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100,000 Reasons Why

VOL. 37 NO. 17

I

CONTENTS NEWS 7

Gene Nichol, UNC law professor and thorn in the General Assembly’s side, wrote a book about the last decade of GOP rule. They won’t like it.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

10 Durham County is investigating whether manager Wendell Davis improperly tried to influence the March election. BY THOMASI MCDONALD

t takes about 400 words to fill this space, but I only have two that come to mind: Thank you.

One year and one week ago, we launched the INDY Press Club hoping to do, well, something to effect a change in a local news industry that seemed to be slipping away, year after year, month after month, into a shell of its former self, unable to do the kind of work it should do for the communities it serves, barely able to keep its head above water even in good economic times that couldn’t last forever.

The people who knew about fundraising—I was not one of them—told me to set a goal, a target for the first year. They didn’t tell me how to arrive at that amount.

They just said to do it. “One hundred thousand dollars,” I said, about five minutes before everything went live. It was a nice round number.

I never thought we’d make it.

FEATURE 14

Reopen(ish): Phase 1 of Governor Cooper’s plan won’t feel that different, but it’s something. BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

15 Here’s what’s in store for our coronavirus future.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN

16 Want to know how the pandemic will affect North Carolina elections this year? So do we. BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN 18

Long-term isolation takes a psychic toll. Hang in there.

BY LEIGH TAUSS

19 Movie theaters will return, but nothing ever stays the same.

20 When live music returns, what will it look like?

21

BY BRIAN HOWE

BY SARAH EDWARDS

A restaurateur explains the new normal for dining out.

BY MATTIE BEASON

MUSIC 22 When is a label not a label? When it's Potluck Foundation.

BY BRIAN HOWE

24 Raleigh MC Tanajah is making the most of being stranded in Denmark by COVID-19. BY KYESHA JENNINGS

Then, overnight, everything went to hell. We asked for help; our readers delivered.

From March 11–31, the Press Club raised about $20,000. In April, about $19,000.

And there we were, 10 days out from our anniversary, $15,000 away from that imaginary target.

Which we couldn’t possibly hit. That would mean averaging $1,500 a day. A grand a day is a hard-enough target in a Depression-era economy, even with T-shirts and prize giveaways. So we settled on 10 days, $10K—$95,000 for the year. That would be amazing.

But we got there by Wednesday. And when I woke up on Friday, the last day of our membership drive, we were only $3,500 short of $100,000. It would be a big ask— the biggest single-day haul we’d ever had—but we put it out into the universe. And, slowly at first, the money started trickling in, then a bit more, then more, until we were $800 away, then $500, then $200, and I sat for an hour with a bourbon in my hand refreshing my computer.

We crossed the finish line at 6:28 p.m., with five hours and 32 minutes left. As important, in just 10 days, the Press Club added nearly 300 new members and more than 100 monthly contributors, which means we’re building something sustainable, something we can use to plan, a new model to fund the work we do.

DEPARTMENTS 4 1,000 Words

By the middle of March, we’d brought in about $50,000. At that pace, we’d probably hit $65,000 by May 8, our 12-month anniversary. Perfectly respectable.

6 A Week in the Life

I guess I did have 400 words in me. But only two really matter: Thank you.

5 Quickbait

You make the work we do possible. Every day, we’ll work to live up to the faith you’ve entrusted in us.

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—Jeffrey C. Billman (jbillman@indyweek.com)

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1,000 Words 4

May 13, 2020

You Gotta Fight … for Your Right (to Spread an Infectious Disease) PHOTOGRAPHY BY BRENNA BERRY

A smaller version of the ReOpenNC crowd again descended on downtown Raleigh last Tuesday to demand an end to the state’s social-distancing restrictions. This time, they were met by health-care workers and counter-protesters asking them to think about the people who could get sick or die. W

INDYweek.com

Q U ICKBA I T

Failures to Comply

No. 1: Most FTCs by County

I

n late April, a report from the Duke Law Center for Science and Justice found that in 120,000 cases each year, North Carolina’s criminal courts impose fees and fines that will likely never be repaid. More than 650,000 residents—one in 12 people who call the state home—have unpaid debt, the report continues. Most of them are minorities, and much of their debt arises from low-level traffic cases and infractions.

For those facing criminal charges, there are fees for being arrested; fees for spending the night in jail; fees for forensics; fees for experts to testify against you. If you don’t pay, you are fined. If you don’t pay the fine, you might be arrested and jailed—basically, debtors’ prison. And the cycle repeats.

In traffic cases, failures to pay costs or show up to traffic court lead to an indefinite driver’s license suspension. Right now, the report says, 1.25 million North Carolina residents—one in seven adults—have a suspended license due to a so-called failure to comply, or FTC, most for failing to appear in court, some for failing to pay traffic fines.

Driving with a revoked license is a class 3 misdemeanor, which introduces a new set of fees.

As the INDY reported last March, the Durham Expunction and Restoration initiative, designed to tackle this very problem, dismissed more than 70,000 cases (most for traffic charges tied to license suspensions) and waived more than $200,000 in unpaid traffic fines and court fees for more than 1,200 people in its first three months. By January, the Center for Science and Justice report says, “$1.5 million in traffic-related fines and fees have been waived in Durham for 6,140 people (8,339 tickets).”

But statewide, the number of FTC cases is rising, the report says. Especially given the pandemic, the Center argues that court debts should be suspended, and, long-term, the General Assembly should give judges more flexibility to waive fees or should reduce or eliminate them altogether.

Along with its report, the Center uploaded to its website a massive dataset of FTC cases from the late 1980s through January 10 that allows you to dig into the numbers by county, age, race, and the kind of charge.

And we did. We could have played around longer—there was so much to explore—but here are a few data points about Triangle counties that caught our eye. W

1 2 3 4 5

Guilford: 109,815 Wake: 86,240 Mecklenburg: 58,214 Durham: 46,157 Forsyth: 43,351

1 2 3 4 5

Mecklenburg: 1,522 Wayne: 1,456 Chowan: 1,296 Gates: 1,227 Dare: 1,018

No. 2: Longest Mean FTC by County (Days)

28 Durham: 695 92 Orange: 400 95 Wake: 377

No. 3: Length of FTCs by County 1% 2%

Key 12%

5%

11.5% 19%

38%

3% 1%

12.5% 13.5%

24%

17%

48%

4% 12.5%

10%

88%

11%

5.5%

3–12 months

12.5%

1–5 years 5+ years

Durham

Wake

Wake

Black

Durham

White

Unresolved

Orange

No. 4: Median Pending FTC Length by Race

0

30–120 days 27%

2%

State

8,000 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000

Resolved in 0–30 days

20%

(by Days)

Orange

Hispanic

Indian

Asian

Other

No. 5: Median Pending FTC Length by Type of Charge (by Days) 5,000 4,000

Wake

Durham

Orange

3,000 2,000 1,000 0

Felony

Infraction

Misdemeanor

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The Good, The Bad & The Awful

A WE E K IN THE L IFE (Here’s what’s happened since the INDY went to press last week)

5/5 5/6 5/7

SENATOR THOM TILLIS said he believes that Americans will have forgotten the Trump administration’s botched response to COVID-19 by August, when there will be more testing and signs of economic progress.

“And I think all those things will benefit the president and they’ll benefit me.”

The U.S. Department of Labor reports that more than 85,000 people filed initial jobless claims in North Carolina the previous week. Since the pandemic began, more than 1 MILLION NORTH CAROLINA WORKERS—a fifth of the state’s workforce—have sought unemployment benefits.

5/8

Phase 1 of the reopening plan goes into effect. Most parts of Durham’s STRICTER STAY-AT-HOME ORDER remain in place through May 15 except for the state’s guidelines for retail stores.

The NORTH CAROLINA DIVISION OF MOTOR VEHICLES closed its Raleigh office after an employee tested positive for coronavirus.

Labor and farmworker advocacy groups seek protections for North Carolina MEAT-PROCESSING-PLANT WORKERS after the number of cases rises among plant employees.

New Hanover County sheriff’s deputy JORDAN KITA was charged after leading an armed group of white vigilantes to a black teenager’s home. Kita has since been fired.

5/9

ProPublica reported that, in February, on the same day SENATOR RICHARD BURR unloaded his stock portfolio just before the COVID-19 panic crashed the market, his brother-in-law sold off a bunch of stocks, too.

Donald Trump picked top donor LOUIS DEJOY, the husband of former North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services secretary ALDONA WOS, to be the next postmaster general.

A dozen VERY TOUGH WHITE DUDES with very big guns walked around downtown Raleigh to protest the state’s stay-at-home order (nope, that can’t be it; protesting with guns is illegal, and the Raleigh cops would have definitely arrested them, right?) get a sandwich at Subway.

5/10

GOVERNOR COOPER announced that the state would begin phase 1 of a three-part reopening plan on Friday at 5:00 p.m.

Attorney General Josh Stein filed the first PRICE-GOUGING LAWSUIT of the coronavirus pandemic against a Charlotte towing company.

The Raleigh City Council, facing a $36 million budget shortfall, agreed to pay a consultant $72,000 to help it figure out how to replace the CITIZEN ADVISORY COUNCILS it disbanded in February.

The Latinx group MIJENTE celebrated Cinco de Mayo by launching a voter registration drive in North Carolina.

The number of CONFIRMED CORONAVIRUS CASES in North Carolina surpassed 15,000, a surge driven primarily by increased testing.

The Chronicles of Dan Forest, an Idiot How did the GOP candidate for governor embarrass himself this week?

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d goo

May 13, 2020

INDYweek.com

Someone in Dan Forest’s campaign might want to change the Twitter password.

On May 1, the LG found a six-week-old story about an Italian study that found that 99 percent of early COVID-19 deaths in Italy were people who had preexisting conditions. This, Forest tweeted, meant there was no “moral or ethical justification” for Governor Cooper’s stay-at-home policy—perhaps because Forest has gone all-in on social Darwinism, or perhaps because his polling sucks and he wants someone to pay attention to him.

