Raleigh’s exuberant and brightly colored [SLIM’S, $5/ soul-pop. Plus Matt Phillips & the Philharmonic. —PW State C [MOTORCO, $10/9 P.M.]
Kirk Franklin ULTRA Gospel-pop emoter DREAM Kirk Franklin may have himself to thank, at least in part, for the unprecedented success of Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book mixtape. On the Chance-featuring “Ultralight Beam,” from Kanye West’s recent The Life of Pablo LP, Franklin’s appearance and choir direction helped the album surge toward a half billion streams. Still, most of us are guilty of teasing the eight-time Grammy-winning producer, songwriter, and singer for being so geeked on his god. Despite his critics, he’s not out of ways to spread his zeal. In 1994, Mary J. Blige begged to “Be Happy.” Two years ago, Pharrell Williams declared that he was “Happy.” Today, on Franklin’s gospel crossover single “Wanna Be Happy?” he wants to know if you really, really, really desire it. —ET [DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, $39.50–$69.50/7:30 P.M.]
The Horror Bound Throwdown RAZE This all-ages show is HELL a fundraiser for the latest flick by Greenville-based horror filmmaker Jaiden Frost. The film, she says, will be “one hundred percent North Carolina,” including the soundtrack. Metalcore acts continue the horror apace here with homegrown groups like Goldsboro’s A Boy Named Sue, Franklinton’s Blessed by the Broken, and Raleigh acts Friends as Enemies, The Death in Me, and Waking Tera. Clayton’s popular Valleys headlines. Plot twist? Many of these metal bands identify as Christian rock. Now that’s wicked. —AP [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $10–$12/7 P.M.]
Lawrence POP OF This is not the YOUTH producer of minimalist techno for labels like Kompakt, Ghostly, and Mule Electronic but instead the pop duo of New York City siblings Clyde and Gracie Lawrence. The wunderkinds—Clyde got his first
Kneads
Le Weekend
RURAL ROCK INDIE Le Weekend doesn’t sets frontm LOVE have a particularly character-d deep catalog, but it is enough to sound of ca distinguish the band as one of the often veers area’s most consistently and Greensboro subtly surprising acts. No Object, riff-heavy in an all-too-brief EP released as an have fit well empty 7-inch sleeve in 2014, is an quarter-cen enigmatic indie pop gem. It’s full Spell crafts t of classic pop signifiers like warm hook-filled t backing harmonies and gently expect from vamping keys, but its elliptical North Elem approach and gentle detours Lud. Carrbo suggest Bob Pollard more than makes a rar Brian Wilson. Jphono1, or artist —SG [LOCA and songwriter John Harrison , owes similar debts to college rock’s heyday. His solo folk nods venture into sidewinding indie rock and dense shoegaze murk. Second Husband opens. —BCR [THE KRAKEN, FREE/8 P.M.]
To p
PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST
year, at twenty-three, he earned a Grammy nomination. Here, he’ll play alongside the N.C. Symphony. They’ll do some Gershwin, and his trio will play a few originals and, most likely, some Monk. —DR [KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE, $30–$35, 7:30 P.M.]
FRIDAY, JUNE 3–SUNDAY, JUNE 5
WILLFEST VI
Most bar hookups are fleeting affairs. But the woman who picked up guitarist Will McFarlane in a bar gave him an apprenticeship he calls “the greatest in the music business” and a career that still sustains him. The woman was Bonnie Raitt, and their working relationship lasted between 1974 and 1980. McFarlane was playing a bar in Massachusetts. The promoter and photographer Dick Waterman, founder of the first booking agency for blues artists, was helping Raitt recruit her first major touring band. With Raitt, McFarlane got to hang with blues royalty and perform at the No Nukes Concert at Madison Square Garden. “Even if it wasn’t an old-school blues artist opening for her, it was the likes of Little Feat, Roomful of Blues, or Asleep At the Wheel,” McFarlane remembers. “We were always in the company of excellent musicians.” After leaving Raitt’s entourage in 1980 because he and his wife, Janet, didn’t want to raise their children in Los Angeles, McFarlane moved to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and joined the town’s legendary studio musicians, The Swampers. He played on records by Etta James, Johnnie Taylor, and others. For Willfest, his annual birthday party, he will lead three days of concerts, including an acoustic evening on Thursday, a group that features his family on Friday, and an all-star jam on Sunday. The weekend will also mark the first anniversary of the Blue Note Grill’s new location on Washington Street, where it’s become an essential part of Durham’s thriving downtown. Not much to be blue about there. —Grant Britt BLUE NOTE GRILL, DURHAM Friday: 9 p.m., $10; Saturday: 8 p.m., $10; Sunday, 3 p.m., free; www.thebluenotegrill.com
Mike & Dio’s Metal Show OLD Modena, a melodic MEET NU modern rock band, takes the headlining spot as an outlier on this old-school metal bill. Blatant Disarray and the recently reunited Bone Shelter offer churning thrash revivals. Only the opener, The Damnedest Thing, reaches toward Modena’s radio-rock instincts, with vibrato-heavy vocals finding space between Layne Staley and Ronnie James Dio. —BCR [LINCOLN THEATRE, $10/9 P.M.]
Upheaval, Musket Hawk RATTLE & This quadruple bill ROLL should properly shake the walls of Slim’s: Boston’s aptly named Upheaval undercut hyper-distorted walls of guitar fuzz with agile drums and occasional blast beats, ferrying their sludge toward the finish line. Baltimore’s Musket Hawk, meanwhile, mutates a similar sound with antiphonal evil screams and unexpected textural detours. With Street Feet and the
slow-motion, high-action pummel of Raleigh’s Etiolated. —GC [SLIM’S, $5/8:30 P.M.]
State Champion, The Kneads RURAL Louisville quartet ROCK State Champion sets frontman Ryan Davis’s character-driven tales to the sound of casual country-punk that often veers into bar band bluster. Greensboro’s The Kneads deliver riff-heavy indie rock that would have fit well in Chapel Hill a quarter-century ago. Knurr and Spell crafts the sort of jittery, hook-filled tunes that one would expect from from veterans of North Elementary, Pleasant, and Lud. Carrboro synthpop act Robes makes a rare live appearance. —SG [LOCAL 506, $7/9 P.M.]
Kamara Thomas & the Night Drivers
ALSO ON SATURDAY
ROOTS With her band The ROCK Night Drivers, Durham’s Kamara Thomas offers rootsy, guitar-driven songs. Some folk here, some rock there— Thomas and company navigate songwriting territory that’s both comfortable and familiar. —AH [SAXAPAHAW RIVERMILL, FREE/6 P.M.]
We’re Back
BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Primera Jazz; 8 & 10 p.m., $8. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Willfest VI: Fathers & Sons; 8 p.m., $10. See box, page 34. • DEEP SOUTH: Joe Hero; 9 p.m., $8. • HONEYSUCKLE TEA HOUSE: Blue Cactus; 7 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Bo Lankenau; 11 a.m. Eric Meyer Duo; 6 p.m. Jim Ferris Trio; 9 p.m. • JOHNNY’S GONE FISHING: Laura Thurston; 7 p.m. • KINGS: Summer Wars, The Second After, Magnolia; 9 p.m., $5. • KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: N.C. Symphony Summerfest: Classic Under the Stars; 7:30 p.m., $30–$35. • MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM: Cyndi Lauper; 8 p.m., $42–$80. See box, page 33.• MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC HOUSE: River Otters; 8:30 p.m., free. • THE PINHOOK: Zoocrü; 9:30 p.m., $10–$15. See page 30. • POUR HOUSE: The Nitrogen Tone, Texoma; 9 p.m., $5–$7. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Joe Calderazzo Quartet; 8 p.m., $40. • THE STATION: DJ Aviation Parkway; 9 p.m. •
PUSH Combinea Deidre Mc- for adoption, To advertise orHB2 feature pet BACK Calla’s more mellow take onrgierisch@indyweek.com Nina Simone, Dianne please contact Davidson’s roaring folk, and humorist and singer Jamie Anderson’s quirky offerings, and you’ve got a raucous night of topical feminist entertainment. Instead of boycotting the area because of HB 2, the trio has chosen to yield some space at the show to local LGBTQ efforts. —GB [THE ARTSCENTER, $25–$30/8 P.M.]
