Yes! Weekly - January 31, 2018

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FROM STREET URCHIN TO ARTIST

Setsuya Kotani talks about his eventful life 10 V-DAY RESTAURANTS P. 8 www.yesweekly.com

FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE

P. 12

TRIAD BANDS TO WATCH

P. 24

January 31 - February 6, 2018 YES! WEEKLY

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

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January 31 - February 6, 2018

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018 VOLUME 14, NUMBER 5

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F E B R UARY

FR FEB 2 • 8PM

KELLER WILLIAMS SA 3 TH 8 TH 8 FR 9 SA 10 SU 11 TH 15

PERPETUAL GROOVE 8p AJR: THE CLICK TOUR BIG GIGANTIC @ THE RITZ ID 8p FAR TOO JONES 7p SLEIGH BELLS 7:30p MUMU TUTU W/ DIRTY REMNANTZ

FROM STREET URCHIN TO ARTIST

SHAMROCK SAINTS 7p

FR 16 THE SHAKEDOWN SA 17 SU 18 FR 23 SA 24 SU 25 WE 28

(PLAYS TOM PETTY) WHO’S BAD (MICHAEL JACKSON TRIB.) Y&T 7p EMANCIPATOR ENSEMBLE 8p WEEKEND EXCURSION 7p ERIC JOHNSON W/ARIELLE 7p RAILROAD EARTH 7p

FR 2 SA 3 SU 4 SA 10 SU 11 TH 15 FR 16 WE 21

JAZZ IS PHSH 8p LOTUS 8p J.J. GREY AND MOFRO BOWIE BALL 8p KELLY HOLLAND MEMORIAL 4:30p JOHN KADLECIK BAND 7:30p J RODDY WALSTON & THE BUSINESS NEW POLITICS

MAR C H

Seventy years after nearly starving on the streets of Tokyo, SETSUYA KOTANI prepares excellent meals. Still slim despite his love of food, the 82-year-old artist, and retired University of North Carolina Greensboro professor is nimble in mind and body.

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FR 23 COSMIC CHARLIE PLAYS “EUROPE 72” 8p

CO M I N G S O O N

4/6 RUNAWAY GIN (PHISH TRIB.) 9p 4/7 DAVID ALLAN COE 7p 4/12 SLIM WEDNESDAY FT. JOJO HERMAN 7p

4/14 THE SOUL PSYCHEDLIQUE & 4/17 4/18 4/19 4/22 4/28 5/2 5/4 5/12 5/26 6/2 6/7 6/9 7/7

LOVE TRIBE 8p TY SEGALL 7p GHOST LIGHT 7p OLD 97’S 7p ANDERSON EAST 7p PIGEONS PLAYING PING PONG BLUE OCTOBER 7p CARBON LEAF 7p JUPITER COYOTE 7p JAKE MILLER 8p WHISKY MYERS 7p TASH SULTANA 7p RECKLESS KELLY 8p INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE W/ ABACAB 7:30p

ADV. TICKETS @ LINCOLNTHEATRE.COM & SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS ALL SHOWS ALL AGES

126 E. Cabarrus St.• 919-821-4111 www.lincolntheatre.com

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

EDITORIAL Editor KATIE MURAWSKI katie@yesweekly.com Contributors KRISTI MAIER JOHN ADAMIAN MARK BURGER IAN MCDOWELL JENNIFER ZELESKI HEATHER DUKES JON EPSTEIN PRODUCTION Graphic Designers ALEX ELDRIDGE designer@yesweekly.com

ADVERTISING Marketing BRAD MCCAULEY brad@yesweekly.com

SA 24 RIPE 8p SU 25 BIG K.R.I.T & TY DOLLA SIGN @ THE RITZ 8p

Publisher CHARLES A. WOMACK III publisher@yesweekly.com

AUSTIN KINDLEY artdirector@yesweekly.com

W/DREAMERS AND THE WRECKS

TU 27 BETTY WHO FR 30 THE BREAKFAST CLUB 7p SA 31 DELTA RAE 7p

5500 Adams Farm Lane Suite 204 Greensboro, NC 27407 Office 336-316-1231 Fax 336-316-1930

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Ah, VALENTINE’S DAY. Do you heart it or hate it?Oh well, whether you fall into the category of adoring it or the latter, it matters not. Because if only 50 percent of your coupledom hates V-Day, that means the other 50 percent of you has to suck it up and do something, such as go out to eat. We’re here to help you with that. We’ve asked our followers and friends for some feedback to supply you with the top 10 most romantic restaurants in the Triad.

9 Since last week, concern has erupted on local social media about the fate of popular downtown restaurant CAFÉ EUROPA, which is housed in the Cultural Center on 200 N. Davie Street.

10 “They should have torn it down years ago,” said painter and the former University of North Carolina Greensboro professor Setsuya Kotani about the upcoming demolition of the MCIVER BUILDING. 11 The School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts has rolled a lucky seven with its upcoming “Best of the School of Filmmaking” SCREENING EVENT, which takes

place Feb. 9 in the ACE Exhibition Complex on the UNCSA campus.

12 I spoke by phone last week to Tommy Maher of Asheville-based bluegrass outfit FIRESIDE COLLECTIVE while they had an afternoon off near Charleston, South Carolina. Maher said the band was getting ready to go practice. Being an acoustic band, they can pretty much pull their instruments out of the band and rehearse wherever they want.

18 With the 90th ACADEMY AWARDS ceremony set to unfurl on March 4, it’s time to ask the hard questions. Does The Shape of Water represent the shape of things to come? Will Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri get its message across? Will Phantom Thread play it close to the vest, or will it unravel at the last minute?

24 One of the things I most looked forward to when agreeing to write a “BANDS TO WATCH” feature was the opportunity it provides me to stray from my usual comfort zone and see what was brewing around town.

TRAVIS WAGEMAN travis@yesweekly.com ANDREW WOMACK andrew@yesweekly.com TRISH SHROYER trish@yesweekly.com ANNA BROOKS anna@yesweekly.com Promotion NATALIE GARCIA

DISTRIBUTION JANICE GANTT JENNIFER RICKERT WILLIAM HEDRICK We at YES! Weekly realize that the interest of our readers goes well beyond the boundaries of the Piedmont Triad. Therefore we are dedicated to informing and entertaining with thought-provoking, debate-spurring, in-depth investigative news stories and features of local, national and international scope, and opinion grounded in reason, as well as providing the most comprehensive entertainment and arts coverage in the Triad. YES! Weekly welcomes submissions of all kinds. Efforts will be made to return those with a self-addressed stamped envelope; however YES! Weekly assumes no responsibility for unsolicited submissions. YES! Weekly is published every Wednesday by Womack Newspapers, Inc. No portion may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher. First copy is free, all additional copies are $1.00. Copyright 2018 Womack Newspapers, Inc.

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Kit & the Kats

2018

Put a nickel in the jukebox…then buckle up for a nostalgic blast back to those early days of Rock & Roll. Kit (Laura Ellis) and the Kats – backed by a 4-piece band and cool retro video projections – revisit an era of slow dancing, teen idols, bouffant hai dos, pompadours and “The Twist,” as they bring beloved 50’s and 60’s tunes back to life from such iconic artists as Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, The Shirelles, Sam Cooke and many more.

Heart Behind the Music with Alabama’s Teddy Gentry, John Berry, Lenny LeBlanc & Linda Davis: March 9

Saturday, February 3, 2018 — 8:00 PM

Emile Pandolfi with Dona Russell

Shaun Hopper & Joe Smothers: March 23

Wednesday, February 14, 2018 — 7:30 PM

On Golden Pond: April 5

In celebration of Valentine’s Day, pianist Emile Pandolfi and vocalist Dana Russell will present a program of songs that seem comfortable and familiar, music spanning from the 1940s to the present, yet presented in such a way as to feel unique, thoroughly fitting for this most romantic occasion. Each classically trained in their respective arts, both Emile and Dana delight in the magic that takes place while performing before a live audience.

Black Violin: Back by Popular Demand!: April 24

www.yesweekly.com

Al Stewart

The Year of the Cat Tour

Friday, February 16, 2018 — 8:00 PM

W a career spanning four decades as a key player in British music, With Al Stewart released a stunning 19 albums between Bedsitter Images in 1967 and Sparks of Ancient Light in 2008, but is perhaps best known for his “Year of the Cat” hit from the platinum album by the same name and follow up album Time Passages. Most recently, he was honored with the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, presented at the Royal Albert Hall in London.

Dawn Wells: What Would Mary Ann Do? April 28 For Tickets, call 336-887-3001 or visit HighPointTheatre.com Acts and dates subject to change.

For the latest news, go to HighPointTheatre.com

FOLLOW US!

January 31 - February 6, 2018

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EVENTS YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS | BY AUSTIN KINDLEY

be there CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER WEDNESDAY WED 31 CHAMBER MUSIC SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER: BRAHMS AND DVOK WHAT: Guest Artist Series This renowned chamber ensemble returns for a riveting program that juxtaposes two of Romanticisms musical giants: Antonin Dvok and Johannes Brahms.

WHEN: 7:30 p.m.

WHERE: Watson Hall - UNCSA. 1533 S Main St., Winston-Salem.

MORE: $25 tickets. $20 with student ID.

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MISSY RAINES FRIDAY THUR 1 CHARLY LOWRY WHAT: Charly Lowry is a singer-songwriter from North Carolina with Native American roots from the dark swamps of Robeson County. For over a decade, Charly has attained regional and national success as both a solo artist and lead singer of spiritual rock and soul band, Dark Water Rising.

WHEN: 8 p.m.

WHERE: Little Brother Brewing.

348 South Elm Street, Greensboro.

MORE: Free entry.

FRI 2

FRI 2

SAT 3

OPENING RECEPTION + FIDDLE & BOW SOCIETY: FAT SATURDAY GUMBO FIRST FRIDAY W/ LIVE MUSIC MISSY RAINES & THE NEW HIP FESTIVAL

BY JULIA GOODSON WHAT: “With a smokey and seductive alto, WHAT: Join RayLen for our 15th Annual Fat WHAT: Julia Goodson is an alternative singer-songwriter from Greensboro blending classical piano with soaring vocal melodies and haunting lyrics. Currently she is working on her solo debut album, as well as collaborating with EDM producer and multi-instrumentalist DJ FM on a project called Modern Couple WHEN: 6 - 8 p.m.

WHERE: GreenHill.

200 N. Davie Street, Greensboro.

MORE: Free entry.

7-Time IBMA Bass Player of the Year, Missy Raines, heads up this all-acoustic ensemble.

The territory The New Hip covers is broad and the compass is set by Raines, planted right in the center of the stage directing with her bass every bit as much as shes playing it.” - Country Standard Time WHEN: 8 p.m.

WHERE: Muddy Creek Music Hall.

5455 Bethania Road, Winston-Salem.

MORE: $16-18 tickets.

Saturday Gumbo Festival! Celebrate Mardi Gras with authentic cajun zydeco band Bayou Diesel and delicious authentic New Orleans style seafood gumbo provided by Full Moon Oyster Bar & Seafood Restaurant.

Search for a baby in your very own piece of king cake & enjoy a complimentary glass of wine.

WHEN: 11 a.m. - 5 p.m.

WHERE: RayLen Vineyards.

3577 Highway 158, Mocksville.

MORE: $10-15 advance tickets. $20 at gate.

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

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[SPOTLIGHT]

THE TRAVELING BEAN

BY JENNIFER ZELESKI

There’s a new coffee shop tucked away in downtown Kernersville, owned and operated by the former owners of Beans Boro in Greensboro, Kyle and Ellen Burge.

The Traveling Bean is the only in-store roasting coffee shop in the area, offering fresh drip coffee and traditional drinks ranging from cortados to macchiatos.

Since its opening on Oct. 21, 2017, his regulars have continued their commitment to his coffee. “I’ve had a huge amount of support,” Kyle Burge said.“On day one, half of the store was Greensboro people.”

Burge is a self-taught roaster who not only perfects the coffee blends but also works the espresso machine, blender and other equipment behind the counter.

