TCB April 6, 2016 — The RiverRun Issue

Greensboro / Winston-Salem / High Point triad-city-beat.com April 6 – 12, 2016

The best of RiverRun 2016 PAGE 16

Brickyard innovator PAGE 8

Malcolm Gladwell’s tippling point PAGE 21

Phuzz buzz PAGE 22

FREE

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April 6 — 12, 2016

Scarface

by Brian Clarey

24 UP FRONT

OPINION

3 Editor’s Notebook 4 City Life 6 Commentariat 6 The List 7 Barometer 7 Unsolicited Endorsement

14 Editorial: Life in the bubble 14 Citizen Green: The short game 15 IJMW: Council board game 15 Fresh Eyes: Crazy people

NEWS 8 A brick house 10 Participatory Budgeting lurches forward in Greensboro 12 HPJ: Wanted: entrepreneurial millennials

COVER 16 Best of RiverRun 2016

CULTURE 20 Food: Ask a food writer 21 Barstool: Gladwell’s rules for drinking

22 Music: Phuzz Phest primer 24 Art: Uptown’s art boss l

FUN & GAMES 26 Bracketology mea

GAMES

27 Jonesin’ Crossword

SHOT IN THE TRIAD 28 Ashland Drive, Greensboro

ALL SHE WROTE 30 About the 50 ways...

QUOTE OF THE WEEK Davis fights for work, for romance, for his very existence. And as he explains, his financial situation places him in the pre-op, pre-hormone, pre-transitioning category. About all he can do to visually express his gender is wear short hair and masculine clothing.

— Brian Clarey, in the Cover, page 16

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CONTRIBUTORS

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SALES EXECUTIVE Lamar Gibson

ASSOCIATE EDITOR Eric Ginsburg

SALES EXECUTIVE Cheryl Green

NEST EDITOR Alex Klein

SALES EXECUTIVE Korinna Sergent

allen@triad-city-beat.com

brian@triad-city-beat.com

jordan@triad-city-beat.com eric@triad-city-beat.com

alex@triad-city-beat.com

EDITORIAL INTERNS Joanna Rutter intern@triad-city-beat.com

dick@triad-city-beat.com

lamar@triad-city-beat.com

cheryl@triad-city-beat.com

nest@triad-city-beat.com

Cover photography courtesy of RiverRun Still from the movie Tower

Carolyn de Berry Nicole Crews Anthony Harrison Matt Jones Amanda Salter Caleb Smallwood

korinna@triad-city-beat.com

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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK

CONTENTS

The stitches came out over the weekend, leaving a twoinch scar along my left brow as my only tangible souvenir from our Caribbean cruise.

That, and a sky-blue lanyard with anchors on it.

But I’ll take the scar, which has given my face an off-fleekness that I find appealing. My children agree that it is so badass that it looks like I might have done it on purpose, giving the impression of being earned in circumstances way more dire than was actually the case.

In fact, I was motoring from the chow-line buffet at the helm of the ship to the taco bar along the port side when an automatic glass door — so clean! — did not fulfill its intended function. Later, a ship security guard took a photo of the smeared impression of my face, left Shroud of Turin-like on the surface.

A mishap on a cruise ship may be the queen mother of all personal injuries, or so my maritime lawyer tells me. But I feel like I’ve already gotten something out of this deal.

It’s not the first time I’ve busted my head open — there’s another scar on my forehead that I blame on a live cover of “Hot for Teacher” by my favorite band, and still another that I acquired on my 26th birthday at a bar called Snake & Jake’s Christmas Club Lounge while wearing an actual lampshade on my head. Ironically, I assure you.

A mishap on a cruise But this knock on the head, ship may be the queen unlike so many mother of all personothers before it, al injuries, or so my seems to have had a positive effect. maritime lawyer tells Maybe this is me. But I feel like I’ve the vertigo talking, but ever since already gotten somemy face bashed thing out of this deal. into that thick glass door I’ve felt lighter… less anxious… more centered. After a couple years on the grind at full speed, I’m moving more deliberately, and not just because I’m worried that I’ll walk into something again. I feel like I’m finally seeing things clearly — which of course I mean figuratively, because since the incident my actual eyesight has been a little bit off.

And if ever I forget this rosy state of mind brought on by my serendipitous head trauma, I’ll always have the scar to remind me. It looks pretty badass, as I’ve probably mentioned, which is a good thing, because it’s possible my eyebrow will never grow back. I may be looking at it for a while.

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April 6 — 12, 2016

CITY LIFE April 6 – 12 ALL WEEKEND

RiverRun International Film Festival @ Winston-Salem Directors, producers and cinema lovers descend on the Twin Cities to glory in the past year’s best indie films.

Check this week’s cover story for roughly 20 reviews brought to you by the TCB editorial team. (We just watched movies all week for work. It was terrible.) The festival’s 10 days long; each location across town hosts multiple screenings each day. Don’t get overwhelmed.

Check the schedule online for films showing this weekend, read a review or two, and soak up being a part of this significant Triad festival. Buy tickets in-person at the Stevens Center or online at riverrunfilm.com.

by Joanna Rutter

WEDNESDAY High Point Ballet on Broadway @ High Point Theatre, 7:30 p.m.

For this one-night, all-ages production, High Point Ballet presents excerpts from classic Broadway shows featuring pre-professional and professional dancers from throughout the South. School of the Arts alum and founder of the Winston-Salem Festival Ballet Gary Taylor choreographs. Details and tickets at highpointtheatre.com.

Mr. Burns: a Post-Electric Play @ UNCG Brown Theatre (GSO) In lieu of a thesis, MFA student Sarah Hankins directs this trippy exploration of a post-electricity world by Anne Washburn, where survivors struggle to hold onto their humanity by revisiting a classic tale of their pre-apocalyptic time: the “Cape Feare” episode of The Simpsons. The play premiered in 2012 and left most critics conflicted; perhaps Hankins’ take will tie this sprawling plot (covering 80 years) together.

Opening night is Wednesday. Get tickets at theatre. uncg.edu.

THURSDAY

GSO Newsmakers @ Scuppernong Books (GSO), 7 p.m.

Greensboro author Quinn Dalton moderates what is promised to be a lively community conversation with five Greensboro news editors, one of which will be TCB’s Brian Clarey. Joining him are Afrique Kilimanjaro of the Carolina Peacemaker, Allen Johnson from the News & Record, John Hammer at Rhino Times and Jeff Sykes of Yes Weekly. Up for discussion: the editors’ views of Greensboro issues and fielding audience questions. Welcoming remarks

by Mayor Nancy Vaughan. More info can be found on the event’s Facebook page.

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Public hearing on state Medicaid reform @ Guilford Health and Human Services building (GSO), 6:30 p.m.

The NC Department of Health and Human Services holds a public hearing on its drafted plan to reform the state’s Medicaid program; this is the Guilford iteration of hearings that will be taking place all across the state this week. Comments received by April 18 will help shape the final Medicaid reform waiver application that will be sent to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services for approval. Share your comments for the public hearing period at ncdhhs.gov/ nc-medicaid-reform.

Wordsomnia @ Scuppernong Books (GSO), 12 p.m.

The third annual 24-hour marathon reading of poetry and prose begins on Friday at noon and ends Saturday at noon. Each reader can sign up for a 10-minute time slot in which to read original work. Free coffee will be served from 2 to 7 a.m. as incentive to stick around, and sleeping bags are welcome. No word on whether the Brians will allow napping on the bar. A special surprise event at dawn is promised. For more information, or to sign up to read, call Scuppernong Books at 336.763.1919 or email us scuppernongbooks@gmail.com.

RiverRun gala @ Millennium Center (W-S), 9 p.m.

This is your best chance to rub elbows with famous people in the Triad short of hanging around in the VIP lounge at the Coliseum. This sure-to-be-swanky evening will have live music by Camel City Jazz Orchestra, a free photo booth, appetizers and desserts from area restaurants and drinks from the cash bar. Dress well: You might run into Jeff Daniels.

Though, technically, that rule applies to every day. Buy tickets at riverrunfilm.com.

SATURDAY Paddle:Fest Demo @ Lake Brandt Marina (GSO), 9 a.m.

When else do you get to pick from a hundred kayaks, canoes and stand-up paddleboards and ride them around a lake for free? Hypothetically, it’s to test them out to buy from GetOutdoors outfitters, but that never stops anyone from eating seven Sam’s Club samples in a row, either. We won’t tell. Paddles and lifejackets are provided. More details on the Facebook event page.

triad-city-beat.com

FRIDAY

MONDAY Christina Baker Kline discussion and book signing @ High Point Museum, 7 p.m.

The author of widely acclaimed Orphan Train will hold a discussion of her book as well as a book signing. Kline’s fifth novel spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list, and the Library Journal called it a “compelling story about loss, adaptability and courage”; come find out why. For more information about the 2016 High Point Community Read series this reading belongs to, email reader. services@highpointnc.gov.

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Reconsidering Carter Gentlemen: I appreciate your showing President Jimmy Carter some love in your recent rankings of the past six presidents [“The List: 6 presidents, ranked from best to worst”; by Jordan Green; March 16, 2016]. Carter’s presidency was the last time our foreign policy was based on actual ethical considerations, and not just platitudes.

He got a lot of grief over it, but he had my support. Carter also set a direction for environmental sanity. Unfortunately, Reagan undid what he could as quickly as he could, to our lasting detriment. I also have great respect for the good works Carter has done since his presidency. His efforts have improved the lives of millions, and he’s done so without lining his own pockets.

Joel Landau, Greensboro Equal rights, no exceptions North Carolina needs a law, or constitutional amendment, that states that all adult citizens will have the exact same legal, political and civil rights. Bigots will oppose such a law, which is why we need one.

Chuck Mann, Greensboro More dialogue on HB 2 Normally, City Beat provides much more interesting and insightful reading material when compared to Yes Weekly. However, the articles on HB 2 in City Beat did not do anything for me whereas the ones on the same topic in Yes Weekly actually pushed me forward in my thinking.

There is quite a bit of dissent inside feminist and progressive circles on this topic. Why don’t you all, since you are the progressive newspaper in town, facilitate a real political discussion on this topic inside the pages of your newspaper? People — cis women, trans women, cis men, trans men, etc. — need to have a real dialogue with one another, as opposed to everyone just hunkering down in their respective identifies and fighting only for their rights.

Audrey Berlowitz, Greensboro The editors respond: We claim the ground of common sense, fairness and compassion, not progressivism. We’re not aware of anyone “hunkering down in their respective identities”; the vast majority of

people in North Carolina cities appear to be in consensus that the human rights of transgender people should be protected.

Human rights are for all, not just for specific groups or “identities.”

Was a battle flag… we can put it away On Jan. 23, our state celebrated the birthday of Robert E. Lee by flying the confederate national flag at the capitol building.

To honor Lee, supporters carried the confederate national flag outside the Capitol building on Jan. 16. At the same time, a birthday celebration was held inside, hosted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The flag flew again at the Capitol building on March 5, 2016, in celebration of confederate flag day.

The confederate national flag is often called the confederate battle flag — crossed blue bars with 13 white stars on a red field.

The designer of the flag, William Thompson, wrote, “As a people, we are fighting to maintain the heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause…. Such a flag… would soon take rank among the proudest ensigns of the nations, and be hailed by the civilized world as the white man’s flag.”

Some people think the confederate flag is a symbol of heritage. Others see the flag as an emblem of racism, including the man who designed it. Either way, the state should not endorse such a divisive symbol.

Robert Gus Lehouck II, Greensboro Isner all the way Isner will win [“Special election for Congress draws dozens of candidates”; by Jordan Green; March 30, 2016]. Robert Isner has been a successful businessman and entrepreneur his entire life. He is a job creator and he knows how to fix problems.

Isner has employed hundreds of people throughout his business career! I’m not sure any of the other candidates can say that, especially none of the Democratic candidates.

Stuart, via triad-city-beat.com

7 RiverRun films I want to see

by Brian Clarey 1. Acoustic Kitty I’ll never make it to more than a couple RiverRun films this year, but if I had my way I’d take a week off and spend it in the dark. I’d love to catch this one, about a secret agent who inserts listening devices into cats.

2. Bacon and God’s Wrath A 90-year-old Jewish woman tries bacon for the first time.

3. “Flotsam” This short looks at Mardi Gras in New Orleans from the perspective of the people who clean up after it.

4. Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You Lear was the producer behind “All in

the Family,” “The Jeffersons,” “Sanford and Son,” “Good Times” and everything else I loved on TV back in the day. This retrospective looks at his life and work.

