Mountain Xpress 08.19.20

OUR 27TH YEAR OF WEEKLY INDEPENDENT NEWS, ARTS & EVENTS FOR WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA VOL. 27 NO. 3 AUG. 19 - 25, 2020

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

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FEATURES

Asheville Raven & Crone Blackbird Frame and Art Bottle Riot / formerly District Wine Bar Carolina Hemp Company City of Asheville Sanitation Copper Crown Dogwood Health Trust Flying Squirrel Cleaning Company Franny’s Farm Geraldine’s Bakery Habitat for Humanity Restore

FEATURE

Asheville Pro Kitchen

12 COVID CONVERSATIONS Hendersonville residents pay it forward; Asheville dad keeps focus on education

15 SCRAMBLE FOR SPACE Henderson County adult day program loses space; more

GREEN

A-B Tech

10 FOR THE WIN Asheville debuts esports leagues

WELLNESS

NEWS

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Just outside Asheville, residents in the small, predominantly Latino community of Emma have banded together to create a network of small businesses that support one another — a model that’s also helping to create a better quality of life for the neighborhood’s working-class residents.

ASSISTANT TO THE PUBLISHER: Susan Hutchinson

COVER PHOTO Cindy Kunst COVER DESIGN Scott Southwick 4 LETTERS 4 CARTOON: MOLTON 7 CARTOON: BRENT BROWN

13 ASHEVILLE ARCHIVES 14 COMMUNITY CALENDAR 15 WELLNESS 16 GREEN SCENE

FOOD

Ingles Markets Inc. Ingles Markets Inc.

18 TASTE BUDS Wine, beer, cider and cheese tasting events are moving online

Isis Restaurant and Music Hall Mostly Automotive Inc. Musician’s Workshop Nature’s Vitamins and Herbs New Belgium Brewing Organic Mechanic

18 FOOD 22 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT 27 CLUBLAND 28 MOVIES

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22 MAKER’S MARK Tyler Capps finds creative calling with arcade briefcase

30 FREEWILL ASTROLOGY 30 CLASSIFIEDS 31 NY TIMES CROSSWORD

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Pisgah Brewing Co Ravenscroft Reserve Initiative Ruth’s Chris Steakhouse Sovereign Kava Strada Italiano Sweeten Creek Antiques The Blackbird Restaurant The Fresh Market The Regeneration Station Town and Mountain Realty Urban Orchard Wicked Weed Brewing

AUG. 19-25, 2020

PUBLISHER: Jeff Fobes

12 COVID CONVERSATIONS 16 MEASURING UP State researchers release first reports on PFAS in WNC water

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MANAGING EDITOR: Virginia Daffron OPINION EDITOR: Tracy Rose ASSISTANT EDITOR: Daniel Walton STAFF REPORTERS: Able Allen, Edwin Arnaudin, Thomas Calder, Laura Hackett, Molly Horak, Daniel Walton COMMUNITY CALENDAR & CLUBLAND: Madeline Forwerck, Laura Hackett MOVIE SECTION HOSTS: Edwin Arnaudin, Bruce Steele CONTRIBUTING EDITORS: Peter Gregutt, Rob Mikulak REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Mark Barrett, Leslie Boyd, Bill Kopp, Cindy Kunst, Alli Marshall, Brooke Randle, Gina Smith, Luke Van Hine, Kay West ADVERTISING, ART & DESIGN MANAGER: Susan Hutchinson LEAD DESIGNER: Scott Southwick MEMBERSHIP AND DEVELOPMENT COORDINATOR: Laura Hackett MARKETING ASSOCIATES: Sara Brecht, David Furr, Brian Palmieri, Tiffany Wagner OPERATIONS MANAGER: Able Allen INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES & WEB: Bowman Kelley BOOKKEEPER: Amie Fowler-Tanner ADMINISTRATION, BILLING, HR: Able Allen, Lauren Andrews DISTRIBUTION: Susan Hutchinson, Cindy Kunst DISTRIBUTION DRIVERS: Gary Alston, Russell Badger, Clyde Hipps, Joan Jordan, Angelo Sant Maria, Desiree Davis, Charlotte Rosen, Carl & Debbie Schweiger, David Weiss

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OPINION

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In the months following George Floyd’s death, Asheville, like the rest of the nation, has seen regular protests against police brutality. The demonstrations in Asheville have not only been shining a light on police murders of Black people nationally but have also brought attention to how the Asheville Police Department has brutalized the Black community locally. Examples ... include the killing of Jai Lateef Solveig “Jerry” Williams in 2016 and the brutal beating of Johnnie Rush in 2017.

The demonstrators who have taken the streets week after week have rallied around a number of demands set forth by the Black community. The demands include 50% divestment from the police department and reallocating that money back into the community; reparations for Black Asheville city and Buncombe County residents; the removal of racist monuments; and an end to the war on Black people.

Asheville City Council moved quickly to make symbolic gestures such as removing Confederate monuments and shrouding the Vance Monument.

They have also taken the first steps toward reparations by creating a task force. The primary demand of Black Asheville has not been addressed. The APD is still fully funded, and no substantial steps have been taken to protect the Black and brown community or to repair past harm and build trust.

Because these issues have not been

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addressed, demonstrators continue to take the streets demanding justice and systemic changes to public safety.

Although the focus has been directed at systemic racism within the APD, the protests have also highlighted how gentrification under the euphemism of “urban renewal” disenfranchised the Black citizens of Ashville.

The citizens of Asheville, who have gathered to express their grief and outrage, have remained peaceful.

Unfortunately, the Asheville Police Department has not. On Saturday, Aug. 8, several hundred people gathered at the former Vance Monument and soon made their way to the police station. Once there, they lay down in the parking lot with roses or knelt with heads bowed for 8 minutes and 46 seconds in memory of all those killed by police violence. After the vigil, there was a gathering at the amphitheater by the courthouse, complete with music and pizza. What followed was a peaceful march through downtown to bring attention to how systemic racism, police, brutality and gentrification is impacting the Black community.

The demonstrators then made their way to a local hotel, where they expressed their dismay that tourists are streaming into the city as COVID19 cases are skyrocketing. It is well known that COVID-19 disproportionately impacts Black and brown communities. The reopening of hotels is yet another example of white businesses being valued over Black lives. The demonstration at the hotel was disruptive but peaceful. The demonstrators

left the hotel on their own accord; no property damage occurred.

As the sun started to set, the protesters were confronted by an APD officer. The marchers told the officer respectfully that they were exercising their constitutional right to protest.

In response, squad cars closed in on the marchers, and officers jumped out and tackled people to the ground. APD officers also struck people with batons, shoving and choking marchers as they violently made their arrests. The APD showed their true colors once again as they responded to a protest against police brutality with yet more brutality. While the police violently assaulted demonstrators demanding racial justice, they actively defended Rondell Lance. Rondell Lance is a retired cop who is now the president of the Asheville Fraternal Order of Police. He was caught on film shoving, grabbing and dragging protesters along the ground before hiding behind the police line. This follows a disturbing trend of police protecting white supremacists and police sympathizers.

It must be noted that many of the officers present were not wearing masks, as is mandated by the state.

Although the APD has threatened marchers with further arrests and brutalization if they continue to march, the citizens of Asheville have not been intimidated. The very next day, people again gathered and took the streets demanding an end to police violence.

As a community, we deserve better, and as a community, we can reimagine what public safety looks like. In this vision, Black and brown people are not targeted and attacked. In this vision, people are provided the support they need, not punitive punishment. This vision is rooted in compassion instead of racism. We can do better, and our voices will be heard.

— An Asheville father Editor’s note: The writer reports that the letter is written in solidarity with the following: a potter, a college student, an arts educator, a carpenter, an engineer, a community organizer, a musician, a registered nurse, a therapist, a fiddler, a mom, a social worker, an engineer, a mechanic, a horse trainer, a radio DJ, an artist, a forager, a homebuilder, a mother, a death care worker, a storyteller, an environmental educator, a preschool teacher, a woodworker, a jeweler, a medical student, a builder and a paramedic.

Xpress contacted the Asheville Police Department with a summary of the letter writer’s points relating to the Aug. 8 protest but did not receive a response by press time.The Citizen Times published a pair of articles about the incident, including a video

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

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OPINION

Send your letters to the editor to letters@mountainx.com.

showing police arresting protesters and Lance’s actions at the time.

“Lance can be seen forcefully shoving protesters away, shouting, ‘Stay off the police!’ in a video taken by citizen journalist Matt Henson,” according to an Aug. 12 article. “He then pulls a protester in a bicycle helmet along the ground as an officer tries to subdue the person. Another officer steps in and pushes Lance away.” APD spokeswoman Christina Hallingse told the Citizen Times that protesters on bikes surrounded a police car and then “jumped on top of officers and began assaulting them” when officers moved to arrest them. On Aug. 14, the newspaper reported that two demonstrators had taken out warrants accusing Lance of assault and impersonating an officer.

Renaming mania strikes local leaders Asheville’s and Buncombe County’s leaders seem to be afflicted with renamania — the urge to rename all facets of the community tainted by slavery.

The recent decision by City Council to consider renaming streets must go forward, no matter the cost of changing all those addresses. While they are at it, why not change the name of the city? After all, the city’s namesake is slaveholding Samuel Ashe.

The community does not stop at city limits. We should seriously consider changing the name of the county. How did Edward Buncombe, who raised a regiment to fight for the country’s independence, distinguish himself from scores of other slave owners who did likewise?

His regiment won no victories and, though he was honorably wounded in battle, as were thousands of others, his notoriety seems to stem from falling down the stairs while sleepwalking and bleeding to death.

Renaming Buncombe County won’t cost nearly as much as changing the city’s name. It’s not part of postal addresses. In fact, doing so will provide quite a boost to the economy. All the fees attorneys will earn revising decades of legal documents is more than a drop in the bucket.

And changing the county’s name will forever rid us of being known as the source of pure bunkum.

While we’re at it, let’s not stop at changing the names of places that might be racially offensive. How ’bout those that are insensitive to gender?

Since history is to be interpreted by today’s tastes and not by the messy past, what about the French Broad.

Let’s make it the French Wide. And what about Beaucatcher Mountain?

Perish the thought that we might spend more energy and taxpayer dollars debating this name or that rather than on establishing systems to test, trace, and treat COVID-19 exposures; strengthen schools and job training to resolve economic and social inequity; provide health care to the infirm and elderly; and guarantee universal broadband access.

If we were to focus on these things, we would certainly earn a name for ourselves.

— John Ross Asheville

Many in Black Mountain ignore safeguards After reading the previous letter to the editor regarding the town of Black Mountain and its perceived noncompliance with state mandates adherent to the COVID-19 outbreak, I couldn’t help notice some discrepancies between the town manager’s denial of any such negligence and the concrete facts of the situation [“Goodbye, Old Friend,” July 8, Xpress].

Josh Harrold is mistaken when he claims that Black Mountain has been following, to the fullest extent, all mandates thus far enacted. I, personally, along other residents here, have seen a number of government officials ignoring safeguards. These include, but are not limited to, patrolling police officers performing their duties without masks and clearly without any masks on standby for use, and officers walking into small, confined business places devoid of masks or any other such personal protective equipment. On one occasion, I actually witnessed, right on the town square, a small group of officers and firefighters standing around in close proximity, not one of them wearing a mask, gloves or anything else except their normal uniforms.

In fact, as was stated in the previous letter, the vast majority of businesses in the area are showing little to no acknowledgement of the necessity for safety modifications in order to mitigate the current health crisis.

Specifically, one small business has just now installed a much needed protective sheath in a small, confined checkout area, only after months of the pandemic being in full swing. Still, the majority of clerks do not don masks or sanitize hands between customers.

This behavior and attitude is more the rule than the exception and it has spread rampantly, much like the virus itself, into the consciousness of the local citizens. Conversations have ensued regarding this matter, and storekeepers are actually frightened to take decisive action against consumers who seem bent on violating the rights and safety of others. The proprietors fear unknown, quite possibly violent or at least equally aggressive and unreasonable retaliation if they were to enforce the mask requirements clearly listed upon entry.

One notable exception has been Hopey & Co. of Black Mountain, whose owners and employees have, from the beginning, strictly followed all health and safety practices thus far enacted.

Another is the Blue Ridge Biscuit Co., similarly compliant, among a few others. But again, this is, by far, the exception to the vast majority rule.

To be fair, the first responders, shopkeepers/vendors and law enforcement of Black Mountain are easily among the finest, friendliest and most fair-minded staples of the community that I’ve ever had the privilege of encountering.

Still, on a perhaps more administrative level, it is one thing to harbor disregard for the validity of this pandemic, but to contest such heedless resistance among one’s community is a more serious matter. For it could possibly infer a certain contempt for a large portion of humanity itself, nullifying any chance for further discourse or negotiation on the key issues at hand. During critical times such as these, before assuming or declaring a population to be in full accordance with safety guidelines, one must con-

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C AR T O O N B Y B R E N T B R O W N duct a proper survey and inventory of their direct surroundings.

— George Bazley Black Mountain Editor’s note: Xpress contacted Josh Harrold, Black Mountain’s town manager, and Black Mountain Police Chief Shawn Freeman, but they declined to offer a response.

Take action for agriculture [The July 22 Xpress] article “Wide Open Spaces: Farms Innovate Fresh Models for COVID-19 Agritourism,” made me proud to be part of WNC’s farm economy. It’s a pleasure to support local farms at tailgate markets and as they pivot their business models.

There’s another big way that we can support agriculture. We can call or write Sen. Thom Tillis and Sen. Richard Burr and ask them to co-sponsor the Farm System Reform Act (S-3221/H.R. 6718).

The Farm System Reform Act would phase out factory farms, or “concentrated animal feeding operations,” by 2040. And it would help farmers transition to more sustainable forms of agriculture.

Concentrated animal feeding operations treat workers and animals poorly. Their workers face hazardous conditions, especially during COVID-19.

Animals are kept in crowded spaces.

They cannot carry out natural behaviors or move freely — a far stretch from the “happy cows and chickens” that call humane WNC farms their homes!

I’m able to purchase dairy, eggs and meat from farms with sustainable and ethical practices. But not all of our neighbors have that access. It’s going to take something bigger than purchasing power to address all the problems that factory farms cause.

Please consider asking Sen. Thom Tillis (919-856-4630) and Sen. Richard Burr (336-631-5125) to co-sponsor the Farm System Reform Act. Let’s make it easier for people all over the country to access food from sources that treat their workers, consumers and animals with dignity.

— Renee Dunaway Weaverville

Just the facts, please Although the front-page headline “Is It Safe to Go to the Dentist?” may be a question on people’s minds these days, using this phrasing with the headline “Watch Your Mouth” sensationalizes the story too much and adds doubt into people’s minds [Aug. 5, Xpress].

