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Every Wednesday. indyweek.com

Douglas Bourgeois, A New Place to Dwell (detail), 1987. Oil on panel; 14 x 18 inches (35.6 x 45.7 cm).

Collection of Ronald Swartz and Ellen Johnson.

Image courtesy of the artist and Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans, Louisiana. © Douglas Bourgeois.

2001 Campus Dr., Durham 27705

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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS YEAR | RALEIGH VOL. 33, NO.50 6 We rummage through the dumpster fire of 2016 and figure out what we’re going to do next year.

22 From record stores and music festivals to HB 2 protests, local music grappled with growth this year.

State Senator Mike Woodard (center), D-Durham, during last week’s legislative session, in which the General Assembly failed to repeal HB 2

23 The ten best local records and songs of the year came from diverse genres and sources.

24 Comings and goings, openings and closings, coups and controversies—all marked a volatile local arts landscape this year.

24 The ten best movies of the year prove Amy Adams is a national treasure.

25 The ten most fantastical local books of the year are evidence of a thriving genre-fiction scene.

26 In a year that was one long punch in the mouth, local art punched back.

26 The ten best plays seen on local stages explored serious issues and outlandish scenarios, sometimes both at once.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

DEPARTMENTS 5 Peripheral Visions 6 Year in Review: News

27 As the nation feasted on Southern food fads, we held down our diverse roots.

22 Year in Review: Music, Food, Arts & Culture

27 The five best dance performances we saw this year were neatly divided between On the cover: touring legends and grassroots locals.

30 Music Calendar

DESIGN BY SHAN STUMPF

28 What to Do This Week 33 Arts/Film Calendar

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 3

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 NEWS EDITOR Ken Fine STAFF WRITER Paul Blest ASSOCIATE MUSIC EDITOR Allison Hussey ASSOCIATE ARTS EDITOR David Klein ASSOCIATE FOOD EDITOR Victoria Bouloubasis LISTINGS COORDINATOR Michaela Dwyer THEATER AND DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS

Spencer Griffith, Corbie Hill, Laura Jaramillo, Emma Laperruque, Jill Warren Lucas, Sayaka Matsuoka, Glenn McDonald, Neil Morris, Angela Perez, Hannah Pitstick, Bryan C. Reed, V. Cullum Rogers, Dan Ruccia, Dan Schram, Zack Smith, Eric Tullis, Chris Vitiello, Ryan Vu, Patrick Wall, Iza Wojciechowska

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AU L

0 2

6 1

DA CQ U AIN TA N CE BE FOR GOT

SO THAT WAS QUITE THE YEAR.

There was the Pulse massacre and countless other atrocities, so many that we became numb to them. More chaos in Syria and nuclear saber-rattling from North Korea. Refugee crises and terrorism in Europe. Brexit. Fake news.

The alt-right. HB 2. Governor McCrory and the coal ash scandal. Rising global temperatures. Hurricane Matthew. The heroes of our youth—Prince and Bowie, Haggard and Phife Dawg, Leonard Cohen and George Michael—gone.

And, of course, we somehow made the orange-tinted, pussy-grabbing Donald Trump the forty-fifth president of the United States. His white nationalist pal, Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon, will become a top White House adviser, and Alabama senator Jeff Sessions—a man fellow Republicans deemed too racist for the federal bench thirty years ago but who is now set to be attorney general—will be in

6 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

charge of enforcing civil rights and voting rights laws. (Thanks for that, James Comey.)

With that unsettling reality upon us— and with it, a creeping sense that the American experiment is imperiled—we wanted to use this last issue of the year to take one final look at the dumpster fire that was 2016 and offer our hopes that 2017 will be just a little bit better.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find an essay of photos taken this year by INDY photographers chronicling the goings-on in the Triangle, as well as our timeline of important events in 2016 (in case your holidays were too cheery).

Throughout this package, we’ve also included a half-dozen resolutions for living in Trump’s America. Toward the back, you’ll find retrospectives on the year in music, food, and culture, as well as our guide to New Year’s Eve revelry.

We hope you enjoy this look back, and let’s cross our fingers and hope the universe smiles on us a little more in 2017.

—Jeffrey C. Billman

In Ziggy Stardust make-up, Mitchell Bratton, right, and his daughter, Randi Bratton, sing the David Bowie song “Heroes” during a special PopUp Chorus event at Motorco in Durham on January 26. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

JAN. 1: Wake County officials list transportation and affordable housing as their top issues for 2016.

JAN. 4: The search firm hired to replace Durham police chief Jose Lopez releases a job description asking for a “transformative and visionary leader.”

JAN. 5: Liz Masnik, owner of the beloved Raleigh restaurant The Borough, announces that it will close at the end of the month.

JAN. 8: Chapel HillCarrboro City Schools announces it has given a raise to seventytwo bus monitors and custodians, certifying the school system as a living-wage employer.

JAN 8: El Chapo Guzman—the leader of the El Sinaloa drug cartel, who had recently granted an interview to actor Sean Penn—is recaptured by Mexican law enforcement after escaping from jail the previous July.

JAN. 10: David Bowie dies two days after his final album, Blackstar, is released.

JAN. 13: A contractor for the town of Hillsborough removes the “Confederate Memorial” lettering from the Orange County Historical Museum building.

JAN. 19: Twentynine-year-old Matthew LaMont McClain, an inmate at the Durham County Detention Facility, is found dead in his cell. In June, the county Department of Public Health said McClain died “as a result of complications from a seizure disorder” but recommended more than a dozen changes be implemented by the jail’s medical unit.

JAN. 21: Governor McCrory announces a state of emergency due to a winter ice and snow storm. More than 147,000 people would lose power.

JAN. 22: Carolina Theater of Durham CEO Bob Nocek resigns, after a December 2015 audit found that the historic theater was over $1 million in debt. Dan Berman takes over as interim CEO.

In downtown Raleigh on February 13, marchers from the Andrew Goodman Foundation carry signs with the faces of James Chaney, Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, civil rights workers who were murdered by the KKK in Mississippi in 1964. PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

JAN. 24: The 15–1 Carolina Panthers blow out the Arizona Cardinals to advance to the Super Bowl.

JAN. 26: At a UNC Board of Governors meeting in Chapel Hill, four members of the SEIU group Faculty Forward are arrested while protesting Margaret Spellings, the new president of the UNC system and a former Bush administration official.

JAN. 28: Nineteen-yearold Wildin Acosta is arrested by ICE officials as he’s warming up his car to go to school at Riverside High in Durham.

He’s detained in Lumpkin, Georgia, while he awaits deportation.

JAN. 29: The N.C. Supreme Court, in a 6–1 decision, rules in McCrory’s favor in a legal battle with the legislature over who gets to appoint members of the Coal Ash Commission created in 2014.

J A N UA R Y INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 7

Vincent Simonetti plays one of the three hundred instruments in the V&E Simonetti Historical Tuba Museum in Durham.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

FEB. 1: In the first contest of the primary season, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas win the Iowa Democratic and Republican caucuses.

The following Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump win the first primaries in New Hampshire.

FEB. 7: The Carolina Panthers lose the Super Bowl to the Denver Broncos, 24–10.

FEB. 11: After a fortyday standoff, armed anti-government militia members, who had seized the headquarters of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, surrender.

F E B R UA R Y 8 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

FEB. 12: Venerable Durham club The Pinhook, which was $80,000 in debt and in danger of closing due to an unpaid tax bill before the Triangle music community rallied behind it, pays off its debt.

FEB. 13: Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia dies. Senate Republicans immediately announce that they’ll block President Obama’s nominee to replace him.

FEB. 17: Ashley Christensen’s newest Raleigh restaurant, Death & Taxes, is nominated as a semifinalist for the James Beard award for Best New Restaurant.

Christensen is nominated for Outstanding Chef.

FEB. 18: In a one-day special session, the legislature (under a federal court order) redraws its congressional districts. When Representative David Lewis is asked why the lawmakers ensured a gerrymandered 10–3 Republican majority, Lewis responds, “The only reason we are drawing ten districts is because we can’t make it eleven.”

FEB. 19: To Kill a Mockingbird author Harper Lee dies at age eighty-nine.

FEB. 22: In a 5–2 vote, the Charlotte City Council passes an ordinance adding “marital and familial status, sexual orientation, gender expression and gender identity” to the city’s nondiscrimination code.

FEB. 29: Twenty-fouryear-old Akiel Denkins is shot and killed in southeast Raleigh by Officer D.C. Twiddy.

His death sparks peaceful protests.

FEB. 29: WRAL and WNCN switch affiliates; WRAL goes to NBC, while WNCN moves to CBS.

RESOLUTION Restore My Faith in Humanity

Supporters finish a sign as they wait to enter the packed Memorial Auditorium in Raleigh, where Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders holds a rally four days before the March 15 North Carolina primary. PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

MARCH 7: The Durham City Council indefinitely postpones a vote on purchasing body cameras for police officers.

MARCH 10: After Denkins’s death, the Raleigh Police Accountability Community Taskforce asks the city council to establish a civilian review board with subpoena power. In a response in May, the city says it can’t do that without the approval of the General Assembly.

MARCH

MARCH 15: The Raleigh City Council approves a $5.2 million program to put six hundred body cameras on the street.

MARCH 16: President Obama nominates appellate judge Merrick Garland to replace Scalia. He’ll never receive so much as a hearing, much less a confirmation vote.

MARCH 18: In a 174–29 vote, non-tenure-track faculty at Duke vote to form a union.

MARCH 22: A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife Dawg dies at age forty-five.

MARCH 23: In a oneday special session, General Assembly passes the infamous HB 2. McCrory signs it that night.

MARCH 24: Nice Price Books in Durham announces it will close in May. MARCH 27: Quail Ridge Books founder Nancy Olson passes away at the age of seventy-five.

MARCH 28: The ACLU of North Carolina, Lambda Legal, and Equality NC file a lawsuit against North Carolina over HB 2.

MARCH 29: Roy Cooper, the state’s attorney general and McCrory’s challenger in the November election, announces that he won’t defend HB 2 in court.

Permit me a moment of unflattering honesty: I took this election personally, more than I should have. It shook me to my core. It eroded my faith in this country. It soured me on the goodness of its people.

Think about it: we elected a racist, misogynist braggart, an avaricious know-nothing con artist, a man who has, on tape, boasted of sexual assault, to the pinnacle of government, and some 63 million people were willing to overlook the racism, the misogyny, the avarice, and the ignorance, either because they hated Hillary or they wanted to ban abortion or just blow up the system.

I was angry and bitterly disappointed, even (maybe especially) at Trump voters in my own family. Not because they’re more conservative than me—I’m used to that—but because they, for whatever reason, either failed to see this lout for who he is or, worse, saw him for who he was and didn’t care.

In my dejection, I looked askance at those white working-class Trump voters who are now the subjects of a thousand New York Times think pieces, as if their precious feelings about lost privilege and economic anxiety mattered more than the concerns of the Latino in Los Angeles or the African American in Atlanta. I sneered and stereotyped them as an amalgamation of racist hicks, Fox-Newswatching knuckle-draggers, theocratic Biblethumpers, and soulless corporate raiders.

There’s some truth in the stereotype, of course. There are deplorables out there, both of the alt-right and greedy capitalist varieties; let’s not kid ourselves. But the truth is, like the Trump voters in my family, many of them are good and decent people. And I can’t lose sight of that.

After all, to make real progress, progressives need to listen to these folks, to speak to their needs. But more than an electoral strategy, I can’t simply write off 63 million people or try to wall myself off from them.

At some point, I have to let go of the anger and resentment. I have to actively seek out the good in people who don’t think like me, to engage with them and let them restore my faith in humanity.

I’m not ready to do that yet. Maybe by next New Year’s. (If the nuclear winter doesn’t come first.)

—Jeffrey C. Billman

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 9

Participants in the 2016 Piedmont Farm Tour take in the sites at Sunset Ridge Buffalo Farms on April 21. During the tour, several participating farms open their doors and show off their wares to visitors.

PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

APRIL 2: The UNC men’s basketball team defeats Syracuse 83–66 to earn a trip to the NCAA national championship game.

APRIL 4: UNC loses to Villanova on a buzzer-beater by Villanova’s Kris Jenkins.

APRIL 6: Country legend Merle Haggard dies on his seventy-ninth birthday.

APRIL 7: The Durham City Council passes a resolution denouncing HB 2.

APRIL 10 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

APRIL 8: The Durham police’s HEAT unit raids a north Durham home after “smelling marijuana” and tase and allegedly assault several people inside before making arrests.

A video of the incident garners more than two hundred thousand views on YouTube.

APRIL 11: The porn website xhamster.com “bans” access to North Carolina users, with a flashing message warning North Carolinians to “Stop Your Homophobic Insanity!” It turns out you can just click to the side of this prompt in order to, um, finish your business, but point taken.

APRIL 13: Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman clears Officer Twiddy in the shooting death of Akiel Denkins.

APRIL 19: The Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce releases a statement opposing HB 2, calling it “bad for business and bad for North Carolina.” Later that day, the Raleigh City Council endorses that statement.

APRIL 21: Prince passes away at the age of fifty-seven.

APRIL 25: As the General Assembly commences its short session, Moral Monday protesters hold a rally and a mass sit-in at the legislature. Fifty-four protesters are arrested.

APRIL 26: Durham names C.J. Davis, the deputy police chief of the Atlanta Police Department, as its next chief of police.

APRIL 28: Duke president Richard Brodhead announces plans to step down when his current term expires in June 2017.

