INDY Week May 31, 2023

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill

VOL. 40 NO. 21

4 A new bill would ban cities from passing laws to protect tenants based on their source of income. Why do some Democrats support it?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

6 A new skate park is coming to downtown Raleigh. BY JASMINE GALLUP

8 LGBTQ+ students will have their own Queer Prom this year.

BY

MARIANA FABIAN

10 UNC leaders are disclosing more about the controversial School of Civic Life and Leadership. BY JOE KILLIAN

11 Durham leaders are supportive of an ambitious affordable housing project.

BY AUDREY PATTERSON

ARTS & CULTURE

12 Village Lanes, a bowling alley in East Durham, has a community of loyal fans. But on May 31, it shutters for good. BY SARAH EDWARDS

14 The Antiques Roadshow makes a stop in Raleigh. BY JASMINE GALLUP

16 Reviews of Bombadil's In Color and Andy Stack and Jay Hammond's Inter Personal BY JORDAN LAWRENCE

18 Talking with legendary pitmasters Ed and Ryan Mitchell, ahead of the release of their new cookbook memoir. BY LENA GELLER

20 A new book by a trio of North Carolina editors gives a roadmap for reparations. BY

JASMINE GALLUP

3 Backtalk 22 Culture calendar

W E M A D E T H I S

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John Hurld

EDITORIAL

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31, 2023 INDYweek.com

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Jacob Collier performs at the North Carolina Museum of Art on Tuesday, June 13. (See calendar, page 22.)

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Earlier this month, we republished a story from our partner newsroom The Assembly taking a deep look at Durham’s HEART model for community safety, its successes, and city leaders’ plans to expand it. DAWN BLAGROVE, the executive director of Emancipate NC, a nonprofit dedicated to dismantling structural racism and mass incarceration across the state, makes the case that Raleigh needs a program like HEART.

“Helplessness. Fear. Internal turmoil. These are just a few of the emotions you may feel if a loved one was having a mental health crisis. You know something is wrong, and you need professional help—who would you call? Currently, Raleigh residents’ only option is the police, but their presence and response in these crises are almost never helpful and usually escalate the situation, reduce safety for all involved, and even result in tragedy.

Raleigh residents deserve a better option, one the City of Durham is already offering through the successful Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART). Raleigh City Council and Mayor Mary Ann Baldwin should follow suit and invest taxpayer dollars in a non-law-enforcement crisis response team to provide safe and meaningful support that is accessible to us all.

It is estimated that approximately 5% of the US population lives with a serious mental illness, but they make up more than 20% of fatal police shooting victims. Assuming Raleigh has a similar rate of mental illness, more than 23,000 of our residents are at a heightened risk of dying during a police encounter. This disturbing reality is especially poignant for Raleigh’s Black residents, who make up approximately 28.2% of the city’s population yet 69% of the drivers RPD reported using force against during traffic stops in 2022.

Police officers are ill-equipped to address mental health crises, and no amount of training, or money spent on it, can prepare a police officer

to respond better than a mental health professional. Law enforcement often interprets mental health symptoms as hostility, and the symptoms themselves affect a person’s ability to respond to commands. Their presence signifies trouble for most, and brutality for many, exacerbating, and even onsetting, symptoms such as fear of persecution and paranoia. The result is escalation and danger for all involved, the most stark of which is for our Black residents, who are disproportionately impacted by police violence and often fear for their lives in any interaction with them.

The Raleigh Police Department’s ACORN team of police officers and social workers is not an accessible or acceptable option for communities that have been disproportionately impacted by policing and police violence. It is also counter to recommendations from mental health advocates who say a reduction in encounters between police and those with serious mental illness may be the single most immediate and practical strategy for reducing these fatal police shootings.

Data from pilot programs across the country shows that a non-law enforcement alternative will give us a much better, and safe, return on taxpayer investment. Durham’s HEART responders successfully resolve most calls on-scene, and provide follow-up care, all while diverting calls from the police and other first responses. For certain calls that pose a greater potential safety risk, HEART pairs clinicians with police officers, but data from

the first ten months of the program show a police presence is mostly unnecessary. Their responders reported feeling safe in 99% of encounters, and 0% of calls needed police department backup for team safety. Non-law enforcement crisis response teams also benefit the broader community—A 2022 study found Denver’s STAR program reduced ‘low-level’ crime by 34%.

Our country, and the City of Raleigh, have tried to make policing the solution to every social problem, but it hasn’t helped; in fact it’s harmed our communities. Police unions will lobby for law enforcement agencies to take on responsibilities like crisis response because doing so signifies legitimacy and brings more funding. Police departments will take on these responsibilities even when officers are illequipped to fulfill them, and outcomes are unsatisfactory. Making police the solution to mental health crises has resulted in numerous tragedies across the nation. If Raleigh had a HEART (program), Reuel Rodrigues Nunez, Keith Collins, Soheil Antonio Mojarrad, and other beloved members of our community might still be alive.

It’s been more than three months since Emancipate NC, myself, and other members of the community demanded Raleigh establish a non-law enforcement crisis-response team akin to Durham’s HEART program. While Durhamites fight to expand the successful program, Raleigh drags its toes in providing people in crisis and their loved ones with the safety and care we deserve.”

Unprotected Tenants

Why are Democratic lawmakers supporting a bill that would ban municipalities from adopting rules prohibiting tenant discrimination based on their source of income?

BY THOMASI MCDONALD tmcdonald@indyweek.com

It’s hardly a secret that there is an ongoing affordable housing crisis throughout the Triangle that’s exacerbated by gentrification and a housing shortage.

With that in mind, what state Democratic Party member who represents the region would approve legislation that further hinders its poorest residents from having safe places to live?

Ask Adam Golden, a third-year student at the Duke University School of Law.

Golden reached out to 19 Democrats in the North Carolina House about their April votes for House Bill 551, a GOP-led piece of legislation that would prohibit local governments across North Carolina from enacting source of income (SOI) protections for tenants.

The omnibus bill would also require tenants who have service animals to provide written verification from a healthcare professional regarding their disability and need for the animal. And while there are what appear to be some minimal protections for people with disabilities and service animals written into the bill, legal experts and housing advocates say these don’t actually do much to help people with disabilities.

Golden has spent a significant portion of his law school career working with Legal Aid of North Carolina and the Duke Law Civil Justice Clinic representing tenants in eviction and other proceedings.

“[SOI protections] ensure that those using housing vouchers, veterans’ benefits, or other non-traditional incomes can have choice over where they live,” Golden wrote in a May 2 email to state lawmakers following the vote on April 27, which led to the bill’s passage in the house.

In the message, Golden noted that here in North Carolina, more than 80 percent of housing choice voucher (also known as

Section 8) holders are people of color and nearly a quarter are disabled, according to data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

The legislation, Golden explained in a second email to Democratic members of the state senate—which has not yet voted on the bill—would preempt cities and counties from passing SOI protections for their residents, make it more difficult for those with disabilities that require a service animal to bring their animal into their home, and force tenants to pay uncapped attorneys’ fees to their landlords if they appeal their eviction.

“Every day in the courtroom, I see firsthand our failure to provide safe and adequate housing for all, including many forced out of their long-time homes and, frequently, into homelessness,” Golden explained. He added that housing vouchers are one of the few safety nets for the growing affordable housing crisis and mark a congressional effort “to move away from the public housing model and to provide low-income families with more choice over where they live.”

“In doing so, federal lawmakers hoped to break up class and racial segregation in housing,” Golden added.

Jesse McCoy, the supervising attorney at Duke’s Civil Justice Clinic, described HB 551 as “horrific.”

“I’ve seen a lot of bad bills,” McCoy tells the INDY, “but this is really bad.”

McCoy, who helped launch Duke’s eviction diversion program in 2017, says that, under current law, North Carolina expressly forbids rent controls, except in specific situations.

“But the problem with this bill is that it’s trying to expand the law that allows landlords greater access to turn away state residents who rely on rental assistance,” he says.

“This is not a new thing,” McCoy adds. “For years, landlords have refused housing to people who they find out have subsidized housing assistance. This has been happening.”

In North Carolina, there is no law that explicitly allows municipalities to institute their own SOI antidiscrimination ordinances, and traditionally, town and city attorneys have been wary of testing such broad ordinances out of fear of being sued, Golden says.

But municipalities such as Durham, Raleigh, and Winston-Salem have some levels of protections for tenants, if not official ordinances—for instance, for developments that receive city funds, landlords may not discriminate against tenants based on their SOI. Charlotte and Mecklenburg County passed ordinances that protect renters in buildings that receive federal funding. Those practices don’t go far enough to cover the vast majority of tenants in the state, however.

“Many other states and cities have adopted SOI protections because they work,” Golden says.

Examples include Atlanta, Louisville, and New York City, which is taking steps to strengthen enforcement of its SOI antidiscrimination laws. Furthermore, 19 states

have SOI laws in addition to those states’ major cities and counties. While the issue has mostly been partisan, with blue cities frequently passing protections despite opposition from GOP legislatures, even some red states such as Utah and North Dakota have statewide SOI protections.

In Texas, Republicans introduced a bill similar to HB 551 after Democrat-led cities such as Dallas and Austin sought to protect their residents from SOI discrimination.

