INDY Week 6.19.19 by Indy Week

RALEIGH 6|19|19

How to

) o t l i ( Fa

Buy a Home in Raleigh My adventures in pursuing the American Dream (in a city where that’s not always possible) BY LEIGH TAUSS, P. 10

CONSULTANTS AREN’T FREE, P. 8

EPHEMERAL EATING, P. 15

CATCHING LIGHTNING, P. 30

2 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK RALEIGH

VOL. 36, NO. 25

DEPARTMENTS

7 In 2015, wage theft cost North Carolina workers an estimated $316 million.

7 News

8 When Charles Francis made it to a runoff in 2017, he paid consultant Jaimey Sexton right away. After he lost the runoff, “just silence,” Sexton says.

15 Food 29 Music 33 Arts & Culture

10 For many first-time Raleigh homebuyers, the pursuit of the American Dream can be hard, fast, and heartbreaking.

36 What to Do This Week 38 Music Calendar 41 Arts & Culture Calendar

15 Of all the pleasures on offer from our local eateries, Panciuto’s are the most ephemeral. 33 Culture Mill’s American Dance Festival premiere, They Are All, is designed so that you won’t be sure who on stage has Parkinson’s disease and who doesn’t. 35 The Ackland’s new exhibit, Way Out West, includes twenty-some acquisitions UNC alumnus Hugh A. McCallister Jr. Raleigh-based metal band Lightning Born’s next LP is already selling out in Europe (see story on page 30). PHOTO BY KEN TROUSDELL

On the cover DESIGN BY ANNIE MAYNARD

INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 3

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backtalk

Lay Off the Booze

Last week was our Best of the Triangle issue, in which our readers chose their favorites in more than 330 categories. Marc Howlett did the math: “When h Tauss ards reading the ‘Guide to Everything Awesome,’ I counted thirty-five alcohol-related award categories. Thirty-five! You know what’s not awesome? Alcoholism and substance abuse. I know many people can consume en, beer, wine, and liquor in a healthy manner. However, for some of us, alcohol is a lifedestroying force. I encourage you all amillo, to consider that tireless cheerleading of meryalcohol consumption is more societally hols, complicated than, say, encouraging folks to visit the Duke Lemur Center.” Smith, vani, Last week, Thomasi McDonald wrote about the Durham City Council rejecting a , request for more police officers. “The decision is a counter-intuitive, wrong-headed mistake,” responds Hugh Giblin. “This decision is not based on ms reality, but outsiders second-guessing the decision of the police chief. It’s not made art on the facts, but reflects the animus of African Americans, the homeless, and el Wiley LGBTQ people against the police due to police treatment of them in the past.” In late May, we reported that Orange County Commissioner Mark Marcoplos wanted to increase property taxes to pay for projects aimed at mitigating climate anchard change; commissioners have since done so. “Here is a novel concept,” writes Michael Cunningham. “How about identifying te 200 exactly what projects require funding from county funds, do a cost analysis, project the 5 costs in short-, mid-, and long-term figures, include benefit/risk analysis, identify the eek.com appropriate department(s) to manage all week.com this, and have each department write it 1972 into their budget request for the upcoming fiscal year(s), and then start talking about increasing taxes if absolutely necessary, or e redirecting existing funds?” As Republican lawmakers were recently trying to override Governor Cooper’s veto of a bill that would force doctors to provide medical care to “abortion survivors”—and amid a slew of other anti-choice legislation throughout the country—Debbie Matthews wrote about her own abortion in 1983. “There have long been laws against infanticide, as there should be,” Kathryn

“Even they do not really believe their own lies.” Welch writes of the General Assembly’s effort, which failed. “This whole thing was launched as the extremist dominionists latched onto an out-of-context clip of a politician who, as a pediatric neurologist, had to deal with catastrophic neonatal cases. It was about infants dying of natural causes when newborns were born terminally ill. The issue had to do with whether to take extraordinary means to ‘prolong life,’ which in those circumstances had a zero chance of reversing things. Fanatics figured they could con Americans into believing this conversation was about infanticide, and applied to all newborns/live births. Obviously, as infanticide has long been against the law, that is a lie. But this bill is masked as an anti-infanticide bill, to ride outrage all the way to creating new intrusions into women’s lives. The line in the sand has long ago been crossed. Get these men out of office at the next available election. Even they do not really believe their own lies. They are fanning false outrage to control us even more.” Finally, from the INDY’s Department of Corrections (and Clarifications): McDonald’s story on the Durham City Council wrongly suggested that Mayor Steve Schewel voted for the eighteen extra officers; he did not, though he voted for a compromise of nine new officers. That story also misstated the amount spent on an eviction-diversion program, $350,000. And in response to Charlotte Wray’s June 5 story about an alleged racially charged incident at Orange High School, the Orange County Sheriff’s Office pointed out that the school never asked the OSCO to investigate. Also, a paragraph summarizing school board member Will Atherton’s views on the board’s recent reorganization failed to attribute those views to media reports or state that Atherton could not be reached for comment. Want to see your name in bold? Email us at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our Facebook page or indyweek.com, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek. INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 5

6 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

indynews

Silent No More

IN A LAWSUIT, FIVE FORMER EMPLOYEES—ALL MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS—ACCUSE A MEBANE HOTEL OF CHEATING THEM OUT OF $25,000 IN WAGES BY THOMASI MCDONALD

n the end, it was anticlimactic. All week, Martina Robles Salazar had looked forward to this confrontation: to marching into the lobby of the Hampton Inn in Mebane surrounded by more than fifty advocates and supporters, to staring her old boss in the eye and handing him a copy of the lawsuit she and four former co-workers— all Mexican immigrants—had filed two weeks earlier, to calling him out on what they allege was his verbally abusive and disrespectful treatment. As Kathy Diaz, a member of the immigrant advocacy organization Siembra NC, had put it a few days earlier: “This is a moment where immigrants are saying, ‘Fuck you, I’m tired of eating shit.’” But it wasn’t, at least not like they planned. The group was there, in the lobby on Thursday evening, holding signs that read, “Stop Wage Theft.” But Devante Watkins, the hotel’s general manager, was nowhere to be found. He’d just left, a desk clerk told them. She called Watkins and told him that his former employees were here. A few minutes passed. He called back: “Devante Watkins just called and said he’s not gonna come,” the clerk announced. The group groaned in unison and filed out. Robles Salazar couldn’t help but be disappointed. “I really wanted him to be there,” she said. Sebastian Feculak, a field program coordinator with the state’s AFL-CIO, told the protesters that Watkins’s “refusal to face you—not only is it an insult, but it says they know they are wrong.” Watkins is the target of the group’s ire, but he’s not the target of the former employees’ lawsuit. Instead, they’re accusing the hotel and its Charlotte-based owners, Joel B. Griffin and Douglas L. Stafford, of cheating them out of nearly $25,000 over a threeyear period.

On Thursday, protesters descended on the Hampton Inn in Mebane to protest alleged wage theft. PHOTO BY BOB KARP Griffin did not respond to requests for comment. Stafford could not be reached by press time. The alleged wage theft took several forms, according to a complaint filed in Guilford County Superior Court on May 31: The five workers say they were not given their final paychecks. Four say they weren’t paid for their outstanding vacation days. Robles Salazar says she was never given a promised bonus. Her husband, former maintenance worker Aldaberto Rios Ibarra, says he was never reimbursed for mileage. Housekeeper Olivia Vazquez Rangel says that she was sometimes paid $9 an hour when she was supposed to be paid $10. And all five say they were shorted by a malfunctioning time clock that failed to record all of their hours—and by managers who refused to let them correct their timesheets.

Of the five plaintiffs, Robles Salazar is allegedly owed the most—$9,471.90. Rios Ibarra says he is owed $4,930.49. “We will no longer be silent,” Robles Salazar says. “Dehumanizing people for profit— it should be shameful.” Studies show that wage theft is a pernicious problem, depriving low-wage workers—most often women, immigrants, and people of color—of as much as $50 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Just one kind of wage theft—minimum wage violations—cheated North Carolina workers out of $316 million in 2015, according to an EPI report. Robles Salazar and Rios Ibarra migrated to the U.S. from Mexico in 1993. They started working at the Hampton Inn more than a decade ago. It wasn’t glamorous or easy—she made $14.90 an hour, he made $12—but it allowed them to feed their four children, now ages

three through twenty-five, and buy a threebedroom house in Alamance County. And they never felt looked down upon. But then, three years ago, Griffin and Stafford bought the hotel. After that, they say, everything changed; they were treated like second-class citizens. Under the hotel’s new managers, they weren’t allowed to eat in the hotel’s public area when they took breaks and were prohibited from staying at the hotel on snow days. And Robles Salazar and other female housekeepers say Watkins yelled and cursed at them in private. What’s more, Robles Salazar says, working at the hotel took a physical toll. She’s scheduled to have surgery on both of her hands in the next month, she says, due to what her doctor calls repetitive stress injuries suffered on the job. “This company was obsessed with the bottom line at the expense of how we were treated,” she says. “We suffered physically. I will never get back my health.” According to the lawsuit, Robles Salazar was forced to work overtime without being paid time-and-a-half, and she and her fellow workers were denied vacation requests. They complained but didn’t find sympathetic ears among the hotel’s management. In November, Rios Ibarra was terminated, the lawsuit says. (He says he walked off.) In April, Robles Salazar and three other housekeepers quit in protest of their alleged mistreatment. Then, a month later, they sued, seeking nearly $50,000 in unpaid wages and damages. Watkins returned to the Hampton Inn about an hour after the demonstrators left Thursday night. Tears welled in his eyes when he was asked about the allegations that he verbally abused and mistreated his former employees. “My owners won’t let me comment on anything,” he responded. “I must say, I love everybody and will give them the shirt off my back.” tmcdonald@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 7

news

Stiffed!

TWO CONSULTANTS SAY CHARLES FRANCIS STILL OWES THEM FROM HIS 2017 CAMPAIGN BY LEIGH TAUSS

wo political consultants say Raleigh mayoral candidate Charles Francis still owes them nearly $9,000 for their work during his previous bid for the city’s top office in 2017. Brad Crone, the owner of the Raleighbased firm Campaign Connection, says Francis never paid him for a $2,530 newspaper ad he placed on the campaign’s behalf. “In twenty-eight years doing business,” he says, “I’ve never had a client stiff me other than Charles Francis.” Jaimey Sexton of the Chicago-based The Sexton Group alleges that Francis owes his telemarketing firm $6,463.76 for robocalls. “We did a first invoice right after the [2017] primary, and that one was paid in full,” Sexton says. “After the runoff [election], just silence—and I called his office repeatedly.” Francis won 36 percent of the vote in a three-way election in October 2017, enough to deny Mayor Nancy McFarlane a majority. In the runoff, McFarlane defeated him 58–42. This year, Francis announced his campaign the day McFarlane said she would not seek re-election. Reached Friday, Francis told the INDY he had no knowledge of the outstanding bills. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said, adding that he would look into it. An hour later, Francis’s campaign emailed a short statement: “There appears to be a misunderstanding on a set of outstanding balances from the 2017 campaign. The campaign is reviewing these issues. This matter will be resolved quickly with all parties involved.” Soon after the campaign sent that statement, Crone told the INDY that Francis had just called him pledging to pay his debt by July 1. Crone says Francis has made similar promises three times before. Campaign finance reports show that Francis spent about $425,000 on the 2017 race, including more than $55,000 of his own money. Those records also show that Francis reported spending $63,696.96 on mailers through Campaign Connections

8 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

and $2,830 on robocalls through The Sexton Group. Crone, however, says that Francis actually paid him $67,696 for mailers, and Francis was supposed to pay another $2,530 for the ad Crone placed in the October 5, 2017, edition of The Carolinian. But the ad purchase does not appear to be listed in Francis’s campaign finance reports. Francis’s campaign expenditures also do not appear to include all of the money paid to The Sexton Group. An invoice The Sexton Group shared with the INDY puts the total bill for its services at $11,102.80, but the amount Francis paid at $4,639.04. Even with the balance, that’s about $1,800 more than Francis appears to have reported spending. State Board of Elections spokesman Patrick Gannon says that, while he can’t comment on this situation, state law requires that “all expenditures of campaign funds must be reported.” The penalty for not doing so would “depend on the outcome of an investigation, if there was an investigation.” Francis’s campaign manager, Conen Morgan, declined to comment on the unreported campaign expenditures. In an effort to collect its debt, The Sexton Group emailed Francis three times at his law firm address in March and April 2018, according to emails shared with the INDY. In the final email, on April 5, vice president of policy and strategy Elena DiTraglia told Francis, “I just wanted to circle back on our phone conversation from last week. We totally understand your situation but wanted to see about setting up a payment plan for your outstanding invoice.” Sexton says that when DiTraglia reached Francis over the phone, Francis “would plead poor.” Francis, a trial attorney who founded North State Bank in 2000, listed his eightthousand-plus-square-foot Raleigh home for $3.15 million in 2018. It has since been taken off the market. ltauss@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 9

How to

to) l i a F (

them. An $20,000 i cards, no avoid any in my twe But eve to buy a h ing, and so My ge homeown grandpar millennia and thirty 2018 Urb percent of they were at play: makes it payment; of color a whites; de dual inco buying a h toward d other wor many of u Have a Dream Step 1: It’s tha (But Know the Odds) my situat espite an unfortunate paint job, the house on The no gateway East Hargett Street was the one. Just under nine hundred square feet, it hadshould bu everything I wanted: close to downtown Raleigh, a kitchenlandlord’s I could work with, room to grow (but not too much). Anof the Am hour earlier, I’d spotted the day-old listing on Zillow andof rugged emailed my realtor. Now, I was standing in the living room,idealizatio imagining where I’d put my clawed-up red couch and But for crammed bookshelves and picturing my cats lazing aboutCounty, th It’s Eco in the fenced-in backyard. keeping p Better: It was a seven-minute bike ride from Battery Heights to downtown. Best: It was within my budget, or close enough. Two days later, on May 30, I submitted my bid: $206,000, $1,000 over the asking price. Another time and place, that would have been more than enough. But this being Raleigh in 2019, several other people submitted bids, too. And we all lost to a national development firm. My dream home is about to be gutted, renovated, and flipped—or, worse, razed and replaced with a chic halfmillion-dollar box with open floor plans and balconies from which to watch the rest of the neighborhood “improve.” Such architectural harbingers of revitalization dot the street with increasing frequency as you head downtown. Either way, it will no longer be my dream home. And I won’t be able to afford it, anyway. Such is the pursuit of the American Dream for first-time Raleigh homebuyers like me: hard, fast, and heartbreaking.

