INDY Week November 15, 2023

Raleigh | Durham | Chapel Hill November 15, 2023

Betting the Farm

A Chapel Hill venture capitalist is counting on regenerative farming and the muscadine grape to yield profits and usher in a public health revolution.

BY TED VADEN, P. 13

ALSO INSIDE:

Durham County’s first food security coordinators plan to give marginalized farmers access to the land.

BY ZACHARY TURNER, P. 16

Raleigh W Durham W Chapel Hill VOL. 40 NO. 33 VOL. 40 NO. XX

CONTENTS NEWS 7

Thousands of demonstrators have turned out across the Triangle to demand a ceasefire in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

BY JASMINE GALLUP

10 HEART, Durham's non-police crisis response program, has expanded its staff, service area, and hours of operation. BY CY NEFF

FEATURES 13 Chapel Hill venture capitalist Greg Bohlen hopes a new muscadine strain will yield a profit and usher in a revolution in public health. BY TED VADEN 16 Durham County's first food security coordinators plan to give marginalized farmers access to the land. BY ZACHARY TURNER

ARTS & CULTURE 20 In Chapel Hill writer Gabriel Bump's new novel, a grieving couple searches for utopia. BY CARR HARKRADER 22 Beloved Raleigh restaurant Humble Pie helped launch the careers of legendary North Carolina chefs. BY JASMINE GALLUP 24 Good Grief, Alex Bingham's debut project as Magic Al, intercuts "joy and sadness."

BY NICK MCGREGOR

26 Truth Club conjures alt-rock magic. BY SARA PEQUEÑO

THE REGULARS 3 4

5 Voices 27 Culture calendar

Backtalk Op-ed

COVER The Union Grove Farm, pictured on Tuesday, Nov. 7, 2023, in Chapel Hill. The grape vineyard practices regenerative farming by building new nutrient-rich soil without chemicals or tilling. PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS CORRECTION In our November 1 story on the municipal elections in Wake County towns, we incorrectly stated that Lenwood V. Long Jr., a candidate for Rolesville's Board of Commissioners, was a former pastor and current CEO of a nonprofit that supports African American–led community economic development, the African American Alliance of Community Development Financial Institutions. Long Jr. is a federal renewals manager at ServiceNow.

Plini performs at Lincoln Theatre on Wednesday, November 15.

(See calendar, page 27.)

PHOTO COURTESY OF LINCOLN THEATRE

WE M A DE THIS PUB LI S H E R John Hurld EDI T O RI A L Editor in Chief Jane Porter Culture Editor Sarah Edwards Staff Writers Jasmine Gallup Lena Geller

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Reporters Justin Laidlaw Chase Pellegrini de Paur Contributors Desmera Gatewood, Spencer Griffith, Carr Harkrader, Matt Hartman, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Thomasi McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Cy Neff, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Harris Wheless, Byron Woods, Barry Yeoman

November 15, 2023

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CR EATIVE Creative Director Nicole Pajor Moore Graphic Designer Izzel Flores Staff Photographer Angelica Edwards

ADVER TISING Publisher John Hurld Director of Revenue Mathias Marchington Operations Assistant Chelsey Koch CIR CU L ATION Berry Media Group MEMBER SH IP/ SU BSCR IP TIONS John Hurld

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BACK TA L K

Back in October, for the web, we published a story by INDY contributor Cy Neff with a report-out from Carrboro’s town council meeting in which town officials voted to approve a creekside greenway alignment for Bolin Forest following more than a decade of inaction. Reader TONI HARTLEY had some thoughts about the story and even more about the town’s decision.

In response to the recent report about the creekside paved path along Bolin Creek: The process has been a shit show, with the town’s most recent survey being the biggest slap in the face. The Carrboro Town Council released a biased survey that did not include the option to oppose paving the woods altogether. I have begged them to do another survey with this option. It is not a stretch to think there would be more residents who oppose paving the greenway.

There was simply no option on the survey to voice this opinion, no way for our voices to be heard and so I know many folks did not even bother responding. The town had already decided.

There are many other ways to make Carrboro more accessible than paving and lighting the creek path, which would be a TERRIBLE idea.

Leaves and needles will rot on the path, making it slippery. Money and manpower will be needed to keep it up and it will add to city noise pollution. The proposed path is also in a VERY active flood plain. This path will be broken and in need of repair pretty often—pointless and costly.

Lighting will add to light pollution, which we know negatively effects all animals, including us. There is also a HUGE elevation difference between the creek (very low) and downtown (very high). Folks who think they will be biking with their young kids

to and from school along the creek are kidding themselves. This would be a really treacherous bike ride. It is already a heart-pumping hike to get down there and back, which is part of why it is so pretty and beloved. Folks who want the path have not thought through the negative health effects, financial burden and wastefulness of paving the woods.

As it is now, we have Sewell School Road and Estes Drive, which, if lit and widened, would be a wonderful way to connect north and south Carrboro for pedestrians, folks with disabilities, and bikers that does not pave the woods. I am all for getting people out of cars and onto bikes, but paving the forest seems antithetical to everything Carrboro stands for. I am not sold that a paved path down by the creek will be as user-friendly, robust and frequented as folks think.

I know the Indy (and the DTH) post pictures of the woods that make it look like it is ugly and in need of repair. The truth is that it is gorgeous and if Carrboro wants to help maintain the hiking paths, great! Otherwise, we like it the way that it is.

Wild, wooded and quiet during the day, and dark at night. I’ll attach some pics that show how perfect it is. I wish folks would let this go and keep the Carrboro woods wild!

Please help us get the unbiased survey we need!

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November 15, 2023

Heady talk about resurgent unionism belies the beaten-down condition of millions of American workers. Let’s hope they can beat the odds to organize in the coming years.

BY ORIN STARN backtalk@indyweek.com

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Letters to Santa

INDYweek.com

oliday season nears, dear INDY reader, and I wonder what you’ll be ordering from Amazon—a roasting pan, scented candles, or perhaps a “Bah, humbug” coffee mug?

I’ll be packing those orders, scrambling to box the expected 180 packages an hour.

More than 6,000 of us labor away in a giant windowless warehouse near Raleigh off I-40.

We’ve had some worker wins lately—the United Automobile Workers (UAW), the Screen Writers Guild, and, closer to home, at REI and the Duke Graduate Students Union. But heady talk about resurgent unionism belies the beaten-down condition of millions more American workers.

My day job is as a Duke anthropology professor, but I’m working full-time at Amazon to learn more about it. We’re quite the mix between teenagers and seniors, military vets and anime nerds, hip-hop princes, and migrants from around the world, although tilting young and Black in the majority.

You work 11-hour shifts and earn $16.50 an hour at my facility. That’s not even half what MIT economists estimate as the minimum living wage of $38.23 an hour for an adult with a child in the Raleigh area.

At Walmart, McDonald’s, or Home Depot, you’ll make the same starvation pay or less.

These companies get away with their misery pay by keeping unions out. Barely 10 percent of American workers belong to a union despite the momentum at Starbucks and few other companies.

That’s down from 35 percent in the labor movement’s heyday a half century ago.

No unions means nobody to force companies to do right by their workers.

As the crazy-volume holiday shopping begins, we’ll soon be working mandatory 60-hour weeks. I’ll pack more than 1,000

boxes a day. My coworkers at ship dock will trudge upward of 10 miles loading up the big blue tractor trailers that will get packages on the way to your door everywhere across the Triangle.

But Amazon doesn’t pay holiday bonuses. Equal-opportunity miserly, the company gives no paid time off for Christmas, Ramadan, Diwali, Passover, or any other day of the year.

“No unions means nobody to force companies to do right by their workers.”

Our facility will close for part of Christmas Day—yet the “holiday” is unpaid.

Instead a cheery sign about ”Letters to Santa” has appeared in our break room. Do you know a needy fellow worker? Or are you suffering hardship yourself? The sign explains that you can write Santa requesting help, and leave the letter with HR. They’ll pick a few lucky workers for a small cash prize.

It’s one more sign of the abject state of the American worker that a trillion-dollar company substitutes a poverty raffle for paid vacation days and real holiday bonuses.

I see how hard my warehouse friends have it. A woman I’ll call Mary works six days a week, holding down a second job as a cashier at Dollar General. She and other Amazonians are a health problem or unex-

pected expense away from the streets.

One of my coworkers sleeps in his car with nowhere else to go after getting evicted for not being able to make his rent.

Another Amazon facility where I worked had a food pantry for needy workers. That was nice—and a tacit admission the company doesn’t pay enough to put food on the table.

I can attest that people work hard at Amazon. Most of us are fast and efficient and do a pretty good job, despite so many hours on the floor.

My facility has a worker-led union movement, but it’s tough to gain traction. You work so continuously at Amazon that it’s hard connecting with your fellow workers over the conveyor belt din. It’s not like a Starbucks or REI store, where the small workforce can build trust to band together.

High turnover, union-busting, and sheer exhaustion also make unionizing a hard ask.

Only a single U.S. Amazon warehouse has succeeded in unionizing so far, on Staten Island, and the union there is now in disarray.

The UAW victory remains great news for the labor movement. Yet far more Americans will continue to labor away with dismal pay and few rights in places like my Amazon warehouse.

Let’s hope that Amazonians and other poorly treated workers can beat the odds to organize in the coming years.

Or we’ll have to start writing those letters to Santa. W Orin Starn is a Duke anthropologist and has been working at Amazon since 2020. If you would like to volunteer or contribute to C.A.U.S.E, the worker-led group seeking to unionize the RDU1 warehouse near Raleigh, you can email them at amzncause@gmail.com.

VOICES

Wonder, Whimsy, and Radical Rest How a Durham small business owner transcended capitalism with color and is now prioritizing self-care

BY ELIM LEE backtalk@indyweek.com

“A

nd I’m not gonna sugarcoat it! Even if I am Durham’s cotton candy girl.”

Those are JAC’s (she/they) parting words as they leave me, stepping bravely into the next steps of life after closing Wonderpuff, the cotton candy business they founded in Durham six years ago.

This is a story about burnout, and cotton candy as a symbol of resistance.

When I first meet JAC, I’m wrestling tangled hangers out of my small sedan to build up clothing racks and assemble the day’s inventory. It’s a typical pop-up Saturday.

JAC approaches me with a smile, pink eyebrows, and a joyous hello. She is dressed in the kind of color and frill that’s the hallmark of childhood aspirations. She introduces herself, tells me she is here to spin cotton candy at the market alongside the art and clothes and trinkets of other vendors. This is how I meet Wonderpuff, a world of fluffy white clouds of sugar, neon colors, bright patterns, and decadent whimsy.

That was summer of 2022.

I meet JAC again today on the Golden Belt Campus in the fall of 2023. Wonderpuff has just closed.

