INDY Week May 17, 2023

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

VOL. 40 NO. 20

CONTENTS

4 Members of Raleigh's city council are throwing their support behind a bill introducing rent control. BY JASMINE

GALLUP

6 As traditional publications and media coverage dwindle, citizen journalists in Durham are stepping in to keep residents informed. BY LENA GELLER

8 A retired Durham judge and former selfie museum tenants reached an agreement; now, the Guilford County couple wants justice.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

ARTS & CULTURE

10 At international grocery stores across the Triangle, the best food is served up just beyond the shelves. BY GABI

MENDICK

12 Chatting with comedian Hari Kondabolu, ahead of his show at Motorco Music Hall. BY JASMINE

GALLUP

13 "It feels like something that's reaching out to the plurality of Durham," director JaMeeka Holloway says of her new Bulldog Ensemble Theater production, Single Black Female. BY BYRON WOODS

14 Benjamin Felton and John Harrison take a walk in the woods with dreaming machines on their second record as Tacoma Park. BY BRIAN HOWE

THE REGULARS

16 Culture calendar

W E M A D E T H I S

PUBLISHER

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EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief

Jane Porter

Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Jasmine Gallup

Lena Geller

Thomasi McDonald

Copy Editor Iza Wojciechowska

Interns

Mariana Fabian, Sarah Innes, Nathan Hopkins

Contributors

Spencer Griffith, Carr Harkrader, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Byron Woods

2023 INDYweek.com

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Frankie Lee III performs "Soar," an interpretation of "Michael Richards: Are You Down?" at NCMA on Saturday, May 20. (See calendar, page 16.)

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COVER LEFT TO RIGHT: JUSTIN LAIDLAW, REV. CARL KENNEY, AND BRIAN CALLAWAY. PORTRAIT PHOTOS BY BRETT VILLENA, ADDITIONAL PHOTOS FROM UNSPLASH

PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA.

The most recognized award throughout the Triangle is back for 2023—

NEXT UP IS DURHAM COUNTY!

Vote for your favorite Durham County bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum—whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Durham County treasures. Have no fear: Orange/Chatham Counties will have their own nominations soon.

Durham County FINAL VOTING OPENS

WEDNESDAY, MAY 31 ST

Rent Wrangling

Members of Raleigh’s city council are throwing their support behind a bill introducing rent control.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

Sebastian Fernandez Giraldo, like many tenants in the Triangle, has seen his rent go up by hundreds of dollars in the last few years.

“We’re all seeing double-digit rent increases,” says Fernandez Giraldo, who is a community advocate with the Triangle Tenants Union. “I’ve already seen my rent go up by like 10 percent.”

As the INDY previously reported, these rent increases have forced many to leave the Triangle, relocating to cheaper suburban or rural neighborhoods. If you have a car and a steady job, being forced to relocate outside of downtown Raleigh or Durham may not be such a big deal. But for people who are older or working a minimum-wage job, rent hikes could leave them unemployed or unable to access critical resources like health care.

“In East Durham … you have massive gentrification,” says Charles Becker, a professor of economics at Duke University. “If you’re an owner-occupier then, OK, you make a capital gain … but about half the housing in [Durham County] is rental housing. And the people who are most vulnerable are elderly and poor, and they’re being displaced.”

As the Triangle undergoes an economic boom, landlords are rapidly raising rents to meet market rates. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit NC Housing Coalition, about 45 percent of renters in Wake County have difficulty affording their homes, compared to only about 16 percent of homeowners.

The area’s rapid economic growth means there are “winners and losers,” Becker says. “So there are hugely unfortunate consequences to this, and we’ve only been seeing it fairly recently.”

With all the pressure renters are under, some elected officials are considering what they can do to help. Last month, three newly elected Raleigh City Council members resurrected a controversial policy idea: rent control.

The argument for rent control

Back in April, Raleigh City Council newcomers Jane Harrison, Megan Patton, and Christina Jones threw their support behind a state bill (Senate Bill 225) that proposed giving cities and towns like Raleigh the power to regulate rents. The bill, introduced by senator Lisa Grafstein (D-Wake), was likely doomed from the start in the Republican-dominated legislature and died in committee, as expected.

Harrison, Patton, and Jones, however, each say they want to continue conversations about policies like rent control and inclusionary zoning that are currently banned under state law.

“In Raleigh, the median rent is now about $2,000, with prices having grown 20 percent year over year,” says Harrison. “So I think about, is that an affordable rent for a day-care worker? What about a 911 operator? We have essential workers who are struggling to stay in our city.”

Harrison admits rent control isn’t a perfect solution, but she believes it’s one major element that could help the city create housing affordability. When it comes to housing, “supply, subsidy, and stability” are essential, says the councilwoman.

“Stability, for me, is about regulating the housing market to eliminate price gouging and ensure affordable housing

is built as a part of all developments,” Harrison says. “And rent control is just one tool to bring about more stability in the housing marketplace.”

When it comes to rent control, Harrison favors shortterm stabilization measures over decades-long rent caps like those found in New York City. For example, a rule that rents can only be raised by a certain percentage each year could soften the blow of rapid economic growth for renters and give them time to figure out where to live.

Patton agrees, saying such a rule would “provide a measure of predictability for renters.”

“While it wouldn’t lock their rents in at the same price, it would create some guardrails around when their rents could be raised and by how much, so that people could plan to stay in their spaces,” she says.

For Harrison, rent control is a governmental tool that may be appropriate to use as economic forces shift and the housing market changes. There’s no permanent rent cap that will fix the housing crisis, she says.

Today, with interest rates high, Harrison expects to see rent hikes slow down. So, “perhaps rent control won’t be necessary in the near term,” she says. “But what if Raleigh had had this tool at its disposal a few years ago? How many more residents could have remained in their homes, stayed near their kids’ school districts or near their jobs?”

Does rent control really work?

For renters in Raleigh, many of whom are struggling to pay their monthly bills, putting a cap on what landlords can

Housing on South Street in Downtown Raleigh

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

charge sounds pretty good. But many economists agree that while rent control can have short-term benefits, there are longterm consequences.

Rent caps can incentivize landlords to sell their property, reducing the overall availability of rental housing, according to the Brookings Institution. Rent control can also disincentivize developers from building new rental housing, researchers contend.

It “deters people from building structures if they think they’re not going to be able to charge market price,” Becker says. In Durham, he expects rent control would prompt a shift in construction from rental housing to owner-occupied housing.

“It’s not like you’re redistributing from wealthy young professionals to the elderly poor,” he says. “There will be some of that initially, but in the long run, there’s not going to be a whole lot of it.”

One study of rent control in San Francisco found that landlords were 8 percent more likely to convert rent-controlled apart-

of rent control, Harrison says, “We definitely need to be careful.”

“If a municipality were to set a cap on rent increases, that cap cannot be so blunt or so extreme that it then curtails a healthy marketplace for rental units,” she adds. “We don’t want our landlords to say, ‘I don’t want to be in this business any longer.’ There has to be a focus on preventing price gouging more than anything, not to overregulate the housing market.”

In addressing the affordable housing crisis, Becker suggests a more targeted solution, like a county fund to subsidize the rents of the most vulnerable renters, the elderly and the poor. “Subsidy,” or financial support for low-income residents, is also a piece of Harrison’s strategy to create affordable housing.