TRIANGLE YOGA: Samadhi; 7 p.m., $10.
SUN, JUN 5 Bas
Dragmatic SOUND- Raleigh’s Dragmatic WICH recalls Elvis’s favorite sandwich of peanut butter, honey, bacon, and a banana. The band combines seemingly disparate elements— the instant urgency of punk, the husky smoothness of pop-rock, the determined twang of alt-country—into songs that are either entirely endearing or wholly off-putting, depending on one’s perspective. Mostly, it’s the former. Joshua Powell & The Great Train Robbery and Christiane open. —PW [POUR HOUSE, $6–$8/9 P.M.]
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SLEEPA Jay Z co-sign went VILLE a long way for North Carolina’s J. Cole, but there’s nothing that J. Cole can do for one of his own Dreamville label signees, Bas. He’s likeable enough, but everything from this year’s Too High to Riot LP lacked the power of work by his Dreamville co-signees such as Cozz and Omen. Cole jumped the gun on Bas, and it won’t be too long before he turns into the basura of someone’s playlist. With The Hics, Ron Gilmore, Cozz, and Earthgang. —ET [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $16–$18/9 P.M.]
Holy Grail MAINLINE For February’s Times METAL of Pride and Peril, the Los Angeles shredders of Holy Grail offer a reverent resurrection of power metal’s sweeping melodies and galloping pulse. The band undercuts the cheese with
abrupt shifts and lunging breakdowns. Kentucky’s Savage Master revisits the transition between NWOBHM and thrash, bringing a raw groove to occult-themed jams. Locals Colossus and Suppressive Fire open with giddy power metal and pummeling thrash, respectively. —BCR [THE MAYWOOD, $12–$15/8 P.M.]
Journey, The Doobie Brothers FOOL The Doobie Brothers BELIEVES and Journey are former giants of the American mainstream, exemplifying the bloat that rock took on as it evolved from a spry youth into a fussy, codified form. Blessed with three lead singers, the Doobies were a laid-back, guitar-heavy boogie outfit until Michael McDonald showed up with his plush tones and regal beard. Just like their album covers, Journey’s shiny-edged anthems were
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FLESH WOUNDS
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LOCAL COMEDY & ROCK SHOW HOSTED BY BENJAMIN MALONE YOUMA / BLUE FREQUENCY JOE PERROW / SAM MAZANY / KENYON ADAMCIK LOCAL BAND LOCAL BEER STAMMERINGS / DRUNK ON THE REGS FREE FOOTHILLS FREE FIRST FRIDAY
WE 6/1
LIFE STINKS / UROCHROMES / NO LOVE
FR 6/3
TIM STAMBAUGH
SA 6/4
BOOM UNIT BRASS BAND DJ AVIATION PARKWAY FREE
SU 6/5
HAPPY ABANDON
TH 6/9
MARY JOHNSON ROCKERS
FR 6/10
TH 6/2
LAIRS
KATHARINE WHALEN (OF THE SQUIRREL NUT ZIPPERS)
OBJECT HOURS HORIZONTAL HOLD
DJ PEATY GREENE FREE MATT PHILLIPS & TH 6/16 THE PHILHARMONIC SA 6/11
CURTIS STITH
FR 6/17
MINOR STARS
TH 6/23
WILD FUR
SHADOW AGE
SCHOONER
RUMPKE MOUNTAIN BOYS GANG OF THIEVES FREE
THE NITROGEN TONE / TEXOMA
JIMMIE RAY SWAGGER & THE FUSSY EATERS SCHOOL OF ROCK PUNKED 1PM SCHOOL OF ROCK BEST OF THE 90’S 4PM LATE DRAGMATIC / JOSHUA POWELL & THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY / CHRISTIANE
SU 6/5
VOICE OF ADDICTION
MO 6/6
49/SHORT / FEW GOOD THINGS
PHILOS MOORE GIUDA / RICHARD BACCHUS & THE LUCKIEST
TU 6/7 WE 6/8
GIRLS / ZODIAC PANTHERS / MIDNITE COWBOY LOCAL BAND LOCAL BEER MAJOR & THE MONBACKS / GRAND SHELL GAME / AMERIGLOW FREE!
TH 6/9
CHIT NASTY BAND
FR 6/10 SA 6/11 SU 6/12 MO 6/13
TALAWA REGGAE ARMY / WAR IN THE POCKET JON LINDSAY – CITIES & SCHOOLS ALBUM RELEASE W/ THE OLD CEREMONY SHAKINA NAYFACK PRESENTS: MANIFEST PUSSY A JOURNEY OF TRANS LIBERATION
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devoid of wit or subtlety, but nevertheless well crafted and rendered in bright colors. Prince acknowledged that he nicked the basics of “Purple Rain” from Journey’s “Faithfully,” so come prepared—with tissues and a lighter. Dave Mason opens. —DK [COASTAL CREDIT UNION MUSIC PARK, WALNUT CREEK, $37–$399/7 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: Willfest VI: All Star Birthday Jam; 3 p.m. See box, page 34. • DEEP SOUTH: Hectic January, Jackson Honeycutt, Honest John; 8 p.m., $6–$8. Live & Loud Weekly; 9 p.m., $3. • HONEYSUCKLE TEA HOUSE: The Holland Brothers; 1 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Larry Hutcherson; 10 a.m. Zach Wiley; 6 p.m. • JOHNNY’S GONE FISHING: John Goodin; 11 am. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Afton Music Showcase; 6:30 p.m., $12–$15. • LOCAL 506: SALES, Jenny Besetzt; 8:30 p.m., $12–$14. • POUR HOUSE: School of Rock: Punked; 1 p.m., $5. School of Rock: Best of the ‘90s; 4 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Happy Abandon, Lairs; 8:30 p.m., $5. • WEST END WINE BAR-DURHAM: Eric Meyer, Noah Sager & Friends; 4-6 p.m., free.
ALSO ON MONDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Bo Lankenau; 7 p.m. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: The Atomic Rhythm All Stars; 8 p.m., $3–$5. • POUR HOUSE: Voice of Addiction, 49/short, Few Good Things; 9 p.m., $5. • THE SHED JAZZ CLUB: Sessions at the Shed with Ernest Turner; 8 p.m., $5.
TUE, JUN 7 THE CAVE: Lydia Can’t Breathe, Knightmare, Thundering Herd; 10 p.m., $5. • IRREGARDLESS: Eva Walsh; 6:30 p.m. • LOCAL 506: Tiny Moving Parts, Prawn, Free Throw, Sinai Vessel; 7 p.m., $12–$14. • POUR HOUSE: Philos Moore; 9 p.m., $5. • SLIM’S: Isaac Hoskins; 9 p.m., $5.