In fact, the details of the article paint the opposite picture — there are many precautions and policies in place to

make a visit to the dentist quite safe for patients. The title of the article itself (“Safety in the Dentist’s Chair”) was much better. Stick to the facts, instead of using sensationalism.

— Ellie Weyer Asheville Editor’s note: Thank you for your feedback. We’re glad to hear that you found the article well-rounded and informative. Our covers are designed to catch the eye and stimulate curiosity about the week’s news. The words on the cover of our Aug. 5 issue didn’t imply that it isn’t safe to go to the dentist, and one person’s “sensational” may be another person’s “intriguing.” X

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Correction In our Aug 12 article “Transforming Downtown: A Behind-the-scenes Look at Asheville’s Black Lives Matter Mural,” we included incorrect credits.

The aerial photo and group images should have been credited to Reggie Tidwell/Curve Theory, courtesy of Asheville Area Arts Council. Also, the Asheville Area Arts Council hired WNC Landscaping to pressure-wash the pavement. X

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NEWS

Power to the people

Co-op network grows community-based businesses

BY MOLLY HORAK mhorak@mountainx.com When Mirian Porras moved to the Emma community 11 years ago, she never expected to end up running a property management company, let alone one that handles the homes and businesses of her neighbors and friends.

Her background is in community organizing around immigrant rights.

After years of working in the neighborhood, however, she caught wind of a new trend: Residents of mobile home parks in the area were coming together to create housing co-ops as vehicles for jointly purchasing those properties. And in 2018, Porras and her neighbors formed Las Casitas Mobile Home Park Cooperative.

But it didn’t take long for Porras to realize that her new situation provided benefits beyond enabling her to own a share of the property: The co-op also offered community members dignified

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jobs. And with her own basic needs covered, she wanted to do more.

These days, Porras is a member of two real estate co-ops and a housing co-op; she’s also a worker-owner of Chispas, a property management cooperative that maintains several buildings owned by neighborhood collectives.

The model that’s developed is unique, she says, and it has helped create a better quality of life for Emma’s working-class residents.

“Among our network, we have been able to create more economic opportunities and specifically focus on the needs of our community,” she explains.

“We are not outsiders — we live in this community. We care for this community, and we are developing something that will last a long time.”

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INVESTING LOCALLY

Nestled just northwest of Asheville, the predominantly Latino neighborhood is no stranger to community-based development. Asheville’s continued growth and development has accelerated the displacement of Emma residents, says community organizer and co-op worker-owner Andrea Golden.

In 2016, the longtime neighborhood resident co-founded PODER Emma, which seeks to promote economic development while preserving the community’s culture and identity. The group gained local recognition for its network of housing and real estate co-ops and has grown to include an early childhood education cooperative network. In January, PODER Emma formally launched a new

worker-owned cooperative network to encourage what Golden calls “culturally relevant” small-business development.

“We started to think about how neighbors could come together who typically, in terms of finances, were low-wealth families who face a lot of barriers to credit and lending and even just the more traditional streams of small-business development,” Golden explains.

The resulting network, she says, is a place where people give their time and energy to support one another and learn together, so that everyone has a better chance of making it as small-business owners. Currently, the network includes five member businesses spanning accounting, translation, property management, child care and cleaning services.

“It can be overwhelming to start a small business regardless, but to start a small business if you’re facing myriad of barriers — most of our cooperatives are majority Spanish speakers — the peer network is really important for people not to have to develop their business in isolation,” notes Golden. “Rather than looking at it as separate businesses, we look at how the sum of the whole can really build an economy that works for both the members of the co-op and the community around us.”

PODER Emma has also partnered with The Industrial Commons, a cooperative network based in Morganton, to create Power of the Commons, a collaborative ecosystem that shares resources across the different networks. Industrial Commons co-founder Molly Hemstreet sees the model as a way to invest locally.

“Often, immigrant communities are largely laborers working for someone else, creating wealth for a white owner,” she explains. “The cooperative model shifts this wealth back to the worker, into a family and back into the community.”

GROWING A NETWORK

Like many cooperative worker-owners, Jackie Fitzgerald wears a lot of different hats. She’s one of eight worker-owners of Cenzontle Language Justice Cooperative, which provides English/ Spanish interpretation and translation services. Besides serving as the worker co-op network’s coordinator, she helps translate many of its business trainings for Spanish-speaking members.

Everyone in the network is connected, she says, yet every business has its own individual strengths.

“Everybody feels like they’re equally committed and equally compensated.”

— Camille Cushman, Preescolar La Bugambilia communities, Fitzgerald points out.

Add in the fact that an attendee may be simultaneously watching an English speaker talk and listening to someone else repeat the information in Spanish, and it can make dense seminars hard to follow.

“In our community, a lot of people have been workers for years and have tons of experience with business, but maybe not from the administrative side of things,” says Fitzgerald. “When you put a language-justice lens on it, we start to ask how can we take this information and make it more accessible.”

SHARED SERVICES: Cenzontle worker-owner Rocio Quintero, bottom, provides interpretation for members of Opportunity Threads, above, a Morganton-based cooperative that shares resources, including business training and coaching, with PODER Emma, an organization that supports three cooperative networks in Buncombe County. Photo courtesy of Cenzontle There’s Preescolar La Bugambilia, which provides half-day preschool and after-school care for Spanish-speaking children in the Emma community.

Children are excited to learn in their first language, says worker-owner Camille Cushman, and the program gives parents and kids alike a sense of home and belonging.

Chispas, the cooperative Porras helps run, manages properties owned by other network members. The Hendersonvillebased Green Muse Cleaning Co-op, which is currently expanding into Buncombe County, provides an array of cleaning services.

Power in Numbers Bookkeeping was formed to support grassroots organizations and cooperatives working for social justice, says worker-owner Becky Brown. The co-op’s roughly 30 clients include Preescolar La Bugambilia, Chispas and Cenzontle.

“It’s a nice constellation of building out a larger cooperative economy as we need to,” says Brown. “As we develop the network, it’s been exciting to see what needs arise and how we can provide that service through a co-op.”

BY THE SEAT OF THEIR PANTS

Launching a small business is never easy, but it’s even harder when the proprietors face systemic obstacles to

business ownership. Fitzgerald as well as members of the team at Preescolar La Bugambilia say they often feel they’re flying by the seat of their pants. But what network members don’t know, they learn together.

PODER Emma gives the cooperatives access to training in financial literacy, marketing strategies and human relations development, Golden explains.

They share templates for things like contracts, operating agreements and bylaws. In addition, the network’s five member businesses meet several times a year to discuss common problems and find solutions.

The business and financial training has been invaluable, says Cushman: Neither she nor co-owner Keyla Estrada had any business experience before starting Preescolar La Bugambilia, but one-on-one coaching has helped them think through the cooperative’s financial situation to keep its services accessible and affordable for community residents.

Language justice is another crucial element of the PODER Emma network, stresses Porras. All trainings are bilingual, ensuring that all worker-owners can fully access and understand the materials presented.

Business curricula are typically created in English, using American scenarios and examples that aren’t culturally relevant for Spanish-speaking immigrant

DIGNITY AND EQUITY

After years of working for others, the shift to becoming a co-op owner is nothing short of transformational, notes Golden. “It changes the relationship you have with yourself, with your family, with the people around you,” she says. “It’s so inspiring to see the ways it impacts both individuals and the entirety of the place we live in.”

PODER Emma focuses on meeting concrete metrics such as providing a living wage, enabling workers to generate savings for their families, and offering opportunities to grow one’s skill set and take on leadership roles, Golden explains. But equally important, she

maintains — and harder to quantify — is finding a job that feels meaningful and fulfilling.

Cushman, for example, says that after years of working as a teacher within the “very hierarchical” Asheville City Schools system, she feels that Preescolar La Bugambilia’s horizontal structure creates an environment of equity.

“Everybody feels like they’re equally committed and equally compensated,” she emphasizes. “It lends itself to our value of helping and supporting each other, because rather than it being a job that you just show up to, I feel this in my heart.”

Fitzgerald agrees. The collective vision of community empowerment transcends each individual co-op, she believes.

“It’s beautiful to have this vision of what we’re trying to do in this neighborhood and in this part of the community,” Fitzgerald maintains. “My children and the children from the housing co-ops participate in La Bugambilia. The parents live and work in some of the buildings where Chispas is doing property maintenance. We know and trust that they’re doing it with love, that they’re thorough and that they care.

“All of this work, it builds a platform for people to be heard and supported.” X

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BY DANIEL WALTON dwalton@mountainx.com Move over, pickleball.

The latest offerings from Asheville’s Parks and Recreation Department zip along at a considerably faster pace than the trendy paddle game. Instead of bashing a perforated plastic sphere, players are white-knuckling cars in Rocket League, blasting foes in Fortnite and jumping into the shoes of professional athletes in Madden NFL 20 and NBA 2K20 — four video games that are now virtual playing fields for city-sponsored competition.

The new leagues are part of the department’s AVLPARKS eSports program, which began hosting games on Aug. 7. At a time when COVID-19 makes meeting up for in-person sports less safe, says Parks and Recreation staffer Maxime Pierre, virtual activities provide an outlet for competition and help to keep the department relevant.

But Pierre emphasizes that he and co-worker Kimberly Zygmant had been gearing up to offer esports well before the pandemic came to Western North Carolina. Video games, he suggests, allow the city to engage with a larger group of residents than had been served through traditional sports.

“Really the core of it is being able to reach out to a different participant than

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we normally would. Not everyone wants to go outside and play soccer and football,” says Pierre. “We should throw out a massively wide net and try to get as many diverse participants as we can.”

FREE PLAY

That approach has worked, at least in terms of the age range involved in the Asheville esports programs. Of the 96 registrants in August’s leagues, Pierre reports, the youngest is just 8, while the oldest is 59.

“The chasm from the oldest to the youngest is massive, which is fantastic,” Pierre says. “We can’t offer an athletic volleyball league and say, ‘We’ll definitely get a 22-year-old and a 59-year-old.’ Usually, they’re not in the same realm.”

Although the city doesn’t collect other demographic data on participants, Asheville is also designing its esports programs with an eye toward racial equity.

Pierre notes that the first official Parks and Recreation offering to feature video games was a free full-day tournament of Madden NFL 20, NBA 2K20 and Dragon Ball Xenoverse hosted in February at the Dr. Wesley Grant Sr. Southside Center, located in Asheville’s historically Black Southside neighborhood.

Both Madden and NBA 2K20 are among the games offered in the ongoing

esports leagues, which have no registration fees. Matt Carusona, director of programs and marketing for the nonprofit N.C. Recreation and Park Association, says video games allow cities to break down barriers that may discourage some residents from participating in municipal recreation programs.

While joining the Asheville leagues requires a gaming console or PC and an internet connection, many residents already have that equipment and don’t face additional costs to play. Pierre adds that the city is exploring partnerships that would allow participants without gaming devices of their own to borrow them.

“The key components and entry into esports are straightforward compared to the training and the equipment needed to play a sport like football or lacrosse,” Carusona points out. “According to a recent report by the Entertainment Software Association, 75% of U.S. households have at least one person who plays video games.”

Once participants are engaged through esports, Carusona continues, parks and recreation departments have more opportunities to connect with those players about other activities. In Asheville, Pierre hopes video games will provide a pathway for young residents to get involved in science, math and technology.

Before COVID-19 hit, Pierre explains, he and Zygmant had proposed an after-

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THRILL OF VICTORY: Desmond Clark, right, a seasonal Parks and Recreation staffer with the city of Asheville, congratulates a young winner of the city’s inaugural esports tournament, held in February at the Dr. Wesley Grant Sr. Southside Center. Photo courtesy of the city of Asheville school program where participants would play games, then discuss career paths related to game development such as programming and graphic design. That effort is currently on hold due to social distancing restrictions.

EARLY ADOPTERS

Asheville is among a vanguard of North Carolina parks and recreation departments offering esports, says Carusona, who invited city staff to speak on the topic at several professional development events earlier this year. But he says the trend is spreading across the state, especially as municipalities look for new options during the pandemic.

Onslow County in the state’s southeast, Carusona says, added an esports league to its athletics programs after participating in an NCRPA event and hearing about Asheville’s work. Both Greensboro and Wake Forest have announced video game tournaments of their own; the town of Cary is incorporating a dedicated esports room and a 4,000-seat arena that can be converted to host esports in a new $193 million recreation complex.

And nationally, Parks & Recreation Magazine called esports “the next big thing” in a 2019 article. Recreation indus-

try consultant Neelay Bhatt projected that competitive video games would soon reach cultural prominence similar to that of athletics: “With incremental growth leading to more than 500 million viewers and $3 billion in revenues globally in the next few years alone, it is only a matter of time before esports will be on par with traditional sports in participation and viewership.”

Pierre believes growth opportunities abound for esports in Asheville. Beyond the return of in-person tournaments and after-school programs, he says, the city is discussing collaborations with local comic book stores and the Asheville Anime Regional Convention to provide structure for the area’s gaming scene. While Jordan King, the convention’s chair, says those talks are in the early stages, he adds that many of his attendees are eager to participate in organized gaming and will likely join Asheville’s programs in the future.

“It’s already a trend, but I don’t see it waning at all, especially because of how much COVID has affected programming and how people are able to interact with one another,” Pierre says. “I might not be able to hang out with my friend or see them at school, but we can still socialize because we’re going to be playing this game.” X

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

11

COVID CONVERSATIONS

FEA T U RE S

Pay it forward

School of Dad

Hendersonville residents offer random acts of kindness

Single parent Jared Wheatley keeps the focus on education

SHARING IS CARING: Hendersonville residents, including Jamie McMinn, pictured, have donated funds to help community members struggling to pay for utilities during COVID-19. Photo courtesy of the city of Hendersonville Inspired by an article about the city of Hendersonville’s efforts to help community members struggling to pay for utilities during COVID-19, resident Lia Barth called the city’s customer service department to contribute to a randomly selected water customer with a delinquent bill.

“I’ve been very fortunate to have kept my full-time job during all this,” Barth says. “I’ve been trying to keep my eyes open and my ears open on ways that I could help. Even if it is just a small way.”

Jamie McMinn, the customer service representative who took Barth’s call, followed her lead, contributing to another customer’s pastdue balance.

“When Lia called, I was thinking this is really important, and we need to find a way to make this happen,” says McMinn. “My husband and I have both stayed employed during this process. We haven’t received a financial hit during this time, but looking around, the need is astonishing. I’ve been so blessed, why not

12

AUG. 19-25, 2020

contribute to someone else so they can be blessed?”

The pair’s generosity has inspired other customer service team members to do the same.