“I’ve been in the industry for quite awhile,” Kyle Burge said. “But I’ve always had a passion for coffee.”

He also knows what he expects out of his blends.

“With the coffee that I currently have, I have a certain spot that I like to roast them too,” Kyle Burge said. “Certain smells, certain time, certain temperatures [within the roasting process].”

With various five-gallon buckets and large plastic containers around the store, it is evident that roasting is an ongoing process, and customers can be surprised by what blend they might try on any given day.

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“With the way I roast, I try to keep things pretty fresh,” Kyle Burge said. But the process of a new roast follows a common routine. “[When starting the roast] I’m looking at the origin, the characteristic, the type of coffee it is, and I usually do one trial roast,” he said. “From there I usually have a good spot on idea of where I want it.”

One thing that sets The Traveling Bean apart from others, aside from being a family-owned coffee shop, is their commitment to producing new roasts on a consistent basis. When you purchase a cup at The Traveling Bean, “You’re going to get a coffee that’s a week or less old.”

The new store offers more of a family atmosphere than its predecessor, with comfortable furniture, a large chalkboard and a small play area for kids. Burge is planning on having more family-oriented events in the coming months. “Once it gets warmer we’re gonna start doing music, and soon we’re going to start doing game nights,” he said.

Until then, “I just want to bring good coffee to Kernersville,” Kyle Burge said. As for what brew to expect on the day you visit, “In the morning, whatever hand lands on those buckets is what I brew.”

Want to grab a cup of coffee? Visit the Traveling Bean at 126-A South Main St. in Kernersville. !

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

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triad foodies

EAT IT!

Foodies pick the 10 most romantic restaurants in the Triad for Valentine’s Day

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h, Valentine’s Day. Do you heart it or

hate it?

Oh well, whether you fall into the category of adoring it or the latter, it matters not. Because if only Kristi Maier 50 percent of your @triadfoodies coupledom hates VDay, that means the other 50 percent of Contributor you has to suck it up and do something, such as go out to eat. We’re here to help you with that. We’ve asked our followers and friends for some feedback to supply you with the top 10 most romantic restaurants in the Triad.

And to the person who chimed in with their vote as McDonald’s (and you know who you are), well, I’m guessing you’re just joking. If not, you deserve to be single.

1) Spring House Restaurant, Kitchen & Bar, Winston-Salem Definitely more shout-outs for Spring House for most romantic than any other. I call Spring House my happy place. The old mansion is gorgeous, cozy and comfortable with an outgoing chef and unparalleled service. Seriously, if you tell me you got lousy service at Spring House, I’ll assume you’re punking me or that you got punked. More often than not, Mr. Foodie and I opt for drinks and small plates on a velvet sofa and a small table in the Library

3 Bar. There’s hardly a weekend that goes by that the House isn’t already the venue for the romantic celebration, so it makes sense that for Valentine’s Day, Spring is (the) King (of hearts).

2) Gia, Greensboro Gia is swanky. Gia is seductive. This sexy eatery made the list before, so it’s a shooin already for a great Valentine’s Day date.

Lots of small plates to eat with your hands and that’s hot (if you’re not gross).

3) Marisol Restaurant, Greensboro This one is special. The exquisite menu that changes all the time, the piano bar, the refinery, the technique, the memorizing the menu by heart. It’s what makes Marisol one of the quintessential spots for a decadent, romantic date night. They don’t come cheap here at Marisol, and you don’t book your reservation thinking otherwise. Marisol needs to be enjoyed at least once in your life.

4) Bernardin’s at the Zevely House, Winston-Salem There’s nothing more romantic than a century-old house full of history and creaky floors and awesome dishes like kangaroo and elk. If only it wasn’t too cold for the patio. If you’re hoping to pop the question, Bernardin’s is a good place to be.

5 ) 1618 West, Greensboro Get the very famous-super-deliciousincredible-and-cannot be outmatched, Calamari. It’s heaven. Get an entree too.

Like the steak. Or the halibut. Just enjoy.

4 6) 1703 Restaurant & Catering, Winston-Salem Quiet and understated. I’m hopeful that 1703 is going to be booked for Valentine’s Day, which is on a Wednesday. If you want to be a rebel and celebrate on Tuesday instead, may I suggest that you take the opportunity to enjoy Chef Curtis Hackaday’s Tapas Tuesday? He’ll make incredibly sexy things such as octopus and something with organs that will make you so happy to be alive. And happy people are romantic people. Just saying…

7) Meridian Restaurant, Winston-Salem A metropolitan feel with lots of big, wide windows that allow the gleaming sunset to pour in. Followed by the lights of the Brookstown area if you can dare take your eyes off the activity in the kitchen.

The wine service and cocktails are amazing. You’ll still be romanced in the coppertopped bar if you just opt for delicious small plates. It’s just perfect date night ambiance.

8) Tavern in Old Salem, Winston-Salem After your romantic handholding stroll down Main Street, you’ll enter the Tavern, where it’s all about the rustic candlelight.

At night, the family-owned tavern keepers lose the period dress and turn the lights down low for a warm and intimate supper.

The food is amazing; The drinks are wonderful and handmade desserts make for a sweet evening indeed.

5 9) Undercurrent Restaurant, Greensboro A go-to spot for special occasions with a chef-driven menu with locally-sourced ingredients. Undercurrent has such an elegant dining room and takes special care of all of its customers.

10-tie) Ryan’s Restaurant Steakhouse, Chops & Seafood, Winston-Salem This made the list, though, I think Ryan’s is getting more casual as it ages. It’s still the go-to on prom night and engagement parties. The dark finishes and the feel of eating in the woods add to the romantic appeal.

10-tie) LaRue, Greensboro LaRue is in a new, larger space. Chef Trey Bell’s new kitchen is basically the size of his entire former restaurant. And I really, really loved the former location with its speakeasy style and itty bittiness. I wasn’t sure I’d like the larger space. But it is still beautifully appointed, and it’s well, leaning toward French, so that’s very romantic already.

It’s up to you how to use this list for your enjoyment. We’re pretty sure all of these restaurants have something going on for Valentine’s Day. Get your reservations ASAP and eat your heart out.

Happy Heart Day, foodies! !

KRISTI MAIER is a food writer, blogger and cheerleader for all things local who even enjoys cooking in her kitchen, though her kidlets seldom appreciate her efforts.

LARUE

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RYAN’S RESTAURANT

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SEE IT!

visions

Document sheds light on organization taking over Café Europa

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ince last week, concern has erupted on local social media about the fate of popular downtown restaurant Café Europa, which is housed in the Cultural Center Ian McDowell on 200 N. Davie Street. Owner Jakub Pucilowski stated in Contributor my online-only article (http://yesweekly. com/cafe-europamay-lose-its-space/) that he expected his rent to increase substantially when a new lease was negotiated. He also said the controversy is not about having to pay more for his space, despite the effort by some on social media to frame it that way.

On Jan. 25, Mayor Nancy Barakat Vaughan posted on her Facebook page that she was going to ask that Pucilowski get the Right of First Refusal “to bring their lease into alignment to reflect similar terms and conditions of other downtown small business restaurants.”

On Jan. 26 at 3:09 p.m., she posted: “Regretfully I was informed by our City Attorney that it is his legal opinion that we should not interrupt the RFP process due to existing precedent in establishing RPFs [sic] for restaurant services in city facilities,” She also wrote that “according to city records Cafe Europa was notified on June 22nd by email.”

(The term RFP, meaning Request for Proposal, will be explained later in this article.)

The email sent to Pucilowski on June 22 from Wade Walcutt mentions a bidding process as a future possibility but says little definite about it, nor anything about Café Europa coming under the control of Greensboro Downtown Parks, Inc., the semi-private entity that manages LeBauer Park. It is reproduced below in its entirety.

Jakub: I’m contacting you with regard to our recent dialogue on the lease, set to expire February 2018. My last day in service to the City will be June 30, 2017, as I’ve accepted a new position out of state. Phil Fleischmann, Division Manager of Community Recreation Services (which includes the facility your lease is associated with), will serve as Interim Director beginning July 1.

Mr. Fleischmann (copied) will serve as your point of contact and will have the support of our City Manager’s Office (Chris WWW.YESWEEKLY.COM

Wilson, Assistant City Manager – also copied) with the management and next steps of the lease. Since we have exhausted the term of the current lease agreement, and all extension options, it’s the City’s typical practice to take a comprehensive review of all factors: the old contract; current market values; plus other considerations and determine a transparent and equitable course of action best suiting public interest, trust and efficient use of public funds while maximizing the City’s potential for ROI. This process often includes, but not limited to a request for qualifications, or request for proposals /business plans so all potential interested parties have an opportunity to bid on the opportunity.

Once a process and/or direction is developed (soon), clear and proactive communication plans, including access to have your questions answered quickly will be developed and provided so you can best prepare.

Wade Walcutt, Director Parks and Recreation City of Greensboro On Jan. 29, Pucilowski sent me an email with the following statement, which is also reproduced in its entirety.

“We are immensely grateful for the outpouring of support and interest. At no point were we offered an increase in rent.

Had it been offered, verbally or otherwise, it would have been accepted. If a bid for my space was necessary, and run transparently by the City of Greensboro, this issue would not exist. The only question that needs answering is this: How and why are DGPI [sic] suddenly running and profiting from a taxpayer-funded space?”

Pucilowski’s final sentence addresses a main point of the ongoing controversy.

Supporters and patrons of Café Europa have posted on Vaughan’s Facebook decrying what they perceive as the lack of transparency in the process by which Café Europa’s space came under the management of Greensboro Downtown Parks Inc., the private-public partnership in charge of adjacent LeBauer Park. As the June 22 email demonstrates, until late last year, the restaurant leased its space in the Cultural Center from Parks and Recreation, which continues to manage the other units in that building.

Pucilowski and every Café Europa staff member I’ve talked to take exception to the assumption that Café Europa has benefited substantially from the building of LeBauer Park. They all said that, while business did, once the park opened, rise

from the near-disastrous low to which it had fallen during the period in which their parking disappeared, the street was blocked off, and the sand from the construction site made their patio space unusable, traffic has not been greater than what was prior to the disruption caused by LeBauer’s construction. That is also the impression of this writer, who has seen many warm summer afternoons and nights when the park was full but the Café Europa patio was empty.

GDPI’s RFP document, which I obtained at the meeting required of all interested bidders held on Jan. 25, suggests that, whatever restaurant is in the Cultural Center after April 2018, GDPI will play a much more “hands-on” role than Café Europa’s former landlord Parks and Recreation ever did. A Request for Proposals is a procurement tactic used by an organization seeking bids on a property. The term RFP refers to both the RFP solicitation process and the RFP document used to solicit proposals.

In the interest in bringing increased

transparency to this controversial process, YES! Weekly is making that document available to its readers online.

It can be read in its 18-page entirety at http://yesweekly.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/RPF.pdf.

If Pucilowski wins his bid to continue operating a restaurant in this space, he will not only have to pay increased rent but a share of his profits to Greensboro Downtown Parks, Inc. The RFP document also implies this “public-private”(the descriptor used on its LinkedIn page) organization will have more control over his establishment than Café Europa was ever required to cede to Parks and Recreation.The RFP document was issued on Jan. 9 by Rob Overman, executive director of Greensboro Downtown Parks, Inc. !

This has been edited due to length. You can read its entirety on the website.

IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfiction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.

JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

YES! WEEKLY

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‘Ugliest Classroom Building in America’ scheduled for demolition “They should have torn it down years ago,” said painter and the former University of North Carolina Greensboro professor Setsuya Kotani about the upcoming demolition of the McIver Building.

Ian McDowell He wasn’t the only one to disparage the structure which Contributor housed the university’s English, art, classical studies, and language departments until 2006.

Its modernist architecture was controversial when it opened in 1960, and not just because it clashed with its older brick surroundings. The poet Randall Jarrell called it the Thunderbird Motel, and others compared it to a penitentiary. The abstract installation of enameled panels above its western entrance is attractive from a distance, but up close is invisible, leaving the impression of a Soviet-style concrete slab that some have dubbed “Midcentury Gulag.”