Buy a Home in Raleigh My adventures in pursuing the American Dream (in a city where that’s not always possible) BY LEIGH TAUSS

Price in U.S. Dollars (thousands)

efore we go further, an acknowledgment: I didn’t come to this home-buying adventure from a place of adversity, but one of privilege, generational wealth, and downright luck. Journalism doesn’t pay much, but my parents offered toSOURCES: WA help with the down payment, as their parents had done forINCOME, 2000 10 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

so prices are rising. Between 2010 and 2017, Wake County’s population grew by about twenty-four thousand residents a year. During that period, the county added between ten thousand and twelve thousand housing units a year. You see the problem. Wake’s median household income was just under $78,000 in 2017, according to the county’s revenue department. In May, the median sales price of a Wake County home was more than $320,000, according to the Triangle MLS. If you apply the common wisdom that you shouldn’t pay more than three times your income for a home, that means the county’s median household can’t afford the county’s median house. And for those earning less than $50,000 a year—schoolteachers, firefighters, police officers, people in the service industry, certain late-twentysomething journalists—shopping for a home usually presents a choice: learn carpentry skills or buckle up. “If you are a modest-income professional, buying a home either means doing a lot of fixing up yourself, or it means going to the fringe with a long commute,” says Duke economics professor Charles Becker. When I started house-hunting a few months ago, it was, at best, a half-hearted effort. It began with an offhand suggestion from my editor that I try to buy a house and write about the experience; I had no intention of actually buying anything. But the deeper I dug into the process—obsessing over online listings, furiously emailing my realtor whenever something interesting popped up—the more the allure of owning my own house tugged at me.

them. And I don’t have much debt—about $20,000 in student loans, $2,000 on credit cards, no car payment, and I’ve managed to avoid any bankrupting medical catastrophes in my twenty-nine years on earth. But even with all that going for me, trying to buy a house often felt impossibly frustrating, and sometimes simply impossible. My generation isn’t committing to homeownership like our parents and grandparents did. Just 37 percent of millennials between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four own a home, according to a 2018 Urban Institute study, down from 45 percent of Gen Xers and baby boomers when they were that age. There are lots of factors at play: more student loan debt, which makes it hard to scrape together a down payment; increased diversity, as people of color are less likely to buy a home than whites; delaying marriage, as nuptials (and dual incomes) increase your likelihood of buying a home; and millennials’ gravitation toward downtowns in high-skill cities—in other words, we want to live in places where many of us can’t afford to buy. It’s that last one that’s most relevant to my situation. The notion that homeownership is the gateway to financial stability—that you should build equity instead of paying off your landlord’s mortgage—is a fundamental tenet of the American ethos, grounded in the ethic of rugged individualism and the postwar idealization of picket-fence suburbia. But for many middle earners in Wake County, that ideal can prove elusive. It’s Econ 101: The housing stock isn’t keeping pace with a fast-growing population,

House Sale Prices vs. Median Income Price in U.S. Dollars (thousands)

300 Wake County Median Residential Sale Price

250

200 Raleigh Median Residential Sale Price

150

Wake County Median Household Income

100

2000

2002

2004

2006

2008

2010

2012

2014

2016

2018

Year SOURCES: WAKE COUNTY REVENUE DEPARTMENT (MEDIAN SALE PRICE), FEDERAL RESERVE BANK OF ST. LOUIS (MEDIAN HOUSEHOLD INCOME, 2000–17), WAKE COUNTY STAFF PRESENTATION TO COMMISSIONERS (AREA MEDIAN INCOME, 2018)

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I’m almost thirty. For so long, I’ve felt like I’ve been waiting for my life to start. But lately, I’ve realized that it’s happening— right here, right now. I want to start thinking about starting a family (even if it’s not a conventional one). I want to have something to show for myself financially. And maybe, though it had never occurred to me before, I really do want my own piece of the American Dream. So I decided to give homeownership an honest-to-god shot. This is what happened.

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Step 2:

A TASTE OF ETHIOPIA

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Get a Mortgage (and Thank Your Mom)

he first important number: $200,000. That’s how much that broker James Hedges told me I’d prequalified for. I understood the basics of how a mortgage works—a bank gives you money, you pay it back with interest for thirty years— but I only vaguely grasped how my lender figured out how much I could afford, what type of loan I qualified for, and how much interest I’d have to pay. That, Hedges told me, comes back to my debt-to-income ratio: how much I owe versus how much I make. Then the lender runs a credit score to assess how reliable I am about making payments. Which brings us to the second important number: 698. That’s considered good—twenty-three points better than the national average. But it’s also misleading. Deep in my credit report is an American Express account opened in 1982—seven years before I was born—with a low balance on a high limit that I’ve never seen or used. My parents had opened it and added me as a user, in the process making me appear to have a better borrowing history than I actually do. Score one for Mom and Dad. The better your credit, the better your options. Scores above 580 qualify you for a Federal Housing Administration loan; above 620, you can get a conventional loan. FHA loans require lower down payments (3.5 percent) but can have higher monthly payments and come with more strings attached. Conventional loans typically require at least a 10 percent down payment—yeah, right—but have a lower interest rate. Hedges nudged me toward an FHA loan, which allows a higher debt-to-income ratio, meaning I could spend almost half of my paycheck on my mortgage payment. He said I would also qualify for the NC Home Advantage Tax Credit, a program that allows first-time and military veteran homebuyers to claim an income tax credit worth 30 percent of my annual interest

payments, up to $2,000 a year. That’s $167 a month in savings. With a 4.5 percent interest rate, I’d pay $995 a month on my $200,000 loan, about $100 less than I’m currently paying to rent a six-hundred-square-foot downtown apartment. Not bad. But then come property taxes. Including Wake County’s recent 10 percent hike, a $200,000 house will set me back about $2,300 a year in city and county taxes. And don’t forget insurance and mortgage insurance. Put it all together, and you get the third important number: $1,358. That’s how much I’ll pay every month for a $200,000 FHA loan. After I pay my student loan, that leaves me with less than $200 a week to live on: food, cat food, gas, utilities, or, god forbid, an emergency. Going out? Unlikely. At first, that was a depressing thought. But I realized that my disposable income would only be about $75 a week less than it is now. I could keep brown-bagging my lunch and mostly breaking even, and at least I’d own something for my trouble. Here again, I’m fortunate to pay only $200 a month in student loans. Hedges says he’s seen teachers who make $35,000 a year but have more than $200,000 in student loans, which means they’re paying well over a grand a month. Banks won’t take the risk. “That’s a house payment right there,” Hedges says. “If you paid face value for college, it would equal a home loan when you graduate.” Lenders have tightened up since the 2008 crash, says Becker, the Duke professor. The Great Recession came about largely because of unscrupulous lending practices—high-interest loans issued to high-risk borrowers, who defaulted. The wave of defaults led to the fiscal crisis and the stock market crash. That, in turn, depressed the housing market, which left millions of people owing more for their homes than they were worth. The market, of course, has recovered (and then some) over the last decade. Becker says he expects another crash eventually, though not in the next year or two. Perhaps the possibility that I was trying to buy near the peak of the housing cycle should have given me more pause than it did. But I had my pre-qual in hand, and I was ready to shop. “We want to be ready to go,” Hedges advises. “Especially in this market, we’ve got to be ready to move fast. First-time homebuyers are missing out on more homes because by the time you talked to an agent, get pre-qualified, it’s three days later and the house is already under contract.”

Homeownership Rate, Ages 18–34, 1990–2015

Homeownership by Generation at Age 25–34

Percentage Rate

50% 40%

Key

30%

18–24

20%

25–34

37%

45.4%

45%

10% 0

1990

2000

2010

2015

Year

Millennials (b. 1981–97)

Gen Xers

(b. 1965–80)

Baby Boomers (b. 1946–64)

SOURCE: THE URBAN INSTITUTE

Step 3:

Move Fast (and Check for Squatters)

he carport barely hanging over the driveway looks one strong gust away from collapse. The Southeast Raleigh fixer-upper on Sunnybrook Lane is listed for $150,000, well within my budget, but “fixer-upper” is too polite a term. Debris is strewn about the backyard. Everything screams bad vibes. “Because of the state of the property, I am checking for a squatter before we go in,” says realtor Shannon Brien. Open the front door, and you’re hit with the smell of mold and mildew. The wood floors are stained with what Brien believes is animal or human urine. There are unsightly brown stains on the wall and dirt everywhere. A kitchen cabinet is full of green mold. Most problematic, the floor dips in peculiar ways, leading Brien to believe there may be issues with the foundation. Renovations would probably cost more than $70,000. Even if I wanted to bite that bullet, the FHA would never sign off. The Sunnybrook nightmare is less than a minute drive away from a house on Cooper Street, a recent flip listed for $200,000. You can tell it’s a flip, Brien says, because there are hardly any “signs of life”—minor stains or scratches that betray activity. The walls are painted a brilliant white. The new granite countertops gleam. There are three bedrooms and barbed wire on the fence guarding the backyard, hinting at a past painted over for a premium. We look at another house in the same neighborhood listed for $210,000. The brick has been painted a soft shade of gray, and the door is bright red. “It looks like it doesn’t belong,” Brien says. The other houses on this street have yet to undergo such a makeover. Another flip, it smells like fresh paint. There are kitschy

mugs on the kitchen counter with “Mr. and Mrs.” embossed in cursive letters. It’s small for a three-bedroom. It will sell quickly, Brien says. Homes like this hit the market and receive dozens of offers within days, sometimes hours, sometimes in all cash. The result, especially in historically lowincome parts of the city—the last places inside the Beltline where acquiring singlefamily houses for under $300,000 is even conceivable—is rapid gentrification. In May, The New York Times took note of a trend that’s been obvious to local real estate agents, policy makers, and housing advocates for years: Small homes throughout Southeast Raleigh are being scooped up, renovated, and resold to mostly white buyers, transforming longtime black neighborhoods into hip hamlets where the price of admission edges a half-million dollars. This dynamic is playing out in cities all over the country: Black renters are being pushed out by rising rents—40 percent of Wake renters are already considered costburdened, and Triangle rents rose 4 percent in 2018 alone—or landlords who want to cash out as their once-downtrodden neighborhoods become hot commodities. Black homeowners are facing higher taxes as their property values go up or simply see an opportunity in a booming market. And as with so many things, the problem of gentrification inexorably traces back generations and has its roots institutionalized white supremacy. As education and housing policy expert Richard Rothstein explains in his 2017 book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, federal policies enacted during and after the New Deal prevented most African Americans from obtaining the home mortgages they needed to buy into the burgeoning suburbs to which whites flocked

after World War II. Instead, they were left to languish in deteriorating and ignored urban neighborhoods. (Because they couldn’t purchase homes, they also couldn’t build equity and pass along generational wealth. African Americans still lag whites in homeownership—41 percent to 71 percent—according to The Urban Institute—and the divide is worse among younger people.) Things began to change around the turn of the century when downtowns started regaining their mojo. Suddenly these “undesirable” neighborhoods became places where you could buy cheap and live close to the downtown action, or renovate older homes and make a mint on the resale. The story begins a little differently in Raleigh. Before the 1920s, Rothstein writes, African Americans lived throughout the city, especially in thriving sections of North Raleigh. The city’s white leaders, however, wanted to concentrate the black population in the southeast, near a dump and a rock quarry full of stagnant water. The problem was that the U.S. Supreme Court had forbidden municipalities from using zoning to create blacks-only neighborhoods. In stepped Raleigh’s school board: Because the Supreme Court allowed school segregation, it simply located the black schools in Southeast Raleigh and refused to bus students in from other areas. Within a decade, Southeast Raleigh was a black neighborhood, and it remained so for much of the twentieth century. Like many black neighborhoods in the South, it suffered from neglect, with some (but not all) pockets beset by crime and poverty. Then came downtown’s renaissance. And as the value of their neighborhoods rose, the African Americans whose families had lived in Southeast Raleigh for decades could no longer afford the houses being sold to their new white neighbors.

“As we continue to grow, where are these people supposed to go?” Brien asks.