A few days later, however, a DHHS report pointed out that 51 percent of residents—more than 5 million people—

bad

ul

f aw

Cheetie Kumar This is a long-deserved and frankly long-overdue honor. After thrice being a semifinalist in the James Beard Awards’ Best Chef: Southeast category, this year, Garland’s Cheetie Kumar became a finalist. Which is great, of course, though we wish it had come under better circumstances. Garland, like many of the restaurants recognized by the Beard Awards, has been closed since March. “Anything like this is always unexpected," Kumar told the INDY last week. “Right now, it’s extra surreal because we can’t celebrate with our team.”

The General Assembly The state House’s version of the COVID-19 relief legislation had a smallish step toward expanded Medicaid, albeit only to cover costs for those with COVID-19. The Senate’s version had a smallish step toward a marginally improved unemployment system with slightly better benefits. The “compromise” we ended up with had neither of those things—and for good measure, it also didn’t have a provision allowing bars to sell to-go cocktails because Republicans were apparently terrified of pissing off the powerful prohibitionists in the [checks notes] Christian Action League? No, North Carolina, we can’t have nice things.

Richard Burr and Jordan Kita We couldn’t settle on one. First up, throw another log on the dumpster fire that was Richard Burr’s reputation.

Turns out that not just he but also his brother-in-law had the good sense to abandon the stock market just before it crashed. A spokesperson swears this is all a coincidence.

Then there’s Jordan Kita, a (now former) detention officer with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office who led a group of armed white vigilantes to the house of a black teenager earlier this month looking for a teenage girl the DA’s office thinks is a “familial relation” to Kita. Only, Kita had the wrong black teenager. While this was happening, a neighbor called the Pender County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies came out but—so weird!—didn’t arrest any of the armed white dudes or bother taking their names. But at least Kita was fired and he and one of his pals were charged. Everything’s fine, nothing to see here, etc.

have underlying conditions that make them more susceptible to COVID-19.

Still, on May 8, Forest was back at it, tweeting a graphic showing that the elderly accounted for 86 percent of the state’s deaths: “Gov. Cooper has repeatedly used fear to justify his decision to keep our state shutdown. … Why are we not enacting policies and protecting those who are actually most vulnerable, while allowing the rest of the population to act responsibly and get back to work if they want to?”

Who wants to explain to the walking dunce cap how viruses work?

N E WS

North Carolina

INDECENT ASSEMBLY: THE NORTH CAROLINA LEGISLATURE’S BLUEPRINT FOR THE WAR ON DEMOCRACY AND EQUALITY

By Gene R. Nichol (Blair, 224 pages)

The Indictment North Carolina Republicans attacked Gene Nichol because they didn’t like his columns. Wait ’til they read his book.

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

I

f you’ve spent the last decade obsessing over North Carolina politics, chances are you won’t find anything new in Indecent Assembly, UNC-Chapel Hill law professor Gene Nichol’s unflinching 224-page look at the Republican-led legislature.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point, he told me last week, was to detail the General Assembly’s litany of sins for those for whom Phil Berger might not be a recognizable name. More than that, he wanted to contextualize and catalog Republicans’ actions in one volume. Individual acts provoke outrage; the sum of their parts tells a story of ruthless, shameless ideologues who would tear down democratic norms to serve a racialized radical agenda.

In that sense, Indecent Assembly exists as a warning.

“They’re trying to break down the fundaments,” Nichol says. “That’s the main thing the book is about. … That’s a bigger transgression than being wrong or being stupid. It’s a rejection of what it means to be a North Carolinian, what it means to be an American.”

It’s a provocative argument, to be sure. But Gene Nichol has never shied from controversy. In 2008, he was run out as president of William & Mary College in Virginia after refusing to censor a student-funded sex workers’ art show on campus. He returned to UNC—he’d been dean of the School of Law from 1999–2005—and helmed the Center on Poverty, Work, and Opportunity. After Republicans took power in 2011, Nichol wrote columns in The News & Observer denouncing the General Assembly’s economic plans and labeling the state GOP a “white people’s party.”

In 2015, the UNC Board of Governors— appointed by the General Assembly—retaliated by closing the Poverty Center; academic freedom be damned, the UNC System wasn’t about to fund someone critical of its masters. Curiously, Nichol doesn’t talk about that episode in Indecent Assembly. That would have felt too self-serving, he told me.

It’s probably the only big storm he steered clear of. The rest—from HB 2 and Amendment 1 to eliminating the Earned Income Tax Credit, from voter ID and gerrymandering to the motorcycle-vagina bill, from circumscribing Governor-elect Roy Cooper’s powers to retaliating against municipalities that had the audacity to elect Democrats—is all there, presented vividly, unsparingly, and unsympathetically.

Last week, I spoke with Nichol about his book and, more broadly, about the last decade of state government. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

INDY: I knew of the events you wrote about. But there was something eyeopening about seeing them compressed into 200 pages. It reads like an indictment. I’m wondering what you had in mind when you set out to write it, and how did that change?

GENE NICHOL: People write a lot about

the North Carolina legislature, but they tend to write about one event at a time or one subject matter at the time. They’ll write about what we’re doing on voting rights or voter ID or the Racial Justice Act or HB 2. There’s not very much that looks at it as a whole package. When I did that—I think I said in the first chapter—I went from being already angry to a state beyond that. Because it when

“We’re being governed as if this was a white folks’ legislative caucus.

They just don’t want that to be mentioned. It’s like Voldemort. It’s the thing that can’t be mentioned.” you put it all together, it’s noticeably more horrifying.

But the real reason I wanted to do it was that I’m a constitutional lawyer by trade.

A big part of why I wrote the book is not just the specifics of what they’re doing.

It’s mainly about the fact that for someone like me who studies constitutional law, this is a huge example of having broken the compact.

There’s a whole lot that we take for granted in our system of government.

We assume that there’s going to be a lot of back-and-forth on the political front between liberals and conservatives or those who are for economically powerful folks and those who might be pushing for a fairer agenda. We think that there are going to be all these other things.

A commitment to democracy is one of them. The foundations of equality is another one. The belief in judicial review.

It’s taken us a couple of hundred years to

have that seep in. But it’s a fundamental part of what it means to be part of the American experiment.

They’re trying to break down the fundaments. That’s the main thing the book is about. The notion of being an American is not based on tribe or geography or religion or language or the color of your skin. It’s based on a commitment to certain foundational ideals.

Ironically, these guys are attacking the fundamentals of that commitment. They don’t run under the claim that they’re trying to change the American experiment or what it means to be a North Carolinian.

But that’s what they’re doing. It’s a very serious undertaking. It means to weaken and overcome the foundations of what we say we believe in as a people.

That’s a bigger transgression than being wrong or being stupid. It’s a rejection of what it means to be a North Carolinian, what it means to be an American.

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May 13, 2020

7

I’ve seen magazine articles that portray North Carolina as a sort of forerunner for the zero-sum politics in Washington. In a sense, your book reads like a warning. To whom is the warning directed?

When I read the chapter on HB 2, I recalled how much of the argument against HB 2 was framed in economic terms and not in moral terms. On the one hand, you had this dyed-in-the-wool radical-right agenda.

And then you have the institutional Democratic response to this thing that offended everybody else in the word that was like, well, it might cost us money.

Not to be grandiose about it, but it’s for the people of North Carolina. I think most people don’t know how serious the threat to our foundational institutions is. Regular folks have lives to live, they’ve got kids to take care of, they’ve got ballgames to go to. They’re worried about whether they can make ends meet.

They’re not sitting around thinking, are these guys trying to destroy the democratic system?

I think it’s a warning nationally as well. I don’t know that North Carolina is seen as a great beacon to the hardest of the hardright, but it is, for some, providing a roadmap. There is a worry that what begins in Raleigh doesn’t stay in Raleigh.

Much of the book criticizes the General Assembly’s economic policies. Whenever these criticisms have been leveled, Republicans say, “Look at all the growth we’ve had for the last eight years.”

The economy until two months ago, at least, was modestly better than it was in 2008. That’s terrific. But first of all, I don’t buy the claim that that has any [connection] to this horrifying set of economic policies that these folks have created. I have this chart which looks at the unemployment rate in the United States. And in North Carolina, for, I don’t know, the last 40 years, it tracks almost identically, except that the unemployment rate is usually a little higher in North Carolina than it is in the United States. When the federal one goes up, the state one goes up. I don’t believe that North Carolina’s little tail is wagging that big dog.

I focus a lot on people in the bottom third. Are the people in the bottom third actually better off because of this legislature having rejected Medicaid expansion?

Are those low-income people really better off having cut a hundred thousand or more people off of food stamps, mostly kids, even though the money was going to come from the federal government? Are they really better off having ditched the Earned Income Tax Credit, being the only [state] in the country [to do so]? Are they really better off having cut the taxes of those at the top and literally raising the taxes of those at the bottom?

If you focus on the bottom third in North Carolina, they’ve suffered tremendously under this regime. And none of the claimed economic benefits that these folks describe alter that.

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May 13, 2020

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Gene Nichol PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say this is the stoutest war on poor people that we’ve seen anywhere in the United States in the last 50 years.

There’s so much in the book that cuts across racial lines—voting rights and especially poverty. But when you talk to Republican lawmakers, these aren’t really guys who go around screaming the N-word.

You’re right to link race and poverty. I’ve studied poverty for a long time in North Carolina, and the two are inextricably linked. They have been every day of North Carolina’s existence. They’re running buddies. Now I make the race chapter the first one, because of all the things that we’ve seen in the last 10 years, it’s the most astonishing.

I’ve been in North Carolina for almost 20 years, but I’m not a native. But I have a lot of friends who are old-time North Carolinians, and I think the thing that’s astonished them the most is the idea that you would bring race back into the forefront of North Carolina politics.