Former faculty and students are critical of more than its exterior, describing cramped offices, cinderblock classrooms, and the smell of mildew and clogged plumbing. I once noticed the late Jim Clark, director of the creative writing program, recoiling from the odor emanating from the women’s restroom. “I sometimes wonder if teaching for five years in this building helped persuade Randall Jarrell to step in front of that car,” he joked grimly, referring to Jarrell’s possibly nonaccidental death in 1965.

Author, essayist and photographer Lee Zacharias, who taught in McIver for 32 years, remembers the ineffective climate control.

@bestxwireless

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1611 E Bessemer Ave Greensboro, NC 27407 (336) 275-0985 2922 W Gate City Blvd Greensboro, NC 27403 (336) 268-9024 926 Summit Ave Greensboro, NC 27405 (336) 897-0653 2204 E Market St Greensboro, NC 27401 (336) 574-2038

Erected in 1960, UNCG McIver building is scheduled for demolition in Feburary “It was so cold in my office the first couple of summers I was there I had to wear gloves,” she wrote in a Facebook message. “This was back in the days of typewriters, and when I asked for some remediation, it took years to get a work order.” Finally, she wrote, “five men came out with a tall ladder, and one taped cardboard over the vent and said that should solve the problem.”

Erected on the location of an earlier building named after UNCG founder Charles Duncan McIver (razed in 1958 because its wooden roof and obsolete wiring were deemed a fire hazard), the 1960 structure was not designed for air-conditioning. Later installation of a noisy and inefficient HVAC system not only impaired acoustics but lowered the ceilings and thus the lights. “You learned to recognize people by their walks,” Zacharias wrote.

“This many years after retiring, I could tell you more about the shoes, ankles, and pants legs of my students than their faces.”

And then there were the rats. Zacharias recalled them as being particularly bold on weekends when she had to enter the building with a key. “You couldn’t let yourself in the front door without seeing

JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

them climbing into the garbage bins on the front porch.”

Painter and writer Lynne Buchanan recalled those rats but also has fond memories. Calling herself a child of the 1970s, Buchanan said it was the first building at UNCG in which she felt at home. “Like it, I was a relative anachronism: a college freshman at 34.” She said that when the new art building was built, “something about it felt profane.” Where it had seemed natural to spatter paint on McIver’s well-worn floors, “the new place was virginal and immaculate, and we were expected to keep it that way, which felt antithetical to the pursuit of painting.”

Despite admitting to often describing it to friends as “the ugliest classroom building in America,” Zacharias also has fond memories. “Hideous as it was, I am grateful to have taught there,” she wrote me. She also said she is thankful for “the memories of what it meant to spend time with students, with the writing program, and with The Greensboro Review, which was just a closet when I first took it over, in a space that was inadequate, so aesthetically unappealing, but was our own.”

In late 2017, there were rumors that

demolition would begin next month, but a Jan. 8 announcement from University Communications clarified February as when the surrounding pedestrian walkways will be closed, with the vacated building to be razed in April. It is being torn down to make way for the planned $105 million nursing and instructional building.

Award-winning novelist and former North Carolina poet laureate Fred Chappell said he wonders what the demolition will reveal. “When I first arrived in the UNCG English Department in 1964, I heard that the Chairman had repeatedly asked William Faulkner to speak at what was then the Women’s College, and that, after many invitations, Faulkner wrote curtly back that he didn’t do that kind of thing.”

The legend, Chappell said, was that Faulkner’s dismissive note was placed in the cornerstone of the new building.

“So when they tear McIver down, maybe they’ll find it.” !

IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfiction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.

WWW.YESWEEKLY.COMW

UNCSA School of Filmmaking showcases student films The School of Filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts has rolled a lucky seven with its upcoming “Best of the School of Filmmaking” screening event, which takes Mark Burger place Feb. 9 in the ACE Exhibition ComContributing plex on the UNCSA campus. columnist The presentation is free and open to the public. It’s your chance to experience the work of tomorrow’s filmmakers on the big screen. The list of alumni that have gone on to successful Hollywood careers, both in the big-studio and independent forums, is an illustrious one: David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express), Jeff Nichols (Loving), Brett Haley (The Hero), Craig Zobel (Compliance), Chad Hartigan (Morris from America), Aaron Katz (Cold Weather) and Martha Stephens (Land Ho!), to name just a few. It’s at the School of Filmmaking that they honed their skills and brought their creative talents to the fore.

There are seven films included in the “Best of the School of Filmmaking” event, made by second-, third-, and fourth-year students during the 2016-2017 school year.

Many of the live-action films were shot in and around Winston-Salem, so audiences can enjoy seeing familiar local landmarks.

This selection of films consists of: The Little Giraffe (animated and directed by Anna Kamaroff): A second-year animated short about a hungry giraffe who needs a little help to reach the leaves atop a tree.

The Patient (directed by Savannah Giselson, written by Kate St. Ogle and Marylea Wiley, produced by Moriah Hall and Charles Witosky): A third-year drama focusing on a closeted gay doctor whose secret and professional reputation is jeopardized by his relationship with one of his patients.

Iron (directed by Brian Ferenchik, written by Corey Graff, produced by Dorian Thomas and Shelby Tyre): This third-year film depicts an aging bodybuilder trying to reconcile the fantasy of his past accomplishments with the potential present (and future) offered to him by a freespirited woman.

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written by Jason Thomas, produced by Shelby Tyre and Emmilee Millhouse): This third-year fantasy sees a young man using a time-travel device to correct his past mistakes and create the perfect date for a New Year’s Eve celebration.

Tin Man (directed by Nathan Knox, written by Shamus Sass, produced by Sass and Moriah Hall): A third-year drama in which a father-to-be struggles to overcome his grief and fear of becoming a father – especially a father like his own.

The Harem of Harry Javier (directed by Jared Sprouse, written by Graeme Pischke, produced by Darren Dai and Tom Coradini): A fourth-year comedy/fantasy about an imaginative teenager torn between the harem of women from his fantasies and a sassy new classmate.

Tethered (directed by Beth Fletcher, written by Fletcher and Chris Dold, produced by Ilayda Yigit and Lauren Henderson): A whimsical fourth-year comedy about the tempestuous teaming of a quirky inventor and the amateur pilot of a hot air balloon.

This event was curated by Susan Ruskin, School of Filmmaking Dean, who admitted it was difficult to select films for the 90-minute presentation because there was so much to choose from. “We are training storytellers to develop their unique voices and project them onto the screen,” she stated. “I am always amazed at the broad-ranging storylines, and I am constantly impressed by the creativity they bring to the task. It’s always hard to select the final program.” !

MARK BURGER can be heard Friday mornings on the “Two Guys Named Chris” radio show on Rock-92. © 2018, Mark Burger.

WANNA

go?

UNCSA’s “The Best of the School of Filmmaking” screening event takes place 7 pm Friday, Feb. 9 in the Main Theatre of the ACE Exhibition Complex, located on the UNCSA main campus: 1533 S. Main St., Winston-Salem. Admission is free. For information about this and all the goings-on at UNCSA, visit the official website: www.uncsa.edu.

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11

tunes

HEAR IT!

Asheville’s Fireside Collective to play Winston-Salem

S

ome bands benefit from being a highly mobile, portable operation, able to take the show on the road whenever they want.

I spoke by phone last week to Tommy Maher of Asheville-based bluegrass outfit Fireside Collective while they had an afternoon off near Charleston, South Carolina. Maher said the band was getting ready to go practice. Being an acoustic band, they can pretty much pull their instruments John Adamian out of the band and rehearse wherever they want. @johnradamian “If we wanted to practice on the frickin’ beach we could walk over there and do it,” Maher said.

As it was, they had the run of a house that one of Contributor their fans had let them use nearby. And that was going to serve as a pretty sweet rehearsal spot for the afternoon, before the group made its way to Augusta, Georgia.

Fireside Collective play the Muddy Creek Music Hall in Winston-Salem on Feb. 10.

“We’ve played enough places over the last four years that we’ve either made or found friends or hosts in a lot of the city’s that we come back to,” Maher said.

That mix of rambling, picking and connecting is what fires the cylinders of Fireside Collective. Being in motion, on the road, in transit, rootless, taking the stage at a new club every night, highway miles blurring in between -- it all informs the quintet’s music.

Asheville bluegrass quintet Fireside Collective keep moving

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JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

By Michael Frayn

February 9-11 & 15-18 Arts Council Theatre 610 Coliseum Drive Winston-Salem

Tickets: (336) 725-4001 TheLittleTheatreofWS.org

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The band’s most recent record, 2017’s Life Between the Lines, is a road album. The songs are about travel and that strange thrill of being dislocated by touring. “Movin’ on Down that Line,” the album’s opener, begins with deft flourishes from dobro and fiddle to accentuate the motion of the song, with lines like “When everyplace you’ve roamed feels just like home, tell me how can you get lost?” Other songs, like “Cabin Song,” present the idea of staying still out in the woods as a romantic fantasy.

Lots of bands want to tour. Running dates in an expanding radius around one’s home turf can be a gratifying way of broadening a fan base. Fireside Collective has taken that spirit to at least one place that a lot of bluegrass bands don’t get to. Through the goodwill and creative energies of Doug Beatty, a club-owner and experienced traveler in Virginia, in November 2017, the band was able to play in a kind of cross-cultural exchange near the communities that ring Lake Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacan in Mexico.

Beatty proposed the trip to the group one night after a show. Thinking it might be big talk, they didn’t exactly expect any plans to take shape, but Beatty did a lot of organizing and got plugged into some grant money from the Mexican government, and before long Fireside Collective had to get their passports in order and gear up for a musical odyssey.

“We stayed with a host family there. Basically every day we would go and practice with this local folk music group,” Maher said. “We would rehearse with these bands and then go play in these little villages around the lake where we were at. We had nothing but love come our way.”

The sonic similarities between some of the indigenous folk music of Michoacan and bluegrass seemed to make the exchange fairly natural for musicians and audiences alike. And now the hope is to eventually bring local musicians from Michoacan up to North Carolina and Virginia for a series of shows highlighting the fruitful collaboration and interplay the folk music of Mexico and the United States.

Bluegrass has kept Fireside Collective moving. It was bluegrass that drew Maher and band founder, songwriter and mandolin player Jesse Iaquinto to the mountains after graduating from Eastern Carolina State University. The music scene in Asheville helped the players sharpen their chops.

Recruiting some students of bluegrass and old-time music from nearby Johnson City, in eastern Tennessee, Fireside Collective took shape in 2014. The mix of tradition and a sense of the music’s built-in progressive aesthetic has inspired Iaquinto, Maher and the band -- which includes Carson White on bass, Joe Cicero on guitar, and Alex Genova on banjo -- to push ahead with their own WWW.YESWEEKLY.COM

original material rather than simply pulling from the deep well of classic repertoire.

“Not growing up raised on this music, and coming at it through bands like Yonder Mountain String Band and Old & In the Way, we had already seen other people’s interpretations of bluegrass,” Maher said.

Knowing that bluegrass was a strong enough tradition to withstand creative tinkering, that gave the band the feeling that elements of pop, folk, country, blues or jazz could be folded in without danger to the music’s durable foundation.

“What [original bluegrass creators like] Earl Scruggs and Bill Monroe were doing was super innovative at the time,” said Maher of the fleet music that blended elements of old-time and country with the dexterity and rhythmic drive of jazz. “Yeah, you’re honoring the past, but you’re honoring dudes who were super ahead of the curve at the time.”

Acoustic music continues to cross-pollinate with the pop sounds on the radio and elsewhere. A new generation had experienced the artistic trickle-down of another iteration of the folk revivals that started rippling through America back in 1952 when Harry Smith assembled his hugely influential Anthology of American Folk Music.

Bands such as the Avett Brothers, Old Crow Medicine Show and the Lumineers have all drawn listeners back to older sounds, and to the charms of numerous voices harmonized organically.

