INDY Week 12.13.17

raleigh 1|27|16 raleigh 12|13|17

The end of the web as we know it p. 6

Pity the poor inspectors p. 8

No such thing as a free

lunch p. 17

Burned out on bands after The Love Language and Toddlers, Missy Thangs returns to her roots as an audio engineer at the famed Fidelitorium

BY ALLISON HUSSEY p. 18

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INDYWEEK.COM

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK VOL. 34, NO. 49

DEPARTMENTS

6 If critics are right, Thursday could mark the end of the web as we know it.

6 Triangulator

8 For years, Raleigh’s building inspectors have been tasked with a job they’re not equipped to do.

8 News 15 Food 18 Music

9 The Durham Housing Authority’s eighteen hundred units need more than $19 million in basic repairs.

24 Arts & Culture 26 What to Do This Week

15 When the Black Panther Party created a free school breakfast program in 1969, J. Edgar Hoover called it an attempt to brainwash young people.

29 Music Calendar 32 Arts & Culture Calendar

18 At a recent recording session, Fidelitorium Recordings engineer Missy Thangs had a band toss triple-bagged trash out the studio window to create a percussive effect.

ON THE COVER

22 Lydia Loveless is a rising country singer, but her biggest Spotify hit is a Justin Bieber cover.

24 Murielle Elizéon’s Brown emerges from her personal history, but its portrait of trauma is one-size-fits-all.

RALEIGH: PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA DURHAM/CHAPEL HILL: PHOTOS BY CAITLIN PENNA

Clothes hang on a line at McDougald Terrace (see page 9).

PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA

2017 Finalist for Best Aesthetician: Angela Hugghins

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Raleigh Durham | Chapel Hill PUBLISHER Susan Harper EDITORIAL

EDITOR IN CHIEF Jeffrey C. Billman MANAGING EDITOR FOR ARTS+CULTURE Brian Howe DESIGN DIRECTOR Shan Stumpf STAFF WRITERS Thomas Goldsmith,

Erica Hellerstein, Sarah Willets

MUSIC EDITOR Allison Hussey COPY EDITOR David Klein FOOD EDITOR Victoria Bouloubasis LISTINGS COORDINATOR Kate Thompson THEATER AND DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods RESTAURANT CRITIC Emma Laperruque STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Caitlin Penna CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS Amanda Abrams, Jim Allen,

Elizabeth Bracy, Timothy Bracy, Michaela Dwyer, Katie Jane Fernelius, Curt Fields, Spencer Griffith, Glenn McDonald, Neil Morris, Hannah Pitstick, Noah Rawlings, V. Cullum Rogers, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Zack Smith, Chris Vitiello, Patrick Wall INTERN Emma Parna Gomes

PRODUCTION+DESIGN

PRODUCTION MANAGER Christopher Williams GRAPHIC+EDITORIAL DESIGNER Steve Oliva

OPERATIONS

BUSINESS MANAGER Alex Rogers

CIRCULATION

CIRCULATION DIRECTOR Brenna Berry-Stewart DISTRIBUTION Laura Bass, David Cameron,

Nathan Fellers, Michael Griswold, JC Lacroix, Richard David Lee, Gloria McNair, Jeff Prince, Timm Shaw, Freddie Simons, Trudi Vass

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4 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

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Let’s clea beginning still getti more rece Last mo Raleigh p for a mor Comment lovitz’s po division c fuzzy. As children, dren ques needed to was the tr we love th Here is news tha on the 20 sion: “I w tion for a around th traffic, m thousand create. Th with bett highways in the mi two-lane every-blo traffic up the Red H Paul V not lose o for 2017 e trying for Last we sis that s repeals th some thir insurance the Trian @RogerW residents able (min ible) insu @RealG thought: forced to b insurance Respon tious Rale cil membe recommen Russ Step axis may

backtalk

No Candy Before Dinner

shot themselves in the foot, as they just lost Let’s clear out the mail backlog, shall we, their largest campaign donor—the mayor.” beginning with some older stories that are Ben Yannessa blames us: “Thanks to the still getting comments and moving on to INDY-supported candidates for bringing more recent ones.

Raleigh to a standstill. Nice job. NIMBYs rule!”

Last month, you’ll recall, we ran a story on Finally, on Friday, editor Jeffrey Billman Raleigh pastor John Pavlovitz, who argues commented on a News & Observer story about for a more inclusive brand of Christianity. the surge in religious vaccination waivers Commenter seadog_terry doesn’t seen Pavin North Carolina: “To be blunt,” he wrote, lovitz’s positions as a sign of strength. “Just “refusing to vaccinate your kids on pseudodivision cloaked in progressive warm and religious grounds because you believe whatfuzzy. As a parent, did John ever say to his ever nonsense you read on the internet puts children, ‘No candy before dinner’? His chilother children in danger and should not be dren questioned him and, as a parent, he allowed.” needed to guide and explain to them why ‘no’ The anti-vaxxers weren’t happy. Here’s was the truth. The Bible is the truth, so while Chris Steffens: “Jeffrey/INDY Week, to be we love the sinner, we must admonish them.” blunt, fuck off.”

Here is Chris Howell, responding to the Shannon Theresa Zarb: “That is blunt news that North Carolina FC missed out and misinformed. When the government can on the 2017 Major League Soccer expanguarantee that vaccinations are safe, do not sion: “I would love a team, but that locacontain a host of dubious ingredients, and tion for a stadium is horrible! The roads will not permanently harm/disable my chilaround there can barely handle day-to-day dren, then we can talk. Right traffic, much less the tens of now, they can’t even make thousands more this would those claims with our food create. There are better sites “That is supply. I’m not an alarmist, with better access to major blunt and parents have not only the highways. Putting a stadium misinformed.” but right but a responsibility to in the middle of a bunch of make those choices for their two-lane roads in a stoplightkids—religious beliefs or not.” every-block city would tie Robert Preston counters, “There will traffic up for hours—just look at the traffic always be people who think they know betthe Red Hat creates.” ter. Either through their flawed understandPaul Vant seeks to clarify: “Raleigh did ing of statistics or science, or intellectual not lose out on MLS. We’re not a candidate arrogance. I’d say let them ‘Darwin,’ but the for 2017 expansion. Raleigh has always been sad part is their paranoia and narcissism trying for 2018 expansion.” hurts their children.”

Last week, we wrote about a new analyIndeed, as @what_thebuck points out: sis that says the Senate’s tax bill—which “Some kids can’t get vaccines for medical repeals the individual mandate—will lead to reasons (like newborns or people with allersome thirteen million people going without gies), so purposefully unvaccinated children insurance, including tens of thousands in are putting other children at risk, too. Herd the Triangle. “This is simply not so,” writes immunity is very important.” @RogerWAllison. “It means that 32K N.C. Finally, @lexicallen argues that even if residents currently forced to buy unaffordthat weren’t the case, immunizations should able (mine is $969/month w/ a $7K deductstill be mandatory: “In addition to putting ible) insurance will have a choice!” other children at risk, it also puts your own @RealGuyBroman offers a similar kid at risk to make those choices. I don’t like thought: “You misspelled ‘would not be the positioning of, Well, it’s OK if you wanna forced to buy government-approved medical risk your kid’s life, but you don’t get to risk insurance under threat of penalty.’” other people’s kids.’”

Responding to a story about the new, fractious Raleigh City Council, after several counWant to see your name in bold? Email us cil members rejected the mayor’s committee at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our recommendations, Joe Boisvert writes: “The Facebook page or indyweek.com, or hit us up Russ Stephenson-David Cox-Kay Crowder on Twitter: @indyweek. axis may work for a period of time, but they INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 5

triangulator

IT’S THE END OF THE WEB AS WE KNOW IT (AND WE FEEL … PISSED) A quick and dirty guide to net neutrality

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission, led

by Republican Ajit Pai, will almost certainly vote 3–2 to repeal rules put in place by the FCC during President Obama’s administration that are commonly referred to as net neutrality. In short, net neutrality seeks to equalize the internet playing field. But its detractors—namely, big telecoms and their financial beneficiaries—have argued that net neutrality stifles

innovation and that a free-market approach will unleash the web’s full potential.

So what does it all mean? Is it no big deal, as Pai and the telecoms want you to believe? Or will it fundamentally alter the public sphere of the internet, as critics warn?

To help you out, we’ve put together a quick and dirty guide to net neutrality.

NE TF LIX

Net neutrality

[noun, first known usage 2003]: “the idea, principle, or requirement that Internet service providers should or must treat all Internet data as the same regardless of its kind, source, or destination.” —Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary In other words, it’s the concept that all internet traffic and data should be treated equally.

That sounds bad.

What does that mean?

Your internet provider, or ISP, can’t decide suddenly that it’s going to make it slower to stream your favorite show on Netflix or that great new album on Spotify (this is called “throttling”) because those apps aren’t paying the provider enough.

OK, but what does it mean for me?

It means ISPs can’t charge you more for using certain services, like Twitter or Facebook. Everything has to be equal.

Without net neutrality, ISPs like Verizon can decide to charge you more for the services you use. The big companies— like Google and Amazon, and probably Facebook and Spotify—will be able to pay for that, which will put them at a big advantage over newcomers to the market. Or an ISP could decide that while The New York Times gets top-shelf service, your little ol’ INDY is relegated to the second or third tier, and it takes you forever to load our pages.

Imagine a provider deciding that it would charge you, in addition to its flat service rate, additional fees for using Instagram and WhatsApp.

Why is the FCC getting rid of net neutrality?

You

Th em

6 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

Wh at?

Pai argues that net neutrality has hurt smaller companies, and that once the rules are repealed, telecom companies will still have to be transparent about their fees, so no harm done. But it’s not like companies haven’t already gotten caught up in content delivery issues. In 2014, before the net neutrality rules were put in place, for example, Comcast throttled Netflix streaming until Netflix paid more to increase streaming speeds.

There’s a reason the big telecoms are the most outspoken supporters of net neutrality, while content providers are almost universally opposed: telecoms stand to make a mint off the Wild West of unregulated internet access.

Wait until you hear about the free-speech implications. Not only will ISPs be able to favor their own content over that of their competitors, but they’ll also—in theory—be able to throttle content they don’t like or that doesn’t further their interests. There would be nothing (besides public shame) stopping an ISP, for instance, from throttling The Washington Post while giving priority status to Breitbart. Without net neutrality, the free-speech organization Free Press has noted, “a company like Verizon could decide where its users can go for news and what stories get buried online. Verizon could strike a deal with CNN and hinder its subscribers’ abilities to access alternative news sources.”

So, you’re saying that internet companies will win, and I’ll lose?

Here’s what former FCC chairman Tom Wheeler recently told NPR: “If you like your cable company, then you’ll love what’s going to happen to the internet because suddenly the rules—instead of being open, the rules now will [resemble] what your rules are if you’re a cable company where the cable company decides who you can get access to, what your prices will be.”

+DISRUPTION

The recent shenanigans of the Raleigh City Council conjure up the disruption that beset Wake County government in 2009, from Commissioner Betty Lou Ward’s infamous bathroom trip to the Ron Margiotta-John Tedesco takeover of the 2009 Wake County Board of Education.

The city council had been reasonably placid, if not spectacularly productive, for the past year or so. But with the departures of veterans Mary-Ann Baldwin and Bonner Gaylord, the council sworn in December 1 started to show its own signs of disruption.

(According to some folks, disruption is a good thing. Think Uber. And think of all the things that bill themselves as “Uber, but for [whatever].” And think all the people who now have gigs instead of jobs.)

It was council member David Cox who introduced a measure disrupting the committee assignments that Mayor Nancy McFarlane had compiled. But it was Russ Stephenson who rode herd, getting a different lineup passed while council member Corey Branch was out of the room sick.

For the most part, the committee assignments themselves aren’t a huge deal.

(Although Stephenson replacing Nicole Stewart with the slow-growth Stef Mendell on the growth and natural resources committee could have some ramifications down the line.) But the rebellion against the mayor’s wishes—in contrast to the council’s traditions—bodes poorly for harmony on the body, if history teaches us anything.

When Betty Lou Ward left the room during the December 7, 2009, county commission meeting, Republicans seized the opportu-

PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS

nity to appoint one of their own, Tony Gurley, chairman. (Commissioner Harold Webb was absent after having a stroke.) Having a GOP chairman leading a majority-Democratic board led to months of conflict over school funding and other matters.

That same month, Republicans Ron Margiotta and John Tedesco engineered a takeover of the school board chairman’s position, which went to Margiotta in an unusual midterm switch. The board went on to hire controversial, short-term schools superintendent Anthony Tata and do away with a diversity program for school assignment.

The accreditation body AdvanceEd reported in 2011: “Since December 1, 2009 the actions and decisions of the Wake County Board of Education have resulted in creating a climate of uncertainty, suspicion, and mistrust throughout the community.”

Coming months will tell how well disruption will serve the Raleigh City Council—and the public—as the panel confronts sweeping issues of affordable housing, traffic, and rampaging growth.

+CLASSROOM CONGESTION

Durham County commissioners are appealing to state legislators to put off the implementation of a law reducing the size of kindergarten through third-grade classes, and are hoping other local boards will follow suit.

The law, passed in 2016, lays out K–3 class size limits for the 2018–19 school

year, reducing the number of students allowed per class by about four on average. On Monday, commissioners passed a resolution asking for a delay and said they would send the template to other local boards for consideration.

Critics say the policy doesn’t allow enough time or funding to implement the change and will force schools to cut art and physical education teachers to pay for more classroom teachers. The legislature had originally passed more immediate reductions, but those requirements were eased earlier this year after parents, students, and educators complained.

Still, commissioners said, Durham Public Schools would need to build an additional sixty-three classrooms and hire an additional ninety teachers to meet the requirements of the law. The school system doesn’t have enough money to build the new classrooms, the resolution says, or sufficient funds or time to set up mobile classrooms. The resolution asks that the General Assembly fully fund smaller classes and phase in changes to class size.

“An immediate reduction in the K–3 class size maximum will worsen an already very difficult environment for [local education agencies] in finding licensed and qualified teachers to fill classrooms,” the resolution says, “most likely leading to more classrooms taught by long-term substitutes or lateral-entry teachers who do not have the pedagogy and classroom management necessary.” triangulator@indyweek.com This week’s report by Thomas Goldsmith, Erica Hellerstein, and Sarah Willets.

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indynews F

or years now, brash, big new houses have been elbowing their way between modest older dwellings in Raleigh, often after a developer scraped off an existing abode to make room.

As happens with virtually all development issues in Raleigh, heated questions have ensued: How is that new house so close to my boundary? Is it supposed to tower over my house? How far from the street should it be?

It turns out the burden of these confrontations lay in part on the city’s zoning inspectors. They were being asked to act as surveyors of boundaries, slope, and setback when they didn’t have the license, the training, or the equipment to do it.

But according to a presentation at the December 5 city council meeting, all that’s going to change. Licensed surveyors will start inspecting new houses on infill lots in Raleigh to make sure they’re not defying codes by rising too high or intruding too much on neighboring spaces. The slope is important because an average of it figures into how tall a house can be built.

The change in zoning policy announced at the council meeting is an apparent victory for residents who have been complaining about the rise of sky-high mansions next to smaller homes in mature neighborhoods such as Ridgewood.

Earlier this year, a Raleigh family with a smallish 1949 ranch house on Churchill Road sued a developer who they said put up a twenty-eight-foot wall next to their home, blocking their sunlight and causing drainage problems.

A Wake County Superior Court judge found enough merit in the family’s case to proceed, but they chose not to. Their lawyer would not disclose the reason.

Indeed, some homeowners don’t follow through on litigation over encroachment or other matters because it can cost a lot of money.

Tom Hosey, the city’s director of development services, said at the council meeting that a longstanding policy asked city inspectors only to carry out a final inspection to make sure any new construction is up to snuff. The problem was that a feature contrary to code, or a nonconformity, was really expensive to fix once the house was nearly complete.

“We are adding an additional required zoning inspection at the time of foundation, a site inspection,” Hosey said. "This inspection will serve not only as an additional compliance check valve, but also dramatically reduce 8 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

Pity the Poor Inspectors A POLICY CHANGE COULD TACK ON UP TO $700 IN ADDITIONAL COSTS FOR SOME NEW HOMES IN RALEIGH

BY THOMAS GOLDSMITH

costs if challenges are discovered. However, it will require the builders to allow for another inspection.”

Having the city bring in licensed surveyors to check the boundaries, setback, and slope of a lot should go a long way toward preventing conflicts. And it will relieve zoning inspectors of the task.

“If the survey marks aren’t there and they don’t really know where the boundaries are, they are eyeballing it,” Mayor Nancy McFarlane told the INDY after the meeting.

But it’s going to cost more, Hosey said, estimating the cost at $200–$300 for plots that have already been surveyed and $500–$700 for new surveys.