5. Reborn Behind the scenes with Lauren Cuthbertson, top dancer for the UK Royal Ballet.

6. The Ken Burns Effect A documentary in the style of Ken Burns, about Ken Burns, starring Ken Burns.

7. The Punk Rock Movie from England Live Super 8 footage from the Roxy in London ca. 1979 features the Clash, the Sex Pistols and Souxsie & the Banshees.

Bacon and God’s Wrath

COURTESY PHOTO

The Ken Burns Effect

COURTESY PHOTO

Correction

An article in the March 30 issue of Triad City Beat (“Four pro-HB 2 Triad politicians up for re-election”) incorrectly speculated that the quote posted on state Senate candidate Michael Garrett’s Facebook page referred to the legislation. In fact, the post was a reference to Good Friday. We regret the error.

With the passage of HB 2, a law our publication vehemently opposes, we wanted to ask our readers (and editors) if it would change how folks vote come November.

80

60

40

20 10

No “I was already voting against them.”

36% Yes

2% No

All She Wrote

62%

Shot in the Triad

30

Games

50

Fun & Games

70

Culture

90

Cover Story

New question: Which hurt worse, the Panthers loss in the Super Bowl or the Tarheels in the NCAA? Vote at triad-city-beat.com.

Opinion

Readers: The majority of you (well, 62 percent of the ones who voted) said no, but qualified it by adding, “I was already voting against them.” Second place fell to “Yes — vote them out!” with 36 percent, while just 2 percent said “No” and nobody voted for “Other.” Don’t like the results of our poll? Well, ya should’ve voted. And we hope all of you, regardless of whether HB 2 is a make-or-break issue for you, to remember it come November.

by Joanna Rutter I assume that someday I’ll be able to look at a man the way I look at an everything bagel with lox cream cheese, but Sunday was no such day.

Dragging my long-suffering roommate Maddie out of bed to join me on the pilgrimage up Bryan Boulevard, I attempted to distract myself in the car with conversation and the soothing sounds of Alison Krauss, trying not to think about the mouth-watering paradise awaiting us.

But as we took the New Garden exit, I couldn’t hold in a squeal of anticipatory glee.

You would think after a few excursions, I’d have calmed down by now about New Garden Bagels, but as I like to obnoxiously remind everyone whenever I can, I’m a native New Yorker. Not only that, but I’m a New Yorker who has a track record of turning up her nose at anything in the Triad laying claim to the edible realms my hometown usually wins. (Mizumi’s sushi in Greensboro and Dioli’s cannoli from Winston-Salem make the cut.) It’s not a snobby standpoint if it always holds up.

Or so I thought before my teeth first sank into a New Garden bagel last year and I realized just how wrong I could be.

Long Island (pronounced lon-GUY-lan) native Ed Bonniberger honed his craft well enough to bring his talents to the South. It’s a damn near miracle that he’s able to recreate the New York style bagel without the city’s tap water, long believed to carry intrinsic dough-empowering properties necessary for real pizza and bagels, so it’s possible that he has magic powers.

I have no idea why Bonniberger relocated to Greensboro and I haven’t yet had the chance to ask him. It’s not important. What’s important is that he brought his bagels here like a veritable fairy godmother of boiled breakfast pastries.

Let me break down the spiritual experience of my go-to order for you. First, you’ll encounter a generous layer of smooth cream cheese with pieces of lox flecked throughout like savory pink jewels. Then you’ll sink into the firm but pillowy bagel itself, which has just the right amount of give, through poppyseeds and onion flakes. The saltiness combines with the sweetness of the dough, and the cold combines with the toasty outer shell.

And then, for a fleeting moment, you see the face of God. High Pointers can check out New Garden Bagels’ recently opened sister location at 1228 Eastchester Drive.

News

Jordan Green: Yes, this definitely solidifies my decision.

I’ve been pretty lukewarm on Roy Cooper because, in my opinion, he lacks the common decency and political courage as attorney general to make a motion for a new trial for Kalvin Michael Smith, a black man in Winston-Salem who is serving a 28-year sentence for an assault conviction whose legitimacy has been cast into doubt by multiple independent investigations. But Pat McCrory forced Cooper’s hand in asking him to defend the unconstitutional and harmful HB 2, thus making this election all about LGBTQ and specifically trans civil rights. I hadn’t yet come to the difficult reckoning

Eric Ginsburg: Gov. McCrory had already given us plenty of reasons to hold his leadership in disdain — remember the Syrian refugees or the attack on FaithAction immigrant IDs? — and I would never vote for Trudy Wade, no matter how unlikable her opponent was. But Jon Hardister, the only other Guilford County lawmaker who supported HB 2 and who has a primary? Yeah, this would affect my vote in his state House race big-time. Thing is, like Brian I don’t live in Hardister or Wade’s district.

New Garden Bagels

Up Front

Brian Clarey: Unfortunately HB 2 will not change my vote, because I won’t have much opportunity to retaliate against the people who passed it. Pricey Harrison is my state representative, and I’m in Sen. Gladys Robinson’s district, neither of whom supports this bill. I will cast my vote against Gov. Pat McCrory, but that was going to happen anyway (though I have voted for him in the past). But anyone running for US Congress who voted for this bill will not get my vote.

of how I could justify voting for Cooper versus writing in someone else. Now, McCrory has made the decision for me.

triad-city-beat.com

Will HB 2 affect your vote in November?

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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NEWS

A brickmaker’s legacy seen as a foundation for urban revival

by Jordan Green

State lawmaker Evelyn Terry is engaging preservation experts to push forward a plan to restore the house and brickyard where her distinguished grandfather operated a successful brickmaking business in Winston-Salem’s Dreamland Park neighborhood.

Evelyn Terry’s goal of restoring her grandfather’s house and brickyard on Dellabrook Road on the east side of Winston-Salem has been a long time coming.

Since taking on the project in 2000, she’s worked with the city’s code inspection office to keep the one-story clapboard house from being condemned.

The grass gets mowed regularly, and a worn brick sidewalk leads out to the street. The property has been listed on the National Historic Register of Historic Places since 2000, and in 2007 a historic marker was erected in front of the houses.

JORDAN GREEN State Rep. Evelyn Terry visits her grandfather’s brickyard that she excavated a couple years ago behind his house And while the project is still a long in the Dreamland Park neighborhood on the east side of Winston-Salem. way from completion, it’s getting a the South American country of Guyana there was a boy in the neighborhood — to build wealth in a society plagued with much-needed boost thanks to a planto teach brickmaking. he probably worked for my grandfather, new structural barriers. ning grant from the Marion Stedman Terry, who is a state lawmaker, too — he would say, ‘Oh, Mr. Black’s “We’ve got innovation today with the Covington Foundation to fund a envisions the house and brickyard as a mule done got loose again.’

And he’d go [Wake Forest] Innovation Quarter,” she charrette scheduled for Saturday with cultural center that anchors an ecodown in the ravine and get that mule.

It said.

“Innovation then was taking whata panel of experts, to be moderated by nomic renaissance in Dreamland Park, was a community.” ever it was that was being thrown away, Preservation North Carolina President a struggling African-American neighTerry estimates that her grandfather and making use of it.”

Myrick Howard. borhood that was largely rural when employed hundreds of people at his When the white-owned brickyard George Black, the son of former her grandfather, affectionately known as brickyard on a seasonal basis.

As her where he was employed went out of slaves, walked to Winston-Salem with “Papa,” moved there grandfather explained to legendary business during the Great Depression, his father and older during the Great broadcaster Charles Kuralt, brickmakBlack didn’t stay idle. He cut ice off the brother from rural A panel of preservation Depression. ing is a springtime activity that happens pond to sell for refrigeration, grew a big in Randolph County experts will present their “The reality is that when the clay is warm enough to extract garden and made bricks — even though in 1889. He worked findings on the George it must be a gathering from the ground.

When Kuralt visited the market had evaporated.

And he held various odd jobs and place that does enin November, Black reportedly told him: onto a wooden mill given to him by his Black House and Brickyard learned how to make hance our culture and “Oh no, it’s hog-killing time.

You got to former employers that screened the clay to the community at St. Paul bricks. Through hard values, and enables come back.” for brickmaking. work and remarkable United Methodist Church, people to learn what The many people who worked for “He took that mud mill that man business savvy, he located at 2400 Dellabrook we did here, and to Black over the years, Terry said, include gave him to break up for firewood, and eventually established Road (W-S), on Saturday go forth with whatevNathaniel Jones, the late grandfather of he made bricks,” Terry said. “Bricks a successful business er inspiration, desire professional basketball player Chris Paul weren’t selling.

He said, ‘You’ve got to at 3:30 p.m.

To learn more as a brickmaker. and talents they have — Paul’s aunt holds a family reunion at keep working.

Can’t sit on the porch. about the project, visit Black’s hand-made to realize their own their place in Dreamland Park — and Got to keep moving.’

Come the next bricks were used in mrgeorgeblack.org. goals,” Terry said.

Thomas Baldwin, who retired from spring or so, someone wanted bricks. He restorations in Old “Papa hired BB&T and now lives in Kernersville. had them.”

Salem, Colonial children in the summertime,” she Terry believes that her grandfather’s One of Black’s protégés, Thomas Williamsburg, Wachovia bank branches continued.

“It was a way for me and my entrepreneurship at the height of Jim Brabham, worked with Terry to excaand fine homes in Buena Vista. Prior cousins to earn money so we could have Crow segregation holds some lessons for vate the brick kiln behind the house. to his death at the age of 101 in 1980, school clothes.

If a mule broke loose, African Americans today who are trying When he was 9 years old, Brabham’s Black was sent by President Nixon to

Brooks will tour the house on Saturday morning to assess opportunities and challenges. During a working lunch at St. Paul United Methodist Church, the panelists will field suggestions from community representatives, and at 3:30 p.m. they will present recommendations to the public.

“The purpose of the charrette is to determine the best use and purpose for this site and the community in which it rests,” Terry said. “We want to lay the foundation for rebuilding this community with a focus on the legacy and values of this place.”

Up Front

Black’s bricks were in the fireplace at the Winston-Salem Marriott, “He just tried to embrace them,” Terry said.

“He is a man with many talents,” she said. “He is definitely an artist. His culture and values and education and learning are all infused in his vision.

He took us through a visioning process.

He told us: ‘You have to embrace your vision and share it with the world. And you’ve got to work at it.’”

A panel of experts, including architect Wesley Curtis, developer Dewey Anderson and Winston-Salem Neighborhood Development Director Ritchie

triad-city-beat.com News Opinion Cover Story

grandfather brought him to Black and asked him to teach the young boy how to work, Terry said. In 2011, Brabham was working sporadically in construction, when Terry persuaded him to help uncover the old bricks.

“Every day that the Lord sent him and I could drive him, we worked together,” Terry recalled. “I hauled away 10 loads of rubbish. We picked through the dirt and discovered hundreds of bricks. So that must have been the last batch of bricks that Mr. George Black made.”

When Brabham got sick, Terry had to put aside work on restoring the brickyard so she could help care for him. He died in 2013.

George Black’s legacy and Terry’s goal of revitalizing Dreamland Park attracted the interest of Theaster Gates, an African-American potter and professor a the University of Chicago, who has used the arts as a catalyst to renovate derelict buildings in the Greater Grand Crossing neighborhood on his city’s south side. Gates visited Winston-Salem in mid-March.

When Gates learned that some of

Culture Fun & Games Games All She Wrote

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Shot in the Triad

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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Participatory budgeting lurches forward in Greensboro

by Eric Ginsburg

Dozens of residents turn out to five district meetings to learn about what proposals will be on the ballot this month in Greensboro’s first participatory budgeting process.

If you know how much it covers, $90,000 isn’t that high a price to pay for an app like this.

At least that’s what NC A&T University student Hassan Black said — standing behind a poster advertising his idea for an app that would allow transit riders to track when their bus would be arriving — at Griffin Recreation Center on April 1.

The phone app, which would be custom-designed for the Greensboro Transit Authority’s bus system, might cost more up front to cover hardware like transmitters for each bus, building a database and creating the phone software, but Black said that in the long run the price tag makes it much cheaper than similar commodities a large company might offer. “$90,000 is actually a really good price for this kind of software,” he said.