I’m a seen I’m does write out h I’m limit get o It e I’m p callin that s one o what peop less p thres there ing, v turn t It’s wher a dys ence disag to sc entire anim twen of tal

Supporters of HB 2 rally at the Halifax Mall on April 25.

PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

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RESOLUTION Embrace Conflict I’m afraid of tornadoes, but I’ve never seen one.

I’m afraid of heights, but that doesn’t get in the way of my job as a writer. I can tackle the A&E beat without having to brave a stepladder.

I’m afraid of conflict, and that does limit me—severely. In 2017, I need to get over that.

It expresses itself in weird ways: I’m petrified at the thought of coldcalling anyone. I get nervous if I see that someone’s left a comment on one of my stories, even before I see what’s in it. I can’t even scan other people’s Facebook battles, much less participate. I have a really low threshold for this kind of thing. When there’s hostility, when there’s arguing, very important parts of my brain turn to static.

It’s a rational fear, and I know where it comes from. Growing up in a dysfunctional household, experience taught me that even minor disagreements could quickly escalate to screaming matches that lasted entire evenings. And working as an animal control dispatcher in my early twenties gave me an overactive fear of talking on the phone at all; it was

at that job that I encountered some of the most vicious people of my life, and my line was the bottleneck where they all collected.

I’ve run from all of that and made a peaceful life with my family. I’ve lost both the will and the ability to fight.

Going into 2017, this feels like a luxury I can’t afford—not under a Trump presidency. Best case, it’s going to be the civil rights, ecological, and economic disaster. Worst case? My imagination fails me. What I do know is that watching from the sidelines is morally untenable—that's practically complicity. As a writer, it’s my responsibility to find and tell true stories of the human cost. Considering the stakes, it would be irresponsible and even immoral to weasel out of potentially combative interviews. I need to lose my fear, or at least control it.

I have kids, after all, and they need to see how one responds to bullies and demagogues. We don’t lose our pacifism. We don’t need fists or weapons. We don’t go looking for conflict. But when conflict comes to us, we don’t wuss out. We figure out how to apply our gifts and we get to work.

—Corbie Hill

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INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 11

RESOLUTION Change What I Can Immediately after the election, I thought about my resolutions for 2017, in particular one that I’ve come to in previous years with varying levels of success: getting in shape. This time, though, it wasn’t for vanity. I half-jokingly figured that if I’m fighting for resources in the Mad Max world we’ll soon be living in, I might as well prepare myself.

This all comes back to a more serious question: How, exactly, does one go about practicing any sort of self-care when the external world that’s beyond our control seems to be going downhill so quickly?

There’s no easy answer, but I know this: since then, I’ve stopped planning for the months ahead and started thinking more about what’s going on right in front of me. I’ve tried to start changing the things I actually can: by signing up for the monthly Southern Poverty Law Center donation I kept putting off, by getting more involved in local activism, by making more conscious choices about how I spend my money.

At a different point, I would have just gotten mad and stewed about it. I still get mad and stew about it, but now I feel like I’m using my time and energy to actually do something. This also contributes to a sense of purpose, which permeates my other resolutions, such as getting back into shape, going to bed before 1 a.m., and so on.

To be clear: this was a hell of a year. And if the last couple of months are any indication, we’ll have at least a few more years like it. But instead of stewing about it, try focusing on what you can do to help get us out of this mess.

If there’s enough of us who do that, it’ll happen.

—Paul Blest

12 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

MAY 3: Donald Trump wins the Indiana primary, ensuring that he will be the Republican nominee.

MAY 2: Durham’s Triangle Brewing Company, established in 2007, closes its doors for the final time.

MAY 5: After twenty-one months of data showing that SolarBees were ineffective, the Department of Environmental Quality finally pulls the plug on the giant water mixers, which were supposed to clean up Jordan Lake.

MAY 6: The third annual Art of Cool festival kicks off in Durham. Headliners include Terence Blanchard, Anderson Paak and the Free Nationals, Thundercat, and Internet.

MAY 9: The U.S. Department of Justice and the state of North Carolina file lawsuits against each other over HB 2.

MAY 15: Laura Jane Grace, the transgender frontwoman of Against Me!, burns her birth certificate on stage during the band’s sold-out set at Motorco in Durham.

MAY 17: Durham County District Attorney Roger Echols announces that he will not charge any officers in the death of La’Vante Biggs, who was shot

by Durham police in September 2015.

MAY 19: The tenth Moogfest— and the first in Durham—kicks off. Headliners include GZA, Explosions in the Sky, sunn O))), and Grimes.

MAY 25: Durham civil rights icon and longtime city councilman Howard Clement III dies at the age of eighty-two.

M AY

Elmar Schmeisser practices Kyudo, a traditional form of Japanese archery, at an archery range in Apex.

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

RESOLUTION Keep Making America Great

Ryan Shelley and his dog, Frito, enjoy a treat in Raleigh’s Moore Square.

JUNE 3: Muhammad Ali, arguably the greatest boxer to have ever lived— as well as an outspoken political activist—dies at the age of seventy-four.

JUNE 6: The Wake County Board of Commissioners votes unanimously to allow county residents to vote on a potential half-cent sales tax to help fund the county’s transit plan.

JUNE 6: The night before the California primary, the Associated Press calls the Democratic primary for Hillary Clinton, making her the first woman to ever be a major party’s nominee.

JUNE

JUNE 6: McCrory vetoes a second Coal Ash Commission bill, even though this one gives him more say over who is appointed. The legislature doesn’t override his veto.

JUNE 7: In the second primary of the year to choose nominees in North Carolina’s new congressional districts, U.S. Representative George Holding defeats U.S. Representative Kay Daly to become the Republican nominee in the Second Congressional District.

JUNE 9: The Durham City Council votes to raise the minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour.

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

JUNE 10: Legendary hockey player Gordie Howe dies at the age of eightyeight.

JUNE 12: Omar Mateen commits the worst mass shooting in American history at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing forty-nine people.

JUNE 19: The Cleveland Cavaliers come back from a 3–1 series deficit to defeat the Golden State Warriors and win the NBA championship.

JUNE 20: Durham civil rights activist Ann Atwater dies at the age of eighty.

JUNE 23: In a referendum, the United Kingdom votes to leave the European Union. In the days following the vote, Prime Minister David Cameron resigns.

JUNE 28: Forty-five people are killed and more than 230 people are injured after a terrorist attack at Atatürk Airport in Istanbul, Turkey.

JUNE 28: Longtime Republican state senator Fletcher Hartsell is indicted in Wake County Superior Court on three charges of knowingly certifying incorrect campaign finance documents.

I spent election night at the N.C. Democratic Party gathering in Raleigh. As the results rolled in, the room quieted, and people began to leave. I left too, an hour early—and I cried the whole way home. I didn’t want to be there to witness the pain, and I certainly didn’t want to be surrounded by strangers when the announcement came in that Donald Trump would be our next president.

I felt completely alone in my new home. I wondered if I had made the right choice in moving to North Carolina from New York City—as if North Carolina alone were to blame for the shocking outcome. I thought if I’d been in New York, people who looked like me and felt like me would have been able to comfort me in a way that North Carolinians never could. But I wasn’t thinking straight during that desperate moment.

The truth is much brighter. While covering the election in North Carolina, I met so many Latinos who were fighting to have their voices heard, whether through voting for the first time, waiting in line for hours just to see Michelle Obama speak, or protesting the inhumane treatment of immigrants in detention centers.

These are the activist Latinos who inspire me and have shaken me out of my near-catatonic state.

While reporting on the Latino community, its growth in this state, and the constant obstacles Latinos face, this year I vow to do more. I have witnessed North Carolinians fighting racial and economic oppression, and I will join them.

You can say “Not my president” all you want. You can resist and march. I get that. I’m sympathetic with it. As for me, I will live in America no matter who’s president, and I plan to thrive here. My community will use this as an occasion to do more. We will resist Donald Trump’s ignorant and hateful rhetoric not only because it’s our right to do so, but because this is our home. We belong here. We will make this work.

Come to think of it, even as a Mexican-American, I am in some ways thankful for Trump’s victory. I am thankful that his vocal hate toward immigrants and people of color have made us stand up and say, “This is not acceptable.” I am thankful to him because I am more vocal about my history, about who I am and where I come from, and I will not back down and pretend that we haven’t been making America great and beautiful.

North Carolina might not be as liberal as California, the state in which I was born, and it’s not as socially progressive as New York, the city I lived in for almost a decade. But something magical is happening. I’ve never felt more alive than I do now, living here.

—Araceli Cruz INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 13

The Reverend Mykal Slack, director of congregational life at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Raleigh, came out as a man in 2006 despite his birth certificate stating otherwise.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

JULY 2: Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Elie Wiesel dies at the age of eighty-seven.

JULY 5: Alton Sterling, a black man peddling CDs in a Baton Rouge, Louisiana, parking lot, is killed by police, sparking protests across the nation.

JULY 5: FBI Director James Comey says the bureau is recommending no charges be filed against Hillary Clinton for her use of a personal email server while secretary of state.

JULY 7: Philando Castile, a thirty-two-year-old black man, is killed by Minneapolis police during a traffic stop.

JULY 7: A military veteran shoots and kills five Dallas police officers in a sniper attack.

J U LY 14 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

JULY 11: State toxicologist Kenneth Rudo says in a deposition that state officials “knowingly told people their water was safe [after the Dan River coal ash spill] when we knew it wasn’t.”

JULY 16: Durham pastor Jamie Daniels, of Divine Grace Worship Center, is fatally shot near the intersection of Lincoln and Dunbar streets.

JULY 11: McCrory signs HB 972, which limits public access to police body camera and dash-cam recordings.

JULY 17: The Loyal Knights of the Ku Klux Klan drops flyers in Raleigh’s Oakwood neighborhood.

JULY 14: Terror strikes France when a truck smashes into a crowd in Nice watching Bastille Day fireworks.

JULY 18: The GOP kicks off the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio.

JULY 19: The Board of Immigration Appeals reopens Wildin Acosta’s case.

JULY 22: In a show of solidarity with the LGBTQ community, the NBA announces it is no longer holding its 2017 All-Star Game in Charlotte as a result of HB 2.

JULY 25: The Democratic National Convention begins in Philadelphia.

JULY 29: A federal judges strike down North Carolina’s voting restrictions, citing the legislature’s “discriminatory intent.”

Paperhand Puppets cast members rehearse for an upcoming show at the Forest Theater in Chapel Hill on July 31. PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN AUG. 2: McCrory’s chief of staff, Thomas Stith, holds a late-night press conference in which he calls toxicologist Kenneth Rudo a liar.

AUG. 10: State epidemiologist Megan Davies resigns, saying she “cannot work for a department and an administration that deliberately misleads the public.”

AUG. 10: After spending six months in a Georgia detention facility, Wildin Acosta is granted bond and eventually released.

AUG. 11: A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court declares North Carolina’s legislative districts unconstitutional, saying they violate the Equal Protection Clause.

AUG. 13: Raleigh police respond to reports of shots fired inside Crabtree Mall. Nobody is shot, and no shooter is ever found.

AUG. 15: Durham police chief C.J. Davis reports that homicides in the city are up 31 percent over 2015.

AUG. 16: Erin Brockovich and the Environmental Working Group send a letter to the EPA calling for the establishment of federal standards for hexavalent chromium in drinking water, citing the coal ash controversy in North Carolina.

AUG. 18: A crisis pregnancy center files a federal lawsuit against Raleigh for denying a zoning request that would allow the facility to open next to an abortion clinic.

AUG. 17: The INDY reports, based on findings from Insightus, that from 2010–14, Wake County found forty private wells with dangerous levels of uranium and then abruptly stopped testing for the chemical.

AUG. 22: UPS workers hold a protest in Chapel Hill after filing more than one hundred grievances against the company.

AUG. 24: Duke University sues the estate of wealthy alum Aubrey McClendon for nearly $10 million.

AUG. 26: A federal judge issues a limited preliminary injunction against HB 2, preventing the UNC system from enforcing the law.

AUG. 29: Gene Wilder, of Willy Wonka fame, dies at age eighty-three.

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Ace Henderson performs at Deep South during Hopscotch.

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

SEPT. 5: The Durham City Council votes to approve the Golden Belt local historic district, despite opposition from the Durham Rescue Mission.

SEPT. 6: Firefighters show up at the Raleigh City Council to protest not getting a raise.

SEPT. 7: McCrory releases a campaign ad suggesting that people are being too sensitive about HB 2, which he says “protects” children.

SEPT. 8: McCrory blames Roy Cooper and President Obama for “forcing his hand” on HB 2.

SEPT. 8: The State Board of Elections votes to expand the number of polling places Wake County voters will have to choose from during the first seven days of early voting.

SEPT. 12: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announces that it will spare the Red Wolf Recovery Program—an effort meant to help save the endangered red wolf population living in eastern North Carolina from extinction—but species advocates say the feds’ plan will actually result in the wild wolves ending up in captivity.

SEPTEMBER 16 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

SEPT. 12: The NCAA announces it is pulling March Madness games and several sports championships from North Carolina in response to HB 2.

SEPT. 14: The Atlantic Coast Conference announces it will pull all “neutral-site championships” from North Carolina in response to HB 2.

SEPT. 18: Bombs in New York and New Jersey injure dozens of people.

SEPT. 20: Forty-threeyear-old Keith Lamont Scott is fatally shot

by Charlotte police, sparking violent protests after city officials refuse to release body-camera footage.