The only problem is that, once again, the state legislature has made it difficult for local cities and towns to enact such policies. According to Becker, a development impact tax—a tax on new construction that

these issues despite lawmakers’ opposition.

“I understand that the legislature is not going to want a specific bill,” she says. “They’re not going to let this one go through the Rules [Committee], or they may not let the next one go through. But if we continue to pursue it and show that this is what we’re about, this is what we stand for, then hopefully we can gain some traction.”

“If we don’t try something, then we don’t have anything,” Jones adds.

Others have reservations about lobbying the state legislature like this, however. Eric Braun, a former land use attorney and chair of the Raleigh Planning Commission, says with rent control unlikely to receive support from the Republican-dominated state legislature, supporting it is “performative politics.”

“[It] distracts from the efforts of those working on improving housing affordability using the tools available today,” Braun wrote in an email. Moreover, supporting rent control could alienate lawmakers, Braun argues.

ments (as opposed to non-rent-controlled apartments) into condos they could sell at market price. The study also found that a 1994 expansion of rent control in the city led to a 15 percent decline in non-rent-controlled apartments and a 25 percent decline in rent-controlled apartments, according to the Brookings Institution.

The overall decline in the supply of rental housing in San Francisco raised the costs of all housing in the long run, contributing to gentrification, the report concludes. As far as the Triangle is concerned, “I don’t think rent control is an answer,” says Becker.

“It mucks up the market,” the economist adds. “New York City has had serious rent control for ages and in the long run, the winners and losers tend to be almost randomly distributed. You have some people who are low-income who benefit enormously; they pass it on to their children. Other people who are not fortunate end up paying more for comparable housing elsewhere.”

Asked about the potential consequences

is designed to finance the need for additional public services—could help finance such a fund. But, like rent control and inclusionary zoning, the tool is currently prohibited under state law.

The future of housing legislation

Throughout the Triangle, people disagree on rent control. But one thing some do agree on is that local governments should have the power to enact policies that could help address the housing crisis.

“As a city, we are often limited and preempted by the state government on [using] tools that … might be appropriate for our city,” Patton says. “Rent control is one of those.”

Patton doesn’t unconditionally support rent control, she says, but she would have liked to see the bill get out of the committee so the city council could at least discuss it. Jones, likewise, says she wants to raise

“Because Raleigh is the state capitol, legislators closely follow what the city and its leaders are doing,” Braun wrote. “Posting support for a bill that is viewed as extreme by Republicans and that has no chance of passing could come back to haunt the city when it asks the General Assembly to pass its broader legislative agenda.”

For Fernandez Giraldo, the Raleigh renter, state legislation supporting rent control is essentially a pipe dream. For renters, solutions are going to come from the ground up, he says. Protections like rent control and maintenance regulations will only come if renters organize and put pressure on landlords.

“If people want to take control over their rent, they need to organize with their neighbors, take collective action, and take back control,” he says. “We can’t really rely on legislators, landlords, and capitalists to do that for us …. The legislature is run by landlords, whether they have an R or a D next to their name.” W

“[Rent control] mucks up the market. New York City has had serious rent control for ages and in the long run, the winners and losers tend to be almost randomly distributed.”

Bridging the Gap

As traditional publications and media coverage dwindle, citizen journalists in Durham are stepping in to keep residents informed.

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

After a turbulent two decades marked by ownership changes, newsroom cuts, and circulation slashes, The Herald-Sun, Durham’s only daily, has become a “ghost newspaper”: a publication that bears its original name but no longer creates its own content, instead publishing stories sourced from larger newspapers in its parent media conglomerate.

When local newspapers, particularly dailies, are shuttered or stripped of staff, routine political coverage and insightful commentary fall by the wayside. Power goes unchecked and community voices go unheard.

The handful of full-time reporters who currently cover Durham for The News & Observer and TV stations such as WRAL do good work. But Durham is a big city for just a few people to cover.

Here to help bridge the gap are a number of citizen and community journalism initiatives working to keep area residents informed while traditional reportage wanes and changes. (Full disclosure: all of the subjects interviewed in this story have shared pieces from the INDY, including recent work by this reporter.) For some, the initiatives also aim to amplify voices and experiences that have long been underrepresented in traditional newspapers.

In January, Brian Callaway launched one of the newest initiatives, a Substack email newsletter called Bull City Public Investigators (BCPI). Callaway, a former Durham city

council candidate with a background in city planning, spent four years working as the coordinator of energy and sustainability for Durham Public Schools (DPS) before shifting to a career in sales.

Callaway says a desire to add context and source material to a public comment he’d given at a school board meeting sparked the idea for the Substack.

The board had voted unanimously to spend $8 million on outsourced project management services, which school system employees usually handle, as its first expenditure of the $423.5 million general obligation bond that Durham voters passed in November. The allotted three-minute comment period, Callaway says, had not provided him with enough time to shed light on the nuances around the board’s decision and chosen firm.

His 1,000-word post on the BCPI Substack remains, as far as the INDY can tell, the only coverage of the vote. A week later, when Callaway got wind that former school board member Matt Sears had resigned his seat and taken a position at the privately run DPS Foundation, he wrote about that, too. This time, he tried to get formal news outlets to take the reins.

“I was tweeting at all the local journalists that I knew in hopes that they would cover it,” Callaway says. “I didn’t want to cover it. I’m not a journalist.”

When no one responded, he followed up

with a more comprehensive BCPI piece on the resignation, which garnered thousands of views. A month and a half passed before any mainstream publications got around to covering it.

Not too long ago, Callaway says, The Herald-Sun had a reporter—Greg Childress, who now works at NC Newsline—at every school board meeting. In 2018, when school custodians whose services had long been outsourced to a contracting company were vying to be hired as DPS employees in order to receive benefits, Childress wrote a series of stories that caused “a sea change among electeds,” Callaway recalls, in how they thought about the employment status of contract workers. The board shifted custodians to DPS employees soon after the reports published.

When Childress was laid off later that year, “there was a distinct void of coverage,” Callaway says.

BCPI, then, became an attempt to fill that void. The Substack’s coverage primarily centers around topics in Callaway’s wheelhouse: DPS and land use. Callaway is “not trying to be a substitute for news,” he says, and views BCPI as more of a “response” than a long-term solution to Durham’s dearth of local reporting.

For now, though, when he sees issues going uncovered, he says he feels obligated to do his part in publicizing them.

“I cannot tell you how many times I’ve

had people ask me, ‘Why is there not a story about this? Where can I read about this?’” Callaway says.

Justin Laidlaw, a Durham native who provides local multimedia coverage on a platform he created called Buddy Ruski, recently broadened his reportage in response to a similar sentiment from a community member.

In July 2022, Laidlaw noticed a Twitter user post about a perceived gap in INDY Week’s coverage: routine articles on Durham city council meetings.

“I was like, ‘I could try that; I don’t have any particular expertise, but I could give it a shot,’” Laidlaw says.

Up until that point, Buddy Ruski’s content, which includes newsletters, blogs, and podcasts, had mostly revolved around Bull City culture and infrastructure. In September 2021, for instance, he published a blog post about Durham outdoor dining initiative The Streetery, examining the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the city to rethink long-standing systems tied to nonessential vehicle traffic.