[Republicans] are doing it, right? They don’t want it to be talked about. But these folks go into their caucuses—still large majorities in both houses—and they’re all white. They make decisions

in those all-white caucuses in which there’s no person of color to stand up and interject, and that’s where they write the rules. That’s where they pass laws which are to the immense detriment of black Tar Heels.

They tend to respond by saying what somebody like [Representative] David Lewis would say, which is, we’re not trying to stop black people from being able to participate in the political process. We’re not trying to hurt them because they’re black; we’re trying to hurt them because they’re Democrats.

They actually govern as a white people’s party in the way that you would expect a white people’s party to govern.

And if you raise the question about it, they get furious. But they have a heavily racialized agenda, which is meant to handicap and penalize black Tar Heels.

And they think they should not be called on that.

The truth of it is, we’re being governed as if this was a white folks’ legislative caucus, and it has a racialized agenda, which is meant to make life more difficult for people of color. They just don’t want that to be mentioned. It’s like Voldemort—it’s the thing that can’t be mentioned.

It’s apparently not rude to do it. It’s just rude to say it.

What you described touches several things. One, of course, is the traditionally frustrating nature of the Democratic Party.

If we were looking at the discussion framed around poor people, what you’d say about Democrats is they have long historically ignored poor people. But we’ve learned in the last seven or eight years that there’s something worse than ignoring them, and that’s to actually target them.

When it comes to an array of civil liberties issues, Democrats are historically mush-mouthed. I think there’s a lot of juice, a lot of power, a lot of blood in the veins of movement politics in North Carolina. By that, I mean Moral Mondays but also broader—the teachers and environmental folks, the ACLU folks. There’s a lot of blood in the movement politics of North Carolina, and not nearly enough in the Democratic Party in North Carolina.

I think part of the challenge is that the Democratic Party hasn’t necessarily been strong enough to take full advantage of the movement blood which exists in North Carolina. We’ve had too strong a history for the last 20 years of Democrats being careful about not saying anything, that their words are going to piss somebody off. And when you spend your whole career doing that, you end up unable to be an effective force against the most powerful challenges you face.

Some of that seems like a product of progressive power—or Democratic power— being clustered in metro areas, but the rest of the state being largely white and Republican, and the state has been gerrymandered to give outsize power to those areas.

One of the clearest examples of that was the tremendous dispute over HB 2.

So OK, Bruce Springsteen can’t come to town. And there’s not gonna be a basketball tournament in Charlotte, and you’re gonna miss these giant events in Raleigh.

But if you’re out in rural North Carolina, I don’t give a shit about that. I don’t care if Bruce Springsteen can’t come to Greensboro or whatever it is. Boycott ’til your heart’s content.

One of the great frustrations that comes from some of the work I’ve done interviewing low-income people across North

“There’s something worse than ignoring poor people, and that’s to actually target them.”

Carolina—I’ll give you this example. One time, a couple of years ago, I spent several months interviewing low-income folks in Goldsboro, in public housing units. At the same time, I was interviewing people in Wilkes County, which is more Appalachian poverty. There were similar levels of poverty in both places, very intense, chronic poverty. In Wilkes, it was almost all white; in the housing projects in Goldsboro, it was almost all black and Latino.

So I would go interview folks in these immensely dangerous and worrisome housing projects in Goldsboro. Now, those folks in Goldsboro would not have considered the white folks who I was interviewing in Wilkes County to be their allies.

In Wilkes County, when I would interview folks in a 40-year-old mobile home under really terrible circumstances—you know, seven or eight people living in this ramshackle mobile home—but outside, they would have a Trump sign and a Confederate flag. Needless to say, the folks in the low-income housing projects in Goldsboro did not have Trump signs and Confederate flags.

Both of those groups would have considered themselves adversaries. But we also asked them a whole series of questions like, what do you need? Whom do you trust? What do you wish the government would do for you? What do you feel like the challenges are here?

Those two groups of people answered those questions almost exactly the same.

If anyone was ever smart enough to help the low-income folks in Goldsboro and low-income folks in Wilkes County realize how much they have in common instead of how much separates them, we could fix our politics in North Carolina. But I’m not smart enough to figure out how to do that.

That reminds me of the LBJ quote about how if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best black man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket.

The extent to which, particularly in the American South, that divisions on the basis of race have dominated politics and have led low-income white people to vote against their economic interest consistently, often out of some hope for racial superiority, that’s the cultural and political

history of the American South. And it still is. You can look at all these states that have rejected Medicaid. The main thing they have in common was they are members of the Confederacy.

There have been numerous occasions when the General Assembly retaliated against political adversaries: In Greensboro, Senator Trudy Wade tried to change the city council after Democrats got elected.

Same with Chad Barefoot and the Wake County Board of Commissioners. HB 2 was a reaction to a Charlotte nondiscrimination ordinance. Most recently, they tried to go after sheriffs who weren’t cooperating with ICE. They also tried to change how Supreme Court justices got elected, then made judicial elections partisan. Of course, they went after you, too.

Broadly speaking, it seems, it’s become the NCGA’s modus operandi to change the rules when the rules don’t go their way.

What do you make of that?

We have these structures of understanding that have made up the operation of the American commitment to constitutional democracy. They include things like judicial review and constitutional accountability, but they also include things like dispersing power to local governments so that it’s not all in the hands of single decision-makers, separation of powers, having three branches of government instead of one. These softer limitations on the operation of American democracy—these guys have just laid waste to them.

For folks in my line of work, it’s been a little bit of a surprise because you thought, surely there’s a more potent commitment to things like freedom of speech, academic freedom, local government authority, the independence of judicial review. We all thought that they were more potent than it turned out that they actually were.

They mean nothing to these folks. They have been willing to lay waste to every sort of constitutional restraint in favor of the expansion of their power.

That has become the marching order of Republicans in North Carolina. That’s what the book is about—that they have been willing to lay waste to the traditions of American government and seem not to have a care about it. W

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N E WS

Durham

The Letter and the Fallout As Durham County investigates whether manager Wendell Davis tried to influence an election, Davis’s supporters ask the state attorney general to intervene

BY THOMASI MCDONALD

tmcdonald@indyweek.com

O

n April 27, Wendy Jacobs, who chairs the Durham County Board of Commissioners, announced that an independent counsel would determine whether county manager Wendell Davis sought to interfere in the March 3 primary election by writing a letter accusing Commissioner Heidi Carter of “inherent bias” toward himself and people of color.

Carter prevailed, along with fellow incumbents Jacobs and Brenda Howerton.

When the new Board of Commissioners takes office in December, they’ll be joined by newcomers Nimasheena Burns and Nida Allam, marking the first all-female board in county history.

Davis’s letter, written on February 11, was first reported by the INDY on February 18. Carter denied the allegations, calling Davis’s claims “baseless” and saying his letter contained “misquotes and fabrications.”

She and her supporters argued that Davis’s letter served two purposes: retaliation for her criticism of his performance and to influence the outcome of the upcoming primary. The commissioners who were elected would determine whether to renew Davis’s contract next year.

Carter’s fellow commissioners may have reached a similar conclusion. Most of them, anyway.

At their April 27 meeting—held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic—Jacobs announced that commissioners had instructed the county attorney and county clerk to begin notifying prospective independent counsels to conduct two investigations.

The first would look at “the letter that was sent by the county manager.” Asked 10

May 13, 2020

INDYweek.com

“I unequivocally deny the misquotes in the letter and that my actions were ever racially motivated.” whether that meant the investigation would focus on whether there was any truth to Davis’s allegations or something else, Jacobs, Howerton, and county attorney Lowell Siler declined to comment.

The second would focus on “the actions that the county manager took in the way that he sent the letter as it relates to the International County Managers Association code of ethics, and the N.C. general statutes related to the conduct of a professional executive, and about whether there were possible violations of interference with elections.”

Jacobs’s announcement wasn’t on the board’s agenda for that evening. Instead, it was prompted by a statement from Howerton—Davis’s biggest defender among the commissioners, who has pointedly said that “Heidi Carter is not the victim”—who questioned why the investigation was taking precedence over the COVID-19 crisis.

Howerton mentioned an email she’d written to Siler, Davis, and her fellow commissioners a week earlier that spoke of the “need to revisit the handling of the investigation into the county manager’s serious allegations regarding one of our county commissioners.”

Jacobs replied that commissioners were implementing what they’d already voted on.

Then things got acrimonious.

“You mentioned two issues that you had not informed me about. One of those issues, you had not informed me of,” Howerton said.

Jacobs suggested a closed session with an attorney present and said it was improper to bring up personnel matters in a public forum.

“Don’t throw stuff out that you haven’t discussed with me,” Howerton responded.

“That’s all I’m asking.”

Jacobs replied that the real impropriety was when Howerton brought up the investigation in the first place. “I am going to continue because you are being hypocritical in the comment you just made,” Jacobs said.

“Oh, you get to call me names,” Howerton said, laughing.

Jacobs and Howerton declined to comment on the exchange.

In her April 21 email, Howerton wrote that she was “gravely concerned” about the investigation being “pushed through in a very clandestine way.” She said that she hadn’t voted for any investigation that would redirect resources away from COVID-19 and questioned “how decisions are being made when all board members aren’t apprised.” Howerton also warned against commissioners being “involved in any aspect of this investigation” and suggested leaving the matter to District Attorney Satana Deberry.

On May 4, Omar Beasley, who chairs the Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People, wrote a letter to Attorney General Josh Stein asking his office to “ensure a fair and just investigation.”

“Commissioner Howerton was unaware of any such investigation” prior to the April 27 meeting, Beasley wrote, asking Stein to investigate a possible violation of the state’s open meetings law. Beasley also said Jacobs may have violated state laws protecting the privacy of employee personnel files by announcing the investigation into Davis.

(On Monday, the group Organizing Against Racism Durham sent Stein an email seconding Beasley’s call for an intervention.)

Frayda S. Bluestein, a professor of public law and government at UNC-Chapel Hill, says the confidentiality aspects of Jacobs’s announcement are “very complicated.”