MON, JUN 6
WED, JUN 8
Body Games
Dirty Dozen Brass Band
ELECTRO In mid-March, FEELZ Chapel Hill’s Body Games dropped Damager, an excellent LP built from layers of electronics and enchanting duets between Dax Beaton and Kate Thompson. The songs mine intense and gnarly emotional ground that can be hard to handle, as with songs like the heartbreaking “Special.” Brooklyn’s Operator Music Band have a tight, grimy single in “Bebop Radiohaus.” Also, Janxx. —AH [NIGHTLIGHT, $7/9:30 P.M.]
Keath Mead, Dear Blanca POWER & Toro y Moi’s Chaz CURVES Bundick recorded and produced Keath Mead’s debut, Sunday Dinner. The album deals in power pop curveballs and pretty psych-folk garlands that challenge and comfort, splitting the difference between maverick 36 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
songwriters like Todd Rundgren and progressive folkies like John Renbourn. Tour mates Dear Blanca suggest The Minutemen as fronted by Townes Van Zandt. Their latest, the twangy I Don’t Mean to Dwell EP, was recorded and produced in Durham by Scott Solter. Weird Pennies (of Raleigh) open. —PW [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $8–$10/8:30 P.M.]
BIG When Dirty Dozen BRASS Brass Band formed in 1977, the New Orleans brass band tradition was practically on life support. Since then, the outfit—which takes its name not from its membership but from The Dirty Dozen Social and Pleasure Club, where it once served as a house band—has almost single-handedly brought back brass. The unit has collaborated with the likes of Chuck D and David Bowie and inspired a generation of new crews to mix heavy doses of funk and soul with jazz standards, spirituals, and second-line classics. They are as emphatic as ever. Major and the Monbacks open. —SG [MOTORCO, $17–$20/8 P.M.]
King Khan & The Shrines SOUL Garage rock ’n’ soul POWER impresario King Khan arrives days after releasing Children of the World, his latest platter for Merge. The J.B.’s-style funk Khan dips into here isn’t a major shift for the famously charismatic frontman, but its social justice themes—the A-side is a response to the recent national conversation about police brutality, for instance—contrast King Khan’s more lighthearted material. Performing here with his psych-soul big band The Shrines, King Khan has a mighty backing for his messages of social progress. With Paint Fumes and Giorgio Murderer. —BCR [KINGS, $15/8:30 P.M.]
James McCartney BEATLE’S All of us probably BOY hate being compared to our parents, but can you imagine being in the same spot as the offspring of a Beatle? Such is the life of James McCartney, the only son of Paul and Linda. His recent single “Too Hard” is pleasant, poppy rock that remains, like most of his output, not all that interesting. Raleigh folk duo Season and Snare opens. —AH [LOCAL 506, $15–$20/9 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY THE CAVE: Isaac Hoskins; 9 p.m., $5. • DUKE GARDENS: Leyla McCalla; 7 p.m., $5–$10, 12 and under free. See page 28. • IRREGARDLESS: The Piedmont Pea Pickers; 6:30 p.m. • KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: La Fiesta Latin Jazz Quintet; 5:30 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Giuda, Richard Bacchus & The Luckiest Girls, Zodiac Panthers, Midnite Cowboy; 9 p.m., $410–$12. • SLIM’S: Lydia Can’t Breathe, Mechabull, Enemy in Disguise; 9 p.m., $5.
SPECIAL A Compilation: EVENT Raymond Melvin. Jun 1-28. Reception: Sat, Jun 4, 5-7 p.m. Naomi Studio and Gallery, Durham. www. NaomiStudioandGallery.com. Afghanistan: A Country A People—Through the Eyes of the Men and Women of the U.S. Military (Part I): Jun 2-Jul 24. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www. townofcary.org. SPECIAL Celebrate Summer: EVENT Paintings and jewelry by Anna Ball Hodge and Stephanie Gardner. Jun 1-26. Reception: Fri, Jun 3, 6-9 p.m. Roundabout Art Collective. roundaboutartcollective.com. SPECIAL The Creepy & the EVENT Crawly: Watercolors, acrylics, and ceramic sculpture by Shannon Bueker. Jun 5-30. Reception: Sun, Jun 5, 1-3 p.m. Joyful Jewel, Pittsboro. www. joyfuljewel.com. SPECIAL Kathy Dawalt and EVENT Michiel Van der Sommen: New oils and bronzes. Jun 3-Jul 31. Reception: Fri, Jun 3, 6-9 p.m. Gallery C, Raleigh. www.galleryc.net. SPECIAL Expansion: Vicki EVENT Rees. Jun 4-25. Reception: Fri, Jun 3, 6-9 p.m. Tipping Paint Gallery, Raleigh. www.tippingpaintgallery.com. SPECIAL FRESH: Juried EVENT exhibition of new works by North Carolina artists. Jun 3-25. Reception: Fri, Jun 3, 6-10 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org. Latino Arts Festival: Live music, food, arts and crafts, and more. $6. Sat, Jun 4, 3-10 p.m. Historic Downtown Apex, Apex. SPECIAL Nature in Colored EVENT Pencil: The Colored Pencil Society of America. Jun 3-Jul 31. Reception: Sat, Jun 4, 2-4 p.m. Nature Art Gallery, Raleigh. www.naturalsciences.org.
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Separation: Megan Bostic, Samantha Pell, and Jan-Ru Wan. Jun 3-Jul 24. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.
ONGOING 10 DEEP 25: Twenty-five years after The Scrap Exchange opened, it’s hard to believe that the creative reuse center not only still exists, but thrives, recirculating materials for artists and crafters, engaging the community with hands-on events, and curating art shows on Chapel Hill Road. But maybe it makes perfect sense in a city that prizes a history it’s in the process of mulching. The Scrap takes a well deserved victory lap in this group show, which features more than ten creative reuse artists with strong ties to the center, including Bryant Holsenbeck, Cici Stevens, Stacey L. Kirby, and Gary Pohl. Thru Jun 11. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. scrapexchange.org. —Brian Howe 2016 Members’ Showcase: Thru Jun 11. Durham Art Guild. www. durhamartguild.org. 4 Directions: Textile and collage. Thru Jun 11. Light Art + Design, Chapel Hill. lightartdesign.com. After Apartheid: Collages on canvas by Kenneth Robert Nkosi. Thru Jun 19. Eno Gallery, Hillsborough. www.enogallery.net. Altered Land: Works by Damian Stamer and Greg Lindquist: In Altered Land, Stamer and Lindquist apply a heavy coat of subjectivity to rural N.C. scenes. Stamer paints a barn with black-and-white horror movie starkness in “South Lowell 18,” and Lindquist spills angry psychotropic colors in his pointedly titled “Duke Energy’s Dan River” series. Thru Sep 11. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. —Brian Howe American Impressionist: Childe Hassam and the Isle of Shoals: In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Childe Hassam spent decades painting Appledore Island, a resort in the Gulf of Maine. His style is beautiful and refined, like a slightly more
FROM THE APOLLO SERIES BY ALINA TAALMAN
OPENING
06.01–06.08 African artists who intimately navigate the facts, official narratives, and myths of two nations that see each other in different ways. $5. Thru Jun 19. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh. org. —Brian Howe PHOTO COURTESY OF PRESERVATION CHAPEL HILL
art
SUNDAY, JUNE 5
ALINA TAALMAN: THE APOLLO SERIES In 2013, NASA launched the Landsat 8 satellite. The detailed data on Earth that it captures is archived online and offered free for anyone to use. Alina Taalman, who recently earned an MFA in experimental and documentary arts at Duke, took them up on it. The Apollo Series consists of visualizations of energy collected by the satellite’s sensors—much of it invisible until Taalman prints it—above Cape Canaveral, Florida, a site the artist chose for its relatively well trodden pathway from terra firma to terra incognita. The result is a kind of astral projection, a dreamy dialogue between land and space in shimmering, mysterious abstractions. After this opening reception, Apollo is docked at Horace Williams House through June 27. —Brian Howe HORACE WILLIAMS HOUSE, CHAPEL HILL 2–4 p.m., free, www.preservationchapelhill.org fastidious Monet, but the subject is repetitious, and oddly, NCMA has chosen to pipe in distracting seagull sounds, like a small-town natural history museum. It’s hard to forget these are essentially a wellheeled person’s pretty vacation paintings. Thru Jun 19. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. —Brian Howe Arise! Bald Man! King of Hair People!: Bill Thelen, the founding director of groundbreaking Raleigh gallery Lump, is stepping down after two decades, and this final show under his tenure is a tribute to him. The group installation, oriented around Thelen’s penchant for drawing bald guys, is the brainchild of Team Lump, the collective that brought bonkers art to Blount Street.