Laidlaw, who studied journalism at NC Central University and spent six years covering arts and culture for the now-defunct Durham media website Clarion Content, launched Buddy Ruski in 2020 with the initial aim of building his portfolio.

“I didn’t have a ton of things on my résumé to compete with folks coming

Clockwise from top left: Rev. Carl Kenney, Kenneth Webb, Justin Laidlaw, and Brian Callaway. PHOTOS BY BRETT VILLENA

out of [journalism] school who interned at places like NPR or PBS,” Laidlaw says. “It was one of those situations where you don’t have the experience, so you can’t get the jobs, but you can’t get the jobs, so you can’t get the experience. I started to think, ‘OK, well, I’m gonna have to build this experience on my own.’”

Since then, Buddy Ruski has evolved into a project that works to serve the community by both platforming untold stories and making complex topics easy to understand.

After seeing the Twitter user’s plea for more routine city council coverage, he launched a newsletter called By the Horns that provides comprehensive reports on nearly every city council meeting. The newsletters, which Laidlaw pens after attending meetings in person, typically include a bulleted summary, a deep dive on one or two notable topics, and a “Civics 101” section to help readers understand terms and processes involved in city government.

Laidlaw is learning alongside his readers, which results in reports that are more accessible to the average person. At the most recent city council meeting, for instance, speakers were throwing around the phrase “council of state,” which Laidlaw had never heard before. He noted it as something to define in his newsletter.

“I could imagine somebody watching the meeting and just freezing when they heard that, or having it go right over their head,” he says.

Laidlaw doesn’t know exactly what Buddy Ruski will look like in the long term, but he envisions collaborations with other area journalists. Their skills give him hope for a solid future for the Fourth Estate, he says.

“Just knowing that the talent is here makes me think that eventually things will tilt in the right direction,” Laidlaw says, “and we’ll be able to rebuild journalistic institutions in a new 21st-century way.”

When Paxton Media Group acquired

The Herald-Sun in 2004, it laid off 80 of the paper’s 350 staffers.

Some Herald-Sun staffers who survived the acquisition were asked to take pay cuts the following year, including Rev. Carl Kenney, a columnist who quit in response to the proposed salary reduction—and who has mixed feelings about the role he served during his eight years at the paper.

The Herald-Sun, he says, had given him the opportunity to do something that no one else was doing: write about the Black community from the perspective of a Black reporter.

While Kenney says he appreciated the platform, he also felt pigeonholed by the paper’s leadership, who all but required him to discuss race in his columns as he

had footholds in a community that white reporters didn’t, he says. Other columnists had more flexibility.

“In many ways, what I was being asked to do was be the gatekeeper for Black community stories,” says Kenney, who currently works as an adjunct professor at the UNC-Chapel Hill Hussman School of Journalism. “I was having to write these stories about Black life and open it up for the white world to see: ‘Here we are, see the Black people, see the Black people.’”

When “the devil came and purchased the newspaper,” Kenney says, he wanted to create a way to continue the work he’d been doing at The Herald-Sun but with a broader lens.

In 2007, Kenney—who also has a master of divinity degree and previously served as the pastor of church congregations in Durham and Missouri—launched Rev-elution, a blog with the stated mission of “engaging readers into a meaningful discussion related to matters that impact faith and society.”

ty in Durham. The blog’s recent posts, for instance, include coverage and commentary on Kevin Primus’s run for school board; a Q&A with Walter Jackson shortly before he was elected as chair of the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People; and a brief background on Soul City ahead of a related discussion at the Durham History Museum.

Soon, though, Rev-elution may go on hiatus. In June, Kenney is shifting gears to helm the reboot of The Durham VOICE, a community newspaper that covered Northeast Central Durham before pausing circulation shortly after the onset of the pandemic. The Durham VOICE was founded in 2009 with the aim of helping reduce crime after the murder of UNC-Chapel Hill student body president Eve Carson by “encouraging a vital civic life and developing a positive sense of place” among young people in the region of coverage, per the paper’s website.

Student journalists from local colleges will continue to write for The Durham VOICE, Kenney says, though the revamped

evolving” but rooted in transparency. In a March edition of By the Horns, for instance, he included a disclaimer acknowledging his role as a volunteer board member with Bike Durham, as representatives from the organization spoke during the budget meeting referenced in the newsletter.

For Kenney, whose blog takes a form closer to an opinion column than a news report, impartiality is less of a concern, though he notes that the principle has historically been wielded in a way that squelches key perspectives.

“The lines that have been created around impartiality are sort of used to dismiss the role of the Black press as an agent for reform,” Kenney says. “It’s a detention that we face as Black reporters, that we enter into the spaces where there’s a requirement that we shed ourselves of who we are for the sake of being an unbiased voice for people.”

Kenney views the rise of citizen and community journalism initiatives as a sign that local media is heading in a good direction—one that more closely aligns with the way journalism was originally intended to function.

“The reason we have a constitution that protects the press is this idea from [political philosopher] John Stuart Mill … that we flood the marketplace with ideas, and democracy gives people the chance to decide which one of these absurd ideas is the one they want to lean on,” Kenney says.

During the first years of Rev-elution, Kenney wrote about Durham happenings but also engaged in national conversations around race, religion, sexuality, and gender, reflecting on things like Fox News host Megyn Kelly’s insistence that Jesus and Santa Claus are white.

But in 2016, when Kenney returned to Durham after a three-year stint as an adjunct professor at the University of Missouri, he felt a need to shift his blog writing. During his time in Missouri, he’d been “writing in the heat of the death of Michael Brown,” he says, which changed some of his theory of reporting.

“I was incensed by what I saw coming from the INDY,” Kenney says. “I was incensed by what I saw coming from what remained of the merging of The Herald-Sun and The News & Observer. It was really whitewashed. It was reporting that was coming from a very biased lens.”

After that, Rev-elution became more centered around the Black communi -

version of the paper will expand its coverage across Durham and incorporate multimedia coverage.

While traditional reporters are required to abide by ethics codes and impartiality standards, citizen journalism initiatives like BCPI and Buddy Ruski are not, which raises some questions: If their content is intended to function as local news, should they adhere to the same principles with which conventional publications comply? Should Callaway and Laidlaw, say, avoid doing advocacy work around an issue that their coverage presents through a seemingly objective lens?

Callaway—who, until now, has published BCPI anonymously—says he strives for impartiality and supports the information in his articles with hyperlinked citations. But as an “engaged public citizen” who sometimes petitions for policy changes, he’s still figuring out where the line is, he says.

Laidlaw describes his approach as “still

One person working to aggregate Durham’s marketplace of ideas is Kenneth Webb, who in 2019 founded what could be seen as another citizen journalism initiative in Durham: a Facebook page called Bull City Political Nerd.

Webb, a web development contractor, says he created the page to channel his personal interest in politics into something that could help keep community members informed. He generates and shares an enormous amount of local news content each week, typically posting links to articles with a few sentences of summary and occasionally writing his own blurbs on items that haven’t received coverage.

The page, which has nearly 2,000 followers, raises awareness and fosters productive discussion around important local issues, Webb says.

While social media, and the internet as a whole, have wreaked havoc on the business models of traditional local publications, Kenney says there’s a benefit to technology “forcing a way of rethinking” our media institutions.