“Because the situation involves actions by an employee, information in the personnel file of the employee is confidential, and discussions in closed sessions

about the matter would be confidential,” Bluestein says. “At the same time, however, the matter also involves an elected official, and information related to the conduct of an elected official is not confidential under the personnel records confidentiality laws. Add to this challenge the fact that it appears that some of the people involved may have voluntarily released records or made statements disclosing some of this information.”

Asked what could come of the two investigations, Bluestein says that if the first supports Davis’s allegations against Carter, her fellow commissioners could vote to reprimand her.

“If the investigation concludes that a board member has done something that a majority of the board considers to be inappropriate they can adopt a resolution of censure,” Bluestein says.

However, “such a resolution has no legal effect,” she adds.

If the second investigation finds that Davis tried to interfere in an election, he would face more serious consequences.

“If an investigation of an employee concludes that the employee has [violated] a criminal statute, it would be up to the board to determine whether to turn the matter over to the district attorney for potential prosecution,” Bluestein says.

Even if commissioners didn’t press charges, such a finding would likely allow them to terminate Davis for cause, meaning they would not have to pay his $210,000 salary through the end of his contract next year.

On February 24, at the first commissioners meeting after news of Davis’s letter broke, about a hundred black residents packed into the board’s chambers to support the county manager.

Some demanded the county investigate his claims. Others said they were concerned that he would face retribution for accusing a respected white woman of racial bias.

Carter told a skeptical audience that night that she had “listened carefully, and I hear your concerns.” Still, she added, she was “deeply disturbed and disappointed that Davis did not speak to her in private or in a closed session instead of lodging “harsh, unsupported allegations, and in such a public way, two weeks before the elections.”

“I want to be clear,” she said, “and it is important to my integrity that I say this: I unequivocally deny the misquotes in the letter and that my actions were ever racially motivated. That is simply not true.” W KeepItINDY.com

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Reopened for Business. Sort of.

Our so-called post-pandemic life

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

A

t 5:01 p.m. on Friday, North Carolina took its first step toward post-pandemic normalcy.

It was a very small step. You probably didn’t notice.

If you live in Durham, in fact, nothing changed at all. The county’s stay-at-home order remains in effect until this Friday, and it will likely be extended with modifications, Mayor Steve Schewel told me last week.

But the rest of the Triangle and most of the state entered phase 1 of Governor Cooper’s three-part reopening plan. So now, after five homebound weeks, you can go to a state park and meet with no more than 10 friends in the backyard.

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Congratulations.

There’s more to it than that, of course.

While the state remains under a stay-athome order, you’re now allowed to leave both for essential activities and commercial ones. We’ve also dropped the distinction between essential and nonessential businesses, which means almost everyone can go into the office, though telework is still encouraged.

Because folks are returning to work, the state is also allowing daycares and summer day camps to cater to the children of people working both essential and nonessential jobs, as well as those looking for work—considering more than a million North Carolinians have filed for unemploy-

ment in the last two months, more than 20 percent of the entire state workforce, that’s a lot of you.

Some businesses are still prohibited: gyms, movie theaters, performance venues, salons, massage parlors, etc. Restaurants are still takeout-and-delivery-only.

Bars can still sell beer and wine to go, but since the General Assembly didn’t include cocktails to go in its recent relief package, they are otherwise SOL. Retail shops, however, can bump up from 20 percent capacity to 50 percent.

State parks and trails have moved from “open at local discretion” to “opening encouraged,” though playgrounds are still closed. Worship services and demonstra-

tions are allowed outside “unless impossible.” And groups of 10 or fewer can gather together, so long as they’re outside and maintain social distance.

Oh, and everyone should wear face coverings. It’s not required, but it’s encouraged. (It will almost certainly continue to be required in Durham, Schewel says.)

Phase 1 is supposed to last at least two to three weeks. If the data indicates that it’s wise, Cooper says, the state could move into phase 2 as early as May 22. The stayat-home order will finally be lifted, and bars and restaurants will be allowed to open at limited capacity, as will gyms and personal-care services. Religious facilities and entertainment venues can reopen, as well, though at reduced capacity. And more than 10 people will be allowed to get together.

Phase 2 is expected to last four to six weeks. Sometime in late June or early July— again, if all goes well—we’ll get to phase 3, and the state will return to something almost recognizable as normal if we even remember what that looked like.

All of that is much too long for some Republicans in the General Assembly.

Last week, they introduced a bill to reduce the penalties for violating Cooper’s executive order to almost nothing. Given that Democrats can sustain Cooper’s veto, the bill is unlikely to become law. Sure, part of the pushback is a political calculation. Cooper’s approval numbers have risen sharply over the last two months, which bodes poorly for GOP fortunes this fall.

But there’s also genuine frustration about a prolonged economic shutdown with seemingly no end on the horizon. The longer this drags on, and the deeper the malaise gets, the more pronounced that sentiment will become. That’s likely to be a defining conflict of the months to come.

This week, as the state begins taking a slow, tepid step out of isolation, we wanted to explore what those months to come will look like—the political conflicts, but also the economic and public health implications, the effects on our culture and food scenes, even the impacts on our mental health.

COVID-19 has reshaped the world and our community in ways we’re only beginning to grapple with. Many of the questions we’ll ask in the pages to come don’t have well-defined answers. That’s to be expected; this is an event unlike any in modernity. But now’s the time to begin asking them. W

Our Coronavirus Future Penn Wharton Budget Model May 29, North Carolina, social distancing in place 625 deaths 8 deaths per day –12.1% annualized GDP 87,372 jobs lost in previous 7 days

Officials’ decisions about COVID-19 are only as good as the models they’re based on. Here’s what the best models in the country tell us about the weeks ahead. BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

“I

t’s tough to make predictions,” the 20th-century sage Yogi Berra once said, “especially about the future.”

Yet when facing a new global pandemic for which there is no established treatment or vaccine and about which we know very little, predictions—or more precisely, epidemiological and economic models—are all we’ve got. Of necessity, they’ve become the mother’s milk of public policy, informing our choices about when the economy should close and under what circumstances it’s safe to reopen, as well as the tradeoffs between public health and financial ruin.

North Carolina’s decision to begin reopening last week was rooted in models showing that the proverbial curve was flattening—meaning, in other words, that the state’s hospitals could handle a surge in new cases if one arose. While the number of diagnoses was rising, that was mostly due to more testing, which was good. And while the state’s COVID-19 deaths approached 550 on Sunday afternoon, the number dying per day appeared to have mostly leveled off.

These models have also framed the White House’s decisions. The University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation’s overly optimistic model—since revised—gave the Trump administration false confidence that the worst would be over soon. Economic models forecasting prolonged hardship in an election year are now leading officials to pretend the crisis is over and push the country to reopen, even as almost 2,000 people a day are dying.

There are several models trying to predict our coronavirus future, each making assumptions about the effects of variables such as various social distancing rules or the weather. Some are relatively optimistic; others are downright frightening. It’s possible none of them will be right. But as North Carolina begins returning to normal, we wanted to show

you what five of the best-regarded epidemiological models say is in store for us over the next two weeks—as well as one that models both economic and public health effects, which forecasts what would happen if we throw caution to the wind and reopen sooner than later. *All data as of Sunday, May 10. The models don’t all have the same reference dates or use the same data points. Where possible, May 29 was selected as a common endpoint.

Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation May 29, North Carolina 889 deaths (range: 720–1,198) 13 deaths per day (4–31) May 29, U.S. 108,216 deaths (96,586–130,420) 1.078 deaths per day (444–2,405) August 4 (furthest prediction) 1,190 deaths (764–2,142), North Carolina 137,184 deaths (102,783–223,489), U.S.

Northeastern University May 29, North Carolina 30 deaths per day (10–75) May 29, U.S. 22,895 deaths per day, no mitigation (21,562–24,834) 778 deaths per day, stay-at-home policy (354–2,458) May 31, U.S. 1,782,880 deaths, no mitigation (1,779,638–1,786,726) 94,857 deaths, stay-at-home policy (77,987–128,863) Los Alamos National Laboratory May 27, North Carolina 859 deaths (635–1,385) May 27, U.S. 100,098 deaths (85,546–122,710) June 17 (further projection) 1,078 deaths (682–2,606), North Carolina 114,332 deaths (89,203–174,930), U.S.

University of Texas Massachusetts Institute of Technology May 29, North Carolina 1,069 deaths (792–1,610) 21 deaths per day (4–78) May 29, U.S. 115,201 deaths (102,432–140,389) 1,115 deaths per day (806–6,112) May 29, Durham-Chapel Hill MSA 133 deaths (88–815) 0 deaths per day (0–58) May 29, Raleigh-Cary MSA 101 deaths (76–168) 1 death per day (0–8)

May 29, North Carolina 1,085 deaths 25 deaths per day May 29, U.S. 105,958 deaths 1,287 deaths per day June 15 (furthest projection) 1,478 deaths, North Carolina 124,403 deaths, U.S.

May 29, North Carolina, social distancing relaxed 721 deaths 16 deaths per day –11.7% annualized GDP 63,042 jobs lost in previous 7 days May 29, North Carolina, social distancing removed 1,144 deaths 69 deaths per day –11.3% annualized GDP 11,276 jobs lost in previous 7 days May 29, U.S., social distancing in place 92,821 deaths 946 deaths per day –12.4% annualized GDP 2,243,011 jobs lost in previous 7 days May 29, U.S., social distancing relaxed 102,693 deaths 1641 deaths per day –12.1% annualized GDP 1,509,551 jobs lost in previous 7 days May 29, U.S., social distancing removed 152,899 deaths 6,776 deaths per day –11.6% annualized GDP 54,361 jobs lost in previous 7 days June 29 (furthest projection) 830 deaths / 61,635 weekly jobs LOST, social distancing in place, North Carolina 1,438 deaths / 17,290 weekly jobs LOST, social distancing relaxed, North Carolina 9,773 deaths / 85,689 weekly jobs GAINED, social distancing removed, North Carolina 115,937 deaths / 925,394 weekly jobs LOST, social distancing in place, U.S. 159,620 deaths / 411,436 weekly jobs GAINED, social distancing relaxed, U.S. 894,932 deaths / 3,504,462 weekly jobs GAINED, social distancing removed, U.S. W KeepItINDY.com

May 13, 2020

15

The New Rules How will COVID-19 affect North Carolina politics this fall? BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN jbillman@indyweek.com

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f you apply the traditional rules of politics to current polling, this should be simple.