“We understand how disruptive COVID-19 has been on the community,” says Assistant City Manager Brian Pahle. “Customer service has established a temporary payment plan for people with past due utility accounts which allows them to pay off their balances over a period of twelve months.” (To learn more about this program, visit avl.mx/7y6.)

Pahle says he appreciates the citizen’s compassionate gesture and how quickly the Finance Department made it possible for the public to be able to help their neighbors.

Any community member interested in paying it forward can contact the city’s customer service at (828) 697-3052 or email customerservice@ hvlnc.gov.

— Adapted from a press release from the City of Hendersonville X

MOUNTAINX.COM

Jared Wheatley operates two businesses out of his office space in the Miles Building in downtown Asheville — WTAPS Construction and the Épatage Workwear clothing line. But as Asheville City Schools heads into fall with plans for all-remote instruction, the busy single father has added a third enterprise, something he refers to as the “school of dad.”

Wheatley co-parents his two children, Alexis, 10, and Ezekiel, 8, both students at Vance Elementary, with ex-wife Jessica Wheatley, who has a health condition that puts her in a high-risk category for severe symptoms if she were to contract COVID19. For the first three months of the coronavirus quarantine, as Jared’s businesses demanded that he interact with clients, he made the hard choice to forgo contact with his children to avoid jeopardizing Jessica’s health. “This was a nightmare as a father,” says Jared. “I really embrace being a 50% [shared custody] single dad.”

By mid-June, the two households had devised a new normal for joint parenting focused on minimizing risks and maximizing learning options for the children. “When we got out of quarantine as a family, we basically, as a business, decided to shift out of project-pursuit mode into more of a balance of work that allows me to essentially work part time,” Jared explains. He’s reduced in-person meetings and communicated with clients about social distancing practices for times when getting together is necessary.

He recently reconfigured his office layout to include a dedicated educational space for Alexis and Ezekiel. With traditional school routines disrupted, the family opted for what Jared calls a “steadier path,” implementing some lessons during the summer. Though he likes to let the daily rhythm be guided by the children’s interests and engagement, a typical day might start with running and jumping jacks at home in Montford before heading to the office/classroom for English, handwriting and math worksheets followed by independent study projects

CLASS IS IN SESSION: Jared Wheatley, an entrepreneur and divorced dad, recently reconfigured his office layout to include a dedicated educational space for his two school-aged children, Ezekiel, left, and Alexis, right. Photo by Thomas Calder — Alexis is designing a board game, for example, based on her interest in zoology — while Jared catches up with clients.

Every other week, the children follow a conventional curriculum with Jessica.

Keeping education as their focal point, Jared says, has helped the Wheatleys stay on course as they navigate parenting with split households during the pandemic. “I don’t think we’re the only blended family who’s seeing that it’s culturally easier to have separate living environments when you have that single line of school drawing the communication together.”

— Gina Smith X

FEA T U RE S

ASHEVILLE ARCHIVES

by Thomas Calder | tcalder@mountainx.com

‘Two corked-up volcanoes’ Advertisements and theories about the 1916 earthquake A 5.1 magnitude earthquake rocked the region on Aug. 9. Several media outlets reported it as the strongest in our area since 1916; however, a September 2014 report by Kenneth B. Taylor, state geologist of North Carolina, notes a 5.2 magnitude earthquake occurred in nearby Mitchell County in 1926. Nevertheless, in this week’s Asheville Archives we’re traveling back 104 years to the 5.5 magnitude earthquake, which featured two shocks, separated by 10 seconds.

According to the Feb. 22, 1916, edition of The Asheville Citizen, the tremors occurred the previous day, about 6:40 p.m. “While not severe, the shocks were strong enough to rattle the dishes in several portions of the city,” the paper reported.

In the same article, The Asheville Citizen claimed hundreds of residents called the paper “asking if an earthquake had really occurred.” Meanwhile, similar calls came in from Tryon, Hendersonville and Saluda.

“All reported practically the same experience,” the paper declared, “although the shock appears to have been a little more violent at Tryon than elsewhere, reports from that place stating that plaster was jarred from the walls of several houses by the shocks.”

Elsewhere in that day’s paper, businesses used the phenomenon to promote their services. “Feel the earthquake?” one began. “Lots of folks thought that it was a ton or two of M. & W. Coal going in the cellar. It’s heavy weight, full weight fuel.”

Another read: “Some earthquake Monday night! Shook up lots o’ folks and made ’em sit up and take notice. Nichols Way Laundry work always makes folks sit up and take notice because of its real perfection of finish.”

One additional story about the quake appeared in The Asheville Citizen’s Feb. 23, 1916, edition. Though the paper does not label the article as satire — and perhaps it was not — there is a healthy amount of folklore and humor within the reporting.

The write-up features an interview with an unnamed elder, described as a “veracious Swannanoan.” According to this “old resident,” the two quakes came from a pair of competing peaks. “It was old Rumbling Bald, and the Smoky mountain up Beetree that made the earthquakes,” the man told the paper.

He continued: “Lots of people don’t know that we have two corked-up volcanoes in this county, but the old folks all know about them. Old Rumbling Bald over Hickory Nut Gap way cuts loose and rumbles

MIGHTY SHAKE: Local artist Terry Taylor created this whimsical collage to accompany this week’s story. On Feb. 21, 1916, dishes rattled in the homes of Asheville residents as the city experienced a 5.5 magnitude earthquake. The Vance Monument did not actually crumble during the event. Collage courtesy of Taylor every few years when it gets the notion, and the mountain on Beetree smokes every once in a while.”

Later in the article, the loquacious local proclaimed: “On Monday evening both mountains cut loose. Old Rumbling gave a shake, and then Beetree followed — they must have got conflicting dates or else had a falling out.”

According to the piece, another man who was listening in asked if the gov-

ernment should try and do something to prevent future disruptions. The “veracious Swannanoan” quickly dismissed the notion.

“What harm has these poor little earthquakes done you?” he reportedly asked the man, before concluding: “Why, they give us something to talk about until politics start up.”

Editor’s note: Peculiarities of spelling and punctuation are preserved from the original documents. X

‘Odor of brimstone’ Like the 1916 earthquake, an earlier 1874 tremor inspired interesting reactions and rumors from the region’s residents. On March 14, 1874, the Weekly Pioneer offered the following report: “The earthquake shocks in the Bald Mountain are inspiring the inhabitants with terror. Those who are not able to emigrate have embraced the Christian religion. Revivals and prayer-meetings occupy the entire attention of the people, and at every quake the atmosphere is surcharged with psalm-singing and the odor of brimstone.”

Subsequent scuttlebutt about volcanic eruptions in the area were quickly addressed in an effort to assuage local fears. On April 2, 1874, North Carolina Citizen featured a letter from Joseph Wilcox, described as “a distinguished scientist.” In his missive, Wilcox writes: “What is the matter with your mountains? From what I read in the papers you have evidently got an earthquake on your hands, but you will not enjoy the luxury of a volcano. I have been through nearly all your Western Counties, and observed your mountain rocks. I saw no evidence of volcanic rocks, and your gneiss rocks and mica slates do not afford any encouragement to volcanoes.” X

MOUNTAINX.COM

AUG. 19-25, 2020

13

COMMUNITY CALENDAR AUG. 19-28, 2020 For a full list of community calendar guidelines, please visit mountainx.com/calendar.

For questions about free listings, call 828-251-1333, ext.

137. For questions about paid calendar listings, please call 828-251-1333, ext. 320.

In-Person Events = Shaded All other events are virtual

LITERARY Malaprop’s Author Discussion Pam Fessler presents Carville’s Cure.

WE (8/19), 6pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xl Stay Home & Write(rs) Group Community writing session hosted by Firestorm.

WE (8/19), 7pm, Registration required, avl.mx/7r8 NC Arboretum Eco-Poetry Reading and discussion with poet Nickole Brown.

TH (8/20), 3pm, $15, avl.mx/7t9 Malaprop’s Author Discussion Jill McCorkle presents Hieroglyphics, in conversation with Lee Smith.

TH (8/20), 6pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7vz Firestorm: Visionary Readers Group The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Deciding for Ourselves by Cindy Milstein.

TH (8/20), 7pm, Registration required, avl.mx/7xd Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance: Reader Meet Writer Justin A. Reynolds presents Early Departures.

TH (8/20), 7pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7wc The Moth StorySLAM Five-minute storytelling competition.

TH (8/20), 7:15pm, $10, avl.mx/7o2

Haywood County Public Library: Book Chat Open discussion with staff.

WE (8/26), 6pm, avl.mx/7kq Malaprop’s Author Discussion Deborah J. Cohan presents Welcome to Wherever We Are. WE (8/26), 6pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xm Race Matters: Book Club & Conversation Series Part 3 Conclusion with panel discussion. Register: 828-743-0215.

TH (8/27), 4pm, Free, avl.mx/7eh Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance: Reader Meet Writer Heather Bell Adams presents The Good Luck Stone.

TH (8/27), 7pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xn

ART & CRAFT Slow Art Friday: A Walk in the Park Discussion led by master docent Sarah Reincke at Asheville Art Museum.

FR (8/21), 12pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7vo Local Cloth Handwork circle.

FR (8/21), 4pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7qf

Skyland Library: Creative Writing Group Community reading and workshop.

MO (8/24), 4pm, Registration required, avl.mx/7xk

Broom Making Techniques Demonstration by Marlo Gates.

SA (8/22), 10am, Free, Southern Highlands Craft Guild, Milepost 382, Blue Ridge Pkwy

Malaprop’s Dual Book Launch In the Key of New York City by Rebecca McClanahan and Beyond Repair by Sebastian Matthews.

TU (8/25), 7pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7wd

How to Wisely Purchase Art Talk on art as a financial asset by curator Caroline Taylor.

TH (8/27), 10am, Free, Atelier Maison, 121 Sweeten Creek Rd

EMPYREAN ARTS 2 FOR $22 ONLINE CLASSES FLEXIBILITY-CONTORTION on Tuesdays 5:30pm & Saturdays 2:30pm INVERSIONS on Mondays 7:00pm See full schedule online

empyreanarts.org • info@empyreanarts.org 828.782.3321

14

AUG. 19-25, 2020

Slow Art Friday: Solitude Discussion led by touring docent Hank Bovee at Asheville Art Museum.

FR (8/28), 12pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7z1

MUSIC SERFA: The Healing Properties of the Blues Seminar by Dr. Sandra Foster.

TH (8/20), 3pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xw Posey Piano Hour Jazz and swing performance.

TH (8/20), 7pm, avl.mx/7mx ArborEvening Featuring roots duo Seth & Sara.

TH (8/27), 8:30pm, $5, NC Arboretum, 100 Frederick Law Olmsted Way

Asheville Homeless Initiative Advisory Committee General meeting.

TU (8/25), 12pm, avl.mx/7xg Asheville City Council Formal meeting with public hearings.

TU (8/25), 5pm, avl.mx/7xh Addressing Racial Inequities in the Criminal Justice System OLLI webinar with city officials and legal experts.

TH (8/27), 3pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7z3

ANIMALS Ilio Canine Care: Dog Safety Course How to care for your dog in public spaces.

SA (8/22), 12:30pm, Free, Triskelion Brewery, 340 7th Ave E, Hendersonville

THEATER & FILM Escape: A Study in Wax Radio drama performance.

WE (8/19), 8pm, The Paper Mill Lounge, 553 W Main St, Sylva How to Plot Anything Workshop by filmmaker Richard L Bergh. Register: avl.mx/7oo.

SA (8/22), 10am, Free, Asheville School of Film, 45 S French Broad Ave Movies in the Parking Lot: The Lion King Directions: avl.mx/7xs.

TH (8/27), 7pm, Free, A-B Tech, 340 Victoria Rd

CIVICS & ACTIVISM Understanding the Tree Canopy Preservation Ordinance Presentation by Asheville GreenWorks.

WE (8/19), 5pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xx Creating Advocates of Change: Racial Justice & Equity Webinar by Asheville-Buncombe Institute of Parity Achievement.

TH (8/20), 12pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7z2 Just Economics of WNC: Budget Workshop 4 Panel with experts from NC Budget and Tax Center.

TH (8/20), 5:30pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xy Cultural Crash Course: Me Too Movement Lecture by Dr. Ingrid Bego.

TH (8/20), 6pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7qn Silent Vigil for Immigration Reform FR (8/21), 4pm, Henderson County Courthouse, 200 N Grove St Asheville Board of Adjustment General meeting.

MO (8/24), 2pm, avl.mx/7xf

MOUNTAINX.COM

BENEFITS Car Wash Fundraiser Proceeds benefit First Responders Children's Foundation.

SA (8/22), 12-4pm, Independent Construction Services, 4006 Hendersonville Rd, Fletcher

CLASSES, MEETINGS & EVENTS

Black Mountain College: An Invisible Revolution Discussion on the life and work of R. Buckminster Fuller.

TH (8/27), 1pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7z4 Spanish Conversation Group For adults.

TH (8/27), 5pm, Free, avl.mx/7c6 SVM: The Negro Motorist Green Book The history of African American travel in WNC with Lisa R. Withers.

TH (8/27), 6:30pm, $10, avl.mx/pruq

BUSINESS Incredible Towns Business Network General meeting.

WE (8/19), 11am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7g8 PPP Loan Forgiveness: Updated Guidance & Strategy Webinar by Johnson Price Sprinkle PA. WE (8/19), 11am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7w9 AFP: Five Mistakes Boards Must Avoid Presentation by Doug Hartjes of COR Consulting.

WE (8/19), 11:30am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7rb

MemoryCare: Elder Fraud Wars Presentation by attorney David Kirkman.

TH (8/20), 2pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7x2

Marketing with a Bang Presentation by Johanna Hagarty of Western Women’s Business Center.

WE (8/19), 1pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xq

Born in NC & Living Elsewhere: Making the Connection Back How to use public records for genealogy research.

SA (8/22), 2pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7p2

SCORE: Preparing for a Small Business Loan Presentation by the Western Women’s Business Center.

TH (8/20), 10am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xr

SVM: History Cafe Webinar Program on the Swannanoa 4H camp as a German POW camp in World War II. MO (8/24), 10:30am, $10, avl.mx/7zd

Incredible Towns Business Network General meeting.

WE (8/26), 11am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7g8

NCCU: Teaching Artist Tuesday Forum on COVID-19 and arts education.

TU (8/25), 4:30pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7xc

ECO & OUTDOOR

Leadership Asheville Summer Buzz Breakfast Discussion on the upcoming election and the pandemic.

WE (8/26), 9am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/761 Justice Matters Tour of Pisgah Legal Program on civil legal aid as an anti-poverty tool.

TH (8/27), 12pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7ur

MountainTrue: Beer Series w/ Wicked Weed Community river cleanup effort.

Register: avl.mx/7z6.