Thru Jun 11. Lump, Raleigh. www. teamlump.org. —Brian Howe Art from Raleigh Sister Cities: Works by artists in Raleigh’s sister cities in France, Germany, England, and Kenya. Thru Jul 31. Betty Ray McCain Gallery, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com. LAST Benjamin Britton: CHANCE The Hope and Desire Forecast: Thru Jun 5. Flanders Gallery, Raleigh. www. flandersartgallery.com. Burk Uzzle: American Chronicle: One of N.C.’s most faithful chroniclers gets a career retrospective. Uzzle, born in Raleigh in 1938 and now based in Wilson, started as a News & Observer shooter before hitting the big time at Life, photographing iconic scenes from the civil rights movement
and Woodstock. Thru Sep 25. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. —Brian Howe Martha Clippinger: Thru Jun 25. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org. LAST Depth Perception: CHANCE Selected works by the UNC MFA class of 2016. Thru Jun 5. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www. ackland.org. Earth, Wind & Fire: Pottery by Garry Childs, carved wood by Larry Favorite, and paintings by Jude Lobe. Thru Jun 19. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. www. hillsboroughgallery.com. The Ease of Fiction: This exhibit features paintings, drawings, and sculptures by four young, technically skilled, U.S.-based
Express Yourself: A Celebration of Black Art in Durham: Thru Jun 17. Duke Campus: Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, Durham. LAST Fragments: Found & CHANCE Formed: Charron Andrews, Susan Parrish, and Carol Retsch-Bogart. Thru Jun 5. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www.frankisart.com. LAST From Frock Coats to CHANCE Flip-Flops: 100 Years of Fashion at Carolina: Thru Jun 5. UNC Campus: Wilson Special Collections Library, Chapel Hill. www.lib. unc.edu/wilson. Half a World Away: Oil paintings by Alicia Armstrong. Thru Jun 19. Eno Gallery, Hillsborough. www.enogallery.net. LAST Here and Now: Larry CHANCE Dean, Craig Gurganus, and Fen Rascoe. Thru Jun 4. ArtSource Fine Art, Raleigh. artsource-raleigh.com. Los Jets: Playing for the American Dream: Thru Oct 2. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www.ncmuseumofhistory.org. Marks of Genius: 100 Extraordinary Drawings from the Minneapolis Institute of Art: This outstanding exhibit can be experienced as a master class in drawing, a chance to see the hands of big names (including Picasso, Matisse, Degas, Klimt, Mondrian, de Kooning, Magritte, Lichtenstein, Warhol, and Ruscha, just to name a few), or as a dazzling technical display. The exhibit ranges from fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts and expressive Baroque portraits to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art (areas of particular strength). Thru Jun 19. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org. —Brian Howe Native: We usually think of cultural diversity in terms of
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Never, Enough, Better Nothing: Bipeds Dance Company with live music by Curtis Eller’s American Circus. $10–$12. Jun 3-4, 8 p.m. The Shed Jazz Club, Durham. See story, p. 29.
difference, but Yousuf Zafar is after what makes us all alike. In his lush color photographs of working-class life in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Central and South America, he looks beyond superficial variations in dress and culture to focus on the deeper commonalities of land and sea, work and play, striving and sustenance. The exhibit “challenges the notion that cultural identity is unique,” writes Zafar, who was born in Pakistan, raised in Ohio, and now lives in Durham. Thru Jun 11. The Carrack Modern Art, Durham. www. thecarrack.org. —Brian Howe
Riverdance: Jun 7-12. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www.dpacnc.com. Road Trip: Dance Theatre South. $12. Sat, Jun 4, 1 & 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. www.carolinatheatre.org.
Passages: Paul Hrusovsky. Thru Jun 18. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. www. cravenallengallery.com. Picturing Sound: Gemynii, Frank Myers, and James Cartwright. Thru Jul 10. Arcana, Durham. www.arcanadurham.com. Rare Earth: Photographs by Marjorie Pierson. Thru Jul 10. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www.durhamarts.org. LAST Rubbish 2 Runway CHANCE III: Dresses by student “trashion” designers. Thru Jun 5. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www.frankisart.com. Silkscreen Prints from the McMann Fine Art Collection: Thru Jun 18. Hillsborough Arts Council Gallery. www. hillsboroughartscouncil.org. Wood & Water: Installation by Greg Lindquist and Damian Stamer. Thru Jun 18. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. www. cravenallengallery.com. Dan Woodruff: Thru Jun 25. HQ Raleigh, Raleigh. 38 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
RONALD WEST
OFF-SPRING: New Generations: This exhibit, mostly photography, makes “ritual” its theme, and the offerings are alternately revelatory and rehashed from big-box postmodernism. “Off-Spring of Cindy Sherman” might have been a better title. Thru Sep 30. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham. —Chris Vitiello
PHOTO BY ANNA MAYNARD
The New Galleries: A Collection Come to Light: Thru Sep 18. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu.
FRIDAY, JUNE 3–SATURDAY, JUNE 4
BLACK IRISH CONTEMPORARY HIP HOP COMPANY: PRO-JECT Projection is the psychological transference of traits onto others. It’s also a neat thing stage actors can do with their voices. In Ronald West’s latest feat of lexi-choreography, his company uses imaginative movement and technology to explore improbable intersections among different definitions of the same word. As West creates scenarios with videographers Michelle Lotker and Clark Ivers where live dancers who can adapt interact with virtual ones who cannot, the question arises: Who—or what—is in control? The music in PRO-JECT straddles the same digital divide, with a mix of live and virtual musicians. —Byron Woods THE CARY THEATER, CARY 7 p.m., $10–$20, www.iamblackirish.com
stage OPENING After the Fall: Staged reading. $8–$20. Sat, Jun 4 & Sun, Jun 5. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www. townofcary.org. All My Sons: Play. $28–$30. Jun 8-19. Kennedy Theater, Raleigh. www.dukeenergycenterraleigh. com/venue/kennedy-theatre.
Arthur Murray Durham Summer Dance Showcase: $15. Fri, Jun 3, 8 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. www. carolinatheatre.org. Bull City Blues: Improv comedy. $12–$20. Fri, Jun 3, 8 p.m. Common Ground Theatre, Durham. www.cgtheatre.com. Burt and Abbie: Staged reading. Fri, Jun 3 & Sun, Jun 5. Cary Arts Center. www.townofcary.org. Dave Coulier: Stand-up comedy. $22–$30. Fri, Jun
Sotol Rag: Site-specific performance by Carley McCready and Brittany Price. $5. Sat, Jun 4, 8:30 p.m. The Carrack Modern Art, Durham. www.thecarrack.org. Third Date Improv, Ellen Ciompi: Improv comedy and music. $12. Sat, Jun 4, 8 p.m. Common Ground Theatre, Durham. www.cgtheatre.com.