SEPT. 26: Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison, after threatening to pull his officers out of Wake schools if the school board did not set a clear policy for transgender students, calls the INDY to rant about the liberal media, the transgender community, and HB 2.

SEPT. 25: Iconic golfer (and the guy who figured out that mixing sweet tea and lemonade is awesome) Arnold Palmer dies at eightyseven.

SEPT. 29: U.S. District Court Judge Terrence Boyle orders a temporary injunction that restricts the federal government’s ability to remove endangered red wolves from private property and blasts the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Michelle Obama speaks to a crowd in Raleigh while campaigning for Hillary Clinton in October.

RESOLUTION Impeach Donald Trump

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

OCT. 3: Triangle television news icon and WTVD anchor Larry Stogner dies at age sixty-nine.

OCT. 4: A representative from the International Association of Chiefs of Police reports to the Durham City Council that, after reviewing the Durham Police Department’s operations, it did not find “institutional racism” within the DPD.

“To withdraw in disgust is not the same as apathy.”

For many years I’ve cited that quote, a paraphrase from the movie Slacker, via an REM song, as my credo in regard to politics.

(Everything about that sentence is embarrassingly 1990s, I know.) But it’s true—for the sake of my mental health and my day-to-day serenity, I’ve remained largely apolitical through the first sixteen years of the twenty-first century.

I really checked out during the presidential campaign. Until November 8, I prided myself on the fact that I hadn’t watched a single moment of the debates, hadn’t seen a single stump speech on TV. I got my headlines from NPR and The New York Times; I listened and read selectively. I haven’t watched network or cable news in ten years.

My approach may have been flawed, it may have been selfish, but it was a considered decision.

That all changed November 9, when I woke up to our current national nightmare. I’m still spiraling, really.

I’ve reluctantly concluded that I can’t withdraw anymore. The math has changed. I need to change, too, both in terms of what I take in and what I put out.

Regarding input, I’ve started

OCT. 7: The Washington Post unearths a hot-mic recording of Donald Trump boasting about his sexual conquests and his ability to “grab [women] by the pussy” with impunity on account of his fame.

OCT. 8: Hurricane Matthew dumps several feet of rain on much of the state and causes catastrophic flooding in eastern North Carolina.

reading everything I can on the incoming Trump administration.

It’s making me crazy, of course— my news app right now is just a sadness-delivery machine. But I’m going to have to deal with that.

As to output, I’ve started signing petitions, writing lawmakers, and donating money where I can. I hope to make the rally and protest circuit in 2017. I aim to misbehave.

That’s because I believe that Donald Trump is an existential threat to our country and our planet. Forget Democrat versus Republican, left versus right. This isn’t a partisan issue, and these false equivalencies are going to kill us.

I’m not mad because my team lost.

I’m petrified because a clinical narcissist now has the launch codes for nuclear weapons. Trump has demonstrated, publicly and repeatedly, that he has the temperament and attention span of a third-grader. He reacts to what’s put in front of him.

He lashes out. What happens when North Korea calls him chicken?

I figure it never hurts to aim high with New Year’s resolutions, so what the hell: my resolution is to contribute to the process that results in Donald Trump’s impeachment in 2017.

—Glenn McDonald

OCT. 15: Vandals firebomb the Orange County Republican Party headquarters in Hillsborough, leaving graffiti that reads, “Nazi Republicans leave town or else.”

OCT. 29: Beloved Durham politician and progressive icon Paul Luebke loses a battle to cancer at seventy years old.

OCT. 28: Eleven days before the election, James Comey tells Congress the FBI is looking into new emails possibly related to the Clinton investigation. Nine days later, the FBI says the new emails didn’t alter its earlier conclusions.

OCT. 31: Complaining about The News & Observer ’s coverage, U.S. Senator Richard Burr bars the paper from receiving notifications about his campaign events.

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A damaged doll of President George W. Bush stands on a table in front of the window through which a firebomb was thrown into the Republican Party of Orange County headquarters in October. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

NOV. 7: Wake County commissioners endorse six weeks of paid parental leave for the county’s nearly four thousand employees.

NOV. 7: Leonard Cohen passes away at the age of eighty-two, three weeks after the release of his final album, You Want It Darker.

NOV. 7: Janet Reno, the first female attorney general, dies at seventy-eight.

NOV. 8: Donald Trumps wins the presidency while losing the popular vote. Burr defeats challenger Deborah Ross. State Republicans maintain their legislative supermajorities. McCrory challenges Cooper’s apparent victory.

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Sarah Shook is a 2016 Indies Arts Award winner.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

NOV. 10: President-elect Donald Trump tweets that protests over his election are “very unfair.”

NOV. 13: Trump names white nationalist and Breitbart CEO Steve Bannon his chief strategist and senior counselor.

NOV. 18: The Durham County Board of Elections rejects McCrory’s demand for a recount.

NOV. 10: The Durham City Council and Durham Police Department reach an agreement in which officers will write citations for misdemeanor marijuana offenses.

NOV. 13: McCrory demands a recount in Durham County.

NOV. 21: Durham City Council members vote to spend $1.4 million on body cameras.

NOV. 14: An autopsy performed on Keith Lamont Scott reveals that he was shot in the back.

NOV. 21: McCrory formally asks for a statewide recount.

NOV. 22: Durham police fatally shoot Frank Clark in McDougald Terrace. Cops and purported eyewitnesses have different accounts of what happened.

NOV. 25: Cuban dictator Fidel Castro dies at the age of ninety.

NOV. 29: A three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court orders the General Assembly to redraw its legislative maps and sets a special election for 2017.

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DEC. 3: To celebrate Trump’s victory, a handful of Ku Klux Klan members drive through a small North Carolina town flying Confederate flags out of their windows and yelling “white power.”

DEC. 5: McCrory, nearly a month after the election, finally concedes.

DEC. 5: After narrowly losing a vote to become vice-chair of the Wake County Board of Commissioners, Jessica Holmes abruptly resigns.

DEC. 6: Holmes retracts her resignation.

DEC. 6: The Raleigh City Council votes to approve $3.1 million in funding for the Oak City Outreach Center, a multiservice center for the city’s impoverished and homeless.

DEC. 6: The Carolina RailHawks soccer team changes its name to North Carolina FC. Team officials announce that they will pursue an MLS franchise.

DEC. 8: John Glenn, a former U.S. senator, presidential candidate, and the first American to orbit the Earth, dies at age ninety-five.

DEC. 13: The General Assembly reconvenes for a special session to address the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew.

DEC. 14: Minutes after the General Assembly passes the Disaster Recovery Act of 2016, state GOP leaders call for another special session.

DEC. 15: Protests break out in Raleigh after the N.C. House and Senate ram through a series of bills designed to curtail Governor-elect Cooper’s power.

DEC. 15: The Obama administration suggests that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally authorized the

hacking of Democratic officials before the November election.

DEC. 15: Dylann Roof is found guilty of murdering nine people last year at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

DEC. 16: State Representative Michael Speciale says protesters who converged on the Capitol during the special session were “thugs who are likely paid and bussed in to disrupt the business of those who represent the people.”

DEC. 19: After Charlotte repeals its nondiscrimination ordinance, McCrory calls yet another special session to repeal HB 2.

DEC. 21: The legislature fails to repeal HB 2, after Republicans try to couple the repeal with a moratorium on municipalities enacting new antidiscrimination ordinances.

DEC. 22: In an op-ed in the N&O, a UNC political science professor writes that, based on the criteria used to evaluate other countries’ elections, North Carolina does so poorly that it ranks alongside Iran and Venezuela. The state “can no longer call its elections democratic.”

DEC. 23: In an episode of This American Life , NCGOP executive director Dallas Woodhouse dismisses evidence showing that voter fraud is almost nonexistent. “Don't show me studies,” he says.

“Academics, I mean, a bunch of knuckleheads, pointy-headed professors.”

DEC. 25: Pop icon George Michael passes away at the age of fifty-three.

DEC. 27: This Year in Review issue goes to press. Nothing of consequence happens the remainder of 2016. (We hope.)

DECEMBER 20 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.

A double-exposure image of the state House of Representatives and state Senate in recess during the December 21 special session in which lawmakers failed to repeal HB 2. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

RESOLUTION Don’t Let the Bastards Win There’s really no other way to put it: Charlotte got played.

Its city council believed in the General Assembly’s honor and good intentions, a mistake no one who’s paid even the slightest attention the last four years should make. The Republicans promised Charlotte that, if it repealed its nondiscrimination ordinance, the legislature would repeal HB 2. Charlotte did. The legislature didn’t. Taxpayers shelled out $42,000 for a special session last week that accomplished precisely squat.

The story is more complicated than that, of course. Last Monday, Charlotte only partially repealed its ordinance and made that repeal contingent on the repeal of HB 2; the full repeal came two days later, on the morning before the legislature’s fifth special session of the year, and with it went the contingency. The legislature, meanwhile, was kinda-sorta willing to repeal HB 2, so long as there was a six-month moratorium on nondiscrimination ordinances, which the legislature could keep extending into perpetuity. It was a fairly transparent con, designed to limit the economic fallout from HB 2. Democrats refused to play along, and Republicans couldn’t get the votes.

So we’re back where we started. Worse, actually, since now the Charlotte ordinance is no longer on the books. The business and sports events that HB 2 chased away aren’t coming back, and the state’s LGBTQ population remains without protections.

The one silver lining was the activism HB 2 engendered.

Municipalities pledged solidarity with their LGBTQ brethren.

Protesters bearing air horns gathered weekly outside the Executive Mansion to make a righteously obnoxious noise.

There were anti-HB 2 concerts and events. We made the world notice—and in November, we sent Governor McCrory packing.

The funny thing is, I suspect HB 2 was never really McCrory’s baby; rather, it was forced on him, and he was too feckless to stand up to zealots in his own party. But, because he signed it and defended it, he became the target, the person at whom so many rhetorical arrows were slung. (Thanks to gerrymandering, the legislature was largely inoculated.)

So now there’s a Democratic governor who opposes HB 2— though, being a good, inoffensive moderate, he tends to talk about it more on economic than moral grounds. There’s no focal point for our collective (and productive) rage. Without that, I worry—and Republican leaders likely pray—that this rage will, over time, dissipate. After all, boiling anger is hard to sustain over months and years. So they think they can wait us out, that eventually, we’ll move on to the next outrage.

We mustn’t let that happen. And so this is my resolution, both as editor of this newspaper and as a citizen of North Carolina: we will not let this kind of bigotry become normal.

Thanks to the laughably racist gerrymandering being declared unconstitutional, there will (barring a successful appeal) be new elections next year. If we mobilize, if we stay angry enough, we can make the bastards pay for what they’ve done to our state.

—Jeffrey C. Billman

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Louder Now FROM MUSIC FESTIVALS AND RECORD STORES TO HB 2 PROTESTS, TRIANGLE MUSIC GRAPPLED WITH GROWTH

BY ALLISON HUSSEY

Boulevards at the Hopscotch Music Festival

NORTH CAROLINA RIVETED THE NATION IN A YEAR WHEN ART AND POLITICS COLLIDED

T

his year, for good and for ill, the nation's attention turned to North Carolina. House Bill 2 made national headlines and sent violent ripples through the art world, as creators and presenters banded together against the discriminatory lesgislation—or against the state. But as we became a national laughingstock and battle lines were drawn, our artists responded with courage, commitment, unity, and a will to save North Carolina from regressive forces.

Musicians played anti-HB 2 benefits and branched out into other kinds of activism. Visual artists created safe spaces for endangered populations and turned to political performance art in droves. Independent bookstores banded together to affirm their status as bastions of diversity, curiosity, and open intellectual inquiry. Theater artists pushed to widen the inclusion of women on local stages as misogyny was enshrined in the highest office in the land. It wasn't all negative attention, though even the positive looks often had a serrated edge, as the country enjoyed a Southern food fad that raised existential questions of authenticty and ownership here. All this national scrutiny, not to mention the dire state of N.C. politics, raised the stakes for our artists, who admirably rose to the occasion. We trust that they'll use their heightened platforms for continued protest in 2017. We'll be here to hold them accountable, support them when they succeed, and catch them when they fall. —Brian Howe

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I

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

n a year when it felt like all hell broke loose at every turn, art has remained a crucial comfort and invaluable outlet for speaking truth to power.

It was a busy but rewarding year for local music as we’ve wrestled with everything these twelve months threw at us.

At the beginning of JANUARY, Carolina Soul, which had operated its online retail business in Durham for years, celebrated the official grand opening of its brickand-mortar store on Main Street. A few blocks away, community members rallied in four spectacular shows at the end of January and early FEBRUARY to save The Pinhook from an eighty-thousand-dollar accounting error that threatened to shutter the community hub.

The Pinhook went on to settle its debt with the state department of revenue, and spent the rest of the year holding strong. In late September, The Pinhook welcomed a new upstairs neighbor: the sit-down restaurant iteration of the Pie Pushers food truck.

Chapel Hill also got a new record store—sort of—in late February. Local institution Schoolkids Records purchased CD Alley, which meant a Schoolkids would be back on Franklin Street after closing its original store there in 2008. CD Alley officially became Schoolkids on March 1.