The new process, slated to start March 3, was also discussed in a November 14 work session. Minutes for the meeting illustrate one of the changes that the October election brought to the council. Objections to the change came from a member who was generally friendly with the development community but is no longer on board.

“Councilor [Bonner] Gaylord expressed concern with the $400 to $500 cost estimate and inquired further about the nature of the inspection,” the minutes say. A little later, “Councilor Gaylord emphasized that communication with engineers and developers should be a top priority of the City during the transition process.”

With Gaylord gone, only at-large council member Russ Stephenson raised objections to the new policy last week, asking whether exceptions could be made in situations where the infill site seems to be flat and without boundary problems.

Not really, Hosey said. Using surveyors ensures consistency: “You have to actually be a licensed land surveyor in the state of North Carolina to perform these measurements. My zoning inspectors don’t have the licensing, they don’t have the training. They were just kind of making an educated guess on which to base the approval, which I don’t think is best practice.”

McFarlane noted that no council vote was required for the change in policy. The reason for last week’s presentation was to prepare for complaints that are likely to reach council members, even though Hosey and crew have been reaching out to homebuilders.

“They’re saying, ‘There’s going to be pushback on it, so you need to have my back,’” McFarlane said. tgoldsmith@indyweek.com

Top

THIS OLD

HOUSE Durham ’s public housing is aging and deteriorating. Is partnering with private investors the answer?

BY SARAH Willets

“W

hen you open your door and you look outside, do you like

what you see?”

This is how Tameika Richardson gets to know her neighbors in the Cornwallis Road public housing neighborhood in Durham. Richardson moved in about a year ago and began working as a community organizer with Durham for All, a group that advocates for bottom-up governance.

To learn about her neighbors’ needs, she goes from apartment to apartment asking this question.

So far, no one has said yes.

“A lot of people say no, they don’t. Some people just feel like nothing’s going to change, so there’s no point in going out to vote or going out to any kind of meetings,” she says. “They feel like Durham’s been like this, and these projects have been like this, for so long you just get used to it.”

A Durham native, Richardson had heard about Cornwallis before she moved in, primarily through news reports on shootings there. She feels lucky that she got an apartment on a quiet cul-de-sac and says the only major issue she’s expe-

PHOTOS BY CAITLIN PENNA

rienced was in August, when “puddles and puddles of water” leaked through an air vent in her living room, leaving behind dark marks on the wall and floor.

But not everyone there has been so lucky.

Built in 1967, Cornwallis Road’s two hundred apartments are aging, just like many of the Durham Housing Authority’s properties, their slow decline dictated by the compounding of time and slashed budgets.

With an estimated $19 million in basic repairs needed in more than eighteen hundred public housing units across twenty-one neighborhoods, the DHA has embarked on what is likely to be a morethan-ten-year redevelopment of most of

its public housing stock. Through the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program, the DHA will convert its public housing units to the voucher program known as Section 8, borrow money, and, most significantly, partner with private investors to transform public housing into mixed-income and, in some cases, mixeduse neighborhoods.

Across DHA neighborhoods, residents are largely unaware of how the program will work and what their rights are; as with other redevelopment efforts in recent memory, they’re skeptical it will go as planned. But for the housing authority, this new strategy is a game-changer in addressing Durham’s affordability crisis— INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 9

council’s DHA liaison for six years, “it really doesn’t matter unless the housing authority succeeds.”

and its only shot at saving Durham’s public housing from continuing deterioration.

“This is probably the only way we can survive in this changing environment,” says Tom Niemann, a DHA board member and former chairman.

A

A

sk DHA residents about the condition of their housing, and you’ll hear some recurring themes. There are the roaches at McDougald Terrace, and the pilot lights that fill apartments with the smell of gas when they go out. There are the leaky ceilings and mold at Hoover Road, and the cracking, peeling floors at Cornwallis.

Not all residents have problems with their units. Others have simply grown accustomed to conditions largely unchanged for years or accept their surroundings out of gratitude for having a roof over their heads. But overall, DHA properties have not been spared from the deterioration of public housing across America. After all, some of the buildings are fifty or sixty years old and are almost entirely dependent on shrinking federal funding.

For the first three decades of the federal public housing program, which began in 1937, rents were determined locally, based on the cost to maintain the housing. In 1969, however, the government capped what tenants pay at 25 percent of their household income. The threshold was later raised to 30 percent, where it remains today.

“That meant that the housing authorities weren’t going to be able to make enough to cover the cost of maintenance,” says Bill Rohe, director of the University of North Carolina’s Center for Urban and Regional Studies. The federal government agreed to cover the gap, but funding for public housing has waned. On average, over the past ten years, housing authorities have received 84 percent of what’s needed for their operating funds and 46 percent for their capital funds, the primary sources of public housing dollars.

Over time, that has added up to what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development estimates is a $50 billion backlog of repairs needed in public housing nationwide—although, at about $42,000 per unit, many advocates believe this figure is too low. Each year, that total increases by $3.4 billion, and ten thousand units fall out of service because of their condition, HUD says. At McDougald Terrace, for example, 14 of 360 units are uninhabitable.

The funding cuts have also affected staffing. Over the past five years, the DHA’s 10 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

n INDY review of nearly twentyeight hundred work orders submitted by DHA residents in August and September shows how the backlog of improvements is manifesting locally.

While many of the work orders describe matters of routine upkeep—changing light bulbs and smoke-detector batteries—or damage caused by residents, as Scott says, “there are other things that fall squarely in our lap in terms of maintenance.”

Issues are also going unreported. Some residents say they don’t want to pay for repairs (DHA charges for materials to fix problems caused by residents) or have maintenance workers in their homes. Others don’t bother because they say it takes too long for work to get done.

Aging plumbing and roofs contributed to frequent clogs and reports of leaks in nearly every neighborhood. Residents in seven neighborhoods reported the presence of mold or mildew. There were twenty-six reports of backed-up sewer lines in residents’ apartments and seven reports of ceilings caving in. Among the more unusual complaints were two reports of bats at Liberty Street.

One twenty-five-year resident of Cornwallis Road says her upstairs toilet is leaking through the floor and into the 1. C insulation snaking through the laundry 2. C room below it. You can see where the floor 3. C had been patched under the toilet, and also 4. D where the insulation sags with liquid.

5. E Though far from the most common 6. F complaint, these types of leaks were pres7. F ent across neighborhoods, with upstairs 8. H showers and toilets leaking downstairs 9. J 10. L into laundry rooms, living rooms, and 11. L kitchens.

12. M At Hoover Road, a community of fif13. M ty-four townhomes built in 1968, flat 14.

M roofs drip on rainy days. The work orders 15. M reviewed by the INDY included twenty16. O five reports of leaks and ten complaints 17. O about mold or mildew.

18. S “Everybody talks about mold in their apartments,” says Regina Lowe, who has lived there about seven years. Lowe’s ceil- ments—in ing used to leak into her bedroom, living three site room, and kids’ room when it rained, but it flooring a has since been patched up, and Clorox has ited, the D kept the mold at bay. based on She would go stay with family just to get far in th away from it. “I used to feel sick. My throat may be. used to get locked up,” she says. “I can feel If all go the difference when I leave the house.” opment w The housing authority’s five-year plan it could b details $10.5 million in physical improve- see signif

DHA

Top left: Durham Housing Authority CEO Anthony Scott Top right: Laura Betye has lived in McDougald Terrace since 2007.

Bottom: Tameika Richardson, who lives in the DHA’s Cornwallis Road development staff has been reduced from 112 employees to 96, including 26 maintenance workers. The more DHA’s buildings deteriorate, the more expensive their upkeep gets, and the busier those workers are.

“We’re at the mercy of the money that Congress appropriates,” says DHA CEO Anthony Scott. “Our real fight is with Congress. Our intermediary fight is with HUD in terms of how they deal with their rules and regulations. But ultimately, it always starts with how much money does Congress fund us.”

The agency’s ability to maintain its buildings is critical as the cost of living rises across Durham. Not only is the DHA the largest provider of affordable housing

in the city, it also serves some of the city’s lowest-income residents.

The DHA owns about a third of the income-restricted, subsidized homes in Durham, as well as most of the units accessible to the estimated twelve thousand extremely low-income households in the city. According to the housing authority, the average income of its 3,727 public housing tenants is $13,253. Between its public housing and housing voucher programs, the DHA helps house about 4 percent of city residents.

“If all of our nonprofit affordable housing builders do tremendously well and really up their production,” says Mayor Steve Schewel, who has served as the city

DHA PROJECTS INCLUDED IN RAD 1.

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8.

9.

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CALVERT PLACE CLUB BOULEVARD CORNWALLIS ROAD DAMAR COURT EDGEMONT ELMS FRANKLIN VILLAGE FOREST HILL HEIGHTS HOOVER ROAD J.J. HENDERSON LAUREL OAKS LIBERTY STREET MAIN STREET TOWNHOUSES MCDOUGALD TERRACE MORNING GLORY SENIOR VILLAGE MORREENE ROAD OLDHAM TOWERS OXFORD MANOR SCATTERED SITES

ments—including HVAC replacements at three sites, roof repairs at four sites, and flooring at seven. Because money is limited, the DHA has to prioritize these needs based on urgency, resources, and how far in the future a site’s redevelopment may be.

If all goes according to plan, the redevelopment will address all of these issues. But it could be years before some properties see significant improvements.

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ADDRESS

YEAR BUILT

910 East Main Street 1215 East Club Boulevard 3000 Weaver Street 1002 Sherwood Drive 912 Angier Avenue 210 North Holman Street 700 South Mangum Street 1126 South Hoover Road 807 South Duke Street 600 Laurel Oaks Drive 131 Commerce Street 101 North Elizabeth Street 1101 Lawson Street 1107 Morning Glory Avenue 3412 Glasson Street 519 East Main Street 3602 Keystone Place 300 Gary Street

2005 1967 1967 1967 1990 2008 1981 1968 1978 2004 1972 2004 1953 2005 1968 1969 1972 1962

T

he Rental Assistance Demonstration program, or RAD, was created in 2012 to help address the backlog of public housing repairs. By October 2015, 185 public housing developments had been converted through the program.

Because Section 8 also caps rent at 30 percent of a tenant’s income, most publichousing residents won’t see their rent go up through RAD. RAD allows housing authorities to bor-

T

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row money and partner with private investors, leveraging low-income housing tax credits, land sales, and developer fees to complete work that would be impossible with federal funding alone. While private partners and managers can be brought in, a public or nonprofit entity must maintain a controlling interest in the property.

“We have to be engaged and involved,” Scott says. “I’m not going to have a situation where the housing authority is giving its full rights to someone else without us having a direct ownership role in it.”

The DHA was approved for portfoliowide RAD conversion in 2015, beginning with the Morreene Road and Damar Court developments, which will be gutted but rehabbed instead of rebuilt. Those deals are expected to close by the end of the year, and renovations will take about fifteen months.

Initially, the agency intended to simply renovate its properties, but since becoming CEO in June 2016, Scott has taken a holistic view, looking for ways to increase density, introduce uses besides housing, and create mixed-income neighborhoods in an effort to deconcentrate poverty.

“We’re designing these financially so that these properties aren’t going to fall in the same old rut that they normally do,” Scott says.

For the most part, the DHA has to maintain the same number of units portfoliowide, but it can increase and decrease the number at individual sites. Overall, DHA officials hope they can increase the city’s stock of subsidized housing through the RAD conversion. Density will likely be upped at Forest Hill Heights, for example—an underused fifteen-acre site with just fifty-five units on it between downtown and the redeveloped, mixed-income Southside neighborhood.

Laurel Oaks, which comprises thirty townhomes built in 2004, will see cosmetic repairs in 2018. Five newer developments won’t undergo renovations, but the administrative work to convert their 151 public housing units to Section 8 is expected to be completed around the end of the year. Specific plans haven’t been determined for other sites.

Planning for the redevelopment of Oldham Towers and Liberty Street, two adjacent developments downtown, is set to begin early next year. No other sites currently have a redevelopment timeline.

Properties near downtown—Liberty Street, Oldham Towers, Forest Hill Heights, and J.J. Henderson—are being eyed for mixed use. Some Liberty Street units will likely be moved to not-yet-built affordable housing at the intersection of 12 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

Top left: Water leaking through Delissia Tatum’s wall in Hoover Road. Top right: Children’s handprints in McDougald Terrace. Bottom: McDougald Terrace.

Jackson and Pettigrew streets, where the developer has already agreed to take housing vouchers from the DHA. The agency is also considering putting housing on the property where its Main Street headquarters sits.

“Our most valuable property is downtown. When you look at some of our other sites far away, they don’t have the same value,” Scott says. “The strategy is you leverage your stronger properties to help support your others.”

Because plans haven’t been finalized, neither have the costs. If each unit is redone to the level of those at Morreene Road and Damar Court, the redevelopment would cost $100,000 per unit, or about $168 million in total.

“HUD is severely underestimating the kind of work that is needed on these properties,” Scott says. “You can just look at the RAD conversions across the country and see what people are spending to get these buildings up to current, modern-day standards.”

The lack of specifics is contributing to skepticism and uncertainty among residents, who have been told they may need to move to some undetermined place at

some undetermined date for some undetermined time. Over the years, they’ve gotten letters about RAD periodically but see no change in their neighborhoods.

RAD stipulates that residents have a right to return to their neighborhoods post-conversion. But the residents have heard that before in previous redevelopment efforts. The urban renewal projects of the sixties and seventies wiped out thousands of Durham homes and businesses, which weren’t replaced as promised. In the early 2000s, redevelopment of what had been the Few Gardens public housing neighborhood took years, and some residents moved on.

Peggy Davis sums up the sentiment best: “Right to return? Yeah, right.”

Suspicion of the RAD program is perhaps strongest at the DHA’s downtown properties, like the 1978-built J.J. Henderson, the senior housing where Davis has lived for thirteen years.

“This is one of the most prime market areas in Durham. We’re right in the center of everything,” says Rafiq Zaidi, who has lived at J.J. Henderson since 2006 and worries the property—less than half a mile from the Durham Bulls Athletic Park and

the American Tobacco Campus—will end up in the hands of a private developer.

“They remember what happened on Pettigrew, in Hayti,” he says of his neighbors.

J.J. Henderson is in better condition than other properties, but it is still due for new toilets, kitchen renovations, floor repairs, new hallway and fire escape doors, and new ceiling tiles, according to the fiveyear plan.

Because its residents are elderly, and some disabled, fears about RAD are acute.

Many rely on bus routes and doctors nearby. Even though federal law protects them from being permanently displaced

by RAD, even being temporarily relocated would be significant.

“If it’s a different building, it’s going to be a better building,” Scott says. “If it’s a different neighborhood, that’s something I’m very sensitive to.”

The housing authority plans to move residents into vacant units while theirs are being renovated. So far, eighteen units are being held open at Morreene Road and Damar Court for residents there.

At other sites, Scott says the housing authority will first try to move tenants into vacant units in their current neighborhood. If those fill up, tenants will move to vacant units at other Durham public housing sites. He says it’s unlikely that relocated tenants will be given rent vouchers to use with private landlords, because that would cut into the agency’s current voucher allotment.

F

or Laura Betye, living at McDougald Terrace has been “a gift.” After Hurricane Wilma slammed South Florida in 2005, she came to Durham on a Greyhound bus in 2007. She was drawn to the city’s progressive politics, which she learned about through CNN’s coverage of the Duke lacrosse scandal.

As a single mother, the assistance she receives for rent at McDougald Terrace has helped her put four children through nearby N.C. Central and a fifth at Durham Tech. Many of the tenants here are single moms and kids, whom Betye met and bonded with through her own children and at the bus stop.

“I love my community,” she says. “It’s like they said on Cheers: everybody knows my name.”

Much of what she likes about the neighborhood, known as the Mac, reflects on her experience with Hurricane Wilma.

The buildings are sturdy, she says, and the gas stove and heat work if the power goes out. There are wellness programs on-site and maintenance staff on call for unexpected issues. The place has given

her so much, she has no complaints about the condition, although issues are well documented.

In 2012, the DHA received a grant from a RAD predecessor, HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative, to plan a redevelopment of a swath of southeast central Durham, including McDougald Terrace.

The grant application identifies structural deficiencies, inadequate ventilation, leaks, mold, sagging floors, “constantly failing” water and sewer lines that “cannot be easily repaired without causing further damage,” and “exposure to previously encapsulated lead-based paint and asbestos floor tile.”

Scott says no capital improvements have been made at McDougald since that application, but the development (like all of DHA’s non-senior housing) is certified lead-free.

In work orders reviewed by the INDY, there was just one report of roaches at McDougald Terrace, although residents say the pests are ever-present.

“It’s so infested with roaches, you can hear them under the floor,” says one resident who asked not to be named. (Many residents whose apartments are in poor condition requested anonymity out of fear of retribution.)