ONGOING Hughie: Play. $12.50–$15. Thru Jun 5. Sonorous Road Productions, Raleigh. www. sonorousroad.com. The New Colossus: Tamara Kissane updates Chekhov’s The Seagull for an entitled, infantile Internet age. $5–$20. Thru Jun 4. Manbites Dog Theater, Durham. www. manbitesdogtheater.org. —Byron Woods North Carolina’s Funniest Preliminary: $10. Wed, Jun 1, Thu, Jun 2, Tue, Jun 7, Wed, Jun 8. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com. The Unspeakable Triumph of Supreme Brilliance: Play. Thru Jun 2. Carrboro High School Theater, Carrboro.
3 & Sat, Jun 4, 7:30 & 10 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.
The Wedding Singer: Musical. $12–$20. Thru Jun 12. North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre, Raleigh. www.nract.org.
Family Improv: Interactive clean comedy for families with children under 12. $6–$10. Sat, Jun 4, 3 p.m. DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www.dsicomedytheater.com.
Weekly comedy at DSI: League Night (Jun 2, 8 p.m.), The Thrill (Jun 3, 8:30 p.m.), Mister Diplomat (Jun 3, 10 p.m.), The Jam (Jun 3, 11 p.m.), Improv Wildcard (Jun 4, 7 p.m.), Stranger Danger (Jun 4, 8:30 p.m.), Versus (Jun 4, 10 p.m.). DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. dsicomedytheater.com.
Ladies Night: Female comics. $10. Fri, Jun 3, 7 p.m. DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www.dsicomedytheater.com.
screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS
Creed: $6. Fri, Jun 3, 9 p.m. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. Karate Kid: Fri, Jun 3, 6 p.m. Raleigh City Plaza, Raleigh.
OPENING The Lobster—Director Yorgos Lanthimos skewers society’s fear of single people in this surrealist dark comedy. Rated R. Me Before You—A young woman in a small town develops a connection with the paralyzed man she cares for. Rated PG-13. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping—A former boy band star (Andy Samberg) flounders after his first solo record flops. Rated R. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows—Mutants and an extraterrestrial invasion threaten the TMNT crew. Rated PG-13.
A L S O P L AY I N G Read our reviews of these films at www.indyweek.com. ½ 10 Cloverfield Lane— The spiritual successor of Cloverfield has wit and suspense, not just mysterious marketing. Rated R. ½ Alice Through the Looking Glass—Alice returns to Wonderland to rescue the Mad Hatter in this visual spectacle. Rated PG. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice—D.C. Comics’ most iconic heroes clash in an overstuffed slog littered with great moments. Rated PG-13. ½ Captain America: Civil War—As in Batman v Superman, superheroes turn on each other, but the action is served with a Marvel smirk instead of a D.C. frown. Rated PG-13. The Jungle Book— Disney’s animated classic
gets a well done, CGI-heavy update. Rated PG. Love & Friendship—All of Whit Stillman’s classist nostalgia and none of his redempetive wit are found in this achingly boring Jane Austen adaptation. Rated PG. Keanu—Key & Peele’s action-comedy-slash-catmeme falls flat with the same jokes over and over. Rated R. The Meddler—Writerdirector Lorene Scafaria
captures a love-loathe relationship between a daughter and her widowed mother. Rated PG-13. Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising—A sorority and a suburban couple square off with mindless gross-out gags. Rated R. ½ The Nice Guys—Ryan Gosling cracks a case as a private eye in 1970s L.A. in this hoot-and-a-half comedy. Rated R.
SATURDAY, JUNE 4
THE PRINCESS BRIDE An outdoor summer movie series without The Princess Bride? Inconceivable! After kicking off with Creed on Friday, NCMA’s summer series continues on Saturday with Rob Reiner’s 1987 hit. Kids will enjoy the fantastical adventures of Princess Buttercup after she loses the love of her life, becomes forcibly engaged to the slippery Prince Humperdinck, and gets kidnapped by the mysterious Man in Black—whose noble sidekicks, sword master Inigo Montoya and Fezzik the giant, remain as lovable as ever. Adults, meanwhile, can revel in nostalgia and try to quote along as much as they can. The Princess Bride also screens in Northgate Mall’s Movies on the Plaza series on Thursday, June 2. Be sure to keep an eye out for R.O.U.S.es. —Allison Hussey NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH 9 p.m., free–$6, www.ncartmuseum.org
page READINGS & SIGNINGS William Jackson Blackley, Pat Rifiere-Seel, Scott Owens: Poetry. Sun, Jun 5, 2 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com. Joy Callaway: Novel The Fifth Avenue Artists Society. Wed, Jun 8, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www.flyleafbooks.com. Anton DiSclafani: Novel The After Party. Tue, Jun 7, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www.quailridgebooks.com. Emily D. Edwards: Bars, Blues and Booze: Stories from the Drink House, with live music from Mel Melton and Max Drake. Fri, Jun 3, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com. Ralph Hardy: Middle grade novel Argos: The Story of Odysseus as Told by His Loyal Dog. Sat, Jun 4, 2 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www. flyleafbooks.com. Louise Hawes: The Language of Stars. Sat, Jun 4, 11 am. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. www.mcintyresbooks.com. Grady Hendrix: Novel My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Thu, Jun 2, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www.flyleafbooks.com. Rebekah McLeod Hutto: The Day When God Made Church: A Child’s First Book About Pentecost.
Fri, Jun 3, 4:30 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com. Harrison Scott Key: Memoir The World’s Largest Man. Tue, Jun 7, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www.flyleafbooks.com. Anne Graham Lotz: Daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham discusses The Daniel Prayer. Sun, Jun 5, 3 p.m. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org. Jo Maeder: Naked DJ. Sat, Jun 4, 2 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. www.mcintyresbooks. com. Kennetta Perry: London is the Place for Me: Black Britons, Citizenship and the Politics of Race. Sat, Jun 4, 3 p.m. South Regional Library, Durham. www. durhamcountylibrary.org.
LITERARY R E L AT E D Howard Burchette: “Maurice White, Earth, Wind & Fire: The Soundtrack of a Generation.” Tue, Jun 7, 7 p.m. Stanford L Warren Branch Library, Durham. www.durhamcountylibrary.org. Dan Caton: Discussing observational astronomy with “The Astronomer Who Came in from the Cold.” Sat, Jun 4, 1 p.m. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. www. naturalsciences.org. The Monti Season Finale: Stories with a theme of “The End of the Road.” $22. Sat, Jun 4, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www.artscenterlive. org.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 1–FRIDAY, JUNE 3
BRONWEN DICKEY AND JOHN LANE Pit Bull: The Battle Over an American Icon, the excellent new book by the Triangle’s Bronwen Dickey, cuts directly to the conflict. In the prologue, Dickey sketches an emblematic scene of a family caravanning back to North Carolina from a short vacation. They have two dogs, including a pit named Patton, in one car. But after a police miscommunication, a trigger-happy officer kills Patton, after the dog squrims free from the car, at close range. “He didn’t see a family dog at all,” writes Dickey of the cop. “He saw a monster.” For the next 270 pages, Dickey draws on hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of scientific studies and police reports to explore the evolution of a nebulous breed’s Jekyll-andHyde reputation. It’s extensively researched and passionately articulate; Dickey’s acumen as a reporter and enthusiasm as a new pit bull owner combine in a text that treats its subject with nuance and care. This week she shares three local readings (June 1 at Flyleaf Books, June 2 at the Regulator Bookshop, and June 3 at Quail Ridge Books, all at 7 p.m.) with John Lane, a South Carolina writer who roved the region in search of a relatively new settler, the coyote. —Grayson Haver Currin VARIOUS BOOKSTORES, TRIANGLE-WIDE 7 p.m., free, www.bronwendickey.com
James Murchison: Discussing his Backstabbers Clothing, Honor Raleigh, and social media. Sat, Jun 4, 3 p.m. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www.ncmuseumofhistory.org.
to America: We Are Products of the Stories that Surround Us.” $10. Sat, Jun 4, 7:30 p.m. Church of Reconciliation, Chapel Hill. www.churchrec.org.