Rule 1: It is very difficult for presidents to win reelection amid or soon after a recession.

Fact 1: Gross domestic product contracted at an estimated annualized rate of 3.5 percent in the first quarter (about 1 percent in real GDP), according to the Congressional Budget Office, and will contract by 40 percent in the second (real GDP: 12 percent)—in other words, a recession. And not just a recession, but with unemployment rates north of 20 percent, more like a depression.

Rule 2: If President Trump’s approval ratings are underwater in late June and real GDP contracts by 12 percent in the second quarter, the well-respected “time for change” election model says there’s no chance he’ll get 270 electoral votes.

Fact 2: Trump’s approval numbers haven’t been positive since February 2017.

He’s currently upside-down 44–52 among registered and likely voters. As the coronavirus death toll climbs into six figures by the end of the month, it’s hard to see that getting much better, especially and given how steady his polling has been.

Conclusion, part 1: Joe Biden should win, and it shouldn’t be close.

Conclusion, part 2: If Biden wins big, Governor Cooper will win big, and North Carolina Democrats will do well up and down the ballot. It’s not just that Cooper is trouncing GOP competitor Dan Forest right now; it’s that Cooper consistently polls well ahead of Biden in the state. So if Trump-Biden is a dead heat here, Cooper could win by four or five, maybe more. In a strong Democratic year, Dems will make a run at the gerrymandered state House and reclaim several seats on the Council of State: labor commissioner, insurance commissioner, lieutenant governor, maybe agriculture commissioner, too. Oh, and Cal Cunningham will stomp Thom Tillis.

On the other hand: The betting mar-

kets heavily favor Trump, and for a not-unfounded reason. While the first half of the year will be an economic disaster, the CBO forecasts significant improvement in the second. Unemployment will still be in double digits, but if there are clear signs of progress—and if the pace of coronavirus deaths tapers over the summer—voters might credit Trump with the recovery.

Revised rule 1: The thing about Trump’s steady poll numbers? That goes both ways.

So far this year, the best Trump’s approval has been in the website 538’s aggregator is 46.2 percent; the worst, 42.7 percent.

So while he has a ceiling that seems destined to keep him underwater, he has a floor that’s likely to keep him in the game no matter how bad everything else gets.

Revised rule 2: Trump can win at 45 percent approval for two reasons. First, his strategy doesn’t require you to like him; his strategy requires just enough voters in just the right states to loathe and/or be terrified of Biden and Democrats in general.

Second, the composition of the Electoral College means that Trump can lose the popular vote by 5 million and still win the election; such a victory, however, requires him to win North Carolina.

Reconsidered conclusion: The political scientist Rachel Bitkofer wrote recently, “In 2020, in places where partisan competition is equalized … it will be the coalition that is angrier and/or more frightened that wins that battle.” While historical data portend a blue tsunami, the peculiarities of the Trump era do not. North Carolina is a state where partisan competition is near equilibrium, and Trump is at his best politically when he’s fomenting anger and fear. That was his MO in 2016, and it will be his MO in 2020. It will trickle down in ways that benefit other Republicans on the ballot. He’ll attack Roy Cooper and Cal Cunningham and prop up Dan Forest and Thom Tillis at his rallies. If the presidential race is close, the margins between Cooper and Forest and Cunningham and Tillis will shrink. Polarization will do its work.

The hell with it: I have no idea what’s going to happen this fall. Neither do you.

Neither does anyone else.

The Great Lockdown is unlike any financial disaster we’ve seen before: It came on suddenly, caused not by an acute economic weakness but by a public health crisis.

If there’s a V-shaped recovery—meaning things go back up as quickly as they collapsed—Trump will benefit.

But that probably won’t happen. Even as states reopen, demand for restaurants and retailers and services and entertainment venues will lag until there’s a vaccine. That means unemployment will remain high, some businesses will close, and because of declining revenue, state and local governments will hike taxes and slash services to meet shortfalls, which will only make the economic picture gloomier. Maybe Trump can spin it as an unavoidable calamity.

If there are signs of life on the horizon come September or October, he’ll call it a comeback.

Of course, if he’s faulted for 100,000plus deaths and a depression, it’s game over. Or at least, it should be. Here, too, Trump benefits from a new playbook. A side effect of a polarized culture is that Republicans distrust mainstream media sources and turn instead to what are essentially propaganda outlets. Negative information about the president doesn’t always get through.

I’m focusing on Trump to talk about North Carolina’s future because the two are intertwined. That’s the only thing I’m sure of. If Trump tanks here, the state GOP will tank, too; it has no breakout stars or a reservoir of goodwill. If Trump narrowly wins, he still might not pull Tillis and Forest over the finish line.

Reconsidered conclusion 2: It’s also possible that we have a second coronavirus wave in late October, the General Assembly fights tooth-and-nail against making mail-in voting easier, the election becomes a debacle, and nothing I’ve said in the previous 900 words matters one bit. W

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17

The Invisible Enemy One side effect of the coronavirus pandemic: psychological trauma. The good news: We’re more resilient than we think.

BY LEIGH TAUSS ltauss@indyweek.com

W

e’ve spent more than a month social distancing to keep the spread of COVID-19 in check. In North Carolina, it’s largely worked. Compared to our neighbors, we’ve seen fewer cases and fewer deaths, and the number of hospitalizations has stabilized.

But this intense isolation doesn’t come without consequences. Research shows that it can make us lonely, depressed, and anxious. It cuts us off from our support

outside of New York reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress.

“We saw the role the media could play in transmitting trauma beyond the directly impacted communities,” she says.

What’s different this time is that the coronavirus will leave no one untouched.

COVID-19 has already killed more than 25 times the number of people who died on 9/11. Beyond that, more than 33 million people have filed for unemployment,

“This is a very different kind of disaster.” systems. We retreat to our phones and televisions for information, but the constant feed of bad news only reinforces our distress.

And if we freak out, chances are our kids will, too.

Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has studied the psychological aftermath of mass tragedies for more than two decades.

Nearly 60 percent of Americans watched the graphic footage of planes slamming into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Two months later, her studies showed, 17 people of the population

and nearly the entire country found itself locked down throughout April, depriving high school and college students of graduation ceremonies and couples of wedding ceremonies.

Like 9/11, COVID-19 could be a defining event for a generation. But in other ways, it’s not like 9/11 at all, Silver says.

“The research that has been done thus far on large-scale collective trauma has been on events where there is a clear start and a clear end—the natural disaster is over or the mass violence has ended—and then we pick up the pieces and move forward and move beyond

it,” she says. “But this is a very different kind of disaster because it’s slow-moving, and it appears to be escalating. We don’t know when the peak will be. Maybe it will wax and wane for some time. And because of that, it’s very difficult to project from our past research how things will look at the other side.”

Here’s what we do know: No one reacts to mass events in the same way. For some, this event triggers anxiety, while others experience chronic depression. Individuals who have already been diagnosed with anxiety disorders or depression are at greater risk, Silver says. A person’s circumstances, such as having a place to live or a steady job and quality support network, can also influence their ability to cope.

Social isolation brought on by forced stay-at-home orders can trigger loneliness, which in turn can worsen or bring about other psychiatric conditions, ultimately leading to “despair” and “potentially self-destructive acts,” Mayo Clinic psychiatry professor Renato D. Alarcon writes in Psychiatric Times.

Without intervention, ”a dramatic cascade effect can take place,” Alarcon writes.

For children, the COVID lockdown has disrupted every part of their routine, cutting them off from friends at school and

forcing them to adjust to learning from home. Their stress can manifest both psychologically and physically, says child psychologist Robin Gurwitch, a Duke University professor.

Some kids may experience behavioral changes such as disruptions to sleep or difficulty focusing or paying attention.

Even basic tasks like chores and homework may present hurdles. They may report headaches or stomach aches.

Older children may experience mood swings or irritability.

Parents shouldn’t view these changes as defiance, Gurwitch says. Rather, they’re symptoms of distress.

She recommends that parents create new routines for their families, schedule virtual playdates, and have frank discussions with their kids about the coronavirus to dispel their fears and misconceptions.

But the best thing parents can do is try to manage their own reactions and well-being.

Even though things might seem bleak, Silver cautions against gloom. Human beings, she says, are quite resilient in the face of long odds.

“We’ve seen that time and again after tragedies, and we know that people and communities are able to rebuild,” Silver says. W

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Six Dreams in the Dark Movie theaters will return, but to me, they were already a lost world

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

I

got my writing hustle started in a movie theater projection booth.

I was about 20 when I began writing about music for local zines and the alt-weekly The Spectator, the INDY’s vanquished competitor. At the time, circa 2000, I was a projectionist at the Movies at Timberlyne, the little six-screener that bravely soldiers on in Chapel Hill, perched above the Chelsea.

Though I didn’t know it then, these were the last days of 35mm film, before you could simply push a button on a digital projector, and there was just enough art to it to make it a job. In a 12-hour double shift, once every couple of hours, I would circle the “booth”—which was really the whole second floor of the theater—and start the movies.

Eventually, I could thread a projector in one minute and 18 seconds. The rest of my time was spent reading and writing in the halo of a desk lamp as the dim world beyond it softly whirred, beaming six dreams down into the dark.

The exception was Thursday, when all the new movies arrived by truck and there was much to do. They came on six to ten reels in two orange hexagonal cans. On a table with motorized reels, I spliced them end to end, using a little hand press that cut with a satisfying thunk. I put shiny silver tape near the sprocket holes here and there, to cue the lights or change the lens’s aspect ratio.