Plus, he added, it would provide GTA ERIC GINSBURG Residents discuss one of the participatory budgeting proposals at a District 1 community expo at Hayes-Taylor with all sorts of incredibly useful data YMCA in southeast Greensboro on March 31. about its fleet, making it an asset to the first time for the next budget year. The meeting on March 31. added, several of the ideas put forward city and bus riders. Several larger cities idea is to empower voters to decide how A few residents who attended the Disare more agreeable. already benefit from comprehensive a portion of the city budget is spent, trict 1 community expo at Hayes-Taylor And therein lies the significance of public transit apps, Black said, and voting directly for proposals at a series YMCA said they wished more commuparticipatory budgeting — residents can building one for Greensboro is exactly of meetings later this month. nity outreach had been done to solicit vote directly on the proposals, and some the kind of work he hopes to pursue Last week, the city and the nonprofit ideas, arguing that some of the proposideas will rise to the top while others will after graduating.

Participatory Budgeting Project held a als — including $40,000 for artistic bus fade into the background.

Around Black, similar tri-fold posters meeting every night of the week, one wraps and $10,000 for chess tables — But the concern that more outreach were stacked atop tables in the side in each district, to allow residents to didn’t align with the real needs of a city may have been needed or that the room at the rec center in west Greenssee the proposals before them, ranging with high poverty rates. inaugural attempt at participatory boro, each making the case for capital from new chess tables to crosswalks.

“The community outreach just was budgeting in Greensboro is a little shaky projects the city of Greensboro could Some, like Black’s, not there,” Tarshia C. Donnell said. isn’t without merit. By the fourth district undertake to enhance aren’t district specific, Standing next to her in the corner meeting last week, organizers said that the city. Most cost and would require of the room, Sandra Isley agreed.

Too some aspects about the process — like far less than Black’s To learn more about support across the city many of the ideas didn’t reflect the how many votes each person will get — proposal — like a to win, while others real needs of the community, she said, are still being worked out.

And at the when you can vote, visit $10,000 mural of the like pet wastebaskets quickly offering one of her own: some fifth meeting, for District 5, attendees A&T Four — though greensboro-nc.gov/pb at Benbow Park in way to help single mothers like her and organizers talked about how a plan a few such as a skate District 1 could be afford summer camps and community for Hester Park’s soccer fields might be spot at Lake Daniel accomplished with an programs this summer.

Without the split into smaller components so that Park or upgrading estimated $300. help, Isley said she’d need to find somethe district’s entire $100,000 allocation Hester Park soccer fields hit $100,000.

Ideas were collected through a public one to care for her daughter while she’s wouldn’t necessarily be eaten up by one Greensboro’s participatory budgeting input process and then fleshed out by at work after school lets out for the year. project if approved by voters. project — the first of its kind in the volunteer committees who helped assess Timothy X, an activist who also runs There isn’t much time to sort out region and one of only several in the feasibility and cost, project assistant Cash Money Photography, said he those kind of details — the first vote will nation — allocates $100,000 to each Erica Lindenberg with the Participatory liked Isley’s idea and concurred about be held for District 4 on April 11. of the five city council districts for the Budgeting Project said at the District 1 the need for greater outreach. But, he Each district will have two opportu-

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Cover Story

Mary Lacklen • Allen Broach • Bob Weston

Opinion

nities to vote, and with the exception of District 3, there are different polling places each time in an attempt to maximize accessibility. For example, District 2 residents can vote on April 14 at McGirt-Horton Library from 4 to 8 p.m., or from noon to 4 p.m. at Windsor Rec Center on April 18. The pattern is similar for each district, though each of the 10 voting times is held on a different day over a two-week span, which might add to some confusion among residents.

The full schedule and additional information about participatory budgeting is available at greensboro-nc.gov/pb.

The site doesn’t include a detailed list of what ideas residents will be able to vote on, though Lindenberg said the posters would be up at voting sites and residents could browse or ask questions before making a decision. That will help, because while some ideas are self explanatory — a bus shelter at the intersection of Vandalia Road and Lakefield Drive in District 1, or a Latham Park emergency call box in District 3 — others, like Black’s, benefit from a deeper explanation.

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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HIGH POINT JOURNAL

Wanted: ‘Active, engaged, entrepreneurial and working millennials’

by Jordan Green

High Point City Council has developed a strategic plan that includes attracting and retaining more millennials, and completing a catalytic project that will stimulate private investment in restaurants and retail, along with housing.

High Point City Council has embraced many of the goals of Andrés Duany, a Miami-based urban planner who created a master plan to revitalize the core city in 2013 and 2014, albeit somewhat belatedly.

In addition to reconstituting a downtown revitalization agency strikingly similar to the entity the previous council sidelined in 2014, this city council has officially embraced three long-term goals that mostly parallel Duany’s vision for a core city with public gathering spaces, year-round retail and restaurants, and an urban aesthetic that appeals to entrepreneurial millennials.

During a retreat at High Point University to develop a strategic plan for the city last month, council members agreed that the city needs to promote an entrepreneurial culture, create a vibrant downtown and improve the small-business sector.

One of the council’s long-term goals, as City Manager Greg Demko reported on Monday-evening city council meeting, is to “increase the population of active, engaged, entrepreneurial and working millennials in High Point by 25 percent.”

A second goal, as Demko articulated, is “to produce a downtown catalyst project that produces 500 private-sector jobs, 15 to 20 new restaurants and shops, 250 additional residential housing units and a centralized gathering space.”

The council has been discussing the idea of building a sports complex with a ballpark as its focal point that would provide a home to the HiToms, a collegiate summer baseball team that is currently based in Thomasville. Funding for the project would likely come from a combination of public and private sources, although a specific financing

City Manager Greg Demko has retained the support of High Point City Council as the city belatedly embraces a downtown revitalizaton agenda.

plan is a long way from fruition.

A third goal of moving to 100-percent proactive enforcement of the housing code instead of being driven by residents’ complaints is more related to stabilizing poor areas of the city than creating a central gather place to revive downtown.

“How we do that is being forceful and more upfront about enforcing our codes,” Demko said.

City council met in closed session before the public meeting to discuss Demko’s annual performance evaluation.

After Demko presented the strategic plan, the council voted unanimously to approve a 2 percent merit raise, effective immediately, bumping the city manager’s salary from $171,700 to $175,134.

Demko took the position in January 2015.

“The consensus of council is that he has excelled at his job performance,” Mayor Pro Tem Jim Davis said. “We look forward to the implementation of his initiatives, as discussed today.”

Demko’s presentation did not include a target date for when the city should achieve its goal of increasing the num-

ber of “active, engaged, entrepreneurial and working millennials” by 25 percent, or spell out what criteria the city would use to determine which members of the age cohort fit the description.

But council members have agreed on a number of short-term objectives to support the long-term goal of increasing the population of millennials.

“Develop a needs assessment to determine how to grow and retain them from now until the end of the summer,” Demko said. “Develop the millennial task force within the next 90 days.”

Mayor Bill Bencini said, “I think the millennial task force is going to be key to the success of this.”

He added that city council’s prosperity and livability committee, chaired

by Councilman Jason Ewing should provide oversight of the task force.

Also in furtherance of the goal of attracting and retaining millennials, the city council has set an objective of establishing a downtown business incubator in 60 days.

“I think that might be a little…” — Demko struggled to find the right word.

“Aggressive?” at-large Councilman

JORDAN GREEN

Latimer Alexander ventured.

“Aggressive!” Demko concurred. “But that goal’s out there, so we’ll continue to monitor how that works. We’ll recruit groups to establish the incubator and identify locations downtown. Measurement? Five locations within six months.

Report to the task force, the business community and the council quarterly.”

The Southwest Renewal Foundation had been working on a plan to establish a business incubator but a deal to buy the old NC Shakespeare Festival Building on Ward Avenue fell through last year because the property got tied up in the seller’s bankruptcy proceedings.

Bencini said the strategic plan represents a new sense of shared purpose among members of city council.

“A lot of us up here said a year and a half ago, ‘We want to do this,’” he said. “This council member wants to do this thing, and another one wants to do another thing. I think for the first time I see that council is in agreement on these three definable and measurable goals.

I’m excited.”

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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OPINION EDITORIAL

Life in the bubble “We didn’t see this coming,” state Rep. Jon Hardister said after HB 2, which he had voted for in an emergency legislative session just days before, elicited a strong negative response from many quarters.

Business leaders came out against it in a drove, including HanesBrands in Winston-Salem, which had been erroneously included in a list of companies that actually support the bill, and Bank of America, the biggest company in the state.

On the artistic side of the economic scale, composer Stephen Schwartz disallowed any use of his creative property — which includes the Broadway musicals Godspell and Wicked — inside the borders of the Old North State. From the world of sports, the NBA, which as it turns out has many employees who are interested in civil rights, is reconsidering its decision to hold its All-Star Game in Charlotte.

Governors and mayors are cutting off non-essential travel here. Tourists are looking elsewhere for their vacations.

Demonstrators are taking to the streets. Television and film crews are making other plans. It’s a genuine fiasco of the kind that can be measured in dollars and cents.

That Hardister and the higher-ups in his party did not see this ferocious and immediate backlash coming speaks to the bubble in which they’ve ensconced themselves, where the United States is a Christian nation, tax cuts create jobs and bringing a gun to the state fair just makes good sense.

Contemporary issues of gender, privilege, race and systemic violence — the things everyone in our cities are talking about — do no permeate this bubble. It is populated mostly by white men who have no comprehension of the sexual spectrum beyond its binary poles.

And if they’ve never heard of a thing, then it doesn’t exist.

There is hostility, inside the bubble, against new information, particularly when it does not align with the party’s message. This phenomenon was on evidence after executives from the High Point Market Authority — which hosts the two largest events in the state, in terms of economic impact, in the spring and fall — alerted state leaders that people were pulling out of the April market due to the new law. Indeed, the American Society of Interior Designers advised all 26,000 of its members, many of whom also share an interest in civil rights, to skip the High Point furniture market this spring.

When faced with this information, whispers emanated from Raleigh insinuating a cut in state funding for the market could be the result of merely pointing it out.

That’s how it goes inside the bubble, and exactly how it will go, until someone — or, more likely, many someones, all with state IDs in their hands on Election Day — comes along and pops it.

CITIZEN GREEN

Playing the short game against history Gov. Pat McCrory has been spoiling for this fight for several months. And he clearly calculated that in attacking the rights of transgender people to use the bathroom of their preference, he had found

by Jordan Green a social issue to use as a wedge to distract rural, conservative, working-class voters from the anti-poor agenda he and the General Assembly have enacted since he took office four years ago.

McCrory signed on to an amicus brief with the states of South Carolina, West Virginia, Arizona and Mississippi in support of a rural Virginia school board seeking to prevent a transgender male high school student from using the men’s restroom in December, and tellingly, challenged his eventual Democratic opponent, Attorney General Roy Cooper, to join the legal intervention. Notably, McCrory weighed in by adding his name to the amicus brief — labeling the high school student’s efforts to uphold his dignity as “radical” — on Nov. 30, 2015, almost three months before the city council in his hometown of Charlotte passed an ordinance providing civil rights protections to trans people.

The political calculation is pretty obvious here: Cooper would either join the amicus brief, and alienate much of his Democratic base, or refuse and open himself up to charges from the right of bowing to political correctness run amok, or some such foolishness.

Thankfully, the attorney general resisted the invitation to pander to bigotry.

Like the Southern segregationist politicians of the 1960s who tried to outdo one another with racial demagoguery to rack up white votes as the federal government and courts gradually upended Jim Crow, McCrory and his political cronies are playing the short game against the inevitable tide of progress. The Republican governor and leadership of the General Assembly are banking that their appeal to unfounded fears about phantom sexual predators posing as women to prey on girls in public restrooms will whip up enough votes to allow them to maintain political control as the state’s electorate slowly but surely diversifies and urbanizes. But they know that laws that single out transgender people for discrimination will be struck down as unconstitutional, just like previous laws against same sex-marriage, just like laws against marriage between people of different races, and just like laws maintaining different bathrooms and water fountains for people of different races.

The lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina on behalf of two transgender citizens, including a UNCG student, points out that HB 2 creates “conflicts between state law and various federal laws.”

Notably, the US Department of Education issued guidelines in 2014 asserting that Title IX prohibitions against sex-based discrimination apply to transgender students. Accordingly, the US Justice Department has weighed in to support the Virginia transgender high school student, landing on the side opposite of McCrory.

Similarly, the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission interprets the prohibition against sex discrimination “as forbidding any employment discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation,” according to a recent guidance. As examples of discrimination the EEOC cites, “failing to hire an applicant because she is a transgender woman,” “firing an employee because he is planning or has made a gender transition” and — wait for it — “denying an employee equal access to a common restroom corresponding to the employee’s gender identity.”

As a legal basis for its protection of the civil rights of transgender persons, the EEOC primarily cites a 2011 decision by the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals finding that a transgender female was entitled to protections against workplace discrimination when she was fired by the Georgia General Assembly.