Part of the reason pop and rock music continue to resonate so profoundly with listeners is surely that the volume of big speakers and sound systems creates a powerful feeling in our bones. The airwaves have a force that’s almost independent of the music itself. But acoustic music has some other appeal that’s equally archetypal.

“The human ear has heard unamplified music for thousands of years longer than it has heard it through an amplifier,” Maher said. He believes the challenge of capturing that essence in a club setting, where one usually does plug into to some amplification, is a key hurdle for many acoustic bands.

Maher suspects that acoustic music taps into “some primal wavelength in the body, something deep within us that goes beyond popular music.” !

JOHN ADAMIAN lives in Winston-Salem, and his writing has appeared in Wired, The Believer, Relix, Arthur, Modern Farmer, the Hartford Courant and numerous other publications.

WANNA

go?

See Fireside Collective at Muddy Creek Music Hall, 5455 Mill Creek Road, Winston-Salem, on Saturday, Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. 336-923-8623

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Submissions should be sent to artdirector@yesweekly.com by Friday at 5 p.m., prior to the week’s publication.

Visit yesweekly.com and click on calendar to list your event online. home grown muSic Scene | compiled by Austin Kindley

ASHEBORO

FOUR SAINTS BREWING

218 South Fayetteville St. | 336.610.3722 foursaintsbrewing.com Feb 2: Open mic w/ Wolfie Calhoun Feb 3: The New Habit Band Feb 9: Turpentine Shine Feb 11: Miriam Nelson Feb 16: Casey Noel Feb 17: No Strings

clEmmOnS

VILLAGE SQUARE TAP HOUSE

6000 Meadowbrook Mall Ct | 336.448.5330 Feb 2: DJ Bald E Feb 3: Ryan Trotti Feb 8: James Vincent Carroll Feb 9: Whiskey Mic Feb 10: Essick-Tuttle Outfit

dAnBuRy

GREEN HERON ALE HOUSE 1110 Flinchum Rd | 336.593.4733 greenheronclub.com

gREEnSBORO

ARIzONA PETE’S

2900 Patterson St #A | 336.632.9889 arizonapetes.com Feb 2: 1-2-3 Friday Feb 10: August Burns Red Mar 27: The Contortionist

ARTISTIkA NIGHT CLUB

523 S Elm St | 336.271.2686 artistikanightclub.com Feb 2: DJ Dan the Player Feb 3: DJ Paco and DJ Dan the Player

14 YES! WEEKLY

BARN DINNER THEATRE 120 Stage Coach Tr. | 336.292.2211 May 13: Stephen Freeman: Elvis Tribute

BEERTHIRTY

505 N. Greene St Feb 2: Mix Tape Feb 9: Leather and Lace Feb 16: Gerry Stanek Feb 17: Mix Tape Feb 23: Leather and Lace Feb 24: James Vincent Carroll

THE BLIND TIGER

1819 Spring Garden St | 336.272.9888 theblindtiger.com Jan 31: Crown The Empire, Dear Desolate, The Second After, Til We Ignite Feb 2: Perpetual Groove w/ Imperial Blend Feb 3: Create. Presents Localove ft.

Jordan Castle Feb 5: John 5 and The Creatures Feb 7: Bob Marley’s B-Day PArty w/ Iron Lion & The knotty Lionz band Feb 10: The Eric Gales Band Feb 11: Butch Parnell w/ Sara Sophia, Big Brutus, & Susanna Macfarlane Feb 15: Fat Catz, 3PC & A Biscuit Feb 16: Brothers Pearl w/ Whiskey Foxtrot Feb 17: Intervals, Jason Richardson, Nick Johnston, Night Verses Feb 21: Treehouse! w/ The Hypnotic Conquest Feb 23: Slaves, Ghost Town, Dayshell, kyle Lucas, Set For The Fall, Reflect/Refine

CHURCHILL’S ON ELM 213 S Elm St | 336.275.6367 churchillscigarlounge.com Feb 10: Sahara Reggae band

THE CORNER BAR

1700 Spring Garden St | 336.272.5559 corner-bar.com Feb 1: The kneads Feb 8: Corey Luetjen Feb 15: DC Carter Feb 22: Night Sweats Mar 1: Lisa Saint Redding

COMEDY zONE

1126 S Holden Rd | 336.333.1034 thecomedyzone.com Feb 2: James Sibley Feb 3: James Sibley Feb 9: Sid Davis Feb 10: Sid Davis Feb 14: Chris Wiles’ Love & Laughs Valentine’s Day Show Feb 16: Valarie Storm Feb 17: Valarie Storm

COMMON GROUNDS

11602 S Elm Ave | 336.698.3888 Feb 1: Devon Gilfillian Feb 12: Jenny & Tyler Mar 2: The Human Circuit & Crystal Bright Jul 21: Couldn’t Be Happiers

CONE DENIM

117 S Elm St | 336.378.9646 cdecgreensboro.com Feb 9: Lalah Hathaway Feb 17: Jon Langston Mar 2: Eli Young Band Mar 3: Scotty McCreery Mar 8: PnB Rock Mar 24: Carolina Spring Jam Apr 6: Marshall Tucker Band Apr 7: Chris Lane

GREENE STREET CLUB

HAM’S NEW GARDEN

1635 New Garden Rd | 336.288.4544 hamsrestaurants.com

LOCk’S TAVERN

3720 Holden Rd Feb 3: Misbehavin Feb 10: Chasin the Rain Feb 17: kwik Fixx Feb 24: D-Railed

SOMEWHERE ELSE TAVERN

5713 W Friendly Ave | 336.292.5464 facebook.com/thesomewhereelsetavern Feb 17: Desired Redemption, Trailer Park Orchestra, Rockin’ Rob, Des Pairtheplague, Angelic Steel, The Devil’s Notebook Feb 24: Murder Maiden Mar 10: Boxxer Mar 24: Murder Maiden

SPEAkEASY TAVERN

1706 Battleground Ave | 336.378.0006

THE IDIOT BOx COMEDY CLUB

2134 Lawndale Dr | 336.274.2699 www.idiotboxers.com Feb 19: Sally Ann Feb 19: zo Myers and Friends

HigH pOint

AFTER HOURS TAVERN 1614 N Main St | 336.883.4113 afterhourstavern.net Feb 2: karaoke - DJ Dance

113 N Greene St | 336.273.4111 Mar 3: Olympus

DOWNTOWN BISTRO & BAR

TACO TUESDAY KARAOKE WEDNESDAYS WITH $8 BEER/SHOT COMBOS! HALF PRICE WINE THURSDAYS POKER & DJ FRIDAYS LIVE MUSIC SATURDAYS KITCHEN OPEN LATE January 31 - February 6, 2018

324 S. Elm Street • Greensboro 336.617.5922 • thewonelm.com

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ham’S palladium

Bull’S tavERn

jamestown

cB’S tavERn

5840 Samet Dr | 336.887.2434 hamsrestaurants.com

thE dEck

118 E Main St | 336.207.1999 thedeckatrivertwist.com Feb 2: Jukebox Rehab Feb 3: Brothers pearl Feb 9: Jukebox Junkies Feb 10: Soul central

kernersville

dancE hall dazE

612 Edgewood St | 336.558.7204 dancehalldaze.com Feb 2: Skyryder Feb 3: highway time Feb 9: colours

BREathE cocktail loungE

221 N Main St. | 336.497.4822 facebook.com/BreatheCocktailLounge Feb 1: thunder Snow cone: love hurts Freakshow kinkshow

lewisville

old nick’S puB

191 Lowes Foods Dr | 336.747.3059 OldNicksPubNC.com Feb 2: karaoke w/ dJ tyler perkins Feb 3: lasater union Feb 9: Rockers Feb 10: karaoke w/ dJ tyler perkins Feb 16: karaoke w/ dJ tyler perkins Feb 17: Big daddy mojo Feb 23: Evan & dana Feb 24: karaoke w dJ tyler perkins

oak ridge

Jp loonEY’S

2213 E Oak Ridge Rd | 336.643.1570 facebook.com/JPLooneys Feb 1: trivia

randleman

RidER’S in thE countRY 5701 Randleman Rd | 336.674.5111 ridersinthecountry.net

winston-salem

SEcond & gREEn

207 N Green St | 336.631.3143 2ngtavern.com apr 28: perpetual groove & marvelous Funkshun

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408 West 4th St | 336.331.3431 facebook.com/bulls-tavern 3870 Bethania Station Rd | 336.815.1664

Finnigan’S wakE

620 Trade St | 336.723.0322 facebook.com/FinnigansWake Feb 7: Bedlam Boys mar 7: Bedlam Boys

FoothillS BREwing 638 W 4th St | 336.777.3348 foothillsbrewing.com Feb 4: Sunday Jazz Feb 11: Sunday Jazz

JohnnY & JunE’S Saloon

2105 Peters Creek Pkwy | 336.724.0546 johnnynjunes.com Jan 26: Studs of Steel Jan 27: the lacS

mac & nElli’S

4926 Country Club Rd | 336.529.6230 macandnellisws.com

millEnnium cEntER 101 West 5th Street | 336.723.3700 MCenterevents.com

NEXT HOME GAME WEDNESDAY February 7th 7PM VS. TO PURCHASE TICKETS CALL 336-907-3600

milnER’S

630 S Stratford Rd | 336.768.2221 milnerfood.com Feb 4: live Jazz Feb 11: live Jazz

muddY cREEk caFE & muSic hall

5455 Bethania Rd | 336.923.8623 Feb 1: open mic w/ country dan collins Feb 1: Sarah howell, Brad pruette, and the late night Boozers Feb 2: Fiddle & Bow presents: missy Raines and the new hip Feb 3: nik Bullins & the crooked Saints Feb 3: will Jones, lance and lea Feb 4: Rob price and Jack Breyer Feb 8: open mic w/ country dan collins Feb 9: Bill and the Belles Feb 10: Ryan newcomb Feb 10: Fireside collective Feb 11: Rob price and Jack Breyer Feb 15: open mic w/ country dan collins Feb 15: nora Jane Struthers w/ ashley heath Feb 16: Fiddle and Bow presents: Josephine county

Marcus Paige

January 31 - February 6, 2018 YES! WEEKLY

15

GreensboroColiseum

@GBOColiseum GBOColiseum

Upcoming Events

March 23

GREENSBORO COLISEUM • Friday, May 18 TICKETS ON SALE THIS FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 2 AT 10 AM AT TICKETMASTER.COM • VENUE BOX OFFICE

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Saturday February 24

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Men’s Basketball vs. VMI > Feb 1 ALSO -- UNCG Carolina Weddings Show > Feb. 3 COMING: - UNCG Men’s Basketball vs. ETSU > Feb 12 www.greensborocoliseum.com

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1-800-745-3000

Saturday March 24

- NCHSAA State Wrestling Championships > Feb 15-17 - Shriners Drag Racing & Hot Rod Expo > Feb 16-17 - Bryan Series presents Ted Koppel > Feb 20

Event Hotline: (336) 373-7474 / Group Sales: (336) 373-2632

Safe. Legitimate. Coliseum-Approved. greensborocoliseum/ticketexchange

January 31 - February 6, 2018

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[CONCERTS] Compiled by Alex Eldridge Feb 14: Emile Pandolfi w/ Dana Russell Feb 16: Al Stewart Feb 17: The United States Air Force Heritage Brass Mar 9: Alabama’s Teddy Gentry, John Berry, Lenny LeBlanc, & Linda Davis

CARY

BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE 8003 Regency Pkwy | 919.462.2025 www.boothamphitheatre.com

CHARLOTTE

BOJANGLES COLISEUM

RALEIGH

2700 E Independence Blvd | 704.372.3600 www.bojanglescoliseum.com

CCU MUSIC PARK AT WALNUT CREEK

CMCU AMPHITHEATRE former Uptown Amphitheatre 820 Hamilton St | 704.549.5555 www.livenation.com