Ongoing (thru 8/22) MountainTrue: Snorkeling on the Watauga River Led by riverkeeper Andy Hill.

SA (8/22), 10am, $20, Register at avl.mx/prur for location Composting 101 Demonstration by Canton Giving Garden.

MO (8/24), 9am, Free, avl.mx/7xp

How Houseplants Contribute to Air Quality Discussion and plant review

by Sean Sullivan of Living Stone.

WE (8/26), 10am, Free, Atelier Maison, 121 Sweeten Creek Rd

• Hendersonville Farmers Market: Tomato Day Celebration. 8am-1pm, 650 Maple St, Hendersonville

Pop up 5k in the Park WE (8/26), 6pm, $10, Fletcher Park, 300 Old Cane Creek Rd, Fletcher

• ASAP Farmers Market at A-B Tech. 9am-12pm, 340 Victoria Rd

Restoring the Central Asheville Watershed Q&A session with RiverLink.

TH (8/27), 10am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7z7

FOOD & BEER YPA Social: Mixology Cocktail class and networking.

TH (8/20), 5:30pm, Free, avl.mx/7w0 Free Vegan Community Meal Hosted by the Holistic Triage.

TU (8/25), 4pm, Rhubarb, 7 SW Pack Square Sweet Southern Funk: Middle Eastern Fusion Pop-up Street food and comfort fare.

WE (8/26), 4pm, Baba Nahm, 1 Page Ave Front Porch Food Busking Taco pop-up with Chef Eden of HomeGrown.

FR (8/28), 4:30pm, Cascade Lounge, 219 Amboy Rd

WEEKLY MARKETS Tuesdays • West Asheville Tailgate Market. 3:30-6:30pm, 718 Haywood Rd Wednesdays • Asheville City Market South. 12-3pm, Biltmore Park Town Square • Weaverville Farmers Market. 2:30-6pm,17 Merrimon Ave, Weaverville • RAD Farmers Market.

3-6pm, Pleb Urban Winery, 289 Lyman St • Locally Grown on the Green. 3-6pm, 35 Hwy 64, Cashiers • Jackson County Farmers Market. 3:30-6:30pm, Innovation Station, 40 Depot St, Dillsboro Thursdays • ASAP Farmers Market at A-B Tech. 9am-12pm, 340 Victoria Rd • Flat Rock Farmers Market.

3-6pm, 1790 Greenville Hwy, Hendersonville • Enka-Candler Tailgate Market. 3:30-6:30pm, 70 Pisgah Hwy, Candler Fridays • Marion Tailgate Market.

10am-3pm, 67 W Henderson St, Marion Saturdays • North Asheville Tailgate Market. 8am-12pm, UNC Asheville, Lot C

• Yancey County Farmers Market. 8:30am-12:30pm,10 S Main St, Burnsville

• Black Mountain Tailgate Market. 9am-12pm, 130 Montreat Rd, Black Mountain

Seniors’ Group Exercise Class Total body workout.

SA (8/22), 11am, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7wj Steady Collective Syringe Access Outreach Free educational material, naloxone, syringes and supplies.

TU (8/25), 2pm, Firestorm, 610 Haywood Rd

FESTIVALS & FAIRS

Living Beyond Breast Cancer: Session 4 Pardee UNC survivorship series for young women.

TU (8/25), 6pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/64a

Fringe Digital Summer Vol. 3 Music, dance and spoken word.

WE (8/19), 7:30pm, Free, avl.mx/7vw

Intro to Medicare: Understanding the Puzzle How to avoid penalties and save money.

TH (8/27), 2pm, Registration required, Free, coabc.org

Summer Pop-up Market Local vendors and artists.

SA (8/22), 11am, Hi-Wire Brewing, 2A Huntsman Place

First Contact Ministries Recovery support meeting.

TH (8/27), 6:30pm, avl.mx/7ko

• Haywood’s Historic Farmers Market. 9am-12pm, 250 Pigeon St, Waynesville

The Booth Fairy's Traveling Trunk Show Vintage pop-up.

FR (8/28), 12pm, Ambrose West, 312 Haywood Rd

SPIRITUALITY

Haywood Library: Step-byStep Painting Ages 10 and up.

FR (8/21), 10am, Free, avl.mx/7wx

Appalachian Tea Ceremony (PD.) Mary Plantwalker will be hosting an Appalachian Tea Ceremony every 3rd Thursday of the month!

Come and enjoy local infusions with heartfelt offerings in a beautiful setting. Donation based.

Registration required: info@herbmountainfarm. com. Weaverville at Herb Mountain Farm off Maney Branch. Email for directions.

4:00-5:30pm.

History's Mysteries: Ancient American Indian Artifacts Outdoor class and activities hosted by Swannanoa Valley Museum.

SA (8/22), 10am, $5, Black Mountain UMC, 101 Church St, Black Mountain

Practicing Detachment in Troubled Times Devotional, prayer and music with the Bahá'ís of Buncombe County.

WE (8/19), 7pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7vj

Miss Malaprop's Storytime Ages 3-9.

WE (8/26), 10am, Free, avl.mx/73b

Getting Ahead in a JustGettin'-By World Community problem solving workshop.

TH (8/27), 5:45pm, Foster Church, 375 Hendersonville Rd

KIDS Haywood Library: Storytime Ages 2-6.

TH (8/20), 10am, Free, avl.mx/7ww

WELLNESS Alzheimer’s Association Workshop Healthy living for your brain and body during a pandemic.

WE (8/19), 12pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7wf Substance Abuse 101: The New Science of Substance Use Disorders Training with Bob Cummings of Red Oak Recovery.

WE (8/19), 6:30pm, Registration required, Free, avl.mx/7yx Tranzmission: QTPOC Support Meeting Questions: info@ tranzmission.org.

TH (8/20), 6:30pm, avl.mx/7we

VOLUNTEERING American Red Cross Blood Drive Free COVID-19 antibody tests for donors. Register: redcrossblood.org/give.

FR (8/21), 11am, Asheville Outlets, 800 Brevard Rd Blood Connection Blood Drive Register: avl.mx/7oy.

MO (8/24), 2pm, Hillman Beer, 25 Sweeten Creek Rd YPA Community Service Day Food packing. Register: avl.mx/7y2.

TU (8/25), 6pm, MANNA FoodBank, 627 Swannanoa River Rd

HEALTH ROUNDUP

by Xpress Staff | news@mountainx.com

Adult day program loses space For older adults who benefit from safe and structured daytime activities — and their family members, who often need a break from caregiving — access to an adult day program can make the difference between living at home and moving to a nursing facility.

MountainCare, which operated under the CarePartners umbrella prior to HCA Healthcare’s 2019 purchase of Mission Health, runs adult day programs in Asheville, Brevard and Flat Rock.

It’s not easy: For one thing, state reimbursement rates for the programming don’t cover the cost of providing it, says Elizabeth Williams, MountainCare’s executive director.

The challenge of making the numbers work got harder in April, when Pardee UNC Health Care notified MountainCare that it would no longer donate the use of the 6,000-square-foot building that houses MountainCare’s Henderson County adult day program.

MountainCare must move out by the end of the year to allow Pardee to reuse or sell the building. Pre-pandemic, about 30 people took part in the Henderson County program every weekday.

On Aug. 6, Williams appealed to the community for help in locating a free or low-cost space where the program could continue operating. Likely candidates include a church meeting hall, civic organization facility, former child care space or other facility with accessibility to those who have mobility issues.

Since her call for help, Williams has received many ideas and suggestions, but no solid leads. “The important thing is just to try to keep some services in Henderson County as we get stable as an organization,” she explains. Community members can contact Williams at elizabethw@mtncare.org or 828-820-2152.

After closing on March 17 due to the coronavirus pandemic, MountainCare reopened on July 1 and is serving smaller groups of adult day participants at each location.

“The timing is just so difficult. It’s our first year as an independent organization, and then COVID,” says Williams.

“I’m really dedicated to making sure Henderson continues to have an adult day. It has such an impact on the families that it serves.”

Community kudos

• Harris Regional Hospital in Sylva was named to Newsweek’s 2020 list of the

offerings for the fall semester. At its main campus, the institution added psychiatric technician and substance abuse education tracks for students interested in mental health careers; the courses are funded by a grant from Pisgah Health Foundation. BRCC also announced three health care courses at its Transylvania County campus: phlebotomy, health care billing and coding and nurse aide.

• Range Urgent Care now offers house calls to all Asheville zip codes. The visits can provide services including lab and diagnostic tests, IV fluids and injections at a patient’s home or other location. House call vehicles also carry a selection of the most common prescription medications for urgent care issues, eliminating the need for a separate trip to the pharmacy.

House call visits can be scheduled at rangeurgentcare.com and cost the same as a visit at a Range clinic plus a $49 dispatch fee.

LOVING LIFE: Mills River resident Mark Forbes takes part in adult day programming at MountainCare’s Flat Rock location. Here, Forbes observes Valentine’s Day as part of the organization’s Love is in the Air celebration in February. Photo courtesy of MountainCare best maternity care hospitals. The list was compiled using data from the 2019 Leapfrog Hospital Survey.

• A partnership between Henderson County and The Free Clinics received a Local Government Federal Credit Union Excellence in Innovation Award. The joint program provides substance use disorder diagnosis and treatment for individuals in the county detention center and creates a plan for treatment after their release.

• Dr. Michael Messino of Messino Cancer Centers received the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, North Carolina’s highest award for service to the state, from Sen. Terry Van Duyn on behalf of Gov. Roy Cooper.

• Jessica Shuford, a registered nurse at AdventHealth Hematology Oncology Infusion Services Asheville, has received the DAISY Award, which recognizes outstanding patient care.

• Nurses Dave Przestrzelski and Jim Luetkenhaus received Secretary of Veterans Affairs’ Awards for Excellence in Nursing and for Advancement in Nursing Programs during a virtual cer-

emony July 17 at the Charles George VA Medical Center.

• Skyterra Wellness in Lake Toxaway was named one of the top three wellness retreats in the country by USA Today’s annual Readers’ Choice awards. The resort has earned the distinction for three consecutive years.

New on the scene

• Worried about skin cancer? Get checked at a free community screening Tuesday, Aug. 25, 5:30-7 p.m. at Pardee Family and Sports Medicine at 3334 Boylston Highway, Mills River. For appointments, call 828-698-7317 or visit pardeehospital.org/classes-events.

• Pardee UNC Health Care added robotic guidance and navigation to its spine surgery toolbox. According to a hospital press release, the improved accuracy offered by the technology may contribute to “less blood loss, less muscle damage and faster recovery.”

• Blue Ridge Community College expanded its health care course

Good to know

• Jeddidiah W.D. Griffin, an assistant professor of biology at Mars Hill University, published a paper that explores how an enzyme involved in the reproduction of the virus that causes COVID-19 might be inhibited by an antiviral drug.

• At the July 29 meeting of the Pardee UNC Health Care board of directors, a new executive committee was elected: Tammy Albrecht, chair; Greg Burnette, vice chair; Tommy Thompson, secretary; and Chip Gould, treasurer. Pardee also added Myles Fish as executive director of the Pardee Hospital Foundation.

• Dr. Kevan Hansel joined Pardee Adult and Family Medicine at 1824 Pisgah Drive, Hendersonville.

• Dr. Marianna Benson joined AdventHealth Medical Group Multispecialty at Laurel Park in Hendersonville, where she will provide primary care with a focus on geriatrics.

• Project Dignity of WNC, which provides free feminine hygiene products to hundreds of women and girls, received a $25,000 grant from Pisgah Health Foundation. Period products cannot be purchased with public food assistance benefits, and the monthly costs, including sales taxes, can be prohibitive for many women. X

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GREEN SCENE

Measuring up

State researchers release first reports on PFAS in WNC water

BY DANIEL WALTON dwalton@mountainx.com Scientists with the N.C. Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Testing Network racked up a lot of miles last year. From April through October 2019, researchers from Duke University and N.C. State University visited all of the state’s 191 municipal drinking water systems to collect raw water samples, which they then analyzed for dozens of so-called “forever chemicals.”

What made those scientists spend so much time on the road, and what made the N.C. General Assembly allocate over $5 million to fund their work in 2018? According to Detlef Knappe, co-lead of the N.C. PFAST Network’s testing team and a professor at N.C. State, it all goes back to Wilmington.

Measurements in 2013-15 by the federal Environmental Protection Agency, Knappe explains, detected

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NAVIGATING THE WATERS: Duke University scientist Abigail Joyce takes a sample for PFAS testing as part of the N.C. PFAST Network’s work. Photo courtesy of Detlef Knappe

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PFAS concentrations of just 27 parts per trillion near the intake for the coastal North Carolina city’s drinking water. But a 2019 analysis of preserved water samples from that period using better methods found total PFAS levels exceeding 100,000 ppt, with the contamination tied to a Chemours Co. chemical manufacturing plant in Fayetteville 80 miles upstream of the intake. The EPA regards combined PFAS chemicals at 70 ppt or greater as potentially hazardous to human health.

His team’s widespread testing, Knappe says, is meant “to provide greater confidence about the water quality that enters drinking water systems around the state — and to avoid surprises like we had in Wilmington.”

The N.C. PFAST Network’s most recent results, publicly released in July, suggest that no such surprises are lurking in Western North Carolina’s water supplies. None of the systems that serve readers in the Mountain Xpress coverage area exceeded the EPA’s advisory

Responsible Automotive Service & Repair limit for PFAS chemicals. Nor did any system have more than 10 ppt of any individual PFAS, the level at which the N.C. Department of Environmental Quality recommends water filtration.

However, the researchers found that even WNC’s most pristine mountain waters weren’t completely devoid of contamination. Five area systems, respectively serving Asheville, Black Mountain, Mars Hill, Old Fort and Sylva, all had detectable levels of at least one PFAS compound.

IN THE WILD

Lee Ferguson, Knappe’s collaborator on the testing effort and a professor at Duke, emphasizes caution in interpreting WNC’s PFAS results. “There’s a huge difference between detectable and adverse to health,” he explains. “It is absolutely clear from the mapping data that the sites in Western North Carolina are considerably lower than the sites in Central and in some of Eastern North Carolina.”

The team’s analytical methods are also extremely sensitive, capable of detecting 1 nanogram of a given chemical in a liter of water — the equivalent of one penny in a stack of coins nearly 944,000 miles high. While researchers take great care to validate their results, Ferguson says, false positives are certainly possible when measuring such tiny quantities.

Nevertheless, Knappe says the results show how potentially toxic human-made chemicals have become omnipresent in the environment. The substances discharged by a manufacturing plant in Fayetteville can be carried away on the wind, then deposited hundreds of miles away in protected watersheds through rain. “I don’t know if there’s a place on the globe that doesn’t have any PFAS,” he says.