Prepare for Disappointment (or Learn to Love the Hinterlands)

Step 4:

livia Robinette and Evan White are holding hands, walking through the backyard of a one-story ranchstyle house in Fuquay-Varina. It boasts tall trees and spans nearly an acre, more than enough room for the couple’s chocolate Lab. After months of looking—and being outbid on several houses closer to Raleigh’s Morse Square Middle School, where Robinette works as a middle school teacher—this house sparks optimism. “We could get married in this backyard,” Robinette says. It would be about a half-hour commute, but other teachers drive farther. Some of her co-workers live in Johnston and Harnett Counties, where you can still buy a big house on an educator’s budget. Robinette has toured about fifteen houses so far, some she really liked, but she didn’t move fast enough. Besides, closer to Raleigh, houses came with tiny lots and big mortgage payments. In Fuquay-Varina, they could get a big lot and a smaller payment. She’s going to make an offer, she decides. Other millennials have had luck in Wake’s smaller towns, too—though who knows how much longer that will be possible. Jacob Bowen, a twenty-three-year-old sheet metal fabricator, lived with his grandparents for three years while he saved up money to buy a house in Youngsville. He paid $160,000—after being outbid for other houses six times over eight months. Dave Shay, a twenty-nine-year-old photographer, earns about $85,000 a year working two jobs, but he didn’t even bother looking in Raleigh. The day after INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 13

Homeownership Age 25–34 By Race

Percentage Rate

60% 50%

White

40% 30%

Hispanic

20% 10%

Black 1960

1970

1980

1990

2000

2010

2015

Year SOURCE: THE URBAN INSTITUTE

14 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

touring a house in Holly Springs, he offered $270,000 for it. “The fear was, if we don’t buy something soon, we’re not going to be able to afford anything in a few years,” he says. “The market was going up just about as fast as we were saving.” I looked at places in the suburbs, too: There was the home in Wake Forest with a ton of land and lots of modern fixtures, but I couldn’t stomach the thought of spending an hour a day on Capital Boulevard. There was the cute house in Wendell, but that commute would also have been miserable. Then there was the new construction near Fuquay-Varina’s blossoming downtown, a modern ranch with an open floor plan on the market for $210,000. It was built by a nonprofit specializing in affordable housing. The paint was barely dry, and the whole place stank like sawdust. Someone else’s affordable dream, perhaps. I could have moved to North Raleigh. I looked at a lime-green two-story home outside the Beltline; the fixtures reminded me of my grandmother’s house. I also found a house in a golf community within city limits. I’ve never played golf, but the high ceilings had some appeal. The dead roach on the carpet did not. At heart, though, I’ve always been a city girl. I want to live in Raleigh, as close to downtown as possible. I want to bike to work. I want to live near the retailers and bars and restaurants I like to frequent (even if living there meant I couldn’t afford to frequent those places). But checking all of those boxes presented a moral quandary: Would I become just another gentrifier with a bright red door, contributing to, and eventually profiting from, what seems like an inescapable tide of displacement? That thought left a bad taste in my mouth.

ffordable housing is the number one issue in this fall’s city elections. Everyone agrees it’s a problem, though there’s no consensus on how to fix it. We know there will probably be a housing bond on next year’s ballot. We also know that some incumbent city council members are pushing developers to “voluntarily” add affordable units to get their projects moving—under state law, the city can’t compel them to do so—while challengers are pushing for more density, betting that having supply match demand will keep prices from rising too much too fast. But no matter what, houses aren’t going to get cheaper. In the end, I didn’t buy a house. Or rather, I haven’t bought one yet. I looked at a dozen houses, was sort of interested in three, and put in an offer on one. Despite my longsuffering realtor and patient mortgage broker doing the heavy lifting, I still found the whole exercise emotionally exhausting: the high of hope on Hargett Street, the low of losing it, and the Goldilocks-like slog of seeing home after home that wasn’t just right. Even so, I might get back in the game. Brien still sends me listings. They appear like little bursts of hope in my inbox. Perhaps I’ll rethink my parameters and start looking at condos and townhouses, even though sharing a wall with my neighbor is the very thing from which I’d like to extricate myself. Who knows. If adulthood has taught me anything, it’s to continually downgrade my expectations. ltauss@indyweek.com Editor’s note: The INDY would like to thank realtor Shannon Brien and mortgage broker James Hedges, who donated their time for this story.

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Ephemeral Eating

YOU CAN’T REALLY REVIEW PANCIUTO. YOU CAN ONLY CAPTURE A MOMENT IN TIME. BY NICK WILLIAMS

he game. ey appear here’s a Brigadoon-like quality ox. to Panciuto, the cozy restaurant eters and entering its fourteenth year of life wnhouses,in downtown Hillsborough. Simply getting with mythere—for anyone who doesn’t happen to which I’dlive in central Orange County—is a bit of a journey, and if your route takes you down aught meone of many backroads in the hazy, refractgrade myed glow of an early summer evening, then the elsewhere vibes grow more immersive week.comby the mile. Panciuto is only open four nights a week, and the menu—according to to thank legitimately poetic website copy—“changes ge broker a little bit every day, noticeably week to ime for week, and completely month to month.”

Of all the pleasures on offer from our esteemed local eateries, Panciuto’s are the most ephemeral. Perhaps that’s why the restaurant seems to flicker on the edges of the local consciousness, in the shadow of the grander egos and bigger crowds of the “in-town” places. Mention Panciuto to gastronomically inclined friends, and you’ll hear things like, “I’ve been meaning to try it,” and “I never make it out there,” and “Oh yeah! That place!” Even Panciuto chefowner Aaron Vandemark seems like a bit of a wallflower, despite six James Beard Foundation nominations and gushes of

social media love from culinary bigshots. He’s an iconoclast by his own admission. “You don’t do what we do,” Vandemark says. “It doesn’t make sense.” Panciuto—in a dining culture where the word “local” has been buzzed into near meaninglessness—is local as all hell. It walks that particular path of righteousness with a single-minded resolve, serving nothing that isn’t grounded in the pursuit of regional terroir. Its dishes and preparations sprout like crops, are nurtured and loved and coaxed into form, only to disappear with the next turn in the season, usually never to be seen or tasted again.

Open Wed.–Thurs., 5:30–8:30 p.m.; Fri.–Sat., 5:30–9 p.m. 110 South Churton Street, Hillsborough 919-732-6261 | panciuto.com

The triumphs and tribulations of local agriculture and fisheries inform every aspect of Panciuto’s menu: According to Vandemark, the restaurant both suffers and celebrates along with the people who supply the vast majority of its food. “The connection to people, time, and place is everything,” Vandemark says. “We will always be a reflection of the reality of farming in this community.” And so, a caveat. This is not a review, not really. It’s a snapshot of a restaurant— and in the spirit of that restaurant’s mission, a region—at one particular moment in time. It just so happens to be quite a nice moment, with a wet and miserable winter fading into memory, and the feisty flavors of spring giving way to summer’s swooning, heavy-laden abundance. Panciuto offers a frieze of this precise point in the harvest in the form of a vegetable board, which sounds like something you might find at a Lutheran picnic but is, in fact, one of the sexiest and most audacious dishes around. Nine local vegetables, fiercely in season, arrayed on a serving board in gorgeous, psychedelic hues. The least I can do is to describe it in the same detail as it was presented. Grilled strawberries, their exterior caramelized and interior molten; grilled onions, smoky and sweet; sugar snaps with a percussive crunch, sprinkled with a lemony gremolata; beets in onion jam, their juices like a smear of lipstick; asparagus, savory and pleasingly bitter. Broccoli, fried to tempura delicacy; bok choy in spicy vinegar, vivacious and exotic; pickled cauliflower, with an appetite-whetting tang; best of all, fennel in fig jam and mustard vinaigrette, anise sweetness amplified to candied sublimity. Vandemark pointed out the provenance of every item in this litany, and the growers would be familiar to anyone who’s lurked around local farmers markets. The dish is a portrait of what the average home cook would be picking up this time of year, prepared with intent and consummate skill. Radicchio has a niche hewn into my personal Divine Pantheon of Vegetables, and it was happily the centerpiece of Panciuto’s salad the night of my visit. Grilled to a lightly smoky char, it came dressed in anchovy oil and a pickly dill aioli and tossed with a cleanly contrasting lettuce. Balancing wholesome bitterness INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 15

Be healthy • Be strong

AKAI HANAA

Japanese Restaurant & Sushi Bar 206 W. Main St., Carrboro • 919-942-6848 909 A Arendell St., Morehead City • 252-222-3272 www.akaihana.com

RECYCLE THIS PAPER Panciuto chef-owner Aaron Vandermark PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

Thank you to all of our guests for voting us Best Burger, and Fries in Orange and Chatham County! We couldn’t do it without you.

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with oily richness, it’s a hearty, crunchy salad I wanted to eat with my hands. The cold cucumber soup was fussier but came generously apportioned with golf-ballsize lumps of sweet crab meat. The seafoam green broth was a bit salty but made for a breezy, herbaceous palate cleanser. Pasta is the crux of Panciuto’s menu, and it’s where the restaurant’s ambition is most evidently put to the test. There were four on the night of our visit: passionate, technical dishes relying solely on the bounty of our very small (in global terms) swath of field and coast. The duck meatballs with chicken and duck liver tortellini was our only dish of the evening featuring the meat of a land-dwelling animal, and it was a stutter-step. I like the strange, metallic complexity of offal, and the pasta filling was admirably livery. But the tortellini itself was undercooked, crunchy, and unappetizing. The meatballs were flavorful but seemed to lack fat, the texture crumbly. These disappointing bites did, however, come resting in a superb duck broth that I drank out of the bowl. The canestri—sort of a giant, pot-bellied macaroni—was a better example of Panciuto’s produce-focused approach. A blanketing sauce of cream, asparagus, basil, and scallion was augmented by a poached egg, its tangerine yolk spreading in little tributaries over the noodles, an added layer of

decadence to the vivid, deepgreen flavors of spring. Next came gnocchi. I have a bad track record with gnocchi. Usually, I find it to be just fine, and I rarely understand its penchant for eliciting gasping adulation. But Panciuto’s version is far better than just fine. Gnocchi can be chewy and leaden: These are diaphanous, the interior like a puff of cotton. They come anointed by a squash butter that elevates the dish into pleasurecoma territory. While the gnocchi’s charms come easy, the black spaghetti is on a different plane, and ultimately the one entrée where Vandemark’s skills are on the most transcendent display. It’s an arresting-looking dish, the noodles dyed a stygian greenish-black by squid ink. In contrast, “noodles” of cucumber run through the tangle, dotted here and there by clam shells. It’s cloaked in a fiery tomato sauce, little pops of red against the dark background. And there’s more of that crab meat, rendered briny and pugnacious by heat and spice. It’s an aggressive dish, perhaps a rejoinder to those who might doubt Panciuto’s bona fides. It was absolutely stupendous. If there is any through-line to these four divergent preparations, it’s intensity. They are bravely flavored and unapologetically rich, with nothing tamed or withheld. And their flavors belie the humbler aspects of Panciuto’s aura. This unadorned dining room, open maybe twenty hours a week, will nonetheless squeeze every possible drop out of the local gleaning. This little restaurant, tucked away on a quaint main street in an absurdly charming riverside town, will surprise with powerful, emotional cooking. At least that’s what happened the last time I went, accompanied by three friends on a perfect June evening. By the time you read this, the menu will have changed, these ingredients and flavors replaced by something fresher, livelier, more implacably in season. I can only recommend that you take the time to capture your own snapshot, and know that it will be fascinatingly different than mine. food@indyweek.com Restaurant reviews are supported by the INDY Press Club. Visit KeepItINDY.com to learn more about how you can keep the Triangle’s best culture journalism sustainable.

food

BLACK FARMERS MARKET

Noon–4 p.m., Sun., June 23 NC Mutual Building Plaza 411 West Chapel Hill Street, Durham

Disproportionate Response TO PREVENT BLACK-OWNED FARMS FROM VANISHING, THE BLACK FARMERS MARKET WANTS TO GIVE THEM ACCESS

217 WEST MILLBROOK RD. 919-787-9894

BY LENA GELLER

lack-owned farms represent less than 2 percent of all farms in the nation, and that percentage is declining. What’s more, black farmers generate less income than their white counterparts, according to the most recent U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Census of Agriculture. It hasn’t always been this way. A number of initiatives following the Civil War successfully promoted independent farming by black tenants, and in 1920, about 14 percent of America’s farms were black-owned. But due to discriminatory land lending, a lack of access to loans, and increased industrialization, millions of black farmers were pushed off their land during the twentieth century. Derrick Beasley, co-founder and creative director of Black August in the Park and the Black Market—two local organizations working to advance black-owned businesses—says that “black farmers may go extinct” if the current trajectory continues. “Small farms are disappearing anyway, in terms of the larger industrial food landscape,” Beasley says. “But black folks experience that disproportionately, as we disproportionately experience most social justice issues.” Beasley says the displacement of black communities is a major factor harming black farmers, referencing Complete 540— the proposed extension of the Triangle Expressway—which will displace more than two hundred homes. The project, Beasley says, will uproot a historically black community in Holly Springs that has contributed to the local food scene. “Displacement isn’t just an urban issue. It’s happening in rural communities as well,” he says. “The land we own is shrinking faster than most.” The best way to combat the problem, he says, is to support black farmers—which Black August in the Park and the Black

Farmers from Pine Knot Farms in Hurdle Mills sell produce at the November 2018 Black Farmers Market. PHOTO COURTESY OF BLACK AUGUST IN THE PARK Market will be doing this Saturday with their second Black Farmers Market. Vendors will include Pine Knot Farms, Williams Produce, Off Grid in Color, and Turtle Mist Farm, as well as several local black-owned retailers. The market aims to create a space that fosters connections between black farmers, local and regional food systems, and food and land justice organizations. “Black folks have a complicated relationship to growing, and to land, and to farming,” Beasley says. “There’s a cultural resistance. The Black Farmers Market is trying to give these people access.” This weekend’s market will also provide opportunities for the public to learn about the obstacles black farmers face, featuring informational booths and a panel discussion on black land ownership and agriculture. Panelists include Undreya Hudson, director of Communities in Partnership Food Co-op and the N.C. Community Bail Fund of Durham; ancestral historian Georie Bryant; and Gabrielle Eitienne, a writer and cultural preservationist.