JAC is not wearing the colors I always imagine them with. Sunglasses wrap around their head despite the shading clouds. We walk around until we find a place to sit, and we plop down and commiserate about how tired we are.

There is a heavy air. We are both carrying a lot.

Wonderpuff has witnessed an eventful trajectory within Durham’s small business scene. Many small business owners haven’t recovered from the collective exhaustion brought on by the pandemic. Even the consumers are exhausted enough to shop differently.

We reflect on our common connections within the Triangle’s market community. It

has changed a lot in six years. Somehow, it has become both more inaccessible and far too expansive. “Community” no longer accurately describes what we used to cherish about the scene. Prices are too high for shoppers who once relied on these outlets for alternative purchases. And the incoming waves of elite, richer vendors have diffused the network beyond meaningful connection.

JAC came to self-employment in an attempt to refute capitalism’s apathetic and abusive demands. She grew up watching her father force himself to work through pain to keep the lights on in a house he didn’t even have time to live in.

And as someone who did not want to die working, JAC had to do something that felt contradictory: she had to close Wonderpuff to save herself.

Wonderpuff was born from the belief that spreading necessary joy can be radical. JAC wanted to be “limitless Blackness.”

Against the oppressive images that the public projects onto Blackness, Wonderpuff used sparkly rainbow colors to shock past people’s preconceived notions.

“Colors are the most hopeful thing for me,” JAC says. As a kid, they were singled out and called “gay” for wearing bright colors. In response, Wonderpuff was purposely decked out to be “queer as hell,” a place of comfort for the visiting closeted kid.

“The aesthetic of Wonderpuff is everything I wanted to be as a kid,” JAC says.

JAC knew Durham would be the perfect place for Wonderpuff. The city is filled with people who have “patience and empathy,” something its residents work hard to preserve.

“Thanks to Wonderpuff, I personally know hundreds, if not thousands, of radical, passionate, empathetic motherfuckers,” JAC says. They are people who are fighting to create a reality that cares for those overlooked, that provides for basic

Wonderpuff owner JAC PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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needs without asking anything in return, that centers empathy even when it gets hard. People who are “trying to do the work.”

But “doing the work” is burning us out.

Trying to dismantle the inherent racial fear the public holds against Blackness is a lot to take on, to personally try and overturn.

“Yes,” JAC says, eyes widening. “It is creating in a world that doesn’t see you.”

The violence of erasure has led JAC to this point. Capitalism doesn’t make room for small business owners, people daring enough to care about the humans that do the work. And being a Black small business owner doubles the barriers JAC faces.

As a small business owner working for yourself, health care becomes a prohibitively expensive commodity.

And as a Black person with a uterus, JAC had to navigate an additional racialized lack of access to proper health care. It is the intersection of these struggles that led her to urgently needing time away from Wonderpuff.

“America does not take reproductive health seriously, especially for Black vaginas,” they assert.

Despite their pleas and insistence that they didn’t feel good and a dozen trips to clinics over two years, JAC says she wasn’t heard. On Instagram, JAC is open about experiencing two miscarriages. According to the CDC, Black women endure an infant mortality rate almost three times the rate of white women. But time off to grieve is not built into capitalism.

In recounting their experience at the clinic, they are taken aback by their own memories of how small they felt in response to the dismissive attitude of the doctor. She tells me about how small she feels conditioned to be in this world. ”You know, one person can’t solve capitalism,” I say. It’s a small reassurance, but it’s true.

JAC pauses and looks at me and slowly nods. “The solution is each other,” they say.

“The solution is community.”

JAC tells me about their amble into poetry lately. She attended a retreat at Mariah

M.’s Saltwater Sojourn, where Black queer artists are given space to create. JAC says seeing the focus and practice of Black rest inspired her. She has since started journaling and writing poetry as self-care.

They pull out their phone and ask me to listen to something they wrote recently “in solidarity with our people in Gaza.”

As a Black, queer Muslim rehabilitating themselves from burnout, watching the suffering of people who look like her and share her faith is traumatic.

“The secret to living is doing it together / It’s time you decolonize / Your mind” For JAC, decolonization means fighting present-day gentrification. Durham has always been for the people, and we will keep it that way by creating a community that supports each other. That means running a business that prioritizes people over profit, choosing yourself, and saving yourself in a world that wants you to sacrifice yourself. It means undoing that fear that people hold against you by providing color so loud it trumps hate.

“The vision is still there. The colors are still bright.

“The rage against white supremacy still lives in and around our sugar. “‘Liberation for all’ is what I think about when I’m spinning my sugar.”

JAC emphasizes that, despite the load of painful transformation that they are currently shouldering, she is not giving up. Her next step might be the most important one yet in her life. It involves existing without justification, taking up space without paying for it, being gratuitously kind to oneself. They are healing themselves for the sake of the community they believe in.

She is doing something radical; she is choosing to rest. W

“The vision is still there. The colors are still bright. The rage against white supremacy still lives in and around our sugar.”

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November 15, 2023

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Elim Lee is a Georgia peach who took a detour in New England and came back to her roots in the South this past year. Her least-in-progress, most-finished project is her children’s book Needle and the Too Big World. Follow her on Twitter at @wellwhatgives and Instagram at @elimscribbles.

ack queer JAC says Black rest d journale. d ask me e recentin Gaza.” bilitating hing the her and

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Raleigh

A Call for Peace

ogether / Thousands of demonstrators have

turned out in the Triangle to demand a ceasefire.

C, decol-

n means

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com presgentrifiDurham ays been people, will keep ay by creommunisupports her. That running ess that es peor profit, yourself, ng youra world omen in traditional hijabs and abayas march up ts you to Wilmington Street, leading children by the hand. oing that Palestinian flags wave in the breeze, flashes of bright red u by pro- and green peeking through the crowd. A young woman, te. hoarse from shouting, leads chants through a loudspeaker: olors are “The people demand ceasefire now!”

At protests in downtown Raleigh and Durham, thoumacy still sands of people banded together to send a loud and unignorable message. nk about In the crowd, it becomes a roaring demand for action.

But while the message at downtown Raleigh’s Moore he load of Square Park is loud on October 29, it’s harder to shout, are cur- or even say, in day-to-day life. g up. Her “There’s so much stigma about standing up for it,” says mportant 19-year-old Shay, who declined to give her last name. Like ing with- many people who support Palestine, she worries about e without being harassed or even attacked if she shares her views kind to openly. elves for “I’ve gotten called a terrorist just for posting ‘Ceasefire believe in. now’ [online],” Shay says. “There are websites where they’ll al; she is track you and you can lose jobs.”

Shay’s friend Mai, a 21-year-old wearing a long black hijab, has experienced a similar spike in Islamophobia ho took a since the conflict between Israel and Hamas erupted e back to about six weeks ago. year. Her On October 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack on project is Israel, killing more than 1,200 people in a brutal mase Too Big sacre and taking around 240 hostages, according to the wellwhat- Associated Press. Israeli military forces quickly retaliated, bbles. attacking Gaza with air strikes. Since then, more than 11,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the

W

Demonstrators in downtown Raleigh PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS Hamas-run Health Ministry.

“I’m in a group chat with other students from school, and they were talking about how they’re so afraid to be in their own house because their neighbors know they’re Muslim,” Mai says. “Every Muslim is afraid to leave their house, especially when you wear hijab and you’re voicing to the world that you believe in this religion.”

But speaking up isn’t really a choice for these young women. Mai, who is from Morocco, can’t stop thinking about the children in Gaza who are being killed: “What they’re doing right now, how scared they must be,” she says.

Shay, who was born in Gaza, lost contact with family members who are still in the area around October 25, she says.

Shay still remembers the sounds of artillery and rocket fire from her childhood, when Israel launched a three-week siege on Gaza in 2008. She was only about four years old, but “I witnessed the atrocities,” she says, and “I know it’s just a lot worse now.”

“It just sucks how normalized it is,” Shay says. “When I tell my friends, they’re always like, ‘Oh, that’s just the Middle East.’ It’s an awful feeling, because over here, we’re just living our lives, while over there, they’re praying to survive.”

The American narrative With the history of conflict in the Middle East, “it wasn’t surprising something like this happened,” says Shay. Living in America, however, has made coping with the conflict even more difficult, since the United States is a long-standing supporter of Israel, even as the country’s leader, prime

minister Benjamin Netanyahu, builds a government that looks increasingly authoritarian.

Mai spent two days struggling with her feelings before talking to her coworkers about the conflict, only to find out they support Israel, like many Americans, she says.

“It just sucks that I have to convince them that these lives are worth fighting for,” she adds.

“We have to convince them why we shouldn’t be killed while they’re convincing me why this is OK,” Shay adds, cutting in. “So many people are uneducated about the issue.

The media has not shown our voice at all.”

That’s a common sentiment among protesters. One woman, Sarah, says “Fox and CNN will never show the truth,” referring to reports the major news outlets have made about death tolls, particularly estimates of the number of children who have been killed.

According to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, more than 4,100 Palestinian children have been killed in the first four weeks of fighting. Nearly half of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants are under 18, and children account for 40 percent of those killed so far in the war, per the Associated Press.

Like many pro-Palestine activists, Sarah and her husband Ahmed want people to understand the history of the conflict. For Ahmed, the war in the Middle East feels like a “continuous bleeding wound,” he says.

It’s similar for another protester, a middle-aged man with a beard, who compared the eruption of hostilities to a volcano.

“Under the ground, when the lava is melting and cooking, it is going to eventually burst,” says the man, who asked INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

7

to remain anonymous. “What the Palestinian people have been going through the last 75 years, they’ve been living under oppression.”

Fighting for humanity As deaths continue at an alarming rate, protesters have focused on drawing attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Jewish and Muslim activists, among others, are demanding an immediate ceasefire and end to American tax dollars “funding genocide.”

“We are calling on [U.S.] Rep. [Valerie] Foushee and President [Joe] Biden to do everything in their power to implement a ceasefire,” says student rabbi Noah Rubin-Blose, a Durham local who is also a member of international nonprofit Jewish Voices for Peace. “To stop the genocide of Palestinians that is happening right now.”

Rubin-Blose was one of more than 50 Jewish protesters who blocked off Highway 147 during rush hour on November 2 in an effort to draw attention to the plight of Palestinians.

“It’s just so devastating what’s happening in Gaza right now,” he says. “I felt grief out there [at the November 2 demonstration]. But it was also really powerful to be together with people demanding a ceasefire and to be a part of this movement with people all over the world.”

“As Jewish people, we say ‘never again’ to genocide,” Rubin-Blose adds. “And we’re saying never again, for anyone. We’re saying ‘not in our name’ …. Every life is a whole world. If one life is taken, it’s as if a whole world has been destroyed. All life is sacred. That means Jewish life and that means Palestinian life. I don’t think that’s complicated. It

should not be complicated.”