And because PFAS compounds contain many bonds between carbon and fluorine, one of the strongest linkages in chemistry, they don’t break down easily. The federal National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences says researchers have been “unable to estimate” how long PFAS chemicals can persist.

But Knappe suggests that Western North Carolina residents should likely be more concerned about sources of PFAS within their own homes than about contamination of water supplies.

Carpets, microwave popcorn bags and furniture stain repellents, he points out, all often make use of PFAS compounds for their nonstick qualities. People can then ingest the chemicals through eating food packaged with PFAS or inhale them as part of indoor dust.

“I can measure cocaine in Raleigh drinking water at picograms per liter [a thousand times less concentrated than the PFAS detection limit], and I don’t know whether that’s exciting or not,” Knappe says. “If you have a method that’s supersensitive, you can find just about anything, but the question is if it’s relevant from a health perspective.”

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The local officials responsible for overseeing WNC’s municipal drinking water systems take a similar view of the N.C. PFAST Network’s results. All of those contacted by Xpress said the low PFAS levels detected in their raw water supplies were not a cause for concern.

“There’s nothing but trees and mountainsides around our watershed,” says Nathan Bennett, town manager for Mars Hill, in a representative response.

At a total PFAS concentration of 2.7 ppt — less than 4% of the EPA’s 70 ppt advisory level — he says “there’s no reason to pursue it with the results they’ve given us.”

Leslie Carreiro, who manages water production and quality for the city of Asheville, notes that the only PFAS compounds detected in the city’s raw water sources were from the Mills River, not the protected North Fork Reservoir northeast of the city near Black Mountain that provides about 70% of Asheville’s water. The Mills River is primarily fed from the Pisgah National Forest, she adds, with no known local sources of PFAS. And Sylva’s Tuckaseigee Water & Sewer Authority questions the validity of testing at its water intake, which found 1.2 ppt of GenX, a chemical with many of the same properties as PFAS. Executive Director Daniel Manring notes that the authority shares its water source with Western Carolina University’s water treatment plant, for which researchers found no PFAS compounds.

“It does not make any sense that WCU would be absent while we have a ‘reportable’ result,” Manring argues.

“The other question is whether 1.2 ppt is actually reportable.”

Ferguson acknowledges that the PFAST team’s results to date are limited, based as they are on just one round of sampling. He says the researchers intend to take further measurements to better understand how PFAS levels fluctuate over time, particularly in water systems where the team previously detected the chemicals: “A single snapshot, or even two snapshots, isn’t necessarily sufficient.” X

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Taste buds

BY KAY WEST kwest@mountainx.com When Andy Hale was a restaurant sommelier studying for rigorous exams to achieve higher certifications, he and a buddy doing the same honed their skills by staging blind tastings after work. “We would pop the cork on a couple of bottles and challenge each other to figure out what they were,” he says. “If we got it right, we’d drink the rest of the bottle to celebrate. If we got it wrong, we’d drink the rest of the bottle to drown our shame.

It was fun either way.”

Hale, now the director of the Asheville School of Wine at Metro Wines, thought people interested in wine would enjoy what he calls an “educational drinking game,” so he founded the Blind Tasting League. Before COVID-19, as many as 30 people gathered monthly in the classroom at Metro Wines to sniff, eyeball and taste their way through two unknown whites and two reds to deduce climate, grape variety or blend and whether they were Old World or New World, then reach conclusions and make a guess.

On Wednesday, Aug. 19, at 5:30 p.m., Hale takes the BTL where no tasting has gone before, making his Facebook Live debut with a guided event where participants can play aspiring sommelier in the privacy of their own homes. Two wines — one red, one white — will be available for tasters to buy in advance at Metro Wines, wrapped in brown bags, no peeking. Accompanying printed materials can be downloaded from the BTL blog (avl.mx/7x5), site of an amusing introductory video by Hale. “We try hard to be anti-wine-snob,” he says reassuringly.

The free virtual tastings (the wines cost about $20 each) require no RSVP

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Wine, beer, cider and cheese tasting events are moving online

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BAG MAN: Metro Wines’ Andy Hale challenges wine lovers to participate in the monthly blind tastings he will conduct on Facebook Live. The mystery wines — one red, one white — are available at the shop for pre-purchase, securely wrapped.

Photo courtesy Metro Wines and will be held the third Wednesday of each month.

GRAB A GLASS

No guessing games are involved with Sierra Nevada’s free virtual beer tastings presented every Friday at 5 p.m. via Zoom. “We miss seeing people, and this is a way to keep that connection going,” says Amy Ebling, tour supervisor at the brewery’s Mills River location, which remains fully closed to the public.

Reservations are required (avl.mx/7x6) in order to receive the link to join in; participants will also be told which beers will be tasted and discussed so they can purchase and chill the selections in advance of the 45-minute primer.

Ebling or tour coordinator Ashly White will welcome Zoomers, then introduce certified tour guide Mason Ward, who will weave stories from Sierra Nevada’s 40-year history throughout the tastings along with details about four or five styles of beer. Ebling recommends having a glass on hand. “So much of what we perceive as taste is also smell, so when you pour it in a glass, you’ll get more sensory components.”

CHEESE, PLEASE

Local beer, wine, cider and cheese are explored in the virtual paired tastings that have replaced the live events conducted by Katie Moore, executive director of the WNC Cheese Trail, which hosts the annual Carolina Mountain Cheese Fest. “The tastings and pairings were one of the main ways we kept the trail and our member businesses alive in people’s minds through the year,” she says. “We wanted to figure out a way to do that when we can’t gather in person.”

Tickets to Moore’s online pairings include a kit for two that must be picked up in advance of the hour-long event.

The first on June 15 was a wine-andcheese collaboration with plēb urban winery; on Aug. 13, the second explored beer and cheese was with Blue Ghost Brewing. The third, which takes place Thursday, Aug. 27, with TreeRock Social Cider House, will feature two ciders, one mead, three local cheeses, crackers, olives and nuts for $35 (avl.mx/7x7).

“The beverage makers talk about their product, and I talk about the cheeses,” Moore explains. “We do a little Q&A at the end and record them for people who buy tickets but can’t make the set time.

It’s been fun and successful, so we plan to keep doing them.” X

Take your pick

WNC apple orchards have plenty of fruit and distancing space for healthy outdoor fun

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APPLE-ATCHA: Kameron and Colby Creasman Buchanan, Bobby, Dawn and Haley Creasman are ready to welcome pickers at Creasman Farms apple orchard in Hendersonville. Photo credit Alice Wannamaker The N.C. Apple Festival marks its 74th anniversary this year, but like everything else planned for 2020, the celebration will unfold differently from its traditional Labor Day weekend takeover of downtown Hendersonville. This year, there will be no King Apple Parade, no live entertainment, no Kiddie Carnival and no grower booths brimming with appleliciousness.

“We couldn’t have a festival with 50,000 people,” says David Nicholson, executive director of the festival. “We are canceling the large events but still celebrating apples. We want people to know they can still come to our community and buy fresh apples from a local grower.”

The 20-plus varieties of apples grown in Western North Carolina — many in orchards in Henderson County — are following various ripening schedules from late July through November. Local farms that rely on tourists to purchase prepicked apples on-site or pick their own are stressing that they have plenty of room for quarantine-weary families itching to get out and roam their orchards.

“We opened a little early this year because we noticed people are eager to find something to do in the fresh air,” says David Butler, who owns Sky Top Orchard in Flat Rock with his wife, Lindsey Butler. “It is safe to come to a 125-acre apple orchard to pick your own.”

Like other orchards, Sky Top has added COVID-related precautions. “We require masks in the building,” he says.

“We used to give you a basket for picking, then would put your apples in a bag to take home. This year, we’re selling a

beautiful basket with your apple purchase, so it’s a one-touch operation.”

Justus Orchard in Hendersonville is open daily for U-pick 8:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. and offers a bakery and limited children’s activities on weekends. “People pay for the size box they want, pick and carry that box home,” says Don Justus, fourth of five generations working the farm. Justus says perennial favorite varieties Gala and Honey Crisp will be ripe for pickin’ by the third week of August, and the orchard’s Facebook page lists other varieties’ availability.

Creasman Farms would have spent its 22nd consecutive Labor Day Weekend at the festival, says farm manager Colby Creasman Buchanan. Instead, the Hendersonville farm will stage a minifest of its own, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. FridaySunday, Sept. 4-6. “We’ll have U-pick apple bags, baked goods, cider slushies, two local craft vendors and a daily food truck,” she says. Creasman also welcomes U-pickers 1-6 p.m. Sundays in September and October.

Nicholson points out that the festival website, ncapplefestival.org, links to the event’s 14 growers with instructions on how to safely visit their farms and purchase their apples. He says he intends to visit each one on his personal mission to find the best apple pie and reassure farmers that the festival will return. “We are already planning for our 75th anniversary in 2021,” he says. “We’ll be back bigger than ever.”

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WASTE NOT: Asheville will participate in the Food Matters Project to help reduce food waste through strategies such as composting food scraps. Photo courtesy of NRDC Asheville is the smallest of the four cities recently chosen to participate in the Southeast Regional Initiative of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Food Matters Project. And Asheville sustainability officer Amber Weaver believes the city’s previous work in identifying and addressing food waste was an asset in the application process.

“We have done a lot of work around these issues, such as two Food Waste Solutions Summits in partnership with local nonprofits and working with the county and the state, so I think that piqued NRDC’s interest in working with us,” she says. The Southeast cohort also includes Atlanta, Memphis and Orlando.

The Food Matters Project partners with cities to achieve meaningful reductions in food waste through comprehensive policies and proven programs.

The pilot program was initiated in Nashville, Tenn., in 2015 and the collaboration continues as the Nashville Food Waste Initiative led by the 11-year-old nonprofit Urban Green Lab. The first step, says Weaver, will be to establish a work plan for the city’s Office of Sustainability (no new staff will be hired). Next will be to select action items to implement based on strategies defined by the NRDC, which include setting targets, leading by example, addressing policy barriers, increasing public awareness, engaging local businesses, expanding food rescue

capacity, engaging health inspectors and expanding community composting efforts.

Though the four cities will focus on some of the same strategies, Asheville has some unique operational structures, such as a county-owned and operated landfill and transfer station.

There are also general COVID-related challenges to contend with, such as implementing a food waste audit at a large food consumption facility. “One of the NRDC strategies is auditing a large food arena, but how do we do that when the arena is closed?” asks Weaver. “We can spend time making a preparation plan for when we actually are able to do it. ” Throughout the 12- to 18-month working partnership, there will be monthly check-ins with the cohort as well as monthly one-on-one meetings with NRDC representatives to discuss specifics about how Asheville is working toward achieving goals.

“This initiative will help us gather information to better understand food waste reduction efforts and how we can best communicate those with both business and residential users,” Weaver says. “There has been a lot of change in leadership at the county level, which we believe offers us many opportunities to work together on creative strategies.”

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ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT

Maker’s mark

Tyler Capps finds creative calling with arcade briefcase

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PORTABLE BLISS: Asheville maker Tyler Capps pauses while working on The Negotiator, the folding case arcade machine that he first designed in 2019. Photo by Laura Williams

BY EDWIN ARNAUDIN earnaudin@mountainx.com In March 2019, Asheville resident Tyler Capps was living in Charleston, S.C., when his brother Nate asked him to help turn a glass-top coffee table into a cocktail arcade machine. Using a computer monitor that Nate found at a thrift store and a small, versatile Raspberry Pi computer — which, with the right software installed, can run almost any old video game from Atari to Playstation 1 — the siblings successfully completed what Tyler calls a “pretty simple project.” Invigorated by the endeavor, Tyler felt inspired to look into more ambitious uses for the Raspberry Pi in terms of game systems.

“Before this, neither of us had made anything quite like that, but we had both subscribed to and watched different makers on YouTube. He had seen a lot of Bob Clagett’s projects, and I had been following people like Jimmy 22

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DiResta, Simone Giertz, Adam Savage and Laura Kampf for years.” Capps says. “I was always envious of the things they were able to make, and that maker community is a big reason that I took the leap to start my own projects.”

THE BRIEFCASE SOLUTION

One month later, Capps committed to making a portable gaming system, which he initially thought would be built into a preexisting suitcase or briefcase. But after looking at numerous unsatisfactory options at thrift stores, he realized he would need to make a custom case and turned his attention to woodworking and making a high-quality product. Without tools of his own or experience working with wood and only a passing knowledge of electronics, Capps also knew he needed assistance — and found it in his neighborhood.

“I have been aware of maker spaces for a few years now and I had even

sought them out before but never joined one. Reforge Charleston just happened to be right around the corner from where I was living at the time and was one of the more capable maker spaces I’d ever seen,” Capps says. “They had a full wood shop, [computer numerical control machines], laser cutters, 3D printers, etc. I learned more there over the five months that I was a member than I had in years. I owe a lot to that space and the people there.”

During that time, Capps used Adobe Illustrator and Tinkercad to aid the design, plus guidance from a few Reforge members and what he calls “a lot of YouTube videos.” He then utilized such items as a salvaged 15.6inch screen from a disused laptop, old desktop PC speakers, pine boards, birch plywood, plus arcade controller parts, including joysticks, buttons, controller boards and wiring.

After some trial and error — during which he ingeniously discovered that

the screw-on joystick ball tops, which had been preventing the case from closing, could double as an exterior carry handle — Capps’ odyssey suddenly seemed to be complete. Anxious to see if his hard work had paid off, he turned on the machine and, with everything functioning as intended, felt an indescribable sense of satisfaction.

Right in front of him was physical proof that he belonged in the world of makers, and by learning to trust himself in this manner, he believes that he has found a new calling.

“It might sound silly, but the process of designing and building that first arcade case was a revelation for me. It was the most daunting and complex thing I had ever challenged myself to complete, and it ended up rearranging some priorities in my life,” Capps says.

“Given how many things I didn’t know going into it, it seems a little insane in hindsight. But I poured myself into the process. I used every skill I know, and I stepped out of my comfort zone over and over again to learn new skills that I needed. It felt right — like I was doing exactly what I was built for.”

REPLICATING THE MAGIC

Capps dubbed his creation The Negotiator. “The name comes from a silly idea that this box might be a kind of briefcase you would take to a business negotiation,” he says. “And the negotiation would involve competitive head-to-head arcade games.”

In spring 2020, Capps posted a GIF of The Negotiator to Reddit, and the post’s popularity prompted him to start making them on commission. He named his one-man operation End Boss Customs, launched a website and began taking orders — with the caveat that no games be included. Through open-source software RetroPie, retro games can be legally played on the Raspberry Pi, but since selling ROMs — digital versions of old cartridge or disc-based games — is a legal gray area that Capps would rather avoid, he instead includes detailed, easy-to-understand instructions for customers to add games to the machine.