Still, more and more tenants are gaining protections across the country. HUD data show that denial by landlords decreases from 77 percent to 35 percent in areas with protections, “and recipients are more likely to move into low-poverty, high-opportunity neighborhoods,” Golden adds. And in what is essentially a high-demand seller’s market, “landlords continue to do just fine,” Golden says.

Among the Democratic legislators here in the Triangle who voted in favor of HB 551, or the Landlord-Tenant and HOA Changes Act, were Zack Hawkins of District 31, which includes East Durham; B. Ray Jeffers of District 2, which includes North Durham; Joe John and Ya Liu of Raleigh; Renee Price of Hillsborough; and Maria Cervania, of District 102, which includes Cary

Clockwise from top left: Rep. Maria Cervania, Rep. Zack Hawkins, Rep. B. Ray Jeffers, Rep. Joe John, Rep. Ya Liu, and Rep. Renee Price PHOTOS COURTESY OF NCGA

and Apex, according to the NC General Assembly website.

Price, a freshman house member who served on the Orange County Board of Commissioners from 2012 until 2022 before winning a seat in the General Assembly, says she has long been an advocate of affordable housing and federal housing vouchers.

“Builders don’t want these types of controls,” Price told the INDY about her vote for HB 551. “And with smaller landlords, some of them are not really into being forced to accept these vouchers.”

Price added that the proposed legislation does not preclude cities and counties from working jointly with builders who may be offered incentives, like tax breaks, to build affordable homes.

John, a former judge, says the bill “has a mix of good and bad to address multiple issues.”

“I ultimately voted ‘Yes’ in this instance, albeit unenthusiastically, because I support the increased protections for renters with disabilities and service animals,” John wrote in an email to the INDY

Cervania told the INDY that HB 551 has “some good pieces.” But she says that after fully researching the bill and talking with others, she now opposes the section that would preempt cities and counties from enacting ordinances prohibiting landlords from accepting housing vouchers and would oppose the bill on that grounds if given another opportunity to do so.

“The last thing I want to do is preempt any county,” Cervania says.

McCoy, the Duke clinic’s supervising attorney, takes issue with the parts of the bill that lawmakers have interpreted as protecting people with disabilities and service animals. He says that in addition to creating the image that a prospective tenant has bargaining power, the bill “inhibits the city and county from getting involved in any way.”

McCoy also takes exception that the service animal section in the proposed legislation is intended to protect people with disabilities.

“Landlords have been trying for years to figure out creative ways to kick people out with pets that are not authorized,” he says, adding that they have accepted that they can’t deny service animals who help, for instance, members of the blind community.

Instead, McCoy says he thinks the legislation will target the owners of animals who provide emotional support. He says requiring tenants to provide medical certification also crosses the line regarding a person’s medical privacy.

Concerns about landlords refusing to accept federal housing vouchers surfaced publicly in Durham in the wake of the coro-

navirus pandemic in 2021, at the end of a federal eviction moratorium.

Data from state courts show that the number of eviction cases across the state last year spiked to its highest level since 2019, the year before the start of the COVID moratorium and federal rental assistance.

In Wake County, for instance, while eviction filings are currently happening at a lower rate than in 2019, evictions jumped to 9.5 percent last year. The rate was 6.2 percent in 2021.

Meanwhile in Durham, Sarah D’Amato, who directs Legal Aid of North Carolina’s eviction diversion program, told The News & Observer in February that the “courthouse’s eviction docket has now grown to 100 to 200 cases a week,” adding that trends over the last few months show that eviction rates in the Bull City are “on pace to hit 2019 levels, if not higher.”

HUD data from 2019 show the median income of a voucher user was $13,450, “hardly enough to afford adequate housing in the free market,” Golden says. In Durham the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is around $1,600, according to rent.com.

Moreover, Golden adds, currently only one in four qualifying families receives a housing choice voucher, and waitlists to receive one “are often years long.”

Despite the challenges, Golden says the voucher can be a lifeline, reducing the likelihood of homelessness by three-fourths, of living in an overcrowded home by half, and of moving in a five-year period by a third, according to data from HUD.

Golden told the legislators that as a consequence of federal law not requiring landlords to accept vouchers, somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of voucher recipients are unable to find a willing landlord in the allotted time.

McCoy notes that tenant discrimination, as seen in this bill, is apiece with historical practices in the South that are rooted in racism, with the legacy of property owners refusing to comply with government telling them what to do with their property dating back to slavery.

“It’s a relic of Jim Crow, [pre–]civil rights, slavery, and redlining,” McCoy says.

Far from partnering with the state’s GOP lawmakers to codify a law that forbids cities and counties from enacting anti-discrimination housing ordinances, Golden says the “administration of housing vouchers is a local issue that should be left to local decision makers.”

“Quite simply,” Golden told the Democratic lawmakers, “I find such a vote by those who profess to care about vulnerable North Carolinians to be unconscionable.” W

Skate Space

Raleigh’s newest skate park will be a needed “third place” for the city’s young people.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

The formerly abandoned, sprawling asphalt lot located off Capital Boulevard heading into downtown doesn’t look like much right now. But in a few weeks, new ramps and curbs could draw dozens of skateboarders to the area.

The Conlon Family Skatepark—a 2.5-acre space for skateboarders, BMX bikers, and roller skaters to gather—is the creation of Raleigh residents Stephen Mangano, an app developer, and Cody Charland, a marketing professional. Each has children who skateboard, and Charland is a longtime skateboarder himself, although he uses skateboarding more as a means of transportation these days, he says.

Together, Mangano and Charland formed Skate Raleigh, a nonprofit designed to advocate for the construction of a larger, permanent skate park in the city. The temporary Conlon Family Skatepark is named for a local family that is the park’s primary donor.

“Really, I’m thinking about my two sons,” Charland says. “I don’t want them to grow up without the right skate facilities, us having to drive to Durham or Cary. We have enough space downtown that we can do this. It’s just up to us to make it happen.”

Raleigh has a large skate community, Charland adds. Multiple pro skaters have come out of the area, including Reggie Barnes, who competed in the 1980s and now owns a skateboard company headquartered in North Carolina. For all those skaters, though, there’s only one skate park— Marsh Creek Park on New Hope Road— currently in Raleigh, a city of half a million

people, Charland says.

“Skaters are having to skate in unsafe places because there is nowhere else to go,” he says. “That’s why people make DIY skate parks.”

In addition to housing, grocery stores, and other critical infrastructure, “Raleigh needs places of belonging,” Charland says. Kids and teenagers used to gather on the baseball field, he says. Now, the city needs new “third places” where adolescents can go.

Mangano agrees.

“More than ever, kids of all ages need a way to connect,” he says. “In skate parks, there’s a ton of diversity … from gender, from race, from a socioeconomic standpoint … so kids can come together. It’s a very supportive environment.”

Skating has other benefits, Mangano says. It’s different from team sports, where kids might be grouped together by neighborhood or school. Skating has more cross-community interaction. The sport is also still very “kid-driven and approachable” as opposed to other sports that have become “adultized,” he argues.

In skating, “everybody’s supporting each other to get that next trick. And you’re advancing individually. You’re really pushing yourself against yourself.”

For years, public officials and city planners have looked at skateboarders as an undesirable element. Police across the country have stopped kids from skateboarding in parking lots, accusing them of loitering, and confiscated skateboards from people rolling down sidewalks. Urban amenities

are designed to keep skateboarders away. Today, however, attitudes are changing.

Stephen Bentley, director of Raleigh’s Parks, Recreation, and Cultural Resources Department, says he’s excited about exploring opportunities to create safe public spaces for people to skate. He says he’s seen parks directors in other cities oversee the construction of massive skate park complexes and recognizes they’re meeting a need that is also present in Raleigh.

The Conlon Family Skatepark is an important first step toward creating additional, permanent places to skate in Raleigh, Bentley says. The skate park, located on 14 acres of city-owned land, is expected to have to close in two years to make way for Smoky Hollow Park (formerly Devereux Meadow Park).

Construction on Smoky Hollow Park is expected to begin in 2025, but in the meantime, as Raleigh officials finalize the design and finish the permitting process, skaters will have a central place in the city to go. In the department’s upcoming development of its long-term plan, staff will also talk to the skate community about creating permanent skating locations, Bentley says.

“Let’s engage the skaters on the vision for skating in Raleigh,” he says. “How can we use this [project] to gain momentum, to replicate it somewhere else?”

Charland’s vision for Raleigh is a city that has “dots, spots, and parks” for skating. In addition to a large regional skate park with half-pipes, bowls, and rails, Charland hopes to see smaller skating spots incorporated across the city.

“That means [skating in] really small corners of parks, spots that are unattended or underutilized in cities. Then, we’re gonna create designated skateable places within existing parks,” Charland says. “We want to ultimately create, if not a big regional park, more support for Marsh Creek [skate park]. We want to be able to create destination parks for skaters and skating.”

For now, Charland and Mangano are simply looking forward to opening the Conlon Family Skatepark in June. The park is “plaza style,” Mangano says, which means it is made up mostly of basic features skaters could find on the street.