“Durham has such an affinity for local businesses, so there’s an opportunity to connect local restaurants with farmers and build our own infrastructure that prioritizes strongly disenfranchised groups,” Beasley says. “As Durham puts itself in conversations with cities around the country in terms of development, it will be fascinating to see how we can set the tone within this food context as well.” Several thousand people attended the inaugural Black Farmers Market last November, and Beasley expects a similar crowd this weekend. He hopes that Black August in the Park and the Black Market will occur more frequently in coming years—even if black farmers begin to get more recognition by mainstream farmers markets. “As long as there’s a disproportionate amount [of black farmers], there needs to be an equally disproportionate response to ensure that black farmers have access,” he says. food@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 17

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28 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

indymusic Free Spirit

CICELY MITCHELL UNLEASHES HER TALENTS FROM BEHIND ART OF COOL'S PAYWALL TO SERVE ALL OF DURHAM AT GOLDEN BELT BY KYESHA JENNINGS

n 2014, Cicely Mitchell—a biostatistician at PharmOlam by day, a lover of jazz and all things music by night—introduced The Art of Cool Project to Durham with trumpeter Al Strong. The project began as a unique collaboration between Durham’s music and art scene. It eventually grew into a homegrown, multi-venue music festival that hosted a slew of legendary jazz and hip-hop acts, including George Clinton, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Washington, Rakim, and Nas. One of the first Art of Cool concert series took place at LabourLove Gallery at Golden Belt. Five years later, much has changed. Art of Cool’s founders sold the festival to The DOME Group last year, and Mitchell is currently the artistic director of the SummerStage event series at Golden Belt. But in a way, there’s a divine order leading from then to now: The office of LRC Properties, which bought Golden Belt from Scientific Properties in 2017, is where LabourLove once stood. “It’s coming around full circle for me to be presenting on the campus, because that’s where I got my start,” Mitchell says. “That’s where I cut my chops.” LRC Properties sought out Mitchell to direct its arts, music, and community event stage because of the curatorial expertise she demonstrated via Art of Cool and her management of Beyú Caffè’s more intimate jazz offerings. Taking place on an outdoor stage next to Hi-Wire Brewing’s patio, the series is free; after launching in April, it runs through October, giving Durham and surrounding areas thirty weeks of awe-inspiring, art-infused cultural experiences. Golden Belt is located in the heart of East Durham, an area of downtown that has traditionally been neglected by the city, and Mitchell is trying to disrupt negative narratives of gentrification by centering on the needs of Black and Brown residents in East Durham and inviting the rest of the city to come along, rather than the much more common opposite scenario. Her hope is for “all of Durham to see this as a community stage” and to “reframe what the downtown map looks like, to get people to come across the tracks.” Mitchell’s choices—from the musicians to the thematically connected film screenings, from having bilingual storytelling on the lawn to making the programming free— highlight her commitment to inclusivity. Attendees have access to genre-bending artists like Orquesta GarDel, a multinational salsa group; Jennah Bell, an African-American folk singer from Oakland, California; and Naughty Professor, a New Orleans brass band with a rock aesthetic, just to name a few.

Cicely Mitchell PHOTO BY CHRIS CHARLES “Golden Belt is not just music focused—there is a holistic approach to visual art, family fun, film, and health initiatives,” Mitchell says, explaining ways in which it differs from Art of Cool. Most important, without the pressure to sell tickets, attention can shift to programming familyfocused events. This is more important than ever in light of Durham’s fight for liveable wages. Music-festival tick-

ets in the Triangle typically began at $100, excluding the city’s low-wage workforce. At Golden Belt, Mitchell hires locally whenever possible and collaborates with community partners like Go Triangle, Downtown Durham Inc., and Alliance Architecture to make SummerStage accessible to all. In September, SummerStage will pay tribute to Nigerian musician and Afrobeat originator Fela Kuti. The tribute will include an Afrobeat performance by jazz artist Butcher Brown (September 20), accompanied by a screening of Finding Fela during September’s Fourth Fridays film series (September 27). This week, on June 21, Oakland folk artist Jennah Bell will perform, followed by an energetic Orquesta Gardel performance on June 27 and a film screening of Sprinter on June 28. It’s the story of Jamaican track star Akeem Sharp and his undocumented mother, who separates from her family to support her son’s dreams. July and August’s featured films, House of Flying Daggers and Matangi/ Maya/M.I.A., are a fantastical look at resistance during China’s Tang Dynasty and an intimate portrait of a Sri Lankan artist who found acceptance in America’s popculture arena, respectively. There’s much to look forward to besides concerts and screenings, from monthly fitness classes to weekly weekend brunches and genre-free open-mic jam sessions—no registration required, just show up and plug in. Sundays are dedicated to Brunches Brew, jazz sessions facilitated by Alan Thompson of ZOOCRÜ. To assure the brunch aesthetic, mimosas, fancy brunch cocktails and breakfast centered food trucks will always be in attendance. “We want musicians to see Golden Belt as a space to create,” says Mitchell, adding, “I feel like there is a hole in the ecosystem for something like that, and I’m hoping that people take advantage.” Mitchell is also opening doors for other curators: SummerStage is available for private renting. Thus far, curators of color have benefited directly from Mitchell’s partnership with Golden Belt. The goal is for curators, event planners, concert promoters, and artists to have access to an affordable space that also happens to be functional and aesthetically pleasing. It’s easy to wonder how a director and biostatistician manages to juggle all of this. Mitchell credits her beginnings at Art of Cool, where the workload was high but so were the rewards. “There’s no balance at all, but when you love what you do, it doesn’t feel like work,” she says. music@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 29

JUNE

WE 19 THE RECORD COMPANY 7p

TH 6/13 • 7P

THE STRANGER

BILLY JOEL TRIBUTE FEATURING MIKE SANTORO

SU 23 PHISH LIVE AT MERRIWATHER POST PAVILLION WEBCAST 6p

FR 28 LIQUID STRANGER 8p SA 29 “TRAP APOLLO”

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

SU 30 PHISH AT BB&T AMPITHEATRE WEBCAST 6:30p

J U LY

FR 5 THE CLARKS 7p SA 6 SECOND HELPING:

THE LYNYRD SKYNYRD SHOW 7:30p 7p

WE 10 THE NEW MASTERSOUNDS FR 12 PHISH AT ALPINE VALLEY NIGHT ONE WEBCAST 7p

SA 13 GRASS IS DEAD & SONGS FROM THE ROAD BAND 8p

SU 14 PHISH AT ALPINE VALLEY

NIGHT THREE WEBCAST 7p

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

FR 19 GREENSKY BLUEGRASS

AT KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE 5:30p

FR 19 INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE:

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

SA 20 LONG BEACH DUB ALLSTARS

W/ AGGROLITES / MIKE PINTO 7:30p

SU 21 AFTON MUSIC SHOWCASE

FEATURING: ELECTROMANIC, MEISTROXMUZIC, MARK DIPRIMO, AIRCRASH DETECTIVES, KEITH LEGLUE, THE GYPSY MYSTICS , THE OCEANFRONT BAND & GUEST 5:30p

SA 27 DIRTY LOGIC:

TRIBUTE TO STEELY DAN 8p

CO M I N G S O O N

8/2 COSMIC CHARLIE 8p 8/3 BENNY “THE BUTCHER” 8/9

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

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

W/ HARMONY HOUSE SINGERS 7p

8/23 JIVE MOTHER MARY

W/ BROTHER HAWK / BIGGINS / SIXTEEN PENNY 7:30p

9/13 WILDER WOODS

LIVE IN CONCERT 7p

8/31 METAL POLE MAYHEM 8p 9/15 BRENT COBB AND THEM 7p 9/20 BLACK UHURU 8p ADV. TICKETS @ LINCOLNTHEATRE.COM & SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS ALL SHOWS ALL AGES

126 E. Cabarrus St.• 919-821-4111 www.lincolntheatre.com 30 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

music

Bottled Lightning

RALEIGH METAL BAND LIGHTNING BORN FLOUTS THE TRUISM THAT HEAVY TOURING IS THE ONLY ROAD TO SUCCESS BY BRYAN C. REED

onventional wisdom suggests that the only way for an upstart band to find success is through relentless touring. The optimistic view of this is that live performance is what connects musicians to fans in a way algorithms or record reviews never could. The more cynical view is that in the face of meager album sales, bands must become de facto T-shirt companies, using their tunes as merch-table magnets. But the Raleigh band Lightning Born offers at least a glimpse of an alternative. Though its live performances have been sporadic, and its recent self-titled debut album arrives three years after the band’s formation, the quartet attracted the attention of the California label Ripple Music and its devoted, if far-flung, audience. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the roster includes well-established musicians. Singer Brenna Leath also leads the hard rock band The Hell No and, more recently, the doom trio Crystal Spiders. Drummer Doza Hawes has played with Mega Colossus and Bloody Hammers, among others. Guitarist Erik Sugg leads Demon Eye, and bassist Mike Dean is best known as the bassist and occasional frontman of Corrosion of Conformity. Lightning Born draws elements of them all in its hard-grooving proto-doom. Leath’s dynamic vocal is a compelling complement to the burly swing Hawes and Dean ply in the low end and the earworm riffs Sugg reels off. (“He is a riff machine,” Hawes says.) “We have international interest, in part because of Mike Dean,” Leath says. “But also, the genre that we’re in and the ‘#RippleFamily.’ They really have a worldwide network of people who are passionate about this genre of music, who follow it even though it’s somewhat niche.” For a busy quartet that balances Lightning Born with the demands of other touring bands, careers and families, that built-in interest allows the band to exist and grow with a more laidback approach. Whereas

Lightning Born PHOTO BY KEN TROUSDELL PHOTOGRAPHY Hawes’s previous outfits focused on precision and repetition, Lightning Born takes a looser approach, rehearsing in Deans studio, where they can press record anytime they find the right groove. “Mike’s encouraging us just to experiment and play off the cuff, and whatever ideas come out, we’ll put them on tape,” Hawes says. “We’re just playing riffs together and all of a sudden, there’s a song.” That approach also allows for accommodating the band members’ schedules. When Leath was pulled away by business travel, her bandmates would send her their recordings so she could write lyrics and vocal melodies to bring back to the studio. But the band does have limitations, selfimposed and otherwise. “The things you do for love are not the things you do for money,” Leath says. “This has been and continues to be a passion project for us. It’s a lot of fun in the studio, and we’re fortunate to have Mike’s studio

to do it in. But I think it’ll be more of a festival project than it will ever be a heavy touring project.” So far, though, it’s working. Lightning Born played the annual Maryland Doom Fest twice ahead of the album’s release, appeared at last year’s Hopscotch Music Festival, and are booked for the September festival Descendants of Crom III in Philadelphia. And even with no formal tour planned, pre-orders of the LP’s limited-edition variants are already selling out in Europe. Leath acknowledges that live performance is still a vital aspect of being in a working band. “There’s still a heavy appetite for live music and live shows,” she says. But Lightning Born seems to have struck a balance that allows its members to maintain separate lives while growing a fanbase, conventional wisdom be damned. music@indyweek.com

music

JPHONO1

Friday, Jun. 21, 9 p.m., $8 Nightlight, Chapel Hill

SUN STUDIES

Thursday, Jun. 20, 8 p.m., free The Night Rider, Raleigh

Triangle Pastoral

THREE NEW ALBUMS IN THREE DIFFERENT GENRES ALL SEEM HEWN FROM THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE M. GRIG

MOUNT CARMEL 

12k; May 10

We live in a lucky time for ambient music, especially the kind with ties to the American South. Michael Grigoni, a Duke doctoral candidate in religious studies who performs under the moniker M. Grig, falls loosely into this category, although his latest release evokes landscapes outside of Durham, farther westward, toward California, where Grigoni was raised. Previously, M. Grig released three meditative EPs, Field Notes, Still Lifes, and Millpond Way. On LP Mount Carmel, which was released last month on the experimental label 12k, the dobro, lap steel guitar, acoustic guitar, and pedal steel guitar are all at play, but each instrument recedes in service of the whole, a technique he describes as a kind of instrumental “erasure.”

M. Grig PHOTO COURTESY OF 12K RECORDS On past albums, Grigoni’s prowess as a guitar player shone through as more of a focal point; on Mount Carmel, the instrumentation is carefully layered with—and deconstructed by—field recordings and electronics. The resulting sound has an airy, astral quality that seems to evoke the spaciousness of years passing slowly in an open landscape. Grigoni was raised near the hills of Los Peñasquitos; the album was created with that particularly dry, hilly landscape in mind. On opening track “Call,” drones sweep through gentle acoustics with a spooky, arid effect, like hot wind blowing across grass, while the

heavily-textured “B” suspends full-bodied instrumentation in moments of tense silence. In “Form,” the guitar work spackles with meandering, crackling atmospherics. At different points, I was brought back to a specific memory of riding in a car in Montana as a child, transfixed by a gigantic black storm cloud miles down the highway, which the car never seemed quite able to reach. In this way, Mount Caramel’s asynchronous electronics achieve one of the best things that ambient music can do, which is to pull you, taffy-like, away from the center of something and hold you at a deliberative, transformational distance. —Sarah Edwards

JPHONO1

LOBLOLLY BOOGIE ½ Potluck; June 14

“Some of my earliest memories have also been constant in my life. One of these is the loblolly pine tree. … They stop time in stillness, they dance in the flow, and they provide a familiarity with myself I’ve only just begun to notice.” That’s John Harrison, a local indie-rock legend from bands such as North Elementary and jphono1, writing about the indigenous tree that serves as the title spirit of his new album, which also stops time in stillness, dances in the flow, and, for all its gentle psychedelics, has a warm, easy intimacy. Loblolly Boogie explores a mellower side of Harrison’s solo-ish project, jphono1, lacking the rhythm section, The Chevrons, which played on the two prior releases. It does so without compromising the lush riffs and intricate sentimentality associated with the project. The opening track, “Where Clouds Are Born,” gracefully sets the scene, evoking the collective sway of Southeastern pines in summertime respite; it also captures something of the album’s alert languor: “High above where

clouds are born / Steal away into the morn / Everything that’s here is awake.” On “I’ve Let All My Hair Grow,” Harrison opts for a more poignant pastoral approach, waxing nostalgic while removing a photograph from a frame: “Open up the blackframed off-white grainy film / I’ve let all my hair grow hiding out within.” Harrison’s simple vocal approach, and the reduction of competing sonic layers from prior jphono1 releases, prioritizes emotional clarity over flash. So does the accompanying book that Harrison, also a visual artist, created with local photographer and musician Kevin Clark, which pairs the lyrics with Clark’s evocative piney photography. Together, the music and images capture something vivid and timeless embodied in the familiar tree. “They have always been there with me,” Harrison says of loblolly pines, “and they will be there after I’m gone.” —Julie K. Smitka

SUN STUDIES SKETCHES 

Self-released; May 3

“Pastoral” is easily one of the most over-slapped descriptors in all of music, but for Reid Johnson’s charred folk vehicle, Sun Studies, the term feels accurate and useful. Laconic solo projects are nothing new for the Schooner frontman, of course. Ersatz names like Hospital Smokers and Clinton Johnson ring familiar in the memories of longtime Triangle indie heads, but Johnson’s artistic output has always waxed and waned depending on your level of attention. These days, he’s fully in Sun Studies mode, and on Sketches, he indulges in his blurriest folk tendencies, crafting accessible, honeyed desolation and several of the strongest songs of his winding career.