“I don’t feed into the idea that local journalism is a dying thing,” he says. “I think that it’s actually adapting to the change.” W

“It was one of those situations where you don’t have the experience, so you can’t get the jobs, but you can’t get the jobs, so you can’t get the experience. I started to think, ‘OK, well, I’m gonna have to build this experience on my own.”

Corruption Complaint

Retired Durham judge and former Selfie Museum tenants reach agreement; now the Guilford County couple wants justice.

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

Attorneys for retired Durham superior court judge Jim Hardin and a Guilford County couple confirmed this week that both parties agreed to dismiss complaints they had filed in the Bull City’s superior court.

For the Greensboro couple, Joseph Wooten and Erica Bishop, Hardin’s decision to drop his lawsuit means they are no longer on the hook for nearly a quarter of a million dollars to the legal titan who evicted them from the basement of a building he owns and manages on Ninth Street.

“We couldn’t move,” Wooten said about the sum of money Hardin demanded.

Wooten and Bishop invested tens of thousands of dollars to transform the basement of the historic Couch Building at 714 Ninth Street into the Bull City Selfie Museum, a photo studio that featured more than 20 photo booths before Hardin evicted them in February of last year.

Last week, Wooten and Bishop signed an agreement with Hardin that dismissed their owing “overdue rent and liquidated damages in the total amount of $237,960.92.” “We are extremely satisfied with the outcome of the case,” Wooten told the INDY

The agreement signed by Hardin and the Guilford County couple was not yet publicly available on Monday. A clerk in the downtown Durham superior court’s civil division

said the agreement has not yet been fully processed in the court’s electronic system.

Hardin’s attorney, J. Gray Wilson of Durham, told the INDY this week that both parties agreed to drop their claims against each other.

It was on September 8, 2021, that Wooten and Bishop signed a lease and spent close to $250,000 to open the Bull City Selfie Museum in the Couch Building basement.

As the INDY previously reported, Wooten and Bishop say that Hardin forcibly evicted them on February 8, 2022, for nonpayment of rent.

Wooten and Bishop filed a countersuit in April contesting Hardin’s claim and stated that they were unable to open the business because of the construction company’s failure to obtain a building permit from the City of Durham’s inspections department.

Then, Hardin rented the place by early fall to tenants who used the couple’s designs and business plan to open the Red Carpet Selfie Studio. City inspection records show that the basement still does not have a building permit that would allow the space to open for business.

Wooten and Bishop are satisified with their agreement with Hardin.

But now they want justice. They’re moving forward with litigation against a con-

tractor and his associate who did construction work on the space, Bishop told the INDY

Last year Michael Moore, the owner of the construction company that transformed the basement of the two-story building into a selfie studio, filed a complaint seeking nearly $40,000 in damages from the couple.

On March 23, Wooten and Bishop’s attorney, Garrett Davis of Durham, filed a 62-page complaint in superior court that claims Moore and an associate, Stephen M. Baumgardner, violated federal racketeering laws. They say Moore’s Construction Company and related enterprises are corrupt and have been for years.

Durham attorney David Lewis, who has represented Moore in the past, told the INDY that he expects to represent Moore again in this civil case.

“He hasn’t been served yet,” Lewis told the INDY about the complaint, “and we’ll

make an appropriate comment when the time comes.”

The Guilford County couple’s lawsuit names Moore and his businesses—Moore’s Commercial and Residential Development LLC, and Moore’s Construction Company, LLC, formerly known as Baumgardner Investments, LLC Construction—along with Baumgardner.

Wooten and Bishop claim that Moore and Baumgardner violated the federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 that is primarily used to target organized crime. In addition to violating the RICO Act, Wooten and Bishop claim that Moore and Baumgardner engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices through a “pattern and practice of submitting false certification to state licensing authorities for the purpose of maintaining general contractor licenses,” according to the complaint.

Erica Bishop and Joseph Wooten PHOTO COURTESY OF THE COUPLE

Baumgardner this week told the INDY that questions from this writer marked the first time he had even heard about the complaint.

Davis states in the court affidavit that he discovered the alleged corruption after Hardin evicted Wooten and Bishop, the couple lost the $140,000 they had paid Moore “to build out the Bull City Selfie Museum (BCSM).”

Davis says that no one from Moore’s Construction … ever submitted a building permit [to the City of Durham] before BCSM was evicted on February 8, 2022.”

At the crux of Wooten and Bishop’s contention is that Moore and Baumgardner were operating a corrupt enterprise.

Under North Carolina’s general statutes, the recipient of a general contractor’s license must be a responsible managing member or an employee of the business, according to the lawsuit.

Davis states “Moore has never passed the general contractor’s exam, nor has he personally gone through all of the other application steps a licensed contractor must [go] through.”

Davis contends that Moore and Baumgardner “reached an agreement.” Baumgardner would take the general contractor’s license exam, obtain the license, and eventually become a “qualifier” and “responsible managing member” for his construction business.

“And less than 12 weeks after being granted a general contractor’s license on February 25, 2014, Baumgardner Investments, LLC became known as Moore’s Construction, LLC,” Davis states in the complaint.

Then Baumgardner moved to Texas.

“Baumgardner has been a permanent resident and registered voter in the state of Texas since November of 2014,” Davis states in the complaint.

Wooten and Bishop’s lawsuit includes Baumgardner’s voter registration record, which states that he lives in Pearland, Texas. Baumgardner ran for a seat on the Brazoria County, Texas, school board. According to a candidate’s application he filed for a May 6 election. He wrote that he’s lived in Texas for seven years and eight months.

Baumgardner told the INDY that although he has a permanent address in Texas, he spends “more than half my time here in North Carolina, and has for many years.”

“I was born and raised here,” says Baumgardner, who adds that he ran for the school board in Brazoria County as an “absentee candidate” and “lost terribly.”

“I’m never there,” he explains. “It’s very hard to win a race when you’re never there. My wife lives there, but my businesses here

require me to be more here than there.”

Davis states in the complaint that Baumgardner “annually submits false certification to the state’s general contractor’s board to maintain Moore’s Construction LLC’s license.”

“By law a ‘responsible managing member’ or employee means a person who is engaged in the work of the applicant a minimum of 20 hours per week or a majority of the hours operated by the applicant, whichever is less,” says Davis. He later added that it is doubtful Baumgardner could have met that requirement while living thousands of miles away in Texas.

“We never met Baumgardner,” Bishop says. “Joseph and I were on-site everyday for the upfit of our business and Baumgardner was not there.”

Davis, in the complaint, says Moore and Baumgardner concocted a sham qualifier scheme that enables Baumgardner to receive kickbacks from companies that find it cheaper to do business with him instead of hiring an on-site general contractor to monitor their work.

“The economics behind this arrangement is simple,” Davis states. “Upon information and belief, Baumgardner is provided a kickback-like payment by Moore (as well as the owners of the firm like ProMark Construction in Durham and Trinity Consulting and Development in Guilford County) each year Mr. Baumgardner allows those companies to use his name and number to maintain a general contractor’s license.”

He later adds that someone was “illegally selling their name and credentials to not one, not two, at least three corporations for the express purpose of allowing these corporations to maintain occupational license is a quintessential racket.”

As the INDY previously reported, Frank Weisner, executive director of the NC Licensing Board for General Contractors, confirmed in March that Moore’s Construction Company is under investigation for potential violations of the state statutes concerning general contractors.