Springtime found the Triangle music scene at its most hectic, thanks in large part to the passage of HB 2 at the end of MARCH. Artists including Bruce Springsteen, Ringo Starr, Boston, Pearl Jam, Ani DiFranco, Maroon 5, and Itzhak Perlman canceled concerts in the Triangle, Greensboro, and Charlotte in protest of the bill. Others, like Rhiannon Giddens, the Dixie Chicks, Dead & Company, and Duran Duran used their shows as platforms for protest and fundraisers for organizations like Equality NC and the Human

Rights Campaign.

At the end of APRIL, Hopscotch announced its first 2016 headliner, Lavender Country, widely recognized as the first openly gay country band, as a protest against the bill; Lavender Country’s festival set in September was equal parts concert and queer history lesson. The cancelations slowed down throughout the summer and fall, but on December 12, Carolina Performing Arts announced that the San Francisco Symphony was canceling its April 2017 performances over the bill. As last week’s special sessions at the General Assembly demonstrated, it’ll probably be a while before we’re out of the woods with HB 2.

But spring wasn’t all bad. Art of Cool and Moogfest both made strong showings in Durham in MAY—AoC for its third year, Moogfest for its first after relocating from Asheville. The festivals had clashed over uneven funding from the city of Durham, but the city granted the grassroots Art of Cool an additional twenty thousand dollars shortly before the festival arrived. Moogfest drew international attention to Durham for its high-minded approach to music, technology, and the future of both. And in Carrboro in early April, The Station reopened under new ownership after closing at the end of 2015. Once home to free live music every night of the week, the club now hosts regular shows and dance parties for a modest cover.

JUNE, JULY, and AUGUST were peppered with local acts, from MAKE to the Mountain Goats, throwing their own anti-HB 2 benefits, with proceeds going to organizations like the Southern Vision Alliance and Southerners on New Ground. Cary got a new music venue, the Sound Factory, an alcohol-free allages space that boasts a DIY approach to booking, though it’s been quiet through much of the fall. Hop-

Nathan Bowles: Whole & Cloven Bowles is a relatively recent transplant to the Triangle, and his latest album on Paradise of Bachelors finds the banjo picker taking his instrument to intricate new ends.

The Dead Tongues: Montana On his second record as The Dead Tongues, Ryan Gustafson delivers another clutch of scintillating songs that raise the bar for folk-rock in a flooded market and find Gustafson further strengthening his instrumental and lyrical chops.

Skylar Gudasz: Oleander Gudasz finally released her first proper full-length in February, and Oleander is a collection of even-keeled tunes that bridge classic folk, pop, and rock in a gleaming new package.

MAKE: Pilgrimage of Loathing The Chapel Hill metal trio MAKE leaned harder into politically inspired songwriting on this summer’s Pilgrimage of Loathing, which offers a kind of heavy catharsis that’s proved necessary in a tumultuous year.

Jenks Miller & Rose Cross NC: Blues from WHAT Jenks Miller’s first “official” release with Rose Cross NC burns slowly across its forty-two minutes, but its hypnotic, drone-driven intensity will help you drop out of life for a spell.

No One Mind: No One Mind A band that rose from the ashes of Toddlers, No One Mind's shoegazey self-titled album is one of the strongest local rock releases of the year.

Some Army: One Stone and Too Many Birds Another long-awaited LP, Some Army’s dense One Stone and Too Many Birds is a fuzzed-out rock record that satisfies from start to finish.

Joe Westerlund: Mojave Interlude Conceived as a score for a dance piece, the two-part Mojave Interlude is a brain-tickling electronic endeavor from percussionist Joe Westerlund that keeeps you on your toes with its unexpected twists and turns.

ZenSoFly: Little Miss Perfect EP ZenSoFly rose up as a powerful force in local hiphop this year, and her debut EP is as audacious as she is. She's a clever writer who shows off her skills well.

THE TEN BEST LOCAL SONGS OF 2016 Shirlette Ammons: “Dear Nora” Featuring Meshell Ndegeocello on vocals, “Dear Nora” is a dreamy cut from Ammons’ February LP, Language Barrier. The song's sparkling simplicity is utterly gorgeous.

Hiss Golden Messenger: “Biloxi” The lead single from Hiss Golden Messenger’s Heart Like a Levee is a warm, big-hearted tune that strikes an easygoing balance between comfort and weariness.

Beauty World: “Joypop Turbo” Beauty World once limited its instrumentation to mostly guitar and cello, but the band has blossomed by adding rich new layers to its sound on this fall’s Joypop Turbo EP. Driven by a charming melody, the EP's title track is one of Beauty World's best songs yet.

Horseback: “Shape of the One Thing” We've heard the turn of phrase "ugly crying," but what about pretty anger? The dark and brooding second song from this summer’s Dead Ringers, “Shape of the One Thing” shimmers as it seethes with its layers of guitars and electronic elements.

Flock of Dimes: “Semaphore” Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner is another new face in Durham, and she issued her solo full-length debut as Flock of Dimes this fall. The electropop tune “Semaphore” alternately chugs and tiptoes, with Wasner maintaining an effortless grace.

The Hot at Nights: “O.R.G.Y” The Hot at Nights re-interpreted a small batch of local songs for its January EP, Cool It, and its version of this Hammer No More the Fingers tune is a brassy, twangy delight.

Loamlands: "Restless One” Kym Register powers the magnetic “Restless One” with a crunchy guitar riff, and the song’s soaring

now

FINDER

Body Games: Damager Anchored by vocal duets by Kate Thompson and Dax Beaton, the dark electronic moods of Body Games’ Damager are irresistible.

GUIDE TO THE TRIANGLE

THE TEN BEST LOCAL ALBUMS OF 2016

THE INDY'S

scotch descended on Raleigh for its seventh year in early SEPTEMBER, and festival director and cofounder Greg Lowenhagen announced that it would be his last. Nathan Price, who’s worked with Hopscotch since 2012, took over Lowenhagen’s position on September 16.

That same weekend, the Raleigh-based North Carolina Opera undertook an ambitious production for its season opener, staging Wagner’s Das Rheingold in Meymandi Concert Hall; at the end of October, it staged Patrick Morganelli’s delightfully creative Hercules vs. Vampires. For its consistently excellent efforts over the years, the institution was among this year’s Indies Arts Awards winners. Musicians Sarah Shook and Erika Libero received one, too, in part for their anti-HB 2 Safe Space sticker initiative.

The duo was also responsible for Manifest, a new music festival at Local 506, Nightlight, and The Cave in OCTOBER, which focused on spotlighting bands whose members were not exclusively men.

Things have slowed down as we’ve slid into the holiday season, but you’ve still got at least one more night stacked with shows to end the year (see p. 31). Next year won’t be a cake walk, but one thing you can count on is a local community that’s as responsive and engaged as ever. ahussey@indyweek.com

on stands

chorus will have you shouting along with it in no time.

Mandolin Orange: “Gospel Shoes” “Gospel Shoes” might not sound like a protest song, but Mandolin Orange wryly pushes back against Bible-thumping, hypocritical American politicians over a tasteful and well-rounded full-band arrangement.

Mount Moriah: “Chiron (God in the Brier)” On this track from February’s How to Dance, Heather McEntire sings, “Light came knockin’ knockin’ on my door, and I got no need for you no more.” It’s a strong, confident song that feels equally empowering and soothing.

Sylvan Esso: “Radio” The Durham duo’s driving new single, released in November, is Sylvan Esso's most biting and aggressive songs to date, hinting at a muscular new LP next year.

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 23

Where We’re At

THE TEN BEST MOVIES OF 2016

REFRESHERS AND UPDATES ON THE TOP STORIES OF A VOLATILE 2016 IN THE ARTS

AMERICAN HONEY Newcomer Sasha Lane's stunningly tough but vulnerable performance and Robbie Ryan's cinematography capture the raw, vibrant energy of teens on society's fringes. —Laura Jaramillo

BY BRIAN HOWE

ARRIVAL In what's basically an art film with a Paramount budget, Denis Villeneuve gives us an alien invasion without fighting, a lesson in linguistics, a formidable Amy Adams, and a heady twist that really lands, all with cold, engrossing beauty and fascination.

—Brian Howe CERTAIN WOMEN Kelly Reichardt's slow, meditative film leaves room for pauses that reveal immense emotional complexity, such as the silences between would-be lovers Beth (Kristen Stewart) and Jamie (Lily Gladstone). —LJ THE HANDMAIDEN Park Chan-wook delivers an exhilarating Korean-Victorian erotic thriller that rotates and swivels like some clockwork puzzle from a parallel universe. It’s fifty shades of cray. —Glenn McDonald

The Durham Artists Movement in its Parrish Street space PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

A

dark year in the Triangle started on a deceptively light note when Chatham County got mixed up with an Oscar-gobbling movie. In JANUARY, we profiled Pittsboro tool shop owner Ed Lebetkin, whose antique tool collection was sought out by The Revenant's producers to add authenticity to the 1823 setting. Has Ed gotten more movie work since? Well, no. “There haven’t been many movies featuring antique woodworking tools lately,” he says good-humoredly. But he’s enjoyed his local celebrity. Meanwhile, Unexposed Microcinema moved into Durham’s Golden Belt district, giving experimental film a social hub. Vivienne Benesch staged Three Sisters, her first production as director of PlayMakers, and elicited a rave review from INDY theater critic Byron Woods. Carolina Theatre CEO Bob Nocek resigned after the discovery that the historic theater was running a huge deficit, going on to form a new concert and comedy company, Bob Nocek Presents.

FEBRUARY and MARCH were transitional months, too.

Beloved Quail Ridge Books founder Nancy Olson passed away while the store was moving from its longtime home in Ridgewood Shopping Center to new digs in North Hills. Ward Theatre Company debuted in its Durham space with Jacuzzi, which we dubbed the hottest show in town. In a year when so many theaters foundered, will this one stick around? “We’re building two new original productions slated for 2017 that will take audiences from deep-woods Appalachia to nineteenthcentury Ireland,” says director Wendy Ward.

In APRIL, some things were business as usual—Full Frame came and went—but most things were not, after the late24 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

March passage of House Bill 2 sparked a maelstrom of cancellations, boycotts, and benefits. Still, there was a little good news: Durham fashion line Runaway Clothing opened its first brick-and-mortar store. And GeekCraft Expo, a new national series of expos for handmade geek-chic wares, debuted at the Durham Armory. “We had almost three thousand attendees and our exhibitors reported record sales—several of them were making things at the show to keep up with the demand,” says cofounder Daniel Way. As the expo expands nationally, plans for a second round on May 14 at the Durham Armory are underway; you have until January 23 to apply for a booth to hawk your Westworld macramé coasters.

April showers bring MAY Moogfests, which fled Asheville for Durham, but the month also saw a sad exit. Esteemed used book and record shop Nice Price folded, replaced in its Broad Street spot by—single tear—a Papa John’s. As if in defiance, local authors made national noise. Journalist Bronwen Dickey released her controversial Pit Bull: The Battle over an American Icon, while a unique talk that Monica Byrne gave at the 2016 TED conference in Vancouver in February hit the Internet.

The American Dance Festival returned like clockwork in JUNE and JULY, but otherwise it was musical chairs. Near Golden Belt, SPECTRE Arts owner Alicia Lange opened her new Torus Building and the Carrack Modern Art moved in, expanding the downtown Durham scene. The radically intersectional Durham Artists Movement took over the end of the Carrack’s lease on Parrish Street and won an Indies Arts Award for creating a safe space for marginalized artists. Now

HELL OR HIGH WATER All the traditional tropes are here (cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, an aw-shucks lawman and hayseed banks), but this postmodern Western starring a complex Jeff Bridges is about how the West was lost, not how it was won.

—Neil Morris THE LOBSTER Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos’s Hollywood breakthrough, a lush dystopian diorama of mandatory romantic coupledom, is as hilarious, cruel, manipulative, and utterly original as his independent films were. —BH MANCHESTER BY THE SEA Casey Affleck gives an Oscar-worthy performance as a man with a tragic past returning to his hometown after his brother’s death.

Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan sharply observes and juxtaposes quotidian moments with dysfunction and loss. —NM MOONLIGHT Barry Jenkins decants black masculinity, homosexuality, and mentorship into a hurting, hopeful coming-of-age elixir that deserves every ray of praise for its alertness to humanity, its disregard for stereotypes, and its sensitive performances. —BH NOCTURNAL ANIMALS Amy Adams (again!) and Jake Gyllenhaal shatter in slow motion in Tom Ford's menacing pulp fiction, which pours hot-blooded Texas noir into the cool porcelain aesthetics of the L.A. art world. —GM THE WITCH This portrait of a Puritan family gripped by witch hysteria is meticulously researched and genuinely terrifying. —LJ

they’re leaving the loft with more members, clearer goals, and a commitment to finding a sustainable home in 2017. And Chapel Hill’s Deep Dish Theater Company, long based at University Mall, quietly closed. We asked founder Paul Frellick, who is moving to Los Angeles with his wife, what he’s been up to since our exit interview. “The last couple of months were filled with opportunities to reminisce with colleagues and audiences about our fifteen-year run, along with a little writing, a little parenting, and a whole lot of packing,” he says. “I’m excited about opportunities in LA, but the Deep Dish experience will always occupy a preeminent spot in my career.”

Funding was a major concern in the performing arts this month, as Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern switched to a patronage model and Saxapahaw’s Culture Mill received the first of two grants that nudged it from shoestring to sustainable. We starkly witnessed local theater’s venue challenges, but some found ways to make that an asset.

Raleigh’s Bare Theatre staged free Shakespeare at unusual public sites, crowd-funding the production with considerable success.