“This is definitely not something I could patent, but, more importantly, it isn’t something I would ever want to patent. If someone wants to make their own, I highly encourage it. I want to

Why I support Xpress:

inspire people to make stuff the way I was inspired to make stuff,” he says, noting that he’s by no means the first person to make a folding case arcade machine. “The most notable and most amazing is a Swedish maker named Love Hultén. He is incredibly talented and makes funky high-end custom game systems and electronic instruments. He’s much fancier than me — for now, anyway.”

Capps describes his current order volume as “a trickle” — “It’s not booming, but it’s not nothing … and I’m very grateful for that,” he says — and feels more than capable of handling the current workload. He asks for up to two months to build and deliver the finished product and says that feedback from customers has been great.

“I’ve got some good constructive criticisms that have led to minor quality-of-life design changes,” he says. “One customer said he and his son have been playing it side by side and beating old games together like Altered Beast. That’s amazing and super satisfying to hear.”

Now living in Asheville, Capps has made the last couple of Negotiators by using a combination of the downtown Asheville Makers’ space — which he describes as home to “great people,” but not as robust as Reforge and lacking wood shop tools — and the Harvest House’s wood shop in Kenilworth.

The COVID-19 pandemic understandably shut those options down, so he’s been “bumming some friends’ tools and workshops.”

Capps’ dream is to one day have a small shop space of his own where, in time carved out on the side from his full-time job in production and facility maintenance at Smith Systems in Brevard, he can work on Negotiators and other projects that he’s dreamed up.

He has a lot of different case designs in mind and eventually wants to create a handheld device.

“I also want to produce and sell simpler DIY kits for people who want to assemble a game system themselves,” he says. “It would be really cool to build custom projects for brewery spaces — once things have calmed down, that is. I’ve also dabbled in making puzzle boxes with custom-designed locks and mechanisms that I would love to make more of. I have tons of ideas.” endbosscustoms.com X

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A&E ROUNDUP

by Edwin Arnaudin | earnaudin@mountainx.com

Pickens to create Wortham Center mural A few weeks after completing her role as one of the three lead artists on the Asheville Area Arts Council’s downtown Black Lives Matter mural, Jenny Pickens is hard at work on her next endeavor. The Asheville native is the first artist-in-residence for Randy Shull’s and Hedy Fischer’s 22 London studio and exhibition space, and has been commissioned to design and paint a 4-by-24-foot mural for the courtyard of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. In designing the mural, Pickens researched thousands of performances at the Wortham Center and filtered her findings down to images that synthesize over 20 years of programming.

She recently began working on the three-panel mural at 22 London and aims to have it completed by the end of August or early September. Shortly thereafter, it will be installed in the courtyard. avl.mx/7y5

Writing range

Among the books by local authors published in August are a pair of decidedly different offerings. Available since Aug. 11, Bee Locke’s Creative Woodburning (avl.mx/7y7) is a visual guide for pyrographers of all levels, featuring 20 step-by-step projects that teach readers the basics, plus advanced techniques like shading, creating realistic fur and adding color. Joining it is Sebastian Matthews’ Beyond Repair: Living in a Fractured State (avl.mx/7y8), a memoir in essays that finds the author struggling to reconnect with society after three years of recovering at home following injuries from a major car accident. The book, which attempts to capture the polarized condition of the

NATIVE DESIGN: Asheville-based artist Jenny Pickens is hard at work on a mural for the courtyard of the Wortham Center for the Performing Arts. Her sketches, left, for the final product synthesize over 20 years of performances at the theater. Photos by Hedy Fischer nation 2014-19, will be published on Tuesday, Aug. 25.

Perseverance Local singer-songwriter Chris Wilhelm is back with This Too Shall Pass, his first full-length album in five years.

The self-described “record for survivors, outsiders and dreamers” finds the guitarist/vocalist revealing previously

unexpressed layers of vulnerability and will be performed in full on Thursday, Aug. 20, at 6:30 p.m., on the Isis Music Hall lawn. Wilhelm will be joined by his backing band from the album, composed of Josh Maddox (drums), Chris Rosser (keyboard, guitars), Zack Page (standup bass) and Asher Leigh (backing vocals). The program will also include favorite earlier tracks from Wilhelm’s catalog and a few cover songs. Tickets are $15. isisasheville.com

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It might get loud

Once the site of the participatory “Before I Die” chalkboard, the wall on Biltmore Avenue between the Bender Gallery and Shanghai Dumpling House has been transformed into an outdoor gallery by local photographer John Gellman. In June and July, his snapshots of local buskers attracted the attention of numerous pedestrians, and since Aug. 9, the wall has played host to 50 Years of Music Photography or How to Go Deaf Without Really Trying.

The latest show features images of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, CSNY, Duane Allman, Ronnie Van Zant, Charlie Daniels and other icons from Gellman’s decades-long tenure as a rock photographer. “How long the new show will remain depends upon how many prints are removed by passersby, or if the owners of the wall make me stop,” Gellman says. jgphoto.com

Back to school

The 2020 Wortham Center for the Performing Arts’ Youth Education Scholarship Emerging Artists Fund win-

ners have been announced, aiding high school graduates who plan to pursue a career in the performing arts. The gifted local students are: T.C. Roberson High School vocalist/actor Anaiya Adwaters, who plans to pursue musical theater at UNC Greensboro; Enka High School guitarist Linda Diaz (music, UNC Asheville); A.C. Reynolds High School tubist Chayse Howard (music education, Appalachian State University); T.C. Roberson vocalist/actor Katherine Stevens (dramatic art and music/vocal performance, UNC Chapel Hill); Nesbitt Discovery Academy saxophonist and actor Julien Swoap (theater, creative writing and physics, Hamilton College); Enka clarinetist Shelby Taylor (music performance and graphic design, Western Carolina University); and T.C. Roberson trumpeter Aaron White (trumpet performance, Arizona State University). worthamarts.org

Clay unity

In April, when her Village Potters Clay Center was unable to operate as usual due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Sarah Wells Rolland persevered by remaining hopeful — and decided to make and sell

500 vessels for the fundraiser Vessels of Hope to keep the River Arts District studio going. “I could not have foreseen the glorious experience that was about to unfold,” she says. “I have received an outpouring of love and encouragement from all of you, and it has sustained me through the momentous project.”

Though in-person classes with limited capacity have returned in the interim, the current critical nature of sales has inspired Rolland and the six other artists who call the space home to embark upon Vessels of Hope: Chapter Two. Lori Theriault is making 100 bowls with sgraffito trees carved into the surfaces; Christine Henry, 50 vases with impressions from objects found in nature; Judi Harwood, 100 small saggar vessels; Tori Motyl, 50 baskets with cane handles; Julia Mann, 100 candle lanterns; new addition Katie Messersmith, 100 vessels; and Rolland will make a limited series of 25 large vessels. “We are believing that the Vessels of Hope: Chapter Two project will carry us through November and hopefully well into 2021,” Roland says. thevillagepotters.com X

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

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A&E

Out of the garden

Sally Anne Morgan makes old-time music for modern minds The first time that old-time music truly clicked for Sally Anne Morgan, she wasn’t even playing it.

For the better part of a decade, Morgan flirted with the fiddle tunes and bluegrass standards of Appalachia.

As a teenager outside of Washington, D.C., she asked her parents to shuttle her to social jams in nearby parks, where she’d muster her best version of some fiddle break she’d studied in an instruction manual. Years later, during college at Virginia Tech, she’d go to jams and house shows in Blacksburg, sometimes traipsing 30 miles south to the fabled Friday dances at The Floyd Country Store.

Nevertheless, she felt like an outsider peering in — the former middle-school orchestral violinist trying to tap into some of the country’s oldest and most ecstatic music. The legacy was intimidating, she remembers, a locked treasure chest of culture. But while idly biking through Blacksburg in 2009, a fiddle tune she’d heard somewhere popped into her head, like the chorus of some chart-topping anthem.

“I went home and played this tune,” remembers Morgan of “Ducks on the Millpond,” an ebullient favorite. “And from there it snowballed. I became obsessed — I played other tunes, started listening all the time, going to festivals. It even became a fun social thing because I could lead a tune now.”

For much of the last decade, Morgan has been a fresh, energetic voice in a new wave of Appalachian music. In Blacksburg, she joined The Black Twig Pickers, a spirited crew of old-time revivalists. And several years after mov-

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ANIMAL FARM: On their 4-acre spread in Alexander, Sally Anne Morgan and her husband have sheep, chickens, guinea hens, a cow, a goat and a donkey that roam the pasture alongside their dogs, Agnes and Barney. Photo by Katrina Ohstrom ing to Asheville in 2012, she and guitarist Sarah Louise Henson co-founded House and Land, a duo that bends seemingly bucolic sounds into surreal shapes through exploratory improvisation and mystic textures.

That’s likewise the path Morgan pursues for her absorbing solo debut, Thread (out Sept. 11), a nine-track excursion from transcontinental standards to trance-inducing instrumentals and back again. For Morgan, Thread is, in some respects, an exercise in the same sort of passive creativity that led her to that first fiddle tune a decade ago.

“The less I try, the better it is,” Morgan says, laughing by phone as she strolls along the shore of Georgia’s Tybee Island during a brief and socially distant vacation. “For so long, I tried to learn music from a book. It felt like work. But now I understand that, at least for my brain, there’s a lot of subconscious processing. All of a sudden, I wake up with new things in my head.”

For the last two years, Morgan has reveled in the processing space that her newly rural lifestyle has allowed.

In 2018, she and her husband, Andrew Zinn, moved from Asheville to

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Alexander — a community alongside Buncombe County’s northern edge — and purchased a home one ridge over from the French Broad River.

The listing for their 4-acre spread advertised two steers, but by the time they could close, the cows had escaped.

Morgan and Zinn, however, were already taken with the idea of a modest homestead. Sheep, chickens, guinea hens, a cow, a goat and a donkey now roam the pasture alongside their dogs, Agnes and Barney. Their garden has exploded, too, from a little urban plot in West Asheville to a riot of squash, peppers and greens.

“We’re very much learning about farming as we go, talking to neighbors for advice,” Morgan says. “One thing about that work is that, as you busy yourself with something that’s not music, some idea will come from the side. And that’s true of the artwork I respond to the most — not overwrought or superstructured, but from the gut.”

Thread feels delightfully fluid and open, a complex portrait of a musician happily rooted in Appalachia but influenced by a world teeming with ideas.

“Garden Song,” a majestic and patient

ode to summer’s bounty, sits alongside “Sheep Shaped,” a fiddle-and-drum stomp that seems to treat Mississippi fife master Otha Turner and German rock visionaries Faust as equal icons.

And though the long violin tones and ghostly piano chords of “Ellemwood Meditation” frame an endless expanse of exurban ambient music, “Sugar in the Gourd” is an excitable fiddle triumph, pointing like a finger toward the dance floor.

Though Morgan is known best for that fiddle, she plays guitar or banjo on six of these nine songs. She often sits on her Alexander porch, playing the antique Supertone Pearletta parlor guitar she found in an Asheville shop. Her stunning solo electric guitar rendition of “Wagoner’s Lad” — an Appalachian standard collected in North Carolina a century ago by Olive Dame Campbell and since covered by the likes of Joan Baez — lands here like a timely anthem for women’s empowerment, specifically peeling away from the pleasantries of meeting expectations. Likewise, Thread is not concerned with the purity tests of traditionalism or the strictures of genre.

Morgan admits now that her relationship with old-time music has gotten complicated in recent years, a reckoning that unspools throughout Thread. She’s started to realize and reckon with the racist past of what may seem anodyne tunes, as epitomized by “Swannanoa Tunnel,” a Western North Carolina staple she learned long ago that whitewashes the cruelty of Black prison labor after Reconstruction. She ponders the way popular field recordings essentially plundered families for their artistic inheritance. And she knows that, from writing to performing, women have sometimes been pushed into background roles in mountain music, even in the service of songs that documented and soundtracked their domestic and social lives.

Mostly, though, Morgan has realized that she doesn’t want her creativity to be confined to presenting the past and upholding songs that might not reflect the world in 2020. These tunes can instead be a springboard for the songs she wants to write — about the summertime joys of tending her garden, the wintertime warmth of homestead domesticity and the ceaseless wonder of the golden hour in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

“I’ve always been a person who’s easily duped by nostalgic feelings, but I’m seeing the problems with that,” Morgan says. “It sounds so cheesy, but I am ready to create something new, to be free to synthesize things that are important to me.” sallyannemorgan.com

— Grayson Haver Currin X

CLUBLAND

Online Event= q WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19 OKLAWAHA BREWING CO. French Broad Valley Mountain Music Jam, 6pm 185 KING STREET Team Trivia & Games, 7pm CATAWBA BREWING SOUTH SLOPE Outdoor Trivia Night w/ Bingeable, 7pm

BALSAM FALLS BREWING CO. Open Mic Night, 8pm

FRIDAY, AUGUST 21 ONE STOP AT ASHEVILLE MUSIC HALL Free Dead Friday (Grateful Dead tribute), 5:30pm

IAMAVL q Downtown After 5, 5:30pm, avl.mx/7xu

TWIN LEAF BREWERY Open Mic w/ Thomas Yon, 7pm

BOLD ROCK HARD CIDER Canaan Cox (country), 6pm

THE PAPER MILL LOUNGE Karaoke X, 9pm THE SOCIAL Karaoke w/ Lyric, 10pm

THURSDAY, AUGUST 20 LAZY HIKER BREWING Open Jam, 5pm ONE WORLD BREWING WEST The Get Right Band (psychedelic, indie), 6pm SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN BREWERY Sunlight Drive (blues, folk), 6pm ISIS MUSIC HALL Lawn Concert w/ Chris Wilhelm & Friends (Americana, folk), 6:30pm TRISKELION BREWERY Irish Session (traditional Celtic music), 6:30pm THE ORANGE PEEL q Lovely World (indie), 7pm, avl.mx/7vm THE GREY EAGLE Patio Show w/ Graham Sharp (bluegrass), 7pm ONE STOP AT ASHEVILLE MUSIC HALL Gunslinging Parrots (Phish tribute), 8pm

DINNER AND A CONCERT ON THE LAWN

WHITESIDE BREWING CO. Doug Ramsay (jazz, soul), 5:30pm

MOUNTAIN SPIRIT q Jack Williams (folk), 7pm, avl.mx/7vk

SOVEREIGN KAVA q Poetry Open Mic, 8:30pm, avl.mx/76w

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ONE WORLD BREWING WEST Jones Cove (rock), 6pm MAD CO. BREWING Mr Jimmy (blues), 6pm SWEETEN CREEK BREWING Cigar Bros Duo, 6pm