The monstrous wheel of film that wound up tightly coiled around a metal ring was fraught with danger because dropping it spelled long hours of untangling it on the floor. I affixed clamps to it and got help carrying it to one of the three horizontal platters growing like a strange tree next to each projector.

Mistakes could be made, from missing cue tape to backward reels, so the movies had to be screened before they could open the next day. Sometime during the nine o’clock shows, while I was teetering on a 20-foot ladder to change the marquee,

“ As we mourn how things are not the same, there’s melancholy comfort in realizing they never were.”

Chapel Hill’s Silverspot Cinema, empty and waiting

my friends would start showing up, by the carload or the dozen.

It’s amazing how many friends you have when you can let people into the movies for free and after hours. The projection booth had a hatch to the party-ready roof, where you could peer down over the shopping center, feeling regal or existential as the moment demanded. After my meteoric ascent to assistant manager, I presided at the door like a baronet and had a book of passes I spent like money all over town.

It really was the best early-20s job.

Somehow, the time would come to actually watch the movie, whether it was American Pie or The Sixth Sense or Belly, and I would return to the booth as everyone gathered in the theater with trash bags full of leftover popcorn.

I’d pry the metal ring from the film and start threading it through a floating arm that led to a cluster of rollers in the middle of the platter, which I think was called “the brain.” The arm always had to have three Q-Tips taped to it to work right, for reasons none of the theater chain’s engineers could ever satisfactorily explain to me.

PHOTO BY JEREMY M. LANGE

From the brain, I stretched the film to a high roller before pulling it down into the projector, looping and clamping it into the critical path through the jumbled profusion of rollers and sprockets that would safely collect it on the next platter. I remember the purple emulsion sifting down in the white light of a xenon bulb that would burn the film if you left it idle and explode from the oils on your skin if you touched it.

I thought of all this recently when local theaters like The Carolina and The Rialto started offering takeout concessions, which gave me an intense feeling of lost-world nostalgia that I didn’t immediately understand.

After all, movie theaters look likely to reopen

by June, albeit with patrons sitting at safe distances in reduced-capacity houses.

But they’ll still face the existential threat from an atomized viewership that they did before their main asset—public gathering—became a liability. They’re fragile, like all technologically obsolete institutions that persist on cultural tradition alone, and as we mourn how things are not the same, there’s melancholy comfort in realizing they never were.

After I became assistant manager, I still worked projection sometimes, but I also scooped popcorn and tore tickets and swept floors and counted money in the office. Instead of anticipating Thursdays, I dreaded Sundays, when we had to inventory ever kernel and lid in the stockroom.

I had to wear a tie.

Eventually, I transferred to the Plaza, which used to be by the Whole Foods in Chapel Hill, and when it shut down, I helped take it apart. I remember sliding down a ladder while cutting out a screen with a knife and lifting incredibly heavy bronze-bottomed soda fountains from the counters.

By my mid-20s, I was out of the movie business, working part-time as a barista and embarrassing myself nationally as a young Pitchfork writer. The Timberlyne projection booth was no longer my domain. The Plaza was gone, and the film I threaded was soon to follow it into oblivion. It was another art, like pulling espresso, that I might never use again— just a few stray frames from a reel that has to keep moving or be consumed, a few dreams in the dark that leave behind only the faintest smear of purple dust. W KeepItINDY.com

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The Uncertain Future of Live Entertainment When concerts come back, what will they look like? Local venue owners say your guess is as good as theirs. BY SARAH EDWARDS sedwards@indyweek.com

YOUR WEEK. EVERY WEDNESDAY. FOOD • NEWS • ARTS • MUSIC

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“P

ostpone, cancel, rebook, postpone, cancel rebook.”

This, says Motorco Music Hall owner Josh Wittman, has been his booking process ever since his venue went dark on March 17. Booking national tours normally requires several months’ notice. With all but two of Motorco’s 55 employees furloughed and an uncertain future ahead, trying to imagine the future of live music has become Wittman’s fulltime job.

In North Carolina, under Governor Cooper’s reopening plan, venues will stay closed at least through May 22.

After that, barring a spike in COVID-19 cases, they’ll be allowed to reopen at a “limited capacity.” Four to six weeks later, they can increase their “permissible capacities.”

What those capacities will look like isn’t clear. For that matter, it isn’t clear whether audiences will return no matter what the state allows. A recent poll suggests that only about 40 percent of Americans would be willing to attend a sports or live-music event before a vaccine is available. Many venues were already operating on a tight margin; sustaining themselves with smaller crowds would be a heavy lift.

Some are already folding. In Boston last week, the owners of the legendary rock club Great Scott announced that it had closed forever.

Collectivism is one step forward.

Nationally, 1,200-plus business owners have mobilized to form a new advocacy group, The National Independent Venue Association. Numerous local venues in the Triangle, including Kings, Lincoln Theatre, The Pinhook, Motorco, and Cat’s Cradle, have joined the #SaveOurStages efforts. Those efforts largely entail lobbying for industry relief but, Pinhook owner Kym Register says, it’s

also been refreshing to see owners putting their heads together.

“Competition in art, in general, is one of the big problems, period,” Register says. “NIVA’s cool. And if we can take this lesson of working together collectively and collaboratively, we can be better in the long run. It’s not just a crisis that we’re responding to; capitalism is the crisis.”

Register suggests that live-streaming is one technology that may stick around.

Since it closed, The Pinhook—which is also fundraising for employees through a Patreon account—has filled its nights with virtual drag shows and karaoke. Register says the platform has allowed performers the space to experiment, make money, and keep queer culture alive online.

“It’s cool to create access for people who are more compromised in their health or are more anxious about getting sick,” Register says. “There’s a lot of [people] who can’t afford to pay a price to go to a thing that’s dependent upon that cover price range. It’s a cool door to open, and so I think we’re gonna lean into it a little more.”

It’s not a perfect solution for everyone, though. Nick Wallhauser, a member of the beat-music collective Raund Haus, says the group immediately felt that live-streaming was too unwieldy to invest in.

“It became so saturated from the get-go because it’s the only answer that we can think of,” Wallhauser says.

Instead, Wallhauser says that Raund Haus—known for throwing packed, pulsing electronic parties—is prioritizing its label and educational programming over live events.

“Rather than pushing to do another one of many live-streams, we’re going to choose to focus on releasing music that

we believe in and artists we want to support,” Wallhauser says. “One of our mandates early on was, make dope shit happen. And that goes for live shows, that goes for collaborations with people. And it stays with the records we release.”

As for the actual mechanics of a live show—that part of the puzzle is especially uncertain. In Arkansas, a Travis McCready concert on May 15 is serving as a lonely prototype for what a live show could look like. The Southern rock concert, occurring in defiance of the governor’s orders, will feature an audience of 229 in a theater that seats 1,100. Sections will be grouped into “pods” of friends and relatives; bathrooms have a limited capacity and walkways are one-way.

With one eye squinted, Josh Wittman says that he can imagine a more sanitized, restricted concert-going experience of the future. That experience might begin at the door with a ticket stub and a temperature check and continue with six feet of distance and frequent trips to sanitation stations.

NIVA, Wittman says, is putting together a list of practices that venue owners might be able to introduce into live shows.

Motorco only has a few comedy nights on the calendar for August, and Wittman suggests that music shows may not return in their normal form until March of 2021.

But a timeline and a set of practices are just ideas for now. Wittman and other venue owners repeatedly emphasize the painfully speculative nature of the moment.

“I really wish that it would just go back to normal,” Register says. “But I don’t think it’s gonna. I think there’s going to be a new normal for a long time. And I don’t think it’s going to go back to the way that it was.” W

Nothing Will Be the Same A local restaurant vet on what the post-pandemic scene will look like

BY MATTIE BEASON food@indyweek.com

S

ince age 15, when I got a job at Subs Etc. in Durham, I’ve spent almost my entire life around restaurants.

Between 2004 and 2018, I opened or owned five local food-service establishments—Pop’s Trattoria, Rue Cler (I left before it opened), Six Plates Wine Bar, Local Yogurt, Mattie B’s Public House, and County Fare (again, I left before opening)—with the help of amazing equity and silent partners and some of the most creative, hardworking people in the business.

I was lucky to walk away with very little debt. I didn’t actually make money selling my restaurants— contrary to popular belief, they’re not cash cows—but I emerged mostly financially unscathed as I searched for my next career.

I’m also lucky because, when I gave up restaurant life, I gained time back with my two small children and my wife. Don’t get me wrong: I loved working in restaurants and providing an experience that made people smile.

Somewhere along the way, however, I lost my love of restaurant management.

But my heart breaks for my industry.

In a twist of fate, I’m back in the building I owned for 10 years running a bottle shop for my new employer, Stem Ciders, while I wait for my job managing East Coast distribution and sales to become viable again.

Because I don’t own a restaurant, I haven’t had to furlough or lay off a single worker. I haven’t had to worry about closing my doors. I haven’t had to worry about how to support my family.

While I worry about what the restaurant landscape is going to look like, I know that we hospitality folk are resilient. Many dedicated diners have ordered takeout, bought merch and gift certificates, and donated to local relief funds.

I’m not here to tell anyone to do more right now.

But I do want to prepare you for some changes that are coming.

Fewer tables, no bar Restaurants can begin to reopen in phase 2 of Governor Cooper’s plan—starting on May 22 at the earliest—but there will be obvious changes: You’ll see lots of sanitizing stations. You’ll see gloves and masks on all employees. You’ll also see fewer employees because there will be fewer patrons. Restaurants will have half the normal number of tables. But how much staff can restaurants cut, considering the sanitizing and cleaning they’ll have to do? Menus will be more compact so food isn’t wasted.

costs—rent, utilities, ingredients, online ordering, reservation systems—have gone up. And many restaurants have shouldered the burden of tackling systemic issues like low pay, poor benefits, and wage disparities while consumer expectations have increased.