Donna Washington: “The Mythic Journey from Africa
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BLUE POINT YOGA DURHAM is hiring a part-time administrative and sales position. Candidate must have experience with sales, customer relations and be comfortable learning different software. 10-20 hours/week. Please send resume to sara@ bluepointyoga.com.
SUMMER JOBS To Protect Civil Liberties. Pay $300-$550/week Work with Grassroots Campaigns Inc., on behalf of the ACLU to fight for LGBT rights and equality. Full-time/career.
MANUSCRIPT READER The Sun, an independent, adfree magazine, is looking for a part-time manuscript reader to evaluate fiction, nonfiction, and poetry submissions and determine their suitability for the magazine. If you live in the Chapel Hill area, are able to work 15 to 20 hours a week at home or in the office, and can make at least a two-year commitment, visit thesunmagazine. org for details. (No e-mails, phone calls, faxes, or surprise visits, please.)
(919) 904-4699
body • mind • spirit groups Do you want to stop, but can’t? We Can Help! Marijuana Anonymous: www.NorthCarolinaMA. ORG 919-886-4420
classes & instruction T’AI CHI Traditional art of meditative movement for health, energy, relaxation, self-defense. Classes/workshops throughout the Triangle. Magic Tortoise School - Since 1979. Call Jay or Kathleen, 919-968-3936 or www.magictortoise.com
MARK KINSEY/LMBT Feel comfy again. 919-619NERD (6373). Durham, on Broad Street. NC Lic. #6072.
PENIS ENLARGEMENT
Michael A. Savino NCLMBT 00703
Injury Rehabilitation Medical & Deep Shiatsu, Sports massage Tissue massage 28 years experience Reflexology, mjsavino512@gmail.com Hot Stones Durham 25 years experience 919-308-7928 Chapel Hill 919-428-3398
Programs in Massage Therapy, Medical Assisting, and Medical Office. Call Today!
Medical Pump. Gain 1-3 Inches Permanently! Money Back Guarantee. FDA Licensed Since 1997. Free Brochure: Call 619-294-7777
THE MEDICAL ARTS SCHOOL
Raleigh: 919-872-6386 • www.medicalartsschool.com
critters
Where Is Love? Just like Oliver Twist, Sir Charles is an
orphan looking for love. This sweet dog has spent the last several months moving from kennel to kennel while his rescuer desperately tries to find him a home. Sir Charles is six years old, neutered, vaccinated, micro-chipped, housebroken and non-destructive! He’s very cuddly and affectionate with people. He does need to be an only pet and should be in a household without small children as he thinks they are puppies!
Day Program General Instructor -
General Instructor needed for Day Program. Monday through Friday from 9:00am to 4:00pm. Experience with individuals with Intellectual Disabilities required and college degree preferred. Please submit resume with cover letter to Rachael Edens at rachael@pathwaysforpeople.org. No phone inquiries please.
Full Time Floater -
Position entails filling in with various consumers in Wake, Chatham, Orange, Person, Johnston, and Durham counties. Must be available from 8:00am - 7:00pm Monday - Friday. Experience with individuals with Intellectual Disabilities required. For more information contact Michele at 919-462-1663 or michele@pathwaysforpeople.org.
40 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
Michael J. Savino NCLMBT 1186
CLASSES FORMING NOW
products
is looking for energetic individuals who are interested in gaining experience while making a difference! Positions available are:
www.pathwaysforpeople.org
919-416-0675
www.harmonygate.com
massage
Pathways for People, Inc.
For a list of other open positions please go to:
No matter which MICHAEL SAVINO you choose, you’ll get a great massage!
IS IT HARD TO IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT WEED?
To adopt: 919-403-2221 or visit animalrescue.net
Atticus
is very playful and cuddly.
Sponsored by
Please ADOPT Sir Charles! He deserves a love filled life. To meet me, contact Noelle at:
919-815-8956 or paullnoelle@hotmail.com
324 W. Rosemary St. Chapel Hill 967-7110 Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL
cLassy@indyweek.com
soft return
crossword If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “Diversions” at the bottom of our webpage.
Signal Received The first half of this year has been a brutal one for our musical icons. David Bowie died early in January, a canary in a coal mine for a string of deaths that’s been particularly tough to take—Prince and Phife Dawg, Tony Conrad and Merle Haggard, all gone before the start of summer. Last week, though, marked the first time a musician’s death put me on my knees in my own office late at night, my head crammed inside the dark recesses of a crowded cabinet. I was looking for a pair of albums by Ticonderoga, a trio of old pals who moved from Iowa to North Carolina more than a decade ago. Wes Phillips, that band’s bassist and one of the most remarkable musicians I’ve ever encountered, had died earlier that day. I had to hear him play. Wes arrived in Raleigh with Phil Moore and Mark Paulson, looking to start a new band and join what they considered a fabled scene. Lucky us: I remember the band’s first show, and marveling, even from the start, at their singular vision of collective ambition. They swapped instruments between (during, even?) songs and split vocals in a way that suggested all three members shared the same breath. They pulled loose indie rock skin over a fragile jazz skeleton, and they always seemed aspirational, turning intimate ideas into intricate anthems. The seams could show, but Ticonderoga was always punching up. Ticonderoga didn’t last long, breaking up around the time it released its second album. But the spark from the flame lasted: Moore started Bowerbirds, and I loved his voice so much I launched a record label with my own best bud to share those songs. Paulson became a Bowerbird, played with an array of other acts, and engineered some remarkable records in his restored Raleigh home. Wes—whose magnetic smile always seemed to be conquering some unspoken sadness—became the musician people called when they needed better bass. For much of the last decade, he bounced between North Carolina and Iowa, working to master his own prodigious talent. We’d communicated sporadically online, and I’d always expected big news, not this. In the last week, I’ve revisited his old recordings, from solo songs to albums where he was a guest. Mostly, though, I’ve coveted the spray-painted CD-Rs Ticonderoga famously passed out at each of its shows and the pair of albums it issued in quick succession in 2005. Hearing them for the first time in a decade, and reading what I wrote so long ago, I now recognize that trio’s effect on me and how, in the right context, little-known bands can have the greatest impacts. I was finishing college, but Ticonderoga continued to teach me. They made me stretch my musical references. They made me listen and watch in new ways. They helped me see that, sometimes, success only stems from failure. I would have liked to thank Wes for those lessons. But I realized them too late, just after retrieving a stack of CDs on the heels of awful news out of Iowa. —Grayson Haver Currin gcurrin@indyweek.com
Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL
cLassy@indyweek.com
INDYweek.com| |6.1.16 6.1.16| |41 41 INDYweek.com
housing
music
own/ durham co.
rent/ elsewhere
rent/wake co. STUDIO EFFICIENCY APARTMENT 1BA/KITCHENETTE (325 SQFT.)