That means it’s also more accessible for beginner and intermediate skaters, who may be intimidated by the steep drops at Marsh Creek, Mangano says. The plan includes a rail, a set of stairs, and box jumps. Mangano says he hopes to eventually add a quarter-pipe and other “BMX-type jumps.” Most of the elements are designed to be movable, so they can be relocated to a new skate park once Conlon closes.

“The idea is just to give the kids a safe place to skate and hang out and practice action sports,” Mangano says. “And ultimately, [I hope] it attracts more kids to the sport and it builds momentum toward something bigger and better.

“[The skate park] supports families, it supports the community, it supports creativity,” Mangano adds. “Hopefully, we’ll have DJs out there and roller skating nights. Bringing the community together is truly the purpose.” W

Concept drawing of the Conlon Family Skatepark IMAGE COURTESY OF SKATE RALEIGH

A Dance of Their Own

Hope For Teens will host its first Queer Teen Prom in Wake County for LGBTQ+ youth.

BY MARIANA FABIAN backtalk@indyweek.com

On September 22, 2010, Tyler Clementi jumped off the George Washington Bridge after his roommate live streamed his very first gay date.

It was an event that stuck with Holly Atkins, who grew up in New York City and recalls seeing the bridge from the window of her home. When she went to sleep, the memory of Clementi stayed with her, as did the deaths of LGBTQ+ youth she learned of through media reports and the countless others that were never publicized.

“[Clementi] hadn’t come out to anyone, including his parents, so [the live stream] was a very traumatic thing for him to find,” Atkins says.

But it was Clementi’s death that motivated Atkins to start Hope For Teens, an antibullying nonprofit that works to advocate for and support LGBTQ+ youth just like him.

“I told my husband I wanted to volunteer at some place that helps kids,” Atkins says. “He said OK, and I did a search as far as nonprofits and youth nonprofits, and there were none for Wake County. So, I went back to my husband two days later and said, ‘We don’t have any, I’m starting one.’”

Atkins sketched out the name, logo, and catchphrase on a napkin, and Hope For Teens was born.

Drawing inspiration from Durham’s iNSIDEoUT, a youth-led nonprofit for queer teens, Atkins collaborated with the organization and used it as a reference to shape her group.

“Seeing the work that iNSIDEoUT has done in Durham over the last 13 years … I enjoy the confidence that those kids have,” Atkin says. “To come, be among their peers, celebrate themselves, it takes a lot of courage. There’s

closed-minded people who just want to shut down that kind of freedom and confidence for no reason.”

The Hope For Teens Queer Prom

These days, Hope For Teens frequently visits middle school and high school Gay Straight Alliance meetings to let students know they have their support. After one of these meetings last April, Atkins overheard members discussing why they weren’t planning to attend their schoolwide prom.

“They were like, ‘Oh, are you going to prom?’ And the other said, ‘No, like, why would I go to prom with people who made my life hell for the last four years?’” Atkins says.

Atkins suggested going to Queer Prom to the students, and they told her they didn’t have one.

“That spoke volumes to me,” Atkins said. She asked if there was anything for queer students, and they told her no.

“And I said, ‘There will be next year.’”

Atkins and her team of five board members and three student ambassadors worked to ensure every vendor they partnered with for Queer Prom was part of the LGBTQ+ community. She wants the teens to see the various industries and areas they can work in, she says, so they know they can be LGBTQ+ and be an integral part of society.

The theme for this year’s prom is Superheroes Among Us, Atkins says, as she feels every teen should be celebrated for their bravery in being who they are. Every sponsorship

level for vendors who donate to the prom is a different superhero that is part of the queer community.

The prom won’t cost students any money to attend. Students register, and their friends as allies are also encouraged to join.

Drake Gomez, a student ambassador at NC State University for Hope For Teens, has helped the organization raise awareness for the Queer Prom.

Gomez created a list of LGBTQ+-friendly or LGBTQ+-centered organizations, groups, and businesses for Hope For Teens to potentially partner with. He facilitated conversations with the nonprofit and these groups to see if they could sponsor, volunteer, or contribute to the event in any way.

Gomez says the nonprofit’s mission and values sparked his interest in being an ambassador of Hope For Teens.

“I believe in what [Atkins] is trying to accomplish,” Gomez says. “And with her connections to the [LGBTQ+] community, as far as in education, in high schools, and now, even in college, I think she’s going to have reach to a massive amount of students in the [LGBTQ+] community that hasn’t been seen before.”

Advocacy for LGBTQ+ youth: What could Queer Prom mean for them?

Atkins says events like the Queer Prom in Wake County means queer teens are finally being seen, validated, and celebrated as who they are. Queer Prom isn’t a completely

Hope For Teens at Panther Creek High School PHOTO COURTESY OF HOLLY ATKINS

Trigger Warning: This article contains references to suicide.

novel idea—the LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit Equality NC hosted a similar event last fall, but only for adults over 21 who didn’t get to experience their prom the way they would have wanted to. But without a celebration of and for queer students from their local school districts, the Queer Prom is filling a void for local teens.

Atkins says that the teens seeing the vendors who are LGBTQ+ give them a sense of community. She says Hope For Teens anticipates hosting this prom every year from now on in the first weekend of June, for the beginning of Pride Month.

“Having the chaperones be from various different industries, backgrounds, hopefully opens up the conversation more for people to say, ‘Wait a minute, like, we just had, you know, gender-affirming care needs be

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banned in [our state] politics,’” Atkins says. “Why are we not reporting on the good news that trans kids are being celebrated for who they are?”

After the prom, Gomez says he hopes queer youth throughout the county and beyond see the support the community has in Raleigh. He wants the teens to know that there’s a larger community for them outside of their hometowns, and there will always be advocates fighting for them.

Even though the Queer Prom is happening in Wake, Atkins and the rest of Hope For Teens encourages students from all counties in North Carolina to attend if they can. W

The first Queer Teen Prom of Wake County is happening on June 2nd. If you can’t attend or would like to support Hope For Teen’s cause, check out their GoFundMe: gofund.me/2c4bb4dd

“Why are we not reporting on the good news that trans kids are being celebrated for who they are?”

The New School

UNC officials are sharing more information about the controversial new School of Civic Life and Leadership that is causing discomfort among faculty.

BY JOE KILLIAN backtalk@indyweek.com

Now that the academic year has ended, UNC-Chapel Hill leaders are sharing more information about the new and controversial School of Civic Life and Leadership with faculty who, thus far, have questioned and opposed its creation. This includes additional details about the school’s creation, the hiring of faculty, and the formation of a curriculum.

In a letter to faculty this week, Jim White, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, acknowledged the push from the legislature and its political appointees to create the school, one of several recent legislative reaches into what is taught and how at schools in the UNC system that has caused widespread discomfort among faculty.

White addressed both the new school and a new and unrelated Communication Beyond Carolina requirement, which emphasizes communicating to different audiences. The new school may play some part in teaching classes to meet that requirement, White wrote, and he supports the stated ethos behind both.

“I know that the School of Civic Life and Leadership was launched in a way that concerned many faculty,” White wrote. “But the foundational idea behind both the school and the CommBeyond requirement—to better equip our students with the skills needed to engage in public discourse and thus to better prepare them to be stewards and citizen-owners of our shared democracy—was

an idea that our faculty had when including Communication Beyond Carolina in the new IDEAs in Action curriculum.”

The new school, which has been in the planning stages for years, has been described by some of its architects, supporters, and political appointees on the UNC Board of Governors as variously as a “conservative center” for UNC-Chapel Hill and an attempt to “level the playing field” at a university they believe is ideologically dominated by the political left. It has been strongly opposed by students, faculty, and alumni who object to both those aims and the process by which it has been established outside of the usual campus-based, faculty-led process for creating a new school.

“I heartily embrace that idea and encourage us to own the school, make it a national model for public discourse and civic engagement, and ultimately make it uniquely Carolina,” White wrote. “Civil discourse is a commodity in short supply today, yet it is essential to a well-functioning democracy. Many universities and colleges are currently exploring how to address this problem. Let us lead the way.”

In January the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees, whose members are political appointees of the legislature’s Republican majority, passed a resolution to accelerate the creation of the school.

Under the state senate’s version of the state budget, the School of Civic Life and

Leadership would be officially established and receive $2 million in each of the next two fiscal years. That matches the state house’s budget proposal.

Both chambers’ budget proposals fall short of the $5 million in state funds anticipated in a school planning document drafted by UNC-Chapel Hill provost Chris Clemens. The provost’s plan anticipated state funding would be matched by unnamed private donors. With or without the private funding match, the house and senate budget bills say if state funding is insufficient to establish the school, the university itself “shall expend sufficient additional funds to achieve that purpose.”

In his letter to faculty, White announced an ad hoc committee charged with working out the details of the school. White will chair the committee himself. Here are the other members:

• Sarah Treul, faculty director, Program for Public Discourse; Bowman and Gordon Gray Professor, Department of Political Science

• Donna Gilleskie, professor and chair, Department of Economics

• Jeff Spinner-Halev, interim chair, Department of Art and Art History; distinguished professor, political science

• Matt Kotzen , professor and chair, Department of Philosophy

• Elizabeth Engelhardt, senior associate dean, fine arts and humanities

• Jaye Cable, senior associate dean, natural sciences and mathematics

• Noreen McDonald, senior associate dean, social sciences and global programs

• Kate Henz, senior associate dean, operations and strategy

The proposed school continues to generate strong opposition from faculty, with some departing members citing it as political overreach into the university system that helped drive them to other opportunities.