According to work orders, maintenance staffers spent hours reigniting pilot lights for residents’ gas-fired stoves and heaters, which are exposed in each unit. Twenty-nine reports explicitly asked for pilot lights to be lit, with more reporting no heat, no hot water, or the smell of gas.

About a quarter of the work orders submitted dealt with clogged plumbing and leaks, including twelve reports of sewer lines backing up.

The city’s oldest and largest public housing development, McDougald Terrace was built in 1953, the African-American counterpart to the white public housing at Few Gardens. It sits in a sort of valley between N.C. Central and Durham Tech and is so big and devoid of trees that its footprint is easily identifiable on a map, forming an arrow that points up toward N.C. 147.

“It’s not normal. No benches, no open area, no flowers, no life,” says Ora Smith, who has lived there five years.

A

lthough fourteen years younger, Cornwallis Road is often mentioned along with McDougald Terrace when residents talk about what they see as the worst neighborhoods. With two hundred units, Cornwallis isn’t as big, and mature trees break up the rows of orange brick buildings.

Leatrice Davenport was hesitant to move there at first. She’d been living in a

“It’s so infested with roaches, you can hear them under the floor.” studio apartment at J.J. Henderson and was offered a bigger apartment at Cornwallis. But she heard there was crime and that the development would soon be demolished anyway, so she turned it down.

She reconsidered two years ago when a new unit that had been redone after a fire opened up. The only real issue she’s had is a leak under her kitchen sink. She can’t find the source, but the mildew smell is unmistakable.

“I thank God for what he brought me, because I never had something new,” she says.

The apartment is almost immaculate, and Davenport takes care to keep it that way. But as the former president of the Cornwallis resident council, she knows her neighbors’ apartments don’t all look the same.

“A lot of people’s apartments, the walls have holes, the floor is coming up, shaking,” she says.

The tiles at the top of one resident’s staircase are peeling up the perfect amount for toes to get hooked. A few residents say they don’t drink their tap water because it smells like sulfur. (Scott has asked for water-quality testing.) Others have cracks along their floors, walls, and ceilings.

“You can hear the house settling at night,” says one resident. “It sounds like someone’s making popcorn in the walls.”

Jennifer Hunt says residents are too busy with jobs and kids or too disenfranchised to insist on better conditions.

Hunt, a mother of five, and her family are often looking for ways to address repairs until maintenance can come.

They’ve filled a grapefruit-size hole in the wall of her daughter’s bedroom with plastic, but it doesn’t fully stop the cold air from coming inside. She’s figured out just how to finagle the hallway switch so the lights don’t flicker out. There are cracks in the walls of her living room and daughter’s room, and three of her kitchen cabinets are missing doors.

Hunt moved to Cornwallis about six years ago after leaving Hoover Road because of mold in her apartment.

Asked about the presence of mold at Hoover Road, Scott says testing and remediation have been done where residents have reported it, and that “there does not appear to be a development-wide issue.”

On September 20, Delissia Tatum, a Hoover Road resident, reported a mildew smell under her sink and in one of her bedrooms and water coming up between the tiles in her kitchen. According to DHA records, this was checked out and the mildew cleaned up two weeks later.

By December 6, the mildew smell was back, and water squished underfoot in both her kitchen and bedroom.

“The water in front of my stove stays wet,” she says. Tatum, who moved into this apartment in March, says she had to throw out dishes she kept under her sink and uses the adjacent bedroom only for storage because of the smell. It’s half-filled with toys and other items, kept behind a door she prefers to keep shut. She worries about the effect the moisture will have on her daughter, who suffered from allergies and sinus problems before they moved in.

Four work orders at Hoover Road describe ceilings falling in.

“The plaster was off. The insulation was on the floor. I could see the two-by-fours in the roof,” says Angela Marshall, whose bedroom ceiling fell in while she was sleeping a few years ago. At first, she thought something had happened outside; she often hears gunshots and fighting. But then she got out of bed and turned on the lights.

Different shades of beige and white show where the damage was patched over, but when it rains, water sometimes comes in from the ceiling, around her bedroom window and leaks into a bowl-shaped light fixture in a room down the hall.

“I know it’s not just my unit,” she says.

Marshall, a Rockingham native, moved into this apartment six years ago because she could afford it. Mainly because of the crime (her apartment has been shot into), she wants to move, but despite working two jobs as a certified nurse practitioner and at a mall, she hasn’t been able to save enough money to afford rising rents in Durham.

Meanwhile, rent is due at Hoover Road,

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despite her leaky ceiling.

“I want to do better,” she says. “I know I can do better, it just may take a while.”

D

HA officials believe they are primed to not only address the backlog of repairs at the agency’s properties but also to transform the housing landscape of the Bull City. The agency has new leadership, controls about fifty acres of valuable downtown real estate, and has the support of city officials, developers, and residents who want more affordable housing.

“It’s the perfect storm,” says Niemann, the longtime board chairman.

Still, there are concerns about the DHA’s redevelopment plans, both because of the agency’s past and the RAD program itself.

A 2004 audit by HUD found millions of dollars in questionable spending at the DHA, prompting HUD to recommend a federal takeover if the issues weren’t fixed.

A few years later, the DHA was designated as troubled, primarily because of issues with its Section 8 program. The agency has been upgraded to standard performer status, but just last year a HUD audit found that some private housing units that accepted the DHA’s Section 8 vouchers “did not meet minimum housing quality standards” and that the violations weren’t

14 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

caught by DHA inspectors.

The DHA has since hired a new Section 8 program manager (and a chief financial officer) and will be able to add to its staff under RAD. Scott also wants to explore new funding sources to aid redevelopment, like a trust fund to collect donations to build affordable housing.

“I think that with the support of the city, the housing authority has the capacity to do this,” says Schewel.

Although tenant protections—like the right to return to a property, the right to organize, and the right to a grievance process—are enshrined in RAD regulations, housing advocates say there is not sufficient oversight or transparency from HUD. HUD has evaluated how much money the RAD program has been able to bring in, but the agency isn’t expected to release a study of how it is affecting low-income residents until next year. In the meantime, the federal agency is advocating that the cap on the number of units allowed to convert to RAD be eliminated.

Advocates like Jessie Casella, a staff attorney with the National Housing Law Project, rely on records requests and a network of local attorneys to find out what’s happening at RAD conversions around the country and step in when residents’ rights

are being infringed upon.

“That’s been particularly challenging, to make sure that the RAD program lives up to the lofty goals it was created for,” she says.

The textbook case of RAD-gone-wrong happened in Hopewell, Virginia, where public housing residents alleged they were moved to units in poor condition, misled about their right to return to their old neighborhoods, and that families and people with disabilities were denied units when they tried to obtain them. In October, they settled a civil rights suit with HUD. Tom Davis, who oversees RAD at HUD, says the agency scrutinizes conversion plans before they are approved to identify any red flags, and has also rolled out postconversion reporting requirements.

“The implementation of these transactions is clearly the housing authority’s responsibility—to implement it according to the rules—but we are not just relying on them to do it on trust,” Davis says.

Housing authorities must inform resident councils of RAD plans, but Casella says RAD doesn’t require frequent enough meetings or allow for adequate access to the program’s plans. The DHA is holding regular meetings that cover RAD, but they are mostly attended by people already involved with resident councils.

Scott previously worked for the Baltimore Housing Authority, where RAD plans were met with a backlash from residents and advocates. In Durham, he’s trying to bring more transparency to the process. He plans to hold communitywide input sessions and hopes to have a local university study the redevelopment.

DHA officials are excited about the potential for RAD to raise residents’ quality of life. But there are a lot of moving pieces—securing low income-housing tax credits, negotiating development deals, and doing it all within set deadlines to avoid an entire project being put back on the wait list. RAD regulations could change, and Congress could cut funding for Section 8. Republican tax proposals could undermine low-income housing tax credits by eliminating the private equity bonds they rely on or lowering the corporate tax rate, which companies buy the credits to offset. And RAD is currently only authorized through September 2020.

The program has been extended three times so far, but any project without a financing plan in place by then could be in jeopardy.

“If any piece is missing,” Scott says, “it doesn’t work.” swillets@indyweek.com

indyfood

The Hunger Games

A CENTURY AND A HALF OF GOOD INTENTIONS AND POLITICAL DO-SI-DO LED TO SCHOOL LUNCH AS WE KNOW IT

BY DEBBIE MATTHEWS

A student picks out fruit and vegetables to go with her lunch at North Side Elementary School in Chapel Hill.

PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA

M

ary Spell worked as a baker in two different Durham middle schools in the nineties. At the time, Durham Public Schools had a mainly scratch-made philosophy in its cafeteria.

Spell would arrive at seven-thirty every morning and, with her baking partner, craft hot yeast rolls, pizza dough, cookies, and cobblers to feed the children.

Although there was a district-wide menu each week, the recipes were up to the individual schools, she tells me as we sit on her porch. She shows me a bundle of yellowing, handwritten recipes that she’s kept

from that time. The amounts of ingredients and servings, though not unexpected, are still jarring; her French bread recipe begins with seven and a half pounds of flour; doughnuts call for fourteen.

When Spell started baking for Lowe’s Grove Middle School, most food was made on-site and with fresh ingredients. But by the time she retired from Neal Middle School, the policy had changed: most foods came in premade, frozen packages ready to be reheated.

The disappointment that resulted from this change hastened her departure from

school lunchrooms.

Being in the food business has always been tricky for schools. It’s expensive. In the 2005–2006 school year (the last available statistics for a full year), the average cost to produce a school lunch was $2.91.

But the average full price for lunch for high schoolers is around $2.60, and the governmental reimbursement for a free lunch was only $2.50. There are binders full of regulations, with the index alone running to well over three thousand words. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, just one law, spans eighty-four pages.

As in most everything else, poor kids bear the brunt of the extreme politicization that surrounds education in general, and school meals specifically.

Although education was essential among the upper classes in the United States, free, compulsory education for all proved a slow process. In 1852, Massachusetts was the first state to mandate public schools, with Mississippi the fortyeighth and final state, in 1918. Similarly, school lunches were first implemented in large cities in the Northeast. The earliest major city to institute a lunch program was Boston, in 1894. The motives were twofold—to teach children nutrition, and to “Americanize” immigrant children with a strictly American menu.

In the more agrarian, smaller towns of the South, most children went home for lunch. But many areas simply lacked the funds for building kitchens and dining rooms in the cramped, often one-room schoolhouses.

Up until the Great Depression, the school lunch programs were small, voluntary, and led by teachers or mothers’ clubs. Due to the economic crisis, these programs were inundated with hungry children. Local governments sought support from the state, which then turned to federal assistance.

During World War II, men were being rejected from the military draft because of health problems brought on by poor childhood nutrition. This led President Harry Truman to sign the National School Lunch Act in 1946. The purpose was to set nationwide standards and partially fund meals for public school students.

Regardless of the law’s underlying motivation, by 1947, seven million children had been fed. Still, almost from the start, the National School Lunch Program became an economic and ethical hot potato. Politicians have long viewed the program as an unnecessary giveaway to the poor. In 1981, President Ronald Reagan promised to cut INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 15

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the budget and downsize the government.

To this end, one of his administration’s first acts was to cut 25 percent from the program, insisting there was little actual need but, instead, much waste and malfeasance. The battle still rages with Donald Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos, who is pushing to slash programs, and Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget, who defended cuts by arguing that there’s no evidence that feeding hungry kids raises test scores.

Until significant changes in the sixties, the program was less about feeding children and more of a financial windfall to the bottom lines of commercial farms and food-processing companies. Very few poor children received assistance to purchase the meals. After President Lyndon Johnson signed the Child Nutrition Act in 1966, funding was made available to feed poorer kids; still, almost no basic nutritional standards were mandated. The legislation also funded a USDA pilot program to test a comparable breakfast program.

Three years in, the breakfasts had still not reached the communities that needed them the most. In response, the Black Panther Party organized the Free Breakfast for School Children Program in 1969.

Funded by neighborhood businesses and charities, it originated in Oakland, California, and operated out of St. Augustine’s Church. By the end of the program’s first year, 20,000 children were being fed in nineteen U.S. cities. It also inspired the Young Lords Party, a Puerto Rican/Hispanic movement, to start its own program.

Calling the Black Panthers a hate group, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover declared the breakfasts were an attempt to brainwash “highly impressionable youths.” His stated mission was to destroy the good will toward the party that the breakfasts engendered among “uninformed whites and moderate blacks.” Because of him, the last of the programs ended by the mid-seventies.

Rising costs and funding cuts in the seventies led many districts to contract with private companies to run the programs. As a result, fast food became the only available option in many cafeterias. The nation was poised to enter the Reagan era of “ketchup as a vegetable.”

In 2004, the USDA urged schools to use the meals not only to fight malnutrition but also to target the obesity epidemic.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 was passed, mandating nutritional minimums and sodium, fat, and caloric maximums.

What effect has this governmental and

societal do-si-do had on current school lunches, and the children who eat them?

After one hundred and twenty five years of good intentions, innovations, duplicity, heartbreak, and occasional victories, it’s clear that outsourcing is a public school system’s best bet. Most area private schools don’t even offer meals for students and require them to bring lunch from home. Raleigh’s Chesterbrook Academy, for example, offers a catered lunch program where each day of the week places like Boston Market and Jersey Mike’s provide a lunch for $5.

These varied, complicated stressors combine for school systems to make contractors a viable choice. Chapel HillCarrboro City Schools partners with Chartwells Food Service. They serve three districts: Winston-Salem, Burke County, and CHCCS. Last year 1,247,495 meals were served to Chapel Hill-Carrboro students.

Waiting for me in the Northside Elementary School’s clean, bright cafeteria was Liz Cartano, Chartwells director of dining; Jordan Keyser, district chef (he’s culinary-school trained), and registered dietician Lynne Privatte. They were proud of what they had put together.

Very quickly I realize I need to jettison my preconceived notions. If it’s not scratch-made on-site, foods like pizza dough are made off-site and brought in to be finished. The only canned foods are kidney and black beans. A vegetarian meal is available each day. The vegetarian meal for today is hummus with pita points and raw veggies. The hummus is brought in but flavored with herbs and lemon in the cafeteria. There is the aforementioned pizza with fresh sauce and cheese (partskim) added in the cafeteria before baking.

The other entrée is teriyaki chicken, with “fried” brown rice and stir-fried veggies. The veggies were lightly cooked broccoli, cauliflower, and bok choy. Unlike the limp gray canned vegetables from my school days in the seventies, this is bright, colorful, and crunchy. Dessert is mainly fresh fruit; milk is low fat, and juice comes in small portions.

Activities are set up to promote healthy eating, like farmers markets during school hours that equip kids with “dollars” to make purchases. Then the culinary staff works with the students to cook that food.

It’s tricky to get everything right. But in defiance of all those monkey wrenches in their machinery, schools are still giving it a sincere effort every day. food@indyweek.com

nt school t them? enty five ovations, onal vicis a pubMost area meals for ng lunch terbrook a catered y of the and Jer5. stressto make apel Hillers with ey serve m, Burke 1,247,495 Hill-Carr-

food

No Such Thing As Free Lunch

A DURHAM CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN STILL NEEDS $50,000 TO PAY DOWN STUDENT LUNCH DEBT

BY VICTORIA BOULOUBASIS

side Elecafeteria rector of hef (he’s egistered ere proud

to jettif it’s not ke pizza ought in foods are rian meal For families who can’t afford the full rian meal price of a school lunch in Durham Public oints and Schools, cafeterias participate in the Free ought in or Reduced Lunch Program. on in the But at the end of the school year, an outentioned standing balance can still leave parents in se (part- a financial bind. By November, 636 of the e baking. 1,500 students in Durham who particichicken, pate in the reduced lunch program owed stir-fried $4,883. Parents owe forty cents per meal, y cooked which accumulates into sums they may oy. Unlike not be able to afford. from my Within a week, a community crowdis bright, funding campaign led by Durham resident s mainly Rebekah Miel raised enough money to ce comes cover that debt. So she decided to extend

it and try to raise $103,835, the November e healthy total amount owed by all students, whethduring er in the program or not. ith “dol- The Grammy-nominated Durhamthe culi- based band Sylvan Esso donated $10,000 dents to to the cause, bringing the total balance

down to $50,000 as of Monday. ht. But in A family’s income determines whether enches in kids qualify for a free or reduced lunch. giving it But James Keaten, director of Child Nutri-

tion Services in Durham County, says this week.com factor is precarious, and many families

may not qualify but still have the need.

“I want students to be able to focus on school without the lunch stigma,” says Keaten, who grew up in Maine and participated in a reduced lunch program throughout his adolescence. “Kids shouldn’t have to worry about paying for food.”