Every piece of technology a restaurant uses costs them money: third-party reservation systems, online delivery apps, the top spot on an online review list, you name it. Same with conveniences like freshly laundered hand towels in the bathroom and bougie candles.

Restaurants that survive are going to need a bigger cushion. So prepare yourself: The $1 online reservation charge will get added to your bill. (Just call the restaurant directly.) Those hand towels and fresh-cut flowers? They’ll be priced into the steak frites price you just ordered.

Your meal will also cost more because the smiling waitperson who took care of you is going to need that 20 percent tip more than ever; they only get paid $2.14 per hour, and that hour they work before and after the shift just became two due to sanitation practices (tip generously).

Mattie Beason

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECT

There will be no bar to congregate around, which will be a big financial hit, as bars are among restaurants’ biggest moneymakers. Another big hit: no big parties.

Guaranteeing 30 people are walking in on a Tuesday night pads the bottom line.

Every restaurant, in other words, will face learning curves.

You’ll pay more Restaurants operate on tight margins. And with fewer tables and fewer diners, they’ll have less of an opportunity to make money to cover costs. So your entree will probably cost more.

Beyond that, the pandemic has laid bare the fragilities of the industry’s ecosystem.

In my day, not a single restaurant could have survived this shutdown. The most successful eateries I owned— Mattie B’s or Six Plates—would have struggled to make rent or utilities by week two.

It’s not just the tight margins; it’s that restaurants have largely kept their prices consistent even as other

Be patient Everyone who’s dined in independent, casual sit-down spots has their complaints, of course (see Yelp). People at Pop’s thought the tables were too close together; at Six Plates, they thought the towels were over the top.

Sometimes they think the service isn’t attentive enough or the meal is too expensive.

I’m not asking you to change your opinion. But I do ask that you change the way you react to your restaurant experience in the future. Restaurants aren’t perfect. In the weeks and months to come, we’re going to need a little understanding on both sides of the table.

So let me take this time to say they are sorry. If they didn’t exceed your expectations, they are sorry. If you didn’t think they were on their best behavior, they are sorry. If you didn’t think the meal was worth the price, they are sorry.

Please accept this apology, and please, please, please refrain from taking to the internet to voice your disappointment.

Restaurants are a central part of any community.

They’re where we congregate, celebrate, and commiserate. They’re where we meet new friends and reunite with old ones. Restaurateurs are also the folks we turn to when we need support for our fundraiser, charity, or tragedy.

To survive this crisis, they’re going to need our support. W KeepItINDY.com

May 13, 2020

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M U SIC

When Is a Label Not a Label?

From its deepest cuts to its latest releases, Potluck Foundation’s co-op model is business as unusual

BY BRIAN HOWE bhowe@indyweek.com

Left to right: Potluck Foundation founders John Harrison, Maria Albani, and Reid Johnson

I

f you didn’t know better you would think Potluck Foundation was cranking out local indie-rock records specifically to fill the COVID-19 shutdown. The nineyear-old quote-unquote label—to borrow a rhetorical device favored by Maria Albani, one of its three founders—issued five releases in April and the first week of May. The onslaught began on April 3 with 3 Good Songs by Le Weekend, who introduce volatile strains of math-rock and dance-punk to hooky indie-pop tunes with invigorating results, if you have the acquired taste for consciously homely singing. It continued on April 24 with Erie Choir’s Starlight Veins EP, where former Sorry About Dresden larynx-shredder Eric Roehrig goes full Nick Lowe.

May 1 brought the dreamy, drone-y, dark-hued rock of Shelles’ Hot After Heat and the genial Jerry Garcia jams of Your Space Is You by Jphono1 & The Chevrons, the project of Potluck founder John Harrison. Stray Owls’ acoustic-electric psychrock record Stray Owls Versus Time and Space followed on May 8.

And there’s more to come: A new folk record by Matt Southern is on deck for June, while the long-awaited new Schooner, led by Potluck founder Reid Johnson, is in the can and awaiting a release date.

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But Potluck didn’t coordinate this flood of releases during the quarantine. Potluck doesn’t coordinate much of anything. It’s a laissez-faire label that never set out to be a label at all, and that’s what keeps it going strong.

“I think it’s just evidence of poor planning,” Harrison says of the logjam, chuckling. “People are like, ‘Do you have any releases coming out next month?’ And I’m like, ‘I dunno, somebody said they were gonna do this.’ So this happens sometimes. Personally, I think it’s awesome, and I don’t think I’d still be involved in it if it was a normal label.”

Like most of the bands under their umbrella, all three founders have deep roots in the local music scene, particularly in Chapel Hill. Schooner’s amply spaced records have been earning national notices since around 2004. Albani, a bassist and drummer, has played in bands from Schooner to her own projects, including Organos and See Gulls. Harrison, who currently performs homespun electronic epics in Tacoma Park alongside his Jphono1 output, has a pedigree that stretches back through North Elementary and all the way to The Comas.

In 2011, the three realized that they and most of their friends were increasing-

ly self-releasing, self-promoting, and otherwise running their own bands. A lot of the little labels that would give you a couple of thousand dollars to make a record were fading away, and Potluck wasn’t trying to replace them.

“We never intended to operate like a quote-unquote label,” Albani says. “It’s really just a collection of friends and people we know making music that we like, who want to be a part of Potluck for whatever reason. I think it’s because we’re nice people, and when we see people making good music, we want people to know about it.”

“The first thing that I say in any conversation I have about the label is, ‘We have no money for you,’” Harrison adds.

The idea of Potluck, as its name implies, is mainly to share resources and information, from press contacts to good vinyl pressing plants. Each of the founders brings in and handles their own signees, offering guidance in self-releasing where needed and pitching in with labor when possible. For some projects, Albani and Johnson have handled press, writing one-sheets and sending CDs and emails to writers and radio. Harrison has screen-printed album covers and done layouts.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE SUBJECTS

“It’s like, you can do some of this with an app or a website that has some of these resources, but this is a group of people that you already know and trust,” Johnson says.

Potluck releases might be on vinyl, cassette, or CD, in runs of ten or runs of 1,000. They might be simple digital releases or they might be complex multimedia presentations. It all depends on what the artist is trying to do.

“I like to encourage folks to do something out of the box,” Johnson says. “But it’s just a suggestion. This is an anarchist label, I guess, accidentally. We suggest that you do this thing, and then you do what you need to.”

Beyond guidance, community, and moral support, Potluck’s hands-off help also increases visibility for artists by putting them all in one online place, under one banner. Harrison calls it “strength in numbers;” you might think of their model as self-releasing with a safety net.

To celebrate Potluck’s almost-ten years of keeping the Chapel Hill indie-rock flame alive, we gathered the founders on a conference call to defrost some of the label’s deeper cuts, from the very first Organos-North Elementary seven-inch to the debut of Beauty World. Let’s eat. W

Five to Reheat from the Potluck Freezer

Organos & North Elementary split 7” (2011)

Potluck Foundation made its debut by establishing its collective, collaborative spirit with a unique release format.

ALBANI: We reached out to musicians and artists around the country and said we were putting a split seven-inch out and wanted each one to have its own cover. So whatever they sent would be the cover of one of the copies. I think we did 50. It was cool because at the live shows people would look through and pick the one they wanted. I also just liked the aspect of getting more people involved. The more people you have involved in what you’re doing, the more excitement builds around it. We had Missy Thangs, we had Eric Morrison from Home, we had Andrew Whiteman from Broken Social Scene.

JOHNSON: For me, it’s always easier to promote something that other people are a part of.

Joshua Carpenter: Full Flight (2011)

Potluck’s first full-length cassette release revealed the singer-songwriter prowess of a musician then better known as a supporting player.

ALBANI: Josh is a very dear friend of mine who later wound up becoming the drummer for Schooner. He’s been in a lot of bands; he was in The Nein, Piedmont Charisma, Floating Action. Basically, people knew Josh for playing drums or bass, not for singing and writing songs. He’s a really great songwriter. He’s got a great voice. He’s a great guitar player. It was exciting, for all those reasons, for people to get to experience that part of his creativity.

Robes: Welcome Worn and Dead Sound (2012)

Potluck started to broaden its indie-rock horizons with this pair of releases from Carrboro’s synth-y Robes, which sounds more like Hot Chip than Archers of Loaf.

HARRISON: This was the first band that reached out to us. Didn’t they take us to dinner?

ALBANI: I remember it perfectly; they took us to Acme, and we sat out back. Pat [Cudahy, guitar and vocals] was one of the first people I met when I moved here from Florida. He had sort of been out of the realm of playing out and stuff for a little while, which is a perfect example of people who were like, OK, you guys have this thing, how can we get involved?

HARRISON: On the digital version there’s three songs on each and putting them together is almost a record. They got a lot of press we hadn’t gotten. They released a dope-ass video, too. There was a nice slick non-indie-rock style to what they were doing, and I was happy from a Potluck perspective because most of our friends play indie rock.

Schooner: Neighborhood Veins (2013)

Schooner’s long-awaited second album earned Potluck more national notice—PopMatters dubbed it the antidote to chillwave and witch house—and it featured an all-star guest lineup.

JOHNSON: John and I collaborated on the cover.

I took a photo, John screen-printed it on a piece of glass, and we both went outside and took a picture of the sun coming through the glass, and that was the cover. It looks like Photoshop but it’s total analog.

ALBANI: It was Josh Carpenter, Chris Badger, me on bass, and a buttload of guest appearances like Catherine Edgerton, Ivan Howard, Billy Sugarfix, Wendy Spitzer, D-Town Brass people, and Jeff Crawford.

JOHNSON: It definitely represents a shift in paradigm for Schooner. The previous one was—Maria says pop, but I think a melancholy record. Neighborhood Veins was more capital-R Rock. Nick Jaeger, who recorded that record, plays bass with us now—when we play.