Like Muslims, Jewish people have also faced an increase in hate since the conflict started, says Rubin-Blose.

“We are seeing both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism in response to these events. I know a lot of Jews and Muslims are feeling scared because of it. It’s not OK,” he says. “It’s really important for all of our community to stand against … all forms of oppression, together. That’s the only way we can get through this, is to be in solidarity with each other.”

Hundreds of thousands march on Washington Zainab Baloch, a former candidate for the Raleigh City Council and activist with Emancipate NC, says she hopes the scale of recent protests will incentivize President Biden to listen to calls for a ceasefire. More than 300,000 people from across the country marched in Washington on Saturday, November 4, marking the largest Palestine solidarity protest in history, according to the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which helped organize the event.

Dana Alhasan, a North Carolina local who attended the D.C. protest, says the experience was rejuvenating. After weeks of physically and emotionally exhausting work, it was fortifying to see how many people supported Palestine and calls for a ceasefire, she says.

“I just felt so energized and hopeful and just ready to continue this work,” Alhasan says. During an impromptu stop outside the White House fence, the activist was surrounded by other young Palestinian men and women chanting in Arabic, she adds.

“I felt like I was back home … it was an incredible feeling of community. You [could] feel the solidarity and the love.”

Alhasan helped organize the transport of some 650 people from North Carolina to D.C. for the march. She and others employed about 15 buses—eight from Raleigh, three from Charlotte, two from Greensboro, one from Durham, and one from Rocky Mount, plus a van from Asheville.

“People really understood that this fight is not just local,” Alhasan says. “Every single U.S. administration has unequivocally supported Israel, giving almost $4 billion every year.

In the same breath … we hear from our legislators that they don’t have money for housing, for improving education, to cancel student debt.

“People can see the clear hypocrisy. They understand that our government doesn’t represent the interests of the people. They don’t want their tax dollars to fund genocide.”

The trip to D.C. was the culmination of weeks of rallies around the Triangle, starting October 8. Each week, crowds grew, Alhasan says, from 700 that first week to a peak of about 5,000. Like other protesters, Alhasan was struck by the diversity of the crowd.

“You see people from all ages, all genders, all nationalities that are there fighting for Palestine,” she says.

“It’s incredible—because people understand that it is not just a struggle for Palestine, but it’s a struggle for all oppressed people.”

Shay, too, has seen people from all walks of life join together in recent weeks to stand against violence and hate.

“I’ve been fighting for Palestine my whole life,” she says.

“And something I noticed this past month is how many non-Palestinians came out, which was really nice. I saw people from all over, different ethnicities … different religions. We had Jews today, Christians. That really shows you that this isn’t a religious conflict.” W

Demonstrators gather at Moore Square in downtown Raleigh to call for a ceasefire on October 29 PHOTO BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

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A Bigger HEART Durham’s non-police crisis response program is no longer two sizes too small.

BY CY NEFF backtalk@indyweek.com

L to R: HEART responders Whitney Alston, Cassaundra Martinez, Stevie Schlessman, and Yolanda Dawson in front of the Pacificare. PHOTO BY CY NEFF

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t’s a brisk November afternoon and an ocean blue Chrysler Town and Country minivan, lovingly dubbed the “Pacificare,” prowls across Durham. Inside the Pacificare is a loaded box of snacks (veggie straws, Pirate’s Booty cheese puffs, Bumble Bee “chicken on the run” cracker snacks), a police dispatch radio, ample Narcan, and four city workers wearing soft gray fleeces stitched with the words “Compassionate Care Response” on the back.

There’s also a man in the minivan’s middle row, cigarette tucked behind his ear, drunk as two skunks, letting out a spirited “Ayyyeeeee, I’m riding with the HEART police.”

“Well, we’re actually not the police,” clinician Cassaundra Martinez says.

“Yeahhhh, I’m riding with the HEART police,” the man says, fidgeting with his seat belt. There’s a moment of silence. “I appreciate y’all though. Thank you.”

Durham’s HEART program is growing up fast. Not quite a household name, hence the earlier misidentification as police, but well known enough that HEART employees are often approached out and about on the job, likely a result of Have a HEART Durham’s intensive yard sign campaign earlier this year.

HEART’s origins trace to 2019 when Durham’s then police chief, CJ Davis, proposed adding 72 officers to the city’s police force. Local organizing groups, including Durham Beyond Policing and the Durham chapter of BYP 100, successfully blocked the proposition and helped convince the city to launch the Community Safety and Wellness Task Force (CSWTF). Starting in 2021, the task force operated for two and a half years, seeking, according to its final report, to “identify proactive, community-based 10

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approaches to safety and wellness as alternatives to policing and the criminal legal system.”

HEART was born out of the CSWTF’s crisis response focus area, which conducted canvassing, virtual town halls, and community listening sessions across Durham. HEART launched under the city’s Community Safety Department as a pilot program in June 2022 with a 20-person staff. As reported in a deep dive by The Assembly, HEART headed into the city’s budget negotiations this past summer with strong political backing and an expectation of expansion.

And that expansion came, giving HEART the capacity for 50 employees across its four units: crisis call diversion, community response teams (CRT), care navigators, and co-response teams.

“The pace and the depth and the public support with which this holistic community safety has grown is astonishing,” says Manju Rajendran, a Durham Beyond Policing and CSWTF member. “We feel really proud and grateful.”

HEART is at a crucial point in the program’s history. It recently expanded its service area to cover all of Durham, and upped its operating hours to 12 hours a day (nine a.m. to nine p.m.), seven days a week.

“I feel good about where we’re at with the expansion,” says Community Safety Department director Ryan Smith.

“Once we’re fully staffed, we’ll be extending the shifts to cover till midnight.”

Smith’s office sports a bookshelf and a whiteboard laden with multicolored Post-it notes. A cork board in the hallway just outside has a map of the United States, with color-coded pins—purple for “cities we’re learning from” and green for “cities learning from us”—denoting the increasing

numbers of municipalities across the country exploring new methods of community safety.

The freshness and curiosity of a program that’s going from zero to 50 employees in under two years is well on display. As well as Post-its, large sheets of paper noting aspirations and best practices line the department’s walls.

Social worker Stevie Schlessman and peer support specialist Yolanda Dawson stand next to a set of windows facing City Hall Plaza and conduct their first ever morning meeting, under the guidance of HEART shift supervisor Whitney Alston. The sense of treading on new ground brings a level of optimism and sense of imagination that’s not often found in a government workplace.

“It’s exciting to meet people where they are in the world instead of just in an institutional setting, when they’re at their lowest point,” Dawson says. “It’s a very low barrier.”

Schlessman nods. “It’s cool not having to give people care at a hospital, or working around Medicaid billing just to help someone,” Schlessman says.

The first call of the day comes in—a welfare check.

There’s concern about an elderly man, usually communicative, who’s fallen out of touch. His spouse is having a medical emergency, and he’s been unresponsive.

“Welfare checks are the most unpredictable. You’ll never know if you’ll find someone in crisis or if everything’s just fine. They’re gray calls,” Martinez says.

Schlessman starts the van, and Dawson rides shotgun.

Martinez and Alston buckle up to supervise. Schlessman and Dawson are two-thirds of a CRT team. The missing piece is an EMT, a current vacancy that HEART is expecting to fill, having just switched the hiring process from going

through the county to in-house.

The welfare check takes place in a sunny Durham suburb. An American flag sways over a nearby porch, and fallen leaves give the responders’ footsteps a nice crunch.

The HEART team meets the man on his front steps, who assures them that everything is well. He’s been overwhelmed and is just now pulling on a jacket and heading out to his spouse.

Dawson marks the call as closed on the team’s iPad, which then processes through Durham’s computer aided dispatch system.

This data will end up on the HEART’s public dashboard, which breaks down each of the HEART unit’s call responses. On a day in early November, HEART has responded to 11,107 calls across its four departments since June 28, 2022.

HEART’s early days are being intimately scrutinized, with RTI International and Duke University’s Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity both tracking the units’ metrics. If HEART hopes to receive future funding for an around-the-clock expansion

responders as being able to walk into tense situations with a level of approachability not associated with law enforcement.

“Going to, say, a homeless encampment with only only a [HEART] T-shirt and some hygiene kits and granola bars can feel much friendlier than showing up in a police uniform,” Martinez says. “It carries less expectations.”

With the safe ride completed, the HEART team receives its third dispatch—a suicide threat, phoned in by a concerned medical provider regarding an at-risk patient.

Schlessman plugs in the coordinates, and the Pacificare is back on the road. Over the course of the afternoon the team traverses a wide spread of neighborhoods and zip codes. Crisscrossing the city’s map gets tiring. In an effort to streamline this process, HEART is partnering with Durham Parks and Recreation (DPR) to add two informal substations in DPR offices in north and south Durham.

The suicide risk check-in directs the team to an empty apartment. After a back-

“The pace and the depth and the public support with which this holistic community safety has grown is astonishing. We feel really proud and grateful. ” or serve as a beacon for other programs around the country, it’ll need to back up its arguments for effectiveness with hard data.

“This transparency is important internally and for the residents of Durham to show that the services we’re delivering are done well,” says Anise Vance, assistant director of the Community Safety Department. “The more we do this and show that we can do this well, the more we’re acting as building blocks for other cities around the country that want to do similar programs.”

The team has just settled into the Pacificare when they receive their second call of the day. A man is inebriated outside of a local business and refusing to leave. Dawson and Schlessman find him sitting on the curb and talk him down from “I’m going to jail regardless” to accepting a safe ride away from the gas station. It’s the sort of scenario—unhoused citizen, mental health crisis—that advocates for programs like HEART cite as too often ending violently at the hands of police. Martinez sees HEART

and-forth with the medical provider who called, and no alternative addresses found, the call is marked as closed, and the team heads back to city hall to regroup.

The team splits once at city hall, some to the restroom, some for a mid-shift snack. It’s a little after three o’clock, dead center of the universal midafternoon slump, but the office is still humming. Administrative specialist Cherine Robinson sits at the front desk, juggling work duties with picking out just the right greeting plant. Robinson reflects on the program’s significance, to herself personally and to Durham.

“You know, I used to tell [the responders] when they’d leave for the day to be safe out there saving the world,” Robinson says. “Because none of us on our own can save the whole world. But, say, if you help stop someone from killing themselves, then you saved their whole world.

And the world of every person that loves that person.” W INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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FE AT U RE

Betting the Farm Venture capitalist Greg Bohlen is counting on a new strain of muscadine grape, paired with regenerative farming techniques, to yield profits and usher in a public health revolution.