CONCERTS BEGIN AT 6:30PM T HU 8 / 20

CHRIS WILHELM AND FRIENDS AMERICANA, FOLK

F RI 8 / 21

THE DARREN NICHOLSON BAND COUNTRY FARE: “Singing and writing songs are the only things I truly love to do,” says the frontwoman of The Christy Lynn Band. Based in Asheville, the classic country group pairs “catchy and campy” lyrics with vintage, roots-infused melodies. The band will perform selections from its debut album, Sweetheart of the Radio, at The Grey Eagle Saturday, Aug. 22, 7 p.m. $5 advance/$8 day of show. avl.mx/7yz. Photo by Izzy Nelson

ISIS MUSIC HALL Lawn Concert w/ The Darren Nicholson Band (bluegrass), 6:30pm

BATTERY PARK BOOK EXCHANGE Dinah's Daydream (jazz), 6pm

POINT LOOKOUT VINEYARDS Sunlight Drive (blues, folk), 2:30pm

THE GREY EAGLE Patio Show w/ Jesse Barry Duo (blues), 6:30pm

ISIS MUSIC HALL Lawn Concert w/ Runaway Home (Americana), 6:30pm

ONE STOP AT ASHEVILLE MUSIC HALL Shakedown Sunday w/ The Late Shifters (rock, funk), 4pm

ASHEVILLE GUITAR BAR Live from the Loading Dock: The Space Cooties (rock), 7pm SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN BREWERY The New Rustics (Americana, rock), 7pm MILLS RIVER BREWERY The Snozzberries (psychedelic), 8pm WHITE HORSE BLACK MOUNTAIN q Dana Cooper & Pierce Pettis (folk), 8pm, avl.mx/7zf

SATURDAY, AUGUST 22 ASHEVILLE GUITAR BAR Live from the Loading Dock: Vince Junior Band (blues, funk), 6pm

ONE STOP AT ASHEVILLE MUSIC HALL Anthony Wayne Vibe (funk), 7pm THE GREY EAGLE Patio Show w/ Christy Lynn Band (country), 7pm DRY FALLS BREWERY Folkadelic Jam, 8pm WILD WING CAFE Karaoke Night, 9:30pm THE SOCIAL Karaoke Show w/ Billy Masters, 10pm

SUNDAY, AUGUST 23 HIGHLAND BREWING CO. Reggae Sunday w/ Chalwa, 2pm

SOUTHERN APPALACHIAN BREWERY The Knotty G’s (Americana), 4pm RIVERSIDE RHAPSODY BEER COMPANY Drinkin’ & Thinkin’ Trivia, 5pm 185 KING STREET Open Electric Jam, 6pm ISIS MUSIC HALL Lawn Concert w/ Alexa Rose Trio (Americana, country), 6:30pm THE GREY EAGLE Patio Show w/ Eat the Label (indie, punk), 6:30pm ICONIC KITCHEN & DRINKS UniHorn (funk), 7pm

ISIS MUSIC HALL q Chatham Rabbits Album Release (roots), 8pm, avl.mx/7ze

MONDAY, AUGUST 24 ARCHETYPE BREWING Old Time Jam w/ Banjo Mitch McConnell, 6pm HIGHLAND BREWING CO. Nerdy Talk Trivia, 6pm OKLAWAHA BREWING CO. It Takes All Kinds Open Mic Night, 7pm THE CASUAL PINT Team Trivia, 7pm

TUESDAY, AUGUST 25 OKLAWAHA BREWING CO. Team Trivia Tuesday, 6pm

WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26 OKLAWAHA BREWING CO. French Broad Valley Mountain Music Jam, 6pm THE GREY EAGLE Riyen Roots & Kenny Dore (blues, roots), 6:30pm 185 KING STREET Team Trivia & Games, 7pm

MOUNTAIN SPIRIT q Jenner Fox (solo acoustic), 7pm, avl.mx/7yh TWIN LEAF BREWERY Open Mic w/ Thomas Yon, 7pm SOVEREIGN KAVA q Poetry Open Mic, 8:30pm, avl.mx/76w

BLUEGRASS

SAT 8 / 22

RUNAWAY HOME ACOUSTIC, AMERICANA SUN 8 / 23

ALEXA ROSE TRIO AMERICANA, COUNTRY T HU 8 / 27

JESSE BARRY & THE JAM FUNK, POP/ROCK, R&B

F RI 8 / 28

THE PAPER MILL LOUNGE Karaoke X, 9pm

ZOE & CLOYD

THE SOCIAL Karaoke w/ Lyric, 10pm

THURSDAY, AUGUST 27 LAZY HIKER BREWING Open Jam, 5pm OKLAWAHA BREWING CO. Izzi Hughes (rock, folk), 6pm MOUNTAIN SPIRIT q Lawn Concert w/ Jesse Barry & The Jam (funk, pop, rock), 6:30pm, avl.mx/7yk THE GREY EAGLE Patio Show w/ Brad Heller & The Fustics (rock), 6:30pm BALSAM FALLS BREWING CO. Open Mic Night, 8pm ONE STOP AT ASHEVILLE MUSIC HALL Gunslinging Parrots (Phish tribute), 8pm

AMERICANA, BLUEGRASS

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

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MOVIE REVIEWS THIS WEEK’S CONTRIBUTORS

Hosted by the Asheville Movie Guys EDWIN ARNAUDIN earnaudin@mountainx.com HHHHH

BRUCE STEELE bcsteele@gmail.com

= MAX RATING

Desert One HHHH DIRECTOR: Barbara Kopple PLAYERS: Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Ted Koppel DOCUMENTARY NOT RATED

Coup 53 HHHHH DIRECTOR: Taghi Amirani PLAYERS: Ralph Fiennes, Walter Murch, Taghi Amirani DOCUMENTARY NOT RATED The temporary shuttering of movie theaters during the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent partnerships between independent cinemas and distributors to keep the stream of films flowing into viewers’ homes has resulted in the digital release of numerous great documentaries — none finer than Coup 53.

The latest feature from Iranian-born director Taghi Amirani (Red Lines and Deadlines) chronicles the ousting of his native country’s democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953, a historical event that’s fallen into obscurity but, in the filmmakers’ capable hands, should soon return to global prominence.

A decade in the making, Coup 53 features a wealth of archival footage, newly sourced interviews, Amirani’s behind-thescenes investigation and even rotoscope animation, all expertly pieced together by legendary editor and sound designer Walter Murch (Apocalypse Now; The English Patient).

Synthesizing these diverse components, the collaborators make a compelling argument that the joint CIA/MI6 operation to remove Mossadegh — who was working to nationalize industries, including the oil that the British had controlled — and replace him with the 28

AUG. 19-25, 2020

corrupt shah not only resulted in the tense Middle Eastern relations that remain today but gave the then-fledgling U.S. agency a dangerous taste of power that resulted in similar international meddling, including Vietnam.

Though the CIA’s role is no secret, Amirani’s apparent ace in confirming MI6’s involvement — which the U.K. government still hasn’t admitted — is British agent Norman Darbyshire’s interview for the mid-’80s documentary series End of Empire. Darbyshire’s damning filmed contribution was cut from the final version of Empire, but thanks to multiple independent sources, the transcript of that interview finds its way to Amirani.

With Darbyshire no longer alive to comment, Amirani and Murch devise the absolutely brilliant concept of putting Darbyshire into the movie by having none other than Ralph Fiennes play the spy, and he more than convincingly performs Darbyshire’s suppressed lines like the master actor he is, doing so in the very same London hotel where the original interview was conducted.

Fiennes’ phenomenal portrayal is then seamlessly integrated into Coup 53’s thrilling storytelling as it builds to the titular overthrow, resulting in a fascinating convergence of imagination and education that might very well be the first truly must-see film of 2020.

REVIEWED BY EDWIN ARNAUDIN EARNAUDIN@MOUNTAINX.COM

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For millennials, it’s pretty hard to understand just how big of a deal the Iranian hostage crisis was in the late 1970s and early ’80s. Master documentarian Barbara Kopple (Harlan County, USA) attempts to recapture the anxiety and uncertainty that loomed over the nation during this frightening period of history with her latest film, Desert One. Focusing mostly on Jimmy Carter’s failed attempt to put together a successful rescue mission in 1980 and the special ops team that participated in the assignment, Desert One — the code name of the operational staging area for the failed rescue attempt in Iran — tells its story with archival news footage, animated interludes and plenty of interviews from each of the surviving members of the rescue team, plus news anchors like Ted Koppel and even former President Carter himself.

These are not groundbreaking documentary techniques, however, and the greatest detriment to the film is its matterof-fact presentation of the story in a way that can sometimes feel a bit too much like a history lesson. Still, the people prove to be so fascinating and are emotionally open about the events — even in their old age — that it never seems monotonous.

One of the strongest elements of Desert One is how it frames the hostage crisis and Iran’s revolution as a whole from the point of view of the Iranians themselves.

Among the slew of interviewees are former officials of Iran’s government, as well as those who participated in storming the American embassy and keeping the hostages in line. For an event that has long been viewed as a traumatic one in the eyes of U.S. citizens, Kopple deserves acclaim for her ability to remain somewhat unbiased on the issue.

Nevertheless, the filmmaker doesn’t lessen the importance of the soldiers’ sacrifices in the aftermath of the failed rescue attempt. Aside from the mission’s lack of success, lives were lost, and seeing these veterans recounting the tragedy of losing their fellow soldiers really got to me. The audio clip of Carter receiving the news of their deaths for the first time is also one of the most powerful moments of the film and will make many viewers long for the

Josh McCormack

Casey Ellis

Melissa Myers

day when we had a commander-in-chief who was actually capable of empathy.

REVIEWED BY JOSH MCCORMACK MCCORMACKJOSHU97@GMAIL.COM

Peninsula HHHHH DIRECTOR: Sang-ho Yeon PLAYERS: Dong-Won Gang, Junghyun Lee, Re Lee FOREIGN FILM/ACTION/HORROR NOT RATED Peninsula is the sequel to one of the best Asian horror pictures to come out last decade, Train to Busan, which I watched for the first time at the beginning of the lockdown in March, oh so long ago. That movie shook my pandemic-virgin psyche (warning: It contains explicit examples of why not to touch public doorknobs) and was a ride I’ll never forget.

I highly recommend it, but the good news is you don’t need to have seen it to enjoy its follow-up. None of the characters are held over from the original — except maybe the flesh-eating hordes of aggro ghouls, but I don’t think they’re played by the same actors.

In much the same way that the tense and self-contained Alien paved the way for the more popcorn-munching, shoot’em-up Aliens, Peninsula succeeds Busan with the full intent of pure entertainment.

The basic plot is that a group of refugees with nothing left to lose, led by Seok Jung (Gang Dong-wan), head into the godforsaken territory of the Korean Peninsula to retrieve a truck full of money and return it to Hong Kong, where they’re promised a lush life — rich and zombie-free.

From the moment our gang touches down, the movie evokes a tang of some of the best post-apocalyptic films ever made: The gauntlet-running of Escape From New York, the cabin fevered military vs. civilian dynamics of Day of the Dead and, yes, sweet St. Francis of Rome, the octane-a-go-go madness of Mad Max: Fury Road.

To give more away would do neither you nor me any good. Just know that there’s hardly a dull moment within its fast-paced, two-hour run time and plenty to keep you glued to the screen. And it’s not just the action, either. There are some great turns by a couple of sisters (played

by Lee Ye-won and Lee Re), who are both wholly charming and will definitely survive the zombie apocalypse longer than you or I, plus some utterly despicable

military personnel you can’t wait to see get their comeuppance.

I wouldn’t say that Peninsula shares the uniqueness of Train to Busan’s story or the way it’s portrayed on screen, but thanks to Yeon Sang-ho, the director of both films, Peninsula rises above your run-of-the-mill action film — or, usually worse, action/horror — to truly grab you by the blood-pumper. Furthermore, it makes you feel those raw emotions that separate us from the flesh-eating hordes: love, fear, guilt, loss and sometimes, hopefully, selflessness. If you cried at the end of Train to Busan, your tissues are now getting a sequel.

Available to rent starting Aug. 21 via Amazon Video, iTunes and other streaming services REVIEWED BY CASEY ELLIS C.DALTON.ELLIS@GMAIL.COM

Project Power H DIRECTORS: Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman PLAYERS: Jamie Foxx, Joseph GordonLevitt, Dominique Fishback ACTION/SCI-FI RATED R For an action movie about substance abuse, this new Netflix movie is sorely lacking in substance. It has a premise — high-tech pills give users random superpowers for five minutes. It’s got an aggressive visual style, with high-contrast photography, kinetic camera moves and randomly off-kilter compositions. It’s got a couple movie stars: Joseph Gordon-Levitt is Frank, an honest but rule-breaking police detective; Jamie Foxx is Art, a slick avenger — the “bad guy” you know will be teaming up with the “good guy” at the movie’s halfway point.

What Project Power doesn’t have is character development or a plot that raises the stakes beyond saving people (or oneself) from getting slaughtered. Frank is every rogue cop cliché rolled into one and flattened into a thin outline. Art is every antihero whose violence turns out to be in service to justice. As Robin, Frank’s parttime drug-dealing sidekick, Dominique Fishback (HBO’s “The Deuce”) manages to make an impression despite direction

by Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost (Nerve) that barely lets any performer register an emotion before flitting to some new neon-colored image.

The screenplay is essentially an endless chase-and-fight scene with pauses to showcase what the magic pills can do: A human torch! Bulletproof skin! A woman with Elsa’s powers from Frozen!

It’s all familiar and jumbled together to no effective purpose. If this is what an artistic superpowers movie looks like, please

send me back to the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the next plane out.

Project Power does however get points for showcasing the less touristy sides of New Orleans, and its two leading men retain some magnetism amid the tumult.

But those are slim satisfactions. The whole affair is like watching someone play a violent videogame without sharing the controller — you can sort of follow what’s going on, but you’re not involved.

Available to stream via Netflix REVIEWED BY BRUCE STEELE BCSTEELE@GMAIL.COM

Represent HHH DIRECTOR: Hillary Bachelder PLAYERS: Julie Cho, Bryn Bird, Myya Jones DOCUMENTARY NOT RATED “Could this be the ‘Year of the Woman’ in politics?”

The question is posed again and again by pundits in crackly footage from the 1990s and early 2000s, during the opening of Represent, poignantly setting the tone for the ongoing battle its subjects fight.

More specifically, director Hillary Bachelder’s documentary follows the campaigns of three women working to effect change in their Midwestern communities by running for various political offices. Myya Jones, a 22-year-old mayoral candidate in Detroit, is attempting to shake up the system as a Black woman going up against an experienced white male candidate; Bryn Bird, a progressive potential township trustee, is running in the predominantly conservative town of Granville, Ohio; and Republican Julie Cho is a Korean-American vying for the office of state representative in Illinois’ liberal-learning 18th District. All three subjects face an uphill battle and experience varying degrees of success and failure throughout their campaigns.