Reid Johnson PHOTO BY MARIA ALBANI This moody corner of folk music lives and dies with the vocal chops of the singer, and Johnson continues to sell his windswept baritone with the understated plea of a subway busker. Stripped of full-band rigmarole, his dazed melodies are unable to hide anywhere but in plain sight. These songs smolder in your ears, no protective noise or springy basslines required. “Bruiser/Pawn” boasts a gorgeous acoustic strum and characteristically alienated imagery. “Summer Night” sounds retrofitted for just that; it’s serpentine folk for a balmy, melancholic evening on a porch with a choice brew. There’s the sense of an artist who has achieved a level of technical skill at which sentimental balladry is not only permissible but encouraged. He’s paid his dues. If you’ve never paid attention Schooner beyond acknowledging its presence on local Facebook events or tattered telephonepole flyers, this might be your best entry point into Johnson’s earthy yet ornately ornamented world. He’s one of the brightest folk talents North Carolina can boast, and Sketches stands as an immersive addition to his catalog as well as our collective Sunday-morning-coffee soundtracks. —David Ford Smith music@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 31

32 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

indystage

MURIELLE ELIZÉON & TOMMY NOONAN: THEY ARE ALL Tuesday, Jun. 25 & Wednesday, Jun. 26, 8 p.m., $33 Von der Heyden Studio Theater, Durham www.americandancefestival.org

No False Moves

They Are All PHOTO BY SARAH MARGUIER

MURIELLE ELIZÉON AND TOMMY NOONAN ARE CREATING A SPACE FOR NEW KINDS OF VIRTUOSITY AT ADF BY BRIAN HOWE

n the premiere of They Are All, the new work by Murielle Elizéon and Tommy Noonan, you’ll see a multigenerational cast of fourteen dancing to an original soundscape by Shana Tucker. You’ll see them moving through relations and formations that suggest turning spirals, crisscrossing tracks, and tributaries flowing into a river. You’ll see biometric data about one dancer’s breathing projected behind the cast, externalizing their internal experience in real time. What you won’t see, if the show comes off as intended, is that some of the dancers are professionals, while others have never set foot on a stage—let alone at the American Dance Festival—and that more than half of them have Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s is a nervous-system disorder that affects motor control, speed, and balance; about sixty thousand Americans, most of them sixty or older, are diagnosed with it annually. In recent years, research has shown the benefits of dance for people with Parkinson’s. Mark Morris Dance Company (which performs its Beatles extravaganza, Pepperland, at ADF this week) started its “Dance for PD” classes in Brooklyn. They soon spread across the country, including to Durham, where they were eventually taken under the auspices of ADF, as Byron Woods detailed in our July 4, 2018 issue.

But if you’re familiar with the highly personal and pathbreaking work of Elizéon and Noonan, who co-direct the internationally inclined performance lab Culture Mill in Saxapahaw, you won’t be surprised to hear that they’re carving their own lane through this context in three important ways. One, they’re viewing Parkinson’s through an “artistic perspective on movement as opposed to a scientific one,” as Elizéon says. Two, the participants aren’t dancing choreography in a repetitive, mastery-based sense, but helping to devise choreography that emerges from their own movement palettes, their personal virtuosity. And three, it’s been as much about providing the choreographers with new tools as the opposite. You might assume that Elizéon and Noonan have a personal connection with Parkinson’s—which, of course, they now do. But initially, their focus was simply on multigenerational, untraditional dance work that minimized artifice and control. They spent years working in Europe before they moved to Noonan’s home state, and their friends in Germany’s Theater Freiburg were working on a Parkinson’s-centered university project involving dancers, choreographers, neuroscientists, philosophers, and more.

“What was really revolutionary was that researchers were dancing and experiencing their bodies in collaboration with people with Parkinson’s, who are considered experts in their own movement, creating a common experiential framework,” Noonan says. “We wanted to build on that and create a project with dual aims: seeding the ground for new conceptual approaches to research and giving us a whole different set of conditions to create work. Working with people who are experts in loss of control aids us in thinking about how to produce dance differently.” The cast of They Are All consists of five professional dancers and nine people with Parkinson’s or other movement disorders, all of whom have been in Elizéon and Noonan’s weekly classes at ADF, alongside scientists and researchers, since March. “The neuroscientist at Duke we’ve been working with, Dr. Jeff Hoder, said, ‘Wow, the way you structure improvisation around imagery in a nonjudgmental way and use an artistic framework to create a relationship to movement is totally different from a standard physical-therapy perspective,’” Noonan says. “In his view, for people with Parkinson’s, any movement is good. All that matters is their emotional and cognitive investment.” That can come from doing a familiar activity in a new way, or just from loving what you’re doing, Noonan says. He and Elizéon are already prone to working from improvisation rather than a predetermined form. “Even if we are engaging in the same tasks, there is another way to approach them every time, while a physicaltherapy approach is, do this twenty times,” Elizéon says. “We are interested not only in what we are doing, but how we are doing it.” Because of the way art involving people with disabilities is often marketed, it’s easy to read the show description and get the wrong idea: that the piece is about Parkinson’s, or, worse, that it’s supposed to be “heartwarming” in a condescending way. That couldn’t be further from the work’s aims. “The piece is formulated so that it’s not entirely clear who has and doesn’t have Parkinson’s,” Noonan says. “It’s rigorous, but it’s the rigor of connecting your own story and humanity and vulnerability to being embodied on stage. Parkinson’s is a very particular disease, in that someone may have incredible difficulty walking from here to there, but if they dance or their motor neurons are primed with a metronome, everything becomes possible. The whole thing is mutually beneficial: the tools we have to offer and the experience they have to offer.” In short, it’s an extension of Culture Mill’s efforts to reframe virtuosity away from the technical idea of what a body should do and toward a personal idea of what a body can do. “As a dancer you are told you need to be the best—but compared to what?” Elizéon says. “We’re working with how to bring the whole of ourselves into the room, and that’s what being the best is. It’s the body being the repository of its own complex, layered history, being transparent to all of ourselves.” “It’s incredible what some of [the amateur dancers] are doing, and I don’t mean that in a patronizing sense,” NoonINDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 33

an adds. “When work is framed around inclusivity, there can be a false sense of lowering a bar. But according to our reference points of courageously bringing your whole self on stage, I’m truly impressed by things a lot of highly technical dancers are not capable of.” This isn’t the only uncharted territory in the piece: Though Elizéon and Noonan are married and frequently appear in each other’s works, usually only one is the choreographer. This is the first evening-length piece they have co-choreographed, seeking to unite complementary approaches. Noonan tends to work from the outside in, starting from ideas about staging and composition. This makes the process of They Are All newer for him than for Elizéon, who always tends to work from the body outward, which this piece, in order to open an authentic path from class to stage, necessitated. They Are All is built around personal relationships, some longstanding, some developed in the classes. The professional dancers include local stalwart Matthew Young, whom Noonan has known since childhood, and Angelika Thiele, a longtime friend and collaborator of Elizéon. “As this river or community builds, it builds as a network of real relationships instead of working from fictional images of a couple,” Noonan says. “Matthew and Angelika didn’t know each other, and so their duet works from the reality of not knowing a person, and as they start to know each other, their duet is changing.” Elizéon and Noonan credit ADF director Jodee Nimerichter, who commissioned the piece, for extending them an extraordinary amount of trust and freedom as they developed a work that, owing to its nature, was difficult to preordain in terms of cast and content. The result is something that slips along the margin between the festival’s modern-dance center and Culture Mill’s radically vulnerable approach. “Instead of exploding the conventions of dance, we’re trying to work right on the edges,” Noonan says. But for all its innovations, the work is traditional in one sense: It aspires to beauty, which Elizéon characterizes as “the transparency to all that is there.” “If beauty is taking the complexity of humanness and putting it in a relational space, I think it does that,” Noonan says. “Hopefully, it transcends Parkinson’s, which was a vehicle in the process.” If that vehicle intends to travel into new modes of research, it also goes where art always goes: into the heart of your own personal experience, writ large in a diverse constellation of unique bodies on a stage. bhowe@indyweek.com 34 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

stage

BRIEF

BRIGHT STAR 

Through Sunday, Jun. 23 NCSU’s Titmus Theatre, Raleigh www.theatre.arts.ncsu.edu Steve Martin has long been a beloved comedian, actor, essayist, and bluegrass enthusiast, but his career on stage has been far more checkered. That’s part of the reason why this TheatreFest production of Bright Star, Martin’s 2015 Broadway musical with songwriter Edie Brickell, is actually stronger in places than its material. When Martin’s script seeks to associate itself with his betters—as gruff literary editor Alice Murphy (a fine Tina Morris-Anderson) and her staff namedrop famous wordsmiths, including Carl Sandburg, Eudora Welty, and Carson McCullers—the inevitable comparisons hardly favor Martin. In this tale about the rise of a young Appalachian writer named Billy Cane (an earnest Benaiah Barnes), a social occasion crucial to the plot is graced with the vivid title “Couples Day” before Billy announces his inevitable discovery of love in deathless prose: “I think I’m seeing you in a new way.” Brickell’s plainspoken lyrics too often stay too on the nose. “I’m ready for my life to begin / I’m ready for it all to start,” Billy asserts in the title song. “There goes our chance for happiness / And all our hopes and dreams,” Young Jimmy Ray (Chris Inhulsen) forthrightly despairs in “Heartbreaker.” Only the wistful first-act tune “Asheville,” imaginatively staged by director Rachel Klem and lighting designer Joshua Reaves, fully benefits from such economy of expression. Still, Diane Petteway’s solid musical direction makes for show-stopping moments. She and choreographer Morgan Piner take Texas swing to a boozy barroom in the raucous “Another Round,” before Daryl Ray Carliles gives a Lyle Lovett take on “I Had a Vision.” Though Morris-Anderson’s climactic song, “At Last,” reunites two couples and a mother and child after too long a separation, it can’t erase the cardboard scripting of an earlier reconciliation between an estranged dad and daughter. In a play about writing, the writing’s the problem in Bright Star. —Byron Woods

indyart

WAY OUT WEST

Through Aug. 25 Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill www.ackland.org

The Lie of the Land

WESTERN LANDSCAPES CONCEALED AND REVEALED IN NEW EXHIBIT WAY OUT WEST BY SARAH EDWARDS

light-drenched view of the Virgin Canyon by Hudson River School painter Thomas Moran is the first thing you see upon walking into the Ackland’s new exhibit, Way Out West, which consists of more than twenty paintings newly acquired from the collection of Hugh A. McCallister and almost sixty from the Ackland’s collection. In the first part of the exhibit, “Virgin River, Utah” is shown alongside several remarkable studies by Albert Bierstadt and other late-nineteenth-century landscape artists. Moran’s Edenic depiction of the canyon is majestic in the most providential sense of the word: Rocky outcroppings frame a canyon suffused by pink light. Standing in front of it, it’s hard not to ask how a place that beautiful can possibly exist. The answer, it turns out, is that it likely doesn’t exist. Hudson River School artists were famously loose when it came to realism, crafting composite scenes from different landscape studies and filling in the gaps with their own imaginations—painting the world, in other words, that they wanted to see. “Virgin River” is likely one such composite, a radiantly pristine vision of the American West. In a contemporary age where we’re rightfully wary of curated content and of whether anything put in front of us resembles reality, Moran and Bierstadt’s paintings remind us that false fronts are all part of a grand American tradition—in this case, one that propelled the displacement and genocide of Native American populations. Way Out West is divided into four sections; the next three expand and complicate that first glimpse. “The Collectors Eye” contains paintings from McCallister’s collection, including several contemporary landscapes. Wilson Hurley’s 1971 panorama of clouds sweeping across the horizon, “Sunset on

“Virgin River, Utah” by Thomas Moran PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ACKLAND MUSEUM OF ART

the Rio Puerco,” is particularly arresting. The first half of the exhibit is mostly landscapes; the second half, made up of sections “Encounter and Exchange” and “Abstraction and Transformation,” begins to include signs of life, including numerous works by Native American artists drawn from the Ackland’s collection. There are the early-twentiethcentury pen, ink, and watercolor drawings of Alfonso Roybal and Abel Sanchez; numerous earthenware works by unnamed artists; and “The Three Graces,” Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s brightly-colored portrait of three Seminole, Muskogee, and Diné women. Larry McNeil’s stunning color lithograph, “Diacritical Formline,” is perhaps the standout piece. In the next room, it’s thrilling to see Gary Winogrand and Robert Adams photographs up close, as well as a signature Dorothea Lange. The last painting in the exhibit is Richard Misrach’s “Submerged Gazebo, Salton Sea” (1984), which depicts a ghostly vacation town flooded by toxic fertilizer runoff. Like Moran’s canyon, it’s bathed in a hazy, almost otherworldly light, although the focal point of this scene is a gazebo overtaken by flooding. Grim, perhaps, but it feels like a suggestion of what’s to come, and an appropriate close to a show about a part of the country that has been particularly shrouded and corrupted by American mythology. sedwards@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 35

6.19–6.26 WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

SATURDAY, JUNE 22

DIY FEST

Sometimes we describe The Scrap Exchange as a “creative-reuse center” and then wonder if Triangle newcomers (and even some long-timers) have any idea what we mean. After all, it’s not like every city has one, and that’s what makes it a Durham institution. In essence, the nonprofit makes “waste not, want not” more than an idle maxim, after nearly thirty years of collecting every kind of scrap material imaginable from local businesses and residents and then releasing it back into a creative ecosystem of artists, makers, and teachers. There’s no better time to dive in than the third-annual DIY Fest this Saturday, which is synergized with the yearlong Durham 150 sesquicentennial celebration. The family-friendly activities with more than thirty creators include screen-printing with Supergraphic Print Lab, a cardboard neighborhood-building project, robot sumo wrestling, and a Q&A with directors Laura Nicholson and Ann Woodward on the emerging “Reuse Arts District” centered on The Scrap Exchange, along with food trucks and live music by Swedish Wood Patrol. Yes, we said “robot sumo-wrestling. —Brian Howe THE SCRAP EXCHANGE, DURHAM 12–5 p.m., free, www.scrapexchange.org