BY TED VADEN backtalk@indyweek.com

Muscadine grapes PHOTO BY MEREDITH SABYE

F

or nearly 60 years, visitors to Orange County’s Dairyland Road admired the hilltop dairy farm that gave the road its name. Maple View Farm was an iconic feature of the landscape, its adjoining ice cream store a must-see, must-taste attraction.

Dairyland’s rolling hills and long vistas make it a popular bicycling route in midland North Carolina.

But today the view has changed. As visitors settle into rocking chairs with their butter pecan, they see not the familiar Holstein cattle grazing the meadows but instead a grid of grape vineyards stretching toward the horizon.

The Maple View silo standing sentinel over the fields now bears the name Union Grove Farm, heralding a new and innovative era in the dairyscape.

In 2021, a venture capital entrepreneur bought Maple View, with a vision of planting its fields with tens of thousands of grapevines. Greg Bohlen is planting 1,000 acres in muscadines, a native Southern grape that advocates acclaim as a nutrient-dense “superfood” with health benefits ranging from better nutrition to cancer treatment.

With the help of a local grape breeder, Bohlen has developed a new strain of muscadine that is seedless, thinskinned, and sweeter.

“We are going to change the world,” says Bohlen, who has literally bet the farm—tens of millions of dollars from his VC earnings—on turning Union Grove Farm into a major food producer and demonstration laboratory for new agricultural technology.

Bohlen is a nationally recognized starter and seller of businesses, whose successes include the meat-substitute

company Beyond Meat and Hero Bread, a low-carb bakery.

“I am convinced that if I have a legacy, it will be tied to the farm and not to my venture capital work,” he says. “My companies have changed a lot of things in the landscape of the world, but this is literally the first company I’ve had that can do exceedingly well by doing good.”

“Oh my God, have you tasted it? It’s a cross between a muscadine and a table grape and the taste is phenomenal.”

Bohlen is planting muscadines using advanced agricultural technology called regenerative farming. It is a process that eschews fertilizers and pesticides in favor of nutrient-enriched soil to revive fields exhausted by decades of erosion and chemical poisoning. His tools are not tillers and chemicals but sheep and red wiggler

worms, tens of thousands of them.

This year, Union Grove planted 20 acres of vines and will add 50 more next year, toward the goal of 1,000 over 10 years. Bohlen aims to make the Union Grove grape a moneymaker for his portfolio, but his vision is a public health revolution.

“If they are successful, I will say they will be the biggest vineyard in the Southeast,” says Mart Bumgarner, North Carolina Agriculture Extension Agent for Orange County. “It’s phenomenal that they’re bringing this to Orange County.”

Bumgarner and other farming experts say Union Grove still has a lot to prove to reach that potential. It needs to show both that its new muscadine strain can attract a broader consumer market than traditional muscadines and that regenerative farming—an expensive investment even for a venture capitalist—is worth the cost. It faces some resistance from traditional farmers and the vested interests of the farm world—lenders, property owners, and farm supply companies.

There also are questions, faced by any farmer, about environmental threats, insect infestation, and the food safety of a new product. “We do not know what diseases could get them, we do not know about the management system of those grapes at this point in time. And we won’t for a very long time, because there is a limited supply of those grapes,” says Mark Hoffman, an NC State University agriculture professor who specializes in grapes and other small fruits.

Bohlen and his team have heard the skepticism, but INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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they are plowing ahead with a combination of science and field work. They have planted 8,000 vines so far, with a plan to add 30,000 more each year up to 400,000 plants by 2030.

Bohlen’s new strain of muscadine was developed by Hillsborough grape breeder Jeff Bloodworth, a former NCSU grape expert. Test-planting 1,800 varieties, Bloodworth developed a seedless, thin-skinned hybrid to supplant the pulpy, hard-husked muscadine traditionally grown in North Carolina. The new grape, by many accounts, is delicious.

“Oh my god, have you tasted it?” asks Bumgarner, the extension agent. “It’s a cross between a muscadine and a table grape, and the taste is phenomenal.”

Bloodworth’s first generation of fruit, called Razzmatazz, is sold now in Weaver Street Market, Food Lion, and other retailers. He and Bohlen developed a relationship after Bohlen began acquiring land near Hillsborough. Bloodworth has patents on the new strain, and Bohlen controls the marketing rights.

The muscadine is considered a nutritional food because it is high in polyphenols, which impart health-improving antioxidants. “These are the reasons your mother told you to eat your fruits and vegetables, to get these dietary polyphenols,” says Wake Forest University medical school researcher Patricia Gallagher, who is leading a $20 million study of the health benefits of muscadines. Early results show reductions in tumor growth in prostate and breast cancer.

Bohlen is not yet claiming cancer-reduction properties, but he is pinning his hopes on his grape’s health benefits.

“It’s important for a society that continues to be over-

weight and a society that tends toward pharmaceuticals instead of looking for their food to heal them,” he says.

“That’s our goal, to feed people in a way that makes them healthier, not less healthy.”

Mary Ann Lila, professor of food and nutrition at NCSU, says the muscadine goes beyond being just a nutritious food. As part of a regular diet, she says, the grapes can protect against chronic diseases like cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, arthritis, and even cognitive decline.

“That's our goal, to feed people in a way that makes them healthier, not less healthy.”

“The thing that’s so interesting about muscadines, unlike table grapes, is they are not heavily bred, but they are so close to nature,” says Lila, who directs NCSU’s Plants for Human Health Institute. “They’re natural and they’re naturally evolved to the Southeastern environment. They’re tough, they’re very resilient to the insults the environment can impose, and because of that they are a repository for health-protective compounds.”

The uniqueness of the grape is one of Bohlen’s competitive strategies. The other is the regenerative farming process used to grow it. Regenerative farming aims to rehabilitate fields exhausted by erosion and traditional farming practices by building new nutrient-rich soil. The process avoids chemicals and tilling, instead keeping fields planted in cover crops and infusing them with a compost cocktail generated in Union Grove’s vermiculture lab.

The facility collects tons of debris and food scraps to feed into bins of more than 100,000 red wiggler worms, which digest the scraps and poop out a nutrient-rich compost. A compost tea then is sprayed onto fields of cover crop, building up new layers of high-nutrient soil.

Instead of using tractors and mowers, the farm maintains the land using 250 Katahdin sheep that simultaneously graze cover crops and fertilize the fields, priming them for later grape planting.

Bohlen says regenerative farming not only rebuilds the soil but also recaptures carbon from the atmosphere. “For every 1 percent of soil organic matter we build, we’re taking 8.5 tons of carbon out of the air,” he says. “Imagine how the soil that has been for generations depleted by tobacco would respond if it instead built up an inch of topsoil a year, what that would do to our productive agricultural land in North Carolina.”

Regenerative practices date back to Indigenous populations, but the concept has taken off in recent decades as a movement to reverse climate change and address world hunger. It was spotlighted at the World Economic Forum in 2022 and adopted as policy by the Biden administration,

Left: Greg Bohlen (on left), the Union Grove founder and CEO, and Martin Crompton, the Union Grove Farm vineyard and project director. Below: Dane Jensen, a shepherd at Union Grove Farm, stands behind a herd of Katahdin sheep. The sheep fertilize and mow down the fields, preparing the soil for future grape planting and advance the farm’s regenerative farming mission. PHOTOS BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

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which is investing funding to incentivize farmers to adopt sustainable practices.

Bohlen and his team are trying to spread the regenerative gospel to traditional farmers and to that end have set up the Center for Regenerative Agriculture at Union Grove to showcase the practices. But they have run into indifference, if not skepticism.

“The main challenge we face is going to be the farmer— the small and medium size, the ones that are going out of business,” says Martin Crompton, Bohlen’s vineyard director.

“Ninety percent of them are not making money from farming anymore. What regenerative farming will offer them, if they will open their minds to it, is an opportunity to not just make money from farming but enjoy farming again and encourage their sons and daughters to come in behind them.

“If they don’t, what we are going to see in North Carolina is out of the 8 million acres currently that we’ve got for farms, a million will be lost in the next 10 years to development.”

Crompton and Bohlen have tried to set up a meeting with state agriculture commissioner Steve Troxler, but so far that has not panned out. Troxler, through a spokesperson, twice declined interviews for this story.

Hoffman, the NCSU grape specialist, says Union Grove’s new grape looks promising, but regenerative farming could be a tough sell to traditional farmers. “If there is no economic incentive, I don’t see a fresh-market grower changing their practices,” he says. “They have to show you can make a profit with that approach.”

Bohlen says he is absolutely in the grape business to make a profit. “It takes about $100,000 an acre to get grape production,” he says. “We generate about $40,000 a year in gross revenue, once we’re up and running. That’s a 25 percent IRR [internal rate of return]. I’m pretty happy making a 25 percent IRR.” Still, Bohlen admits to concerns. “There are a lot of things that worry me,” he says. “Can my team do this? … I worry about the money. What happens if I can’t keep loading the machine? I worry about the unknowns: Zero degrees for three days. What would a year of insects do?”

Other possible issues: Hoffman says grape supply could be an obstacle to mass marketing, since Bloodworth currently is the only producer of the new muscadine strain.

Bloodworth says he can easily ramp up production.

Lila, the NCSU researcher, says a highly bred variant like Bloodworth’s may not confer as much health benefit as a natural muscadine. But she says regenerative practices would help.

Bohlen says the greater concern is what happens to the global environment if food production practices don’t change. “The challenge for me, as I see it, is we’re running out of time. First of all, we’re going to be carbon bound; [global] temperature is going to increase. Second, our soils are losing efficacy and ability every single year, making it more difficult to make the transition.”

He adds, “I think my team is going to be able to pull it off. Look at those vines. Look at how green they are. Look how much bigger the vines get. I’m willing to embarrass myself by talking about it at this point.” W

FE AT U RE

Right: a red wiggler worm close up. Center: a tank of an estimated 100,000-150,000 red wiggler worms at Union Grove Farm in Chapel Hill. The worms are part of the farm’s larger regenerative farming effort to enrich the soil without chemicals or tilling. Bottom: The worms’ poop is converted into a compost tea, which is sprayed over cover crops to replenish the soil. PHOTOS BY ANGELICA EDWARDS

Ted Vaden was a reporter and editor with the Raleigh News & Observer for 32 years. Now retired in Chapel Hill, he is president of the NC Press Foundation, which supports open government and citizens’ access to public records.

INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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The Land Remembers Durham County’s first food security coordinators plan to give marginalized farmers access to the land.

BY ZACHARY TURNER backtalk@indyweek.com

M

ary Oxendine, Durham County’s first food security coordinator, arrived at the Hawk’s Nest Healing Gardens on the penultimate day of August. Pines, pecan trees, and willow oaks shrouded the gardens, casting a dappled light on Oxendine as she walked down the driveway.