“We had backers contribute more than two thousand dollars to production costs and to help travel the show around the Triangle,” says Bare Theatre director G. Todd Buker.

“Lots of audience members tipped the actors

as well. The show ran for seventeen performances over six weeks and saw more than seven hundred in attendance, which is larger than some of our black-box productions.”

The big news in AUGUST was the debut of the Women’s Theatre Festival, which took over Triangle venues to produce shows largely staffed by women and won an Indies Arts Award for its efforts to correct local theater’s abysmal gender balance. The upshot for women, says founder Ashley Popio, is having “a giant theatrical network of people they know now”—no small prize in a field that, like most, thrives on nepotism. Meanwhile, Raleigh gallery Adam Cave Fine Art escaped downtown development for the edge of Five Points. The versatile, accessible space (dedicated parking!) has served the gallery well.

“We have seen more visitors, more new faces,” Cave says. “With the opening of Lee Hansley Gallery and Glas on the same block, I think we are in the beginning stages of a real arts district here.” Hansley, a Raleigh gallery pioneer, would leave his genteel Victorian space in Glenwood for a modern warehouse in Dock 1053 in October.

In addition to the usual Hopscotch fests in Raleigh and the debut of Varipop in Durham, SEPTEMBER and OCTOBER found national acclaim flowing into the Triangle—a nice change of pace from the censure precipitated

by HB 2. Belle Boggs developed her breakout 2012 essay about infertility, “The Art of Waiting,” into a full-length collection that earned plaudits from The New York Times and Oprah.

The Times also took note—with a bit of condescension (did you know we were “the hinterlands?”)—of the Nasher exhibit Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art, which INDY art critic Chris Vitiello called “life-changing.” And Durham's Stacey L. Kirby won $200,000 at the international ArtPrize festival in Michigan for The Bureau of Personal Belonging.

“This offers opportunities for expansion beyond North Carolina, especially in light of the presidential election and recent local legislation,” Kirby says. She’s planning to issue “restroom facility permits” in Trump Tower and is working on a “swing state tour” of Bureau, which challenges viewers to reconsider how they classify others and themselves.

In NOVEMBER, the North Carolina Museum of Art opened its new park with a celebration that drew ten thousand people. New sculptures have continued to appear there since; one by Mark di Suvero just went up alongside the Blue Ridge Road corridor. In thornier news, a group of local independent theaters joined an initiative to hire female directors before a discrimination complaint to the City of Raleigh (some of the signees

receive public funds) halted it. But don’t think this setback undoes the work of the Women’s Theatre Festival—it’s one step back, one giant leap forward.

Speaking of giant leaps, director Joseph Megel took a work by Elisabeth Lewis Corley, based on interviews by students in UNC’s Southern Oral History Program, across the pond. After The Black Pioneers Project, about the first generation of black students at UNC, had its first staged reading in UNC’s Process Series, Megel was invited to take it to King’s College London right after the U.S. election.

“The discussion about this oral history and its legacy, in relationship to our current political situation and theirs, was engaging and provocative,” Megel says. “After doing the project in Chapel Hill with many of the pioneers present, a truly emotional experience, it was equally moving to see how issues of color can be global, and issues of justice international.”

Which brings us to cruel DECEMBER, when theater suffered more blows: the closing of Durham’s venerable Common Ground and the endangerment of Raleigh’s Sonorous Road.

The Raleigh art scene lost Flanders Gallery, but it gained the continued existence of Lump, as Flanders’s Kelly McChesney stepped in for outgoing Lump director Bill Thelen and earned an Indies Arts Award for her trouble. bhowe@indyweek.com

THE TEN MOST FANTASTICAL BOOKS OF 2016

BY SAMUEL MONTGOMERY-BLINN BLOOD FAMILY by Brent Winter (Selfpublished) This gripping, literary occult thriller explores the ties of family, layers of reality, and the edges where sanity blurs into the supernatural.

Walker launched a YA series featuring a teenage protagonist who has bounced from foster home to foster home—oh, yeah, and she can talk to ghosts, even if she’d rather be left alone.

CINDER by James Maxey (Self-published) We had to wait four years for this stunning conclusion to the Hillsborough author and recent Piedmont Laureate’s “Dragon Apocalypse” series, set in an imaginative high-action fantasy world that asks plenty of moral and ethical questions.

THE DRAGON HAMMER by Tony Daniel (Baen Books) Roman vampires war with Dragon-bonded Vikings in a Shenandoah Valley full of talking buffalo, gnomes, and star-crossed elves in this fantasy adventure for readers twelve and up.

DEATH’S BRIGHT DAY by David Drake (Baen Books) In the eleventh novel in his “Lt. Leary” series, the legendary military science-fiction author sends now-Captain Leary into the gray areas of an interstellar cold war.

THE DELPHI EFFECT by Rysa Walker (Skyscape) To follow her best-selling, award-winning "CHRONOS Files" series,

THE LAST GREAT AMERICAN MAGIC

by L. C. Fiore (Can of Corn Media) The Durham author weaves magic, myth, and history to retell the story of the Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, struggling to preserve his tribe’s way of life against encroaching Europeans at the end of the Victorian era. Shamans, nightmarish beasts, twin brothers, and beautiful writing await.

OUTRIDERS by Jay Posey (Angry Robot) This is gritty, detail-oriented, squad-based special ops in a solar system on the brink of war from Posey, the Durham-based author of the "Legends of the Duskwalker” series and narrative designer of multiple Tom Clancy video game franchises.

THE RAVEN AND THE REINDEER

by T. Kingfisher (Red Wombat Tea Co.) The popular Pittsboro children’s author Ursula Vernon has also been successfully writing darker fairy tales for adults under this pen name, here offering a dark and whimsical take on Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.

THE WOODEN PRINCE by John Claude Bemis (Disney-Hyperion) Back with his first novel in four years, the Hillsborough children’s author recasts the story of Pinocchio in a gloriously rendered Venetian Empire of alchemists, airships, fairies, djinn, and the legendary Prester John.

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 25

The Agitators

THE BEST LOCAL ART COUNTERATTACKED A DISGRACEFUL YEAR

BY CHRIS VITIELLO the hilarious, edgy spectacle of “Consensus While this year felt like one long punch in Reality” by Gabrielle Duggan and Neill Prethe mouth, lots of great local art hit back. witt at the Carrack. It made me write “TalkSeveral large group exhibits showed ing Heads circa 2016” in my notebook. countless ways that artists are responding I have vivid memories of street theater to contentious political times. At Raleigh’s at protests this year, especially of Durham Pink Building, FUHB2: NC Artists Respond Artists Movement members in front of to House Bill 2 was aggressive right when the Durham Police Department, expresswe needed it. It included Stacey L. Kirby’s ing authority’s menace and bathroom installation, “I AM,” absurdity without parody. which became part of her ArtTheir street art stood out, too, Prize-winning installation in including posters with the Michigan later in the year. At word “HATE” on a demonic Visual Art Exchange, Black Trump and records fastened on Black gave crucial space to to trees and fences in Durartists of color and may have ham, painted with rememfuture iterations in 2017. At brances of police-violence the Nasher, Southern Accent: victims such as Jesus HuerSeeking the American South ta. Choreographer Stephain Contemporary Art contexnie Leathers’s performances tualized the issues raised in around Durham construction FUHB2 and Black on Black. sites also stood out as necMany solo shows also stood essary moves in gentrified out for activism, outrage, territory. and defiance. I’ll never forget The most fun art night of Antoine Williams’s “Those the year was the first (and, I Other People (For Fredhope, annual) Monster Drawdie Gray),” a trio of hanging ing Rally at the North Carsculptures from which seat olina Museum of Art. Scads belt straps dangled almost to of artists worked shoulder to the floor of the Artspace lobby. shoulder on original drawAndré Leon Gray’s one-room Jeffrey Gibson's "I ings, which were then sold show at 21c Museum Hotel, Put a Spell on You" to giddy, salivating crowds A Nation Under Our Feet, was in Southern Accent at (I took home great works by just as intense, especially one the Nasher PHOTO BY PETER Tedd Anderson and Celia piece that mimicked the presPAUL GEOFFRION Johnson). Other exciting new idential seal in tar. In a Raleigh arrivals on the scene included Don’t You Lie storefront, Lincoln Hancock’s interactive To Me!, an artist-interview podcast by Jeff light installation, “Flag,” took a subtler tack Bell and Warren Hicks; Tether Projects, to question identity and authority. Other Rusty Shackleford and Julie Rudder’s ongonotable solo shows included William Paul ing series of artists’ flags in front of SPECThomas’s Thicker Than Mud at the DurTRE Arts; and the ART& community space ham Art Guild’s Room 100, Lien Truong’s at the Ackland Art Museum, which comAmerica, America and al maghrib ghareeb at missioned murals from Stacy Lynn WadThe Carrack, and Gesche Würfel’s Oppresdell, Heather Gordon, and Derek Toomes. sive Architecture and Thomas Sayre’s White Next year is shaping up to be another round Gold at CAM Raleigh. of bare-fisted combat. At least we have a full Performance art gained momentum this complement of artists, curators, and instiyear. Some of the best included the intense tutions willing to swing the bat for us. mess of “Mattress Power,” an installation Twitter: @ChrisVitiello and video by Charles Chace, Ginger Wagg, and Jesse Paddock at SPECTRE Arts, and 26 | 12.28.16 | INDYweek.com

THE TEN BEST PLAYS OF 2016

BY BYRON WOODS

ALL MY SONS (Theatre Raleigh at Kennedy Theatre, Raleigh) A top-flight ensemble led by Julie Fishell, Mitch Poulos, Charlie Brady, and Meagan Mackenzie Chieppor explored the secrets and lies of a mid-century American family frozen by wartime grief. www.theatreraleigh.com CLOUD 9 (Tiny Engine Theatre at Common Ground Theatre, Durham) A gutsy ensemble in Victorian drag took on Caryl Churchill's farcical roundelay of gender roles and noblesse oblige, from the British empire a century ago to today. www.tinyenginetheatre.com DOUBT (Temple Theatre, Sanford) Actors Lynda Clark and Gus Allen went ten rounds in a psychological war of nerves in a play where a priest's behavior with a young boy comes under question. www.templeshows.com HAMLET (Honest Pint Theatre at William Peace University, Raleigh) This rare, audacious staging of Shakespeare's complete text occasionally flirted with disaster in theatrical deconstructions, but it delivered thought-provoking performances from accomplished actors and a nuanced vision of a dysfunctional Denmark. www.honestpinttheatre.org JACUZZI (Ward Theatre Company at Ward Theatre, Durham) In her North Carolina debut, director Wendy Ward gave proof of concept for the techniques of acting teacher Sanford Meisner with a taut psychological thriller set in a remote Rocky Mountains cabin. www.wardtheatrecompany.com LUNGS (Sonorous Road Productions at Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh) Director Tony Lea, in his best work to date, led Michelle Murray Wells and Jonathan King through the dramatic twists of a young millennial couple destined to overthink everything about their relationship. www.sonorousroad.com "MASTER HAROLD"…AND THE BOYS (Mortall Coile Theatre Company at Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh) Gil Faison's career-defining performance and newcomer Ben Pluska's strong work anchored Athol Fugard's memoir of racial dialogue in apartheid-era South Africa. www.mctheatre.com

MOTHERS AND SONS (Raleigh Little Theatre at Gaddy-Goodwin Teaching Theatre, Raleigh) With actors Brian Westbrook and Christopher Maxwell, stage veteran Rebecca Johnston probed the legacy of AIDS in playwright Terrence McNally’s consideration of what the living owe to one another—and to the dead. www.raleighlittletheatre.org TIME STANDS STILL (South Stream Productions at Sonorous Road Theatre, Raleigh) Investigative journalism hurts when the subject is yourself. Two war correspondents asked what their relationship was based on besides good sourcing in this emotionally frank drama. www.southstreamproductions.blogspot. com THREE SISTERS (PlayMakers Repertory Company at Paul Green Theatre, Chapel Hill) The strong production values of Vivienne Benesch's first show as artistic director of PlayMakers let us look in on a bell jar of privilege and useless aristocracy before the Russian revolution. www.playmakersrep.org

David Henderson in Hamlet PHOTO BY CURTIS BROWN PHOTOGRAPHY

Growing Our Own

AS THE NATION FEASTED ON SOUTHERN FOOD FADS THIS YEAR, WE HELD DOWN OUR DIVERSE ROOTS

BY VICTORIA BOULOUBASIS

Tamales being plated at El Chapin in Durham PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

This year brought many headaches and heartbreaks, but our food still showed us our soul. If you bit hard enough, you could find plenty of stories on your plate.

In our 2016–17 Finder special, Angela Perez heralded the wide appeal of Southern food. “Even the most healthconscious cosmopolitan needs to find culinary succor in some good ol’ downhome fried and fatback-laden goodness,” she wrote. It’s true. Southern food is a thing. Food-obsessed people nationwide looked South, despite our political faux pas, for the latest dishes. But while the rest of the country defined Southern food as trendy chicken-and-waffle joints and sixty-six-dollar collards from Neiman Marcus, we stayed rooted in what we know is truly ours.