Curtis Huff, an investigator with the state licensing board, told the INDY that the agency still has an active investigation going on.

Davis added that under state law any construction work over $30,000 requires a general contracting license.

“For jobs under $30,000, with hard work, a little bit of elbow grease, a truck, and a cell phone, you can be a handyman,” Davis says in a phone call to the INDY. “Which is all Michael Moore has, a truck and a cell phone, and he’s taking on jobs for hundreds of thousands of dollars.” W

Market Meals

At international grocery stores across the Triangle, the best food is served up just beyond the shelves.

BY GABI MENDICK food@indyweek.com

“Love Bao has been able to allow people to try and eat classic Taiwanese dishes in a town that still doesn’t have as many Asian options as other big cities,” says Joe Luo, the owner of Love Bao Taiwanese Kitchen, a food vendor tucked inside Cary’s H Mart. “It also allows people from Taiwan to have a taste of home when they’re far, far away.”

H Mart, like a handful of other international grocery stores scattered across the Triangle—including Li Ming’s Global Market and Compare Foods in Durham and Almadina Market, K-Town Market, and El Toro in Raleigh—serve as vital resources for immigrant communities, providing hardto-source ingredients, access to favorite snacks, and produce that doesn’t grow in North Carolina.

Among this rich scene, the unsung heroes of international grocery stores are the food purveyors, like Luo, who operate businesses inside these stores.

You’re not likely to stumble across these vendors on Yelp, local food blogs, or “Best of” lists. While some do business with their own unique branding, others don’t have names independent of the larger store in which they operate. Many vendors are owned and operated by the grocery store itself, while others rent out the space and operate independently.

These unostentatious outposts are perfect for grabbing a quick bite after a long shopping trip—but beyond their convenience, they’ve also become culinary destinations in their own right, with mouthwatering plates of affordable dishes from around the world.

Filipino Express at Oriental Store of Raleigh, 3601 Capital Boulevard, Raleigh, NC 27604

Tucked inside Filipino grocery the Oriental Store of Raleigh, the Filipino Express offers savory staples like lumpia and adobo, as well as sweets like cassava cake and halo-halo.

Owner Mack Libago explains that when his wife’s aunt Maria Victoria Ng Chua opened the store in 1970, it was the first international grocery store of any kind in the region. At the time, Oriental Store carried a range of international products, catering to many immigrant populations. But as different communities grew and more international stores opened, Oriental Store shifted to specializing in Filipino items.

In those early days, staff at Oriental Store would often request that Chua cook lunch for them during their shifts.

“One day the health inspector came in and my aunt was given a ticket because we were serving food without a license,” Libago says, “so then she decided, why not make it a business?”

15 years later, the business is still humming. Libago explains that Filipino food is not easy to make, and preparing it properly requires a plethora of herbs and spices. The restaurant, where an array of perfectly balanced stews are served, is particularly appreciated by the Filipino locals for whom it is difficult to find enough time to cook the complex dishes themselves.

Filipino Express is one of just a few restaurants that found a silver lining in

pandemic restrictions. Because the establishment is situated in a grocery store, it was able to remain open and accessible to patrons venturing out for groceries. The customer base grew.

Libago, conscious of the need to continually expand his customer base and tactical about growing the business, always wants to welcome new diners from all backgrounds.

“In my mind, to grow the business, you have to appeal to the Americans, you have to make sure that they love it. Because they are the most populous group,” Libago says. “If you are only considering the Filipinos, it’s limited. Right now I can see the growth of American customers.”

Americans tend to be less “adventurous” when they dine at Filipino Express, Libago says, typically ordering dishes like lumpia, fried Filipino spring rolls; pancit, a stir-fried noodle; and chicken adobo, a stew that includes a variety of spices, vinegar, and soy sauce—dishes that share elements of cuisines with which American customers are more familiar. While these are the dishes that are most common in the United States, Libago encourages all diners to branch out and taste other dishes.

“Filipinos like the dinuguan more,” Libago says of a dark, garlicky pork stew. “We have this dish that is flavored with pork blood, so it’s a very unique taste, but it’s very good.”

Taiwanese Kitchen at H Mart, 1961 High House Road, Cary, NC 27519

H Mart in Cary is by far the most robust of local international supermarkets in terms of both square footage and the number of independent food vendors who operate there. The Korean supermarket chain was founded in 1982 in Queens, New York, and today has nearly 100 locations across the United States. (The supermarket chain is also the subject of musician Michelle Zauner’s 2021 memoir, Crying in H Mart.)

Since the Cary location’s opening in 2016, the store has been home to a slew of vendors. The prepared-food outlets in H Mart represent a variety of Asian cuisines, serving traditional fare and street foods from across the continent.

One of those outposts is Luo’s Love Bao Taiwanese Kitchen. In 2015, after living in the United States for 30 years, Luo had moved back to his hometown of Keelung, Taiwan, to train alongside and learn recipes from his father-in-law. There, he opened his own restaurant in the Keelung Night Market. The restaurant was a success over the course of his 18 months in business, so he moved his venture back to the United States. In 2019, he opened Love Bao Taiwanese Kitchen.

The Love Bao menu features extensive variations of its namesake dish, gua bao,

Love Bao

Mack Libago PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

a steamed bun that the menu describes as “the Taiwanese burger.” The original gua bao is filled with braised pork belly, pickled mustard greens, powdered peanuts, brown sugar, and cilantro, creating a rich balance of acidic, nutty, sweet, and bright flavors. The menu also features fusion bao recipes, among them the chicken filet gua bao filled with fried chicken, lettuce, tomato, cucumber, honey mustard, and ketchup.

The business agreement with H Mart requires that vendors pay rent based on sales—in essence, a commission.

“We have a working contract with H Mart where we are not responsible for paying many of the expenses of a stand-alone restaurant,” Luo says, explaining the benefit of the arrangement.

La Superior, 3325 N Roxboro Street, Durham, NC 27704

Hispanic supermarket La Superior is known equally for its robust selection of groceries as it is for its in-store panaderia and pasteleria, its tortilleria that churns out fresh handmade tortillas, and its taqueria located inside the store.

La Superior first opened down the street in 1999 in what is now Super Taqueria. The store is owned by three siblings and their spouses, all originally from Mexico City. At the time, Mexican food and ingredients were not readily available in the area (Compare Foods, now a widespread Hispanic grocery chain in the area, didn’t arrive in North Carolina until 2004), and the business quickly struck a chord with the local community.

La Superior offered “traditional things like chorizo, chicharrón, and carnitas that weren’t found in other places; they were like, ‘Hey, this reminds me of back home,’” says Jazmin Flores, a daughter and niece of the store owners and a manager at La Superior.

Flores’s family operated taquerias in Mexico City before immigrating to the United States, and many of the same dishes they served there are now offered at the taqueria. Though many dishes, from tacos to tortas, are available for purchase across the Triangle today, Flores explains that certain cuts of meat that fill those tortillas and sandwiches are more difficult to find locally.

“Cabeza [head], tripa, the intestines, there’s carnitas that come with buche [pork stomach], there’s lengua, tongue,” Flores rattles off, listing some of the La Superior’s more singular menu options.

The bakery and tortilleria were new adventures for La Superior. Committed to getting it right, the market hired individuals who had previous expertise baking and making

tortillas on a mass scale in Mexico to come hone its shop’s recipes and processes. Since then, some of those individuals have gone on to open their own successful businesses.