3801 Rock Quarry Rd | 919.831.6400 www.livenation.com

THE FILLMORE

500 S McDowell St | 919.996.8800 www.redhatamphitheater.com

1000 NC Music Factory Blvd | 704.916.8970 www.fillmorecharlottenc.com Jan 31: Keys N Krates Jan 31: Killswitch Engage & Anthrax Feb 2: Big Head Todd & The Monsters Feb 2: Kacht Rock Revue Feb 8: Excision Feb 9: Big Gigantic Feb 10: AJR Feb 10: George Clinton & Parliament Feb 13: Less Than Jake Feb 13: Fetty Wap Feb 16: Tonight Alive & Silverstein Feb 17: The Marshall Tucker Band Feb 17: Drezo Feb 20: Of Mice and Men Feb 22: Molotov Feb 22: Emancipator Ensemble Feb 23: Who’s Bad Feb 23: Mako Feb 25: Awolnation Mar 1: St Vincent Mar 1: Lotus Mar 6: Ferg Mar 6: Missio Mar 8: LP Mar 9: Dropkick Murphys Mar 9: Nahko and Medicine for the People

PNC MUSIC PAVILION 707 Pavilion Blvd | 704.549.1292 www.livenation.com

OVENS AUDITORIUM

2700 E Independence Blvd | 704.372.3600 www.ovensauditorium.com Feb 11: Robert Plant & the Sensational

TWC ARENA

333 E Trade St | 704.688.9000 www.timewarnercablearena.com Feb 9: Andrea Bocelli Feb 10: Kid Rock WWW.YESWEEKLY.COM

RED HAT AMPHITHEATER PNC ARENA

DURHAM

CAROLINA THEATRE

309 W Morgan St | 919.560.3030 www.carolinatheatre.org Feb 2: Aimee Mann Feb 10: Arlo Guthrie Feb 12: Marillion Feb 13: The Langston Hughes Project Feb 15: Earls of Leicester Feb 16: Trey Anastasio Feb 18: Four Resplendent Gems

DPAC

123 Vivian St | 919.680.2787 www.dpacnc.com Feb 7: The Temptations & The Four Tops Feb 10: Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit Feb 17: Diana Krall

GREENSBORO

CAROLINA THEATRE 310 S Greene St | 336.333.2605 www.carolinatheatre.com Feb 1: The Wailin’ Jennys Feb 8: Art Garfunkel

GREENSBORO COLISEUM 1921 W Gate City Blvd | 336.373.7400 www.greensborocoliseum.com Feb 2: Rhythms of Triumph Feb 24: Winter Jam

WHITE OAK AMPITHEATRE

1921 W Gate City Blvd | 336.373.7400 www.greensborocoliseum.com

1400 Edwards Mill Rd | 919.861.2300 www.thepncarena.com

HIGH POINT

HIGH POINT THEATRE

220 E Commerce Ave | 336.883.3401 www.highpointtheatre.com Feb 1: Golden Gates Feb 3: Kit & the Kats

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3915 Battleground Ave GREENSBORO 336-282-7070

WWW.SANLUISRESTAURANT.COM JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018 YES! WEEKLY

17

SCREEN IT!

flicks

Swimming into focus: Analyzing this year’s Oscar nominations

BY MATT BRUNSON

W

ith the 90th Academy Awards ceremony set to unfurl on March 4, it’s time to ask the hard questions. Does The Shape of Water represent the shape of things to come? Will

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri get its message across? Will Phantom Thread play it close to the vest, or

will it unravel at the last minute? Or does Winston Churchill pose a double threat thanks to Darkest Hour and Dunkirk?

These are all viable questions, as the five aforementioned films racked up the most Oscar nominations from the 2017 cinematic crop. Here, then, is a look at various highlights and low points in this year’s race.

HIGHLIGHTS • The Best Director nomination for Jordan Peele. Get Out was one of the best films of 2017, but since it primarily resides in the horror genre — a designation largely frowned upon by the Academy — it would seem to be an also-ran in the awards race.

But its critical raves, its potent box office and, most importantly, its sociopolitical import (did any 2017 release tap into the zeitgeist more stirringly?) kept it in the conversation all year long. The Academy responded positively, handing it nominations for Best Picture (co-produced by Peele), Director (Peele), Original Screenplay (Peele) and Actor (Daniel Kaluuya).

Peele’s director bid is especially significant

Lady Bird, starring Saoirse Ronan (left) and written and directed by Greta Gerwig, earned five major Oscar nominations.

— it marks only the fifth time that a black filmmaker has been nominated in this category. The others: John Singleton, Lee Daniels, Steve McQueen and Barry Jenkins (none have won).

• The Best Director nomination for Greta Gerwig. Second verse, same as the first.

Like Get Out, Lady Bird was one of the year’s finest achievements, and it likewise scored a handful of major nods: Best Picture, Director (Gerwig), Original Screen-

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play (Gerwig), Actress (Saoirse Ronan) and Supporting Actress (Laurie Metcalf).

Gerwig’s director bid is especially significant — it marks only the fifth time that a female filmmaker has been nominated in this category. The others: Lina Wertmüller, Jane Campion, Sofia Coppola and Kathryn Bigelow (only Bigelow won).

• The five nominations for Blade Runner 2049. Ridley Scott’s 1982 masterpiece Blade Runner only nabbed two Oscar nominations (it lost Best Visual Effects to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial and absurdly lost Best Art Direction-Set Decoration to Gandhi) even though it deserved a lot more (Best Original Score and Best Cinematography, for starters). Dennis Villeneuve’s belated follow-up fared better, landing a quintet of nods. The race to watch is Best Cinematography, where Roger Deakins landed his 14th nod.

Deakins is widely considered the best director of photography working today (credits include Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Skyfall and Sicario), but he has yet to win an Oscar. Let’s hope this is the year he finally prevails.

• The Best Supporting Actor nomination for Woody Harrelson. Harrelson is one of the most interesting performers on the scene today, but a nomination for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri was not guaranteed. That’s because Harrelson’s co-star, Sam Rockwell, has been

inexplicably grabbing most of the attention for his acceptable albeit showboating, look-Ma!-I’m-acting turn as a lovable loony cop who also happens to be a racist redneck. Harrelson’s charismatic turn is smaller but also more subdued, and it’s a fine contrast to his frightening work in last summer’s War for the Planet of the Apes. In the end, the Academy ended up nominating both actors for their supporting stints in the film.

LOW POINTS • No Best Picture nomination for The Florida Project. One of the year’s most

critically adored films and a major player with all the major critics’ groups, writerdirector Sean Baker’s phenomenal film certainly deserved a Best Picture nomination, as well as additional nods for Baker for Best Director and Alexis Zabe for Best Cinematography. Yet while many prognosticators expected it to be in the mix, I predicted it would only receive a solitary nomination for Willem Dafoe’s formidable supporting performance. (I hated being right.) For all its excellence, the film struck me as too small and too raw to be embraced by an Academy that mostly feeds on glamour and hype. And in Trump’s America, it seems that even liberal Oscar voters don’t want to watch a film about impoverished Americans living on the fringes. Or, as Charlotte Clymer

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accurately stated on Twitter, “I was legitimately stunned that The Florida Project wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Then I remembered it’s a gritty, unromantic look at poverty that forces the viewer to recognize conditions that actually exist in this country for millions of children.”

• The Best Supporting Actress MIAs. To be sure, the five nominees represent a solid lineup. But next to Dafoe, the year’s greatest performance was delivered by Hong Chau, who earned accolades (and SAG and Golden Globe nominations) for her breathtaking work in Downsizing. Unfortunately, Alexander Payne’s latest picture was despised by many, and Academy members opted to ignore the picture altogether. Veteran Holly Hunter was largely expected to earn a deserved nod for her stellar turn in The Big Sick, but she also came up short. And while Tiffany Haddish was a long shot to earn a slot for her hysterical turn in Girls Trip, that would have made for a hip pick a la Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids.

• The shutout of Wonder Woman. Superhero flicks were largely a no-show this year, with only Logan earning a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 nabbing one for Best Visual Effects. Unfortunately, the best superhero film of 2017 was completely ignored. Film adaptations were remarkably slender this past year, which explains how Logan cracked the lineup alongside the deserving likes of Call Me by Your Name and Mudbound. But if they were going that route, Wonder Woman deserved that slot more. Its biggest fault was a shaky final act, compared to Logan’s various flaws in terms of lazy plot devices (a clone?), lackluster villains (particularly Richard E. Gant, who was about as menacing as an inchworm), and repetitive action scenes and narrative beats (including one borrowed from the reviled X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Alas, voters ultimately mistook nihilism for gravitas.

Even on just the technical side, Wonder Woman should have contended in the categories of Best Costume Design, Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing.

• The Boss Baby for Best Animated Feature. In the earliest years of this category (which began in 2001), the nominees were often junky Hollywood efforts that didn’t belong anywhere near an Oscar (e.g. Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Shark Tale). Eventually, though, the animation committee began serving up a perfect mix of deserving hometown efforts (e.g. Zootopia, Moana, Inside Out) and foreign and/or indie titles (The Red Turtle, Anomalisa, Shaun the Sheep Movie). So what happened this year?

The Pixar gem Coco deserves its placement, as do the Polish production Loving WWW.YESWEEKLY.COM

Vincent and the Irish-Canadian effort The Breadwinner. But instead of filling the

other slots with acclaimed international efforts like Canada’s Window Horses: The

Poetic Persian Epiphany of Rosie Ming

(which I caught at Winston-Salem’s RiverRun International Film Festival) or any of numerous Japanese works (among them A Silent Voice and In This Corner of the World), voters opted for Ferdinand, which earned respectable but hardly revelatory reviews, and The Boss Baby, a truly mediocre effort deserving of its negative reviews. Why the backsliding on the part of the Academy? Easy. Whereas it used to be that (following the protocol of most other branches) only animators nominate animated productions, a rule change this past year now allows everyone to weigh in. As Collider’s Matt Goldberg presciently wrote back in April 2017, “This is going to strike a major blow to the category’s diversity... With voting now open to the entire body, the studios have far more power because their films have wider distribution. It wouldn’t shock me if we’re hearing nominations for The Boss Baby and Despicable Me 3 next year.”

OTHER THOUGHTS • While 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens nabbed five Oscar nominations, Star Wars: The Last Jedi did almost as

well, earning four nods. Both garnered noms for Best Original Score, Visual Effects, Sound Editing and Sound Mixing, with Force having also grabbed one for Best Film Editing.

• Speaking of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, composer John Williams earned his 51st nomination for that film, extending his record as the most nominated living artist (Walt Disney still has the most overall, with 59). However, Williams was overlooked for his score for Steven Spielberg’s The Post. And speaking of The Post, Best Actress contender Meryl Streep earned her own record-extending 21st nomination, by far the most for any actor in Academy history (Katharine Hepburn is a distant second with 12).

• Christopher Plummer now becomes the oldest person ever nominated for an acting award, cited for Best Supporting Actor for All the Money in the World. At 88, he surpasses Gloria Stuart, who was 87 when she was nominated for Titanic.

• Mudbound deserves mention for breaking through on two different fronts.

Rachel Morrison becomes the first woman ever nominated for Best Cinematography, and the movie itself becomes the first Netflix production to score major nominations (Best Supporting Actress for Mary J. Blige and Best Adapted Screenplay for Virgil Williams and the film’s director, Dee Rees). !