There she met Phoebe Gooding, who owns Hawk’s Nest with her husband. Named for the red-shouldered hawks that perch in the surrounding loblolly pines, the backyard project includes a medicine garden as well as community plots, a high tunnel, and a chicken coop.

“I call her my sis-star,” Gooding says of Oxendine. The pair has been mistaken for relatives; both have curly hair and light-colored eyes. In the first year of Oxendine’s tenure, she provided Gooding with a grant to purchase soil for the community gardens. They have since become close friends.

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Luffa flower at Hawk's Nest PHOTO BY ZACK TURNER

Oxendine visits small farms like Gooding’s as part of a new initiative at the Durham County Cooperative Extension to bring more county residents into agriculture.

The Durham Farm Campus aims to give them access to land, training, and shared equipment. It’s still in the planning stages, but the USDA Office of Urban Agriculture and Innovative Production has provided a $167,015 grant to assess the feasibility of the project.

Among other things, this includes finding a contiguous tract of land to build the campus, scouting people to join the program, and organizing meetings to determine how it will meet community needs. The Durham community includes many resettled refugees who have strong agricultural backgrounds but lack familiarity with North Carolina’s climate and access to land.

As food security coordinator, Oxendine sees the role farmers play in building a local food system. Still, land redistribution is a far cry from Oxendine’s original, albeit flexible, job description.

Oxendine was first hired in spring 2021, and much of her work then focused on pandemic response. Durham County had many nonprofit groups and government agencies working independently on hunger issues, but the pandemic pushed them to the brink. Visits to food pantries more than doubled in 2020, and traffic stalled as lines formed outside some locations. On the other end of the crisis, farmers threw out produce amid distribution and labor shortages. The county saw the need for someone who could address these gaps.

Oxendine had spent the last 12 years as a health policy analyst at the Research Triangle Institute working on the National

Commission on Hunger and had recently started her master's degree in nutrition at Meredith College.

Part of her job was coordinating public hearings in cities across the United States and visiting "summer feeding sites” that serve children when school is out. She hoped her next position would more closely connect her with the people she helped.

“I saw how nutrition is connected to lots of things,” says Oxendine. “It's culture. It's community. It can be job opportunities.”

B

ack at Hawk’s Nest, farming and community go hand in hand. Gooding’s husband, Hector Lopez, leads temascal ceremonies here every month, in which water is poured over hot stones in their sweat lodge to produce steam in a healing ritual.

Lopez and other community members built the lodge out of Bradford pear limbs they collected from around the farm, bending them into a wooden dome. The inside smells like the burlap sacks that cover its floor; at the top, the limbs meet to form a star.

“You have to build this in community,” says Gooding. “No one person can do this alone.”

A similar philosophy governs the community gardens, where members exchange seeds and watch over one another’s plots.

Last year, Oxendine rented her own plot at the Hawk’s Nest community gardens. It has given her a chance to reconnect with North Carolina soil in a way she hadn’t experienced since childhood. In return, the land gifted her squash.

“I almost cried while I was eating, because it felt like a miracle,” says Oxendine. “It felt like magic. Like, I didn’t pay for these things.”

The study of nutrition has fascinated

INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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Oxendine since she was an undergraduate at UNC-Chapel Hill, but her connection to the land and food began back home in Robeson County.

Money was scarce when Oxendine was a little girl, but family and plant life abounded. When the sun rose over the tobacco fields, Oxendine and her cousins could be found tending their great-uncle's garden while he slopped (and later slaughtered) his hogs. Oxendine recalls sitting in the shade of her grandmother’s plum tree, picking fruit off its branches.

But land access is a major barrier to people interested in farming, even if they have the skills. The land was once cared for by the Eno, the Occaneechi, and the Tuscarora peoples—a group to which Oxendine belongs, as well as the Lumbee.

After white settlers forcefully removed the Indigenous peoples, enslaved Black people worked the soil. They were never given the land the federal government had promised them, and much of what they could secure has been lost. In 1910, Black North Carolinians owned 3 million acres of farmland. By 2017, it was under 100,000 acres.

Durham County was no exception to this trend. Farmers sold their land and took jobs in the growing metropolitan area. In a little over a century, total farmland shrunk

to 13 percent of what it had been in 1910.

Today, Black residents make up over onethird of the county, yet Black-owned operations only constitute 4 percent of the total farms in Durham County.

“One of the big end goals is more farms in Durham County,” says county extension agent John Lyttle, “run by people who have

“I saw how nutrition is connected to lots of things. It's culture. It's community. It can be job opportunities.” not historically had as many opportunities.”

Lyttle lists Black and Indigenous people, people of color, young adults, femme-identifying genders, veterans, immigrants, refugees, the formerly justice-involved, and low-income people among those targeted for the program.

There are four parts to the plan for the Farm Campus: an incubator farm, post-harvest education, a value-added facility, and a healing garden. The current feasibility

Phoebe Gooding shows Mary Oxendine ground cherries from the neighboring plot PHOTOS BY ZACK TURNER 18

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study will inform what comes next, but it will likely entail interviews and site visits for farmers who are already growing on a small scale. Project leaders envision farmers signing an agreement to farm an estimated one half to two acres.

Extension agents would also help maintain a demonstration farm and teach classes on

building hoop houses, setting up irrigation, and operating a successful farm business.

Most of the Farm Campus would not be open to the public, but the healing garden would be accessible 24/7. Oxendine describes it as a place for people to “heal their relationship with the land” and grow herbs and medicine, two resources that are generally more expensive to buy.

Durham County recently contracted with real estate consulting firm HR&A Advisors

to find 80 acres for the farm. Once it finds a location, the County Extension Office will apply for grants, seek donations, and explore land banks and land conservancies as potential funding sources. So far, many prospective spaces either have proven to be too hilly, contain wetlands that already provide vital services to the county like absorbing and filtering stormwater, or aren’t within walking distance of a bus stop.

“We could work with maybe a steep slope in one part of it,” says Oxendine. “Other Indigenous cultures have farmed on steep hills and done a stair-step model.”

There are still many questions the Farm Campus group needs to answer, including how urban-dwelling farmers will get to the campus and how to remove financial barriers for low-income people who want to participate in the program.

For Oxendine, the Durham County Farm Campus is about more than food production.

“I'm reconnecting with the land and with these practices,” says Oxendine, “figuring out how I really take care of myself. How do I have sisterhood with these plants?

You can't call someone your sister that you don't know.”

She hopes others can build their own relationship with Durham County soil, too. W

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GABRIEL BUMP READING

McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro | Saturday, Nov. 18, 11 a.m.

Gabriel Bump PHOTO COURTESY OF ANDREW RUSSELL/UNC RESEARCH.

New Worlds In his sophomore novel, Chapel Hill writer Gabriel Bump takes the long, grief-ridden road to utopia.

BY CARR HARKRADER arts@indyweek.com

G

abriel Bump’s arrival in North Carolina could easily have been the opening scene of a novel.

Driving from Buffalo to Durham in the middle of winter, Bump passed through an intense snowstorm in New York and Pennsylvania.

“There was this horrible blizzard and the further South I got, the blue started opening up,” the writer tells me in a recent conversation. “It felt great coming down.”

Straightforward symbolism like this—stormy weather leading into welcoming skies—would never be found in Bump’s fiction, however, especially in his just-released novel, The New Naturals. Bump isn’t interested in the uncomplicated. This second book—his first, Everywhere You Don’t Belong, published in 2020—takes the idea of a utopian world to examine the very un-utopian decisions people make.

What does it mean to care for each other in a world 20

November 15, 2023

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that seems intent on breaking us? In our present day, is retreating—forming a bunker, even—the only sensible path?

Upon moving to North Carolina, after that long drive in 2021, Bump began work as an assistant professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s creative writing program. When he arrived, faculty were still in mourning: during Bump’s hiring process for the position, the renowned writer Randall Kenan, a long-standing member of the program, had suddenly passed away. Bump learned more about Kenan’s legacy once he was on campus and welcomed by his new colleagues.

“I knew they were happy I was here, but you know they would prefer if their friend was still there …. He was beloved and just a brilliant, talented figure,” Bump says. “I felt like I got to know him well, in a strange way.”

The escalating reach of grief is a topic Bump knows well.

The New Naturals begins in the present day with Rio and Gibraltar, a young couple, and the birth of their daughter,

Drop. A few weeks after her birth, Drop wakes up with a horrible cough and her lungs give out. The doctors, after first dismissing Rio’s concerns, can’t provide much help as she passes away. The devastating loss of their “celestial beauty … in this brilliant small package,” Bump writes, leads Rio and Gibraltar through pain and isolation and, eventually, toward an unexpected idea: an underground community beneath the hills of western Massachusetts “for people to live, and love, and hide.”

Rio and Gibraltar are Black and the community they create seems intended to be both an escape from their pain and a place for themselves and others to find a communal love denied to them by a society hostile to caring for people like them. While writing the novel, Bump researched Brazilian quilombos—small, deeply hidden communities that runaway enslaved people established in the jungles starting in the 17th century. Eventually, some of them became welcoming sites for Indigenous people and wayward travelers within Brazil. In The New Naturals, Rio and Gibraltar’s underground haven soon begins to attract others who are feeling frustrated and alienated.

Those same feelings are ones that Bump has dealt with in his own life during periods of deep depression and anxiety. During his MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and immediately afterward, Bump received critical praise and support for his work. Outside of writing, though, he felt suicidal and alone.

In conversation, he talks about those times with a ruminative balance, understanding that his life is better now, but with an inherent wariness that depression could always return. The poet Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Bump’s UNC colleague in the English department, describes Bump as being “as much a philosopher as a fiction writer.” He does write about his characters with a sort of earned wisdom—he’s honest about their flaws, yet they seem even more sympathetic and humane because of those flaws.

“He is a wise old soul,” Jeff Parker, the director of the University of Massachusetts’s creative writing program and Bump’s graduate school mentor, tells me, “full of compassion and with a generous, if realistic, view on life.”

Born and raised in Chicago, Bump’s childhood was shaped by the 1990s-era Bulls teams led by a particularly talented UNC alum. His room and wardrobe were full of Bulls paraphernalia.

“My dad and his friends bought season tickets the day Michael Jordan was drafted,” Bump says. In The New Natu-

rals, one of the main characters is a former college soccer player struggling with the mental and emotional toll that sports can place on male athletes (this is a theme that Bump also explores in his first novel). Growing up watching the Bulls and Chicago high school basketball, college basketball fandom was new to Bump. But he has quickly taken to the local culture: when UNC beat Duke at Coach K’s last game, Bump and his wife, Lauren Christensen, rushed Franklin Street.

Professionally, these days, Bump has started to settle into his work with UNC’s heralded creative writing program, impressed by both his colleagues and his students. They seem just as impressed by him.