The writing is on the wall for HB 2, but we can’t wait two years or however long it takes for the courts to right this wrong.

As Callie Schmid, a transgender woman told roughly a thousand people packed into College Park Baptist Church in Greensboro on Sunday afternoon: “I’m worried about that fifth grader that’s now exposed to more bullying. And I’m worried about that trans teenager that’s trying to navigate the minefield that is high school. And I’m worried about that female-to-male college student who’s told they have to go back to using the women’s bathroom because it is in a public college school. I’m worried about the young professional who is transitioning on the job and gets fired because they’re trans.”

Schmid talked about losing one of her closest friends, a medical doctor with a bright future ahead of her, to suicide last year.

“She lost her struggle to being trans and all the sh-tuff that comes with it,” Schmid said. “And so I want to say to Mr. McCrory and the haters in the General Assembly: The next time a trans kid walks into oncoming traffic to end his or her life, I want you to look the parents and the family in the eye and tell them that HB 2 was a good idea.”

City council election board game

by Jordan Green

Shhh... I work with crazy people

Cover Story Culture

Jorge Maturino is the art director at Triad City Beat.

Opinion

Brian Clarey, he’s all over the place. If you saw his desk it is a disaster — no organization at all. Maybe the fumes from the mold growing in coffee cups on his desk might be doing something to his brain. During production day, when you ask him a question, there is normally a two-minute delay before a response is gathered. Brian may not be diagnosed ADHD but since my oldest son is severe ADHD, my best guess would be “Definitely.” Growing up in Long Island and being a bartender in New Orleans must have added to his craziness. [Ed. Note: Is there such a thing as attention surplus disorder?]

Even though I work with crazy people, I do respect the writers at this paper for their contribution to the Triad. Regardless of how crazy writers are, having to put your words out there for the public to criticize cannot be easy. No thanks. It would be much simpler to draw some colorful picture with splotches of paint, different brushstrokes and drops of paint crawling down the canvas. I would call it art and say I was inspired by watching my wife dance barefoot in the rain. Yeah, I guess that is crazy, so maybe we are all crazy at Triad City Beat. Hope you enjoy our craziness; I know I do.

News Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

The other day TCB Editor in Chief Brian Clarey said jokingly that someone was crazy for working some sort of job that he did not relate to.

by Jorge Maturino Well, I told him, Eric and Jordan that they were all crazy themselves for wanting to be writers. In school I absolutely dreaded writing. I followed the slogan of Gaston in Beauty and the Beast: “How can you read this Belle, there are no pictures?”

There’s something seriously wrong with all of them.

Let’s start at the top of the hierarchy of craziness here. Anthony Harrison read the dictionary when he was a teenager. The whole thing. Need I say more? Well, I guess I will: When he watches different clips on YouTube he will laugh hysterically in the middle of the office and have to share what happens with others.

Nicole Crews — come on, you’ve seen her column in the back. She is not afraid to let her thoughts drift out on that page. (Since she’s not in the office, I don’t have as much on her.)

Eric Ginsburg stands at 6-foot-4 and can’t shoot crumpled paper balls into the trashcan from six feet away! He should be ashamed of himself; I mean, of course you know he played basketball at some point. Okay, that is a different type of crazy. How about the fact that his desk consists of two chairs? He is extremely territorial over these two chairs as well. When he comes into the office he’ll throw you out if you are in his seat, similar to one of the scenes from “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” when Jazz would get tossed out by Uncle Phil.

Jordan Green is so crazy I am afraid to share, but here goes nothing. You should hear this guy interrogate people on the phone.

He is not intimidated by any authority figure. No matter what their level is, he will call them out on their crap. Craziness must be a requirement for an investigative journalist though; the crazier you are, the better writer you must be. Let’s just say Jordan must be one of the best writers out there.

Up Front

I haven’t played board games in years, but there’s a handful that I loved; Clue, Monopoly and Parcheesi come to mind. I have a child now, and I’m beginning to fantasize about imposing all my old enthusiasms on her when she gets older. Which leads me to an uncomfortable realization: The game that I really got into, I mean spent obsessive hours at, was Risk, which is all about conquest and seizing territory.

It’s not a nice thing to admit for someone who is an avowed anti-imperialist and who embraces civic values of mutual cooperation in pursuit of shared goals, but there you have it — I must have a pretty deep power fetish.

Since I don’t play Risk anymore, most of my gaming instincts are now channeled into observing and handicapping local elections. And so it suddenly struck me that a city council race is readymade for a classic board game in which multiple players circle a board, draw cards and accumulate and leverage resources in pursuit of victory. If you haven’t been following the contested South Ward race in Winston-Salem, which as of Tuesday was separated by only six votes, you may not appreciate how suspenseful and unpredictable the science of vote building and counting can be.

I imagine a map of a city council district with different sectors — part of a central business district, a university area, residential neighborhoods and public housing — each with a set number of votes based on past turnout.

Each player would attempt to win as much support from each of the different sectors as possible, with chits representing pledged votes.

Money would factor into each candidate’s prospects: After rolling the die, a player might land on a “campaign finance” space and draw a card from the pile. Maybe the card reads “Collect $1,000 from the mega developer,” or “Three gas station owners pony up $100 apiece.” Or the player might have to settle on “Your former high school English teacher in Buffalo sends five-dollar bill.”

The players would have choices about how to spend their funds.

Billboards? Newspaper advertising? Direct mail? Door-hangers? Or they could invest in a campaign fundraiser to generate more funds. Decisions about how to make use of time — a limited commodity in every election — would also factor in.

I haven’t worked out all the details, but there would have to be some element of chance wherein the player rolled the die after making a particular gambit — say speaking to a student group on campus. Rolling a 1 could represent a disappointing result: Sorry, students just aren’t tuned into this election. Collect five votes. On the other hand, maybe the neighborhood groups are up in arms about the city discontinuing looseleaf pickup and like what you had to say about it. Roll a 6 and pick up 600 votes.

Perhaps there could be other spaces on the board with corresponding card piles representing advancing or receding fortunes for the various players. Draw a card from the “candidate forum” pile that says, “Your opponent humiliates you by pointing out that your proposal to privatize public transportation is empty considering that a private company already operates the system,” and you lose 30 votes. Draw the card for your husband getting arrested for shoplifting or your wife divorcing you in the middle of the campaign, and similar penalties apply.

I know this isn’t the way it’s actually done, but I can’t think of a better way to do it.

And sorry, no recounts or protests.

FRESH EYES

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IT JUST MIGHT WORK

15

April 6 — 12, 2016

The Triad’s very own 10-day film festival kicks off with an opening gala this Friday, drawing filmmakers, actors and loads of viewers to Winston-Salem. The good folks here at Triad City Beat had the opportunity to preview 22 of the most interesting flicks showing at this year’s festival, and several seriously impressed us.

Here are our takes on almost two dozen of the films showing at RiverRun this year — remember, there are many more we didn’t have time to watch.

Cover Story

Deep Run screens April 12 at 5 p.m. at SECCA and April 13 at 1 p.m. at A/perture 1

16

Just about any teen from poor, rural North Carolina could provide fodder for a feature-length documentary: undereducated and underemployed, with a dearth of opportunity and rigid social structure based largely on the mores of evangelical Christianity.

But Cole Ray Davis, the centerpiece of Hillevi Lovin’s Deep Run has one other thing going against him.

Davis is transgender, born Jasmine Davis in Canada, who came out shortly after his mother fell in online love with a pig farmer and moved them to this small town.

Deep Run, NC sits in the heart of Lenoir County, between Fayetteville and Greenville, with a population of about 3,000 and reactionary attitudes towards alternate lifestyles.

When he was still known as Jasmine, Davis started a gay/straight alliance at the high school, which was promptly shut down by the administration.

Davis took a job wearing the mascot suit for Deep Run’s minor-league baseball team, the Indians, and when he came out he was jumped by fans after a game.

As Davis’ pastor put it, “This area is not really popular with the gays.”

This same pastor would tell Davis’ girlfriend Leslie that “homosexuality is a sin,” leading promptly to their breakup.

That Davis doesn’t consider himself gay but a transgendered male is lost on the town’s clergy.

A subsequent girlfriend was told the same thing by another pastor, who later admitted on camera to engaging in gay-bashing while he was in the Marine Corps.

“I’m not of the opinion that people are born that way,” he said.

Against the constant oppression of churches that view Davis’ entire existence as a sin, a backdrop of poverty captured in anxious conversations about finances on the porch and late-night trips to the Piggly Wiggly to pay bills casts a pervasive fog of despair.

The story becomes more pertinent against the passage of HB 2, which centralizes the issues facing trans Americans. Davis fights for work, for romance, for his very existence. And as he explains, his financial situation places him in the pre-op, pre-hormone, pre-transitioning category. About all he can do to visually express his gender is wear short hair and masculine clothing.

Deep Run broadens the discussion of what it means to be transgender in North Carolina, and lengthens the spectrum of gender identity at the heart of the HB 2 debate. And it comes to RiverRun at an important time.

Almost from the first scene of the film, we get the sense Deep Run is the kind of place to which this law was designed to appeal.

— Brian Clarey

The best of R Cameraperson screens April 14 at 4:30 p.m. at A/perture 2, April 16 at 1 p.m. at UNCSA Main Theatre and April 17 at 2:30 p.m. at A/perture 1 It takes several relatively short scenes passing before the viewer settles into the filmmaker’s proposed arrangement — that footage shot for more than 20 films, cut and compiled into Cameraperson, be viewed as a journal or memoir about the woman behind the lens.

Bouncing from rural Bosnia to lightning striking on a vast Missouri landscape to a boxer in New York and then a Nigerian hospital, hanging in with filmmaker Kirsten Johnson’s request requires a little bit of initial patience. But once the viewer accepts this pattern featuring brief windows to view people dancing in Uganda or Derrida crossing a street and teasing her, the piece starts to become fascinating.

What, exactly, will she show us next?

The footage comes from several big-name films Johnson worked on, including CitizenFour, Pray the Devil Back to Hell and Fahrenheit 9/11. These documentaries, like others Johnson has worked on, deal with horrific, tragic and heartbreaking events including mass rape in Bosnia, the War on Terror, various execution and atrocity sites in Africa and the Middle East and specific appalling cases in the United States.

There are still light moments in Cameraperson, but the mood is undoubtedly dark, including when Johnson herself finally appears on camera in the second to last scene. At another point, about partway through, Johnson can be heard crying during an interview.

But amidst the sadness, the undergirding humanity of the filmmaker and her subjects — including a laughing police officer eating watermelon on a picnic or women joking as they chop firewood — carries the day.

— Eric Ginsburg

Driving While Black screens on Friday at 7 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre and April 10 at 4 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre

There are plenty of great things to say about Driving While Black, but the coolest part may be that it’s based on the real life experiences of Dominique Purdy, a creative partner and co-writer of the film who also stars as the lead.

Driving While Black follows a weed-smoking artist and pizza delivery driver in LA through his seemingly endless travails with the police. Purdy — a recording artist and comedian — plays an instantly likable dude that is just scraping by, and who for much of the film is trying to make it to a job interview with a company that leads touristy Hollywood home tours. But the police, more than anything, stand in his way, often jacking him up for no reason and at one point pulling over a friend’s car in front of a Black Panther mural.

“My f***-the-police attitude didn’t happen overnight,” he explains. “The police showed me at an early age that they didn’t like us much.”

It’s easy to see why the fast-paced film has already picked up 14 best-feature awards — the acting is great, the subject important and the mood generally comedic. Maybe when you go see it you’ll run into Purdy and director Paul Sapiano — they’ll be in town for the festival.

— Eric Ginsburg

The Anthropologist screens April 13 at 7:30 p.m. at A/perture 2 Katie doesn’t exactly want to be following her mom around the world, especially during Christmas.

The Anthropologist, which follows the mother-daughter duo from Siberia to the south Pacific, tracks the pair over a four-year period beginning when Katie is 14.

“I have great respect for what my mom is doing, but that doesn’t mean I want to be like her,” she says at one point in the film. But it’s their mostly supportive relationship that anchors the piece as the two learn about the ways climate change negatively impacts the lives of poor people worldwide.

The film also features the daughter of famous an-

thropologist Margaret Mead, which leads to some initial discord in the viewer’s mind because it isn’t exactly clear where the film will focus. With periodic personal details from Mead’s daughter, her role is more than that of an expert commentator but falls far below the focal point of the main pair, creating some confusion.