Out of this campaign, Miel is organizing a coalition of parents and teachers, to begin convening early next year to discuss the issue.

“I’d like this to be the sort of conversation about what it would mean to have free lunch in Durham,” says Miel, “recognizing that it’s a complicated issue that needs a lot of moving parts to happen.”

“It would be possible as a community to say that everyone in Durham gets a free lunch,” says Natalie Spring, head of the E.K. Powe Elementary School PTA. “It’s really cool that the Durham public is supporting the GoFundMe and paying down lunch debt. I wish we didn’t have to do this.”

Wake County Schools, on the other hand, has enlisted a policy where no student can go into arrears, according to CNS director Paula Delucca. That means all

students get a free meal regardless of if they have money to pay that day.

“If those meal charges do not get paid for later by the students, they become the debt of the child nutrition program,” she says. “By virtue of that, there is no accumulated lunch debt for the families.”

“We don’t classify our students by eligibility; we treat all of our students equitably,” she adds.

The alternative complimentary meal, though, while meeting nutritional standards, is not a hot meal, but a variety of fruit options. Keaten says Durham’s current policy allows for up to five free hot meals, no questions asked. This helps reduce the stigma around school lunches, giving students the best possible access to the same meal.

Instances of shaming at schools nationwide have led to students skipping out on eating anything, so their need isn’t exposed, according to teachers who have spoken to Miel since the campaign began.

On Thursday, the DPS school board will host a work session, where they’ll discuss a new meal charge policy, Keaten says. food@indyweek.com

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BY ALLISON HUSSEY Missy Thangs in the Fidelitorium control room, her home away from home PHOTO BY CAITLIN PENNA

I

t’s approaching 9:30 p.m. on a Sunday night. A snowy, wet weekend is drawing to a close; most folks at home are probably winding down into their end-of-day exercises. But for Missy Thangs, her work is just about to begin.

Her main task this evening is calibrating a Studer A800 MKIII, a thirty-year-old, twenty-four-track analog tape-recording machine. Her “office” is the control room at Fidelitorium Recordings, the renowned studio owned by Mitch Easter in Kernersville, about an hour and a half down Interstate 40 from her Raleigh home. She’ll use the machine the following day to record new music by the Asheville band Konvoi.

Thangs has been a figure in the Triangle’s music scene for several years, but for

much of that time, she’s participated in it as a musician in a list of acts that includes Birds of Avalon, Toddlers, Soft Company, No One Mind, and The Love Language. But for the past three years, she’s focused on honing a different set of artistic and technical skills—not as a performer but as a recording engineer.

“I was so jaded of playing in bands and the drama about being in a band, and I was just over it,” she says.

Thangs’s winding path to the Fidelitorium has stretched over nearly a decade and a half, beginning at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, where she earned a bachelor’s of science degree in recording arts. In 2004, she moved to Chapel Hill and began making pop-rock tunes

as Soft Company.

She recorded some of her own songs, but only in mostly informal, home-studio settings (it was also around that time that she adopted her “Missy Thangs” moniker, which is not her given name but a semipermanent nickname). Within a few years, she’d linked up with The Love Language, which, for a couple of years, seemed like it would be The Next Big Thing to come out of the Triangle.

That was when her audio engineering skills began to take a backseat, Thangs says—one of her bandmates, B.J. Burton, already had a strong reputation as a producer, and Thangs felt more comfortable stepping back from the board. When there are too many cooks in the kitchen, she says,

her inclination has always been to let others take the lead.

“I think it just all got away from me, and I forgot that I even studied it in school and that I knew these things. People were around that knew what they were doing, so I just kind of stopped acting like I really knew what was going on and didn’t really deal with it,” she says.

But in 2012, frustrated with the lifeenveloping instability that comes with being a hard-touring rock band, Thangs decided to leave The Love Language.

Another band she was involved in, Toddlers, fell apart. She was frustrated and exhausted.

“I was throwing in the towel, and meeting with friends just to be like, Hey, what else is going on?” Thangs says.

One of those friends was the Fidelitorium’s studio manager, Amanda Lindsey, who Thangs knew through the bands Celestogramme and Violet Vector and the Lovely Lovelies. Not long after their conversation, Thangs got an email from Easter himself, inviting her to work at the Fidelitorium. He thought she’d be a perfect fit.

“I just remember being like, Me?!”

Thangs recalls.

Thangs declined Easter’s offer at first, but he followed up with an even longer e-mail that ultimately convinced her to say yes.

“I’m very opinionated, and that can be such a pain in the ass for a lot of people, but for him, it’s maybe a good sign,” she says.

“When you take the reins of a project and you’ve got five people in the room, you need to have a strong opinion on how to move forward, especially on a tight timeline.”

Thangs came aboard at the studio in 2013, but her first official sessions as an engineer were with See Gulls in 2014, recording the band’s You Can’t See Me EP. It didn’t take long at all for her to feel comfortable in the esteemed studio.

“It was a lot of fun, and it just felt natural,” she says. “All of the years I kind of felt like I didn’t know what I was doing—and I felt like I’d been treated that way too—it was like all of a sudden, I was like, Oh, I can put this mic here!”

Recording in a hallowed environment

like the Fidelitorium is a nervewracking experience for some bands, who perhaps feel a little nervous about meeting the challenge of making a perfect-as-possible document of their talents. Thangs would know, because she lived through it for a spell when Toddlers used the studio to record their 2013 self-titled LP. “Recording here for three weeks helped me figure out how to work with my clients.

The artists I work with come in here, and I know what it’s like—the frustrations, or just being nervous being in here,” she says.

And so she knows how to set bands at ease to help them achieve their best work, a process that begins before the band even arrives in Kernersville. Her job isn’t just tweaking mics and running the soundboard, but making holistic considerations of what a band wants and how to make that happen.

“I’m fully immersed in the whole process, from listening to demos before we get in to how we get the sounds, what sounds we decide to get,” she says.

Thangs typically works with varying strains of rock bands— Las Rosas, Estrangers, Cold Cream, GHOSTT BLLONDE, Ex Hex, Gross Ghost, and Skemäta among them— and they’ve often pulled her in interesting directions. One project she worked on included recording a tap dance solo for one song, and for another band, she had them throwing triple-bagged trash from the studio to give one track a conclusive crash.

“The bolder the color, the bolder the stroke, the better,” she says about her approach. “The more I read and the more I learn and explore, the more I learn that there is absolutely no rule in the book. You can do the strangest thing, and it could still be a hit,” she says.

As Thangs continues to grow and thrive in her role as an engineer and a producer, she says it’s changed her whole approach to music. Even records she’s loved deeply for years, like Lou Reed’s Transformer, feel completely new again.

“I feel like a toddler when I listen to music now,” she says. “I can’t hear it in a way where I’m not analyzing it from a technical standpoint. I’m in that zone.” ahussey@indyweek.com

“The bolder the color, the bolder the stroke, the better.”

INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 19

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music

LYDIA LOVELESS

Friday, Dec. 15 & Saturday, Dec. 16 8:30 p.m., $15 Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro www.catscradle.com

Real Talk

AFTER A DIVORCE, A NEW RECORD, AND A MOVE TO MORRISVILLE, LYDIA LOVELESS FINDS A FRESH FOCUS

BY SPENCER GRIFFITH

Lydia Loveless PHOTO BY COWTOWN CHAD

I

f you try to call Lydia Loveless on her cell phone and she doesn’t pick up, you’ll get the following message: “Hello, you have reached firebrand cowpunk badass Lydia Loveless. I can’t come to the phone right now because I’m too busy saving country music…”

Loveless recorded it long enough ago to sometimes forget it still exists. While the rural Ohio-born artist burst onto the altcountry scene earlier this decade with tunes like “Back on the Bottle”—which, in true outlaw fashion, Loveless wrote and released before she was even of legal drinking age— her cheeky greeting ignores the fascinating growth of her music since the rowdy rockmeets-honky-tonk hybrids of her high22 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

octane, unfiltered 2010 debut.

Along with an odds-and-ends collection of previously released material, Loveless’s 2017 output consists of an EP of club-ready remixes of “Heaven”—her dreamy, Smithswith-synths original from last year’s Real— and a somber, stripped-down cover of Justin Bieber’s “Sorry” that served as the b-side to “Desire,” a leftover from the Real sessions.

“My number one song on Spotify is that Bieber cover,” Loveless laughs. “It’s amusing, but it must have done something to broaden my fan base.”

For longtime fans who have followed Loveless since the raucous twang of her early releases, the nineties pop influence on her more recent work may be a bit sur-

prising. But for the twenty-seven-year-old Loveless, those influences felt natural.

“That’s when all of the boy bands and pop singers were coming out, which was the biggest thing that made me even want to be a musician,” Loveless says. “I thought I was going to be like Britney Spears and dance around with choreography, but obviously that didn’t work out.”

Despite those ambitions, her novice guitar skills and limited budget helped the familiar sounds of country music win out when she first started writing songs. She says she gravitated toward old country records because they were what she could afford—it was easy to find Hank Williams records in dollar bins, she says. As a nov-

ice guitarist, she could teach herself how to play some of Williams’s slow, sad tunes.

While Loveless’s songwriting has remained brutally honest, her palette has broadened as she’s honed her guitar chops and become more comfortable with her band. Compared with recording 2011’s Indestructible Machine—her second album and first with most of her current bandmates— communicating her vision is far simpler.

“It’s much easier to get your own language within a band,” she says. “Just stupid stuff like saying ‘Do a Todd Rundgren bass line’ where a song can develop into something that isn’t just the first thing you grab onto because it’s easy.”

That ease shows on Real, where Loveless

escapes genre confines by adding electronic accents and pop polish to her refined sense of melody on arrangements that expand far beyond the rootsy implements of banjo, pedal steel, and fiddle. Loveless hopes that expanding her stylistic tool kit will help her continue to break away from being pegged to just one genre.

“Once you’ve been deemed a country artist, it’s really easy to be pigeonholed and it’s harder to make yourself accessible because [some people] won’t even take a listen,” she says, noting that it’s even tougher for a female singer to break out of that niche due to an undercurrent of sexism. “Almost every show I play, someone comes up and says, ‘I don’t like women singers, but you were really good’ and they think that’s a compliment.

It’s not like ‘I hate women’ but it’s this deeply buried thing where some men are kind of embarrassed. They feel like it’s emasculating to enjoy a woman’s art.”

For Loveless, an outdated, outgoing voicemail message isn’t the only part of a phone call that fails to reveal her current situation; she retains a central Ohio area code despite moving to Morrisville in early August. After undergoing a dark period in her personal life that included a divorce from her former bassist Ben Lamb (which Loveless addresses throughout Real), Loveless says she’s found peace and anonymity—along with increased access to touring bands and terrific food—since arriving in the Triangle after more than a decade in Columbus.

“I wouldn’t say I’m in the backwoods, but it’s definitely quieter,” she says. “Getting away from all the familiarity is nice, and I’m doing way better now just with some distance from some of the bullshit I was going through.”

A recent tour accompanied only by guitarist Todd May—her first such string of dates in eight years, she guesses—also helped give her some space while getting back to playing her songs at her own pace. She’ll wrap that run with a two-night stand at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room this weekend.

“I like acoustic performances because they can be more relaxed and funny, and it’s not the end of the world if you make a mistake, because it’s obviously supposed to be intimate and fun,” she says, adding that her varied sets will draw from a broad range of material. “I don’t have to worry about whether we’ve rehearsed this song in a while, but it’s more about what my comfort zone is.”

For her first “hometown” shows since moving to North Carolina, perhaps she’ll find more comfort in her new surroundings—and then finally update that voicemail greeting. music@indyweek.com

MUSIC BRIEF NAKED NAPS

Year of the Chump Self Aware Records HHH A seismic moment occurred in the late sixties when power trios rejected the two-guitar model made standard by the Beatles and eliminated one guitar.

Taking away the bass yields an even more primal concoction, yet, as bands like the White Stripes, Black Keys, and the Kills have proven, that blunt guitar-and-drums essence hasn’t lost its currency.

Naked Naps, the Raleigh duo of guitarist/vocalist Catie Yerkes and drummer John Meier, trades in that same alchemy. On last year’s Middle, the band evinced a ragged indie rock feel in songs that wore nineties influences on their sleeve while suggesting a weirdness and a worldview of their own. On the new Year of the Chump, the group doesn’t exactly abandon those aspects, but adds to the mix a turgid complexity that feels as influenced by prog rock as by the Pixies. Whereas tunes on Middle might veer off but find their way back to the next verse in relatively predictable fashion, these tracks often go in several unexpected places in their short run times, almost as if determined to repeat as few riffs as possible.

The record is urgent and a bit dissonant, but embellishments like the stately piano touches on “Frank Lloyd Wright Designed the Carport” add piquant counterpoint.

The songs push and pull rather than fall into comfortable cadences, with Yerkes’s urgent, unnerving vocals the focal point between thick-textured guitar-and-drum conversations.

The group’s continued penchant for drily humorous song titles, like the arresting opening track, “Toyota Prius the Silent Killer,” gives the impression of lightheartedness.

Even so, an uncompromising attack, a refusal to simply chug along conventionally, persists.

What are they saying with punning titles that don’t surface in the songs?

It’s hard to tell. But Naked Naps don’t want to make you dance, and they don’t want to please you with pop stuff; mostly they want you to pay attention.

And it’s hard not to. —David Klein

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indystage

MURIELLE ELIZÉON: BROWN HHHH Closed Monday, Dec. 4 Monkey Bottom Collaborative, Durham www.culturemill.org

Rise from the Ashes

FROM INTERGENERATIONAL TRAUMAS OF RACE AND GENDER, DANCE ARTIST MURIELLE ELIZÉON EXTRACTS UNIVERSAL CATHARSIS IN BROWN BY BRIAN HOWE

S

ix years ago, Murielle Elizéon reconnected with her father just in time to watch him die. For the first seventeen years of her life, she hadn’t known him at all. For twenty-five more, she’d seen him only a few times. In their final meeting, she traveled to his bedside and touched his hands. Then she traveled to his coffin, where he looked smaller.

No one gathered there knew what to say because they had no shared history with him, so they danced instead.

With taut emotion and brutal brevity, Elizéon relays all this in the monologue that begins Brown, the hour-long dance solo she recently premiered at Monkey Bottom Collaborative in Durham, adding, “It was a fucking bummer.”

That’s a fucking understatement. Produced by Saxapahaw arts nonprofit Culture Mill—which Elizéon codirects with her husband, Tommy Noonan—and presented by DIDA, Brown leaves you not depressed so much as electrified and enervated, scoured and purged, feeling sorely intimate with the performer, the other spectators, and yourself. When Elizéon batters herself against floors and walls, it is not easy to watch. But she cracks this vessel for pain and trauma with a single vignette of sublime beauty, a gesture that mightily bends an arc of loss back toward repletion. Émilien Elizéon peers out of the cover of the program in a snapshot, his dark suit a Rorschach blot against white architecture, his smile cryptic, his eyes hooded in shadow. His presence in the show is at once pervasive and elusive. His name is etched on a glass urn filled with what appear to be cremated remains. Beyond its literal representational purpose, the urn is also a symbol of the mortal meeting between father and daughter, an event that became a sort of container—a face and a form—for all the unmade memories that had previously swirled through Muri24 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

Murielle Elizéon in Brown

PHOTO BY BRIAN HOWE

elle Elizéon’s life like so much cloudy ash.

Brown is neither primarily narrative nor primarily confessional. We don’t come to know Émilien Elizéon through it—how could we, when his daughter barely did?— nor, really, do we come to know the artist.

“Do you have something to say?” she huskily whispers to the ashes. Of course, they don’t. But the suffering they incarnate contains many strata, including racism, sexism, cultural displacement, and domestic violence against women.

Survivors of any of these miseries are apt to encounter keen triggers and zones of identification barred to me, a white man. But even those of us who have been privileged to evade these particular woes don’t escape unscathed. Brown’s visceral portrait of trauma, abstracted from Elizéon’s backstory until it stands alone and darkly shines, is one-size-fits-all.

After the opening monologue, on designer Sarah Marguier’s sparse set—a shard of mirror and a square of black metal or plastic on the floor, a microphone on a stand, and the urn of off-white ashes—Elizéon embarks on something more like an exorcism than an elaboration of her premise. She performs most of the piece wearing only dark glasses, leather pants, and high heels. She beats the mic on her thigh, slowing it like a dying heartbeat. She has seizure-like episodes, strafing her bare skin on rough surfaces.

She carries herself by the hair. She jogs, staggers, loses her breath, collapses.

The presence of her Italian mother can be felt in the sparing use of songs like “Stabat Mater,” but more of the piece is scored with seemingly incongruous party music that Elizéon, who was born in France, associates with her French African father.

“Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag” does double duty: the title is a bit of gallows humor, while the biography of its creator, James

Brown, calls down the specter of domestic violence.