THE FIVE BEST DANCE PERFORMANCES OF 2016

BY MICHAELA DWYER

JOHN JASPERSE PROJECTS: REMAINS (American Dance Festival at Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham) Downtown New York dance stalwart John Jasperse’s impeccable movers tripleted in sequined dresses and assumed hedonistic poses in a haunting meditation on artistic legacy. www.americandancefestival.org LIL BUCK: A JOOKIN’ JAM SESSION (Carolina Performing Arts at Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill) Lil Buck interweaved the jagged fluidity of Memphis jookin’ with borderless music from members of the Silk Road Ensemble in spring’s most spectacular show. www.carolinaperformingarts.org TOMMY NOONAN: JOHN (Durham Independent Dance Artists and Culture Mill at Living Arts Collective, Durham) Noonan, dressed in garish red and drenched in sweat, played hype man, politician, and Saturday Night Fever’s Tony

Manero in a pre-election doozy of a solo that took swings at masculinity and ambition. www.culturemill.org REAL.LIVE.PEOPLE.DURHAM: FEATURE PRESENTATION (DIDA at The Trotter Building, Durham) In this relentlessly energetic dance theater piece, Anna Barker and Leah Wilks teased out their real and fictive selves to interrogate what audiences and arts patrons expect of dancers—and vice versa. www.didaseason.com TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY: IN PLAIN SITE (Duke Performances at Duke Gardens, Durham) The legendary postmodern choreographer’s troupe led us through a pastoral re-setting of her repertoire in what felt like a private tour of the gardens. www.dukeperformances.duke.edu

One persistent myth of the South is its cultural homogeny, but there is no dearth of diversity here, and there hasn’t ever been. Southern food provides a rich historical context for this variety. In 2016, we saw Triangle folks staking claim to their roots or blooming (and flourishing) where they’ve been planted.

The Ordoñez family at El Chapin, the first Guatemalan restaurant in North Carolina, celebrated its first year of business in a Durham strip mall. Toriano and Serena Fredericks of the roving Boricua Soul food truck and Oscar Diaz at Raleigh’s Jose and Sons challenged the idea of authenticity in food as well as our obsession with it.

In our Dish special, Kim Lan Grout

pushed a tense conversation about cultural appropriation in a new direction, comforting us with the notion that it’s OK to eat pho how you want to (it’s “a lot like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup: there is no wrong way to eat it”), but reminding us to make sure we gulp the history that comes with it. And our inaugural food awards honored four local preservers of tradition—Katherine Gill of the Hub Farm, April McGreger of Farmer’s Daughter Pickles and Preserves, and brother-sister team Vansana and Vanvisa Nolintha of Bida Manda.

These Southerners are planting, sustaining, and shaping the future of food here in the Triangle, and it’s food that takes you to the heart of a place. vbouloubasis@indyweek.com

INDY WEEK’S BAR + BEVERAGE MAGAZINE

ON STANDS FEBRUARY 22 RESERVE BY JANUARY 11 INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 27

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PHOTO BY JUSTIN COOK

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Eugene Chadbourne FILE

MUSIC

MONDAY, JANUARY 2

INTERNATIONAL WONDER OF WEIRD SONGBOOK It’s been about a year since Eugene Chadbourne, a Greensboro-based heavyweight of broadminded experimental music, last took up Neptunes Parlour in Raleigh for one of his renowned residencies. To kick off 2017, the uncontainable banjoist leads a new outing titled “International Wonder of Weird Songbook,” and the foundation is protest music of all stripes. Will it be Woody Guthrie, Hazel Dickens, Pete Seeger, or Public Enemy? With any luck, we’ll get all that and more—Chadbourne’s sets always yield delightful surprises. The series continues every Monday in January and will feature a rotating cast of guests along the way. Yeah, you could take in just one set, but you’d be better off collecting ’em all. —Allison Hussey NEPTUNES PARLOUR, RALEIGH | $8, 8:30 p.m., www.kingsraleigh.com

FOOD

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31

FIRST NIGHT RALEIGH

Now a twenty-six-year-old tradition, First Night Raleigh continues to expand in tandem with its namesake city. This year it will involve nearly one hundred performances, spread across thirty-five venues with a lineup rich in local offerings. Hedonistic pleasures abound: you can dance and groove, eat and drink, get your face painted in jewel tones, and ride a Ferris wheel. You can also investigate some potentially new habits for the new year: ballroom dancing, for example, or yoga, or a henna tattoo—all are supposed to be good for you.

That’s a lot to take in, but fear not, there’s an app. As for midnight, the place to be is Fayetteville Street for a super-duper countdown, capped by the nowacornic Raleigh acorn drop and music by Jack the Radio and Birds of Avalon.

—David Klein VARIOUS VENUES, RALEIGH | Various times, free, www.firstnightraleigh.com

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

An American in Paris PHOTO

MUSIC

BY MATTHEW MURPHY/COURTESY OF DPAC

STAGE

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 30

PIPE

Pipe didn’t get all the props it deserved the first time around. Formed in Chapel Hill in the summer of 1991, the quartet bucked the college-rock conventions of the Triangle at the time. Pipe’s brash punk rock bridged hardcore and indie, and the band fit comfortably in both worlds, punk enough to tour with hardcore legends Bad Brains in 1994 but also melodic and accessible enough to tour with indie outfits like Versus and Archers of Loaf. That biformity earned Pipe a home in the nascent Merge Records stable, where they became kissing cousins with the likes of Polvo and Superchunk.

Hand injuries suffered by drummer Chuck Garrison and guitarist Clif Mann led to Pipe’s dissolution in 1999, but after a ten-year hibernation they reformed with original guitarist Mike Kenlan for Merge’s twentieth anniversary celebration. The band’s second wind is as strong as its first; Pipe still packs an immediate punch, swiveling and buckling with maniacal intensity. Old punks never die—and, in Pipe’s case, they don’t fade away, either. Elvis Division and DJ Tuhans open. —Patrick Wall

TUESDAY, JANUARY 3–SUNDAY, JANUARY 8

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS

In their Tony-winning 2015 Broadway production, director-choreographer Christopher Wheeldon and playwright Craig Lucas explore a different, darker vision of Vincente Minelli’s beloved 1951 MGM movie musical.

When the stage work begins, it’s 1945 rather than 1950, and Paris is just beginning to emerge from the trauma of occupation during the second World War. Aspiring painter Jerry, the Gene Kelly character, is a battlescarred war veteran. Lise, the aspiring ballerina Leslie Caron played, has survived the Holocaust. As the City of Lights reawakens to new possibilities and growth, can this unlikely couple do the same? Find out when the touring version comes to Durham this week. —Byron Woods DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DURHAM Various times, $30–$165, www.dpacnc.com

THE STATION, CARRBORO | $8, 10:30 p.m., www.stationcarrboro.com

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

THE BEST COUNTDOWN EVER AT DSI COMEDY THEATER (P. 35), DURHAM CINEMATHEQUE AT THE DURHAM HOTEL (P. 33), PARTY ON NEW YEAR’S EVE ANYWHERE YOU WANT (P. 31) INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 29

WE 12/28 TH 12/29

FR 12/30

SA 12/31 SU 1/1

STERN & COTTON THE BONDSMEN REUNION SHOW DUKE STREET DOGS SNAKE MALONE & BLACK CAT BONE NYE WITH JOSH PRESLAR BAND TBS 1ST SUNDAY BLUES JAM

8PM

6-8PM

6-9:30PM

TH 12/29

FR 12/30

SA 12/31

FR 1/6 SA 1/7 TH 1/12

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

SITTING IN THE INTERSECTION PODCAST SOIRÉE 8PM FREE PIPE W/ ELVIS DIVISION & DJ TUHANS 10PM $8

NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY W/ HAND OF DOOM (BLACK SABBATH COVER BAND) & SOLAR HALOS 9:30 $10 THE 8:59’S 8PM FLASH CAR (DJ SET) 10PM FREE DANIEL AYERS

W/ CASEY OVERTON 8PM $6/$8*

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KAITLYN RAITZ & BEN PLOTNICK

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AN EVENING WITH JO GORE

W/ SWIFT CREEK BAND 8PM $8/$10*

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Teasers New Years Eve Party Open 7pm-2am, Saturday, Dec 31st with all your favorite entertainers

Free hors d’oeuvres, party favors and a free champagne split per person Members in free 7-8pm

WED, DEC 28 BLUE NOTE GRILL: Blue Wednesday; 8 p.m. • CORNER TAVERN: Chris Overstreet; 9 p.m. • HUMBLE PIE: Sidecar Social Club; 8:30 p.m., free. • IRREGARDLESS: Matt Walsh, Levi Walsh; 6:30 p.m.

• LINCOLN THEATRE: Phish Live from MSG Webcast; 7 p.m. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Ill Digitz; 10 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Adwela & The Uprising; 9 p.m., $5–$8.

THU, DEC 29 Audio Fidelity HILL This exhilarating PUNKS Chapel Hill garage-punk three-piece possesses an aptitude for wringing insinuating hooks out of a musical vernacular pitched someplace between Tiger Trap and the MC5. On tracks like the scorched earth “Closeted Sex (A Satire),” frontwoman Kati McMonagle sounds fully weaponized as her voice drips with scorn. Pretty Odd opens.

—TB [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

AVL Battlegrounds BATTLE You don’t need an ARENA obsessive collection of classic battle rap to appreciate this night of fights brought to you by the AVL Battlegrounds crew.

Come and scope one of the most visceral, oft-underrepresented— No, 8 Mile doesn’t count—cornerstones of hip-hop. Matchups for the evening include Shame vs Samson, Kenny MacGuyver vs.

Thiago and Silhouette vs Qing.

—DS [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $7/9 P.M.]

PETER MULVEY / RYAN BAXTER

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

www.teasersmensclub.com 919-6-TEASER 156 Ramseur St. Durham, NC

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NOTE: HOLIDAY HOURS MAY AFFECT RECURRING EVENTS. CALL VENUES AHEAD OF TIME BEFORE MAKING PLANS.

9PM FREE 9PM $45/$25

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

8PM $10

LIVE MUSIC • OPEN TUESDAY—SUNDAY THEBLUENOTEGRILL.COM 709 WASHINGTON STREET • DURHAM

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music

COVER Though the band’s BONDS original run only lasted four years, Durham’s The Bondsmen are remembered fondly as a party band whose covers ranged from James Brown to the Five Americans. The band was only active from 1966 through 1970, but one member

went on to carve out a long, but rocky career in music. Phil Pearson, who later changed his last name to Lee, had started out in Durham, played briefly with the Flying Burrito Brothers then finally to Nashville where his career peaked with 2000’s The Mighty King of Love. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, $10/8 P.M.]

Local Band Local Beer: Boom Unit Brass Band HORN OF The final iteration of PLENTY the year for this can’t-miss combo of music and suds stars Boom Unit Brass band playing a rousing blend of funk, jazz, and NOLA second line propelled by rousing percussion and the members’ own vocal exhortations and handclaps. This is also the last time the series will be offered gratis: beginning next week, a five-dollar admission policy will go into effect to generate more money for the bands. With Trike and the Kapayah! Band. —DK [POUR HOUSE, FREE/9:30 P.M.]

David Teeter COUNTRY Three local MEN troubadours bring their complementary approaches to this bill of contemplative Americana. As leader of Martha Ann Motel, David Teeter purveyed a melodic alt-country built around his emphatic vocals and pensive worldview. As Young Yonder, he strikes a similar note of somber triumph. John Massengill, who usually leads Old Quarter, brings heat-streaked country tunes, while Christopher Lazarak sings stately folk songs in a ringing tenor pleasantly flecked with bits of grit and soul. —DK [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.] ALSO ON THURSDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Russell Favret Trio; 7 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: 15-501 Music; 6:30 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Phish Live from MSG Webcast; 7 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Lord Redbyrd; 10 p.m.

FRI, DEC 30 Dom Casual GUMBO Dom Casual strolls JAMS down the nostalgia aisle, throwing surf, garage, punk, and twisted sixties-style pop in its grocery cart to mix together and cook down into a scary but savory gumbo. The band serves it with some Link Ray fuzztone on top and a pinch of Tex-Mex organ stirred in for extra flavor. —GB [THE KRAKEN, FREE/9 P.M.]

Dylan Earl HELLO Dylan Earl is a EARL singer-songwriter out of Lake Charles, Louisiana, whose voice carries the weight and intimations of classic American music traditions. He operates out of Ontario now, but the music draws on the classic twangy country music of his native land. With The Hills and the Rivers and City Dirt. —DK [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.]

Kaylin YOUNG Local seventeenPOP year-old wunderkind Kaylin Roberson has made a name for herself with a robust, affecting voice that handles low key folk, winsome pop, and spare, high drama piano balladry with equal skill. With a formidable tool kit and growing fan base, her future might be limitless. Catch her in a small room while you can.

OG Merge and Cody Daniel open.

—EB [DEEP SOUTH, $5/8 P.M.]

Sunny Ledfurd NEW Like Tom T. Hall COUNTRY possessed by the spirit of Kid Rock, Sunny Ledfurd’s broadly comedic and lovingly rendered redneck leisure-time picaresques work equally well as subversive parodies and unironic calls to party. It can be difficult to discern the singer’s true intentions: catchy tunes like “Pontoon Boat” and “Myrtle Beach” contain a writerly

specificity and overall cleverness that cast suspicion on Ledfurd’s straight-up knucklehead persona.

Whatever the case might be, the young man definitely has an act.

—TB [POUR HOUSE, $12–$15/9 P.M.]

Laila Nur & the Love Riot DRUMS As an activist, OF LOVE Durham’s Laila Nur has spent time in the ranks of Cakalak Thunder, a radical drum corps that lends its sounds of support to progressive political activism. Now, Nur has revived the Love Riot, her folk-rock full-band project that’s been in hibernation for the past several months, for a throwdown at The Pinhook. Durham hip-hop institution The Beast opens, plus Vaughn Aed. —AH [THE PINHOOK, $10/9 P.M.]