But now that you know that, you’ll be able to watch The Anthropologist with no hang-ups, trailing along for meetings with the Navy or hiking for glacial ice in South America. And just as interesting, viewers witness Katie’s growth and transformation with the benefit of her own insight.

— Eric Ginsburg

Off the Rails screens on April 10 at 4 p.m. at A/ perture 1 and April 11 at 5 p.m. at SECCA

Asperger’s syndrome, an autism-spectrum disorder, causes obsessive interest in one or a few different subject areas.

However, not many of these obsessions land people in jail for most of their lives.

Off the Rails, a documentary

by Adam Irving filmed partly in Winston-Salem and Greensboro, details the tragic story of Darius McCollum, a New York City native with Asperger’s syndrome intensely interested in mass transit. Like many documentary profiles, the film follows its subject through day-to-day life, artfully supplemented by dramatizations, some animation and numerous interviews with friends, family and sympathizers.

McCollum’s life unfortunately finds him in and out of prison.

His crime? Commandeering subway trains and buses. Since 1985, McCollum has been charged some 30 times, earning him the moniker “the Public Transit Bandit.”

But there’s no malice in these crimes, no financial end or harmful intent. All he wants to do is ride the routes and get people from place to place. And he did so each time without incident.

Most interviewees come to the same conclusion: The MTA would benefit greatly from hiring McCollum; the job would be a dream for him.

But the man is doomed to be misunderstood.

Off the Rails doesn’t just cover McCollum’s life. It’s a case study on addiction, obsession and correctional failures for those with mental illness.

— Anthony Harrison

Francofonia screens on Saturday at 10 a.m., April 11 at 7 p.m. and April 12 at 4 p.m. at A/perture 1 Russian director Alexander Sokurov often tackles heady themes like corrosive power and the persistence of time. His newest film, Francofonia, combines these themes with his spellbinding visual knack in one glorious package.

Francofonia tells the story of the Louvre Museum, largely during the Nazi occupation of France. Put simply, it’s historical fiction. But Sokurov abhors simplicity. The film is a selfaware cinematic legend, devoid of timeline, plot and genre, to its own gain.

Just like wandering through different wings of a museum, Francofonia meanders dreamily across time and place, featuring the specters of icons like Napoleon Bonaparte, appropriately caricatured as a bloated megalomaniac, and a ghostly Marianne, the feminine spirit of France. But the main current remains the Nazi takeover of the Louvre and the regime’s perverse, attempted seizure of art and culture.

Sokurov appears unambiguously as the subjective narrator. Sometimes, the film even flashes to him sitting silently in his messy office. His direction complements his role as voiced narrator, telling the audience how and what to perceive with both voice and image.

He waxes poetic on a motley backdrop of archival footage and his own, pontificating

on culture, humanity, history, art and — the institution tying these elements together — museums.

“Who needs France without the Louvre?”

Sokurov asks. “Or Russia without the Hermitage? Who would we be without museums?”

Museums fascinate Sokurov. His magnum opus, Russian Ark, sanctified the aforementioned Hermitage Museum.

Consider this, too: Sokurov has created films in series.

So this begs the question: Is Francofonia the second movement in a new suite on museums? If so, what new portrait awaits us?

Regardless, Francofonia is nothing but beautiful. Perhaps no other director could have done the Louvre justice so masterfully and artfully.

“In the Louvre, everything is about how people struggled, loved, killed, repented, lied and cried,” Sokurov says.

— Anthony Harrison

The Polar Bear Club screens on Friday at 5 p.m. at UNCSA Gold Theatre and Saturday at 1:30 p.m. at UNCSA Main Theatre The harsh Minnesota winter provides an apt metaphor for the fragility of life in this quiet but unexpectedly moving drama about an elderly man and his circle of buddies coming to terms with mortality.

From the first scene depicting the men undressing in a garage and preparing to plunge into an icy lake, the film confronts viewers with bodies — in this case, slightly hunched, flabby and paunchy around the middle — and how they gradually decay and break down. The ritual of the polar plunge takes on different shades of meaning as the film unspools towards its inevitable conclusion.

It’s frightening and exhilarating. It could result in sudden death, but without it the men may have nothing to live for.

The tension of the narrative comes not from

freak occurrence, but from the utter predictability of events. Almost every heartbreaking moment of disintegration and estrangement is foreshadowed. With cinematography that is both bleak and breathtaking, the film yields rich symbolism. For example, a scene of the protagonist, Harold, plodding across a frozen lake intercut with his adolescent grandson skating on a hockey rink suggest that the ice is for both an arena to test and prove their masculinity. For viewers of any age, the film poses a fundamental question about the thin line between living with urgency and committing folly. When does caution become surrender?

When does bravado become suicide? What are the consequences of each choice?

— Jordan Green

Barge screens April 15 at 1 p.m. at A/perture 1, April 16 at 1 p.m. at A/ perture 1 and April 17 at 2 p.m. at UNCSA Babcock Theatre

There’s something serene about the idea of life on a barge, floating down a major river in the heartland of America. And at points, Barge evokes a certain romance of life on the calm waters. But it’s a certain kind of person that could handle being gone on the boat 28 days in a row, working in constant on-again off-again six-hour shifts with a crew of other gruff men.

The prospect sounds a lot more enticing when one crewmember explains, part way through, that, “Without a college education, you can make more than 100+ thousand a year.”

Barge provides a glancing portrait of some of those who fit the bill, men who play dice together gambling with cigarettes or who swing sledgehammers aboard the giant drifting mass. There’s the chef, who says it’s the first time in his life he’s been above the poverty level, or a hardworking deckhand who spent a decade in prison before coming aboard.

These characters bring a level of intrigue to the film, bolstered by the imagery of a class of heavy labor that, whenever possible, has been outsourced or mechanized. But America still needs hands like these to haul grain, coal, fertilizer, plastic and other goods in large quantities.

At times, Barge makes strong use of music to amplify the melancholy yet bootstrap nature of the film. But there are moments where the film itself elicits the feeling of being on a barge, inviting the viewer to zone out as thick drawls sound over boat radios or the landscape slips past. It’s fitting, then, that the film runs just above an hour, credits excluded.

— Eric Ginsburg

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RiverRun 2016

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Cover Story

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World screens on Saturday at 11 a.m. at UNCSA Babcock Theatre and April 10 at 7 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre This latest documentary offering from eccentric and prolific director Werner Herzog explores the texture of modern life itself: the internet. Specifically, where it came from, where it went right and wrong, all while measuring human nature against a future full of robotic automation and artificial intelligence. It’s a reel of robotic apocalypse nightmares and visions of a simplified world.

Capturing that vast a subject in a single film is daunting, but Herzog manages an eerie yet breakneck tour of both the internet’s greatest victories — such as life-saving robots being built at Carnegie Mellon and the possibility of living on Mars — and its greatest horrors — like leaked photos of deadly car accidents and radiation sickness victims living in Faraday cages.

The structure of Lo and Behold is not immediately clear. It’s broken into chapters that are treated as meditations on the nature of the technological world and human society itself, mainly conducted through interviews with scientists, hackers and entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk.

Herzog’s bemused German-accented narration and a haunting strings soundtrack provide a sense of cohesion.

The variety of participants helps the film vacillate between moments of lighthearted optimism and poetic doom in rapid succession. One scientist, reflecting on the inevitability of the next huge solar flare that will likely wipe out all electricity and internet connection, says, “It will be unimaginably bad. And I’d prefer not to think about it right now.” Lo and Behold offers no such escape.

— Joanna Rutter

Nathan East: For the Record, screens April 16 at 7 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre and April 17 at 2:30 p.m. at UNCSA Gold Theatre

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Maybe you’ve never heard of bassist Nathan East, but you’ve definitely listened to him.

Nathan East: For the Record focuses on East’s prodigious career in a conventional but heartwarming way. He’s credited with more than 2,000 album sessions over four decades, contributing bottom end on hits from Lionel Richie and Diana Ross’ “Endless Love” and Eric Clapton’s Unplugged to Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose” and Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.”

“It would be great […] if there was a list of all the tracks he’d played on, where you’d think, ‘My god, that was ’im… My god, that was him… My god, that was him,” says drummer Phil Collins.

Many of his collaborators contribute interviews extolling East’s talents, including jazz legend Herbie Hancock, country songbird Wynonna Judd, indispensable bandleader Quincy Jones and Clapton, who called East “the best bass player I’ve ever worked with.” The volume of testimonials trickling throughout may seem overkill, but when you know so little about the man, they add to his character’s depth.

East, aside from a legendary workhorse, is a charmer. Alongside the interviews and warm, grainy archival footage of live performances, the camera follows him in 2014 as he records his debut album, showing a casually joyful man chatting with old friends and goofily dancing to Van Morrison’s “Moondance” in his car.

The documentary shows that, despite his famous pals and 10,000 studio hours, he’s a naturally humble, down-to-earth guy.

Session musicians don’t get much cred, but For the Record grants a deserved share to East.

— Anthony Harrison

Lace Crater screens on April 13 at 7:30 p.m. at A/perture 2 and April 15 at 10 p.m. at Hanesbrands Theatre In this grown-up version of a teenage summer-camp horror movie, a twentysomething woman named Ruth hooks up with a ghost on a drugfilled Hamptons weekend. The debut feature-length effort of writer and director Harrison Atkins, Lace Crater is designed to make you squirm instead of scream; to call it trippy would be a gross understatement.

The horror genre this film borrows from is softened somewhat by its self-conscious quirk. Light moments of comedy — we watch over Ruth’s shoulder as she Googles “STD sex with ghost” to figure out why she can peel off her skin post-paranormal coitus — parallel disturbing scenes full of leaking black goo and hallucinations.

Precise sound editing perfectly creates an underlying unease, allowing the music to shine, and thank goodness for that: The

film is brilliantly scored by Alan Palomo, Neon Indian’s frontman and also the headliner of the upcoming Phuzz Phest. His threatening, space-age bass with primordial clangs and metallic synths reflect the nightmarish dissonance happening inside of Ruth’s body.

And though Lindsay Burdge does a masterful job as the infected leading lady, the best performance is by Peter Vack as melancholy poltergeist Michael; ironically, the most human moment in the film may be when Ruth touches his cheek and he shudders with delight.

Actor Andrew Ryder and producer Adam Kritzer will attend the April 13 screening at A/perture Cinema, co-presented by Phuzz Phest as a direct nod to headliner Neon Indian’s film score.

— Joanna Rutter

The Fits screens at April 12 at 4:30 p.m. at A/perture 2, at April 15 at 7:30 p.m. at A/perture 2 and April 17 at 11:30 a.m. at UNCSA Gold Theatre This mesmerizing piece of fictional portraiture is so marvelously acted and beautifully cinematic that it feels not just like a documentary, but real life.

The Fits begins with minimal dialogue and a strong soundscape, contrasting female dancers and male boxers sharing different parts of a gym. The main character, a young girl with braids, transitions from her brother’s boxing world where we see her doing pullups with a split lip to emulating the older girls upstairs.

Nearly every character is black and young, and all of them — especially the leads — show incredible poise and dexterity in their roles.

Oh, and there’s a scene of young black girls dancing in an empty pool, a la Beyonce’s now-iconic “Formation” music video.

It’s particularly challenging for a piece that focuses at least initially on a lowstakes internal conflict — to box or to dance — with thin dialogue to remain captivating. The Fits succeeds effortlessly.

This isn’t a stereotypical poverty/projects sob story or a rags-to-riches sort of tale; it’s just a slice of life in a relatively brief span of time, a short witness to childhood.

It’s wonderful and moving, and if that weren’t enough to hold audience’s attention, there’s a mysterious twist that haunts the latter half of the film.

— Eric Ginsburg

Tower screens on Saturday at 4:30 p.m., April 10 at 1:30 p.m. and April 11 at 1:30 p.m. at A/perture 2

Chevalier starts strong, stark, serious.

The opening composition, with its scraggly cliff face and roaring slate-blue tide, suggests the weight of legendary Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman.

Though it employs Bergman’s archetypes and symbolism, Greek director Athina Rachel Tsangari’s film is billed as satire.

When you view Chevalier from that flippant angle, this stripped-down film morphs into a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek farce revealing masculinity’s toxic fragility.

Six male Greek friends on the titular yacht returning to Athens from a spearfishing trip in the Aegean Sea decide to empirically determine who among them is the best man. They devise impromptu pissing contests, rating each other’s performance and habits from their oral hygiene and how high they wear their pants to how they take coffee and — of course — penis size. The three crewmen watch impassive at first, but also slowly succumb to judging themselves.