FRIDAY, JUNE 19

VAMPIRE WEEKEND WEDNESDAY, JUNE 26 & THURSDAY, JUNE 27

ALI WONG

We’re in a rich age for boundary-breaking physical comedy, but Ali Wong takes anatomical wisecracks to a whole new level. For one, she’s been pregnant during the filming of both of her Netflix specials, Baby Cobra and Hard Knock Wife—a handy prop that has caused some people to ask Wong if she plans to be pregnant on every future comedy special. (She does not.) Breast-milk jokes are fair game, as is trying to get pregnant, pregnancy, afterbirth (the literal thing), and the other kind of afterbirth: raising a baby (“a wack-ass job.”) Wong’s jokes, though, certainly subvert any kind of stereotype that those topics might bring to mind: Her work oozes verve and raunchy energy. With a new Netflix romanticcomedy out this month, in which she plays an acclaimed chef who reconnects with a deadbeat childhood best friend, she’s primed to pack the house. —Sarah Edwards DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DURHAM 7 p.m., $40–$60, www.dpacnc.com 36 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

Ali Wong PHOTO

BY KEN WORONER/NETFLIX

FRIDAY, JUNE 21

MARIA BAMFORD

As a rule, every Maria Bamford article must describe her standup as some variant of “weird,” “bizarre,” or, perhaps, the diplomatic “unique.” Her surprising choices extend from her phrasings (like describing her body as “going full Detroit, abandoning all infrastructure”) to venue selections (her latest special, 2017’s Old Baby, includes shows at a bookstore and a bowling alley). Listening to Bamford, the star of the short-lived, critically-acclaimed Lady Dynamite, delivers the unstable thrill of a waterbed. As she flits between exploring her mental illness and dysfunctional Midwestern family and analyzing mundanities like dog-park interactions, her elastic voice—robustly impersonating folks we’ve never heard of but somehow know—sparks segments akin to actually-funny episodes of Prairie Home Companion. She earns stacked laughs, first stemming from her meticulously tuned growl-whisper-lilt, then swelling as the audience realizes the dark absurdities she’s concocted. Perhaps the worst slur for a comedian is “predictable;” Bamford, thankfully, is anything but. —Lucas Hubbard THE CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM 8 p.m., $35, www.carolinatheatre.org

Sometimes indie rock acts hit growing pains as they move from dive bars to amphitheaters. Death Cab for Cutie leaned too much into schmaltzy sadboy gauze; Modest Mouse muzzled Isaac Brock’s mischievous mania for milquetoast, maudlin pop rock. And Vampire Weekend? They leaned hard into their left-field tendencies while still honing their mainstream instincts. Latest album Father of the Bride is by turns inspired by Kacey Musgreaves (frontman Ezra Koenig told Stereogum in 2017 that he had a minor epiphany listening to the country singer’s songs) and Haruomi Hosono (the cult-favorite Japanese musician and producer is sampled on Bride’s “2021”). Its revolving door of guest musicians and vocalists—most notably Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth and Haim’s Danielle Haim—is both jarring and pleasant. Its traditionalist hits, such as the sweetly straightforward “Bambina” and the melancholy midtempo “Harmony Hall,” deliver easy, empirical rewards. But its difficult moments, like the kaleidoscopic “Sunflower,” shine, too. It’s willfully weird on a wonderfully large scale. —Patrick Wall RED HAT AMPITHEATER, RALEIGH 8 p.m., $70+, www.redhatamphitheater.com

Father John Misty

PHOTO COURTESY OF BELLA UNION

TUESDAY, JUNE 25

JASON ISBELL AND FATHER JOHN MISTY

On the surface, Jason Isbell and Father John Misty have a lot in common: Both emerged in a similar surge of early-2010’s indie-rock and have loyal fanbases. Both also tend to be outspoken, specifically about politics, authenticity, and the ravages of consumer culture. Their messaging, though, is divergent enough to place them worlds apart. Isbell is all pardon-me-ma’am sincerity, often engaging in good-faith Twitter exchanges, while Father John Misty, with his Jackson Maine swagger, cultivates the rabid exasperation of a Biblical prophet, often referring to himself in the third-person and abruptly walking offstage when he’s had enough. How will these two tall men do at sharing a bill? The only way to find out is to witness this unique pairing at its stop in Cary this week. Both artists have trotted out new songs on this tour, a move that bodes well for the promise of new albums. Jade Bird opens. —Sarah Edwards KOKA BOOTH AMPITHEATRE, CARY 7 p.m., $50–$80, www.boothamphitheatre.com

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO? BLACK FARMERS MARKET AT NC MUTUAL BUILDING PLAZA (P. 17), BRIGHT STAR AT TITMUS THEATRE (P. 34), CHURCHILL’S SHORTS AT BURNING COAL (P. 43), JPHONO1 AT NIGHTLIGHT (P. 31), MAIN STREET AT SHADOWBOX (P. 44), MARK MORRIS DANCE COMPANY AT DPAC (P. 42), MURIELLE ELIZÉON AND TOMMY NOONAN AT THE RUBY (P. 33), SUN STUDIES AT NIGHT RIDER (P. 31), TRAMPLED BY TURTLES AND DEER TICK AT NCMA (P. 38), WAY OUT WEST AT THE ACKLAND (P. 35), WHERE WE AT?! AT CHOICE TATTOO (P. 41) INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 37

music 6.19–6.26

THU, JUN 20 ARCANA: Cuchulain & Wren, Alan Barnosky; $10 suggested. 6 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Josh Rouse; $20. 8 p.m. THE CAVE: Sodada, Old Flame, Pool Boy; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. GIBSON GIRL VINTAGE: Jones Michael; 6 p.m. KINGS: Nerd Nite; 6:30 p.m. LOCAL 506: Slaughter to Prevail, Illist; $13-$15. 7 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Xylem, Tha Materials, Tumbao; $10. 9:30 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: T. Gold Album Release with Chessa Rich; $12. 8 p.m. THE NIGHT RIDER: Sun Studies, Andy Holmes, Shannon Garcia and the Taken; Donations. 8 p.m. THE PINHOOK: Daddy Long Legs, Katharine Whalen’s Swedish Wood Patrol; $12-$15. 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Local Band Local Beer: Thick Modine, The Mobros, The Dead Bedrooms; $5. 9 p.m. THE RITZ: A Day to Remember, Knocked Loose, Boston Manor, A Day to Remember; $69. 7:30 p.m. SLIM’S: Medium Heat, Duck, Goddamn Wolves; $5. 9 p.m.

FRI, JUN 21

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Night Moves, Computer Science; $12-$14. 8 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 22

THE CAVE:

TRAMPLED BY TURTLES AND DEER TICK The hard-to-label string band Trampled by Turtles has become something of a roots-music institution since forming more than fifteen years ago. The Minnesota-based group pushes bluegrass beyond the genre’s traditional boundaries, making the band pliable enough to play both folk festivals and more mainstream events like Lollapalooza and Coachella. Touring in support of its latest critically acclaimed album— last year’s Life Is Good on the Open Road—TBT is set to deliver tender ballads and jaunty romps alike. Splitting the bill is Deer Tick, a rock band from Rhode Island that mixes elements of blues, folk, and country, but generally eschews singing with a twang. Guided by bandleader John McCauley, Deer Tick embraces acoustic music as well as grungy amplification (and occasionally performs as a Nirvana cover band, Deervana). Count on an eclectic evening of string music, folkies. —Howard Hardee

NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m., $29-$40, www.ncma.org

Deer Tick

PHOTO BY SCOTT ALARIO

38 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

WED, MAR 27

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Imani Pressley, RYXOG, Calli Wood, Kae Soul, Aja Marie, DJ K-Vass;$5-$7. 8 p.m. THE PINHOOK: Kyle Hamlett Uno [$8, 8 p.m.]

WED, JUN 19 CAROLINA THEATRE: Steve Earle & The Dukes; $35-$55. 8 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Abigail Dowd & Isabel Taylor Dual Album Release; $7-$10. 8 p.m. THE KRAKEN: Grant Peeples, Jess Klein; 8:30 p.m.

LINCOLN THEATRE: The Record Company, Buffalo Gospel; $20. 8 p.m. LOCAL 506: The Spirit of the Beehive, Strange Ranger and Truth Club; $10. 9 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: Russian Tsarlag Album Release with Dan Talbot, Desert Secretary, Secret Boyfriend, Millie; $8. 9:30 p.m. THE PINHOOK: The Oblations, Dino Horns, Dreamroot; $8-$10. 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Witchtit, Book of Wyrms, Bedowyn; $5-$8. 9 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Medicated Sunfish, Mac & Juice Quintet; $5-$10. 9 p.m. SARAH P. DUKE GARDENS: Joan Shelley & Nathan Salsburg; $10. 7 p.m.

Billy Sugarfix and the Early Girls [$5 SUGGESTED, 9 P.M.]

Longtime local musician and all-around character Billy Sugarfix made his name by being inimitably wacky. For years, he could be seen at local venues passing out candy, hopping on a pogo stick, or freaking out on a theremin while wearing a marching-band hat. These days, he’s backed by a new cast of players as he dabbles in indie rock and country, and has gotten (slightly) more serious. Mystery Ranch and Thomas Comerford round out the bill. —Howard Hardee

Present this coupon for

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919-6-TEASER for directions and information

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

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Young Bull plays at Motorco on Saturday, June 22. DOWNTOWN DURHAM: World Make Music Day; details online. LINCOLN THEATRE: The Stranger; $14-$25. 8 p.m. LOCAL 506: Shelles, Andy Homes, Shannon Garcia & The Taken; $8. 9 p.m. MOTORCO: Back To Back To Black: Amy Winehouse Tribute; $15-$20. 9 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: Jphono1 Album and Book Release with B. Revenge, Paul Swest, Evil English, Tegucigalpan; $8. 9 p.m. THE PINHOOK: Great Good Fine OK, Vesperteen; $12-$14. 9 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Big What? Showcase: Dr. Bacon, Litz, Emma’s Lounge; $8-$10. 8:30 p.m. RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: Vampire Weekend, Chicano Batman; 8 p.m. RHYTHMS LIVE: Good Rockin Sam; $8. 8 p.m. THE RITZ: A Very Get Sad Y’all Summer; $10+. 8 p.m. SHARP NINE GALLERY: Devin Frazier Septet; $15. 8 p.m.

SAT, JUN 22 ARCANA: Pierre Reynolds, Omar Faison, Tomas C, Marshall Jones; $5. 10 p.m. BLUE NOTE GRILL: James Armstrong Band; $10. 8 p.m. CAROLINA THEATRE:

Quiet No More: A Choral Celebration of Stonewall [$15-$35. 8 P.M.]

The Stonewall Uprising marked a turning point in the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ+ civil rights. On Saturday, the

CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Mark Lee; $15-$20. 6:45 p.m. CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM: Speed Stick, Gardener, Dreamless; $8. 10:30 p.m.

IMURJ: Old Cartoons, The Spread; $8. 7:30 p.m. KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE:

Ben Folds

[$54-$59, 7:30 P.M.] In recent years, Ben Folds has been a famous musician, photographer, and reality show judge; approriately, now he’s releasing his own memoir. In support of his forthcoming book, A Dream About Lightning Bugs, he’ll be making a stop in Cary to play with the North Carolina Symphony. —Sam Haw THE KRAKEN: Handsome Al and the Lookers; 8 p.m. LOCAL 506: Freedom Hawk, Year of the Cobra, Ruscha, Megachrome; $10-$12. 8:30 p.m.

AN EVENING WITH

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST

Common Woman Chorus of Durham and the Triangle Gay Men’s Chorus of Raleigh join singers around the country in marking the uprising’s fiftieth anniversary with an eight-movement performance of new works by LGBTQ+ composers. Through song, they’ll tell the story of the uprising and its lasting echoes, including more recent victories and setbacks. —Elizabeth Szypulski

THE CAVE: Colin Phils, Zephyranthes; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. DURHAM FRUIT COMPANY: Fresh Fruit; 10 p.m.

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

@TeasersDurham

MOTORCO:

RECENTLY ANNOUNCED: Oso Oso, The Regrettes, White Denim

Kooley High and Young Bull $15-$20. 9 P.M.

The Durham trio of Solomon Fox, Tahmique Cameron, and Christian Sinclair, collectively known as Young Bull, descends from Kooley High’s kickback rap style, but perfects the vibe by coating soul pizazz with singsong-y melodic vocals that don’t necessarily rely on hip-hop for cool. One of the group’s mottos is “Young Bull is Not an Individual” and, as the culmination of its predecessors, its sound exceeds an individual genre. Well$ and Ian Kelly. —Eric Tullis NC MUSEUM OF ART: Trampled by Turtles, Deer Tick; $26$29. 7:30 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: Triangle Tape Release Party: Case Sensitive, Winfield, M is We, Night Battles, 300 Dog Night, Clyde Boomer, Matt Byron, Heavy For The Vintage; $10. 6 p.m. THE PINHOOK: The Conjure Dance Party; $7. 9 p.m. RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: Slightly Stoopid, Matisyahu, Tribal Seeds, HIRIE; 6 p.m. RHYTHMS LIVE: Johnny White and the Elite Band; $8. 8 p.m.