Beauty World: Beauty World (2014)

Another venture beyond rock music brought the local-classic debut by Duncan Webster from Hammer No More the Fingers and Leah Gibson from Lost in the Trees.

ALBANI: It was cool working at the old Schoolkids Records. When we found out the Franklin Street store was closing, I helped put together the bands that were going to play the show at the Cat’s Cradle. And I remember hearing Hammer No More the Fingers and I loved how young they were and how incredible they were at their instruments. I got to know Duncan from that point, and then Leah from Lost in the Trees. They’re both really wonderful, and the two of them coming together, I would have never expected it to sound how it does. In 2015 I recruited them to come play in See Gulls, and that was super fun.

JOHNSON: Like Organos’s Concha, it was a CD with hand-printed covers, in this case via lithograph with a two-color print. We really love it when people put their music on something handmade or unique, and theirs was made with creativity and care.

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businesses by purchasing gift cards, shopping online, donating, ordering takeout, and tipping more KeepItINDY.com

May 13, 2020

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M U SIC

Tanajah

PHOTO BY JADE WILSON

The Long Way Home Pandemic be damned, Tanajah went to Denmark to put in work, and that’s exactly what she’s doing while stuck there

BY KYESHA JENNINGS music@indyweek.com

O

ver the loud airport announcements in the background of the phone call, I could still hear the excitement in Tanajah’s voice. After chronicling her struggles with getting her passport renewed on social media, she was half an hour away from flying out of RDU to Aarhus, Denmark. She was supposed to spend two months there, recording an album with the group Athletic Progression and performing at the SPOT Festival before returning home to Raleigh.

That was March 8. Three days later, COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Tanajah found herself unable to get a flight home, with the festival that had brought her to Denmark canceled. But the most surprising thing about this turn of events is that she’s thankful for it.

Born and raised in Maryland, Tanajah Lea goes by the moniker Tanajah Raps. She went to North Carolina Central University and graduated with a degree in percussion performance, which influences how she approaches recording and performing, often with a live band.

“Being a music major, you have to take your theory classes, your harmonization classes, or your sight-singing classes,” she says. “I used to be mad that I went to school for music. Once I started rapping, I was like, ‘Wait a minute, that’s exactly what I was supposed to do.’ I wouldn’t be able to listen to my guitar player and say, ‘No, you’re sharp.’ I definitely thank God for it.”

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Whether it was her father playing Tupac and encouraging her to rap or her mother allowing her to listen to hip-hop radio after she finished her homework, Tanajah credits her parents for nurturing her love of music. Still, the beauty politics of hip-hop in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s made her doubt that she could fit in as a rapper.

“When you’re young, you look into what the media is pushing, like a certain size, how people dress—and sex sells,” she says. “I wanted to come into an industry where I could be comfortable with who I was and just have fun, not fit into a status quo in hip-hop, but when I was younger I just didn’t have that.”

But now, when conversations and hashtags about body positivity are more a part of the discourse on hip-hop, beauty, and image, Tanajah feels more confident about what she calls her “chill and comfortable” demeanor. Her around-theway girl personality and her ability to rap-rap makes people excited to root for her and celebrate her wins.

With only three years under her belt in the local hiphop scene, her level of grind is impressive. Tanajah has built a reputation for having the kind of live performances that are almost impossible to follow. She credits her band, The THC Band, as co-curators of the good vibes she aims to reach with each performance.

She has touched the stage of almost every local venue in the Triangle, with prior performances at the Carolina Waves x K97.5 Hopscotch Day Party and at Shakori Hills. In 2018, she dropped May This Vibe Last Forever, an EP that allowed her to show not only the meticulous composition of her raps but also her increased expertise in mixing and recording.

“It’s technically not my first EP, but I consider it as my first,” she says. “I released one before that, First of a New Breed, but I had no idea what I was truly doing at the time, recording-wise.”

Her most recent single, “Smile,” has a unique cadence that sets her apart and neo-soul like vocals by Tanajah herself. The joyful beat matches the motivational lyrics as Tanajah encourages listeners to smile, even through the struggles. The song is a testament to the many setbacks and struggles she has experienced in life and music.

“I know setbacks only prepare you for the next steps, and tears come a lot, but rapping and performing is what I love,” she says. “So I have to work my ass off to get there, and it seems to be paying off.”

Athletic Progression, a genre-bending Danish trio that mixes jazz with hip-hop, funk, and soul, followed Tanajah on Instagram, where she posts videos of her shows.

“Once the bassist from Athletic Progression saw me perform in November, he said he made it his mission to get me to come to Denmark, and he meant it,” she says.

The SPOT Festival, which hosts around 200 international artists each year, funded her trip.

“I got there on March 9 and everything was OK,” she recalls. “The next day I had a dope show. Then, two days

“I can say that this is the most productive I’ve ever been.” later, Denmark experienced a huge spike in cases. Schools were closing, the place that we were recording out of closed. Initially, it just became pandemonium, but what I think Denmark did a great job of was closing the entire country right away.”

Tanajah has been lodging at a culture center called Institut for (X), sharing a loft with several other artists.

“My living situation has been my saving grace,” she says. “I think if I was in solitude, I probably would’ve lost my mind for a longer period of time and a lot earlier on. Thankfully, I am able to talk to people and just learn from them. And luckily, they have a studio here, so I’m still able to record.”

Financially, the situation is difficult, with not just the festival but also shows in countries like Germany and Sweden canceled. But Tanajah has been turning her unexpected free time in Denmark to her advantage—which is good because she still doesn’t know when she’ll be able to leave. (Her original flight home, on May 9, was canceled.)

“I can say this is the most productive I’ve ever been,” she says. “I think it’s because I came to Denmark with the mindset of, ‘I’m here to work.’ I had a talk with my mom, and she reminded me that I’m not in control. She said, ‘When you were telling me your goals for 2020, did you have in your mind that you were going to go to Denmark to make music?’

“After that, I connected and recorded with HansSOLO, a well-known producer who is a part of Joey Bada$$ Pro Era collective,” she continues. “I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything in this world.

I’m so thankful that God felt this was something that I needed. I think it saved my life in a way because I live by myself in North Carolina, so I probably would’ve lost my mind if I was just sitting in an apartment by myself for two months. All I have in my heart is gratitude.” W KeepItINDY.com

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C L AS S I F I E D S EMPLOYMENT ServiceNow Developer Needed - Cary Eminence IT Solutions seeks ServiceNow Developer for its Cary, NC office to Customize, test, document, integrate and implement ServiceNow through screen tailoring, workflow administration, report setup, data imports, custom scripting and third-party software integrations. Administer ServiceNow including delegation of groups, modification of CMS, workflows, business rules, UI actions, UI policies, ACLs, dictionary, catalog items and updates of all existing solutions.

May travel & relocate to various unanticipated sites throughout the US. Must have Masters in Comp Sci, Info Sys, Busi Admin or related & 12 months of exp. Email cover letter & resume to resumes@eminenceitsol. com. EOE. No Calls Solution Delivery Business Systems Architect-Supply Chain Needed - Durham Solution Delivery Business Systems Architect-Supply Chain (Durham, NC): Execute projects for modules in Oracle EBS. Manage EBS extensions, setups, dvlpmt efforts, & integrations under Business Systems’ portfolio while supporting & interfacing w/ internal Business & IT stakeholders, external Customers & Vendors.

Convert business reqmts into global solutions which may incl combinations of on-premise, cloud, & web services-based technologies. Bach’s in Comp Sci or related + 5 yrs’ expe as Oracle Dvlpr or Systems Analyst or related reqd. Resumes: Cree, Inc. Attn: Allyson Van Gorder, 4600 Silicon Dr., Durham, NC 27703, Ref. #6720.

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May 13, 2020

ServiceNow ArchitectAdministrator Needed - Durham ServiceNow ArchitectAdministrator (Durham, NC): Dsgn & implmt process applications & ITOM components. Create ServiceNow reports & dashboards. Coordinate testing activities.

Identify, doc, & track s/ ware defects. Perform regression testing of resolved defects. Integrate ServiceNow w/ 3rd-party applications. Master’s in Comp Sci or related + 2 yrs’ exp as ServiceNow Dvlpr or Systems Analyst or related reqd. Resumes: Cree, Inc. Attn: Allyson Van Gorder, 4600 Silicon Dr., Durham, NC 27703, Ref. #6721.

Senior Manager Quality Assurance Needed Morrisville PPD Development, L.P. seeks a Senior Manager Quality Assurance in Morrisville, NC to assure internal and client processes and projects are compliant and inspectionready. BS + 8 yrs. Work can be performed remotely.

10-15% International Travel Required. To apply send resume to global .recruitmentSM@ppdi. com Job Reference Number: 169094 FTCC - Positions Available Fayetteville Technical Community College is now accepting applications for the following positions: Department Chair of Career & Community Enrichment. Systems Security & Analysis Instructor. Psychology Instructor (10 month).

Grounds Maintenance Supervisor. English Instructor (10-month contract). For detailed information and to apply, please visit our employment portal at: faytechcc.peopleadmin. com. Human Resources Office Phone: (910) 6787342. Internet: www. faytechcc.edu. An Equal Opportunity Employer

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this week’s puzzle level:

© Puzzles by Pappocom

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

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

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solution to last week’s puzzle

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May 13, 2020

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HISTORY TRIVIA: • Winston and Salem consolidated to form the City of Winston-Salem through the election of a new unified city board on May 13, 1913.

• The North Carolina Symphony gave its first concert in Hill Hall at UNC-Chapel Hill on May 14, 1932. In 1943, the symphony became the first symphony orchestra to receive continuous state funding.

•The Hiwassee Dam, a hydroelectric dam on the Hiwassee River in Cherokee County, generated electricity for the first time on May 21, 1940. The dam was built by the Tennessee Valley Authority, created as a New Deal measure in 1933.

•The General Assembly recognized Leonora Monteiro Martin’s poem “The Old North State” with Mary Burke Kerr’s music as the official state toast on May 21, 1957.

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