Each morning, trays of conchas and tres leches are taken out of the oven to wait for customers. A wide variety of baked goods are stocked for shoppers to peruse and fill their own trays with colorful breads, cookies, and pastries.

At 24, Flores says that she and her cousins feel some generational tension when it comes to running the store.

“Our generation now, we want to be a little bit more Americanized, and our family is still more on the traditional Mexican side, so we butt heads,” she says. “Times are different, people are advancing, there are so many new options, and slowly we’re getting there to do those changes.”

Still, when it comes to both adapting and preserving tradition, Flores is proud to be working in the family business in which she was raised.

“Growing up here, this is all I’ve ever known,” she says. “I don’t want to be closed-minded and say I don’t want to learn something else because I actually wanted to go to nursing school—but then I would come here and I’m like, ‘This is home.’” W

OTHER GROCERY STORES WITH FOOD VENDORS IN THE TRIANGLE

Grand Asia Market, 1253 Buck Jones Road, Raleigh | Boasts a Chinese restaurant and bakery inside Super Compare, 2000 Avondale Drive A, Durham | Offers prepared Caribbean food

Choi’s Kitchen at K-Town Market, 6014 Duraleigh Road, Raleigh, NC | Serves traditional Korean food

Li Ming’s, 3400 Westgate Drive, Durham | Offers prepared hearty Chinese dishes at affordable prices

Almadina Market, 1019 Method Road, Raleigh | Serves delicious halal South Asian takeout

Bombay Central, 10966 Chapel Hill Rd, Morrisville | Sells Indian sweets, street foods, and more

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Standing Jokes

Hari Kondabolu talks parenthood, politics, and introducing personal material into his work.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

In a new special, the comedian Hari Kondabolu—who is known for material that tackles big issues like race, colonialism, and immigration—is talking a little more about his personal life. His new show comes to Durham’s Motorco Music Hall on Thursday, May 18. Ahead of the show, Kondabolu spoke to the INDY about parenthood, politics, and introducing new personal material into the mix.

INDY: You recently became a father. What has that been like?

HARI KONDABOLU: Yeah, we had a kid during the pandemic, which is why my new special is called Vacation Baby. He’s two and a half. It’s the most difficult and beautiful and painful and rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life. All the clichés are true. Like, “Oh, I will not see most of my friends again. I am going to be thinking about my kid obsessively, constantly, and always full of fear.” And things are different. Everything has a different meaning.

What is your latest stand-up show about?

[This hour] definitely has the kinds of stuff I have historically done jokes about: race and colonialism and gender and the big-issue stuff. There’s less about parenthood. [The last special] was coming off the heels of the pandemic and having a kid—how could I not write about those things? Now I feel like some time has passed and I’m kind of settling into parenthood.

The way the parent aspect fits in is, it’s like … what do

you do when you have a kid and all of a sudden the pressure is to make more money? How does that affect how you view what you do? It’s a lot of questioning: Is being a popular NPR comedian enough to pay the bills?

It sounds like some of your new material is more personal.

Yeah, that’s a big difference between what I did before and what I do now. It’s been a long-term goal … both because it’s easier to relate to the audience and [because] the audience is more willing to listen to stuff that they maybe disagree with if I’ve already won them over with things they can relate to.

Mixing the personal and political just makes for a more interesting combination. I want people to know who I am because I tell them stories versus guessing who I am [because of] my points of view.

A lot of your comedy is still political—what do you think of politics today?

We’re dealing with this huge generational split. You have this movement of young people who have this incredibly progressive vision and they love AOC. And you also have this old guard of Democrats that are so out of touch with that and are thinking pure political practicality.

Which, to be honest, makes less sense with the environment being what it is, the literal melting of the ice caps. Practicality, when you have to beat the buzzer to mass extinction, is kind of ridiculous. So I think there’s this really different sense of urgency.

What political and social issues do you address in your comedy?

The majority of it [my political stand-up] has always been the bigger issues. Colonialism is an evergreen topic and it’s still something that affects us to this day. When I think about race, that is something that manifests differently than it did a decade ago but is still present.

I talk about the bigger problems, and if there are moments to draw in what’s happening in the news, I will. But to me, let’s keep our eyes on the prize. What is it that we’re really talking about? We’re talking about people’s lives, their freedom, their ability to make choices, that’s what we’re talking about.

You’ve toured in the Triangle. What are your impressions of North Carolina?

The crowds I’ve gotten at all of those shows have varied somewhat, but the one thing that has been really great is there’s been a lot of thoughtful audiences. This is a place that obviously has lots of universities. I end up drawing a lot of either college students or professors. It’s an easier place to perform because people are thoughtful.

Chapel Hill feels the smallest and most laid back, it definitely has the chillest vibe. Raleigh is a mix, there’s a lot more people. And it feels a lot more real than just an extension of a college campus. You know what I mean? It feels like a real place. I’ve had a tough time reading Durham. It kind of feels like a crossbreed of the other two cities to some degree. W

Hari Kondabolu PHOTO BY ROB HOLYSZ

HARI KONDABOLU Motorco Music Hall, Durham | Thursday, May 18, 8 p.m., $25

Invisible Women

Director JaMeeka Holloway turns her sights toward Lisa B. Thompson’s rapid-fire, two-person

show: Single Black Female.

BY BYRON WOODS arts@indyweek.com

“It’s like I stay in perpetual motion,” JaMeeka Holloway says.

The director—and sometime agent provocateur, for pre-pandemic works like her 2015 production of The Shipment with Black Ops Theatre Company and White, a scathing satire on race in the world of fine art, for Bulldog Ensemble Theater in 2019—is talking about both her her past and immediate future on local and national stages.

The day after Single Black Female, her new production for Bulldog, opens at Mettlesome this week, she’ll travel to Charleston, where auditions are taking place for the fall premiere of a musical biography play she’s been tapped to direct about the life of Robert Smalls. The 19th-century congressman, publisher, and seaman first found fame when he freed himself, his crew, and their families from slavery by surreptitiously commandeering a Confederate battleship and piloting it out of Charleston Harbor into the hands of the Union.

“It shifted the course of the Civil War in ways that haven’t been recognized,” Holloway says.

The director hasn’t had much time for rest since the lockdown has lifted and theaters have reopened. Before providing directorial input for Rosetta Circle, Tift Merritt’s recent evening of music and stories about the life of feminist blues and jazz historian Rosetta Reitz at Duke, she assistant directed the groundbreaking production of Hamlet starring Tia James in February at PlayMakers Rep.

Before that, a two-year odyssey saw her careening from Northern Stage in Vermont to La Mama, one of New York’s home churches of the avant-garde, where she collaborated with puppeteer Torry Bend on playwright Howard Craft’s Dreaming. After a pit stop to helm a student production of the Yoruban-tinged drama The Brothers Size at UNC, she was off to Ohio. At Kent State, she created what she calls an Upper East Side, “Gossip Girl–esque” take on Much Ado about Nothing. Then came the premiere of playwright Jacqueline Lawton’s Hotel Berry, a historical drama about the night Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried to stay in a famous Black-owned hotel near Ohio University.

“It’s been a journey,” Holloway reflects, “uplifting memory

and illuminating all of these stories and voices that have stayed under the radar.”