In an open letter decrying a slate of higher-education-related bills this legislative session, the state chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) called the school’s creation part of “a war on higher education in our state.”

“This initiative, reflecting Board members’ claimed desire for greater partisan balance among the professoriate, came from Board members rather than faculty,” the group wrote. “It is a clear violation of the AAUP principle that faculty should shape curriculum and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process (per the AAUP Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities).” W This story was originally published online at NC Newsline.

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W S Durham A Top Priority

Durham’s city council members support a proposal for the city to acquire the Carver Creek apartment complex to develop and preserve more than 100 affordable residences.

BY AUDREY PATTERSON backtalk@indyweek.com

Durham’s affordable housing efforts got a boost last Thursday as city council members voiced support for a $6 million project that would preserve and develop over 100 residences.

At a council work session, the nonprofit Housing for New Hope (HNH) asked the city for over $3 million, and five of six members present showed enthusiasm for the proposal.

That $3 million would go with another $3 million already approved by the county commissioners in early May. The commissioners’ commitment is contingent on the city council’s official approval of the project.

City officials have repeatedly said that affordable housing is a top priority as rents and home prices have skyrocketed in recent years, boxing out scores of Durhamites, many of whom have decided to relocate.

A 2023 NC Housing Coalition report found that 48 percent of Durham renters had “difficulty affording their homes.” Earlier this year, HNH estimated that the city’s unsheltered population—homeless people who live in places such as cars, stairways, and commercial buildings—has increased 10 percent over last year. But as the unsheltered population grows, “we are losing more [affordable housing] across the state, from what we understand, than we are constructing,” Russell Pierce, HNH’s executive director, said in an interview.

Pierce stressed the need for “deeply affordable” supportive housing that provides resources to combat conditions often

faced by people experiencing chronic homelessness, such as substance use disorders and mental health challenges. HNH already oversees two such communities in Durham.

By acquiring the Carver Creek apartment complex at 531 East Carver Street, HNH would be able to develop and preserve 100–120 units of supportive housing. The location, next to another HNH property, would accommodate 45 of the new units.

“Where would that money come from?” Mayor Elaine O’Neal asked at the work session.

City manager Wanda Page responded that Durham’s affordable housing budget “would not be able to cover something of this magnitude.” The $3.025 million would have to come from the city’s savings.

“I do think that we can justify going into our savings,” O’Neal said. “This does fall into a unique category for our most vulnerable and marginalized community members.”

The overall $6 million request would cover only the buying price of the land. HNH mentioned other partners—including Alliance Health, Duke University, and Duke Health—that are interested in financially supporting the development of the units and services.

Currently, the property is under contract with HNH and has a projected closing date of June 28.

The acquisition of Carver Creek would not only allow for the 45 new units; it would also keep the current tenants housed. In 2024, the Carver Creek com-

plex, which serves low-income residents, will be at its 30-year expiration of protections—meaning that a private developer can buy the property. Pierce noted that of today’s residents, 60 percent are on government subsidies, and would likely struggle to find new affordable housing.

As it turns out, other publicly funded properties could also be reaching the end of their protections. “It’s kind of scary that there might be a bunch of other buildings out there that we don’t know about that we might lose, and that we’ve got folks living in that we want to make sure we can continue to house,” city council member Jillian Johnson said.

“We really do look forward to partnering not just in the development of the Carver Creek campus but also partnering to help so that we, as a community, can have a plan to address the potential loss of other properties,” Pierce said in an interview.

At the work session, representatives of several key organizations voiced their support for the Carver Creek acquisition. The organizations included the Community Empowerment Fund, the Criminal Justice Resource Center, Durham CAN, Durham Congregation and Action, and Urban Ministries.

“I have a pretty good life now,” said Jeremy Bergman from CAN, who identifies as

a low-income disabled veteran. “The biggest factor is that I live in affordable housing and I have been able to access mental health services.”

Along with O’Neal, council members Leonardo Williams, Mark-Anthony Middleton, Javiera Caballero, and Monique Holsey-Hyman expressed their support for the project and urged other community stakeholders to get involved.

Between May 2018 and May 2022, average rents in Durham and Chapel Hill surged about 25 percent. And in that same period, median purchasing prices for Durham homes soared about 40 percent. Meanwhile, the number of unsheltered people in Durham has increased 105 percent over the last three years.

“I think this is an opportunity for us to engage the broader community to be players in solving this crisis,” Williams said. “There are a lot of folks that are sitting in the audience or on the sidelines watching, and I challenge them, publicly, to get in the game.” W

This story was published through a partnership between the INDY and 9th Street Journal, which is produced by journalism students at Duke University’s DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.

The Carver Creek apartment complex at 531 East Carver Street in Durham PHOTO BY NICOLE PAJOR MOORE

The Last Days of Village Lanes

Since the early 1960s, an East Durham bowling alley has been a beloved community fixture. This month, it closes for good.

BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

One Monday evening in May, members of the Splitzkrieg league begin to arrive at Village Lanes in East Durham. Some drag suitcases up to the door, which has a stenciled sign posted to it: “Going Out of Business Balls $25.”

The suitcases also contain balls, specially weighted, that the most serious participants bring with them on league nights. Broadly speaking, though, Splitzkrieg is not particularly serious: described by some members as the “aging indie rocker” league, it has met every other Monday night since 2007, mostly as an excuse to socialize.

“We started out with 10 teams and expanded to 20,” explains Russ Dean, who runs Splitzkrieg. “We are known to be the ‘not good bowling league’—but bowling is secondary.”

When Village Lanes was built in the early 1960s, bowling was at an all-time high: investment in the industry was so intense that it caused a “bowling bubble” and the number of alleys doubled to 11,000 by 1963. But—like malls, arcades, and other recreational spaces—bowling alleys began to recede in number and prominence toward the

end of the twentieth century. The bubble burst.

In 2012, only 3,470 alleys were open nationwide, and by 2022, that number dropped to 2,849. This year, Village Lanes joins the ranks of the shuttered.

Owner Renee Dennis declined to comment for this story, stating that the sale of the space had not finalized.

“While our business has been successful, thanks to so many loyal customers, we are choosing to close Village Lanes to focus on other endeavors,” business management wrote in their official statement. “There are plans to sell the property and the buyer plans to repurpose the building for another use.”

On May 31, the bowling alley closes for good.

Tonight, though, Village Lanes is alive and well. Outside, the parking lot is hemmed by woods and the lurking early-summer scent of wisteria; inside, 20 teams, each composed of four players, are spread across the alley’s 40 lanes, crowding around pitchers of light beer to wait their turn.

The alley’s interior seems frozen in amber, with a vintage

palette of seafoam blues and salmon pinks. It’s one of the last alleys to still have wooden lanes, and the scoreboard consoles are decades old.

Every few seconds, the conversation din across the room is intercepted, ever so slightly, by the faint sound of a ball making contact with pins.

“It’s a lot of math,” Dean says from his seat at one of the scoreboards, where he is manually inputting teams into the system. Since 2007, he’s kept a spreadsheet of every team’s scores. Exactly two bowlers, in the 15 years since the league’s genesis, have scored 300: Mike DePasquale in 2018, and Geoffrey Berry in 2022. Perfect games.

Jennifer Peters, a member of a team named Valley of the Balls, moved to Durham in 2010 and joined the league at a friend’s suggestion.

“She said, ‘If you want to meet people in Durham, come bowl,’” Peters says. Shortly thereafter, Peters met her future husband, Mark Oates, at a league night. They’ve been married since 2020 and still show up every Monday, though they’ve agreed to keep a healthy competitive buffer between them, with membership on different teams. “We’ve bucked the trend,” Dean says of Splitzkrieg. “We’ve been able to keep people coming out after all these leagues died out.”

Two decades ago, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, a treatise on the disintegrating fabric of American social life. Where people had once gathered in churches and participated in clubs, Putnam reasoned, suburban sprawl and the deteriorating labor laws of the postwar years caused individuals to work longer hours, further apart, conditioning Americans to become functionally atomized. The rising number of solo bowlers was just one example of the phenomenon.

In lower-income areas, these factors are exacerbated by an alarming inequity of public spaces. Studies have long demonstrated that areas with high poverty rates correlate with lower access to recreational areas, particularly well-maintained ones, making the community businesses that do exist particularly precious.

In East Durham, Village Lanes and Wheels Fun Park have long served as two such spaces. Village Lanes has been a community fixture, with abundant programming for both children and adults, for sixty years. And for 40 years,

Members of the Splitzkrieg bowling league

PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

Wheels, a skating rink that sits just a little over a mile from the bowling alley, off North Hoover Road, has been a hangout spot particularly beloved by young people—a destination for grade school birthday parties and a first taste of Friday-night independence for generations of teenagers careening around the rink to “Y.M.C.A.”

In 2020, after owner Becky Olbrych decided to retire, the city announced that it would buy Wheels and turn it into Splash & Play, a community aquatics center.

When residents advocated that the skating rink be retained in Splash & Play designs, the city folded it back in.