This remarkable documentary vividly and tenderly tells the true story of the United States’ first mass murder in a public space, when, on Aug. 1, 1966, an unhinged architecture student and expert marksman named Charles Whitman opened fire from the top of the University of Texas Tower in Austin and rained down terror for 96 minutes.

The animation is the first genius touch of the film: The real people who survived the massacre narrate the story as they appeared at the time, sometimes interposed with footage of themselves from contemporary interviews. The medium allows for imaginative touches, like the trippy flower-power sequence as Claire Wilson James recounts how she fell in love with her boyfriend, who died in the massacre, or a pulsating effect to dramatize how she felt the sensation of melting as she lay on the hot concrete nearly dying herself.

There are moments of extraordinary courage, as when an artist named Rita Starpattern lay down beside Wilson James, pretending to be dead while the campus remained under siege, so she could talk to the wounded woman and keep her from slipping into unconscious-

The actors all command their archetypal characters, from cocky Christos to quasi-savant Dimitri, with brilliant naturalism.

The effective performances highlight the men’s respective strengths and weaknesses, complicating their game and further proving monolithic masculinity as a straw man. There are no winners, since being a man only becomes competition when you make it one.

As Dimitri states early, “It’s because there’s no such common perception that the game even works.”

— Anthony Harrison

He Hated Pigeons screens on April 16 at 4 p.m. and April 17 at 11:30 a.m. at A/perture 1 In this pilgrimage of grief, Pedro Fontaine portrays Elias, a young Chilean coming to terms with the sudden and unexpected death of his lover, Sebastien, in a lyrical travelogue that takes in the breathtaking extremes of the South American country, from the Atacama Desert in the north to the ice fields of Patagonia to the south.

It would be overstating it to say that Elias arrives at a reckoning with his sexuality; there’s never any doubt that Sebastien was the love of his life. All the same, he carries an ambivalence about him, not owning up to their closeness when he encounters a female acquaintance or later passively accepting the blows of a homophobic bar patron. The scenes of the locales Elias passes through in fulfilling a promise to Sebastian — a beach, a bar, a marketplace, a folk dance — brim with life, but the protagonist re-

triad-city-beat.com

Chevalier screens April 15 at 1:30 p.m., April 16 at 4:30 p.m. and April 17 at 3 p.m. at A/perture

ness; when Artley Fox, a high school student, ran into the line of fire to rescue her; and when Officer Ray Ramirez, who was supposed to be working traffic, ascended the tower and fatally shot the sniper.

If all the film did was recount the events of the day, it would be impressive. That the last 30 minutes of Tower deal with the consequences for the survivors and the phenomenon of subsequent mass shootings that have unspooled with numbing regularity in the past 20 years is nothing short of extraordinary. Fortunately, director Keith Maitland mostly resists the temptation to use the story as a platform for polemic, instead leaving viewers with the collective humanity of the survivors and heroes, while letting Whitman fade into obscurity.

— Jordan Green

Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise screens April 11 at 8 p.m. and April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at SECCA

mains set apart. Only when he shares the journey for a short while with a Canadian traveler, portrayed by director Ingrid Veninger, does he seem to open up and make a human connection. The bohemian hitchhikers towards the end of his journey are a convivial bunch, but Elias quickly slips into a waking dream of the life he shared with his departed soul mate. And as Elias gets closer to an answer in this lyrical film, his grip on his sanity becomes ever more tenuous.

— Jordan Green

Maybe you’re old enough to remember seeing Maya Angelou on Roots, or you can recall her poem from Bill Clinton’s inauguration. But did you know about Maya Angelou’s close relationship with Malcolm X? What about her time spent living in Ghana or South Africa, or her several marriages, or the time she stared down a line of police officers on horseback?

For most anyone past their teenage years, Maya Angelou is a cultural touchstone. (And if this doesn’t describe you, quick, don’t tell anyone and rush to see this film.) But even avid readers of her prolific career likely lack the all-encompassing insight into the myriad things she did in her life, or haven’t heard about the significance of Angelou’s impact first-hand from other cultural pioneers. Be it a scene where Angelou describes James Baldwin counseling her — or chiding, really — on love or listening to the heartfelt remembrances of Angelou’s son, it would be hard

for any viewer not to find something new and meaningful in Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise.

There’s added significance too, considering that so much of the film is Angelou in her own words and that she passed away in 2014, as well as the fact that she lived right here in Winston-Salem. That’s more than enough reasons to consider this PBS-esque biopic as a must-see.

— Eric Ginsburg

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE Questions to ask a food writer

by Eric Ginsburg

M

aking plans for lunch now follows a predictable narrative in my life: I ask where the other person wants to eat, to which they reply, “I dunno. You’re the food guy.”

And that’s just fine — I’m able to eat exactly what I want and, for their part, the other person never seems dissatisfied with my choice.

The pattern isn’t restricted to people I have plans with; friends frequently ask for food advice for dates, dinner parties or run food-related inquiries past me.

And I love being an arbiter on the subject — as long as the question is specific enough, I’ll do my best to provide an answer.

Here are a handful of recent food-themed questions people have posed to me, with more verbose responses on my part for your benefit.

Who do you think has the best pizza in Greensboro, as far as flavor and menu options?

As with most food advice questions posed to me, this text from my college friend Dante in Greensboro required some clarification. What sort of pizza, pray tell, are we talking about here? For classic, New York-style ’za, I like Pizzeria L’Italiano downtown — it’s delicious and often overlooked, but I fell in love on repeat trips with my friend Jorge, a New York native. My overall fave is (duh) Sticks & Stones, but that’s a whole ’nother category. Winston-Salem-based Burke Street Pizza, another favorite, has a Greensboro location I hadn’t tried, so this weekend we spun out there and affirmed its rightful place on the list.

Hops Burger Bar or Big Burger Spot? We’re heading to Greensboro for the ACC swim finals tonight and want to grab a bite first.

When my friend Ryan, who lives in Winston-Salem, shot me this message, I spoke from my stomach — Hops. I’m honestly not a huge burger guy, but I loved Hops instantly. Plus, I know Ryan likes beer (he might own a brewery, NBD). I warned that lines wouldn’t be as big a problem at Big Burger Spot, but his mid-afternoon scheduling made it seem easy. Wrong. Should’ve gone to Banh Mi Saigon for those deliciously cheap sandwiches, his initial back-up plan.

What’s your best suggestion for a low-key date restaurant in Winston? She’s a vegetarian.

For some reason my mind went quickly to Mozelle’s Southern bistro on the northwest side of downtown Winston-Salem. My friend wanted a nice, quiet spot, and Mozelle’s isn’t as costly as go-to spots like the Honey Pot. But when I looked at the menu later, it isn’t super veg-friendly; good thing I suggested Mission Pizza Napoletana as a backup, where there are more vegetarian options but the mood is livelier. Knowing the two were early on in dating and likely preferred not to run into anyone pushed the less central Mozelle’s

higher on my list. I offered up Thai food too, generally a safe bet for vegetarians.

Do you know about Feast Portland? We should do a Feast GSO. I’d never heard of this, but when I looked it up, I realized my friend Tim could be onto something. The group’s website isn’t super helpful, but it does explain that the Oregon festival is made up of more than 30 events at various locations and benefits Partners for a Hunger Free Oregon and a No Kid Hungry campaign.

Given our terrifyingly high ERIC GINSBURG Much as I liked the slices (that are bigger than my head) at Burke food insecurity and food Street Pizza, the joint’s fare tastes even better when drunk. hardship rates around here, we need every idea like to save you that trouble. this we can get. Tim is now, in all likelihood, moving to Winston-Salem, so maybe he’ll get it going there I have been on the hunt for a legit Chinese restaurant in instead.

Greensboro since I came back from China in 2008. I’m I have a group of people who worked together 30 years ago who want a little get-together. There will probably be 8-10 of us. Can you think of a moderately priced restaurant that might have a small meeting room?

My mind jumped to Gia, an upscale restaurant and bar on the northwest side of Greensboro with three small side rooms that can be reserved. My favorite is set up like a library. Knowing that Allen — who asked — and his former colleagues wanted something relatively affordable yet didn’t want to compromise on style, Gia seemed like an obvious fit for a venue that also has a small room. (Had they been in Winston-Salem, Meridian would’ve been my first inclination, though for both cities I can’t say I know of too many private rooms.)

Where should we eat? Chili’s?

“Ummm Emily?” I texted back. “I think we need to kick you out of the band.”

For whatever reason my friend Emily went on a Chili’s kick a little while back, and for all I know she still is but I shamed her enough that she doesn’t bring it up to me. We’d planned to grab an early dinner along with our friend Bethany, and since they were coming from the Wake Forest University area (and we’d already repeatedly been to the delicious and proximate Golden India), I suggested we hit up Tequila Mexican.

I’d never been, but it turned out to be a good call. Generally that sort of experimentation pays off, though once in a while I hate myself for it. Lucky for you, I’m out surveying every week to find the best unsung spots

looking for like barely-dead-whole-fish-on-a-plate levels of authentic… I can’t find anything like what my coworkers would take me to in Beijing.

When I’m craving Chinese food, I actually want those super Americanized dishes you can find at great dives like the spot next to Food Lion in Greensboro’s Glenwood neighborhood. Or I’m going for dumplings at May Way in Winston-Salem’s Reynolda Village. But for authentic Chinese, try Apple China in the little food court to the left of Super G Mart. It was so authentic (or maybe I should say “actually Chinese”) that my inexperienced palate couldn’t handle it. But I’m told it’s definitely legit.

This is just a small sampling of the food questions I receive. Have a (specific!) inquiry of your own?

Send it to eric@triad-city-beat.com and I’ll do my best to answer it.

Pick of the Week Low country visits Gate City Crescent Rotary’s First Annual Boil & Bru @ the Blandwood Mansion (GSO), Friday, 7 p.m.

All-you-can-eat shrimp boil with unlimited local craft beer? No, you haven’t been teleported to Charleston or New Orleans. This here’s happening in downtown Greensboro. Chow down accompanied by music by the banjo-pluckin’ outfit Look Homeward. Proceeds benefit local charities. Buy tickets in advance at boilandbru.com.

News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

only a glass and a half at most.

Establishing limitations makes a healthy relationship with alcohol so much simpler, Gladwell said, recommending the practice.

Our conversation tempted me to plunge deeper, asking about when he built in these parameters and whether a specific incident led to the decision, or prodding Gladwell about his favorite types of red wine. But being as this conversation occurred on the phone and not a dinner party, and since the voice on the other line belonged to Malcolm Freakin’ Gladwell, I righted the ship and sailed a more focused course.

Gladwell is putting the finishing touches on a podcast called Revisionist History, a 10-episode piece to be released weekly by Slate’s podcast network Panoply (a really awesome word that means “a complete or impressive collection of things” or alternately “a splendid display” or “a complete set of arms or suit of armor” — yeah, badass).

The podcast makes sense; Gladwell studied history in school, plus the format allows for greater ease when trying to communicate emotion or humor. Oh, and he said it’s part of his “extended tour of procrastination” as he delays COURTESY PHOTO Yeah, that’s Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping writing his next book.

Point and Outliers, among others.

The episodes, anchored by Gladwell, are scripted and run about 45 anywhere for it. minutes long. And if it performs well, he’s more than I’d like to think that after he arrives, maybe on the willing to sign on for an additional season because eve preceding or following his no doubt captivating the experience proved to be fun and podcasts enable talk, that he’ll unwind with a glass and a half of red flexibility. wine (I’ll venture a guess and say pinot) and the bar of The author of The Tipping Point, Outliers and David his hotel (I’ll guess again and predict that the college is & Goliath (among others, as well as his gig writing for shelling out for the Proximity). the New Yorker) will be the featured speaker as part In this vision, his nose is buried in a Daniel Silva spy of Guilford College’s Bryan Series in Greensboro on thriller — Gladwell told me he collects and consumes April 12. Gladwell said he’s planning to talk about why tons of books in the genre, and is such a fanboy that people rebel — certainly a fitting subject for a Guilford he’ll email authors like Silva to laud their work. And crowd, but also one that ties to our current historical maybe I’ll be there, acting like it’s a coincidence, and moment nationally. use the opportunity to ask my follow-up questions “We’re in quite a rebellious moment and I want to over a glass of the cheap Bordeaux ($5.75) off the sort of explain that phenomenon,” Gladwell said. hotel’s wine list.