FAIR HOUSING ACT NOTICE All real estate advertised herein is subject to the Federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal to advertise ìany preference, limitation, or discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or intention to make any such preference, limitation, or discrimination.î We will not knowingly accept any advertising for real estate which is in violation of the law. All persons are hereby informed that all dwellings advertised are available on an equal opportunity. For more information or assistance, contact Legal Aid of North Carolina’s Fair Housing Project at (855) 797-3247 or visit www. fairhousingnc.org.
3 BUYING OR SELLING...
8
or beginning to look? I can help with any listed property. Lyell Wright, Realtor, Broker. Mobile: 919-669-6402.Email lwright@pscp.com www.pscp.com/lyellwright Peak Swirles & Cavallito Properties.
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Get your listing in 35,000 copies of the INDY! Run a 30 word ad with color photo for just $29/week. Call Leslie at 919-286-6642 or email classy@ indyweek.com
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su | do | ku
FIRST MONTH FREE in desirable Glenwood South area of Raleigh on Boylan Ave. Local transit available, lots of choices for food and entertainment. Full Refrigerator/Microwave, Apt sized Stove/Oven, Freshly painted. $725.00 includes all utilities/basic cable, and washer/dryer use. No Smoking. No Pets. Email: legionblockade@ gmail.com
classes & instruction ART CLASSES
lessons ROBERT GRIFFIN IS ACCEPTING PIANO STUDENTS AGAIN! See the teaching page of: www.griffanzo.com Adult beginners welcome. 919-6362461 or griffanzo1@gmail.com
auto auto
200 VOLVO V70 AWD WAGON 153K miles, great condition, must see! New tires, inspection, oil change and more. $4,800. OBO.919-214-4213.
Taught in small groups, ages 5-adult.#www.lucysartstudio. 54 com 919-410-2327
If you are a man or woman, 18-55 years old, living in the RaleighDurham-Chapel Hill area, and smoke cigarettes or use an electronic nicotine delivery system (e-cigarette), please join an important study on smokers being conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS). What’s Required? • One visit to donate blood, urine, and saliva samples • Samples will be collected at the NIEHS Clinical Research Unit in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina • Volunteers will be compensated up to $60 Who Can Participate? • Healthy men and women aged 18-55 • Current cigarette smokers or users of nicotine-containing e-cigarettes (can be using both) The definition of healthy for this study means that you feel well and can perform normal activities. If you have a chronic condition, such as high blood pressure, healthy can also mean that you are being treated and the condition is under control. For more information about this study, call 919-316-4976 Lead Researcher Stavros Garantziotis, M.D. • National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
this week’s puzzle level:
© Puzzles by Pappocom
There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.
1
3 4 8
1
8
2
3 9 4 2 8 5 8 52 65 8 2 9 3 9 3 8 6 4 3 2 5 9 2 7 47 4 3 1 4
4 7 1 8 6 9 8 1 1 4 5 7 4
5
MEDIUM
5 8 9 1 2 6 4 3 7
6 7 2 8 3 4 1 5 9
7HARD 3 4 8 6 5 9 2 1 1 5 9 2 7 6 3 4 8 4 9 2 6 1 3 5 8 7
# 55
1 7 3 2 5 9 6 8 4
6 9 8 7 4 1 3 5 2
# 56
2 4 5 3 8 6 7 9 1
9 1 7 8 3 2 5 4 6
8 2 4 6 9 5 1 7 3
5 3 6 4 1 7 8 2 9
# 56
2 6 5 8 3 9 4 #7 22 1
1 9can’t 7 4 wait, 5 6 2 check 8 3 If you just 4 3 8 week’s 2 7 1 answer 5 9 6 out the current 3 4 2 5 6 8 7 1 9 key at www.indyweek.com, 8 6 7 1 4 3 2 5 and click 97“Diversions”. 5 1 9 2 3 8 6 4 5 1 and 9 3 8have 7 6 fun! 4 2 Best of luck, 8 2 4 6 9 5 1 3 7 9 5 8
www.sudoku.com 6 7 3 1 4 2
1 7
9 2 3 5
42 | 6.1.16 | INDYweek.com
1950 Hudson Pacemaker 4 door sedan. 6-cyl, 3-speed w/ overdrive on column. Exterior good, interior original and a bit rough. Runs good, new battery, radiator, carb, more. Comes with a cloth cover and many spare parts & manuals. $14,000. 919-883-2151 or 630240-9095.
SELL YOUR CAR FAST! You give us $20, we’ll run a 20 word ad with a color photo for 4 weeks. Call 919-286-6642 or emailclassy@indyweek.com
The Ovarian Health Study Women, 25-29 years old, who are not currently taking birth control pills or hormones, and live in and around Raleigh, Durham, or Chapel Hill, North Carolina, are invited to join an important study to find an easier way to detect a hormone produced in the ovaries. The study is being conducted by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), part of the National Institutes of Health. What’s required? • One visit to donate blood and two urine samples • Samples will be collected at the NIEHS Clinical Research Unit in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina Volunteers will be compensated up to $65 Who can participate? Healthy women aged 25-29 who: • Are not pregnant and not breastfeeding • Have not used tobacco or nicotine products in the past 6 months • Have not taken birth control pills or hormones in the past 3 months • Have not had Depo-Provera shots in the past 6 months • Have not taken any prescription medications in the past month For more information about this study, call 919-316-4976. Lead Researcher Stavros Garantziotis, M.D. National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
6.1.16
solution to last week’s puzzle
Page 14 of 25
COOLEST CAR IN THE TRIANGLE
30/10/2005
9
Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL
6
cLassy@indyweek.com
services
tech services GOT A MAC? Need Support? Let AppleBuddy help you. Call 919.740.2604 or log onto www.applebuddy.com
garden & landscape YARD GUY Let me help in the yard when you’re too busy! Get your yard looking GREAT for Spring!. Mowing, mulching, leaf raking, trimming, planting, garden planning. Chapel Hill area. Experienced reasonable and insured. Free estimates. Mike: 919-428-3398.
professional services
entertainment
renovations EXLEY HOME IMPROVEMENTS For all repairs and upgrades. Your every need is covered: Electrical, Plumbing, Carpentry, Fencing, Additions, Decks and more. New lighting? Cabinets? Sinks? 30+ years experience. Call Greg at 919-791-8471 or email exley556@gmail.com
Andrew C. Hefner Old Fashioned Handyman!
#1 CHAT IN RALEIGH
FUN LOCAL CHAT LINE
Instant live phone connections with local women & men. Try It FREE! 18+ 919.899.6800, 336.235.7777 www.questchat.com
Listen to ads and reply free. Raleigh 919-882-0810. Durham 919059509888. USe free code 7883, 18+.
100’S OF HOT URBAN SINGLES
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are waiting to Chat! Try it FREE! 18+ 919.861.6868, 336.235.2626 www.metrovibechat.com
ROOF REPAIR and gutter cleaning. Over twenty years experience. References available. Call Dan at: 919-395-6882.
FUN LOCAL CHAT LINE
MEET GAY AND BI LOCALS Browse & Reply FREE! Raleigh 919-882-0800, Durham 919595-9800. Use FREE Code 2707, 18+.