PULSE Electronic Dance Party THUMP Surprisingly enough, THUMP “The Nightmare After Christmas” is not an ill-advised cash grab buried in the deepest recesses of Netflix. No, it’s the latest theme of PULSE, Raleigh’s monthly party dedicated to all things brash and unsubtle in electronic music. As always, here’s a perfect opportunity to rage the rest of 2016 away. —DS [LINCOLN THEATRE, $10–$15/9 P.M.]

Sherman & the Blazers BLUES Sherman & the Blazers BUDS reunites in the Cat’s Cradle Back Room in tribute to Rodney Underwood, a well loved blues musician and UNC grad who was devoted to the state and its music traditions, who died in 2009.

Expect some blues from the gut to be part of the proceedings. —DK [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $10/8:30 P.M.]

Snake Malone & the Black Cat Bone BAD TO Skipping easily from TH’BONE the deep-dish soul of Ray Charles to B. B. King’s string-bending heartbreak blues, Wilmington’s Snake Malone and his seven-piece outfit the Black Cat Bone whip up a honkin’ mess of blues from all over the country.

Malone has a fondness for Charles, but uses some interesting filters for his renditions, including a Pee Wee Crayton take on “But on the Other Hand” that’s so nasty it has

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31

SEE YA, 2016: NEW YEAR’S EVE As live music events in the Triangle go, Artsplosure’s First Night Raleigh continues to be both the biggest bash—and best bargain— for heralding the New Year. In its twenty-sixth iteration, the celebration pegs a pair of the area’s finest as headliners in Birds of Avalon and Jack The Radio. The former takes adventurous psychrock trips propelled by pounding percussion and powerful riffage, while the latter’s modern Southern sound is ambitious and melodic, whether it’s channeled through swampy roots-pop or synthy alt rock. Though stylistically diverse, both bands serve up accessible, arena-sized anthems worthy of the big stage. Other musical highlights range from the stellar indie folk of Durham singer-songwriter Skylar Gudasz to traditional bluegrass and country from local duo Compton & Newberry and rowdy Nashville garage-rocker Ron Gallo to brassy blues belter Pat “Mother Blues” Cohen, though there’s an array of options encompassing jazz, classical, gospel, soul, old-time, a cappella, opera, and more.

A slew of performing arts troupes representing comedy, theater, and dance will also descend upon downtown along with a variety of interactive art installations (see page 28 for more on that).

Of course, there’s plenty of choices elsewhere: The Cat’s Cradle Back Room will be lively when Boom Unit Brass Band takes the stage following an opening set from Boom Unit drummer Gary Mitchell. Though a recent addition to the Triangle scene, Boom Unit is comprised of accomplished musicians who view New Orleans tradition from a contemporary perspective, tackling both Dixieland classics and

unexpected pop covers and combining hip-hop, R&B, and funk into its custom party-ready blend.

In the Cat’s Cradle main room, promising Chapel Hill indie pop outfit Cool Party precedes The London Souls, whose originals could be easily mistaken for a classic rock radio block. Speaking of rock classics, Dex Romweber & Crash LaResh dig into Romweber’s work both with and without the Flat Duo Jets at The Cave; the new partnership Might Mare, which teams local Americana icons Sarah Shook and John Howie Jr., and Canadian country crooner Dylan Earl round out a terrific bill.

Back in Raleigh, The Maywood offers up a punishing quartet of metal acts—Datura, Arghast, Horseskull, and My Missing Half— that deal in varying strains of doom, thrash, and death. The Pour House will see reunions from both eighties party band The Fabulous Knobs and early seventies punk quintet Little Diesel.

BIG Something kicks out extended, eclectic jams with help from reggae dance act Spiritual Rez at Lincoln Theatre. Onyx Club Boys and The Clockwork Cabaret’s That Darling DJ Duo provide the soundtrack to Clockwork Ball: A Steampunk Masquerade at Saxapahaw’s Haw River Ballroom.

Cover band enthusiasts can throw down with 120 Minutes and Trainwreck for a “Back To The ’90s” throwback at The Ritz while reminiscing about that venue’s earlier days hosting some of the biggest names in alt rock.

Undercover will similarly mine pop and rock gems of the nineties and early aughts for its set at Deep South, where LaureNicole opens. Rewind

to the seventies and eighties as Same As It Ever Was explores the breadth of the Talking Heads’ catalog at Southland Ballroom or swing over to The Station, where Black Sabbath imitators Hand of Doom are supported by the heavy, ominous surges of Solar Halos in an effort to ring in 2017 with ringing eardrums. Meanwhile, JFK Jr. plays Motorco’s Motoroboto party, where it promises “hits from Reagan to Clinton” between sets from DJ Shahzad.

Class it up with dinner and a show with blues combo Josh Preslar Band at Blue Note Grill or DC-based go-go band JoGo Project at Beyù Caffè. The North Carolina Symphony and the N.C. Jazz Repertory Orchestra team up for Viennese waltzes and big band swing at annual New Year’s Eve in Vienna concert in Meymandi Concert Hall.

Naturally, DJs abound as well: The Pinhook says sayonara with its Go Home 2016 You’re Drunk party, where it plans to flush grievances down the toilet and pay tribute to artists lost during the year along with sets from DJ PlayPlay and DJ Gemynii. Ruby Deluxe hosts the ViZ New Year’s Eve Queer Dance Party with DJ Luxe Posh and DJ DNLTMS, while DJ Pangean spins the NYE Freak Out at Slim’s.

Nightlight continues its Persona series, pumping out house and techno, and City Limits breaks from its usual mold to bring in a DJ that’ll play country, rock, hip-hop, and more. —Spencer Griffith ANYWHERE YOU WANT TO BE Various times and prices, see venue websites for details.

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 31

celebrants howlin’ with ecstasy.

—GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, FREE/9 P.M.]

Yo Mama’s Big Fat Booty Band BOOTY These Boone-based BOUNTY funk stalwarts are seventies throwbacks in the best possible sense, capable of channeling the mind-frazzling let’s-get-weird experimental exploits of Parliament-Funkadelic, the soulful seductions of Curtis Mayfield, and the ambitious genre bending of Innervisions-era Stevie Wonder. With an uncanny knack for a deft hook and insinuating jam, tracks like the JB’s-referencing “Mama Feelgood” provide ample space for the band to cut deep grooves throughout its ingratiatingly high energy live shows. The Broadcast opens. —EB [SOUTHLAND BALLROOM, $12/10 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY ARCANA: Stray Owls, Peachelope; 9 p.m. • BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Brian Miller; 7 & 9 p.m., $10. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Duke Street Dogs; 6-8 p.m., free. • THE CAVE: Al Riggs & The Big Sad, An English Place, Fluorescence;

9 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Blue T; 6:30 p.m. • THE MAYWOOD: NYE Punk Rock Pre-Game: Born Again Heathens, 49/Short, Raw Dog; 9 p.m., $8. • MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC HOUSE: The Grand Ole Uproar; 8:15 p.m., free. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ DNLTMS; 10 p.m. • THE STATION: PIPE, Elvis Division, DJ Tuhans; 10 p.m., $8. See page 29.

SAT, DEC 31 ARCANA: Freakshow New Year’s Bash. • BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Let it Go-Go 2016: The Jogo Project; 10 p.m., $50.

• BLUE NOTE GRILL: New Year’s Eve with Josh Preslar Band; 9 p.m., $25–$45. • THE CAVE: Dex & Crash, Dylan Earl, Might Mare; 9 p.m., $10–$15. • CITY LIMITS SALOON: 13th Annual New Year’s Eve Bash; 8 p.m., $10. • DEEP SOUTH: Undercover, LaureNicole; 9 p.m., free.

• EDENTON STREET UNITED METHODIST CHURCH: First Night Raleigh: Alex Fioto and Josh Dumbleton, NC Opera; 7 p.m., free. • FLETCHER OPERA THEATER: First Night Raleigh. • HAW RIVER BALLROOM: New Year’s Eve: The Clockwork Ball Steampunk Masquerade; 9 p.m., $15–$17. • IRREGARDLESS: Bo Lankenau; 11:30 a.m. Moment’s Notice, Bobby Moody; 6:30 p.m. •

FR 1/13 SA 1/21 FR 2/3 TU 1/3

UNC vs. Clemson On The Big Screen

FR 1/13

THE SHADOWBOXERS HEADFIRST FOR HALOS / The Second After

SA 1/14

MKR / GABRIEL DAVID / Dissimilar South

TU 1/10

Rescue Dawn / Mourning After

SA 1/21

Tan and Sober Live Album Release Party

WE 1/25

Rebekah Todd & The Odyssey MAMMOTH INDIGO / Mature Fantasy

TH 1/26 FR 1/27

THE TAN AND SOBER GENTLEMEN VITA AND THE WOOLF THE LAWSUITS

SA 1/28 SA 1/28

WE 2/8 SA 2/11 TU 2/14 TH 2/16 TU 2/28

COMPASS CENTER PRESENTS

SOLAR HALOS

W/ S.E. WARD / GOWN LOUD PRESENTS HOMESAFE

WE 2/1

CRANK

TH 2/2

ESME PATTERSON TORCH RUNNER

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IT

Life Lessons / Chase Huglin

Guts Of The Oven / Bad Friends COMING SOON:

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SA 3/4 SA 3/11 SU 3/12

KINGS: Pardon Moi French Presents: NYE Bash with Alaska and Katya; 6:30 p.m., $10–$45. • LINCOLN THEATRE: BIG Something; 9 p.m., $25. • LOCAL 506: Stark Raving: Local 506’s Banging New Year’s Eve Funky Dance Party; 9:30 p.m., $6–$7. • THE MAYWOOD: New Year’s Eve: Datura, Arghast, Horseskull, My Missing Half; 8:30 p.m., $8. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: NC Symphony: New Years Eve in Vienna; 8 p.m., $25–$85. • MOTORCO: Motoroboto New Year’s Eve Party; 9 p.m., $15–$18. • NIGHTLIGHT: Persona Presents: New Year’s Eve; 10 p.m. • THE PINHOOK: Pinhook NYE Party: Go Home 2016 You’re Drunk; 10 p.m., $8. • POUR HOUSE: The Fabulous Knobs, Little Diesel; 9 p.m., $25–$30. • THE RITZ: Back to the 90’s: New Years Eve Party with 120 Minutes, Trainwreck; 9 p.m., $15. • RUBY DELUXE: ViZ Queer Dance Party New Year’s Edition with DNLTMS & Luxeposh. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: New Years Eve Party/Fundraiser with Ariel Pocock Trio; $50. • SLIM’S: NYE Freak Out with DJ Pangean; 10 p.m., free. • SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: NYE: Same As It Ever Was; 9 p.m., $15–$20.

• THE STATION: NYE Celebration: Hand of Doom; 10 p.m., $10. Jazz Saturdays; 2 p.m., free. • UNITED CHURCH OF CHAPEL HILL: The Bradshaw Quartet; 7 p.m.

ROBIN & LINDA WILLIAMS SCIENTIST TURNED COMEDIAN: TIM LEE CEDRIC BURNSIDE PROJECT THE MONTI: HIPPO AWARDS JOHN SCOFIELD LUCY KAPLANSKY NC YOUTH TAP ENSEMBLE ALASH BALLAKÉ SISSOKO AND VINCENT SÉGAL TRANSACTORS IMPROV TRANSACTORS IMPROV: FOR FAMILIES! GARY STROUTSOS Find out More at

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300-G East Main St. • Carrboro, NC Find us on Social Media

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SUN, JAN 1 Dog PSYCH Attention, all noise ATTACK rock stans and fans of Guerilla Toss, early Yeah Yeah Yeas, and the more unhinged corners of noise rock: you need Dog in your life. Off-kilter earworm vocals, layers of caked-on fuzz, and loose song structures are the band’s primary tools, all employed with a deft hand. With Spy in the Sky and Jesse Bikman. —DS [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY IRREGARDLESS: Larry Hutcherson; 11 a.m. • KINGS: The Nude Party, Zack Mexico, Konvoi; 9 p.m., $8–$10. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Eric Gales, Joey Williams, Trae Ramon Pierce, Steve Ray aka “Youngsta,” Kevin Wilson, Soul Psychedelic; 8 p.m., $15.

MON, JAN 2 Shadows METAL Merciless shredders MONDAY Shadows top this thrashed-out Monday night lineup

of metal acts. The band is a blistering blur of hardcore ferocity, though it occasionally glaze its nihilistic tendencies with slower, sludgier metal textures. Enemy of The State’s pinched, frenetic assaults and Saxaphaw’s Life Alert are up first. —DS [SLIM’S, $5/9 P.M.]

Shop Boys and New Order. Gabriel David opens. —EB [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $7/10 P.M.]

ALSO ON MONDAY SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH): Junktown; 7 p.m. • THE SHED JAZZ CLUB: Sessions at the Shed with Ernest Turner; 8 p.m., $5.

JAH BLESS Myrtle Beach-based four-piece TreeHouse! has built a devoted following on the jam circuit with its acid-rock-drenched take on reggae. Revolutionary in spirit but heavyhanded in execution, the band to frequently allows a veneer of 311-style modern rock to subsume its Jamaican source material. Tracks like the subtly political “Irie Smiles” suggest a better approach to honoring their heroes. Six Shots Later opens.