After he flies into Raleigh-Durham International Airport for the talk, Gladwell plans to go running in Find more info about Malcolm Gladwell’s April 12 talk the capital’s adjacent Umstead state park before headin Greensboro at Guilford.edu/bryan-series/ ing to Greensboro; he’s big on running, Gladwell said, and he’s been told the park is among the best places

Up Front

Several questions into my interview with Malcolm Gladwell — yes, the Malcolm Gladwell — I asked if it would be alright to switch gears completely. By that point I’d gauged that he seemed to be a pretty good-natured guy,

by Eric Ginsburg relaxed, open and probably wouldn’t mind much. Plus, I thought, justifying the departure in my head, famous people like him are probably sick of the same line of obvious questioning anyway.

And that’s how I learned that Malcolm Gladwell only drinks four things.

It’s a rule he has, though there are several reasons as to why, and so far it’s served him well; no drinks except for red wine, espresso-based coffee beverages, water and tea allowed.

So many other drinks are unhealthy, he explained, such as soda, and though he conceded that alcohol can be a wonderful thing, it’s also dangerous and powerful.

This quartet, really, satisfies all of his desires when it comes to drinks.

His response surprised me a little, not just because it’s unlike most I’ve heard before, but because of the contrast with his answer to the immediate preceding question.

You see, I’d veered off topic from talking about his experiences as a journalist and widely recognized author and his current foray into podcasting to inquire about food and drinks. I figure food can tell us so much about someone’s background, sense of self, habits and so on that it bears exploration, and particularly when it comes to oft-interviewed celebs, even the less obvious subjects you can hit in a brief phoner (as we call them) have already been posed at least thrice over already. That’s why I recently asked Jewel about her favorite breakfast dish (she doesn’t like breakfast — her loss) and why I wondered aloud if Gladwell associated any particular food with his childhood.

Given his mother’s Jamaican heritage, Gladwell said that any quintessentially Jamaican dishes conjure a particular warm feeling, naming curry goat and jerk chicken as specific dishes that help evoke a significant emotional memory. Intrigued by his answer, I tossed out another question, wondering if his current diet consists of anything that shows up regularly or with considerable frequency.

Not really, Gladwell said. His food tastes are pretty wide open and he aims for diversity. Gladwell is up for almost anything, really, when it comes to food. And that’s why I was taken aback a moment later, when he said that he’d isolated his accompanying beverages to four.

His drinking rules actually go a step further, at least when it comes to wine: only after the sun sets, and

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Malcolm Gladwell’s rules for drinking

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April 6 — 12, 2016 Up Front News Opinion Cover Story Culture Fun & Games Games Shot in the Triad All She Wrote

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CULTURE Phuzz Phest primer: A choice dozen

by Jordan Green

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huzz Phest, like its cineaste cousin RiverRun, is a rite of spring in Winston-Salem. The annual indie rock music festival curated by Philip Pledger, which is scheduled for April 15-16, is leaner this year, having been pared down from three days to two. If anything, the streamlined programming should bring a welcome focus, and encourage more fans to stick with the festival for the duration.

Here are a dozen acts to check out, in no particular order of importance and making no correction for the arbitrariness of personal tastes. After you read this, check out the lineup at phuzzphest.com and draw up your own list.

Shirlette Ammons Listening to Shirlette Ammons’ music is to experience the silos of social stratification fracture and reorder into a horizontal plane of mutual exchange and solidarity. A seasoned artist, Ammons recently released her second solo album, Language Barrier, which represents the fruition of an idea the Durham artist has been working at for a good while, at least going back to her participation in the hip-hop/rock ensemble Mosadi Music in 2006. Ammons’ music defies categorization, with the breadth of her collaborators and the ease with which they meet testifying to her wide vision. There’s a decided hip-hop cadence with an indie rock texture. And, folk, yes. Consider the list of guest appearances on the record: Meshell Ndegeocello, Hiss Golden Messenger, Phil Cook, the Indigo Girls and Heather McEntire of Mount Moriah. By those lights you will know the level of respect Ammons gets from her peers.

Boulevards Jamil Rashad, the Raleigh artist who performs under the name Boulevards, channels pure, unadulterated funk, albeit more in the sleek and sexy mold of Chic than the outer-space eccentricities of George Clinton.

He favors concise slices audio ecstasy over extended jams, leaning towards a 1986 aesthetic over ’73. There’s a certain risqué quality to Boulevards combined with unabashed nerd appeal that makes his act irresistibly fun.

Thee Oh Sees There’s a wonderfully weird quality about Thee Oh Sees, the lo-fi Los Angeles-based psychedelic rock band led by John Dwyer that sonically references the garage and proto-punk roots of the genre. That’s probably a romanticization, but it points to both the primitive and forward-leaning spirit of the band. Comparisons to psychobilly pioneers the Cramps and machine-obsessed early Krautrock are oddly enough both appropriate for a band that seems obsessed with eyeballs, violence and weird sex.

Shirlette Ammons, a Durham-based music artist, makes music that defies genre, shapeshifting through hip hop, indie rock and folk.

Lera Lynn The spare, evocative sound of Nashville’s Lera Lynn — a throaty voice steeped in Patsy Cline accompanied

by Gibson hollow-bodied guitar with just the lightest touch of reverb — makes it easy to understand how she got commissioned to write music for the country-noir HBO series “True Detective.” Several of the songs on the series are co-written with Roseanne Cash and T Bone Burnett.

White Denim You can hear a sunbaked boogie with flourishes of jazz and prog-rock in the music of Austin, Texas’ White Denim — Billy Gibbons would surely approve. If the Foghat groove of “Light Up Or Leave Me Alone” paints scenes of Dazed and Confused, you should know that this is a band with wide enough vistas to apply a synthpop sheen and disco beat to the cheesy psychedelia of their cover of Kenny Rogers & the First Edition’s “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Is In).”

Quilla Anna Luisa Daigneault, who performs under the name Quilla, may call Greensboro home, but the geographic identifier is more circumstantial than formative in the electronic-music sensation’s status. Her dual heritage growing up as the child of a French-Canadian father and Peruvian mother probably informs her creative identity the most, along with her experiences

COURTESY PHOTO

traveling to a Mayan ruin in Belize and to Angkor Wat in Cambodia an anthropologist. Quilla’s vocal style is aptly described as “soaring yet intimate, disarming and ethereal.” Quilla co-wrote “Walls,” a massive international dancefloor hit in 2012, and has come into high demand as a collaborator since then, while recording her own album Beautiful Hybrid in 2014.

Teardrop Canyon Some may remember Josh Kimbrough from the pop-leaning indie rock outfit Butterflies in Greensboro in the last aughts. Subsequently, he returned home to the Triangle and has been refining his craft all the while. Kimbrough’s new project, Teardrop Canyon, is something of a departure. The inaugural track “Let It

Pick of the Week For he’s a jolly good fellow Rick Johnson’s 50th Birthday Bash @ Underdog Records (W-S), Saturday, 11 a.m.

An afternoon of half-hour live performances inside Underdog Records coincide with the Burke Street Food Truck Festival. In between tacos, check out the live performances from local acts like Amy Fitzgerald and Kyle Caudle. Treat it as a Phuzz Phest warm-up or a break from RiverRun. (Damn, Winston, back at it again with those festivals.) And after the party there’s the after-party, at Heyday Guitars down the street. Admission’s free. Check the Facebook event for more info.

Opinion Cover Story

Brett Harris Durham’s Brett Harris has sat in

Body Games Carrboro electronic music trio Body Games helped establish the value proposition of Greensboro’s monthly Dance From Above series, and makes a natural addition to the lineup of Winston-Salem little rock festival that could.

Last year, the trio released its Local Love Vol. 1 EP, admirably covering four bands from different genres, including “Dayzd” by Estrangers — the psych-pop outfit helmed by Phuzz Phest’s Philip Pledger. Local Love was both a tribute and a pioneering work of interpretation, but Body Games’ new long-player Damager represents the delicious fruition of the group’s initial promise.

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Yuck The London-based quartet Yuck’s third album, Stranger Things, is a maturation for a band entering its seventh year. The deliciously tuneful songs deliver pop hooks while retaining a kind of raw energy. While not exactly

Cashavelly Morrison Beckley, W.Va. native Cashavelly Morrison left home at the age of 15 to study ballet at UNC School of the Arts in Winston-Salem. A sense of virtuosity from Cashavelly’s fine-arts training carries into her music, but she ultimately rejected the expectations of female beauty bound up in the balletic tradition, choosing instead a truer and freer expression of women’s experience.

Ryan McLeod, who was completing a degree in classical guitar at the school of the arts, introduced Morrison to the music of Appalachian auto-harpist Jean Ritchie, who would prove to be one of her primary influences. McLeod, who is now Morrison’s husband, is also a key partner in their musical enterprise, but the focus remains appropriately on the female voice.

with surviving members of Big Star on performances of the band’s lost classic Third and served as a member of the touring lineup of North Carolina jangle-pop pioneers the dBs. That’s pretty great understudy experience for a song stylist whose work has drawn comparisons to Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Harry Nilsson. He’s also collaborated with Skylar Gudasz, who has her own slot at this year’s Phuzz Phest.

Up Front

Sarah Shook & the Disarmers The music of Chapel Hill’s Sarah Shook draws a direct line to the fertile Triangle alt-country scene that yielded such luminaries like Whiskeytown, the Backsliders and Trailer Bride. An early exponent of that scene was the now-disbanded Two Dollar Pistols, whose frontman John Howie Jr. found a place behind the drum kit for Shook’s newest project, the Disarmers. Howie rounds out a musical partnership previously established by Shook and guitarist Eric Peterson, and together the three produce a rollicking good time formed around questionable decisions and rueful second guesses.

path-breaking, listening to Yuck brings to mind all the best aspects of the last 25 years of indie-pop, suggesting all at once the grungy undertow of Dinosaur Jr., the lo-fi splendor of Pavement and the soaring post-punk of Built to Spill.

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Rest” showcases anthemic vocals, a chugging rhythm section and siren-like guitar playing. A full-length album produced by Lost in the Trees’ Ari Picker is on the horizon.

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CULTURE Uptown’s art boss launches a new magazine and gallery space

by Joanna Rutter

T

wo days before ArtSpace Uptown’s grand opening and companion publication ArtBoss Magazine’s release on April 1, Joseph Wilkerson had been busy hanging pieces along wall mounts in the gallery’s warehouse space at 825 Huffman Street in Greensboro. R&B music played from the speaker system, ladders leaned against empty spots on the walls, and the smell of fresh paint lingered in the air.

It’s not the first time Wilkerson has fixed up a new space in Gate City’s Uptown neighborhood. Wilkerson, a serial entrepreneur who describes himself as an “art boss,” launched this new venture on April 1 after years of experimenting with other locations and ideas such as Uptown ArtWorks, Prime Noir Gallery, Uptown magazine, and the Onyx Art Bar. ArtSpace Uptown very well may be the one that sticks.

“I took the long way around to get to here,” Wilkerson said on March 30 as he stood in ArtSpace. “I have some twist and turns in my story.”

Brooklyn bred and Greensboro grown, Wilkerson’s immutable drive to create is evident; he speaks of starting businesses like other people speak about picking out which shoes to wear, with the cheerful energy of one unafraid to fail. He guesses he may have picked this drive up genetically from his entrepreneurial father, but he might just naturally have restlessness — the currency of most creative people — in spades.

That didn’t necessarily serve him well back in his days as an architectural engineering student at NC JOANNA RUTTER Joseph Wilkerson recasts his artistic ambitions at a new space in Greensboro.

A&T University in the early ’90s, where Wilkerson said he felt “sabotaged” by the invention of the Sony Playstation and unfortunate distraction of a work-study of Jazz moving to Uptown as one of the first signs of art coming into the space: a traditional “old-school placement in the student game room. other joining him in that vision. fine arts” approach, and the style of younger urban “I feel like [now] I’m kinda making up for what I “The community that doesn’t go to clubs are typiartists, which he gravitates toward. didn’t do in college,” he said. cally artists,” he said. “They’ll go, because they want to “I call it #DopeArt,” Wilkerson said, invoking social When he wasn’t shooting pool or working at UPS, he socialize. They want to have a place to hang out, too, media-ready lingo. was working with a T-shirt company called Urban Litaround other artists.”