Over the phone with the INDY, Durham Parks and Recreation culture and community manager Mary Unterreiner confirmed that the projected opening date for the skating rink is spring 2024, followed by the aquatics center in 2025.

Village Lanes has had a less happy ending. When its sale was announced earlier this year, the news caught employees, many of whom have a long history with the alley, by surprise. Bryson Rogers, manager of the Village Lanes pro shop, has worked at the business for 13 years. Ownership told him it was “just time,” he says, but he wishes he had been given enough notice to come up with a way to save the bowling alley.

“I don’t know if they can see the future and economic collapse, or if they were just retiring,” Rogers says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever get a true answer, but the facility itself was profitable. It was making money.”

Village Lanes loyalists affirm the demand.

“My kids have had their birthdays here,” says Eric Thomas, a Splitzkrieg bowler. “It’s ingrained in the community. We can go somewhere else in Durham, but in an area changing so quickly, we’re losing such a cool place.”

“It was something like a church,” Rogers says. “Like a church community, on a weekly basis, with fellowship.”

Bowling Alone was published in 2000, just after the advent of the internet and years before the COVID-19 pandemic splintered public life, making all of us—particularly older Americans—just a bit more lonely.

For its part, Village Lanes hosted two bowling leagues specifically for seniors. Fred Cooley, a Village Lanes employee who helped lay the concrete down for the lane renovations back in 1989, says that the business is one of the only spots in East Durham where seniors have been able to enjoy time together. Unlike some of the recreational sports to pick up recent traction, like pickleball, bowling doesn’t require excess mobility.

Rather, the art lies in experience and precision: in the grip, address, and release of the ball.

“A lot of elders bowl in three or four leagues ’cause they don’t have a lot to do,” Cooley says. “They can barely walk to the lane—but then it’s a strike every time.”

Dean fondly remembers bowling for many years next to the Hazel Plummers, a senior league named after a particularly prolific elder bowler. After he began seeing obituaries with the Hazel Plummers league as a proud biographical footnote, he jokes that it became a “goal” for Splitzkrieg to be in people’s lives so long that it ended up in their obituaries.

Eddie Barnes is 77 and has been bowling at Village Lanes for 40 years alongside his wife, Evelyn. The couple goes bowling at the lanes on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Fridays. For many years, Barnes was on the cusp of a perfect game with multiple scores of 299.

In 2018, at a tournament, he bowled a 300. To this day, he wears a ring with the date of the game engraved on it.

“Just about all of our friends are bowlers,” Barnes says.

Teresa Faulkner worked at Village Lanes for many years, practically raising her son behind the front desk. When he applied to college, he won a scholarship for bowling.

“People don’t have a lot of affordable places [to go to],” she says. “It took everything else away from the seniors and youth. Everywhere else, you gotta drive.”

In the Triangle, there are only a handful of bowling alleys left, and in Durham, there is now just one—Bowlero Durham, just off 15-501, which belongs to the Bowlero corporation.

On May 22, Village Lanes—which had already been unofficially closed for a week—opened its doors to Splitzkrieg one last time. About 100 people showed up to celebrate the space, and the community they’ve built in it.

You could say that Village Lanes is the relic of another era, or an older Durham. But perhaps you could also say that about any good and unprotected part of the city.

Begrudgingly, people are moving on. Dean says that Splitzkrieg will decamp to Bowlero. Faulkner, who is described by members of Splitzkrieg as the “fairy godmother” of the group, affectionately says that she will “follow the league” anywhere, and Barnes has been hired for a new job as operations manager at Bowlero. Eventually, he hopes to find an investor who will help fund the opening of a new Durham bowling alley.

Cooley, meanwhile, isn’t sure of his next steps. But he loves bowling, and loves the steady care it inspires. For years, when not himself participating, he’s watched bowlers cast balls down the wooden lanes.

“It’s not about how hard you do it,” he says. “It’s about putting the ball in the right place.” W

The exterior and interior of Village Lanes at 330 North Hardee Street

PHOTOS BY BRETT VILLENA

Stories from the Roadshow

PBS’s Antiques Roadshow makes a pit stop in Raleigh.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

In a crowded plaza outside the NC Museum of Art, a middle-aged man named Nathan pulls out yellowed papers, diagrams, and other memorabilia from World War II, one piece of history at a time.

“This fellow was an author,” Nathan tells the antiques appraiser in front of him, explaining the origin of a typewritten report. “He was at Guadalcanal during the third battle, on the USS Sterett.”

The appraiser, sitting at a table with a distinctive blue tablecloth, carefully leafs through the report and then, setting it aside, unfolds a detailed diagram of the ship. The technical drawing is of the damage the ship took during battle, he explains.

“You can see all the different hits, where the mast was broken,” the appraiser says. “They were doing a forensic study of the battle, like you would do in a robbery today.”

Nathan is one of the thousands of people who gathered in Raleigh earlier this month for the Antiques Roadshow,

each hoping to find out the value of their knickknacks, collectibles, and attic antiques. The long-running PBS program brings experts from city to city to assess everything from Victorian-age books to 1960s movie posters.

“There are always surprises,” says collectibles appraiser Travis Landry. “When we were back in Arizona, a volunteer we’ve been working with [came up] and laid out her collection of Magic the Gathering cards. I’m like, ‘You were standing next to me all day and you’re just going to tell me now you got this Beta set?’ You never know what you’re going to come across.”

Solving a mystery

When it comes to assessing the value of antiques, appraisers look for different things. Landry, who specializes in pop culture items like comic books, trading cards,

and video games, has to know a little bit about everything to be able to navigate the broad category of collectibles.

“You might not know specifically what something is right off the bat, but you look for clues, play detective,” he says. “It’s like being a doctor. You have to make your diagnosis. And depending on what the item is, you have to look at it from a different lens.”

Still, there are a few factors most appraisers seem to consider. First, they have to determine if the item they’re looking at is real or fake. Is it a genuine oil painting or a photographic print? Was it actually made in the 1920s or is it a replica? It’s amazing what they can tell from small details, pinpointing the origin based on whether a doll is made from plastic or porcelain, or how a book is bound.

One PBS volunteer, Drew, brought in a cast-iron fire engine for an appraisal on behalf of a 93-year-old donor. Unfortunately, it wasn’t worth much. According to the appraiser, the toy was a reproduction. In the old days, he says, iron was cast in sand, so the high grain pattern on the toy shows it was made more recently.

In appraisal, the condition is also important—if a piece of furniture is chipped and deteriorating, it’s less valuable than if it was in mint condition. Finally, the market matters, says painting appraiser Eric Hanks.

“It’s like anything else, tastes change. Somebody gets recognition and never got it before, and so that boosts their market. A lot of factors can play in,” Hanks says. “[Recently], somebody brought [a painting] from Austria. Their dad was in Europe and brought it back. When I did a little background research … 99 percent of the auction results were in Vienna. So in that case, the relevant market is actually back overseas.”

An Antiques Roadshow appraiser examines a cast-iron fire engine. PHOTO BY BRETT VILLENA

ANTIQUES ROADSHOW Raleigh

On the road(show)

This month’s event marks the second time the Antiques Roadshow has come to Raleigh and its fourth time in North Carolina. Roadshow staff spend a full year preparing for their summer of travel, during which they visit five cities across the country, says executive producer Marsha Bemko.

Each stop is an all-day event, with thousands of locals coming to get their antiques appraised and hundreds of volunteers and staff managing the guests and the cameras. Roadshow staff leave with hours of video footage, which then takes another 12 months to edit into 15 onehour shows, Bemko says. The episodes featuring Raleigh are expected to premiere in the spring of 2024.

The show is known for springing surprises on people, capturing their genuine reactions to learning an antique they picked up at a yard sale may be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Those moments are engaging, but there’s something about the Roadshow that Bemko treasures even more, she says.

“My favorite thing is the stories we learn. They come from everyman. We all care about the same things,” Bemko says. “In this world today, we need to remember [that]. We need to respect and appreciate each other’s differences. What you’re seeing here today is humanity, liking each other. All ages, all colors, all religions, all political persuasions.”

Humanity was certainly on full display at the Raleigh roadshow. People from across the state flocked to the art museum with films, furniture, and even Furbies. Items came in all shapes and sizes, from large mystery antiques

lugged in on handcarts to smaller relics wrapped in blankets and beach towels.

It was quickly evident that every person there had a story. Anne and Richard, an elderly married couple from Pittsboro, came in part to get an antique doll of Queen Elizabeth appraised.

“My grandmother gave me this 65 years ago,” Anne says. “I’ve always been an admirer of the Queen. I wrote her a

Together, the items are worth almost $1,000, but Anne says they plan to keep both in the family.

Another guest, Dottie, says she also plans to hold on to a family heirloom: a beautiful diamond-and-pearl brooch that once belonged to her great-grandmother. The piece was valuable enough to make it in front of the cameras, but that wasn’t a surprise, Dottie says. Although the brooch is small, most people have never laid eyes on something with that many genuine jewels, not to mention the large natural pearl.

“I was curious to what [the appraiser’s] reaction would be, and I got just the reaction I thought I would,” Dottie says with a laugh. “It’s pretty startling. I’m very honored that it was in my family and that somebody was good enough not to sell it.”