Feb 2 - 8

[RED]

JUMANJI: WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE (PG-13) LUXURY SEATING Fri - Thu: 11:35 AM, 2:15, 4:55, 7:35, 10:15 THE GREATEST SHOWMAN (PG) LUXURY SEATING Fri - Wed: 11:55 AM, 2:30, 5:00, 7:30, 9:55 Thu: 11:55 AM, 2:30, 5:00 THE SHAPE OF WATER (R) LUXURY SEATING Fri - Thu: 2:10, 4:50, 7:30 THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING, MISSOURI (R) LUXURY SEATING Fri - Thu: 11:40 AM, 10:10 WINCHESTER (PG-13) Fri & Sat: 12:00, 2:20, 4:40, 7:05, 9:25, 11:45 Sun - Thu: 12:00, 2:20, 4:40, 7:05, 9:25 PHANTOM THREAD (R) Fri: 11:45 AM, 2:30, 5:25, 8:15, 11:05 Sat: 11:45 AM, 5:25, 8:15, 11:05 Sun: 11:45 AM, 5:25, 8:15 Mon - Thu: 11:45 AM, 2:30, 5:25, 8:15 HOSTILES (R) Fri & Sat: 11:30 AM, 2:25, 5:20, 8:20, 11:15 Sun - Thu: 11:30 AM, 2:25, 5:20, 8:20 CARDCAPTOR SAKURA: THE SEALED CARD (NR) Sat & Sun: 2:30 PM Maze Runner: The Death Cure (PG-13) Fri & Sat: 11:45 AM, 2:45, 5:45, 8:45, 11:45 Sun - Thu: 11:45 AM, 2:45, 5:45, 8:45 PADMAAVAT (PADMAVATI) (HINDI) (NR) Fri - Thu: 2:50, 9:30

[A/PERTURE]

PADMAAVAT 3D (PADMAVATI 3D) (HINDI) (NR) Fri - Thu: 11:30 AM, 6:10 DEN OF THIEVES (R) Fri & Sat: 11:35 AM, 2:35, 5:35, 8:35, 11:35 Sun - Thu: 11:35 AM, 2:35, 5:35, 8:35 FREAK SHOW (NR) Fri & Sat: 12:15, 2:40, 5:10, 7:30, 9:35, 11:45 Sun - Thu: 12:15, 2:40, 5:10, 7:30, 9:35 PADDINGTON 2 (PG) Fri - Thu: 11:45 AM, 2:05, 4:35 THE POST (PG-13) Fri - Thu: 11:50 AM, 2:25, 5:05, 7:40, 10:15 ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD (R) Fri: 7:00, 9:50 Sat & Sun: 7:00 PM Mon - Thu: 7:00, 9:50 I, TONYA (R) Fri - Wed: 2:05, 4:45, 7:25 Thu: 2:05, 4:45 DARKEST HOUR (PG-13) Fri: 11:50 AM, 2:40, 5:25, 8:10, 11:00 Sat: 11:50 AM, 5:25, 8:10, 11:00 Sun: 11:50 AM, 5:25, 8:10 Mon - Thu: 11:50 AM, 2:40, 5:25, 8:10 LADY BIRD (R) Fri - Wed: 11:50 AM, 10:05 Thu: 11:50 AM THE FLORIDA PROJECT (R) Fri - Thu: 12:10, 2:45, 5:15, 7:35, 9:50 FIFTY SHADES FREED (R) LUXURY SEATING Thu: 7:10, 9:40

Feb 2 - 8

PHANTOM THREAD (R) Fri: 3:00, 5:45, 8:30 Sat & Sun: 9:30 AM, 12:15, 3:00, 5:45, 8:30 Mon: 5:30, 8:15 Tue: 3:30 PM, Wed & Thu: 5:30, 8:15 I, TONYA (R) Fri: 2:45, 8:45 Sat & Sun: 10:00 AM, 12:00, 2:45, 8:45 Mon: 9:15 PM, Tue: 6:30, 8:45 Wed & Thu: 9:15 PM THE SHAPE OF WATER (R) Fri: 3:30, 6:15 Sat & Sun: 12:45, 3:30, 6:15 Mon: 6:00, 8:45, Tue: 3:15, 6:00 Wed: 6:00, 8:45, Thu: 8:45 PM CALL ME BY YOUR NAME (R) Fri: 4:00, 6:45, 9:30 Sat: 10:30 AM, 1:15, 4:00, 6:45, 9:30 Sun: 10:30 AM, 1:15, 4:00, 6:45 Mon: 6:15, 9:00, Tue: 3:30, 6:15, 9:00 Wed & Thu: 6:15, 9:00 LADY BIRD (R) Fri: 5:30, 8:00 Sat & Sun: 9:45 AM, 5:30, 8:00 Mon: 6:30 PM Tue: 4:00, 9:15 Wed & Thu: 6:30 PM

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by Heather Dukes Triad Stage will be presenting A Raisin in the Sun on Jan. 28 - Feb. 18. In a cramped apartment on the south side of Chicago, a struggling family awaits a life insurance payment that could change their circumstances. Matriarch Lena dreams of a nice house in a nicer neighborhood. Daughter Beneatha has her eye on medical school, while son Walter is scheming to buy a liquor store. Lorraine Hansberry’s searing drama about the struggle to achieve the American Dream in the face of racial tensions and economic disenfranchisement changed the face of American theater, and remains no less relevant today.

High Point Community Theatre will be presenting Next to Normal. Dad’s an architect; Mom rushes to pack lunches and pour cereal; their daughter and son are bright, wise-cracking teens, appearing to be a typical American family. And yet their lives are anything but normal because the mother has been battling manic depression for 16 years. Next to Normal takes audiences into the minds and hearts of each character, presenting their family’s story with love, sympathy and heart. Showtimes: Feb. 22 at 7:30

p.m., Feb. 23 at 7:30 p.m., Feb. 24 at 2 p.m., Feb. 24 at 7:30 p.m., and Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Advanced prices are adults: $20, seniors (65+): $18, students (through college): $18, military: $18, At Door: adults: $22, students, seniors: $20, and college students with I.D. at the door: $15.

Limited Seating Available! Seating for this performance will be on stage.

CONTENT ADVISORY: This production addresses mature issues. Not recommended for children under 14.

Triad Stage will be Presenting Our Town from Feb. 14 until March 4. For the citizens of Grover’s Corners, life is sweet. The doctor makes house calls, the teenage boy delivers the paper and the boy-next-door meets the girl-next-door.

Set in an All-American small town at the turn of the century, this 80th anniversary production of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play is a heartwarming and deeply moving reminder to appreciate life while one has it and to relish every moment – no matter how mundane it seems – for it is those small moments that are truly miraculous. A partnership production with UNC School of the Arts !

JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

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19

leisure

[NEWS OF THE WEIRD] NEWS THAT SOUNDS LIKE A JOKE

In Turkmenistan’s capital, Ashgabat, drivers of black cars are facing high costs to repaint their cars white or silver after President Chuck Shepherd Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov banned black vehicles because he thinks the color white brings good luck. Police began seizing dark-colored vehicles in late December, and owners have to apply for permission to repaint and re-register them. The average wage in Ashgabat is about $300 a month (or 1,200 manats); one Turkman told Radio Free Europe that he was quoted 7,000 manats for a paint job, but was told that the price would rise within a week to 11,000 manats. “Even if I don’t spend any money anywhere, I will be forced to hand over pretty much my entire annual salary just to repaint,” the unnamed man said, adding that his black car had already been impounded.

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BRIGHT IDEA

Noting that “nobody else has done it,” on Jan. 4 Nebraska state Sen. Paul Schumacher of Columbus proposed a novel constitutional amendment with the goal of stimulating growth in western Nebraska: Delegate complete or partial sovereignty over a designated, limited and sparsely populated area. “If I were a major business, I would not want Omaha or Lincoln ... telling me what to do,” Schumacher said.

The Lincoln Journal Star reported that the senator believes his concept would attract businesses looking for no state or local taxes and no state or local regulations. It presents the opportunity to “have your own state,” he explained. The Nebraska legislature must approve the resolution before citizens get a chance to vote.

PUBLIC SAFETY Tennessee’s legislature has a newly renovated home in the Cordell Hull building in Nashville, so Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Beth Harwell have been busy outlining some new rules. “Handcarried signs and signs on hand sticks” will be strictly prohibited because they pose a “serious safety hazard.” Animals, too, will be turned away at the door, reported The

Tennessean on Dec. 21. But in a dizzying twist of irony, McNally and Harwell will continue a policy they enacted last year, which allows holders of valid gun permits to bring their weapons into the building.

MY KINGDOM FOR A BURRITO — Tampa, Florida, resident Douglas Jon Francisco, 28, was arrested for DUI after he mistook a Spring Hill bank drive-thru lane for a Taco Bell. On Jan. 17, around 5 p.m., the bank branch manager noticed a driver passed out in a blue Hyundai sedan in the drive-thru lane. When the manager went out to the car and banged on the window, Francisco woke up and tried to order a burrito, according to the Tampa Bay Times.

After being set straight about the bank not serving Mexican fast food, Francisco drove around to the front of the building and parked, where deputies found him and administered a field sobriety test, which he failed. “He made several statements that were differing from reality,” a Hernando County Sheriff’s deputy reported.

— A Facebook event calling for a candlelight vigil to remember a destroyed Taco Bell restaurant in Montgomery, Alabama, started as a joke. But according to United Press International, about 100 people showed up on Jan. 21 to pay their respects to the popular fast-food restaurant, which burned on Jan. 17 after electrical equipment sparked a fire. The owner promised to rebuild and “have a true celebration upon re-opening.”

TAKE THAT! In Dresden, Germany, police reported that two men were injured on Jan. 15 after hitting each other with their cars in consecutive accidents. The first man, 49, pulled into a handicapped parking spot, then saw his mistake and backed out, accidentally hitting a 72-year-old man walking behind the car. The two men exchanged information for a report, then the older man got into his car and reversed out of his parking spot, hitting the younger man. Both men suffered only slight injuries, according to the Associated Press.

FOR THE LOVE OF ANIMALS Richard the 15-year-old pony, of Bridgton, Maine, has had a rough winter. He was suffering from cancer of his penis and infection when temperatures plummeted to negative 25 degrees, which caused frostbite. As a result, part of the animal’s flesh broke off while he was being examined, the Associated Press reported. The Animal Rescue Unit in Bridgton has taken responsibility for the pony and has raised more than $4,000 for his care, including reconstructive surgery. Brogan Horton of JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

Animal Rescue Unit said the goal is for Richard to live out his life pain-free.

CLICHE COME TO LIFE Outdoorsman Sergey Terekhov, 64, had just let his dogs out to run before a January hunting outing in Russia’s remote Saratov region when one of the dogs bounded back to him and clawed the trigger of Terekhov’s double-barreled shotgun, shooting the man in the abdomen. The Telegraph reported that his brother rushed Terekhov to the hospital, but he died less than an hour after the shooting.

ROAD RAGE Distracted driving caused long backups and at least one minor traffic accident on Jan. 20 as a man wandered along I-95 in Philadelphia — in the buff. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported the stripped-down man walked along the shoulder and in and out of the right lane around noon, throwing items at cars before being taken into custody by police. His name was not released.

COMPULSIONS Bradley Hardison, 27, of Elizabeth City, North Carolina, achieved minor celebrity status in 2014 when he won a doughnuteating contest sponsored by the Elizabeth City Police Department. (He ate eight glazed doughnuts in two minutes.) At the time, police had been looking for Hardison as a suspect in break-ins going back to 2013, so they arrested him, and he received a suspended sentence that ended in October 2017. But a doughnut habit is hard to break: The Virginian-Pilot reported that Hardison was charged on Jan. 18 with robbing a Dunkin’ Donuts store on Nov. 21.

UPDATE If you’ve been wondering whatever happened to Barney the Dinosaur, the Daily Mail has the answer for you. David Joyner, 54, romped inside the big purple suit for 10 years on the 1990s “Barney & Friends” show on PBS. Today, he’s a tantric sex guru in Los Angeles who says he can unite his clients’ body, mind and spirit through tantric massage and unprotected sex. Joyner credits his tantric training with helping him endure the 120-degree temperatures inside the Barney suit. While “surprised,” Stephen White, former head writer on the show, said he sees Joyner’s new vocation as the “’I love you, you love me’ deal, but different. I don’t judge or anything, but that’s a side of David I didn’t know.” ! © 2018 Chuck Shepherd. Universal Press Syndicate.

Send your weird news items with subject line WEIRD NEWS to WeirdNewsTips@amuniversal.com.

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From street urchin to artist: Setsuya Kotani talks about his eventful life

S

eventy years after nearly starving on the streets of Tokyo, Setsuya Kotani prepares excellent meals. Still slim despite his love of food, the 82-year-old Ian McDowell artist, and retired University of North Contributor Carolina Greensboro professor is nimble in mind and body.