“Gabe was a writer one had begun to hear about,” Calvocoressi shares with me. “We all felt, and feel, so lucky that he chose to come be with us.”

But, as Bump tells me, “North Carolina is a complicated place” for deeply personal reasons. Last January, Bump and Christensen, who was 20 weeks pregnant at the time, found out that their daughter, Simone, was dying in utero.

“It was this awful, world-ending, I don’t even know … just earth-shattering news,” Bump says. Due to the recent legal restrictions placed on reproductive care in North Carolina, the couple’s local doctors advised them to leave the state to get the treatment they needed. Bump and his wife left their Chapel Hill home for New York, where Christensen is from, and where her family lives. She terminated the pregnancy there.

Bump had written about his characters, Rio and Gibraltar, losing their daughter before his own loss occurred. When putting together his initial few drafts, he’d wanted to write about a real situation that could motivate someone to do an extraordinary thing like remove themselves from their known world. I asked him if he had considered going back and revising the book or even putting it completely aside.

“I was going through copy edits when I looked back at those sections when they first feel the grief [of their dead daughter],” Bump says. “And I feel like those sections were true.” The story stayed in the book.

The publication of The New Naturals coincides with Christensen’s second pregnancy. Bump is on leave this semester, and the couple is spending the rest of the pregnancy out of North Carolina and up north.

After what they went through previously, they wanted to be surrounded by their families, with access to care. He seems ready for what comes next.

“Life is just horrible and messy sometimes,” he says, “but there is all this beauty around it.” W INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

21

FO O D & D R I N K Humble Pie’s beloved outdoor patio PHOTO BY JANE PORTER

a city,” she wrote in an email to the INDY. “It was one of the first places I remember venturing through the then-confusing one-way streets of downtown decades ago to find for its epically rock-and-roll brunch.

Loud music, damn good scratch-made food, and likely an up-and-coming musician or artist of some craft taking your order.”

During Christensen’s time at Humble Pie, one of the most important things she learned was “how to express my own ideas in an established, existing language,” she wrote.

Williamson kept recipes handwritten on index cards —“classic, beloved dishes that reflected Grover’s life experiences and respect for food.”

Pushing to tweak or add to those recipes was a hard battle. The boundaries Williamson drew taught Christensen a lot, she says, about “the importance of restraint when flexing on the creative process in a place with its own history.”

“In our time working together, he could at times drive me absolutely crazy. That said, there was no greater acknowledgment to me at that time than watching him love a new dish that I had put on the menu.”

Mouthwatering memories

A Full Plate Since 1989, Humble Pie has helped launched the careers of legendary North Carolina chefs. That legacy lives on as it closes its doors and a new restaurant opens in the space.

BY JASMINE GALLUP jgallup@indyweek.com

A

perfect plate of crispy Brussels sprouts was served for the last time on September 30, when renowned Raleigh restaurant Humble Pie closed its doors.

After 33 years, the restaurant dished out its final dinner to a packed bar, dining room, and sparkling outdoor patio, a spot that has long been the favorite of many Raleigh locals.

Ownership tells the INDY that it was simply time to “step away” and retire from the restaurant business.

“This moment is bittersweet but we are focused on the good times shared with staff and regulars as well as the extraordinary opportunity we had to serve you,” read a social media post published by the restaurant on September 24. “The buzz of a dining room full of happy diners sharing a meal is a feeling not forgotten.”

A cornerstone of the city’s warehouse district, Humble Pie was founded by Grover Williamson in 1989. The restaurant was a leader in Raleigh’s early food scene, known for offering a tapas-style twist on classic Southern comfort food.

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“Humble Pie was one of the first great food institutions, up there with the Rockford,” says Caroline Morrison, owner of nearby vegan-vegetarian restaurant Fiction Kitchen. Morrison adds that she’s appreciated how owner Joe Farmer, manager Jim Beriau, and chef Josh Young carried on the restaurant’s legacy after Williamson passed the baton in the early 2000s.

“They’ve been able to hang on to that gritty Raleigh feel, in a way,” she says, “and keep the food the focus and keep it simple and presentable. That’s really what I enjoyed about it.”

The restaurant launched the careers of many area chefs, including two-time James Beard Award winner Ashley Christensen, who worked at Humble Pie for two years, in 1999 and 2000. Christensen went on to open Poole’s Diner in 2007, Beasley’s Chicken + Honey in 2011, and Death & Taxes in 2019.

Humble Pie was “a city joint before Raleigh really felt like

As Christensen and other chefs exercised their culinary creativity, Humble Pie’s menu did slowly grow and change over the years. Over the restaurant’s decades on South Harrington Street, it evolved. When asked about favorite dishes, regulars recounted mouthwatering descriptions of fried green tomatoes, crab cakes, and a tortilla cheese plate.

The universal favorite, however, was undoubtedly the restaurant’s famous crispy Brussels sprouts, caramelized with brown sugar and apple cider vinegar. “[Chef Josh Young] really kept it very focused, whatever the dish was,” says Morrison. “And took that tapas-style [food] to a different elevation. The Brussels sprouts tasted like Brussels sprouts, they were just enhanced.”

Keith Stringer, who once worked in the kitchen, also has nothing but praise for Young, Humble Pie’s last chef.

“Josh was not classically trained, but boy, did he have a palate,” Stringer says. “He just knew how to put combinations together of food and make it taste good.”

Young will go on to flex that creativity at Heirloom, located in The Dillon, where he will help create a new dinner menu with a mix of Laotian, Taiwanese, and Japanese cuisine, per a press release.

Stringer—who interned at Humble Pie under Chef Andy Cordova and later worked under Young—says his favorite dish was the braised short rib tostadas. During Stringer’s time in the kitchen from 2009 to 2012, Cordova was working on South American–Asian fusion. He was “really going in different directions with food,” Stringer says.

“These are things I hadn’t done, so I was sort of encouraged to expand my repertoire of food that I could produce,”

he says. “We used to do a stuffed shell dish there with butternut squash and a romesco sauce …. That was a dish I’ve taken to other places.”

Stringer, who now runs a bed-and-breakfast in the western mountain town of Elkin, says he learned a lot at Humble Pie. In addition to studying new techniques of food preparation, he was asked to work with kitchen staff to create new dishes. One recipe Stringer is particularly proud of, he says, is the ricotta gnocchi perfected under Young. It took weeks of experimentation.

“We worked on it, worked on it, worked on it, and finally got it right,” Stringer says. “Josh did most of the research and development, but he’d also grab somebody aside and say, ‘Hey, let’s try doing this and see whether this works’ …. That’s where it became fun, because now you’re working collaboratively.”

A watering hole for chefs Humble Pie was well loved by patrons, but it was also beloved by chefs as a place where they could come together to collaborate, create, and support each other in the sometimes-brutal world of restaurant ownership, says Morrison.

“When our air broke in the kitchen, I walked down there and they had a big-ass fan they let me bring over,” Morrison says with a laugh. “I think I needed cornmeal one time and Josh was like, ‘Sure, come on over and get it.’ It’s neighborly support.”

Owner Joe Farmer has also been a bolstering presence as downtown rents rise and inflation makes operating more expensive, Morrison says. She and Farmer were able to support each other through personal and professional struggles.

As Humble Pie closes, another local restaurateur will take over: Poole’s Diner chef de cuisine David Ellis, who plans to open a pasta restaurant, Figulina, in the space in December or January. As the story comes full circle, Morrison says she hopes the handoff will motivate people to continue to grow the Raleigh restaurant scene with independent owner-operators.

For Christensen, Ellis’s takeover “is the thing that makes me feel like the Pie isn’t going away,” she wrote.

“It was special three, two, and one decade(s) ago, and each of those versions of ‘special’ has been pretty different in the offerings,” Christensen wrote. “The magic of this place is in the walls, and it will continue through Dave’s stewarding. I had my first chef role there just over 25 years ago, and I’m so excited to see Dave carry on the spirit of what this place has meant to Raleigh.” W

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23

M U SIC

MAGIC AL: GOOD GRIEF

Sleepy Cat Records; Nov. 10

Mourning Songs To make his debut album, Magic Al had to learn how to use grief as grist for the creative mill.

BY NICK MCGREGOR music@indyweek.com

Alex Bingham performs as Magic Al. PHOTO BY CHRIS FRISINA

A

lex Bingham has endured a lot these last few years.

But, as the Hillsborough-based musician is quick to point out, haven’t we all?

In 2022, Bingham lost three people close to him: a beloved aunt, a college roommate, and a childhood friend.

Two succumbed to cancer—Angie, quickly, and John, more slowly—while, wedged in between those two deaths, Will died by suicide.

Grief engulfed Bingham. But it also birthed something: Good Grief, his debut solo album as Magic Al, released November 10 on Sleepy Cat Records.

The album’s nine songs intercut joy and sadness, mixing melancholic regret with misty-eyed love. Danceable bangers are backed by skittering synthesizers, hazy acoustic guitars, crisp MPC samples, and Bingham’s trademark bass grooves. They also represent Bingham’s diverse musical friendships: to make Good Grief, he invited Amelia Meath, Libby Rodenbough, Joseph Terrell, Molly Sarlé, Chris Frisina, Vivian Leva, Riley Calcagno, Rosali, and Taylor Meier to cowrite the album, turning it into what Bingham calls a “producer’s record.”

And since death is universal, the artists that play with Bingham on Good Grief also brought their own experiences of loss to recording sessions for the album at his lakefront Bedtown Studios in rural Virginia.

“Death used to be my biggest fear,” he tells me over lunch in Hillsborough. “I couldn’t talk about it. And losing three people close to me in one year broke that all up and redefined how I feel about death.” Now, he says, “it’s OK 24

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to write about it! There’s no longer a fear.”

Bingham has never been afraid to work hard. He’s busy—touring with Hiss Golden Messenger, producing and engineering for a growing circle of Triangle friends, and maintaining his circa-1800 Hillsborough homestead and home studio with his wife, Carley, and their two boisterous dogs. As he said last year when he launched Magic Al, the new artist name and production project, is “a place to finally call my own—keeping the joy afloat while holding space for the harder things.”

That ethos is evident on album opener “Cryin’ at the Party,” in which handclaps and disco beats meld with heartfelt lyrics (“We all feel you around / Your distant company drifts with me”). Released as Good Grief’s final single, accompanied by a photo montage of John, the college roommate, Bingham calls it the most direct song on the record.

It was also the last to make the cut. Bingham didn’t intend to sing lead on the song; initially, he laid down a scratch vocal and circulated it among collaborators. His good friend Chris Frisina, who performs as Lou Hazel, stepped in. Bingham adopts Frisina’s New York accent to tell the story: “Chris called me and said, ‘No frickin’ way!

Your scratch vocal is it.’ Then [Chris] called everybody else and said, ‘Nobody but Al is singing on this!’ I think of producing as fishing, and Chris is my biggest, dumbest fish.