FRI

6/21

SAT

6/22 SUN

6/23 THU

6/27 SAT

6/29

SUN

6/30

FRI

7/12 TUE

7/16 THU

7/18 FRI

7/19 SUN

7/21 TUE

Back to Black: Amy Winehouse Back to Black: Amy Winehouse Tribute featuring Tribute featuring REMEMBER JONES

REMEMBER JONES

YOUNG BULL / KOOLEY HIGH Well$ / Ian Kelly CAVETOWN Chloe Moriondo / Spookyghostboy (SOLD OUT)

JURADO DAMIEN JURADODAMIEN / Corrina Repp Corrina Repp CURTIS ELLER’S AMERICA CIRCUS Charles Latham & The Borrowed Band SHE WANTS REVENGE / MXMS The Guidance SHE WANTS REVENGE / MXMS The Guidance MYSTERY SKULLS Phangs / Snowblood as part of Independent Venue Week Cat’s Cradle presents HOP ALONG Kississippi CHRIS WEBBY Jarren Benton / Locksmith / Ekoh Motorco and Cat’s Cradle present SUMMER SALT Dante Elephant / Motel Radio DAN BAIRD & HOMEMADE SIN Lemon Sparks NC Modernist Houses, AIA Triangle Present A Talk by McMansion Hell’s Kate Wagner

THE RITZ: Gatlantis; $45+. 8 p.m.

7/23

SHARP NINE GALLERY: Kobie Watkins; $20. 8 p.m.

COMING SOON: The Rock*A*Teens, Escape-ism, Myq Kaplan,We’re We Promised Jetpacks, OVERSTREET, Cowboy Mouth,Tessa Violet, Junior Brown, Mac Sabbath, Okilly Dokilly, Kindo, Supersuckers, Sophomore Slump Fest, BoDeans, Sinkane, Bleached, flor, Boy Harsher,This Wild Life, Genrationals,The Way Down Wanderers, Kero Kero Bonito, Team Dresch, Blackalicious,Warbringer, Sonata Artica, Russian Circles, Nile, Chastity Belt, Fruit Bats, Mikal Cronin, Black Atlantic

SLIM’S: Rock N Roll Partyfest Day 1: Acid Chaperone, Shitdels, Vacant Company, Sick Bags, Paint Fumes, No Love, ????, Huffer, Tarnations, Infamous Sugar; $15-$25. 6 p.m.

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

BETTYE LAVETTE WEDNESDAY 7/24 SA 6/22 7/1114

NO SHAME THEATRE – CARRBORO NC 10BY10 PLAY FESTIVAL

8/9-11 URINETOWN: THE MUSICAL (PRESENTED BY CHSMA) TH 8/22

RISSI PALMER W/ XOXOK

Get tickets at artscenterlive.org

RHYTHMS LIVE MUSIC HALL

2020 CHAPEL HILL ROAD SUITE 33 • DURHAM, NC 27707

FRIDAY JULY 12 CRYSTAL GAYLE

19 #1 hits MUSIC ROYALTY Plan for a night ﬁlled with country pop tunes from country icon, Crystal Gayle. Head to Rhythms Live Music Hall in Durham to hear Crystal sing a live rendition of her well-known song, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” among other hits like “You’ve Been Talking in Your Sleep” and “When I Dream.” See this highly acclaimed country singer, who has raked in countless awards from the Grammy’s, American Music Awards and Country Music Association, when she lands in Durham, NC. Limited VIP TICKETS available that include artist meet and greet

RHYTHMSLIVENC.COM INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 39

VAE RALEIGH: Opulence Ball: Zensofly, Asa, Asia, DJ Gay Agenda; $10-$15. 7 p.m. THE WICKED WITCH: Goth Night; $10-$15. 9 p.m.

FREE TO BE FEARLESS. TO HOLD THE POWERFUL ACCOUNTABLE. TO BE A VOICE FOR THE VOICELESS.

FREE TO TELL THE TRUTH. TO CELEBRATE AND CRITICIZE. TO ADVOCATE FOR THE MARGINALIZED.

FREE TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE. FROM CORPORATE INFLUENCE. NO PAYWALLS, NO SUBSCRIPTIONS.

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

Join the INDY Press Club at KeepItINDY.com.

40 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

SUN, JUN 23 ARCANA: Juliana Finch, Pete Pawsey, Jess Klein, Mike June; 8 p.m. DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER:

Styx

[$45, 7:30 P.M.] That The Mission, the overbaked AOR concept record that is Styx’s second release of the new millennium, unapologetically harks back to the group’s late-seventies prime isn’t surprising. Styx has been mostly a legacy act since 1983, when it first disbanded. Absent Dennis DeYoung, there’s no more intraband friction— but nothing remotely resembling creative frisson, either. —Patrick Wall MOTORCO: Cavetown, Chloe Moriondo, Spookyghostboy; Sold out. 8 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Expansionpack: Dawud Salim X St James, Jah’monte X Flls, Jovi Mosconi, Marcus Rock; $7. 8:30 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Day Party Series: Burban, Retro Candy, Social Pariah; $5. 2 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Phat Lip, Triangle Afrobeat Orchestra, Butter; $10-$12. 8 p.m. SLIM’S: Valient Thorr, De() T, Dim Delights, Personality Cult, No Whammy!, Autospkr, Reese McHenry,Dan Melchior, Instant Regrets, 300 Dog Night; $15-$25. 2 p.m.

MON, JUN 24 THE CAVE: Dexter Romweber; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. DUKE ENERGY CENTER:

Tim McGraw

[$55+, 7:30 P.M.] Tim McGraw isn’t exactly viewed as a historical scholar. The hook from one of his best-known hits finds the country superstar fondly recalling the barbecue stain on his white T-shirt. But on Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music that Made a Nation,

Bedouine performs at Duke Gardens on Wednesday, June 26. PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE PERFORMANCES he teams up with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham to explore how music is intertwined with American history. They’ll discuss their book together, and McGraw will perform songs from the book. —Spencer Griffith POUR HOUSE: Shaun And Nikki Mccanahan Celebration: Zephyranthes, Megachrome, Dollhands; $6-$8. 9 p.m.

TUE, JUN 25 KINGS: White Reaper, Twen, Dim Delights; $12-$15. 8:30 p.m. KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Father John Misty, Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit; $50+. 7 p.m. THE RITZ: Rich the Kid, NLE Choppa, 83 Babies, Yung Bino; $18-$25. 8 p.m. SHARP NINE GALLERY: NC Jazz Repertory Orchestra; $20. 8 p.m. SLIM’S: Pinky Doodle Poodle; $5. 9 p.m.

WED, JUN 26 CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM:

Kristin Hersh Electric Trio

[$18-$20, 8 P.M.] Iconic indie rocker Kristin Hersh teams up with bandmates from Throwing Muses and 50FOOTWAVE to play material spanning her thirtyfive-year career. Expect a

hefty dose of the growling distortion and furious noise that defined her 2018 LP, Possible Dust Clouds, which matched sonic bluster with some of Hersh’s grittiest, most powerful vocals yet. Former Throwing Muses bassist Fred Abong opens with a solo acoustic set of bedroom folk. —Spencer Griffith THE CAVE: Distractor, Alberta; $5 suggested. 9 p.m. KINGS: Zach Wiley, The Maudlin Fee; $12-$15. 8:30 p.m. NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Ravary, Dogwood Lung; $8-$10. 10 p.m. NIGHTLIGHT: Closet Goth, Softly; $5 suggested. 8 p.m. THE PINHOOK: D&D Sluggers, Jaguardini, Tide Eyes; $9. 8 p.m. POUR HOUSE: Jerry Castle, Bryan Haraway; $7-$10. 8:30 p.m. RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: Shinedown, Badflower, Dinosaur PileUp, Broken Hands; $26+. 6:30 p.m. SARAH P. DUKE GARDENS:

Bedouine

[$10, 7 P.M.] As Bedouine, Azniv Korkejian crafts breezy, visceral folk with cinematic underscoring. Korkejian’s soulful vocals evoke Joni Mitchell and the soft-spoken poetry of Leonard Cohen. In true folk tradition, politics seep through understated tracks about love, longing, and the natural world. —Sam Haw

art

6.19–6.26

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

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

FRIDAY, JUNE 21

WHERE WE AT?!: A MOMENT IN DURHAM SKATEBOARDING We haven’t made it by the new tattoo shop on Geer Street yet, but it seems to be going for an unusually gentle vibe, starting with the polite name and simple rose logo. Choice Tattoo’s mission statement centers on safety and comfort, and in a photo, its bright, airy interior suggests an art gallery or a hair salon more than a tattoo parlor. But it’s getting an infusion of grit with Where We At?!: A Moment in Durham Skateboarding, an exhibit by Greg Weaver II in collaboration with The Center of Documentary Studies and Manifest Skate Shop. If you’ve been near the skatepark downtown, you know the Bull City has a strong scene (industry bible Thrasher published a Durham photo spread just a few months ago), one powered by skaters of color who are drawing their lines on the chaotic canvas of gentrification construction. Weaver documents this charged, vibrant moment from the thick of it, via photos, videos, and a new zine about Southern skating, Skillet. After this opening-night reception, which features remarks by Weaver at 7:00 p.m. and a video premiere at 8:00 p.m., the exhibit keeps grinding through July twenty-first. —Brian Howe

CHOICE TATTOO, DURHAM 6–9 p.m., free, www.documentarystudies.duke.edu

Skateboarders in Durham

OPENING Linda Carmel, Ellie Reinhold, Jason Smith: Full Circle: Paintings and sculpture. Jun 24-Jul 21. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. hillsboroughgallery.com.

ONGOING 150 Faces of Durham: Photos. Thru Sep 3. Museum of Durham History, Durham. AfterSchool Arts Immersion Student Show: Thru Jun 30. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org. Elise Alexander & Sharon Hardin: Thru Jul 12. Chapel Hill Town Hall, Chapel Hill.

PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE’S CENTER FOR DOCUMENTARY STUDIES

Mike Benson: Thru Jun 30. Smelt Art Gallery, Pittsboro. Beyond Despair: An Environmental Call for Art: Work from 33 artists about, including, and referencing the environment. Thru Jun 22. National Humanities Center, Durham. vaeraleigh.org. Annie Blazejack & Geddes Levenson: Dark Ecology: Paintings, video, and sculpture. Thru Jun 23. The Carrack Modern Art, Durham. thecarrack.org.

Ancestry of Necessity: Group show. Curator, April Childers. Thru Aug 24. Reed Bldg, Durham.

Wim Botha: Stil Life with Discontent: Mixed media. Additional work on view at 21c Museum Hotel. Thru Aug 4. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Paolo Arao, Sam King, Jason Osborne: Like Mercury in the Wind: Paintings. Thru Jul 20. Oneoneone, Chapel Hill. oneoneone.gallery.

Cary Gallery of Artists: Creative Diversity: Group show. Thru Jun 25. Cary Gallery of Artists, Cary. carygalleryofartists.org.

Britt Bates, Charles Marksberry, Seth Marksberry: Thru Jun 28. Gallery C, Raleigh. galleryc.net.

Garry Childs, Jude Lobe, Pat Merriman: Be in Touch: Thru Jun 23. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough.

Allison Coleman, Gabriella Corter, Angela Lombard: Thru Jun 27. Artspace, Raleigh. Avery Danziger: In the Shadow of the Moon: Photos. End date TBA. Through This Lens, Durham. Charles Eneld: Upcycled: Upcycled Haitian art. Thru Jun 29. Triangle Cultural Art Gallery, Raleigh. triangleculturalart.com. Rachel Goodwin: Look Through This: Mixed media. Thru Jun 29. Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Durham. horseandbuggypress.com. Berkeley Grimball, Jim Lux, Jim Oleson, Mary Stone Lamb, Phillip Welch: Group show. Thru Aug 3. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. Bryant Holsenbeck & Kathryn DeMarco: We the Animals: Sculpture and collage. Thru Jun 29. Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. cravenallengallery.com.

INTERSECTIONS: Finding Common Ground: Group show. Thru Jun 30. Reception: Jun 21, 6 p.m. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. John James Audubon: The Birds of America: Ornithological engravings. Thru Dec 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Jim Kellough: Vine Paintings: Thru Oct 10. Durham Convention Center, Durham. durhamarts.org. Stacey L. Kirby: The Department of Reflection: Multimedia. Thru Aug 4. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. ackland.org. Michael Klauke: In So Many Words: Paintings, work on paper, and video. Thru Aug 18. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. Justin LeBlanc: Probable Normal Hearing: Thru Aug 18. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. Left-Handed Liberty: Outsider art. Thru Jun 23. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu.

Christian Marclay: Surround Sounds: Synchronized silent video installation. Thru Sep 8. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. Kelly Sheppard Murray: Accumulated Color: Thru Jun 23. VAE Raleigh, Raleigh vaeraleigh.org. New Faces of Tradition: Documenting North Carolina’s Young Artists: Documentary portraits. Thru Jun 30. Rubenstein Art Center Gallery 235, Durham. artscenter.duke.edu. Our House: Durham Arts Council student-instructor exhibit. Thru Jul 31. 6 Durham Arts Council, Durham. Susan Harbage Page: Borderlands: Documentary photos and found objects from the US-Mexico border. Thru Jul 28. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu.

John Parkinson & Mary Kircher: Furniture and tapestries. Thru Jun 30. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. preservationchapelhill.org. Pop América, 1965-1975: Latin American pop art. Thru Jul 21. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu. Portraying Power and Identity: A Global Perspective: Thru Jan 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com. PRIDE Exhibit: Group show. Thru Jun 30. Carrboro Town Hall, Carrboro. townofcarrboro.org. Darius Quarles: ARTsenal: Paintings. Thru Jul 1. Reception: Jun 21, 6 p.m. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. pleiadesartdurham.com. [re]ACTION: Artistic renditions inspired by scientific images. Thru Jun 23. Golden Belt, Durham. V L Rees: I Love Paris: Paintings. Thru Jun 29. V L Rees Gallery, Raleigh. vlrees.com. INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 41

art

reNautilus: Thru Jul 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com. Susannah Sayler and Edward Morris: Their World Is Not Our World: Video installation. Thru Jul 7. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Katie Shaw: Thru Jun 29. Artspace, Raleigh. artspacenc.org. Smelt Art & Skittles Inaugural Exhibit: Sixteen local artists. Thru Jun 29. Smelt Art & Skittles, Pittsboro. Southern Oracle: We Will Tear the Roof Off: Interactive sculptures. Thru Oct 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Kirsten Stoltmann: I am Sorry: Thru Jul 31. Lump, Raleigh. lumpprojects.org. Tilden Stone: Southern Surreal: Furniture. Thru Sep 8. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu.