In the talkback, Elizéon took care to say that this thread was not about her husband, Noonan; their daughter plays a role in the show that should not be spoiled. But her cameo supplies the moment of sublimity hinted at above, reforging a broken intergenerational line. At one point, Elizéon becomes the absent father, wearing a man’s dress shirt and tying back her hair with a necktie. But here, without artifice, she is the present mother. If this scene were not in the piece, it would be intolerably painful; because it is, Brown heals as well as hurts.

Suffice it to say that the ashes eventually come out of the urn. Elizéon uses them to draw a square around the performance space, a ward of protection—but is it keeping spirits in or out? Her strained, too-bright smile and edge-of-breakdown jauntiness—a performance persona of hers I recognize from other works but now see in a new light—gives nothing away.

Brown is too intense—in its violence and self-immolation, its effort and futility—to say one “likes” it. Instead, it is daringly authentic and honest, dance as group regression therapy. (Not for nothing were the post-performance talkbacks moderated

by Val Hanson, director of the Restorative Justice Program at the Dispute Settlement Center in Carrboro.)

It’s also a reminder of the difference between entertainment and art. The former flatters our preferences; the latter renders them inert through harder, stronger emotions. In this piece, which you should keep an eye out for at inevitable festival stagings, it also works a strange alchemy whereby the unique personal history of a “brown” woman from France becomes a universal template of damage and resilience, vulnerability and defiance, and the love and loss we carry down the generations. bhowe@indyweek.com

We Can Relate

STAGE BRIEF

SHALEIGH DANCE WORKS ASKS HOW TO HEAL A NATION OF OTHERS IN I PROMISE

BY BYRON WOODS

ShaLeigh Dance Works PHOTO COURTESY OF SHALEIGH COMERFORD Spaced more than twenty feet apart, dancers Ay-Jaye Nelson and Majid Bastani lean forward and reach toward each other. Tension builds as they exchange longing looks before they run into a fierce embrace. But, rather than parting, their hug only intensifies in the moments that follow. As the dancers intimately grapple at center stage, each desperately stretches his arms behind and beyond his partner, toward two dancers who are now reaching out from opposite corners of the stage.

Finally, the two men force their way past each other and violently embrace the two new dancers running toward them.

The new pairs hug, intensify, and struggle as before. They keep reaching past their partners toward new ones, a procession of insatiable need repeating through a seemingly endless line of partners, always waiting, always grasping.

“It’s such a terrifying thing,” choreographer ShaLeigh Comerford says about her unsettling new evening-length work, I Promise. “Easily, it’s the hardest piece I’ve ever made.” That’s a considerable statement, coming from an award-winning local choreographer whose advanced techniques and intricate structures have been seen in Tokyo, in New York, and at the American Dance Festival and the North Carolina Dance Festival.

Durham Independent Dance Artists presents the premiere of I Promise this weekend at the Fruit in Durham. Its various sequences probe a series of uncertain encounters with the Other. Some delve into personal interactions between characters of different genders; others explore

SHALEIGH DANCE WORKS: I PROMISE

Friday, Dec. 15–Sunday, Dec. 17 8 p.m. Fri. & Sat./3 & 7 p.m. Sun., $20–$35 The Fruit, Durham www.shaleighdanceworks.com

cultural or national intersections. Because they approach and feel one another out before the stakes escalate in many scenes, we repeatedly find ourselves scrutinizing dancers’ clasped hands on first contact for signs of cooperation, conflict, or coercion.

“I basically feel this piece is a response to living through the past year rather than a statement about it,” Comerford says. As the tumult of the 2016 elections has “trickled down into our lives, polarization has become so pervasive.” The result, the choreographer says, has been turning us into “a nation of others.”

That would explain the mistrust we witness when dancer Megan Rindoks reaches across cultural lines to Jonh Blanco’s character, who at first accepts and then proudly repels her supplication. Comedy and drama ensue later, when different sexes, classes, cultures, and agendas come into contact on a packed commuter train.

After that, a haunting meditation on the cycle of abuse in domestic relationships spills into a pugilistic, visceral group beatdown set to Tom Waits.

“It’s a vulnerable place for me as a choreographer and for the dancers,” Comerford says. “We’ve had to give in to all the things that make us want to put up a block to protect ourselves.” But in a culture in which so many schisms have erupted, Comerford believes “the only gap that can be closed is the gap of flesh and bone.”

Hints of this are visible throughout I Promise. Comerford cites Camus’s The Rebel and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as key inspirations.

“Clearly, there’s a lot more inequality to address now,” she says, “but when you can’t find a solution, imagining what it looks like is a way of carrying a dream forward.” Comerford’s vivid imagination is clearly on display throughout this thought-provoking new work. bwoods@indyweek.com

THE GIFT OF THE MAGI HHH ½ Through Saturday, Dec. 23 Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh www.sonorousroad.com The first question any stage adaptation of The Gift of The Magi must answer is how to make it an evening-length work. It would scarcely take twenty minutes to enact the three brief scenes in O. Henry’s most famous short story, especially because two of them play out in the same modest flat on a New York side street, where young married couple Jim and Della Young are struggling. Jim lost his last job, and his pay has just been cut by a third at his current one.

Now it is Christmas, and the young couple has very little money for celebration.

In this clever, immersive adaptation, Sonorous Road artistic director Michelle Murray Wells and her cast answer the question by adding new details to a small world.

Then she bids intimate audiences— eighteen at the most for each show—to walk in the Youngs’ shoes.

After grabbing a drink in a Jazz Age speakeasy where Jim (a sterling Jonathan King) tends bar while Stella (A.C. Donohue) sings the blues, we follow him down a street of carolers and into his apartment.

Then we split up when the couple does, after an argument. One group follows Jim as he seeks the counsel of a friend, while the other stays with the pensive Della (Wells) and witnesses her subsequent decisions.

So far, so innovative. Director Zachary Roberts admirably conveys the tensions in this young marriage; at moments, the silences in the flat suggest the joyless urban canvases of Edward Hopper. But even with added subplots involving friends and children, one carol too many, and a dilatory hands-on arts-andcrafts sequence, the production feels a bit padded. Its greatest triumphs come in its humblest moments: the crumpled brown paper in which true treasures are wrapped, the plain vintage Christmas lights that bring the group such joy, and the shelter two young loves finally find in each other. Those are the real gifts of these Magi, and they’re not insubstantial ones. —Byron Woods

INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 25

12.13–12.20

The Connells COURTESY OF PROGRESSIVE GLOBAL AGENCY

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13– SATURDAY, DECEMBER 23

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

It’s a literary fact: in Charles Dickens’s novella, A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is haunted by at least six spirits, not three. And if you’ve only seen the popular dramatizations of the holiday classic, you’ve probably forgotten—or you never knew—that it includes scenes in a remote lighthouse and on a ship at sea. In case you’re wondering what else you’ve been missing from the original version, Ray Dooley can remind you. PlayMakers Repertory Company revives his compelling one-person version of the timeless tale this week, a full generation after it was last produced in 1998. Dooley acts out all of the characters in a way that underlines Dickens’s literary genius while accentuating the chilly, spectral elements of one of the most famous ghost stories of all time.

—Byron Woods UNC’S KENAN THEATRE, CHAPEL HILL Various times, $15–$58, www.playmakersrep.org 26 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15

BAND TOGETHER HOLIDAY BASH WITH THE CONNELLS

Now well into its second decade, Band Together has raised millions of dollars in support of organizations that foster social change, ranging from food banks to Special Olympics to the YMCA of the Triangle. Through concerts featuring major national acts as well as regional favorites, the group has become one of the largest of its kind in the Southeast. The Connells, who headline this year’s annual holiday bash, are proud offspring of Raleigh who named their breakthrough album, Boylan Heights.

Coming of age in the long shadow of R.E.M. in the early eighties, with a similar fondness for ringing guitar chords, the Connells struck a decidedly less mysterious, more clearly enunciated pose than “the only band that mutters.” Surrender Human has a similarly rich local pedigree, with Matt McMichaels (late of Mayflies USA), Robert Sledge of Ben Folds Five, and busy local drummer Tony Stiglitz. Plus Space Mullet. —David Klein LINCOLN THEATRE, RALEIGH 8 p.m., sold out, www.lincolntheatre.com

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16

DISHOOM DANCE PARTY

If holiday-related food and drink has already got you feeling a little sluggish, this Durham dance party will help set you back on track. For about four and a half years, DISHOOM has delivered some of the city’s best and most boisterous dance parties, drawing primarily from bhangra, Bollywood, and South Asian music. DJ Rang leads the charge from the decks, while Saleem Reshamwala, aka KidEthnic, serves up colorful Bollywood movie clips that he remixes on the fly. Operating under the alias G2, Jatinderjit “Jeetu” Singh adds another layer of rhythm with live dhol percussion. Show up early for a bhangra lesson from Aditi Sundaresan and Ameer Ghodke, and use the rest of the night to show off your new moves and party down. —Allison Hussey MOTORCO MUSIC HALL, DURHAM 10 p.m., $10–$12, www.motorcomusic.com

Two-Face and Batman throw pillows by Marvelous Katastrophe PHOTO COURTESY OF GEEKCRAFT EXPO

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16

GEEKCRAFT EXPO RDU HOLIDAY MARKET

By definition, pop culture is mass manufactured, which perhaps accounts for the profusion of unique unlicensed goods around it. Millions of people own identical Wonder Woman and Supergirl Blu-rays, but a number small enough to count on your hands own Stitch Culture’s Wonder Woman/Supergirl clutch. Stitch is one of about fifty local makers who will be selling wares at GeekCraft Expo’s RDU Holiday Market on Saturday, which offers many small-batch, hand-crafted, and often totes adorbs ways to take personal ownership of your geek obsession, whether it’s comic-book movies or video games, Star Trek or Doctor Who. In addition to a bankrupting variety of one-of-a-kind jewelry, home décor, apparel, toys, and other crafts, this holiday pop-up of the recurring expo also offers free, Star Wars-themed, hands-on crafting for children, courtesy of Marbles Kids Museum, and a performance by The League of Extraordinary Belly Dancers. —Brian Howe DURHAM ARMORY, DURHAM | 11 a.m.–6 p.m., free, www.geekcraftexpo.com

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14

indyweek.com

FOUND FOOTAGE FESTIVAL

In the eighties and nineties, camcorder enthusiasts and local television stations piled up countless hours of inept, low-budget, strangely beautiful video. As it became easier to digitize old VHS tapes and streaming video became a thing, moments that otherwise would have been lost to dust and decay have resurfaced, like the contents of a jammed toilet. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have taken it upon themselves to archive and curate the oddest and most wonderful of these staticky moments from flea markets, Goodwill, and other places where old tapes go to die. Their latest compilation includes such shorts as “The Law Enforcement Guide to Satanic Cults,” a rarely seen “Welcome Home from Desert Storm” parade with Roseanne Barr and Geraldo Rivera, and highlights from David Letterman’s VHS collection, donated upon Letterman’s retirement. The festival features live commentary, updates on many of the obscure figures featured in the footage, and a special presentation of hygiene films by Raleigh’s own Skip Elsheimer of the A/V Geeks. Prepare to relive old memories and discover things you never heard of but feel like you remember anyway, reminding you that ours is a world of infinite possibility, and also, weirdness. —Zack Smith

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KINGS, RALEIGH | 8:30 p.m., $12, www.kingsraleigh.com

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

ALLAN GURGANUS AT THE REGULATOR (P. 36) THE GIFT OF THE MAGI AT SONOROUS ROAD (P. 25) ANDREA LOVE AT HORSE & BUGGY PRESS (P. 36) LIFE IS A RICH PAGEANT AT SPECTRE ARTS (P. 32) LYDIA LOVELESS AT CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM (P. 22) GREAT RUSSIAN NUTCRACKER AT THE CAROLINA THEATRE (P. 35) REVEREND HORTON HEAT AT CAT’S CRADLE (P. 29) SHALEIGH DANCE WORKS AT THE FRUIT (P. 25) INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 27

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REVEREND HORTON HEAT 3/13/18 J BOOG W/JESSE ROYAL, ETANA ($20)

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(FREE / DONATIONS TO BENEFIT LOCAL CHARITIES ENCOURAGED)

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($25/ $28)

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SAY ANYTHING

IN DEFENSE ANNIVERSARY TOUR W/ AARON GILLESPIE, BACKWARDS DANCER ($22/$27; $40 FOR 2-NIGHT PASS) 1/26 ENTER SHIKARI W/MILK TEETH, SINGLE MOTHERS ($18/$20) 1/27/18 TENNIS W/ OVERCOATS 1/28/18 GAELIC STORM 1/30/18 DESTROYER W/ MEGA BOG ($20/$23 2/1/18 TYPHOON W/ BAD BAD HATS, SUNBATHE ($18/$20) 2/10/18 WHY? W/ OPEN MIKE EAGLE ($16/$18) 2/11/18 NOAH GUNDERSEN ($15/$17) 2/12/18 DECLAN MCKENNA ($15/$17) 2/13/18 SONS OF APOLLO ($25/$28) 2/17/18 THE BLACK LILLIES W/ SAM QUINN 2/20/18 PHILLIP PHILLIPS ($27.50/$30) 2/21/18 PEDRO THE LION W/ MARIE/LEPANTO ($20/$22) 2/22/18 LIGHTS W/CHASE ATLANTIC, DCF ($20/$23) 2/24/18 ANDREA GIBSON W/CHASTITY BROWN ($18/$21)

OUR LAST NIGHT

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CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM TWO 12/15 AND 12/16 SH OWS! LYDIA LOVELESS (SOLO) W/ CASEYMAGIC, TODD MAY ($15)

4/23/18 DURAND JONES & THE INDICATIONS ($13/$15) CAROLINA THEATRE (DUR)

4/6/18 GRIFFIN HOUSE

12/17 HURRICANE RELIEF BENEFIT 12/26 THE MERCH HOLIDAY DANCE PARTY 12/31FTMF'S 2018 NYE BASH: J GUNN, YOUNG BULL, ZOOCRÜ ($20/$25) 1/4/18 MELODIME W/ THE BREVET, THE ROMAN SPRING ($12/$14) 1/6/18 MILLIE MCGUIRE W/ DJANGO HASKINS (OF THE OLD CEREMONY) $6/$8 1/10/18 BEN GERBER (COMEDY) 1/12/18 HEAVEN / ORGANOS / FAULTS ($5/$8) 1/13/18 THE STRAY BIRDS

3/24/18 LUCIUS MOTORCO (DUR) 4/2/18 TWIN PEAKS W/ THE DISTRICTS ARTSCENTER (CARRBORO) 1/27/18 AN EVENING WITH LLOYD COLE ($20) 3/3/18 AN EVENING WITH COWBOY JUNKIES 3/21/18 NEIL HILBORN ($15/$20) 4/20/18 GREG BROWN ($28/$30) THE RITZ (RAL)

2/17/18 SNARKY PUPPY W/ SIRINTIP KINGS (RAL)

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2/17/18 PHOEBE BRIDGERS W/ SOCCER MOMMY ($10)

1/18/18 BE LOUD CAROLINA: MKR, PEOPLE OF EARTH, LOCAL FLORA

3/30/18 SORORITY NOISE W/ REMO DRIVE, JELANI SEI ($17/$20)

1/20/18 CHARLIE MARS

HAW RIVER BALLROOM

1/28/17 1ST ANNUAL CARRBORO DJANGO FEST FT. STEPHANE WREMBEL AND ONYX CLUB BOYS; & GYPSY JAZZ GUITAR WORKSHOP WITH STEPHANE WREMBEL

12/16 CHATHAM COUNTY LINE ELECTRIC HOLIDAY TOUR W/ JOHNNY IRION, ZEKE HUTCHINS, JAY BROWN

1/31/18 THE DANGEROUS SUMMER W/MICROWAVE, THE BAND CAMINO ($15) 2/2/18 BAT FANGS RECORD RELEASE PARTY W/ PIPE, SOLAR HALOS ($10) 2/7/18 WILLIE WATSON ($18/$20) 2/13/18 TINY MOVING PARTS W/ MOM JEANS, OSO OSO ($13/$15)

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3/1/18 QUINN XCII SOLD W/ CHELSEA CUTLER OUT 3/6/18 WALLOWS ($15)

28 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

W/ LYDIA, MCCAFFERTY ($18/$22)

HAYRIDE STARRING REVEREND HORTON HEAT, WITH THE BLASTERS, JUNIOR BROWN, BIG SANDY

2/16/18 NORA JANE STRUTHERS ($12/ $15)

2/1/18 THE DEVIL MAKES THREE 3/3/18 BRETT DENNEN ($22/$26; ON SALE 12/15) 3/23/18 GODSPEED YOU! BLACK EMPEROR ($27/$30) NORTH CHARLESTON PAC (CHARLESTON, SC) 2/25/18 STEVE MARTIN &

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W/ THE STEEP CANYON RANGERS AND JEFF BABKO

CATSCRADLE.COM ★ 919.967.9053 ★ 300 E. MAIN STREET ★ CARRBORO

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music 12.13– 12.20

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WED, DEC 13

SUNDAY, DECEMBER 17

HORTON’S HOLIDAY HAYRIDE: REVEREND HORTON HEAT, JUNIOR BROWN, THE BLASTERS, AND BIG SANDY

THE CAVE: Nest Egg Residency; 9 p.m. • KINGS: Vesperteen, Bonelang, Amy Guess; 7:30 p.m., $15–$18. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour; 8 p.m., $18. • MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM: Kansas; 8 p.m. • MOTORCO: Converge, Pile, Give; 8 p.m., $20–$25. • THE PINHOOK: Guitarzz!; 8:30 p.m., $8. • PNC ARENA: Trans-Siberian Orchestra; 7:30 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Starbird, Tweed; 9 p.m. • SLIM’S: McKinley Dixon, Zen Groove Funkestra; 9 p.m., $5.