The brooch likely dates back to 1910 or 1915, Dottie learns, when her great-grandparents lived in New York City. They were socialites, she adds. Seeing the brooch, and hearing Dottie’s family history, it’s easy to envision a young couple living a life of glitter and glam in the roaring ’20s. Even the few small details Dottie has about the brooch paint a vivid picture.

letter. She didn’t write me back, but her lady-in-waiting wrote me back for the Queen.”

The couple also brought an antique cylinder phonograph, an ancestor of the record player. The device was passed down from Anne’s grandfather to her father and eventually to Anne’s son. The horn itself is beautifully painted. During the event, the couple learns it dates back to the 1800s.

That’s the beauty of the Antiques Roadshow: Not the antiques but the history behind them. Holding a piece of something from a place and time that has long since passed. And, finally, hearing the stories of neighbors and friends.

“You get really emotional with these people and their things,” Bemko says. “I already cried with a guest today. And he has a great story. I mean, ultimately we watch the show for these great stories.” W

Clockwise from left: Anne and Richard with their antique cylinder phonograph; a detailed diagram of the USS Sterett is appraised; and a family heirloom brooch PHOTOS BY BRETT VILLENA

“My favorite thing is the stories we learn. They come from everyman. We all care about the same things.”

Color Studies

Releases from Bombadil and Durham’s Andy Stack are testaments to the chemistry

BY JORDAN LAWRENCE music@indyweek.com

later in the process.

When it comes to the music, this process works beautifully, reshuffling Bombadil’s mix of acoustic and electric elements and peppering in some surprising pet sounds to create exciting, resonant arrangements.

Lyrically, In Color can sometimes feel more distant than other Bombadil efforts, the concept and recording method restricting the group’s typically intense emotional honesty. But the songs in which everything lines up are among the band’s best.

Ramseur | Friday, June 2

When thinking about Bombadil, it’s hard not to get wrapped up in the Durham band’s heartening resilience.

The affably off-kilter pop band persisted through member Daniel Michalak’s temporarily debilitating nerve condition, around the close of the ‘00s, and the departure of founding members Bryan Rahija and Stuart Robinson, several years later.

Throughout all this the band has hung on, putting out some of its most bracing and beautiful work with only Michalak and James Phillips remaining from the band’s original core.

On In Color, the duo finds a fresh spark of creativity in overcoming its latest hurdles: an ocean and a pandemic. In 2019, Michalak moved to France. To keep their internet-based recording fun, the band made two rules for themselves:

1. They would alternate writing songs that emotionally responded to the different colors of a color wheel.

2. On each song, one of them would compose chords and instrumentation while the other would handle melody and lyrics; if you wrote a part, you couldn’t play or sing it, and instead had to pass it along to another collaborator, like guests Nick Vandenberg and Skylar Gudasz and new band member MK Rodenbough, who contributed vocals

Opener “Brown Pennies” slowly builds up a scuffling symphony of electronic beats, keyboard samples, and acoustic strums as Michalak struggles to focus on how the word can feel “so good and fine” when gravity (and inflation) make it seem pointless to break open your piggy bank. Phillips stares down “Yellow Clouds” of sneeze-inducing pollen, pondering mortality as he longs for lazy summer days to “swim in the dirty river / Drink beer every day,” wandering through amiable strums, rich harmonies and a laidback haze of various synth textures.

Flutters of guitar and a shifting backdrop of whirring electronics back Rodenbough, who brings lilting serenity to “Indigo Seamstress,” chasing the ineffable feeling conjured by a color that “does not exist.”

Other songs connect less powerfully.

The stomping electro-pop of “Orange Planets” is a blast, landing like Animal Collective doing Genesis, but the central metaphor comparing “a galaxy of pretty people” to “a bowl of oranges spilling on the carpet” is blunt, and other songs bear some forgettable lines. “Purple Architecture” reaches a clever conclusion—observing two could-be lovers who pass on the avenue and “share a commonality in ignoring architecture”—but the “Day in the Life”-ish verses swerve too close to the banality they describe.

In the end, though, In Color succeeds as another expression of a band determined to persist and find compelling new ways to reinvent themselves. For those of us listening along, this remains affirming.

Sleepy Cat | Friday, June 9

True to its title, Inter Personal is the kind of album that could only be made by two people who know each other exceedingly well.

Even if you didn’t know Durham’s Andy Stack (Wye Oak, Joyero) and Asheville’s Jay Hammond (Trippers & Askers) are longtime friends and one-time college roommates, or that they decamped to a remote cabin to record the album while also spending “a lot of time locked in thorny conversations about love, marriage, getting older, various tensions in our lives and within ourselves,” as Stack described to Stereogum , you’d feel their profound connection listening to the album.

The seven anxiously ambient instrumentals lean on guitar, drums, and synths, and are all improvised, though they don’t immediately scan that way. The album is patient but not static, and as one part mutates and refracts, the response is so immediate as to feel nearly composed.

Take the opening “Anxious in Love,” in which glitchy synths, skittering drums, and angular guitar swirl and circle each other, twisting themselves into giddy knots. The patterns shift restlessly, evok-

ing the exhausting ecstasy of infatuation, but the instruments are never less than utterly in sync.

The album often feels like it’s making subtle twists on the work of other engaging instrumental rock acts. The beaming loops of “Anxious in Love” come across like a more jazz-y Collections of Colonies of Bees.

The serene, synth-pierced electric guitar vistas of the title track envision a more electro-inclined William Tyler. The rippling intensity and slow, echoing riffs of “Life on a Ship” wouldn’t be out of place on the Earth essential The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull

Inter Personal is most resonant when the comparisons are less obvious.

The closing “The Quietest Singing in the World,” for instance, grabs poignancy by placing eagerly splashing drums and cymbals in contrast with forlorn drums and wandering guitar lines that seek calm contentment. The thoroughly distinct result is at once relaxed and on edge, a relatable state of conflicted mind.

While not every tune is so deeply felt, the appeal of Stack and Hammond’s sounds and their captivating chemistry remains impossible to deny. W

that long musical relationships can bring.

BOMBADIL: IN COLOR | HHH 1/2

ANDY STACK AND JAY HAMMOND: INTER PERSONAL | HHH 1/2

Meat of Things

BY LENA GELLER lgeller@indyweek.com

Whole-hog barbecue is Ed Mitchell’s claim to fame, and it makes for great television—years ago, on A Cook’s Tour, he showed Anthony Bourdain how to prepare it; more recently, he did the same for Michael Pollan on Cooked. In between, the process has been captured by dozens of other shows and publications.

But the Wilson native cooks more than just hog.

In Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque, a cookbook/memoir out this month that Ed wrote in collaboration with his son, Ryan, and food historian Zella Palmer, he shares dozens of recipes that can be made with ingredients and equipment that readers have on hand—as well as an in-depth chronicle of the history that gave rise to them.

The book opens with the death of Ed’s father in 1991.

The loss, Ed writes, led to a decline in business at the family-owned Wilson grocery store that his mother suddenly had to operate on her own. Ed began making barbecue—employing the same method that his ancestors, enslaved “pitboys,” used while cooking for plantation owners—as a way to generate additional revenue for the store.

For both Ed and Ryan, who returned home to help run the store a few years after graduating college, practicing a craft with those roots provoked conflicting emotions.

And as their product gained fame, another tension emerged. Without a foundation of generational wealth, the Mitchells write, there was—and continues to be—a massive discrepancy between the family’s renown and its financial stability.

In 2004, for instance, less than a month after Ed had locked in a brand ambassadorship with North Carolina A&T University, his store was foreclosed on and he was charged with embezzlement. He’d fallen behind in paying sales taxes.

“Black entrepreneurs can never be late on payments,” Ed writes. “There is no room for a learning curve, and if we make a mistake, no matter how small, we rarely get just a slap on the wrist.”

He ultimately pleaded guilty to the charge and spent 30 days in prison, though later won a racial discrimina-

tion lawsuit against the bank that foreclosed on the store.

In the years that followed, another honor for Ed and Ryan—holding a recurring role as headliners at the world’s largest barbecue festival, the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party in New York City—also led to financial hardship.

While the gig came with exposure and networking opportunities, it wasn’t paid and the Mitchells were never offered a sponsorship, so they had to go to great lengths to pay for travel and operating expenses.

“Why are so many [well-known] pitmasters white?” Ed writes. “Is it because African Americans consider this type of work too reminiscent of the servitude of their ancestors, or is it because starting a barbecue restaurant today takes hundreds of thousands of dollars?”

Balancing the lengthy, reflective passages in Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque are dozens of recipes, most of which come prefaced with nostalgic blurbs that show why the Mitchells are so committed to preserving these dishes. Ryan touts his grandmother’s fried chicken, which always stays crispy for three days after frying. Ed reminisces about the freshness of the food he grew up on: “Imagine feeding hogs with Silver Queen corn,” he writes, “and tasting the flavor of the sweet corn that you fed the hogs that you raised.”

Ahead of the book’s June 6 release, the INDY spoke with the Mitchells at their home in Wilson to learn more about wht led them to write Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque and what comes next.

INDY: You say whole-hog barbecue is difficult, at times, because it traces back to the trauma of your ancestors, but you also have a strong desire to preserve the craft. And you emphasize that barbecue fosters connection among diverse groups of people. Can you tell me more about how the past has influenced your sentiments around barbecue?