Kotani, as he prefers to be called, is getting his citizenship after 63 years in the United States and embarking on his fourth marriage. “My sweethearts are sad that Kotani is off the market,” he said while brewing a pot of green tea.

At his home, near the UNCG campus where he taught painting and ceramics for 25 years before retiring in 1999, Kotani was candid about his life before, during and after becoming UNCG’s first Japanese faculty member in 1974. He also served a delicious lunch of Normandie cheese garnished with shredded seaweed and a stew of mushrooms, ham and Japanese root vegetables.

It’s not how he ate as a runaway in 1946. “It’s amazing I survived,” he said, “but that sense of being on my own gave me lots of expansiveness in how I would live my life.”

Kotani was born in the Bunkyo-Ku near the University of Tokyo on Oct. 23, 1934.

“The same birthday,” he said smiling, “as Picasso and Johnny Carson!” He was seven when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and spent the war years near Kobe and Osaka with his mother, sister and two brothers. His much older brother, Tetsuo served in the Imperial Marines and his father was in Manchuria.

He described his parents’ relationship as “very difficult.” His father Shoki was a reporter for the Tokyo’s Mainichi (Daily News). Kotani believes Shoki went to Manchuria as a military journalist. When he returned, “it wasn’t to us in Osaka, but his other family in Tokyo, whom we kids had not known about.”

It was a difficult time for Kotani’s mother Kikue, whose oldest son Tetsuo died from tuberculosis contracted in a campaign on Hainan Island off the southern coast of China. Kikue believed

22 YES! WEEKLY

it would be better for her surviving sons to be raised by their father in Tokyo, while her daughter and youngest son would remain with her in Osaka. So she sent Kotani and his brother Minoru to live with her estranged husband’s other family.

“We hated them,” Kotani said, so the two boys ran away and lived on the streets. “This would have been in early 1946 when I was not yet 12.”

He described hard times bluntly. “I remember stealing, sleeping between prostitute and customer, not just once, and being cold, toes freezing.” He said his brother Minoru earned money doing errands for the Yakuza, “and then there were people who were kind to us and took us in.”

Despite struggling to stay warm and fed, he recalled positive things and said the cold and hunger was worth the transformative realization that “little me was on my own, with nobody telling me what to do.”

He returned to Osaka, but not by choice.

“My mother learned I’d run away,” he said, “and contacted the people giving me shelter.” Kotani described being “caught and put into a train carriage through the window and placed on top of a luggage rack” for shipment home.

Due to that experience in self-determination, when his aunt in Hawaii later offered to educate one of her sister’s children in America, “I said, no hesitation, I wanted out of this little island!”

Kotani’s American relatives also suffered from the war. On the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, his mother’s sister, Tsuyo persuaded her youngest daughter to go to school despite the child’s complaints of a headache. “As soon as my young cousin stepped out onto Honolulu street, something fell from the sky,” said Kotani, explaining that his family was never sure if it was bomb shrapnel or a fragment from a damaged airplane. “It doesn’t matter; she died, right there on the street.”

This resulted in more familial estrangement. “Her mother had cajoled her into the street,” Kotani said, “My aunt’s husband, Mr. Arakaki, remembered this,

JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

Setsuya Kotani pictured in 1976 and it would cause marital problems.”

The oldest Arakaki children, Henry, Alice and June, were being educated in Japan. After Pearl Harbor, they were considered enemy aliens.

“They looked like Japanese, but were American, and under what you might call house arrest.”

When the U.S. bombed Tokyo in 1945, Kotani’s cousin Henry was injured by shrapnel that severed his Achilles tendon.

As Kotani later learned from his American aunt, “Henry came back from Japan a crippled young man.”

The two girls, also repatriated, adjusted well, “but Henry, not so much,” Kotani said. “According to my aunt’s story, he wanted to be an interpreter for the U.S. Army.” Henry enlisted in 1950, and “either hid his handicap, or the army didn’t care.”

When North Korea invaded the South, Henry went to war as an ordinary private rather than an interpreter. Captured by the North Koreans, he survived the POW camp and returned to the U.S., “He was a victim of strife, twice, and an exchanged prisoner twice,” said Kotani, adding that Henry had PTSD the rest of his life.

In 1955, Kotani came to America through the aforementioned generosity of his relatives in Honolulu, where his aunt’s husband owned a successful taxi company. “A year after arriving, I persuaded my aunt to let me try to make

a living and go to school without benefit of her family,” he said. He enrolled at the University of Hawaii with no intention of earning his BFA. “I was contemplating a political science major and then the foreign service,” he said.

In his third year, another student came into sociology class with a piece of pottery and suggested that Kotani “take an art course or two.” He did, and that “course or two” turned into his major.

After graduation, his mother wanted him to return to Japan and start a family, but Kotani had other ideas. “I wanted to move to the continental United States.”

But first, he had to make sure he could stay in Hawaii, so he enrolled in graduate school. “And then I kind of fell in love.”

This was with Laura, whom Kotani described as “born of Japanese-American parents in a small town near Pearl Harbor.” Laura spoke no Japanese, “but this was a good thing, as it made learning English faster, although I still struggle with it!”

Laura, who had one more year left, agreed they would move to the mainland after her graduation. Kotani said that Bert Carpenter, chairman of the art department at the University of Hawaii, supported this decision. “‘You can go to graduate school here,’ he said to me, ‘but why not get the Hell out of this place?’”

They moved to New York in the winter of 1961. Kotani had his Green Card, and the couple worked at the Art Student League on 57th Street, then Kotani man-

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Kotani and his mother Kikue pictured in 1981 aged a small mercantile company and Laura worked for an airline. They enjoyed her privilege of discount travel, visiting India, the Soviet Union, Italy and France, but something wasn’t right.

“I was getting too comfortable as a company man,” Kotani said.

In 1968, he returned to graduate school. “Both New York University and Columbia were in Manhattan,” he said, “but we were living on the Upper West side, and Columbia was two subway stations away, so Columbia it was.”

Among the people he asked for recommendations was his old department head, Carpenter. Kotani said he later learned Carpenter gave him a glowing recommendation, “even though I’d made a point of only asking for references, telling people to say anything about me they felt like.”

Awarded a scholarship, Kotani finished his MFA in painting in 1970. He then “ignored reality” for a year while the couple rented a second-floor loft on Canal Street and Kotani painted. Realizing he couldn’t keep living on Laura’s salary, he applied to 80 schools, seeking any position available. “I’d begun to think that, if I could be a good manager, maybe I teach.”

He ended up teaching ceramics parttime for three years at Hunter College, but his contract was not renewed. From a chance encounter with Carpenter’s wife Didi, Kotani learned that she and her husband had moved to Greensboro, where Bert was head of the art department at WWW.YESWEEKLY.COM

UNCG. “So I wrote Bert asking about any openings,” he said. Carpenter replied there was one in ceramics and invited Kotani to Greensboro for a few days. “I met Chancellor Ferguson and Dean Robert Miller from the College of Arts and Sciences.”

They offered Kotani an appointment at UNCG, and he came in 1974.

He would teach there until his retirement in 1999. “I took my duties very seriously,” Kotani said, “but always realized I was only one or two steps ahead of these young people. I learned as much as I taught.”

Laura and Kotani divorced before he left New York. He met Linda Moss in a private ceramics studio where he was teaching in the Village. “When I got my appointment at UNCG, I had to discuss it with Linda, who was living in Little Italy.’’ Kotani said she made one thing clear: “I’m not going to the South unless we get married.”

After their wedding in Bethesda, Maryland, the couple rented a truck and moved to a house on Greensboro’s Wilson Street not far from the University. Kotani described the marriage as lasting “four or five years,” explaining that Linda was unhappy living in the South. “We were both preoccupied with our own work,” he added, “and I think maybe we were not so very loving.”

Kotani has been married three times, “with lots of times where I was bachelor in between.” He described himself as a man who had many relationships, joking that “the ladies were always there,

Kotani in his home near the University of North Carolina Greensboro clamoring for Kotani!” Becoming more reflective, he said, “I do still like women, but not in that way when the world and I were younger.”

He described himself as a man who valued being alone, but also loved “the feeling of being kindred spirits with certain people, which they sense, too, and very much give energy.” Some relationships, he said, dissipate that energy. “When that happens, it’s not easy to work out.”

He compared relationships to ballroom dancing. “You must be sensitive to your partner’s emotion, feeling, idea, movement, and they, yours.”

What he described as the great love relationship of his life did not end in marriage. “That was with Nina,” he said, “who died in my arms of Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1994.” A few years later, he married again.

“That was Janet. Our relationship lasted four or five years.”

He expected to remain a bachelor but met the painter Yoko Yoshimatsu when he was on a tour of Tokyo’s gallery district in the Ginza five years ago. “Since I retired, I began to have more time to revisit and exhibit my paintings.” He explained that Yoshimatsu has been taking care of her aging mother, “so we have to make arrangement so her mother can be cared for by professionals.” When I asked him if they considered themselves engaged, he said “yes,” adding “we’ve not exchanged rings or anything, but talked about it.”

When told he seemed remarkably candid, he laughed heartily. “My life is open;

everyone knows Kotani is a blabbermouth. I cannot ignore these wonderful people who have come into my life, both the men and the women, but especially the women.”

I asked him why he has only this last year decided to become a U.S. Citizen. He said that he had “gathered the forms” on two previous occasions, “but somehow, could somehow never bring myself to fill them out.”

This time, he did without hesitation. “Maybe because my age,” he said, “and maybe because what’s going on with United States political reality.” He explained that Yoshimatsu would have an easier time coming here if he is a citizen.

The original idea had been that he would move to Japan. But his fiancé, he said, “came to realize that Kotani’s life is much bigger in America.”

In An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art, Roger Lipsey describes how Kotani’s delicate abstracts “disappear in reproduction,” with photographs failing to do them justice. At Kotani’s request, no examples are reproduced here. Several of his recent paintings will be on display from Feb. 2 until April 15 as part of the “Slow Art” exhibition at Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art on 200 N. Davie Street in Greensboro. !

IAN MCDOWELL is the author of two published novels, numerous anthologized short stories, and a whole lot of nonfiction and journalism, some of which he’s proud of and none of which he’s ashamed of.

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Triad bands to watch in 2018 One of the things I most looked forward to when agreeing to write a “bands to watch” feature was the opportunity it provides me to stray from my Dr Jon Epstein usual comfort zone and see what was Contributor brewing around town. Despite being in the shadows of the larger metro areas of Charlotte to the South and the Triangle to the East; the Piedmont Triad has a richly diverse music community and continues to produce some of our State’s finest popular music.

It didn’t take me long to realize that to really do the music community justice (of which I am a part both as a writer and as an active participant) that I had gotten myself in deep. It seemed that pretty much everywhere I looked there were bands and artists sincerely committed to their art. Instead of there being a single music scene in the Triad, there is a ridiculous amount of scenes, which are isolated from all the others. I don’t have an explanation for that, but I’m fully expecting a trip down the rabbit hole as I try to unravel it in future columns.

The music scene of the Triad has traditionally found itself focused in three broad genres: Americana (an extension of the folk-rock movement of the 1970s with an emphasis on traditional acoustic instrumentation), The Blues (with an emphasis on nostalgia and all things “vintage”), and what has been called “Jangle Pop” (which is an odd, but in very obvious ways, a hybrid of the first two genres) and is most often associated with R.E.M. Their early career was largely shaped through their work with local Triad producer Mitch Easter who produced and recorded the band’s debut, Chronic Town, and with fellow producer Don Dixon on the band’s second and third albums Murmur and Reckoning.