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CONT’D Gwen Lowery: Night Visions: Fiber art. Thru Sat, Jan 5. Durham Arts Council, Durham. durhamarts.org. William Paul Thomas: Disrupting Homogeny: Portraits. Thru Jul 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. 21cmuseumhotels.com. Cheryl Thurber: Documenting Gravel Springs, Mississippi, in the 1970s: Photos. Thru Mar 2020. UNC’s Wilson Special Collections Library, Chapel Hill. Lien Truong: The Sky is Not Sacred: Multimedia. Thru Jun 22. Artspace, Raleigh. Truth + Tamales: Large-scale, collaborative, temporary public artwork. Thru Jun 28. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

READINGS & SIGNINGS

Way Out West: Celebrating the Gift of the Hugh A. McAllister Jr. Collection: Curator’s Keynote: Jun 14, 6 p.m. Jun 14-Aug 25. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. ackland.org.

Cara Black: Novel Murder in Bel-Air. Sat, Jun 22, 11 a.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. — Sun, Jun 23, 2 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

Christina Lorena Weisner: Explorations: Science sculptures. Thru Jul 28. Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh. gregg.arts.ncsu.edu. Within the Frame: Photos. Thru Jul 7. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org.

Charles Fishman One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon 7pm

Elin Hilderbrand Summer of ‘69 7pm Louise Penny Three Pines Mysteries 7pm 6.26 AT NCSU’s McKIMMON CENTER Sarah Dessen The Rest of the Story 7pm www.quailridgebooks.com • 919.828.1588 • North Hills 4209-100 Lassiter Mill Road, Raleigh, NC 27609 CHECK OUT OUR PODCAST: BOOKIN’ w/Jason Jefferies

Charles Fishman: One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. Mon, Jun 24, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Jessica Handler: The Magnetic Girl. Sat, Jun 22, 2 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

Tim McGraw & Jon Meacham: Songs of America. Musical performance to follow. $55+. Wed, Jun 19, 6 p.m. Memorial Auditorium Raleigh dukeenergycenterraleigh.com. Louise Penny: Tue, Jun 25, 6:30 p.m. Fearrington Barn, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. — Wed, Jun 26, 7 p.m. NCSU’s McKimmon Center, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Christina Proenza-Coles: American Founders: How People of African Descent Established Freedom in the New World. Thu, Jun 20, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. flyleafbooks.com. David Radavich, Rob Merritt, Ruth Moose: NC Poetry Society reading. Sun, Jun 23, 2 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. mcintyresbooks.com. Amber Smith & Mason Deaver: Novels Something Like Gravity and I Wish You All the Best. Wed, Jun 19, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books,

Chapel Hill. flyleafbooks.com. Amber Smith: Novel Something Like Gravity. Fri, Jun 21, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com. Peter Stein: WWII memoir A Boy’s Journey. Mon, Jun 24, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. flyleafbooks.com.

LECTURES ETC. Green Saves Green: The Latest on Home Energy and Water Savings: Sierra Club Orange-Chatham Group. With Mark Marcoplos, Jamie Hager, Mary Tiger, and Tom Marsland. Refreshments. Wed, Jun 19, 6 p.m. Chapel Hill Public Library, Chapel Hill. With Pride: Panel discussion with LGBT female entrepreneurs Susie Silver, Tracy Trellis Gori, Marissa Monroe, and Paige Goss. Sun, Jun 23, 6 p.m. Flourish Market, Durham. susiesilverart.com.

stage RECYCLE THIS PAPER Mark Morris Dance Group: Pepperland PHOTO BY MAT HAYWARD

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e

SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c Bu s i n eDIVORCE ss Law UNCONTESTED In c o r p oBUSINESS r a t i o n / LLAW LC / MUSIC Pa r t n e r s h i p INCORPORATION/LLC Wi lls WILLS

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bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com 42 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

Sarah Dessen: The Rest of the Story. Wed, Jun 26, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

Elin Hilderbrand: Summer of 69. Tue, Jun 25, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks.com.

UNREAL: Group show. Thru Jun 29. United Arts Council of Raleigh & Wake County, Raleigh. vaeraleigh.org.

Amber Smith Something Like Gravity 7pm Jessica Handler The Magnetic Girl 2pm Jessica Handler “Writing History: Yours and Others” WORKSHOP 3:15pm. SPACES STILL AVAILABLE Cara Black Murder in Bel-Air 2pm

6.25

Ely Urbanski: Layers: Monoprints. Thru Jul 6. Durham Arts Council, Durham.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19 & THURSDAY, JUNE 20

MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP: PEPPERLAND Choreographer Mark Morris loathes nostalgia, and composer Ethan Iverson, a former member of the jazz trio The Bad Plus, says that nothing’s worse than a Beatles cover project. So what are these two doing making an evening-length concept dance piece about Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, a work widely regarded as the first concept album? Answer: They’re making it their own. Iverson’s score juxtaposes elliptical new music with idiosyncratic reinventions of the album’s classics, from a theramin-infused “A Day in the Life” to what The Guardian calls a “wonderfully arthritic” take on “When I’m Sixty-Four.” Designer Elizabeth Kurtzman clothes the company’s fifteen dancers in mod, neon-colored suits and miniskirts. Morris’s buoyant lifts and leaps and crisp, balletic, high-energy variations on period dance fuel a prismatic study of a work that engaged the culture’s imagination, if not always engaging the thorniest social dilemmas of its time. —Byron Woods

REYNOLDS INDUSTRIES THEATER, DURHAM 7 p.m. Wed./8 p.m. Thu., $31+, www.americandancefestival.org

stage

CONT’D Ashley Brooke Roberts: Comedy. $8. Wed, Jun 19, 8 p.m. The People’s Improv Theater, Chapel Hill. thepit-chapelhill.com. Ali Wong: $40+. Jun 26-27. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com.

ONGOING American Dance Festival: Full schedule online. Thru Jul 19. Durham. americandancefestival.org. Between2Clouds Comedy Night: $5. Fri, Jun 21, 7 p.m. The Cotton Company, Wake Forest. thecottoncompany.net. Bright Star: University Theatre. Thru Jun 23. NCSU’s Titmus Theatre, Raleigh. Buy My Art & Call It Holy: Thru Jun 21. NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham. northstardurham.com. Caroline or Change: Play. Thru Jun 23. Umstead Park United Church of Christ, Raleigh. thejusticetheaterproject.org.

OPENING THROUGH JUNE 30

CHURCHILL’S SHORTS Before Black Mirror but after the original Twilight Zone, Caryl Churchill cemented her reputation as Britain’s brainy doyenne of dystopias. The region has seen standout productions of her work in recent seasons; before Tiny Engine Theater’s stellar 2016 staging of the postcolonial potboiler Cloud 9, Delta Boys played human pinball in a five-star 2015 run of Love and Information. In this coproduction, Burning Coal Theatre Company and CAM Raleigh put on two of Churchill’s one-acts at the museum. In her 2000 drama, Far Away, the playwright poses a question for those partial to the divide-and-conquer school of governance: When you keep ripping apart the social fabric into smaller and smaller swaths, what is finally left? A Number examines what happens in a society that deploys new medical technology before thinking its ethical and psychological consequences all the way through, when a series of human clones begin experiencing—what else?—identity crises. Guest director Stephen Eckert leads a top-shelf quartet, including Ben Apple, Mark Filiaci, Chloe Oliver, and Julie Oliver. —Byron Woods

CAM RALEIGH, RALEIGH 7:30 p.m. Thu.–Sat./ 2 p.m. Sun., $15, www.burningcoal.org

Maria Bamford: Comedy. $35. Fri, Jun 21, 8 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. Jen Hatmaker & Heather Land: $30+. Fri, Jun 21, 8 p.m. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com. Performance Edge: Various perfoming arts ensembles. $12+. 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Wed, Jun 19, 8 p.m. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com. The Plastic Cup Boyz: Jun 21-23. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com. Ramya Kapadia: Vande Mataram: Jun 19-26. Walltown Children’s Theatre, Durham. didaseason.com.

A rehearsal photo from Churchill’s Shorts PHOTO BY NATHALIE TONDEUR

Comedy in a Cave: With host Michelle Maclay. Wed, Jun 19, 7 p.m. The Cave Tavern, Chapel Hill. caverntavern.com. The Dangling Loafer: Comedy. $7. Fri, Jun 21, 8 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. kingsraleigh.com. Gay Card: North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre. Play. Thru Jun 23. North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre, Raleigh. nract.org. NC’s Funniest Person: Comedy competition. $10. Jun 19-20, 25-26: 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. goodnightscomedy.com. Of Good Stock: $19-$27. Thru Jun 23. Theatre In The Park, Raleigh. theatreinthepark.com. Six Pack Standup Show: Comedy. Wed, Jun 19, 7:45 p.m. North Street Beer Station, Raleigh. northstreetbeerstation.com.

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

INDYWEEK.COM

INDYweek.com | 6.19.19 | 43

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS BEYOND: Curated film festival, screenwriting workshops, and more. Jun 19-23. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. Captain Marvel: Free. Activities at 7:15 p.m., film at 8:30 p.m. Wed, Jun 19, 7:15 p.m. Downtown Cary Performance Green, Cary. A Hard Day’s Night: Wed, Jun 26, 7 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Main Street: Movie Loft. Free. Thu, Jun 20, 7 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham. shadowboxstudio.org. Paris is Burning: Queer Qlub film series. Mon, J un 24, 7 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Prince of Darkness & In the Mouth of Madness: $10. Wed, Jun 19, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. carolinatheatre.org. The Princess Bride: $7. Fri, Jun 21, 9 p.m. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. ncartmuseum.org. Psychomania: Wed, Jun 26, 1:30 p.m. & 9 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Return to Earth: $8-$10. Tue, Jun 25, 7 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary. thecarytheater.com. She’s the Man: Tue, Jun 25, 7 p.m. Alamo Drafthouse, Raleigh. drafthouse.com/raleigh. Spider Man into the SpiderVerse: $5. Fri, Jun 21, 8:30 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. boothamphitheatre.com.

OPENING The Last Black Man in San Francisco—This drama doubles as an antigentrification parable as an African-American man tries to reclaim his childhood home in the Fillmore District. Rated R. Pavarotti—Ron Howard helms a documentary on the famed Italian opera tenor. Rated PG-13. 44 | 6.19.19 | INDYweek.com

Toy Story 4—A toy made of a plastic fork has an existential crisis in the return of Pixar’s beloved animated franchise. Rated G.

N OW P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at indyweek.com. ½ John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum— A bloody, Buster Keaton-esque ballet meets Sam Peckinpah. Rated R.  Men in Black: International—What if Men in Black, but Morocco and Chris Hemsworth’s torso? Rated PG-13. ½ Non-Fiction—This French sex comedy by director Olivier Assayas feels ripped from decadeold thinkpieces about new media. Rated R.

THURSDAY, JUNE 20

MAIN STREET Though it’s only the second-oddest footnote in the history of films made in North Carolina—the first being Maximum Overdrive, the cocaine-fueled “cars come to life” horror film Stephen King admits he doesn’t even really remember making—Main Street is perhaps the most “Durham” film ever made (sort of ). One of the last works by legendary playwright and screenwriter Horton Foote, the 2010 film brings together a murderer’s row of actors, several of them British, to portray Durham residents. Played by Orlando Bloom, Colin Firth, Ellen Burstyn, Amber Tamblyn, and Patricia Clarkson, these townspeople rally together in an effort to save a dying city (this thing was written before DPAC existed). Delayed for several years and barely released—it grossed less than three thousand dollars at the box office—the film is a little-seen curiosity. But for those who want to see a number of unique, if ill-fitting, talents acting against the backdrop of their hometown, take this opportunity. You can enjoy some music by John D. Loudermilk and free hot dogs while you’re at it. —Zack Smith

SHADOWBOX STUDIOS, DURHAM 7 p.m., free, www.shadowboxstudio.org

Main Street

PHOTO COURTESY OF MAGNOLIA PICTURES

food & drink Art Therapy Institute Pint Night: Benefit for Art Therapy Institute. Wed, Jun 26, 4 p.m. Hi-Wire Brewing at Golden Belt, Durham. ncati.org.

Home Pickler’s Contest and Tasting: Entries across multiple categories. Full rules online. Sat, Jun 22, 11 a.m. The Rickhouse, Durham. rickhousedurham.com.

LambruscoFest: Italian food festival. Full schedule online. Jun 17-22. Pompieri Pizza, Durham. pompieripizza.com.

PickleFest Durham: Pickle vendors, dishes, drinks, and more. $10, $25 VIP. Sun, Jun 23, noon. The Rickhouse, Durham. rickhousedurham.com.

Wicked Weed Beer Dinner: $65. Wed, Jun 19, 6:45 p.m. Fairview at Washington Duke Inn, Durham. washingtondukeinn.com.

indy classifieds employment ETL DATA DEVELOPMENT LEAD - RALEIGH ETL Development Lead sought by Community Care of North Carolina in Raleigh, NC to work as part of the Enterprise Architecture group to provide technical leadership across all facets of Data Dvlpmt w/ a core focus on Extract, Transform & Load (ETL) technologies & allied dvlpmt. Reqs a Master’s deg in Public Health, Public Admin, Bus Admin, or Info Technology plus 2 yrs exp as a Data Analyst or Developer OR a Bachelor’s deg in the listed fields plus 5 yrs exp as a Data Analyst or Developer. Submit resume to jdowd@communitycarenc.org & reference ID number 149341.

FTCC POSITIONS AVAILABLE GUNSMITHING, WELDING Fayetteville Technical Community College is now accepting applications for the following positions: Department Chair/Instructor Gunsmithing, Welding Instructor-Continuing Education For detailed information and to apply, please visit our employment portalat: https://faytechcc.peopleadmin. com/ Human Resources Office Phone: (910) 678-7342 Internet: http://www.faytechcc.edu An Equal Opportunity Employer

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