THU, DEC 14 Local Band Local Beer: Nuclear Honey Raleigh’s Nuclear ROOTS ROCK Honey injects good-timey roots rock with an urgent, melodic drive and tangible joy. If guitarist and frontman Gary Henderson has a tendency to make every song a showcase for his instrumental prowess, he at least has the abundant chops to pull it off. Onward Soldiers and Lairs open. —EB [POUR HOUSE, $5/9 P.M.]

Dexter Romweber SINNERS This triple bill of THREE “sinner-songwriters” features three contrasting shades of noir. Crooning or howling, Dex Romweber is an area fixture who has amassed a rich catalog of raucous blues rock and plays a mean guitar. The Monologue Bombs, aka Scott Phillips, trades in moody chamber pop meditations, while Al Riggs’s songs are spare and quietly arresting.

—DK [KINGS, $6/8 P.M.]

Thirsty Curses Thirsty Curses GLAM PUNK bring an energetic, vaguely unhinged charm to their well-crafted glam punk. Tunes like the piano-driven “Neon Sign” and the sinister boogie “Holy

CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Bracy (EB), Timothy Bracy (TB), Grant Britt (GB), Spencer Griffith (SG), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Noah Rawlings (NR), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS)

Reverend Horton Heat PHOTO BY GENE AMBO

Moley” suggest a bizarroworld in which early-seventies Elton John was kidnapped and forced to join the Meat Puppets. Betting for Benson and Smoke From All the Friction open. —TB [DEEP SOUTH, $5/8:30 P.M.]

Iamdynamite This is quite a bill WIDE VARIETY for a Thursday night. Michigan’s Iamdynamite jack the two-piece drums/guitar combo and churn out jittery dancepunk.

On the softer end, Durham’s Tyny specializes in delicate bedroom electronica, and Winston-Salem prog purveyors Foxture dole out

dreamy ambient piano rock in the spirit of Codeseven and Division Day. With Monarc. —DS [THE PINHOOK, $7/9 P.M.] ALSO ON THURSDAY THE CAVE: Canine Heart Sounds Residency; 9 p.m., $5–$10. • RUBY DELUXE: Disco Deluxe Disco Ball; 10 p.m., free. • THE STATION: Andrew Marlin Residency featuring Tommy Edwards; 8:30 p.m., $8–$10.

FRI, DEC 15 Big Bertha There’s no actual FUNKATEERS Bertha in this all-dude Fayetteville band.

Be careful what you say about Jim Heath’s music. As the Reverend Horton Heat, Heath has been releasing red-hot rockabilly for over three decades. But Heath’s Heat signature gets smothered with a lot of prefixes he doesn’t care for. Even though he recorded a tune called “Psychobilly Freakout” (on Smoke ‘Em If You Got ’Em in 1990,) he insists that psycho- is not an acceptable prefix for his -billy, nor is shocka- or punka-. Rockabilly is his go-to genre, his first love and musical mainstay throughout the years.

Heath will be the first to tell you he’s not a purist, as he happily integrates other styles, including country, jazz, and punk into his sound. But his bedrock is the sound Elvis started out with. Heath is a big early-Elvis fan, listing Presley guitarists Scotty Moore and James Burton as favorites, as well as Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps’ guitarist Cliff Gallup. He’s also a big fan of the Sun Records sound that Elvis, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and Jerry Lee Lewis made famous in the fifties.

But rather than doing covers of songs or styles, Heat would rather write his own tunes.

He might adapt a technique from one of his favorite string pullers, like Gallup’s use of echo and whammy bar, but he has his own style, utilizing a technique he calls the “Nashville Claw,” wherein he fingerpicks the guitar’s

And despite winning the Triangle Blues Society’s talent showcase, the band has always been more about jazzy funk than blues. Bassist Puncho Forrest brings slap-happy funk, guitarist Robbie Reid contributes fast-paced, jazzy rock licks, and trumpeter Willie Bradly delivers smooth jazz to the mix. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, FREE/9 P.M.]

Frank Hurricane Nightlight’s WEIRD PARTY annual holiday party collects quite a few respectable old faces for this a respectable throwdown.

Self styled “psychedelic

higher notes while creating an alternating bass part with an actual pick.

Heath’s playing is loud, fast, and raucous, yet he’s a meticulous guitarist comfortable in a variety of styles. He’s also got a wicked sense of humor, as he demonstrated on 1993’s Full Custom Gospel Sounds of Reverend Horton Heat. Bereft of gospel, that record was loaded with goofy rockabilly numbers like “Big Little Baby,” which starts with a belch and part of the drummer’s kit falling off before the band tears through the tune like a pack of speed-crazed dare-demons. In the video for “Wiggle Stick,” Heat, with a large snake draped around his neck, satirizes snake-handling worshippers by praising his wiggle stick, whammy bar, and vibrator bar as instruments of healing.

Heath’s most recent record, 2014’s Rev, is fast and furious. “Zombie Dumb” sounds like a Los Straitjackets surf offering, “Schizoid” comes off like an unreleased Ramones track. Elsewhere, “My Hat” is classic rockabilly, something Elvis might have played proudly in the fifties.

Heath might not always keep his -billy dead center in the ring of fire, but as long as he has a guitar in his hands, the Heat will always be on. —Grant Britt CAT’S CRADLE, CARRBORO 7:30 p.m., $25–$28, www.catscradle.com

gangsta folk” troubadour Frank Hurricane heads up things with his compelling bizarro worldview and folk tunes, plus former Triangle noise fixture Yohimbe comes back for a spell in trio form.

Not to mention double drum duo Speedstick and Foot Mask, a improvisational collaboration between Housefire and Secret Boyfriend. House maven Sponge Bath rounds out this stacked lineup. —DS [NIGHTLIGHT, $7–$10/9:30 P.M.]

menacing metal broods and bewitches, filled with a foreboding feminist fury.

Hammer No More The Fingers makes a rare return to the stage; the sorely missed Durham trio’s angular riffs and shout-along hooks revive nineties indie rock and renew it with quirky, inventive arrangements.

Vassal and PROMM round out the bill with more heaviness. —SG [THE PINHOOK, $5/8:30 P.M.]

GOWN

Heartbroken: A Tom Petty Tribute

Led by a surprisHEAVY HOLIDAY ingly sinister triple cello attack, GOWN’s

LOVE TOM

In a rare show of unity in early

INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 29

October, people of all stripes in the United States and around the world mourned the death of Tom Petty. This show pays musical tribute to Petty while aiding victims of the October 1 concert shooting in Las Vegas.

Jefferson Hart, a true Petty acolyte, leads the proceedings with his band the Ghosts of the North State, along with thirty others, including members of Mount Moriah, Lost in the Trees, and Loamlands. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE, $10/8 P.M.]

N.C. Symphony: Holiday Pops with the Calloway Sisters I heard a story on GOOD CHEER the radio the other day about a band forever stuck playing its one Christmas hit over and over again for decades. They’ve changed around the nature of their shows to foreground this song, limiting their tours to December. It sounds like a bleak loop. Holiday pops concerts seem like a similar exercise, dressing up the same handful of tunes in sleigh bells and tinsel every year without fail. —DR [MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, $18–$82/3 & 8 P.M.]

The Number Twelve Looks Like You Do you like tons of DIRTY DOZEN screaming and shredding guitars? If so, New Jersey’s The Number Twelve Looks Like You might be for, well, you. This show is one of a dozen on the band’s twelfth-anniversary tour to commemorate its record

Nuclear. Sad. Nuclear. —KH [LOCAL 506, $15–$17/6 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Lydia Loveless (Solo), Caseymagic and Todd May; 8:30 p.m., $15. • DEEP SOUTH: Samson; 10 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Band Together Holiday Bash: The Connells, Surrender Human, Space Mullet; 8 p.m. • THE MAYWOOD: Era Gone, Through All This Time, Black River Township, The Cult Classics; 8:30 p.m., $8. • NC MUSEUM OF HISTORY: In a Holiday Mood Big Band Event; 7 p.m., $10–$20. • POUR HOUSE: Funk You, Litz; 9 p.m., $8–$10. • REBUS WORKS: Jaclyn Bowie and Lara Americo; 7 p.m.

• RUBY DELUXE: DJ DNLTMS; 10 p.m. • SLIM’S: Drug Yacht, The Kneads; 9 p.m., $5.

SAT, DEC 16 Afro//Strings: VSPRTN, DJ Violisto, and DJ Rem.e

powerful sense of showmanship to bear on all your favorite holiday tunes. He and his band should sway and groove, recasting all these songs in a warm, fire-lit glow.

—DR [BEYÙ CAFFÈ, $25/7 AND 9 P.M.]

Cruzer CRUNCH Led by the BUNCH cinematically inspired Tom Cruzer and Penelope Cruzer, the Richmond, Virginia, trio Cruzer celebrates the primitive glories of fuzzy guitars, shouted vocals, and limited technique. Zaat is a noisy electronic outfit from Greensboro, while Whaya’s plays a gripping, tuneful take on garage rock with dark gospel touches. —DK [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Hal Engler Quartet

A d.j. set with live LIVE STRINGS violin might sound like a strange concept, but leave it to Durham’s VSPRTN and DJ Violisto to dream up Afro//Strings, a fresh take on the typical DJ affair. According to VSPRTN, Afrobeat, Nigerian disco, and soul music are all on deck for this unique setup, so come out ready to dance. —DS [THE PINHOOK, $7/10 P.M.]

Sunday afternoons FRET MASTER are made for easygoing jazz, and fresh beer just makes things better. Hal Engler is an impeccable guitar player and a fixture at Steel String. With sympathetic accompaniment, his renditions of works from the Great American Songbook, gems by Django Reinhardt, and classic blues tunes go down as easy a crisp seasonal brew. —DK [STEEL STRING BREWERY, FREE/5 P.M.]

Marcus Anderson

Cool John Ferguson

SMOOTH Saxophonist XMAS Marcus Anderson is the second New Power Generation member to play in Durham this month, bringing his silky-smooth tone and

STRING Cool John STAR Ferguson has his guitar on backwards because that’s the way he learned it. It hasn’t cramped his style any, which ranges from Hendrix licks to swampy bayou blues

and gospel throwdowns.

Ferguson served as director of creative development for Tim and Denise Duffy’s Music Maker foundation for many years, helping artists develop their material for live performance. Ferguson is a gifted improviser, often traveling to a musical galaxy unreachable by most mortals.

—GB [THE BULLPEN, FREE/ 8:30 P.M.]

Dylan Earl CLASSIC More neo-tradiTWANG tionalist than modern outlaw, the country fashions of Arkansas crooner Dylan Earl and His Reasons Why are marked by sighing, melancholic melodies paired with peals of pedal steel.

Earl’s ace band rarely gets rowdier than a mid-tempo toe-tapper, ceding the spotlight to his lonesome baritone and rueful lyricism.

—SG [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.]

Craig Owens, Shane Crump, Zach Dawson With the anEMO ELVES nouncement that next year’s Vans Warped Tour will be the last, you can bet we’ll start to see more strength-in-numbers 2000s emo-night-style lineups like this one. Craig Owens, the troubled Chiodos frontman, heads up this lineup, which includes other post-hardcore stalwarts like Alesana’s Shane Crump and Akissforjersey’s Zach Dawson.

Depending on how many Warped Tours of duty you’ve logged, you can probably guess whether this is for you.

—DS [LOCAL 506, $12–$15/10 P.M.]

Mel Melton & the Wicked Mojos

ALSO ON SATURDAY

Gastonia’s Mel Melton went down to Louisiana in 1969 to get his culinary and harmonica mojos working, playing with both Clifton Chenier and his son, C.J. Chenier, as well as co-writing “Congo Square” with Sonny Landreth.

Melton’s own band, the Wicked Mojos, cranks out swampy bayou rhythms, back- and front-porch blues, and red-hot zydeco. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, $10/8 P.M.]

RED HOT

Ozzmosis Few rock careers CRAZY TRAIN have proven as durable and influential as that of Ozzy Osbourne, and the Raleigh tribute act Ozzmosis does an estimable job of paying tribute to the master, from Sabbath to solo.

Openers A Journey to Kansas render the hits of their namesake. —TB [DEEP SOUTH, $5/9 P.M.]

Yarn ROOTSY Tuneful and THREADS tasteful to an overly agreeable fault, Brooklyn roots rockers Yarn specializes in ingratiatingly sentimental odes to various lost loves and geographic regions that are so non-specific that they fraudulently scan as universal. Luckily, they are self-deprecating and legitimately funny, which counts for a lot. Dune Dogs open. —TB [LINCOLN THEATRE, $12/8 P.M.]

THE ARTSCENTER: 2nd Annual Holiday Circle Show; 8 p.m., $25. • HAW RIVER BALLROOM: Chatham County Line Electric Holiday Tour; 8 p.m., $22. • KINGS: Balsa Gliders, Leisure McCorkle, The Geb; 8 p.m., $20. • THE MAYWOOD: DRIVER’s 10th Annual Xmas Party; 9 p.m., $10. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: N.C. Symphony: Christmas with the Calloway Sisters; 3 & 8 p.m. • MOTORCO: Dishoom; 10 p.m., $10–$12. • NC MUSEUM OF HISTORY: In a Holiday Mood Big Band Event; 2 & 7 p.m., $10–$20.

• POUR HOUSE: Better Off Dead: Grateful Dead Tribute; 9 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Bitchcraft; 11 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Kate McGarry, Keith Ganz; 8 p.m., $15–$25. • THE STATION: Jazz Saturday: James Gilmore Trio; 2 p.m., free.

SUN, DEC 17 Vintage Pistol Versatile and GUN SHOW proficient without being needlessly showy, Fayetteville jam merchants Vintage Pistol kick up an admirably furious racket with a mélange of psych and blues rock, a sound pitched someplace between the bayou funk of The Meters and the winning lunacy of Barrett-era Pink Floyd. —TB [POUR HOUSE, $5/8 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Marcus Anderson’s Annual Christmas Concert; 7 & 9 p.m., $25. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: T.A. James Road to Memphis + James Pace & Preslar; 5-7 p.m. • CAT’S CRADLE: Horton’s Holiday Hayride: Reverend Horton’s Heat, Junior Brown, The Blasers and Big Sandy; 7:30 p.m., $25–$28. • THE CAVE: 720, Retro Candy, Deaf Dogs; 9 p.m., $5. • DEEP

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WE 12/13 TH 12/14 FR 12/15

SA 12/16 SU 12/17 TU 12/19

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156 Ramseur St. Durham, NC

8PM $10 5-7PM 7:30PM

TeasersMensClub 30 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

@TeasersDurham

An Adult Nightclub Open 7 Days/week • Hours 7pm - 2am

SOUTH: Live & Loud Weekly; 9 p.m., $3. • NC MUSEUM OF HISTORY: In a Holiday Mood Big Band Event; 2 p.m., $10–$20.

• NEPTUNES PARLOUR: The Hot at Nights Residency ft.

Matt McCaughan; 9 p.m. • THE PINHOOK: Russell Lacy School of Music: Alley 17; 4 p.m.

MON, DEC 18 Claire Vandiver The young FOLK & POP Florida folkie Claire Vandiver boasts a big voice, a winning personality, and an ear for tuneful material both borrowed and original. As she continues to deepen her influences and refine her craft—a little more Joni Mitchell, a little less Colbie Caillat would help— her horizons are endless.

—EB [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.] ALSO ON MONDAY LINCOLN THEATRE: Asheville Holiday Hang: Town Mountain, Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters; 8 p.m., $12.

• NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Polyorchard Residency; 9 p.m., $5.

• RUBY DELUXE: Experimental Tuesday Showcase; 11 p.m., $5. DJ Lord Redbyrd; 10 p.m.