At the new gallery at ArtSpace Uptown, the divide is erature he started with some Wilkerson’s vision for his new space and publication intentionally remedied in the friends. On a trip to Texas to looks beyond creating space — his real goal is making new space. The walls are covvend at a Bob Marley festival, Pick up the first issue of ArtBoss his neighborhood a viable community. The first step? ered in mostly colorful pora festivalgoer asked him if Calling it by the name Wilkerson gave it back in the traiture of icons such as KenMagazine at coffee shops such they sold books. The thought mid-2000s: Uptown. drick Lamar, including some as Urban Grinders and Common hadn’t occurred to him. of Wilkerson’s own collages, “It never had a brand,” Wilkerson said. “It was ‘the “We didn’t sell a single Grounds in Greensboro; check out black side of town.’ You say, ‘I’m over by A&T.’” along with representative art shirt, but I came back with the the lineup of beat battles and art Wilkerson turns his architectural engineer’s eye to like a pair of basketball shoes larger perspective that there textured with microscopic shows coming to ArtSpace Uptown was more to this,” he said. newspaper scraps.

Pick of the Week on Facebook or visit in-person at Wilkerson said the realizaWilkerson’s work with UpUptown: It’s all happening tion set him on a path over 825 Huffman St. (GSO). town Artworks was abruptly 27 Gallery @ ArtSpace Uptown (GSO), Friday, 6 p.m. the next few years hosting brought to a standstill in Greensboro’s Touré Ali Shiver, multimedia artist film festivals, starting a 2014, though, when his young and photographer, brings his work to the freshly handful of magazines and publishing several works. daughter passed away unexpectedly. At the time, he minted gallery space at ArtSpace Uptown. ArtSpace Eventually his bubbling entrepreneurialism spread to couldn’t maintain the gallery while dealing with his will use low lighting to create an ambiance for reflecting on his own college experience, and creating loss. this art experience, further enhanced by “fellow the kind of arts space he would’ve liked to have had Now, with ArtSpace Uptown and ArtBoss Magazine, director of vibes” for the night, fashion designer/ access to back then. his vision continues to extends further, beyond simply DJ Gianni Lee. Charlotte-based producer Rashaun At Uptown Artworks, he was able to realize that what will go on the wall, and into creating a commuHampton performs. See the event’s Facebook page idea, but soon encountered some problems. Beyond nity and space for people who wouldn’t naturally gravfor more details and tickets. simple issues like controlling the unpredictable HVAC, itate toward nightlife. He mentioned Boston’s House Wilkerson saw a divide between two distinct types of

Up Front

got a hip-hop play in the works.

Perhaps the diversity of ArtSpace’s upcoming offerings, paired with the passion of its owner, will be the impetus of community revitalization Wilkerson hopes for.

“My heart is on this side of town,” he said. “I believe eventually we will transform this side of Greensboro and create the types of destinations that are not currently available in the city.”

triad-city-beat.com

urban planning flaws in funneling all incoming traffic and business to downtown.

“Downtown is a default,” he said.

“It’s not designed to function the way [the city’s] trying to make it function.

Sidewalks are your make-or-break with a downtown. It’s too narrow. It wasn’t designed to be a place to hang out.”

Well, ArtSpace is. Its roomy interior and ample curb space will make events like paint battles, producer-on-producer beat battles, film festivals, a comic book convention and an interactive fashion show possible. Wilkerson’s even

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Whatever your thoughts about church, whatever your beliefs about God … you are welcome here.

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Gate City Vineyard is a modern, Christian church that exists to serve the community around us. Our desire is to help people of all ages and backgrounds grow in their understanding of God.

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FUN & GAMES

R

emember a few weeks ago when I wrote a rambling screed about my bracketology system for the NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament?

In case you missed it (or are too busy to read the rantings

by Anthony Harrison of a clearly insane person), I boasted that my system “fundamentally works,” that I’d won pools based on its merits, that offensive rebounds are the most important statistic in the history of any sport, et cetera.

Basically, I had become consumed by delusions of grandeur.

Back then, the world was so fresh and new. It was full of hope, joy and the ecstasy of a coming spring.

Then came the first round of the tournament.

I entered a few bracket pools for this iteration of the tourney. I filled out six brackets, one of them for the Triad City Beat pool.

I did this knowing full well that, if I failed, I would become the butt of jokes made by my colleagues.

The editorial board — Brian, Eric and Jordan — already roasts me on a daily basis, thanks to everything from my space-cadet moments and inexperience of certain Triad culinary institutions to my mumbling and my choice of raincoat. I’m a prime punching bag, and I set myself up for it.

But no; this would be a new level. It would bring into scrutiny my veracity as a follower of college basketball, let alone my reputation as a sportswriter.

And it wouldn’t be just that trio of horrific tormenters. It’d be our intern, our art director, our marketing team — every single person within earshot of the newsroom would know of my embarrassment.

All this loomed over me after I’d bragged — in print — about my bracketology as the end all, be all of sports analysis.

Well, after we returned to the office — after that devastating first weekend of historic upsets — Brian estimated that my bracket busted within six hours.

How could this have happened so quickly? How

Bracketology, or falling on your own sword could a lifelong basketball fan, a sportswriter, appear so woefully inept at such a critical juncture?

Could it be that my bracketology system — the one that “fundamentally works” — is actually a crock of crap?

Maybe, but not necessarily.

Here’s what happened.

I did my thing: I went through my spreadsheets, I looked at each round, compared and contrasted all the different statistics, weighed my hunches.

And I decided the No. 6-seeded University of Arizona Wildcats could go deep.

If you recoiled a bit, believe me: I understand.

But it gets worse. So much worse.

I thought they could go deep. Like, to the championship game.

Instead of making a run at their second championship title, the No. 11 seed Wichita State University Shockers… well, shocked Arizona on the first day of games, 65-55.

It was a hell of an upset. But to my credit, the Wildcats played like a championship-caliber team during the regular season. They averaged 81 points and 40 rebounds per game, 48.2 percent from the field — 38.3 percent from three-point land — and they’d amassed 384 offensive rebounds.

What can you say? The Shockers showed up.

Tragically, the University of Miami Hurricanes blew the Shockers out of the water, forcing Wichita State’s return to Kansas. It was a bitter pill to swallow: The team that beat my contender lost in only the second round.

Then again, most everyone’s brackets were thrown into disarray by what happened on the second day.

If you picked the No. 15 seed Middle Tennessee State University Blue Raiders to beat the second-seed Michigan State University Spartans in the first round of the tournament, prove it with a screen cap. I’ll buy you breakfast.

Similarly, the University of Alabama-Little Rock surprised the country in their triple-overtime victory over Purdue University — though Eric did predict it — only to lose to Iowa State University. And Stephen F.

Austin University destroyed Bob Huggins’ West Virginia University squad. And Syracuse University beat Dayton University on their historic run past the University of Virginia to the Final Four. And so on.

Hell, only 2.6 percent of brackets in the CBS bracket pool picked Villanova University as the winner of the national championship game — probably all of them students and alumni — and the Wildcats only won that game on a ridiculous last-second three off a perfectly executed, drawn-up play.

Point is, the tournament is absolutely unpredictable, this one especially so for many reasons. There’s nothing you can do to definitively draw up a winning bracket, because no amount of seed selecting, stat logging, game watching, pundit following or team pride can prognosticate what ultimately happens in any game after the opening tip.

So those in the TCB pool — including victor Eric, who had never entered one before this tourney — can laugh all they want at my horrifically busted bracket. They can rib me over believing Arizona could make it to the title game. Shoot, this is an invitation to any of y’all: Give me hell over how much hubris I publicly spewed in my March 16 column.

But I bet none of you picked the eventual champion.

I’ll see you next year, nerds.

Pick of the Week Opening week(end) Longwood University Lancers @ High Point University Panthers (HP), Friday-Sunday College basketball is over with, so let’s shake off those Carolina blues by watching the hell outta some baseball. The Panthers are doing great with a 20-8 overall at press time, and they’ll host three games against the Lancers this weekend. The threegame home stretch starts at 6 p.m. on Friday. For more info, visit highpointpanthers.com.

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1 “___ Jr.” (Pixar’s first film, featuring the lamps now used in their logo) 2 Kitchen item: Abbr.

3 Like a neglected garden 4 Remove, in a way 5 “The Man Who Fell to Earth” director Nicolas 6 “I Love Lucy” costar Desi 7 ___-ovo vegetarian 8 “Two and a Half Men” actor 9 Stand-in 10 “Gimme some cat treats” 11 Remove, as a potato peel 12 Hip add-on?

13 “Sweep the ___” (“Karate Kid” quote)

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17 Sign of owing 20 Prop for the course 23 Downton, for one 24 Poet Federico Garcia ___ 25 Bar support 27 Affliction of the eyelid 29 Plot flaws 30 Jet, to a Shark, e.g.

31 Hangs in there 34 Raggedy ___ 35 Lts.’ subordinates 36 Small floor coverings 39 How some sneak in 40 Virgil epic 45 “Blue Rondo ___ Turk” (Brubeck song) 49 Cheeky words after reading a fortune cookie fortune 50 Luxury Hyundai sedan 51 Lawful, informally 7 pm Friday, 53 “Fuller House” actor BobMarch 25, 54 Word game piece 55 Blasted through More than 100 board games -- FREE TO PLAY! 56 Simon of “Hot Fuzz” 57 Aquatic bird 58 Strauss the jeans-maker 59 “Silly Rabbit” cereal 60 “Popeye” surname

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1 Postgraduate study, perhaps 4 1,550-mile continental range 9 Little demons 13 Hip-hop’s ___ Fiasco 14 “Come Away With Me” singer Jones 15 “Protein,” in some restaurant options 16 Go through 18 Sweat source 19 Big shiny building, once you get past the fence?

21 Fractions of a mi.

22 Bus route divisions 23 “Happy Days” diner 26 “___ a small world” 28 Broadway legend Merman 32 Droid 33 Swimming or floating 37 “Game of Thrones” actress Chaplin 38 Chuck, at a fancy NYC party?

41 Yellen’s forte, for short 42 “Rare and radiant maiden” of “The Raven” 43 First responder, briefly 44 “Big Three” meeting site of 1945 46 Mama’s boy?

47 Part of DOS: Abbr.

48 Hipbone-related 52 Anderson who directed “Rushmore”

54 Last dance theater at the end of the block?

61 “Ricochet” actor/rapper 62 Resentment of the successful, in Irish slang 63 2014’s “The ___ Movie” 64 Short-lived NBC drama named for the outermost section of the Pentagon 65 Full of malicious intent 66 Border 67 OKCupid meetups 68 B.O. purchases

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Thank you, Greensboro Beautiful.

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ALL SHE WROTE

50 Ways to Leave Your Governor (With apologies to Paul Simon)

T

he problem isn’t all about the head, he said to NC. The answer is genitalia quite frankly.

by Nicole Crews So we’d like to offer up some options to be McCrory-free.

There must be 50 ways to leave your governor.

He said it’s not really my habit to intrude, but a man’s junk in the ladies’ locker might be misconstrued as crude.

We will repeat ourselves at the risk of being sued.

There must be 50 ways to leave your governor — 50 ways to leave your governor.

Let your business slip out the back, Red Hat Take an economic stand, Dan You don’t need to be coy, Roy — we’re voting for ye.

Hop on the Bill, Phil.

We need to discuss much — like the nullification of civil action against discrimination and such Just drop off the key Mc-Cror-y And set us all free He said it’s all just liberal hullaballoo and I am right.

And I believe in the morning you will all begin to see the light.

And then more than 100 CEOs boycotted our state in a fortnight.

There must be 50 ways to leave your governor — 50 ways to leave your governor.

Write a letter to your rep, Shep Make a few waves, Dave Move outta state, Nate Just listen to NC Get a new plan, Fran We need to discuss much — like equality and worker’s rights, right?

Just drop off the key McCrory — and set us all free

He said it grieves me to think of our wives and daughters being subjected to such distress and pain.

We wish he understood that the LGBTQ community won’t smile again — until we find a way to leave our governor.

There must be 50 ways to leave our governor.

“Our decision is a clear and unambiguous one,” said CEO Dan Schulman of PayPal. And we appreciate the message and we like your style. That’s surely one way to leave our governor.

“As a company that is committed to the principle that everyone deserves to live without fear of discrimination simply for being who they are, becoming an employer in North Carolina, where members of our teams will not have equal rights under the law, is simply untenable,” said PayPal. And other businesses have been against it for a while.

There must be fifty ways to leave our governor.

Let them hear ya, Bank of America Way to scrabble, Apple Show them your whine, American Airlines Show them frugal, Google Just set yourself free.

It looks like both sides are down for quite the fight.

HB 2 is keeping us all up at night.

It’s put out the light on Civil Rights.

There must be 50 ways to leave your governor — 50 ways to leave your governor.

Triad City Beat and triad-city-beat.com 125,000 impressions a month 3,800 are looking at an advanced degree 3,700 are making travel plans 3,125 are pricing real estate 2,500 are foodies Reach the best readers with TCB Source: Google Analytics, February 2016

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