ED: When we got together around the barbecue pit [when I was young], it was all about harmony and enjoying each other. It would become clear that we were much better together than we were apart. I sort of equate that to being a serviceman in Vietnam. No one was worried about a Black and white situation over there—we were just trying to survive and get back home. With barbecue, when you’re sitting there cooking a pig and focusing on being with each other, you’re not having all these different animosities and racial things and so forth. You realize that we’re actually dependent on one another.

In Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque, the legendary Wilson pitmaster and his son Ryan write candidly about what it takes to succeed in a whitewashed tradition.

BOOK LAUNCH OF ED MITCHELL’S BARBEQUE WITH ED AND RYAN MITCHELL Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh | Tuesday, June 6

RYAN: We got into the barbecue business on survival means. We were facing a lot of turmoil. My grandfather had passed away and my family was trying to figure out how we could make it. We had to revert back to skills that were ancestral. Cooking barbecue was a craft that was in our DNA.

But that word you used—trauma—that’s a key underlying point. For Black American pitmasters, plantation workers, slaves—these weren’t jobs that were fun. These are skills that we mastered under extreme conditions. So when you fast-forward into trying to build a business around this, you have to figure out “How am I going to put this trauma behind me?” Cooking this stuff can be triggering because it is reflective of doing something in a menial, undervalued state. You have to ask, “How do I take those skills and make something out of it?” That’s really the essence of African American pitmasters like my dad. To push that trauma aside, and still go cook, that takes some work. That takes some guts.

One of the central themes of the book is that renown doesn’t equate to financial stability or a release from discrimination. Nearly every accomplishment you write about is paired with strife. Why was it important to include both the good and the ugly? What do you hope that readers will take away from your experiences?

ED: I want them to get the real story, the real deal, as young folks say. I was always interested in providing the best-quality product. On the commercial side, when you raise animals in crates, they have to be artificially inseminated. The sow can’t choose the bull she wants to be with. I wasn’t into that; when animals aren’t raised in a

natural setting, the flavor is impaired by stress. But what I didn’t realize was that by [prioritizing] natural products, I was [making myself an enemy of] the commercial industry.

RYAN: 1995 to 2002 was a weird time for us. Pork is the economic engine for our area, and at that particular time, the Golden Corral format of trough-feeding large groups of people was [becoming widespread] around here. The big barbecue places who owned the hog farms and who had connections to commercial facilities—places like Smithfield and Wells Pork and Beef—were getting into business partnerships with places overseas. Feeding hundreds and hundreds of people a day in large-scale settings was the going strategy.

The irony of that period was that the commercialized guys had all of the income, but the foodies—the people who were looking for natural foods—had the bigger voices. And they discovered us. We had just opened a cool little place, and we had dedicated ourselves to cooking whole hogs underground in pits, the old way. It was really all we could afford to do. But because we were craftsmen, we got connected to people with the louder voices. Writers were trickling through here and they were going back and putting articles in The New York Times

When they started talking about [Ed] as “the guy who’s doing it all,” the [commercial producers] were like, “Wait a minute—we don’t need this guy running around New York City, talking about small farmers when we’re trying to turn the pig into a billion-dollar business.”

So, to your original question, we felt it was important to highlight that fame comes way before stability does and that fame doesn’t necessarily lead to stability. Resources are limited for minority-owned businesses. We were on the front page of The New York Times, we were in every

magazine, and we were still the last on the list when it came to sponsorships.

For the Big Apple Barbecue Block Party, they gave us a $1,500 travel subsidy, but the “compensation” they offered was the publicity that came from being in New York. It cost us around $5,000 a trip to get to New York and back, because we had to travel with our old-school barrels and smokers. But we kept going. We decided that New York City was worth the roll of the dice. It was kind of like paying [the travel expenses] to audition for American Idol—you had the chance of striking gold up there. And lo and behold, the block party was how we met the person who offered us this book deal. It just cost a lot to get there.

Our culture has a huge influence. We need to start being at the front of the line when it comes to earning money off of that influence.

What’s next for y’all?

RYAN: Speaking quite candidly, it’s a three-tiered book deal, so Ryan Mitchell’s Barbeque will be next. My book will be more tailored to my generation. In my dad’s era, pork was the unquestioned dominant food source. There was no fear around what the health parameters were. But now, a lot of my peers are looking back on certain family health risks and they’re incorporating more of a plantbased lifestyle. For my dad’s book, we decided, “We’re gonna just slap them in the face with tradition.”

Mine will be a bit more modern, but it will have the same spirit—a story of perseverance and a celebration of family and barbecue culture. W

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Above: Images of recipes in Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque. Left: Sheri’s Smoked Mac ’n’ Cheese. Right: Ed’s Mouthwatering Baby Back Ribs. Facing page: Ryan and Ed Mitchell. PHOTOS BY BAXTER MILLER

Overdue

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

The Black Reparations Project isn’t an easy read, but it definitely belongs on bedside tables. This collection of essays—edited by Chapel Hill writer A. Kirsten Mullen and Duke economists William Darity Jr. and Lucas Hubbard, with contributions by scholars on the subject—not only presents a persuasive argument for why Americans should make amends to the descendants of slaves but also gives a detailed technical framework on how to do it.

The book, subtitled “A Handbook for Racial Justice,” is a comprehensive follow-up to Mullen and Darity’s award-winning work From Here to Equality, originally published in 2020.

It’s a must-read for local, state, and federal politicians; college students studying social justice; and pretty much every American who has ever thought, “Reparations? That’ll never happen.”

With The Black Reparations Project, Mullen, Darity, and Hubbard don’t cater to people who already agree with them. Instead, they use the 200-some pages to outline concrete evidence of how the policies of the federal government have formalized discrimination, keeping Black Americans at the bottom of the economic ladder. The government is directly responsible for creating the Black-white wealth gap, they argue; therefore it can and should be the institution to fix it.

“The federal government has sanctioned a past and present of American white supremacy,” the editors write in the opening chapter. “Therefore, the federal government bears the responsibility for the act of redress.”

The idea of reparations for slaves and their descendants has been around since the Civil War. Various plans, starting with the famous “40 acres and a mule” decree, have been launched and then abandoned.

During the 2020 presidential election, the idea of making reparations was revived by various Democratic candidates, sparking new energy around the subject.

Mullen, Darity, and Hubbard argue that we must take advantage of that political energy to advance reparations before Black Americans are forced to endure yet another century of injustice.

The Black Reparations Project starts by making the case for reparations. The editors recap a series of laws, from 1861 to the present, that have kept slaves and their descendants from upward economic mobility. Some of these laws might be familiar to readers— school segregation, the post–World War II G.I. Bill, and housing discrimination by the federal government, banks, and insurance companies.

Other historical facts, however, may come as a surprise. Like the fact that while former slaves were denied their 40 acres, millions of white Americans received 160 acres through the 1862 Homestead Act. Or the fact that white terrorists, starting after the Civil War, not only lynched and massacred Black Americans but also seized their property and destroyed booming Black business districts. And how, decades later, the construction of highways carved through vibrant Black neighborhoods, destroying “black prosperity and community stability,” the editors write.

Additional chapters on housing, education, and health care only strengthen the argument for reparations, exploring details of American history many readers may be ignorant of. In one particularly compelling illustration, the book details how, in the early 1900s, five of seven Black medical schools across the country were shut down, leaving the United States with a deficit of 30,000 Black physicians, according to a chapter written by Duke medical professor Keisha L. Bentley-Edwards.

One of the most interesting chapters, however, looks at how the amount of money due to the descendants of slaves

should be calculated. In this chapter, six authors examine the cost of discrimination across U.S. history and propose formulas that can be used to quantify that cost. And it’s clear, by the end, that a $14.7 trillion payment—the amount the editors estimate it would take to close the racial wealth gap—would be letting America off easy.

Between the cost of slavery itself (including lost wages and compensation for pain and suffering) and the cost of discrimination (including lost economic opportunities and the reduced value of Black labor) reparationists can easily argue that the African American community is due between $55 trillion and $24 quadrillion—a calculation made using conservative estimates and interest rates. By the end of the book, the conclusion is that a payment of nearly $15 trillion is, literally, the bare minimum for reparative justice.

A new book is a must-read roadmap for making reparations for Black Americans a reality.

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VENUES

VENUES

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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

Indigo De Souza SOLD

OUT. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

La Luz $22. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

STAGE

1776 $25+. May 30–Jun. 4, various times. DPAC, Durham.

The Weight of Everything We Know $32. May 31–Jun. 11, various times. Theatre Raleigh, Raleigh.

MUSIC

Curtis Salgado $25+. 7:30 p.m. The Blue Note Grill, Durham.

Dead & Company: The Final Tour $85+. 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

Dead Fox No Groove / JULIA. / Dylan Innes $10. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Into the Fog $12. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Jun. 1 and 8, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Miss B Haven Presents: Midnight Remedies Drag and Dance $5. 11 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

North Mississippi Allstars $27. 8:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

STAGE

Corpus Christi by Terrence McNally Jun. 1-10, various times. St. John’s MCC, Raleigh.