This isn’t to say that the Triad music scene is confined to these genres. It is anything but that, and melodic metal band, Raimee is proof. Raimee was originally formed in Boone during the early years of the decade before relocating to Greensboro after the two founding members Rei Haycraft and Brandon Mullin graduated from Appalachian State University. Since forming, the band has released one full-length album, After All This Time and one “shared” album with the since-disbanded Charlotte-based

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The Luxuriant Sedans

Doug Davis

Raimee

Reconnaissance titled Of Roses and Ravens. With a sound that is reminiscent but not derivative of Coheed and Cambria and Evanescence. Relying largely on the strength of Haycraft’s vocals, the band’s sophomore album, which is now in production, is sure to be one of this year’s most anticipated releases in the heavy metal community.

For those who have been paying attention, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the audience for rock ‘n’ roll is no longer confined to teenagers and young adults. As generations age, they carry their musical tastes with them. For the generation that came of age in the latter part of the 20thcentury, the rock ‘n’ roll torch is being expertly carried by The Luxuriant Sedans. Drawing on its

members’ vast experience in the Triad as the most iconic combo, the Luxuriant Sedans are the area’s most formidable rock ‘n’ roll band. Grounded by the rocksolid rhythm section of Ed Bumgardner (Fast Annie, The Allisons, Liquorhouse Soul Revue) and Drummer Bob Tarlton (Kingfish, The Promise Breakers), The Luxuriant Sedans serve up a blues-rock gumbo that is equal parts garage rock and British blues-rock that is reminiscent of classic J. Geils. Propelled by the fierce blues harp chops of vocalist Mike “Wezo” Wesolowski (Blues World Order), and bookended by the formidable guitar work of Rob Slater (Peter May and the Rough Band) and Gino Grandinetti (The Allisons), The Luxuriant Sedans are two albums in on what is proving to be one

JANUARY 31 - FEBRUARY 6, 2018

PHOTO BY BOB POWELL

gritty, take-no-prisoners ride. But it is in a live performance context that they truly shine. Any chance to see this band perform is well worth the effort.

One of the pleasures of being a music critic is the thrill of finding excellence in some of the most unexpected places, hence the inclusion of B.G. Bristow and the Rhythm Demons in this overview.

While it appears that band leader and principal songwriter Brent Bristow, who is also the owner of Salem Music, did not knowingly do so, Road Trip the debut album from his band, is one of the finest examples of traditional Outlaw Country that I have encountered in quite some time. Centered on Bristow’s strippeddown guitar playing and lilting vocals, this album is supported by the talents of

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multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Geoff Weber and a cast of musicians that is a veritable local who’s who of traditional Americana. Road Trip is not so much a blast from the past as it is a nod to tradition with an eye toward the future.

While this article began with the observation that the Triad music scene is more readily understood as a collection of autonomous scenes, the efforts of the Friday Night Music Club over the past year in Winston-Salem has done much to integrate those diverse scenes into an actual community. Spearheaded by the multi-talented, and in the running for hardest-working man in show business crown Doug Davis (The Plaids, The Vagabond Saints Society) and Karon McKinney (Karon Click and the Hot Licks). The Friday Night Music Club is a monthly music event held at various venues around Forsyth County that brings together a broad assortment of local musicians, representing a diverse collection of genres, to perform one-off shows while working with other musicians that they would not have the opportunity to create with under normal circumstances. These shows revolve around a specific theme and have proven to be among the most-attended local music events in the area. Most

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importantly, the Friday Night Music Club has become an incubator for new musical projects across genres and has provided an extensive network of local talent from which other musicians can draw inspiration and bands can find new members.

These events are also always connected to philanthropic efforts as fundraisers for a wide range of local nonprofit organizations, and it is very difficult to find fault with their efforts.

This short list represents a drop in the bucket of musical talent in the Triad. Over the course of the year, future columns will highlight other area musicians and bands worth watching. By keeping a finger on the pulse of the local music scene, hopefully it will help draw more attention to the wide variety of superb talent in our region. The result is that for this writer, it is not so much a job as it is an adventure.

Let’s do this. ! *Editor’s note: If you have any suggestions of local bands that you’d like to see YES! Weekly cover or local bands that you think are worth-watching, email Jon Epstein at jonepstein60@gmail.com.

DR. JON EPSTEIN is a writer, artist, and musician living in Winston-Salem.

University Concert and Lecture Series presents:

LYNN HARRELL, cellist

2017-2018 UC/LS Artist-in-Residence

Saturday, March 17 8:00 PM School of Music Recital hall For tickets and more information

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photos [FACES & PLACES]

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AROUND THE TRIAD YES! Weekly’s Photographer

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A: Vanishing Point, Bushwich, Brooklyn, New Years Eve 2008/2009. Several hundred people packed into a crazy warehouse space for a DIY party.

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We barely made it to midnight, only to get shut down by the fire marshall and closed for good.

Q:What’s the best tip you’ve ever gotten?

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I have no problem cutting them off and asking them to leave.

They can come back when they learn how to behave!

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last call

REAL PEOPLE REAL DESIRE REAL FUN.

[HOROSCOPES]

[LEO (July 23 to August 22) Stop wasting energy licking your wounded pride.

Instead, put the lessons you learned from that upsetting experience to good use in an upcoming opportunity.

[AQUARIUS (January 20 to February 18) Good news: Your skillful handling of a recent matter has won admiration from someone who could be influential in any upcoming decisions involving you.

[VIRGO (August 23 to September 22) You love being busy. But try not to make more work for yourself than you need to.

Get help so that you don’t wind up tackling tasks that are better left to others.

[PISCES (February 19 to March 20) You continue to welcome new friends into the widening circle of people whom you hold dear. One of those newcomers might soon have something special to tell you.

[LIBRA (September 23 to October 22) Your usually balanced way of assessing situations could be compromised by some so-called new facts. Check them out before making any shift in judgment.

[ARIES (March 21 to April 19) It could be risky to push for a project you believe in but others are wary of. Never mind. If you trust your facts, follow your courageous Aries heart and go with it.

[SCORPIO (October 23 to November 21) You might feel angry over an unexpected shift in attitude by someone you trusted. But this could soon turn in your favor as more surprising facts come out.

[TAURUS (April 20 to May 20) Your enthusiasm sparks renewed interest in a workplace project that once seemed headed for deletion. Support from supervisors helps you make all necessary changes.

[SAGITTARIUS (November 22 to December 21) Love rules everywhere for all amorous Archers, single or attached. It’s also a good time to restore friendships that might have frayed over the years.

[GEMINI (May 21 to June 20) A colleague might be a bit too contrary when your ideas are being discussed in the workplace. A demand for an explanation could produce some surprises all around.

[CAPRICORN (December 22 to January 19) It’s not always easy for the proud Goat to forgive past slights. But clearing the air could help establish a better climate for that important upcoming venture.

[CANCER (June 21 to July 22) Try to avoid distractions at a time when maintaining stability in a fluid situation is essential. There’ll be time enough later for the Moon Child to enjoy some well-earned fun and games. © 2018 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

[STRANGE BUT TRUE]

by Samantha Weaver

* It was Italian novelist, philosopher and university professor Umberto Eco who made the following sage observation: “Fear prophets and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them.” * The average (presumably non-bearded) man will shave at least 20,000 times over the course of his lifetime.

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* Third-century Saint Lawrence of Rome was martyred for his faith by being roasted alive on a gridiron. I suppose it makes a certain kind of sense, then, that he’s the patron saint of cooks and tanners. * If you’re not in a romantic mood as Valentine’s Day approaches, you might want to consider reviving the vinegar valentine popular in the 19th century. Rather than conveying love and affection, these

insulting missives -- usually sent anonymously, for obvious reasons -- were dripping with sarcasm and black humor. Some were intended to discourage unwanted suitors, but others were just mean, accusing the recipient of being too aggressive (for women) or too submissive (for men) or of putting on airs, among other things.

There were even occupation-specific cards targeted at doctors, salesladies, artists, etc. According to an article in Smithsonian magazine, in the mid-1800s, these vinegar valentines accounted for half of all valentine sales in the United States. * Those who study such things say that 20 percent of American men have spent at least one night in jail.

Thought for the Day: “One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised.” -- Chinua Achebe © 2018 by King Features Syndicate, Inc.

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[THE ADVICE GODDESS] love • sex • dating • marriage • questions

GUESS PAINS

I got dumped four months ago, and I’m still not sure what happened. All of my boyfriend’s explanations seemed vague, and the breakup really came out of nowhere. I don’t want to contact him.

How do I sort this out so I can move on? — Desperately Seeking Closure

Amy Alkon

Advice Goddess

Science has yet to figure out a number of life’s mysteries — questions like: “What came before the big bang?” “Why is there more matter than antimatter?” and “If we’re such an advanced civilization, what’s with short-sleeved leather jackets?”

Freak breakups — unexpected, inexplicable endings to relationships — are really tough because our mind doesn’t do well with unfinished business. It ends up bugging us to get “closure” — and by “bugging,” I mean like some maniacal game show host in hell, shouting at us for all eternity, “Answer the question! Answer the question!”

This psychological spin cycle we go into is called “the Zeigarnik effect,” after Russian psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma Zeigarnik. In the 1920s, Zeigarnik observed that waiters at a busy Vienna restaurant were pretty remarkable at remembering food orders they had taken but had yet to deliver. However, once they’d brought the food to the patrons, they had little

memory of what the orders were.

Zeigarnik’s research (and subsequent modern research) suggests that the mind remains in a “state of tension” until we complete whatever we’ve left incomplete — finishing the task we’ve started or finally answering some nagging question.

This might seem like bad news for you, considering the mystery you’ve got on your hands. However, you can make use of psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s research.

He explains that our brains are “expensive” to run; basically, it takes a ton of energy to keep the lights on up there. So our mind is programmed to take mental shortcuts whenever it can — believing stuff that has even a veneer of plausibility.

As for how this plays out, essentially, your mind assumes that you’re smart — that you don’t believe things for no reason. The upshot of this for you is that you can probably just decide on a story — your best guess for why your now-exboyfriend bolted — and write yourself an ending that gets you off the mental hamster wheel.

Should any of those old intrusive thoughts drop by for a visit, review the ending you’ve written, and then distract yourself until they go away — like by reciting the ABCs backward or by pondering the mysteries of human existence, such as vajazzling (gluing Swarovski crystals to one’s labia and thereabouts). No, ladies, your vagina will not be more fun if it’s wearing earrings.

MOMMY DREARIEST

I’m a woman in my early 40s, married for 12 years. I gave up my career as a dancer to be a mom. I can afford not to

answers [CROSSWORD] crossword on page 21

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[WEEKLY SUDOKU] sudoku on page 21

work, as my husband makes great money.

However, my kids are now 12 and 13 and don’t need me like they did when they were little. I feel as if I don’t have any purpose in my life, and it’s getting me down.

I can’t go back to dancing now. What do I do? — At Loose Ends Sure, your kids still need you, but mainly to drive them places and then (ideally) be kidnapped by Mexican drug cartel members, only to be miraculously released just when they need a ride home.

In fact, in these modern times, it can feel like much of your job as a mother could be done by a stern-voiced Uber driver. This is a problem. As social psychologist Todd Kashdan explains, “Years of research on the psychology of wellbeing have demonstrated that often human beings are happiest when they are engaged in” activities that bring meaning to their lives.

As I explain in “Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck,” living meaningfully means being bigger than just yourself. It means making a difference — making the world a better place

because you were here. You do that by, for example, easing people’s suffering — and you don’t have to be a hospice nurse to do that.

You can do as my wonderfully cranky Venice neighbor @MrsAbbotKinney does as an adult literacy volunteer — teach people how to read. I always get a little misty-eyed when I see her tweets about taking one of the people she’s tutored to apply for their first library card.

Because doing kind acts for others appears to boost general life satisfaction, doing volunteer work should lead you to feel more fulfilled. This is especially important in a world where daily hardships involve things like struggling to remember your new PIN to get milk delivered from the online supermarket — as opposed to trekking through a snowstorm to the freezing-cold barn so you can get friendly with the down-there on a cranky cow. !

GOT A problem? Write Amy Alkon, 171 Pier Ave, #280, Santa Monica, CA 90405, or e-mail AdviceAmy@aol.com (www.advicegoddess.com) © 2018 Amy Alkon Distributed by Creators.Com.

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