TUE, DEC 19 IRREGARDLESS: Elliott Humphries; 6:30 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: The Vegabonds, Pierce Edens; 9 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: Experimental Tuesday Showcase; 11 p.m., $5.

WED, DEC 20 Morning Bells Band THROW Morning Bells BACK Band claims a variety of influences, including pop, goth, and industrial music, but listening to them only indicates easy-listening rock with maybe a hint of Blues Traveler, minus the harmonica. Dana Kletter and Regina Hexaphone open. —KH [POUR HOUSE, $5–$7/8:30 P.M.]

Saving Space Showcase: North Elementary The remarkably successful Saving Space Showcase has promoted benefit events for the past year, featuring acts whose members are, nonbinary, female, of color, and queer. Its goal is increasing diversity and inclusivity in the Triangle scene, while raising money for nonprofits in the process.

This week’s event—which is the series’ final installment— features the ingratiating fuzz-pop of North Elementary, the ragged-but-right soul-funk of Thick Modine, and the forceful power-chord rock of Reese McHenry & the Fox. (Disclosure: Sarah Schmader, who runs Saving Space, is a senior account executive at the INDY.) —EB [THE PINHOOK, $7/8 P.M.]

DO GOOD

Sidecar Social Club Sidecar Social SPEAK EASY Club’s takes on vintage jazz, R&B, and country conjure the Prohibition era, though tonight they’ll focus that warm verve on festive fare.

Joined by an expanded cast of locals—including The Small Ponds’ Caitlin Cary and Matt Douglas, Pinto’s Caroline Mamoulides and Steve Howell, Oak City 5’s Katie Stephens and Dave Wright, and Keaton Lusk— the Raleigh quintet will play short seasonal sets.

Donations at the door—including nonperishable food items—benefit Helping Hand Mission. —SG [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, DONATIONS/8:30 P.M.]

GUITAR LESSONS Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced - all ages

GURU GUITARS 5221 Hillsborough St, Raleigh, NC 27606 (919) 833-6607 www.guruguitarshop.com

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DAR WILLIAMS TRANSACTORS IMPROV: HOLIDAY HOMECOMING 2ND ANNUAL HOLIDAY CIRCLE SHOW POPUP CHORUS HOLIDAY PARTY (JOHN LENNON “IMAGINE” & MARIAH CAREY “ALL I WANT FOR CHRISTMAS IS YOU”)

DIRTY DOZEN BRASS BAND NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY JASON MARSALIS AND THE 21ST CENTURY TRAD BAND TRANSACTORS IMPROV: FOR FAMILIES! NO SHAME THEATRE - CARRBORO IRA KNIGHT PRESENTS

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ALSO ON WEDNESDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: 9th Annual Newtonanny; 7 p.m. • THE CAVE: Nest Egg Residency; 9 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: Goth Night; 10 p.m., free.

• THE HAYMAKER: Rookie of the Year & Jeremy Menard; 7 p.m., free.

RECYCLE THIS PAPER INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 31

art

12.13 – 12.20

OPENING SPECIAL The Woman Who EVENT Made Snow: Photography by Anna Exum Snow. Dec 15-Mar 31.

Reception: Fri, Dec 15, 6-8:30 p.m. Durham History Hub. museumofdurhamhistory.org.

The Analog Museum: Collection of cameras and projectors. Dec 16-17. Durham Cinematheque, Durham.

SPECIAL Art of Paper: Mary EVENT Ann Anderson, Pauline Galiana, Shiho K. Rice, Terry Schupbach-Gordon. Dec 15-Jan 12. Reception: Fri, Dec 15, 5 p.m. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Connect & Create with Sarah Clover: Jewelry making. $10$15. Sat, Dec 16, 10 a.m.-noon.

Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Lunchtime Gallery Tour: Fine Contemporary Craft: Annah Lee. Thu, Dec 14, 12-1 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

SPECIAL Painted Medicine: A EVENT Ceremony of Color: Ashley Spero. Dec 15-Apr 12.

Reception: Fri, Dec 15, 5 p.m. at the Durham Arts Council.

Durham Convention Center. durhamconventioncenter.com.

SPECIAL Richer Than Gold: EVENT Stephen Hayes. Dec 15-Jan 3. Reception: Fri, Dec 15, 6-9 p.m. Durham Art Guild, Durham. durhamartguild.org.

ONGOING

And Then the Sun Swallowed Me: Black tape and video installation by Heather Gordon.

Thru Feb 4. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh.org.

Annual Community Art Exhibit: Thru Dec 22. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

Annual Holiday Show: Artwork and jewelry. Thru Dec 29.

Gallery C, Raleigh. galleryc.net.

Annual Members Exhibition: The Fine Arts League of Cary.

Thru Dec 30. Page-Walker Arts & History Center, Cary. www. friendsofpagewalker.org.

The Boomer List: Photography

by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders.

Thru Dec 31. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Character Space: Text-based art by Scott Hazard and Stephanie Strange. Thru Jan 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

The Disaster Paintings: Donald Sultan. Thru Dec 31. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org.

LAST Don’t Quit: The CHANCE Nello Teer Sr. Story: History of the Teer family in Durham. Thru Dec 15. Durham History Hub, Durham. www. museumofdurhamhistory.org.

Fine Contemporary Craft Exhibition: Juried by Roger Manley. Thru Jan 13. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Drawn Together: Mixed media drawings and ceramics by Kiki Farish, Jean LeCluyse, Aggie Zed. Thru Dec 22. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www. frankisart.com.

Tom Dunne: Paintings.

Thru Dec 24. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

Envision Saint Agnes Hospital: Community and student artists.

Thru Jan 5. Miriam Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www. raleighnc.gov/arts.

Exterminati Sunt Mechanica: John Elliott. Thru Jan 28. NC Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. naturalsciences.org.

A Field, A World: Charlotte native John Beerman spent three decades living and painting in the Hudson Valley.

Six years ago, he returned to his native North Carolina,

bringing with him a delicate way of dealing with light.

Beerman’s paintings, while indebted to the light-obsessed Hudson Valley painters of the nineteenth century, are less grandiose visions. His eye directs itself toward nature and landscapes, but he often frames only fragments of them, fixating upon uncommon angles of perception.

Segments of tree trunks are foregrounded, the earth in which they are rooted and their leaves overhead unseen.

This photograph-like framing, along with a gentle way of abstracting away shadow, lends his work stillness and softness. Thru Jan 20.

Craven Allen Gallery, Durham. cravenallengallery.com. —Noah Rawlings

Flash of Light, Fog of War: Japanese military prints 18941905. Thru Jan 7. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www. ackland.org.

LAST Footnotes CHANCE (Revisions): Archival materials related to the Saunders Hall/Carolina Hall controversy. Thru Dec 14. UNC Campus: Hanes Art Center, Chapel Hill. art.unc.edu.

Freeze!: Installation by Mary Carter Taub. Thru Jan 5. Miriam Preston Block Gallery, Raleigh. www.raleighnc.gov/arts.

Gutter Box: Translatio Imperii North Korea, 1950: Painting by Lien Truong. Thru Jan 4. Lump, Raleigh. www.teamlump.org.

SPECIAL Holiday Salon & EVENT Craft Exhibition: Pottery, glass, jewelry, photography, painting, fibers, books and printmaking by twenty-five artists. Thru Dec

submit! Got something for our calendar? EITHER

email calendar@indyweek.com (include the date, time, street address, contact info, cost, and a short description) OR enter it yourself at posting.indyweek. com/indyweek/Events/AddEvent.

DEADLINE: Wednesday 5 p.m. for the following Wednesday’s issue. Thanks!

32 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR WWW.INDYWEEK.COM

Steve Oliva and Christopher Williams PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTISTS

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 15

LIFE IS A RICH PAGEANT If you’ve been to a rock show in the Triangle, then chances are good that you’ve seen the work of artists Steve Oliva and Christopher Williams.

(Disclosure: Oliva and Williams work in the INDY’s production department.)

They both regularly make flyers and posters for local and touring acts performing at Triangle-area clubs, and they both have been featured at Poster City at Hopscotch. But this one-nightonly showcase of new prints from Oliva and Williams, who run Kitchen

Island Show Print and Plastic Flame Press, respectively, doesn’t trade in rock bands. Instead, these are original art pieces that deal with the myriad absurdities of existence. Some are fun and silly, some are angry or sad, some are big and complicated, some are small and simple. All will be distinguished by the artists’ sharp, graphical use of striking colors and bold designs.

—Patrick Wall

SPECTRE ARTS, DURHAM 6–9 p.m., free, www.spectrearts.org

30. Reception: Thu, Dec 14, 5-8 p.m. Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Durham. www. horseandbuggypress.com.

Imprinted: When she lived in Japan, the Durhambased artist Ely Urbanski lacked access to a studio, so she adapted to meet her circumstances instead of fighting them. She turned from human models to pieces of their clothing, devising her own printmaking method of soaking the clothes in ink or bleach and then pressing them onto fabric with her body weight. Obliquely but poignantly, the prints hint at the stories their former owners relate in accompanying videos; when Urbanski deconstructs the clothes rather than printing them whole, they also capture something of memory’s degradation. And they are weirdly, simply beautiful. Not only can you see some of the work in Urbanski’s exhibit at Duke’s Bryan Center, but you can also contribute to it.

Bring a piece of clothing you can stand to part with to the gallery between three and five p.m. on Dec. 13, Dec. 15, and

Jan. 5, or between noon and two p.m. on Dec. 19 and 21, to tell its story to the camera and indelibly commit its form to Urbanski’s monoprints. Thru Jan 5. Duke Campus: Louise Jones Brown Gallery, Durham. duke.edu. —Brian Howe A Kiss of the Earth: Apt for a work about a season of fecundity, the epochal modernist ballet The Rite of Spring just keeps on giving, more than a century after its legendary premiere. It’s the inspiration for this experiment

by UNC-Chapel Hill associate art professor Sabine Gruffat, whose interactive three-channel video projection remixes the story of a pagan tribe’s maiden sacrifice: real-time weather data from Paris affects the weather in the animation, and viewers can text to a number on the wall to further alter the proceedings.

Thru Jan 28. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh.ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe Landscapes and Dreamscapes: Melanie See. Thru Dec 22. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. artscenterlive.org.

Louis C. Tiffany: Art and Innovation from the Wester Collection: Stained glass windows, vases, lamps.

Thru Mar 4. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

bullcityartandframec ompany.com.

Low Country Life: Paintings

by Irene Tison. Thru Jan 4. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www. historichillsborough.org.

David Shingler & Jimmy Craig Womble: You don’t have to go to the countryside or the museum to look at landscapes—you live in one, even if it doesn’t match the bucolic associations of the term.

Oil painters David Shingler and Jimmy Craig Womble remind us that there is more to landscapes than rolling meadows and hazy mountains. On your way to the gallery, you might pass through views presented in Shingler’s energetic impressions of downtown Raleigh, while Womble’s softer, dreamier hues extend the exhibit’s purview to include Outer Banks docks and Blue Ridge waterfalls. Expect the show to color your perspective for the rest of the evening— after seeing art that looks like the city, the city should look more like art. Thru Dec 23.

Adam Cave Fine Art, Raleigh. adamcavefineart.com.

—Brian Howe

Mike’s Attic: Partnership with Mike’s Art Truck. Various selftaught artists. Thru Feb 28.

Durham Technical Community College (Orange County Campus), Hillsborough. www. durhamtech.edu.

More than One Story | Mas de una historia: Photography.

Thru Feb 1. UNC Campus: Davis Library, Chapel Hill. www.lib.unc.edu/davis.

New Works: Kenia Brea. Thru Dec 30. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Pop Realism: Paintings by Robert Box. Thru Dec 31.

Gallery C, Raleigh. www. galleryc.net.

Barbara Rhode: Watercolors.

Thru Dec 31. Bull City Art & Frame Co, Durham. www.

The Shape of Fashion: Dress trends from 1800s to 1900s.

Thru May 6. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

Signs of the Times: A Single Lady’s Life in Neon: Neon signs

by Danielle James. Thru Dec 22. Glas, Raleigh.

Simple Elegance: Paintings

by Stephen White. Thru Dec 31. Little Art Gallery & Craft Collection, Raleigh. littleartgalleryandcraft.com.

Step Right Up: Sculpture by Patrick Dougherty. Thru Aug 31. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland.org.

The SuperNatural: We’ve lost sight of the seams, once considered inviolable, between nature, technology, and commerce—though we sometimes imagine we are crossing a boundary when we take thousand-dollar bikes into deceptively wild woods with our smartphones and moisture wicking socks. The SuperNatural wades into this liminal zone, exploring how we see and shape the contours of our planet as the physical refuse of the industrial age shades into the digital refuse of the present. The show includes a generative digital video by Tabor Robak, a virtual reality installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and photos by

Lars Jan, among many others.

Brooklyn artist Chris Doyle created “Dreams of Infinite Luster,” a digital animation, for the exterior vitrines. In it, “All the elements are rendered in gold, the color of lucre—the product, engine, and goal of capitalism.” Is a luxury hotel an odd site for post-capitalist critique? Sure. But, as we’ve said, what seams? Thru Jul 1.

21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham. —Brian Howe Test of Faith: Signs, Serpents, Salvation: Photographs by Lauren Pond. Thru Feb 4. Duke Campus: Rubenstein Library, Durham.

LAST Triangle Visual CHANCE Artists Exposition: Paintings, photography, weavings. Thru Dec 15. The Frontier, RTP. Triangle Weavers Art Exhibition: Fiber art. Thru Jan 6. Carrboro Branch Library, Carrboro. www.co.orange. nc.us/library/carrboro.

We are greater than the sum of our parts: Collaboration around the Durham Bull.

Thru Dec 23. Pleiades

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. MUSIC•NEWS•ARTS•FOOD INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 33

THE INDY'S GUIDE TO THE TRIANGLE

FINDER 34 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

on stands

NOW!

We’ve Met Before: Handwoven cloth has a certain rigor, a requirement for stitches to interact with structural integrity rather than spontaneity.

Ink, meanwhile, has a quicksilver impulsiveness, a tendency to slip and run unbounded. Andrea Donnelly holds this contrast in tension. The images on her large textile pieces evoke bodies, Rorschach blots, abstract flora, and, most of all, memory. Dyed, woven, unwoven, and

rewoven, the work contains “a literal record of its own making.” Thru Jan 28. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe Winter Corridor Artists Exhibition: Dana Ayscue, Cynthia Bickley Green, Stephen Cefalo, Eileen Hendren, Kelly Murray. Thru Jan 27.

Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

food

Durty Bull Chili Cook-Off: With the Panters vs. Packers game. Donations go to Durham Rescue Mission food and toy drive. Sun, Dec 17, 1-5 p.m. Durty Bull Brewing Company, Durham.

Faithful Friends: The Holiday Tea: $16-$32.

Thru Jan 7, 2:30-4:30 p.m.

Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

stage OPENING Bizarre: A Drag Show Oddity: $5-$7. Sat, Dec 16, 10 p.m. Ruby Deluxe, Raleigh. www.facebook. com/RubyDeluxeRaleigh.

Black Nativity: Justice Theater Project. $20-$26. Dec 16-18.

NCSU Campus: Stewart Theatre, Raleigh.

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol: Play. $15-$25. Fri, Dec 15, 7 p.m.

Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham. www.durhamjazzworkshop.org.

Dec 17. Durham Fruit Company. www.shaleighdanceworks.com.

See p. 25.

The Dangling Loafer: $5. Fri, Dec 15, 8 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. www.kingsraleigh.com.

Third Annual Drag Show: Vivica C. Coxx and friends. Tue, Dec 19, 7 p.m. PSI Theatre, Durham. www.durhamarts.org.

Funny Business Live: Pro comedy series. $5-8. Fri, Dec 15, 9 p.m. The Thrill at Hector’s, Chapel Hill.www. funnybusinesslive.com.

Transactors Improv: Holiday Homecoming: $10-$15. Fri, Dec 15, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

Vanya in Los Feliz: Staged reading. Wed, Dec 20, 8 p.m.

Imurj, Raleigh. imurj.com.

Ira David Wood III’s A Christmas Carol: $30+. Dec 14-17. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. dpacnc.com.

Winter Wonderland Ball: Burlesque Show and Social Dance: Burlesque. Sat, Dec 16, 8 p.m. Imurj, Raleigh. imurj.com.

Jingle Bell Riot: Riot Kittens Burlesque. $10. Thu, Dec 14, 8 p.m. Legends, Raleigh. www. legends-club.com.

ONGOING

Jon Reep: Stand-up comedy.

Wed, Dec 13-Sat, Dec 16. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Nutcracker: Carolina Ballet. Fri, Dec 15-Sun, Dec 24. Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

Oh What a Holy Night!: Fri, Dec 15 & Sat, Dec 16, 8 p.m.