Holmes and Watson $20. Jun. 1-11, various times. Titmus Theatre, Raleigh.

PAGE

Daniel Wallace: This Isn’t Going to End Well 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

Crooked Cult $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

GEEKED / Kal Marks / Cor de Lux / Tongues of Fire

$12. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Halocene $20. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

IN2IT $12. 11 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Joslyn & the Sweet Compression $12. 8 p.m. Tap Yard Raleigh, Raleigh.

Mamis & the Papis and Party Illegal Present: Moodboard $5. 10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

STAGE

Away Home Jun. 2-3, various times. KennedyMcIlwee Studio Theatre, Raleigh.

Hush Hush: Comedy Based on Secrets $8. Fri, Jun. 2 and 16, 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Leslie Jones: Live $37+. 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

PAGE

David Sedaris: Happy-GoLucky 6 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

La Luz performs at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room on Wednesday, May 31.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE

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

MUSIC

Cooper Alan $50. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Dermot Kennedy: Sonder Tour $52+. 7:30 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

Eric Williams Quartet $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

FlushFest: West Hillsborough’s Homemade Music and Film Festival 12 p.m. 711 Eno Street, Hillsborough.

Gimme Gimme Disco $15. 9 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

The Gone Ghosts / Heat Preacher / Charles Latham and the Borrowed Band $10. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Matt Maeson $28. 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Mother Tongues: Soprano

Louise Toppin with Pianists Stephen Jaffe and John O’Brien 4 p.m. Nelson Music Room, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: The Music of Whitney Houston $42. 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

PARADOX: A 90s Rave Experience $12. 10 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Old Heavy Hands $10. Sat, Jun. 3, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Rent Due Dance Party!!!

11:55 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Star People Gang Presents: Freaks and Beats $5. 9 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Teia Elaine Presents: What Would Eve Do? $10. 6 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

STAGE

2023 Beaver Queen Pageant 4 p.m. Duke Park, Durham.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Jun. 3 and 10, 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

House of Coxx Drag Show! 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

House Party (Improv Comedy) $8. 9 p.m. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

MUSIC

Durham Symphony Presents Bringing It Home: Chamber Music at Hayti with the DSO and Friends 3 p.m. Hayti Heritage Center, Durham.

Eric Sommer and the Fabulous Piedmonts $10. 7 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

The Lover Boyz with Phil Cook, Kym Register, and More $20. 4 and 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Mike’s Dead $16. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Satisfaction: The International Rolling Stones Tribute Show $15+. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

STAGE

The Empower Experience 2023 $25. 4:15 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

MUSIC

Fenne Lily / Christian Lee Hutson $18. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Happy Together Tour $20+. 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Punk Rock Nite: Orphan Riot / The Challenged / Dirty Weekend $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Subhumans $17. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

MUSIC

Bruce Hornsby and the Noisemakers $45+. 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Jun. 6 and 13, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Rebecca Kleinmann Sextet $25. 7 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Thereminist Shueh-li Ong 8 p.m. Arcana, Durham.

STAGE

AIN’T DONE BAD $30. June 6-7, 7:30 p.m. Durham Arts Council, Durham.

PAGE

Ed and Ryan Mitchell: Ed Mitchell’s Barbeque 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Erica Abrams Locklear: Appalachia on the Table 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Thereminist Shueh-li Ong performs at Arcana on Tuesday, June 6. PHOTO COURTESY OF ARCANA

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

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

WED 6/7

THUR 6/8

MUSIC

Ax and the Hatchetman

$15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Les Claypool’s Fearless Flying Frog Brigade Summer of Green Tour, with Special Guests Jerry Harrison and Adrian Belew $69+. 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Music in the Gardens:

Rebekah Todd 7 p.m. Sarah P. Duke Gardens, Durham.

TLC, Shaggy, En Vogue, and Sean Kingston: Hot Summer Nights Tour $31+. 7 p.m. Coastal Credit Union Music Park, Raleigh.

MUSIC

A-F Records New Artist

Showcase: Wolves x 4 / New Junk City / American Television / Distortions $12. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Dave Hause Mermaid Album Release Tour $17. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Declan McKenna: The Big Return SOLD OUT. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

The Disco Biscuits $43.

8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Indigo Girls with Full Band: Look Long Tour $45+. 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Judy Collins Live in Concert $65+. 7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Kindred Spirits: A Chamber Music Concert $20. 7:30 p.m. St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Hillsborough.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Jun. 1 and 8, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

NC Rhythm Tap Festival: Music and Tap Dance Jam Session 8 p.m. NAMU, Durham.

Step Friends / Anna La Mare / MEGABITCH $10. 8:30 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

FRI 6/9

STAGE

ADF Fête $150. 9 p.m. Parizade, Durham.

BODYTRAFFIC: The One to Stay With, Notes on a Fall, SNAP, and PACOPEPEPLUTO $27+. Jun. 8-10, various times. Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham.

Ride the Cyclone $30. Jun. 8-25, various times. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

[title of show] $20. Jun. 8-18, various times. Kennedy-McIlwee Studio Theatre, Raleigh.

PAGE

St. John’s Rose Slumber with Piano Accompaniment 7:30 p.m. St. Joseph’s Episcopal Church, Durham.

MUSIC

Angela Bingham with Jim Ketch Quintet $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Cracker $25. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Glove $15. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Green Jelly with Third Eye: Tribute to Tool $17. 9 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Subtronics: Antifractal Tour $67+. 7 p.m. Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh.

North Carolina Symphony: Fire & Rain: Songs of the ’70s $42. 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. Occult Fracture $10. 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

STAGE

Rennie Harris

Puremovement American Street Dance Theater: RENNIE HARRIS LIFTED: A Gospel House Musical $30+. Jun. 9-10, various times. Page Auditorium, Durham.

Shane Gillis Live $39+. 7 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

PAGE

Steacy Easton: Why Tammy Wynette Matters 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Rebekah Todd performs at Sarah P. Duke Gardens on Wednesday, June 7.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SARAH P. DUKE GARDENS

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

MUSIC

Caifanes $50. 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Frankie Alexander Trio $25. 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Lil Ugly Mane $22. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: All Beethoven $35+. 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

Orchard Park Jazz Picnic with Mint Julep Jazz Band 12 p.m. Orchard Park, Durham.

Quadeca / quickly, quickly SOLD OUT. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Reggae Reunion $25. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Throwback Dance Party with DJ UNK $25. 10 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

STAGE

The Greatest Tap Show Ever! $35. 7 p.m. Carrboro High School, Carrboro.

Her Lies, His Secrets $95+. 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

OR by Liz Duffy Adams $25. Jun. 10-25, various times. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh.

MUSIC

Magnitude $15. 7:30 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. The Raleigh Ringers Spring Concert $26. 4 p.m. Stewart Theatre, Raleigh.

Ricardo Arjona: Blanco y Negro Volver Tour $116+. 8 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Tami Hart / Kym Register + Meltdown Rodeo / Dunums $10. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham. PAGE

David Wright Faladé: Black Cloud Rising 4:30 p.m. Chapel Hill Library, Chapel Hill.

MUSIC

Alex Lahey $18. 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. PAGE

Blair Kelley: Black Folk: The Roots of the Black Working Class 7 p.m. Rofhiwa Book Café, Durham.

MUSIC

Boy Named Sue / Sweet Gloom / Startle $10. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Charley Crockett: Tons of Summer 2023 Tour $52+. 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Jacob Collier: Djesse World Tour $45. 7:30 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Jun. 6 and 13, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: Mozart, Copland, Richard Rodgers, and More 7:30 p.m. Southern Village Green, Chapel Hill.

STAGE

Mark Haim: This Land Is Your Land $27. Jun. 13-14, various times. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham.

PAGE

Kathleen Grissom: Crow Mary 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Lil Ugly Mane performs at Motorco Music Hall on Saturday, June 10.

PHOTO COURTESY OF MOTORCO

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

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

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C L A S S I F I E D S

Sr Quality Test Engineer

Sr Quality Test Engineer sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to lead development & execution of performance & automation testing solutions to validate high load, multi-tiered, cloud-based applications. Minimum of Bachelor’s degree or foreign equiv in Computer Science, Computer Engg, Info Technology, or rltd + 5 yrs exp in job offered or related required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office in Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1100 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job code: 00971.

Controls Technician Controls Technician (CT-LDMH). Provide field svc repairs, trainig & installs as sched by Field Service dept. Travel up to 80% domestically & internationally which reqs nearby proximity (w/in 50 mi) to a major metropolitan airport & may req residence in a specific geographic area to better serve a specific customer base. Telecommuting permitted. Reqs BS+1 yr rltd exp. Mail resume to Syntegon Technology Services: HR Manager, 5224 Sumner Blvd, Raleigh, NC 27616. Must ref job title & code.

Sr. Integration & Optimization Manager - Logistics & Distribution Teleflex LLC seeks a Sr. Integration & Optimization Manager - Logistics & Distribution (SIOM-MC) in Morrisville, NC. Lead & manage internal integration initiatives that arise due to changes in Teleflex’s operations that impact transportation. Reqs 10% dom & intl trvl. Reqs Bachelor’s + 3 yrs exp. Email resume to tfxjobs@ teleflex.com. Ref job title & code SIOM-MC in subj line.