MEET SEXY LOCAL SINGLES TONIGHT! Live local ladies & men connecting right now. Try us FREE! 18+ 919.899.6800, 336.235.7777 www.questchat.com
RECYCLE THIS PAPER
video VIDEO YOUR WEDDING, BAND GIG, PLAY, OR EVENT! Shoot. Edit. Burn. Upload. 919.357.3764 ted@tedtrinkausvideo.com
EXPERIENCED CHEF/ ESTATE MANAGER AVAILABLE Your household can run smoothly! Part or Full-time, live out or live-in (separate residence). Shopping, meal prep, staff/contractor mgt., household animals /horse care, infant/pre-school ages trained. 919-904-9779. Resume: tonya.sweetser@gmail.com
TECHNICAL CONSULTING SERVICE Retired licensed electrician with engineering degree will provide technical consulting service for DIYs. 919-308-5086.
Appliance installation/repair; Equipment, Plumbing and Electrical repair; Fencing; HVAC repair/installation; Preventative maintenance; Roofs/Gutters. Profits support Pleasant Drive Animal Rescue. Call 919-904-9025 or email achfixit@gmail.com
Gardens To Die For
Find Peace, Beauty, and Abundance
in your own yard! Mark N. Jensen • 919-528-5588 GardensToDieFor.com
Dating made Easy
FREE TO LISTEN AND REPLY TO ADS
Free Code: Independent Weekly
FREE
last week's puzzle
to Listen & Reply to ads.
FREE CODE: Independent Weekly
Raleigh
(919) 833-0088
Durham
Chapel Hill
(919) 595-9888 (919) 869-1299 For other local numbers:
FIND REAL GAY MEN NEAR YOU Raleigh:
(919) 829-7300 Durham:
(919) 595-9800 18+ www.MegaMates.com
Book your ad • CALL LesLie at 919-286-6642 • EMAIL
cLassy@indyweek.com
Chapel Hill:
(919) 869-1200
www.megamates.com 18+
INDYweek.com | 6.1.16 | 43
CLASSES FORMING NOW
THE MYTHIC JOURNEY from Africa to America: We Are Products of the Stories that Surround Us
Programs in Massage Therapy, Medical Assisting, and Medical Office. Call Today!
Donna Washington, Triangle-area Storyteller
THE MEDICAL ARTS SCHOOL
Saturday, June 4th, 7:30 - 9:30 pm, $10 Church of Reconciliation, 110 N. Elliott Rd., Chapel Hill Sponsor – C.G. Jung Society of the Triangle | JungNC.org
Raleigh: 919-872-6386 • www.medicalartsschool.com
June 3rd • Comedienne
Barbara Carlyle Seen on Def Comedy Jam & Comic View
ART CLASSES
Taught in small groups, ages 5-adult. www.lucysartstudio.com 919-410-2327
JEWELRY APPRAISALS
While you wait. Graduate Gemologist www.ncjewelryappraiser.com
BARTENDERS NEEDED MAKE $20-$35/HOUR Raleigh’s Bartending School 676.0774 www.cocktailmixer.com 1-2wk class
GOT A MAC?
Need Support? Let AppleBuddy help you. Call 919.740.2604 or log onto www.applebuddy.com
T’AI CHI
Traditional art of meditative movement for health, energy, relaxation, self-defense. Classes/workshops throughout the Triangle. Magic Tortoise School - Since 1979. Call Jay or Kathleen, 919-968-3936. www.magictortoise.com
EXLEY HOME IMPROVEMENTS
For all repairs and upgrades. Your every need is covered: Electrical, Plumbing, Carpentry, Fencing, Additions, Decks and more. New lighting? Cabinets? Sinks? 30+ years experience. Call Greg at 919-791-8471 or email exley556@gmail.com
MARK KINSEY/LMBT
FITNESS STARTS HERE! WORK OUT WITH US AT DUKE HEALTH & FITNESS CENTER.
Newly Renovated! Indoor/Outdoor Tracks, Saline Pool, Group Fitness, Strength/Cardio Equipment, Yoga, Pilates, Tai Chi, Personal Training, Nutrition & Weight Loss, Therapeutic Massage. Call Today! 919-660-6660 or www.dukefitness.org
GREEK FESTIVAL JUNE 4-5
HIRE THE BEST!
HOME REPAIR SPECIAL
TRIANGLEGAMENIGHT.COM
COMING TO ASHEVILLE?
OLD FASHIONED HANDYMAN!
YOUR FOOD PROBLEM ISN'T ABOUT FOOD.
Find the best candidates for your job opening in the INDY! Employment ads start at 70 cents/ word/week. Call INDY Classifieds: 919-286-6642 or email classy@indyweek.com Upscale Spa. private outdoor hot tubs, 26 massage therapists, overnight accommodations, sauna and more. Starting at $42. Shojiretreats.com 828-299-0999
11am-9pm RAIN OR SHINE! FREE ADMISSION! St. Barbara Church, 8306 NC Hwy. 751, Durham 1/2 mile S. of I-40 Exit 274 DurhamGreekFestival.org
SPICE UP YOUR MEETING WITH A SPEAKER WHO’S SEEN A UFO!
Read his book ìWhy Won’t They Believe Meî, available at Roswell UFO Gift Shop or Amazon. Retired professor, reasonable fees. Call the UFO Speaker at 203-293-5088.
919.286.6642
Place an ad in the Professional Services section for 4 weeks, get 2 extra weeks FREE! Ads start at $19/week. 919-286-6642 or e-mail classy@indyweek.com Appliance installation/repair; Equipment, Plumbing & Electrical repair; Fencing; HVAC ; Preventative maintenance; Roofs/Gutters. Profits support Pleasant Drive Animal Rescue. 919-904-9025 ACHfixit@gmail.com
Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com
IS IT HARD TO IMAGINE LIFE WITHOUT WEED?
DANCE CLASSES IN SWING, LINDY, BLUES, CHARLESTON
INTRO TO IMPROVISATION
DECLUTTERING? WE’LL BUY YOUR BOOKS
PATHWAYS FOR PEOPLE
KID’S CAMP JUNE 20-24
Do you want to stop, but can’t? We Can Help! Marijuana Anonymous: www.NorthCarolinaMA.ORG 919-886-4420 Healthy Active Lifestyle Camp, Fitness, Cooking, Sports, Fun, 9am-4pm. Details: 24fitbody.com 919-904-9779
Feel comfy again. 919-619-NERD (6373). Durham, on Broad Street. NC Lic. #6072.
At ERUUF, Durham & ArtsCenter, Carrboro. RICHARD BADU, 919-724-1421, rbadu@aol.com
We’ll bring a truck and crew *and pay cash* for your books and other media. 919-872-3399 or MiniCityMedia.com
Some places do karaoke. We do Game Nights. We bring 75+ board games to venues all around the triangle. Check out our free events.
Find out what it is about, and learn how to eat whatever you want without guilt. katie@katieseaver.com
back page
GARDENS TO DIE FOR
Find Peace, Beauty, and Abundance in your own yard! Mark N. Jensen. 919-528-5588 GardensToDieFor.com
TJ’s, 4801 Leigh Dr. Raleigh • 919-672-1094 1 Show Only Doors Open at 8:30pm Show Starts at 9pm $10 Must Have ID No Athletic Wear
Wed. July 13 and Sat. July 16. Be funny, be quick, be confident. 919-829-0822 or www. comedyworx.com Gain experience while making a difference. See our ad in this week’s INDY employment section!
YOUR AD HERE Get 170,000 pairs of eyeballs on your ad every week. Call 919-286-6642 for info.
RESERVE NOW!
THE INDY’S GUIDE TO DRINKING BEER IN THE TRIANGLE
Deadline: June 15th Publication Date: July 27th Contact your rep or advertising@indyweek.com