Kennedy Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

Rhett and Link: Tour of Mythicality: $35+. Sun, Dec 17, 7 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. www.carolinatheatre.org.

The Santaland Diaries: Based on the David Sedaris story. Dec 15-24. Theatre In The Park, Raleigh. theatreinthepark.com.

I Promise: ShaLeigh Dance Works. $20. Fri, Dec 15-Sun,

Anything Goes Late Show: Sat, Dec 16, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Bulltown Comedy Series: Tue, Dec 19, 9 p.m. Fullsteam, Durham. www.fullsteam.ag.

LAST A Christmas Carol: CHANCE Play. $15+. Thru Dec 17. PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill. www. playmakersrep.org.

The Chuckle & Chortle Comedy Show: Local stand-up comics. $7. Sat, Dec 16, 8:30 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. artscenterlive.org.

LAST Cinderella: Play.

CHANCE $27+. Thru Dec 17.

Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh. raleighlittletheatre.org.

Comedy Overload: Stand-up.

Fri, Dec 15, 7:30 p.m. Deep South the Bar, Raleigh. www.

DeepSouthTheBar.com.

½ The Gift of the Magi: Reviewed on p. 25. $5-$25. Thru Dec 23. Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh. —Byron Woods The Harry Show: Ages 18+.

Improv host leads potentially risque games with audience participation. $10. Fri, Dec 15 & Sat, Dec 16, 10 p.m.

ComedyWorx, Raleigh. comedyworx.com.

Horrible People: Stand-up comedy. $12. Wed, Dec 20, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

LAST  Peter Pan CHANCE & Wendy: In Burning Coal’s devised Peter Pan & Wendy, deft guest director Lillian White probes the darker sides of childhood—the parts that make children, in author J.M. Barrie’s words, “gay and innocent and heartless.” The ruthlessness of Tinker Bell (an animated Holly Holmes) in her dislike for Wendy (a doughty Shawn Morgenlander) could only come as a surprise to those who’ve never witnessed the passions stirred in childhood games of war. More disturbing than the total lack of gratitude displayed by Peter (a strong Alec Silver) is his tendency to forget about people when they stop fulfilling his needs. White

constructs meaningful mirrors with double casting. After stage veterans Mark Filiaci and Julie Oliver get at the love between—and the occasional childishness of—Edwardianera parents the Darlings, they explore those characters’ shadow sides. Mom swashbuckles as a dastardly Captain Hook, while Dad becomes Hook’s nemesis, a robotic steampunk crocodile intent on devouring her.

(Sigmund Freud, please phone in. Strong supporting work reinforces the glee and partial development of those small beings who are near to us, but not quite us yet. $5-$25. Thru Dec 17. Burning Coal Theatre Company, Raleigh. www. burningcoal.org. —Byron Woods

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Musical: Broadway Series South.

Thru Dec 24. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

LAST A Trailer Park CHANCE Christmas: This wasn’t supposed to happen, you understand. Last December, co-conspirators Jeffrey Moore and Rachel Klem took their final bows as Meemaw Hussey, the dowager countess of a certain doublewide in West Durham, and her semi-doting daughterin-law, Loraine, in the farewell production of their low-rent holiday farce, which coincided with the closing of Common Ground Theatre. But theater, to paraphrase Jeff Goldblum, finds a way. When puppet master Torry Bend pulled her current work in progress from the

December slot at Manbites Dog Theater, the whole dysfunctional clan was standing by to pick up the slack. In its tenth-annual production, nerves are on edge because Christmas isn’t the only thing approaching Row M, Lot 16. An eviction notice and a lateseason hurricane are also on the way. What’s worse? Meemaw and Loraine ain’t getting along; one’s been sniping at the other now for days. Surely no one would use a holiday family reunion to have it out or expose the most shameful family secrets. $22-$24. Thru Dec 16.

Manbites Dog Theater, Durham. www.manbitesdogtheater.org. — Byron Woods

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com www.capitalcabaret.com

Under The Bridge Comedy Night Open Mic: Thu, Dec 14.

London Bridge Pub, Raleigh. thelondonbridgepub.com.

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com

BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW Un c o n t e s t e d Di vo rc e Bu s i n e s s L a w UNCONTESTED In c o r p o r a t i o n / L LC / DIVORCE Pa r t n e r s h i p MUSIC BUSINESS LAW Wi l l s INCORPORATION/LLC WILLS C o l l e c t i o n s SEPARATION AGREEMENTS Mu s i c

Great Russian Nutcracker

PHOTO COURTESY OF WWW.NUTCRACKER.COM

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13 & THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14

MOSCOW BALLET’S GREAT RUSSIAN NUTCRACKER

Most think the Russians invented The Nutcracker. Not true: Tchaikovsky’s famous suite and Maurice Petipa and Lev Ivanov’s choreography for the Imperial Ballet were both based on an 1816 story by German gothic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann. Choreographer Anatoly Emelianov’s 2003 version of what has become the world’s most popular ballet takes liberties with the original; the child heroine who befriends the enchanted nutcracker prince is named Masha, not Clara, and, in the end, the

two are a fully adult couple in love.

(Well, they all have to grow up sometime, we guess.) Critics have praised the Moscow Ballet’s “magnetic sense of theater” (The New York Times), its “lively and resourceful” style (Los Angeles Times), and the imaginative scenic designs of Carl Sprague, who designed sets for Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. —Byron Woods

CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM 7 p.m., $30–$70, www.carolinatheatre.com

967-6159

(919) 967-6159

bill.burton.lawyer@gmail.com INDYweek.com | 12.13.17 | 35

page READINGS & SIGNINGS Dan Ariely: Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter. Wed, Dec 20, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Dar Williams: What I Found in a Thousand Towns. $30. Wed, Dec 13, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. artscenterlive.org.

LECTURES ETC.

Willa Brigham: The Pizza Tree. Sat, Dec 16, 2 p.m. Barnes & Noble, Cary. www.barnesandnoble.com.

Artist Talk: Irene Tison: Low Country Stories. Sat, Dec 16, 1:30 p.m. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www. historichillsborough.org.

Allan Gurganus: A Fool for Christmas. Thu, Dec 14, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Carolina Fried Chicken Map: Chat with the creators. Sat, Dec 16, 1 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. quailridgebooks. com.

Rob A. Okun: Voice Male: The Untold Story of the Pro-Feminist Men’s Movement. Wed, Dec 13, 7 p.m.

Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Donald Davis Storytelling: Donation.

Sat, Dec 16 & Sun, Dec 17. Fearrington Barn, Pittsboro. www.fearrington.com.

Nerd Nite 4: Seeing is Believing: Series of short talks. Wed, Dec 13, 7 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. www. local506.com.

Stop-motion animation by Andrea Love

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 16

ANDREA LOVE

Durham native Andrea Love, who now lives in Washington, works as a freelance stop-motion animator, a medium that has only grown more charming in its humble tactility as digital animation technologies produce ever more detailed, extravagant, and lifeless wonders. From classic Rankin-Bass holiday specials to Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, the living-diorama feel of stop-motion is imprinted on most hearts—but how does this exacting, frame-by-frame method actually work? You can find out at Horse &

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS A Chorus of Versus: Sun, Dec 17, 8 p.m.

The Pinhook, Durham. thepinhook. com.

Allan Gurganus FILE PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE THURSDAY, DECEMBER 14

ALLAN GURGANUS: “A FOOL FOR CHRISTMAS”

Christmas is based on a story, and stories—whether of the Dickens variety or the one on TV with the kid who licks the frozen sign pole— are an integral part of the holiday tradition. Allan Gurganus, the celebrated N.C. author, created a tradition of his own with a story called “A Fool for Christmas.” His narrator, the misfit manager of a shoppingmall pet store (blessed with the misfit name of Vernon Ricketts), meets a pregnant teenager who needs a friend, and something miraculous happens. Put it this way; there may not be room at the inn, but there’s room at the mall. After Gurganus debuted it thirteen years ago in an NPR broadcast, response has been such that he continues to tell it, in ever-changing permutations, and the results are no less heartwarming. “A Fool For Christmas” has never been published; it’s something you need to hear for yourself. —David Klein

THE REGULATOR BOOKSHOP, DURHAM 7 p.m., free, www.regulatorbookshop.com 36 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF HORSE & BUGGY PRESS

Durham Cinematheque’s Microcinema: Program changes monthly. $5. Saturdays, Sundays.

Durham Cinematheque, Durham.

Unclear about Nuclear War: Cold war films and commercials. By Tom Whiteside. Fri, Dec 15, 5-8 p.m. Power Plant Gallery, Durham.

OPENING Ferdinand—Beloved children’s book The Story of Ferdinand, about a Spanish bull who prefers peace to fighting, gets the computer-animation treatment.

Rated PG. The Shape of Water—Guillermo del Toro’s fantasy film explores the relationship between a mute janitor and a strange aquatic creature in a 1960s research facility. Rated R. Star Wars: The Last Jedi—In this sequel to The Force Awakens, new Jedi Rey joins Luke and Leia on an adventure that divulges secrets of the Force. Rated PG-13.

Buggy Press on Saturday, when Love screens a thirtyminute program of her animated shorts—which often tend toward documentary storytelling, covering issues such as environmental dangers and mental health—followed by an artist talk that will illuminate the process behind them. Seating is highly limited; email Horse & Buggy’s Dave Wofford at dave@horseandbuggypress. com to reserve a place. —Brian Howe

HORSE & BUGGY PRESS (AND FRIENDS), DURHAM 7 p.m., $8, www.horseandbuggypress.com

N OW P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale.

Read reviews of these films at indyweek. com.  Blade Runner 2049—This satisfying sequel to Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi noir reminds us that it works best to mess with the classics when there’s actually something wrong with them. Rated R.  Coco—This Day of the Deadthemed animated fantasy has one of Pixar’s richest worlds and weakest stories. Rated PG.  The Disaster Artist—James Franco does a suspiciously bad impression of bad artist Tommy Wiseau, but the point eludes us. Rated R.  It—Blend vintage Spielberg with Stranger Things and you get this scary, heart-filled new version of Stephen King’s horror classic. Rated R. ½ Justice League—Uneven but much better than Batman v.

Superman: Dawn of Justice, this collision of Zack Snyder’s bombast and Joss Whedon’s wit actually kind of works. Rated PG-13.

 Lady Bird—Greta Gerwig’s nostalgic coming-of-age debut as a writer-director is winning and alert to class but falters on race. Rated R.  The LEGO Ninjago Movie— Expect weak puns, weary pop-culture references, and a waning sense of discovery from this Ninjago-branded minor entry in the LEGO franchise.

Rated PG. ½ The Man Who Invented Christmas—Charles Dickens and his famous A Christmas Carol characters come to life in this pleasant holiday surprise from across the pond. Rated PG.  Novitiate—Maggie Betts’s quietly stunning historical drama is about nuns trying to keep the faith against an encroaching modern world. Rated R.  Thor: Ragnarok—A stodgy, self-serious franchise springs to life with demigods delightfully out of their element. Rated PG-13. ½ Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri—Maybe the Coen brothers could have pulled it off, but Martin McDonagh has tonal problems with the weighty themes and discordant plot of this vengeful-mother tale. Rated R.

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is looking for COMPANY DRIVERS and OWNER OPERATORS. Brown requires: CDL-A, 2 years of tractor trailer experience OTR or Regional (Multiple states) in the last 3 years, good MVR and PSP. Apply: driveforbrown.com.

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GOT AN OLDER CAR, VAN OR SUV? Do the humane thing. Donate it to the Humane Society. Call 1-855-617-2024

notices NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC Mobilitie, LLC is proposing to construct a 54-foot overall height utility pole at 400-598 Youth Center Drive, Raleigh, Wake County, North Carolina. The proposed structure would not be lighted. Mobilitie invites any interested party to request further environmental review of the proposed action under the FCC’s National Environmental Policy Act rules, 47 CFR ß1.1307, by notifying the FCC of the specific reasons that the action may have a significant impact on the quality of the human environment.

This request must only raise environmental concerns and can be filed online using the FCC pleadings system at www.fcc.gov or mailed to FCC Requests for Environmental Review, Attn: Ramon Williams, 445 12th Street SW, Washington, DC 20554 within 30 days of the date that notice of this proposed action is published on the FCC’s website. Refer to File No. A1084702 when submitting the request and to view the specific information about the proposed action.

(T2405/9NCB002258)

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body • mind • spirit services

NOTICE TO THE PUBLIC KY Backhaul Transmission Networks, LLC is proposing to construct a 55-foot overall height utility pole at 2700-2914 New Bern Avenue, Raleigh, North Carolina 27610. The proposed structure would not be lighted. KY Backhaul Transmission Networks invites any interested party to request further environmental review of the proposed action under the FCC’s National Environmental Policy Act rules, 47 CFR ß1.1307, by notifying the FCC of the specific reasons that the action may have a significant impact on the quality of the human environment.

This request must only raise environmental concerns and can be filed online using the FCC pleadings system at www.fcc.gov or mailed to FCC Requests for Environmental Review, Attn: Ramon Williams, 445 12th Street SW, Washington, DC 20554 within 30 days of the date that notice of this proposed action is published on the FCC’s website. Refer to File No. A1084699 when submitting the request and to view the specific information about the proposed action.

(T2367/9NCB002136)

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MAKE THE CALL TO START GETTING CLEAN TODAY Free 24/7 Helpline for alcohol & drug addiction treatment. Get help! It is time to take your life back! Call Now: 855-732-4139 (AAN CAN)

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home improvement

ALL THINGS BASEMENTY! Basement Systems Inc. Call us for all of your basement needs!

Waterproofing, Finishing, Structural Repairs, Humidity and Mold Control. FREE ESTIMATES! Call 1-800-6989217(NCPA)

critters To adopt: 919-403-2221 or visit animalrescue.net

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ROOF REPAIR and gutter cleaning. Over twenty years experience.

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SAFE STEP WALK-IN TUB ALERT FOR SENIORS. Bathroom falls can be fatal.

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Beyond Fences seeks plastic or igloo style dog houses for dogs in need, as well as indoor metal crates. To donate, please contact Amanda at director@unchaindogs.net.

MAKE & SAVE MONEY with your own bandmill- Cut lumber any dimension. In stock ready to ship! FREE Info/DVD: www.NorwoodSawmills.com 1?-800?-578?-1363 Ext.300N

1-ACRE LOTS Located in Eco-community in Efland. Comes with shared use of 7-acre nature preserve, active beaver ponds, water fowl, creeping cedar, ferns, all wooded, beautiful. Text Tom at 919932-0704

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Model SE Sedan 4-door, standard equipment, silver, 30,821 miles, very good condition.

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EMAIL KIM FOR ADS! CLASSY AT INDYWEEK.COM

Book your ad • Email kim: classy@indywEEk.com

INDYweek.com| |12.13.17 12.13.17| |37 37 INDYweek.com

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If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “Diversions” at the bottom of our webpage.

last

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box.

The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered.

Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

1 4 8 6

9 9 6 9 7 8 3 4 5 6 7 7 1 1 4 2 6 3 7 1 9 8 6 5 3 4 5 2 2

1

7

crossword

4

7

3 9 5

2 3 1 69 2

# 40

MEDIUM 2 1 5 7 4 8 6 9 3

4 6 7 3 2 9 8 1 5

8 3 9 6 1 5 4 7 2

# 40

8 7 4 3 1 2 5 6 9

5 3 1 6 4 9 7 2 8

9 2 6 8 7 5 4 3 1

2 4 3 1 6 7 8 9 5

# 94 6 5 7 9 2 8 1 4 3

1 8 9 4 5 3 6 7 2

3 6 8 5 9 4 2 1 7

4 9 2 7 8 1 3 5 6

7 1 5 2 3 6 9 8 4

solution to last week’s puzzle

2

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

3 30/10/2005 6 8 7 5 2

38 38| |12.13.17 12.13.17| |INDYweek.com INDYweek.com

4

If you just can’t wait, check out the current week’s answer key at www.indyweek.com, and click “Diversions”.

12.13.17

6

CLASSY AT INDYWEEK DOT COM Book your ad • Email kim: classy@indywEEk.com

Book y

please contact advertising@indyweek.com

THE INDY'S GUIDE TO THE TRIANGLE To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact advertising@indyweek.com

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last week's puzzle

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Book your ad • Email kim: classy@indywEEk.com

INDYweek.com| |12.13.17 12.13.17| |39 39 INDYweek.com

back page

Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com

THOUSANDS OF EYES ON YOUR AD EVERY WEEK

EMAIL KIM!

CLASSY (AT) INDYWEEK (DOT) COM

40 | 12.13.17 | INDYweek.com

COMPUTER REPAIR– WE COME TO YOU!

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DANCE CLASSES IN SWING, LINDY, BLUES, TAI CHI At ERUUF, Durham & ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

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