The journey’s far from over, although there have been sudden detours along the way. For her first live public production in four years, Holloway originally planned to stage the North Carolina playwright Stacey Rose’s drama As Is: Conversations with Big Black Women in Confined Spaces

“The casting calls for a demographic of women over 250 pounds,” Holloway says. “It’s a demographic of women who haven’t been highlighted enough on the American stage.”

But when two cast members had to leave the production, Holloway had to pivot to another work that’s long been in her visual field: Single Black Female

“[Producer and photographer] Erin Bell and I had wanted to do it a couple of years back,” Holloway recalls. The pair presented it early in the pandemic during the Let Her Tell It online reading series of Black women playwrights in 2020.

Stage veteran Kyma Lassiter and up-and-comer Lauren Foster-Lee play the title characters: an English professor and a lawyer, two successful, single Black women in their upper thirties. But what at first looks like a couple of old friends catching up over drinks soon begins to resemble an intervention instead—with the audience as the subject.

After the unnamed lawyer says, “Welcome to the lives of single middle-class Black women,” the professor springs a pop quiz on us.

“Remember Ellison’s Invisible Man? Well, we are the invisible women. Black professional intellectual leftists with conservative fiscal ideologies … the New Negro African American Black Colored Girls who only considered therapy. And even though nobody wants to hear us—we are tired of being ignored!”

Holloway notes that playwright Lisa B. Thompson wants us to know up front that Black women are not a monolith.

“She’s not trying to speak for the entirety of Black women; she’s looking at a very specific demographic,” Holloway says. “That specificity really resonates with me.”

Though they’re successful, Thompson’s characters are still dealing with longings and expectations—from their families, their friends, and themselves—about careers, relationships, and the everyday realities of life.

“They’re trying to grapple with their identity as single Black women and how that exists in relationship to all the other aspects of their lives,” Holloway says.

There’s an edgy, almost stand-up-comedy vibe to Thompson’s candid, rapid-fire inventory of discontents. But what attracted Holloway to the work is the home-truth honesty in the dialogue.

“It felt so familiar to all the ways me and my girlfriends speak on a day-to-day basis,” she says. “It felt so accessible. I love that, how that language felt.”

To Holloway, the spirit of the piece “felt really prime for collective witnessing. It’s a callout to single Black females—and there are so many in the world. It just feels like something that’s reaching out to the plurality of Durham.” W

JaMeeka Holloway

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

SINGLE BLACK FEMALE Bulldog Ensemble Theater | Mettlesome, Durham | Thursday, May 18–Sunday, May 28 | Bulldogdurham.org

Opposites Refract

Benjamin Felton and John Harrison take a walk in the woods with dreaming machines on their second record as Tacoma Park.

BY BRIAN HOWE music@indyweek.com

On its surface, Tacoma Park’s second, self-titled record is simply a chance to lose yourself in a soft, green world where guitar tones drift and delicate analog synth timbres flourish endlessly. Though the album feels huge and fills two LPs, it barely tops an hour, and it’s divided into digestible songs, each with its own contour of space and weight of emotion.

In the first, the synths embellish a hypnotically switching acoustic guitar line, a harmonic field slowly lensing into a high, whistling lead. The second song bounces off a short, rubbery loop and into the shoegaze stratosphere. The third asks how many licks it would take to get to an electro-pop surprise in the center of Terry Riley’s “In C.” The way these complex musical shapes interlock is a shadow of the story beneath the surface—a story about how the complex shapes of people can make apparent opposites fit together.

There are a few guests on the record: John Crouch adds drums both rock and abstract to several tracks; Justin Blatt added violin and viola to the pastoral fantasy “Medicine”; Judy Woodall contributed some electric guitar. But Tacoma Park is primarily the duo of Benjamin Felton and John Harrison, both at least two decades deep in the Triangle music scene.

Felton moved to Chapel Hill after college, about 20 years ago, and joined the great Durham glam-punk band Jett Rink, which left behind one EP and many memories of riotous shows. A big part of their appeal was Mike Walters’s analog synths, still

a daring novelty to indie rockers, though Felton was strictly a guitarist then. Later, he joined Pegasus and started a solo guitar-looping project, Blood Revenge, edging toward the large canvases he and Harrison stretch out now. These days, he also plays bass with Shark Quest whenever that Chapel Hill dynasty cranks up.

Harrison came from Wilmington in the late 1990s with a band whose name— Emily’s Porch—a period-piece scriptwriter could hardly top. He soon started drumming and sampling in The Comas, perhaps one of the last local bands to enjoy a good old-fashioned wining and dining before file sharing hit big labels hard.

He also started his own lengthy run as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist in North Elementary, though now he tends to focus on his looser, freer catchall project, jphono1. He’s a general all-star contributor to and champion of local bands as a cofounder of the label Potluck Foundation.

Felton, who teaches eighth-grade social studies, makes the more studious impression of the two. He’s the one who has collected the desirable synths, the Moog Grandmother and the Arturia MiniBrute, that have accreted on the duo’s foundation of improvised guitar, and he has more of the music-nerd influences that the record indicates. It’s very much in the line of Harmonia and Cluster, who contrasted the driving, motorized beat of 1970s German experimental rock with more organic-feeling forms of electronic propulsion.

Harrison works in grant management at

UNC-Chapel Hill and has ripened into a Jerry Garcia–like visage and vibe. (He loves The Grateful Dead and mentioned them first among his influences in our group interview.) He discusses the music in wandering, laid-back lines, in contrast to Felton’s more cerebral spirals. Harrison is a prolific painter who says he’d quit music for it if he were a better capitalist. But he’s growing a little weary of his trademark astronauts and has been drawn to abstraction lately, as Tacoma Park might imply.

“We were kindred spirits,” Felton says of their bond, which began with a debut album in 2020, “and had some things to learn from each other.”

But however convenient it would be to cast Felton as Apollo and Harrison as Dionysius, each has elements of the other. Felton creates the videos that encase Tacoma Park’s live show in their own pocket dimension of motion and light.

“Not everybody gets fired up on a Friday night to hear two guys play a D for 20 minutes,” Felton says. “The video makes it a more accessible experience.”

And Harrison has a knack for bringing big ideas to practical conclusions. Felton remembers once wanting to keep recording the same 50-minute take until they got it just right. “Sure, we could do that,” he remembers Harrison saying in his kindly way. “But we could also just think of it as songs.”

In its most intimate texture, Tacoma Park emerges from the circumstances of an organic friendship, a safe space to try new things, whether it’s performing live with synthesizers or producing the album themselves, with Nick Petersen mastering.

“This was all new and exciting for me, but it feels really natural and normal now,” Harrison says. “I joke with Ben that us going to a bar together is probably as good as practice. It’s about spending time together and getting into that mental space. It’s nice to be able to just hand something over with complete trust.”

The new record was made by passing bits of music back and forth from their respective studios during the pandemic, building and recomposing, editing and adding even more effects, then paring everything back with sculptural intention. The excised work and thought still crackles in the negative space.

Whoever began a given song was responsible for its edit, and each wrote the titles for the other’s tracks, blurring the lines of authorship.