When his eyebrow goes up, I know he’ll bite. He’s the creative lubricant that gets the energy going.”

Frisina wrote and sang lead on “Party for One,” drawing

on memories of a lackluster high school prom. The dual party songs pull listeners in opposite directions, mixing elation with sadness, a juxtaposition that also extends to “Hello,” in which Bingham nails a blend of Petty-esque guitar riffs, Dilla-style beats, and folksy vocals from frequent collaborators Vivian Leva (of Viv & Riley) and Taylor Meier (of CAAMP).

“I’ve always felt this spiritual connection between oldtime music and beat-making,” Bingham says. “There’s deep emotional value in both of them.”

He juxtaposed Leva’s ethereal voice with a jaunty beat that “always feels like it’s falling backward.” The result?

“Magical,” Bingham says. “On ‘Party for One’ and ‘Hello,’ we found that duality I often search for.”

Both songs, Bingham adds, were fostered by what became perhaps the album’s most critical component: an inflatable Coleman hot tub at the Bedtown Studios lakehouse.

“It turned out to be the most important piece of gear,” he laughs. “It’s a social gathering space, a place to get inspired, and a place to celebrate when the songs were done. So many of them clicked right after getting out of this little plastic hot tub.”

It’s where he and Molly Sarlé watched a moon rise over the lake before writing the tenderly haunting “There Was a Moon.” The duo talked for hours before transforming an initial idea for a big, danceable song with a slapping beat into a gentle lament.

“Molly is not afraid of tackling heavy subjects,” Bingham says. “She really met me where I was emotionally,

and her voice led us to this heavier, more subdued place.”

True to Good Grief’s caterwauling form, the next two songs after “There Was a Moon” carom in sonically wild directions.

“2003 Suburban, 2021 Wedding” connects the dots between carefree teenage memories of John with “This Must Be the Place,” the Talking Heads song that served as John and his wife Emily’s first dance when they married two years ago.

“The bass line on ‘2003 Suburban’ is very derivative of that,” Bingham admits. “I’m obsessed with Tina Weymouth and have been mimicking her for years.”

Libby Rodenbough was the only collaborator to bring a previously written song— “6am”— to the Good Grief sessions. But over pizza (and yes, the hot tub), the duo molded it into something new. “There’s so much tension in Libby’s song,” he says.

“She wrote it about struggling through a morning with your partner, but after we finished it, it feels more like a song about lying awake and grappling with grief.”

“Libby lost her mom while we were recording her album [Between the Blades] at Bedtown,” Bingham continues. “She’s my best friend. And she trusted me with a song she’d written! Like, ‘Yes, this is a Magic Al thing now.’ I feel so honored by that trust.”

Good Grief floats into the ether on final track “Live Forever,” just 99 seconds of haunting vocals from Hillsborough musician Rosali over a gentle guitar strum. Bingham says it was a surefire closer. “When Rosali sings, ‘Do you wanna / Live forever?’

I know what my answer is now: no. John

Alex Bingham PHOTO BY CHRIS FRISINA

was ready to go. My aunt was ready to go.

But when Will died, I didn’t have the tools to deal with that.”

In that sense, Good Grief represents a purposeful exercise in devoting time to remembrance—roughly one day per song spent immersed in creation with friends.

“It’s really important to make that time,” Bingham says. “That was one of my first big lessons from grief counseling. I think about it every day.”

The morning of my interview with Bingham, I was preparing my notes when I found out my oldest friend had unexpectedly died the night before. I briefly considered canceling, but here I was, crafting questions about the grief Bingham faced and the way music offered him a path through it. Perhaps our conversation would be illuminating—even cathartic.

Naturally, Bingham was empathetic. He listened as I described how “There Was a Moon” had made me cry on the drive to Hillsborough and how “2003 Suburban” flooded me with memories of my own friend. I finished our interview still mired in grief—but also buoyed by the joy Bingham brought to Good Grief. A week later, he followed up by mailing me a copy of Iris Gottlieb’s book Everything Is Temporary: Illustrated Contemplations on How Death Shapes Our Lives.

For our second interview, Bingham welcomed me into his organized home studio.

Synthesizers, MPCs, pedals, and meticulously looped cords lined one wall. Speakers and mixing consoles stood guard around his computer workstation, while handwritten notes, Polaroid grids, and potted plants dotted the in-between spaces.

“Following my interests has always served me best,” he says, reminiscing on the limitations he experienced studying classical music in high school and jazz at UNC Greensboro. “Every rub I’ve come up against has led me to this point—to this studio we’re in, to this life.”

He smiles, bright-eyed below his shaggy red hair. He previews a few new beats, fluidly bouncing between keyboard and sampler even as he corrals his dogs and shows off funky bric-a-brac like a Bootsy Collins action figure and the pale yellow “Life Is Good” mug he drinks out of to channel Aunt Angie’s spirit.

“I try to produce by re-creating these kinds of feelings,” he finishes. “If I can make emotions happen through sound, that’s my job.” W INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

25

M U SIC

TRUTH CLUB: RUNNING FROM THE CHASE

Double Double Whammy Records; Oct. 3

Truth Be Told With Running From the Chase, Raleigh quartet Truth Club conjures noisy, mesmerizing alt-rock magic.

BY SARA PEQUEÑO music@indyweek.com

“I

t is better to hear the rebuke of the wise, than for a man to hear the song of fools.”

In early October, that ominous Bible verse first began appearing around Trinity Park on flyers that also pleaded for Durham neighbors to “stop smoking cigarettes and blasting sacrilegious ‘Truth Club’ music.”

The posters received attention on Twitter and Reddit, though the blasphemous local band in question wasn’t behind the gimmick originally. While selling merch at the band’s October 26 set at the Bowery Ballroom, Truth Club drummer Elise Jaffe explained that a friend came up with the idea and sent them videos.

The group was quickly on board, and the street team shtick about “devil’s music” does seem to capture the band’s current moment. Truth Club may have a fresh new album—Running from the Chase, released in October on Double Double Whammy— raking in praise and recognition, but they still have the feel of a college band with a grounded sense of humor.

“If Wednesday are like the Superchunk-esque rallying point of the current NC scene,” Pitchfork’s Stuart Berman wrote in a recent glowing review of the album, “then Truth Club are like the more enigmatic and forbidding Polvo, deploying more oblique strategies to similarly arresting ends.”

It’s a comparison that someone was bound to make for a scrappy band born of the Triangle, but one that limits Truth Club to the world of its local predeces26

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L to R: Truth Club band members Yvonne Chazal, Kameron Vann, Travis Harrington, and Elise Jaffe PHOTO BY ALEX MONTENEGRO

sors. In truth, though, the sound the band is etching out feels less like a replica of the grunge era and more like a revitalization of the best parts of the old scene and a continuation of its story.

Truth Club began their 2023 tour with Chicago indie act Squirrel Flower in Asheville, staying with the same friends that they did in 2019 when they first began playing as a quartet. At that time, Truth Club was composed of childhood friends—lead singer and guitarist Travis Harrington, Jaffe, and bassist Kameron Vann—and had already begun receiving attention from national music outlets. Their first album, 2019’s Not an Exit, earned them a spot on Stereogum’s “Best New Bands of 2019” list alongside Black Midi and Faye Webster. At the time the list dropped, though, the band had been on hiatus for about a month and canceled their set at Hopscotch Music Festival that year.

Despite the performance hiatus—and soon after, the pandemic, with its unforgiving effects on local music scenes nationwide—the group began working on what would become Running from the Chase, piecing riffs and lyrics together over time to create an album that gracefully succeeds the first. As the band tells it, the album’s title track was in the works in Harrington’s head from the jump.

“I’d been hearing you play that riff in particular for years,” Jaffe says over a Zoom call, in reference to that song, “just absentmindedly in the middle of practice.”

“We kind of took stock of what was there,” Harrington adds, “and what we needed to do to get a record done, which is kind of the opposite of how Not an Exit worked.”

Running from the Chase is a natural progression from that debut. The band is older—no longer college students performing as friends but musicians trying to carve out their own space in the local scene.

The album oscillates between upbeat, guitar-heavy tracks and slow, sadder jams.

“Blue Eternal,” a two-minute track that opens with amp feedback and the exclamation “found you again,” feeds into “77x,” with its heavy bassline and Harrington’s croon matching the tempo.

“I feel like when you write your first album you’re more focused on proving to yourself that you can do it than refining a concept or presentation,” Harrington says in an email.

“The nine songs on [Not an Exit] barely got us through the door, but we used it as a reference point for how we wanted to approach [Running from the Chase].”

Back in 2019, the group had also brought on bassist and keyboardist Yvonne Chazal, whom Jaffe knew through work with Girls Rock NC, a local nonprofit that helps girls and gender-expansive young people express themselves through music. On- and offstage, the group’s chemistry and trust is evident, with each musician’s strengths shining through.

“I don’t want someone to be like ‘Elise is

a good girl drummer,’” says Jaffe. “I would like to just be viewed as someone who is a good drummer and who is making good music with a group of people.”

The band’s set at Bowery Ballroom served this new era and the ethos Jaffe espouses. Dressed for Halloween as a mummy, a burger, a vampire, and one of the yellow Minions from the Despicable Me franchise, the band’s set reverberated through the famed venue with authenticity—from Harrington’s onstage bashfulness to the seamless movements between Chazal and Vann as they handed off bass duties, to the unspoken moments where Jaffe’s drumming was allowed to take center stage on “It’s Time” and “Is This Working?”

Harrington’s writing offers an honest portrayal of living with bipolar disorder: “I can show up for my own life / But I don’t have to be present,” he sings on “Clover,” midway through the album. The band’s lyricism, paired with the fuzzy guitars and a solid rhythm section, seems to have only improved with time and perspective.

“I don’t think I have any sort of great insight, necessarily,” Harrington reflects.

“At least that’s not what I’m thinking when I’m writing. I’m just doing it because it’s a helpful way to process my own lens on the world. It’s a helpful way to process what’s going on in my head.”

Perhaps the song of fools doesn’t sound too bad, after all. W

C U LT U R E CA L E NDA R

LIKE TO PLAN AHEAD?

THURS 11/16

WED 11/15

FRI 11/17

MUSIC

STAGE

MUSIC

STAGE

MUSIC

STAGE

Citizen $27. 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

A Case for the Existence of God $20. Nov. 9-19, various times. Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Bully $20. 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Carolina Ballet: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons $55+. Nov. 16-19, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Bush $50+. 7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

The Harry Show $15.