—TB [POUR HOUSE, $8–$10/9 P.M.]

TUE, JAN 3 The Landing MEHVeiled in a heavily LECTRO cultivated air of mystery and a vaguely ironic embrace of New Age mysticism, one-man synth-pop purveyor The Landing is grating in self-presentation and benignly ingratiating on record. Tracks like the fey but catchy “Then Comes the Wonder” and the almost persuasive blue-eyed soul exercise “Stars in Motion” have the feel of good time oriented rehashes of more substantive inspirations like Pet

WED, JAN 4 TreeHouse!

ALSO ON THURSDAY HUMBLE PIE: Peter Lamb & the Wolves; 8:30 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Mysti Mayhem; 6:30 p.m.

The INDY’s Guide to Dining in the Triangle

The INDY’s guide to Triangle Dining

ON THE STREETS NOW!

g

art OPENING

Resolutions 2017: Group show.

Jan 4-22. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. www. hillsboroughgallery.com.

ONGOING LAST Annual Community CHANCE Art Exhibit: Group show. Thru Dec 31. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. artscenterlive.org.

Annual Holiday Art Gallery Exhibit: Group show. Thru Jan 5. ERUUF Art Gallery, Durham. www.eruuf.org Anywhere but here: Group show.

Thru Jan 20. Lump, Raleigh. www.teamlump.org.

LAST The Art of Giving: CHANCE Mixed media. Thru Dec 31. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts. hillsboroughgallery.com.

Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation: By examining the history of Indian immigrants as they assimilated into the U.S. and their contributions to American life—musical, political, culinary, scholarly, sporting, and cultural—this traveling Smithsonian exhibit reframes what it means to be an Indian American. The artifacts range from images of nineteenthcentury Indian railroad workers to today’s Silicon Valley. Thru Apr 2. City of Raleigh Museum, Raleigh. —David Klein Chinese Lantern Festival: This holiday spectacular returns to Koka Booth Amphitheatre to celebrate the Chinese New

12.28–1.4

screen WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 28

Year. More than twenty LED displays illuminate the woods surrounding Symphony Lake, including a fiery dragon, a pair of intricate swans, and a forest of trees with Santa and Frosty in the middle. The festival also hosts cultural performances and sells artisan crafts. $10-$15. Thru Jan 15. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. www.boothamphitheatre. com. —Erica Johnson Claymakers Instructors’ Holiday Showcase: Pottery.

Thru Jan 7. Claymakers, Durham. www.claymakers.com.

LAST Collections: Leah CHANCE Sobsey. Thru Dec 31. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com.

Constants and Unknowns: Mixed media by Randy McNamara. Thru Jan 13.

Durham Arts Council. www. durhamarts.org.

Caroline Coven: Thru Jan 24.

HagerSmith Design Gallery, Raleigh. www.hagersmith.com.

Gordon Dean: Site-specific installation. Thru Feb 5.

Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation: In this visually dazzling, politically charged exhibit, artists of international renown and local legends alike unravel clothing, costume, and ornament into identity politics, especially those pertaining to race. Through September. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels. com/durham. —Chris Vitiello

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THE CONQUEST OF CANAAN

The film world has long been bound to and driven by technology, from silent pictures to talkies and on through Technicolor, to the point where your five year old knows what CGI is. So it’s easy to lose sight of the original advance that made it all possible: the cinématographe. When the Lumière brothers first demonstrated their invention before a paying audience in Paris 121 years ago, projecting images of workers leaving their family-owned factory, they basically invented cinema. Sure, the system is constantly evolving, but projecting rapid-fire images on a screen in the dark remains its essence.

Accordingly, Durham Cinematheque, whose very name summons the Lumières’ creation, sees off 2016 with a screening of The Conquest of Canaan and other films made in North Carolina during the silent era. The fact that these films even exist will surprise many, but more than three hundred such works were made in-state, although few remain. The Durham Hotel’s mezzanine should provide an opulent spot from which to contemplate the magic of moving pictures projected on a screen in the dark—among likeminded spirits.

The Conquest screening is at eight, but the mezzanine opens at one for an entire afternoon of screenings and exhibits. —David Klein THE DURHAM HOTEL, DURHAM 8 p.m., free, www.thedurham.com

SPECIAL SHOWINGS Frozen: Thu, Dec 29, 2 p.m.

Orange County Main Library, Hillsborough. www.co.orange. nc.us/library.

I Hope You Dance: Fri, Dec 30, 7 p.m. The Oasis at Carr Mill, Carrboro. www.oasisatcarrmill. com.

A L S O P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at www.indyweek.com.  ½ Allied—Sexual tension, spousal spying, and WWII nostalgia power a hit-andmiss effort from director Robert Zemeckis. Rated R.  Arrival—Denis Villeneuve’s thoughtful aliens-to-Earth film—one

of the year’s best, certainly in multiplexes—is less about first contact than first communication. Rated PG-13.  Doctor Strange— Marvel’s magic master’s feisty cape, among other spectacular visuals, almost steals his movie.

Rated PG-13.  ½ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—This Rowling-penned film is a promising start to a new Harry Potter franchise. Rated PG-13.  ½ Hacksaw Ridge—Mel Gibson clearly identifies with the religious persecution of conscientious objector Desmond Doss. Rated R.

HH½ Jackie—Natalie Portman nails her portrayal of a bereaved Jackie Kennedy, but the slight, weakly scripted

film is unworthy of her efforts.

Rated R.  La La Land—Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash follow-up reunites Gosling and Stone in a breezy jazz musical that overpowers reservations with its Technicolor charm. Rated PG-13.  ½ Manchester by the Sea—Casey Affleck’s brilliantly restrained performance as a traumatized handyman returning home after his brother’s death powers Kenneth Lonergan’s quotidian tragedy. Rated R.  Moonlight—Barry Jenkins’s must-see drama deals with a gay black man’s coming of age with sensitivity and nuance. Rated R.  Nocturnal Animals— Amy Adams’s emotional

authenticity elevates fashion mogul Tom Ford’s glam pulp noir. Rated R.  Office Christmas Party— This holiday comedy follows in the National Lampoon tradition, but dirtier. Rated R.

HH½ Passengers—Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence work hard in this glossy interstellar vehicle for provocative moral entanglements, but the film ultimately implodes from the pressure of its star-driven, crowd-pleasing mission. Rated PG-13.

 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—This war film set in the Star Wars universe takes place just before the first film, and bodes well for the prospects of its sequels. Rated PG-13.

INDYweek.com | 12.28.16 | 33

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BILL BURTON ATTORNEY AT LAW

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LAST Fiber Art of the 21st CHANCE Century: Ralph Wileman. Thru Dec 31. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. chapelhillpreservation.com.

Finding Each Other in History: Stories from LGBTQ+ Durham: Personal narratives. Thru Jan 15. Durham History Hub. www. museumofdurhamhistory.org.

Flag Post: Derek Chan. Thru Jan 19. SPECTRE Arts, Durham. www.spectrearts.org.

LAST Flight Lessons: CHANCE Mixed media by Kim Wheaton. Thru Jan 1. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

LAST FREEDOM: The CHANCE Experiment: Candy Carver, Raj Bunnag, Kenia Brea, Darius Quarles, and William Paul Thomas. Closing reception: Dec 30, 6-9 p.m.

The Cary Theater, Cary.

History and Mystery: Discoveries in the NCMA British Collection: This is the first time in decades that NCMA has curated an exhibit from its British holdings of Old Master painting and sculpture. Thru Mar 19. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org. —Brian Howe LAST hush, hush,: Anthony CHANCE Ulinski and Kiki Farish. Thru Dec 31. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Imagination Architectures: Eric Mack. Thru Jan 6. UNC Campus: Sonja Haynes Stone Center, Chapel Hill. www. sonjahaynesstonectr.unc.edu.

Inventing History: Cherished Memories of Good Times That Never Happened: Drawings by Richard Chandler Hoff. Thru Jan 13. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www.durhamarts.org.

Jake and Charlie: Folk Art

food

Countdown to 2017: A Sophisticated New Year’s Eve Dinner: $75. Sat, Dec 31, 5:30 p.m. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

Counting House New Year’s Eve Dinner: $69-$75. Sat, Dec 31, 5 p.m. Counting House, Durham.

by Jake McCord and Charlie Lucas: Mixed media. Thru Jan 26. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www. historichillsborough.org.

Luminous Creatures: Digital images by JP Trostle. Thru Jan 6. Atomic Fern, Durham. www. atomicfern.com.

LAST A Man Singing To CHANCE Himself: Thru Dec 30. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www.durhamarts.org.

My Favorite Things: Group show. Thru Feb 4. Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh. www. leehansleygallery.com.

Natural Forces: Paintings and drawings. Thru Feb 5. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www. frankisart.com.

LAST Nature as My CHANCE Camera Sees It: Bobby Nicks. Thru Dec 31. Bond Park Community Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

Nightscapes: Paintings by Charles Williams. Thru Jan 21. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Planting Hope: Drawings. Thru Feb 5. FRANK Gallery, Chapel Hill. www.frankisart.com.

LAST Quiet Season: Group CHANCE show. Thru Jan 1.

Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

Rolling Sculpture: Art Deco Cars from the 1930s and ’40s: On one hand, these ostentatious cars are the obscene baubles of the interwar industrialists whose progeny are today’s rogue traders, junk bond kings, and profiteering Wells Fargo executives. On the other hand, the cars offer a nuanced look at how design aesthetics responded to the production line and its consumerist culture with

Guglhupf New Year’s Eve Dinner: $65. Sat, Dec 31.

Guglhupf Bakery, Restaurant & Cafe, Durham. www.guglhupf. com.

New Year’s Eve Celebration: Sat, Dec 31, 5:30 p.m. Parizade, Durham. www.parizadedurham. com.

a mixture of fantasy and faith.

Thru Jan 15. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.— Chris Vitiello Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art: This is less a simple exhibition than a speculative and critical archive of Southern identity. Slavery, the Civil War, racism, and their complex inheritances?

Much of the work explores and interrogates that. Connections to place so deep that land and body become the same thing?

Many artists unravel the warp and weft of that. The dissonance of the past’s intrusion into the present? The exhibit shimmers with that temporal disorientation. It’s powerful work by supremely capable artists, and the intensity of their proximity is life-changing. Thru Jan 8, 2017. Nasher Museum of Art, Durham. nasher.duke.edu.

—Chris Vitiello Super Shitty Art Show: Group show. Thru Jan 20. Mercury Studio, Durham.

Dawn Surratt: Photography.

Thru Jan 14. Through This Lens, Durham. throughthislens.com.

LAST Taking Flight: CHANCE Stephen White.

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

The Ties That Bind: Precious Lovell. Thru Jan 8. CAM Raleigh, Raleigh. camraleigh.org.

Unpacking the Past, Designing the Future: Stories and artifacts.

Thru Feb 11. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. scrapexchange.org.

Zanele Muholi: Faces and Phases: Photography. Thru Jan 8. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

New Years Eve Party: Sat, Dec 31, 8 p.m. The Glass Jug, Durham.

Wine Tasting at Mandolin: Exploring Terroir with Pinot Noir: Wednesdays, 6 p.m.

Mandolin, Raleigh. www. mandolinraleigh.com.

stage OPENING The 2017 Pregame: $18.

Sat, Dec 31, 7:30 p.m.

DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www. dsicomedytheater.com. See box, right.

African American Dance Ensemble KwanzaaFest: Sun, Jan 1, noon. Durham Armory, Durham.

An American in Paris: $30$165. Jan 3-8. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www.dpacnc.com.

See p. 29.

Best Countdown Ever: $25. Sat, Dec 31, 10 p.m.

DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www. dsicomedytheater.com. See box, right.

Best of Raleigh Roundup: Stand-up comedy. $12.

Wed, Jan 4, 8 p.m.

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 31

BEST COUNTDOWN EVER Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Family Countdown: $12. Sat, Dec 31, 6 p.m.

DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www. dsicomedytheater.com. See box, right.

Robert Kelly: Stand-up comedy. $15-$23. Dec 29-31. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella: Musical. $34-$135. Dec 30-Jan 1.

Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www. dpacnc.com.

Sitting In The Intersection Soirée: Storytelling, poetry, music, and dancing.

Thu, Dec 29, 8 p.m.

The Station, Carrboro. stationcarrboro.com.

In a year that has given us so very little to be amused about, why not usher in 2017 by exercising your atrophied laugh muscles? DSI Comedy Theater, a local bastion of improv comedy, offers a three-part slate. It begins with a family-friendly show (6 p.m., $12) that won’t stint on the giggles while keeping things strictly G-rated. The evening’s middle segment (7:30 p.m., $18), the “2017 pregame,” gathers several of N.C.’s sharpest standup wits for a performance timed to allow revelers to frontload some laughs before heading off to, ahem, more elegant precincts. In a similar family-friendly spirit, the pregame show also promises not to go blue, Carolina or otherwise. But the highlight is the main event at ten, when the party will take on a more adult flavor (and, accordingly, turns twenty-one-and-up). DSI will supply the party favors, noise makers, a champagne toast at midnight, and a bunch of funny people who will make you laugh. Show up dressed for cocktails and in the mood to end this year smiling.

— David Klein DSI COMEDY THEATER, CHAPEL HILL 10 p.m., $25–$30, www.dsicomedy.com

Last New Year’s Eve at DSI PHOTO COURTESY DSI COMEDY THEATER

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