Whoever began a given song was responsible for its edit, and each wrote the titles for the other’s tracks, blurring the lines of authorship. They approached the attractive collage on the album’s cover in the same way, trading it back and forth until opposites refracted into a peaceful, harmonious whole W

Tacoma Park’s Benjamin Felton and John Harrison

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

TACOMA PARK

Friday, May 26, 8 p.m. | Shadowbox Studio, Durham

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C U LT U R E CA L E N DA R

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

music

Beartooth / Trivium

$58+. Wed, May 17, 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Crowded House: “Dreamers Are Waiting” North American Tour

$62+. Wed, May 17, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

redveil $20. Wed, May 17, 8 p.m.

Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Al Strong Presents: Jazz on the Roof

Thurs, May 18, 7 p.m. The Durham Hotel, Durham.

Bongfoot $12. Thurs, May 18, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Dan Melchior Band / DJ Craig Layabout $10. Thurs, May 18, 9 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Dylan Earl $10. Thurs, May 18, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

LIVE @ Lake Raleigh: Caique Vidal & Batuque

Thurs, May 18, 6 p.m. Lake Raleigh, Raleigh.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thurs, May 18, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Eric Johanson $15.

Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. Transfer Co. Food Hall Ballroom, Raleigh.

The Floor with Special Guest Miss Ashley $5. Fri, May 19, 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Get the Led Out $30+. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Gown / sister,brother $10. Fri, May 19, 7:30 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Hippie Sabotage: The Trailblazer Tour $28+. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Kinetic Audio Presents: Abyss $15. Fri, May 19, 9:30 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Scott Sawyer Quartet $25. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m.

Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Slow Teeth $10. Fri, May 19, 8:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Sueco $20. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Trash Piñata $12. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

The Wood Brothers / Shovels & Rope $37. Fri, May 19, 7:30 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Ballyhoo! $20. Sat, May 20, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Detroit Durham Connection 04: The Soul of Techno Edition $20. Sat, May 20, 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Durham Blues and Brews Festival $60. Sat, May 20, 5 p.m. Durham Central Park, Durham.

Fortune Factory Presents: Factory 54 $5. Sat, May 20, 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

John Mellencamp SOLD OUT. Sat, May 20, 8 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Kate McGarry, Keith Ganz, and Ariel Pocock $25. Sat, May 20, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Kpop in the Park $3. Sat, May 20, 3 p.m. John Chavis Memorial Park, Raleigh.

Marvelous Music Mainstage Series: Rissi Palmer $27. Sat, May 20, 7:30 p.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary.

A Gardener’s Guide to Botany: Author Talk and Book Signing Wed, May 17, 5:30 p.m. Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham.

Rhonda McKnight— The Thing About Home Wed, May 17, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Abraham Josephine Riesman— Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America Thurs, May 18, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Liberation Station Bookstore Fundraiser $100. Thurs, May 18, 6:30 p.m. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh.

Bart Elmore— Country Capitalism: How Corporations from the American South Remade Our Economy and the Planet Tues, May 23, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Pouya: All but 6 Tour $43+. Sat, May 20, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Spring Swing: Wine and Jazz Night with Noah G. Fowler Sat, May 20, 5 p.m. The Glass Jug Beer Lab RTP, Durham.

Tim Barry $20. Sat, May 20, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Voices Presents “Hands of Love” with Triangle String Quartet $20. Sat, May 20, 7:30 p.m. University United Methodist Church, Chapel Hill.

The Woggles $15. Sat, May 20, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Bullhorn Durham

Tour: DJ Yammy with Ally J Sun, May 21, 7:30 p.m. perfect lovers, Durham.

Chamber Music

Raleigh: The Merz Piano Trio $31. Sun, May 21, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

The Gibson Brothers $18. Sun, May 21, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Spyro Gyra $20+. Sun, May 21, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Those Americans: Nicole Keller, Concert Organist Sun, May 21, 3 p.m. White Memorial Presbyterian Church, Raleigh.

Viv & Riley $10. Sun, May 21, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Matthew Logan Vasquez $25. Mon, May 22, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

OFF! $20. Mon, May 22, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. Bad Omens: Concrete Forever Tour $150+. Tues, May 23, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh. The Beach Boys $50+. Tues, May 23, 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tues, May 23, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

redveil performs at Motorco Music Hall on Wednesday, May 17. PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO

screen

Clockwatchers Thurs, May 18, 7 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

Eric Clapton: Across 24 Nights $13. Thurs, May 18, 7:30 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

stage

Up & Comers

Comedy Showcase

Wed, May 17, 8 p.m. Bull City Ciderworks, Durham.

Single Black

Female $20. May 18-28, various times. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Carolina Ballet: Sleeping Beauty $40+. May 18-21, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Hari Kondabolu $25. Thurs, May 18, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Hot Tip! A Sex & Love Advice Comedy Show $10. Thurs, May 18, 9:30 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Matter of Mind: My ALS with Musical Performance by Nnenna Freelon and Panel

Discussion Thurs, May 18, 6:30 p.m. NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham.

Maya Lin: A Clear Strong Vision $7. Sat, May 20, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Backchannel

Cinema Tues, May 23, 7:30 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

The Minority Report: A Satirical News Panel Show Where Melanin Gets the Last Word $8. Thurs, May 18, 8 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Comedy Night: Bo Johnson and Matt White $15. Fri, May 19, 8 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Sat, May 20, 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Dadz: A Drag King Show $15. Sat, May 20, 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Soar: An Interpretation of Michael Richards: Are You Down?

By FLEE DANCE/ Frankie Lee III Sat, May 20, 1 and 3 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

su | do | ku

© Puzzles by Pappocom

this week’s puzzle level:

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

U Z Z L E S

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page” at the bottom of our webpage.

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzles page”.

Best of luck, and have fun! www.sudoku.com

C L A S S I F I E D S

EMPLOYMENT

IT Professionals

IT Professionals: Ent. Lvl to Sen. Lvl (multiple positions)

Software Developers are needed for our Apex, NC Office. Must be willing to travel to set up systems to various clients at unanticipated locations across the nation. Pls send resume, cvr Ltr., & Sal. Req. to ERK Solutions LLC at 2905 Macintosh Woods Dr., Apex, NC 27502

Instrumentation Technical Trainer

919-416-0675 www.harmonygate.com

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

Instrumentation Technical Trainer - NAT Systems sought by Grifols Diagnostic Solutions Inc. for the Durham location. Candidate must have a Bach’s or foreign equiv deg in Electronic Engg, Electronics, or Comp Sci & 5 yrs exp w/ Immunohematology & NAT instrumentation, incl Xpress. Must have exp in: servicing electronic/electro-mechanical eqpmt, troubleshooting medical & diagnostic instruments; operating diagnostics eqpmt in a lab environment for testing & maintenance; server storage of controlled docs in DCM; ISO 9000 & ISO 14000 quality mgmt standards; d/base user interface & query s/ware, incl Salesforce Service Max platform; enforcing HIPAA & PHI compliant protocols; ensuring bloodborne pathogen safety through use of PPE; performing TPA; & delivering tech’l instrumentation training to technologists or FSEs. Must be willing to obtain Field Service Engineer (FSE) instrument trainer certification for instrument platforms. Must be willing to travel 20% annually to national worksite locations for training purposes. Send resume to Attn: HR Staffing/ PERM, 4101 Research Commons, Durham, NC 27709 or online: www.grifols.com/careers. EOE.