Fridays at 10 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Plini $25. 7 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

, and

“I would ne who is king good

om served e espousmummy, the yelMe franperforms at d through Husbands Cat’s Cradle Back Room ity—from on Thursday, November ss to the 16. PHOTO COURTESY OF CAT’S CRADLE hazal and es, to the drumming e on “It’s

onest porder: “I can on’t have ver,” midand’s lyriars and a have only ve. of great reflects. king when ause it’s a ns on the ss what’s

Twelfth Night $10.

Nov. 9-18, various times.

Rubenstein Arts Center, Durham.

Duke Wind Symphony: Famishius Fantasticus with Guest Composer Michael Markowski 7:30 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

PAGE

Husbands $11. 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Henry Winkler: Being Henry SOLD OUT. 7 p.m.

McKimmon Center, Raleigh.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends 7 p.m.

Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Janet Hurley: Glove Shy: A Sister’s Reckoning 5:30 p.m.

Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Til Thursday: ’80s Night with DJ PlayPlay $5.

10 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

SCREEN Backchannel Cinema curated by Crowmeat Bob 7:30 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

Ghastly $20. 9:30 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Le Weekend / The Wigg Report 8 p.m. Shadowbox Studio, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: An American in Paris $22+.

Nov. 17-18, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

UNC Faculty Jazz with Special Guest Rufus Reid $25. 8 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Hush Hush: Comedy Based on Secrets from the Audience $8. 9 p.m.

Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

SCREEN Star Wars: Episode IV–A New Hope and Spaceballs $12. 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Victoria Victoria featuring Charlie Hunter $20. 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Vincent Neil Emerson $18.

8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Wailin’ Storms $10.

7:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

WXYC Decades Dance— Pump Up the Jam: An ’80s Glam Rock Dance Party $5. 10 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

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SAT 11/ 18

SUN 11/19

MON 11/20

TUES 11/21

WED 11/22

MUSIC

STAGE

MUSIC

MUSIC

MUSIC

MUSIC

6LACK: Since I Have a Lover Tour $74+. 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

A Nerdy Drag and Burlesque Show $15.

10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Ashley Gavin $33+. 7 p.m.

The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Golden Apples $13. 8 p.m.

Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Candlelight: A Tribute to Taylor Swift $43. MerrimonWynne House, Raleigh.

Barrett Martin $20.

8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Electric Frankenstein / Night! Night! / The Temp Agency $8. 5 p.m. Kings, Raleigh.

Jacquees with Nick Lavelle: Sincerely for You Tour $35. 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

North Carolina Symphony: A Harry Potter Holiday $60+. Nov. 22-25, various times. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Auntie Boy / Jooselord $20.

9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Emily Musolino 9 p.m.

Speakeasy, Carrboro.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Saturdays at 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Depths of Wikipedia $23.

8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Janice Carissa $10+.

8 p.m. Baldwin Auditorium, Durham.

Jerry Seinfeld $150+. 7 and 9:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Kate McGarry and Keith Ganz with Ariel Pocock $25. 8 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Primetime at ComedyWorx $15. Saturdays at 8 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

PARADOX: A ’90s Rave Experience $15. 9 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

PAGE

Queer Agenda with DJ Black as the Cosmos $7.

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

Poetry as Spellcasting 5 p.m. NorthStar Church of the Arts, Durham.

SNMNMNM $10. 7 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

November 15, 2023

STAGE Derek Hough $50+.

7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Straight No Chaser $50+.

3 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

Steve Treviño: America’s Favorite Husband Tour $20+. 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Peridot Sun 4 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

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Michael Gardner Celebration of Life Concert 7:30 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

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John-Allison Weiss performs at the Pinhook on Tuesday, November 21. PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PINHOOK

John-Allison Weiss $15.

8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Thomas Taylor: Third Tuesday Jams (Miles Davis) $5+. 5:30 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

STAGE A Magical Cirque Christmas $87+. 7 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

C U LT U R E CA L E NDA R

FRI 11/24

LIKE TO PLAN AHEAD?

SUN 11/26

SAT 11/25

MON 11/27

TUES 11/28

MUSIC

MUSIC

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SCREEN

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Geoff Clapp Trio $25. 8 p.m.

Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Crazy Chester: A Very Carrboro Tribute to the Band and the Last Waltz $12. 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

A Drag Queen Christmas $54+. 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Flow of Community: A Dance Film Screening 4 p.m. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham.

Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith Christmas $70.

7:30 p.m. DPAC, Durham.

A Motown Christmas $68+.

7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Leanna Firestone $24.

7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Martina McBride: Joy of Christmas Tour $91+.

7:30 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

STAGE The Harry Show $15.

Fridays at 10 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Mean Girls $35+. Nov. 24-26, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Dan Davis Group 4 p.m.

Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

Hail the Sun $23. 7 p.m.

Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

Ryan Hanseler: The Legacy of All for One Records $30. 8 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

Sluice Springsteen $10.

8:30 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Tar Heel Troubadours: Fireside Collective $15.

6:30 p.m. North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Saturdays at 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Beach Fossils: The Bunny Tour $30. 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Golden Age $8. 9 p.m.

Mettlesome Theater, Durham.

Duke Chorale Christmas Concert 7 p.m. Duke Chapel, Durham.

Holiday Enrapture IV: A Mash-Up of Music and Comedy Unchained $74+.

7 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tuesdays at 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Primetime at ComedyWorx $15. Saturdays at 8 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Joanne Shaw Taylor $27+.

5 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

North Carolina Jazz Repertory Orchestra $25.

8 p.m. Sharp 9 Gallery, Durham.

SCREEN Documentary Film Screening: The Only Doctor 7 p.m. D. H. Hill Jr. Library, Raleigh.

The Duke Chorale performs its annual Christmas concert at Duke Chapel on Tuesday, November 28. PHOTO COURTESY OF DUKE CHAPEL

INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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P U Z Z L ES If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “puzzle pages” at the bottom of our webpage.

www.regulatorbookshop.com 720 Ninth Street, Durham, NC 27705 Open Every Day 10-6

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

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

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key and previous puzzles at indyweek.com/puzzles-page.

Best of luck, and have fun!

11.15.23

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November 15, 2023

INDYweek.com

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

C L AS S I F I E D S HEALTH & WELL BEING

919-416-0675

www.harmonygate.com SERVICES

EMPLOYMENT Software Engineer III Software Engineer III, F/T at Truist (Multiple Openings) (Raleigh, NC) Deliver complex solutions w/ significant system linkages, dependencies, associated risk. Lead & perform dvlpmt efforts such as analysis, dsgn, coding/ creating, & testing. Oversee & participate in testing, implmtn, maintenance, & escalated support of Truist’s solutions. Must have Bach’s deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg or related tech’l field. Must have 6 yrs of progressive exp in s/ware engg or IT consulting positions w/ the following: proficiency w/ Angular, Java, Spring, & Hibernate; Big data technologies incl MapReduce, Hadoop, Spark, & Hive; Distributions incl Cloudera, EMR, &/or HDInsight; & working in a CI/CD environment. Must have at least 2 yrs of exp w/ the following: dsgng, implmtg, & documenting features for multiple functional modules; dvlpg & deploying applications in multi-cloud & enterprise grade environments w/ high availability, scalability, & security; mentoring/coaching team members; Agile dvlpmt using Scrum, Kanban or other equiv methodologies; Microservices architecture w/ Springboot & Kubernetes; & Cloud-based dvlpmt & deployment w/ AWS & Azure; infrastructure & platform services. Position may be eligible to work remotely but is based out of & reports to Truist offices in Raleigh, NC. Must be available to travel to Raleigh, NC regularly for meetings & reviews w/ manager & project teams w/in 24-hrs’ notice. Apply online (https://careers.truist.com/) or email resume w/ cvr ltr to: Paige Whitesell, Paige.Whitesell@Truist.com. (Ref. Job R0080804)

INDY CLASSIFIEDS classy@indyweek.com

EMPLOYMENT

Senior Software Engineer Senior Software Engineer sought by Perceptive Informatics LLC (d/b/a Calyx) in Morrisville, NC to dvlp Data Export apps. Using SAS & SQL language. May work from home or other various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S. up to 5 days per week. Must have a Master’s deg in Comp Sci, Comp Engg, Informatics Analytics, or related field plus 2 yrs. of software eng. exp. (OR Bachelor’s deg + 5 yrs. progressive exp.) Exp must include at least 2 yrs with the following: (1) writing code in SAS, (2) applying database & data warehouse concepts, dsgn principles, architectures, software, & Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), (3) data, project lifecycle, & Agile methodologies, & (4) writing advanced SQLqueries to implmt data JOINs & window functions. Will accept any suitable combo of edu, training, or exp. Apply online using the posted job opening at: https://www.calyx.ai/careers/ or email your resume to Kristin.Kelley@calyx.ai. Ref job #00021.

Senior Cloud Engineer Senior Cloud Engineer sought by Perceptive Informatics LLC (d/b/a Calyx) in Morrisville, NC to build, maintain, & troubleshoot cloud platforms & infrastructure. Position may work from home or other various & unanticipated worksites throughout the U.S. up to 5 days per week.

Must have a Master’s deg in Digital Sciences, Electronics Engg, or related field plus 2 yrs. of software dvlpmt exp. (OR Bachelor’s deg + 5 yrs. progressive exp.). Exp must include at least 2 yrs with the following: (1) Azure Environment to maintain Infrastructure, (2) working with Azure DevOps & tools to deploy apps., (3) Azure AD to maintain Active Directory, (4) PowerShell, ARM templates, & Json coding, (5) providing production support, & (6) Azure Security tools. Will accept any suitable combo of edu, training, or exp. Apply online using the posted job opening at: https://www.calyx.ai/careers/ or email your resume to Kristin.Kelley@calyx.ai. Ref job #00023.

Data Engineer III Data Engineer III sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to perform moderate research, design, data engg assignments within specific engg functional area or product line. Minimum of Bachelor’s degree or foreign equiv in Computer Science, Computer Engg, Info Technology, Management Info Systems, or rltd +3 yrs exp in job offered or rltd occupations required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1000 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job code: 01055.

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

Software Developer JAGGAER (Morrisville, NC) is looking for a Sftwre Dvlpr to be part to be part of the Prdct Dvlpmnt Teams that dvlp Procure-To-Pay (P2P) apps & apply agile sftwre dvlpmnt prncpls to build prdcts that serve cstmrs needs, inclding gthring & reviewing user reqs, database & app dsgn, coding, tsting, installation & maintenance, intrnl & extrnl cstmr training & prdct rollout. Bachelor’s in Cmptr Scnce or rel. disp. w/5 yrs of prgrssvly rspnsbl wrk exp. are req. in the pos. off. or rel. Must know (thru acad training or wrk exp.) Java, Servlets, JSP, JavaScript, JSON, CSS, HTML, & SQL. Apply at: https://careers-jaggaer.icims.com/jobs/3686/softwaredeveloper/job

INDYweek.com November 15, 2023

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