But despite the extreme relevancy of this documentary during the 2020 election cycle, it falls short of providing much new information and tangible solutions for women in politics. The problems female candidates face in our male-dominated world have already been covered in such documentaries as Knock Down the House (2019), which follows — among others — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in her ultimately successful attempt to defeat a longstanding male incumbent in the 2018 primary elections. While Represent hints that women face a lack of financial and party-backed support for their campaigns, how to bring more support to fruition is left for viewers to ponder.

However, there is one novel element that Bachelder addresses especially well: the growing tokenism of Black,

Indigenous, People of Color (aka BIPOC) women in politics. The rhetoric is certainly growing in support of this demographic, particularly for the Democratic Party, but its implementation remains largely theoretical. In the film’s most potent moments, the director depicts the racial stereotyping and tokenism that Jones and Cho encounter from constituents of both their own and opposing parties, and the discomfort of these interactions is palpable for viewers with a discerning ear for microaggressions and covert racism.

Though somewhat redundant, Represent’s exploration of gender and race gaps in politics remains welcome, especially in an election year. Viewers can still benefit from seeing these societal shortcomings play out on camera, and anything that demystifies the political process can bolster constituents to be more active and feel more empowered in their own local political scene.

REVIEWED BY MELISSA MYERS MELISSA.L.MYERS@GMAIL.COM

less task of narrating the film. Dressed in period garb yet operating a laptop and babbling about Google searches — part of a sad, uncommitted attempt at era-blending quirk that includes iPhones and vacuum cleaners at random and culminates painfully in Hawke’s karaoke cover of Tears For Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” — Hewson delivers dry, lifeless insights on Tesla.

Amid this uninspired milieu, only Kyle MacLachlan’s turn as noted egomaniac Thomas Edison and Almereyda’s use of rear projection to transport his characters to bygone locales inject Tesla with any sense of personality. The artificial backdrops, as well as miniatures and imaginative minimalist sets, improbably become the only things to look forward to — besides the arrival of the end credits, that is.

Available to rent starting Aug. 21 via Amazon Video, iTunes and other streaming services REVIEWED BY EDWIN ARNAUDIN EARNAUDIN@MOUNTAINX.COM

Tesla HS

AVAILABLE VIA FINEARTSTHEATRE.COM (FA) GRAILMOVIEHOUSE.COM (GM)

DIRECTOR: Michael Almereyda PLAYERS: Ethan Hawke, Kyle MacLachlan, Eve Hewson BIOPIC/DRAMA RATED PG-13 Depicting brilliant inventor Nikola Tesla as the most boring human being of all time seems like an impossible mission.

But have no fear! Michael Almereyda (Experimenter) is up to the task.

Boldly suppressing the inherent excitement of his subject at practically every turn, the writer/director struggles to shepherd the fact-based story to the screen, resulting in a tonal nightmare rooted in hands-off direction.

Working once again with his Hamlet star Ethan Hawke, Almereyda fails to instill in his leading man the fact that he’s portraying a late 19th-century Croatian immigrant. Spouting awkward, overlong and laughably self-serious dialogue, the actor mainly sounds like himself while playing Tesla — with the rare exception when he sneaks in a halfhearted Eastern Bloc accent.

Though frustrating to witness, Hawke’s lack of investment is understandable.

Almereyda gives him little to do in a script that tracks Tesla’s development of the alternating current motor and other electric innovations, touting with equal flatness the man’s genius and his repeated lack of business acumen and social skills.

A match made in wax-museum heaven, Eve Hewson (Bridge of Spies) equals — and possibly surpasses — Hawke’s lack of presence with her take on J.P. Morgan’s daughter Anne, who has eyes for Tesla and, as a result, is saddled with the thank-

2020 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Tour (NR) HHH (GM) A Girl Missing (NR) HHH (GM) Ai Weiwei: Yours Truly (NR) HHHS (GM) Amulet (R) HHHH (GM) At the Video Store (NR) HHHHS (GM) Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint (NR) HHHS (FA) The Booksellers (NR) HHHS(FA) Coup 53 (NR) HHHHH (Pick of the Week) (GM) Creem: America’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Magazine (NR) HHHH (GM) Days of the Whale (NR) HHHS(GM) Desert One (NR) HHHH (FA, GM) Fantastic Fungi (NR) HHHH (FA) The Fight (PG-13) HHHH (FA, GM) Flannery (NR) HHHH (FA) Fourteen (NR) HHHH (FA) Gordon Lightfoot: If You Could Read My Mind (NR) HHHS (GM) Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful (NR) HHH (FA) The Hottest August (NR) H (FA) I Used to Go Here (NR) HHHHS (GM) John Lewis: Good Trouble (PG) HHHH (FA, GM) My Dog Stupid (NR) HHHH (FA) Out Stealing Horses (NR) HHHHS (FA, GM) Papicha (NR) HHH (FA) Proud (NR) HHH (FA) Rebuilding Paradise (PG-13) HHHS (GM) Represent (NR) HHH (GM) River City Drumbeat (NR) HHHHS (GM) Runner (NR) HHHS (GM) Someone, Somewhere (NR) HHHH (FA) Starting at Zero (NR) H (FA) The Surrogate (NR) HHHHS (FA) The Times of Bill Cunningham (NR) HHHHS (FA) The Tobacconist (NR) HHHS (FA) Vitalina Varela (NR) HHHHS (FA) You Never Had It: An Evening with Bukowski (NR) HHHS (GM)

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

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FREEWILL ASTROLOGY ARIES (March 21-April 19): “We never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough,” said Aries singer Billie Holiday. I don’t think that applies to everyone, although it’s more likely to be true about the Aries tribe than maybe any other sign of the zodiac. And I’m guessing that the coming weeks could be a time when you will indeed be vivid proof of its validity. That’s why I’m issuing a “Too Much of a Good Thing” alert for you. I don’t think it’ll be harmful to go a bit too far and get a little too much of the good things; it may even be wise and healthy to do so. But please don’t go waaayyyy too far and get waaayyyy too much of the good things.

LIBRA (Sept. 23-Oct. 22): “I transformed stillnesses and darknesses into words,” wrote Libran poet Arthur Rimbaud. “What was unspeakable, I named. I made the whirling world pause.” In accordance with current astrological potentials, I have turned his thoughts into a message for you.

In the coming weeks, I hope you will translate silences and mysteries into clear language. What is unfathomable and inaccessible, you will convert into understandings and revelations. Gently, without force or violence, you will help heal the inarticulate agitation around you with the power of your smooth, resonant tenderness.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20): Taurus author Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) took many years to write The Human Comedy, an amalgam of 91 intertwined novels, stories and essays. For this vast enterprise, he dreamed up the personalities of more than 2,000 characters, many of whom appeared in multiple volumes. I bring this to your attention, Taurus, because I believe that the next 15 months will be an excellent time for you to imagine and carry out a Balzac-like project of your own. Do you have an inkling of what that might be? Now’s a good time to start ruminating.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): “Your desires, whether or not you achieve them, will determine who you become,” wrote author Octavia E. Butler.

Now is a fertile time for you to meditate on that truth. So I dare you to take an inventory of all your major desires, from the noblest to the most trivial. Be honest. If one of your burning yearnings is to have 100,000 followers on Instagram or to eat chocolate-covered bacon that is served to you in bed, admit it. After you’re through tallying up the wonders you want most, the next step is to decide if they are essential to you becoming the person you truly want to be. If some aren’t, consider replacing them with desires that will be a better influence on you as you evolve.

GEMINI (May 21-June 20): Not until the 19th century did humans begin to take organized actions to protect animals from cruelty. Even those were sparse. The latter part of the 20th century brought more concerted efforts to promote animal welfare, but the rise of factory farms, toxic slaughterhouses, zoos, circuses and cosmetic testing has shunted us into a Dark Age of animal abuse. I suspect our descendants will look back with horror at our barbarism. This problem incurs psychological wounds in us all in ways that aren’t totally conscious. And I think this is an especially key issue for you right now. I beg you, for your own sake as well as for the animals’, to upgrade your practical love and compassion for animals. I bet you’ll find it inspires you to treat your own body with more reverence.

CANCER (June 21-July 22): Cancerian literary critic Harold Bloom bragged to The New York Times that his speed-reading skills were so advanced that he could finish a 500-page book in an hour. While I believe he has indeed devoured thousand of books, I also wonder if he lied about his quickness.

Nonetheless, I’ll offer him up as an inspirational role model for you in the coming weeks. Why? Because you’re likely to be able to absorb and integrate far more new information and fresh experiences than usual — and at a rapid pace.

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): “Magic lies in challenging what seems impossible,” says Leo politician Carol Moseley Braun. I agree with her but will also suggest there’s an even higher magic: when you devise a detailed plan for achieving success by challenging the impossible and then actually carry out that plan. Judging from the current astrological omens, I suspect you’re in an unusually favorable position to do just that in the coming weeks. Be bold in rising to the challenge; be practical and strategic in winning the challenge.

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): “Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances,” writes author Frederick Buechner. What he doesn’t say is that you must be receptive and open to the possibility of joy arriving anywhere and anytime. If you’re shut down to its surprising influx, if you’re convinced that joy is out of reach, it won’t break through the barriers you’ve put up; it won’t be able to land in your midst. I think this is especially important counsel for you in the coming weeks, Virgo. PLEASE make yourself available for joy. P.S. Here’s another clue from Buechner: “Joy is where the whole being is pointed in one direction.”

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AUG. 19-25, 2020

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): If you can manage it, I recommend taking a break from business-as-usual. I’d love to see you give yourself the gift of amusement and play — a luxurious sabbatical that will help you feel free of every burden, excused from every duty and exempt from every fixation. The spirit I hope you will embody is captured well in this passage from author Okakura Kakuzo: “Let us have a sip of tea. The afternoon glow is brightening the bamboos, the fountains are bubbling with delight, the soughing of the pines is heard in our kettle. Let us dream of evanescence and linger in the beautiful foolishness of things.”

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 19): Rapper Eminem advises us, “Never take ecstasy, beer, Bacardi, weed, Pepto-Bismol, Vivarin, Tums, Tagamet HB, Xanax and Valium in the same day.” What’s his rationale? That quaffing this toxic mix might kill us or make us psychotic? No. He says you shouldn’t do that because “It makes it difficult to sleep at night.” I’m going to suggest that you abide by his counsel for yet another reason: According to my analysis, you have the potential to experience some wondrous and abundant natural highs in the coming weeks. Your capacity for beautiful perceptions, exhilarating thoughts and breakthrough epiphanies will be at a peak. But none of that is likely to happen if you’re loaded up with inebriants.

AQUARIUS (Jan. 20-Feb. 18): “Everyone who has ever built a new heaven first found the power to do so in his own hell,” declared philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. That’s a rather histrionic statement!

But then Nietzsche was a Maestro of Melodrama.

He was inclined to portray human life as a heroic struggle for boldness and liberation. He imagined us as being engaged in an epic quest to express our highest nature. In accordance with your astrological potentials, I propose that you regard Nietzsche as your power creature during the coming weeks.

You have a mandate to adopt his lion-hearted perspective. And yes, you also have a poetic license to build a new heaven based on the lessons you learned and the power you gained in your own hell.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): Here’s some knowledge from author John le Carré: “In every operation there is an above the line and a below the line. Above the line is what you do by the book. Below the line is how you do the job.” According to my analysis, you have, at least for now, done all you can in your work above the line. That’s great! It was crucial for you to follow the rules and honor tradition. But now it’s time for a shift in emphasis. In the coming weeks, I hope you will specialize in finessing the details and massaging the nuances below the line.

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1 ___ rock (Queen’s onetime musical style)

10 Line at an airport 14 Mustang, e.g.

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5 Start of many volcano names

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15 A bug might produce one 16 “Now!” 17 Place 18 Charlie follower

19 It might send you to the moon 20 Tennis player with a Career Golden Slam (winning all four majors and an Olympic gold) 22 Digitize, as a document 24 Hangs tight 26 Military formation 27 Facility 28 Pointy features on Vulcans and elves 29 Info on a flight board, in brief 32 Text of gratitude 33 Pitcher’s asset 34 They’re often stored in towers 37 Commercial district in Tokyo known as a fashion center 39 Actress Kristen of the “Twilight Saga” series 41 Off-white shade 42 “Can’t you see, people are trying to work!”

44 British sailor, in slang 45 Film ratings org.

46 Lead-in to boy or follower of yoo

No. 0715 47 Big skiing destination 48 Actor Schreiber 49 ___ commentary 51 “___ we forget” 53 Food also known as ladies’ fingers 54 O’Connor’s successor on the Supreme Court 55 Things drawn with compasses 56 Yak 57 Informal “yes” 59 L x w x h 60 ___ B. Wells, co-founder of the N.A.A.C.P. 61 Western range 62 Kerfuffle 63 Little part of a big wheel 64 Grants may come out of it 65 The youngest host in its history is Drew Barrymore (age 7): Abbr.

66 Lepidopterist’s need

DOWN 1 Fancy balls

puzzle by Lee Higbie and Jeff Chen 2 Video game character with an “L” on his hat 3 Bugged no end 4 Often-chocolaty dessert 5 Avoiding the press 6 Division of the Danish krone 7 Surfer’s destination?

8 “Let’s ___” 9 Creative works made of recyclable parts 10 Some shortcuts for ships 11 Body position in yoga 12 Great ___ National Park 13 Brand of figureshaping underwear 21 Spreader of frosting or plaster 23 ___ Soprano (Edie Falco role) 25 Alternative to fivecard draw 26 Toys that can be dangerous 29 Madrid’s country, in the Olympics: Abbr.

30 Popular Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera 31 Accessory that’s good for changing times?

34 Mobile home?

35 Business casual, e.g.

36 Where hogs go wild?

38 Cheer at an opera house 40 Author Cather

43 More pious … or more motheaten 48 What you need to solve sudoku 49 “Ixnay!”

50 Sometime adversary of Godzilla 52 Letter-shaped opening for a bolt 57 Middle of many metaphors 58 Fashion monogram

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS NY TIMES PUZZLE

B L I S S R O S S I

A O R T A O P T E D

S C A R F E A R L S

F E T I K E T E E

S I N I T O N S L E S S E A R I D A M N S P A L L L I K E A M A A Y S O B O L D E A E A V O N S N

E N Y A

P E L T S

S C O P E

E S O S

P I C O

R O A R

T D R R Y Y I N G T O O L O C A D A S S E T A B D R O O P O U T B H T S

R A G O L O O L O P R E O P

T E T R A

O N S E T

I S A A C

D A R L A

S L E E T

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