INDY Week 9.20.17

Your week.

Every Wednesday.

INDYWEEK.COM 2 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK 6 Of the $99,459 Farad Ali has raised in his bid for Durham mayor, 48 percent came from outside Durham.

8 If you lived in a neighborhood that was demarcated as red or yellow, our city government and national government said, ‘We don’t invest in those communities.’”

DEPARTMENTS 6 Triangulator 8 News 12 Endorsements 18 Food

10 Part of the reason Wake County officials didn’t audit the Register of Deeds office was that they assumed Laura Riddick was running a tight ship.

20 Music

12 In 2015, only 11 percent of Wake County voters showed up for the municipal elections; in Durham County, less than 8 percent.

37 Music Calendar

18 Descriptions of lush red fruits and a mellow finish refer to coffee, not wine, at Back Alley Coffee Roasters.

20 A spirit of entrepreneurship without gender or color lines and a support staff of “dope-ass black women” have helped the Beats N Bars Festival gain a solid footing.

26 During the minor-league playoffs, the Durham Bulls pull in half as many fans as they do during the regular season.

VOL. 34, NO. 37

26 Arts & Culture 34 What to Do This Week 41 Arts & Culture Calendar

ON THE COVER

DESIGN BY SHAN STUMPF

M.C. Taylor, of Hiss Golden Messenger, at his house in Durham PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 3

NCDOT TO HOLD A PUBLIC MEETING REGARDING THE PROPOSED WIDENING OF I-40 AND THE PROPOSED IMPROVEMENTS AT I-40 AND N.C. 42 INTERCHANGE STIP Project Nos: I-5111 & I-4739 The N.C. Department of Transportation will hold a public meeting regarding two projects to make improvements to Interstate 40 in Wake and Johnston Counties. Project I-5111 proposes to widen I-40 between exit 301 in Raleigh and exit 312 in Johnston County. The purpose of widening I-40 in this area is to improve the level of service throughout the length of the 11-mile project. Project I-4739 proposes to improve the interchange at I-40 and N.C. 42 (exit 312) in Johnston County. The purpose of the work is to improve the function of the interchange and its ability to handle large volumes of traffic in the Cleveland area of Johnston County.

The meeting will take place on Monday, October 2, at the Garner United Methodist Church, located at 201 Methodist Drive from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m.

The public may attend at any time during those hours. NCDOT representatives will be available to answer questions and listen to comments regarding the project. The opportunity to submit written comments will also be provided at the meeting or via phone, email, or mail

by October 20, 2017. Comments received will be taken into consideration as the project develops. Please note that no formal presentation will be made.

Project information and materials can be viewed as they become available online at http://www.ncdot.gov/projects/publicmeetings.

For additional information, contact Robert Deaton, NCDOT Project Development Engineer by mail: 1548 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699 by phone: (919) 707-6017, or via email: rdeaton@ncdot.gov.

NCDOT will provide auxiliary aids and services under the Americans with Disabilities Act for disabled persons who wish to participate in this meeting. Anyone requiring special services should contact Tamara Makhlouf, Human Environment Section via e-mail at tmakhlouf@ncdot.gov or by phone (919) 707-6072 as early as possible so that arrangements can be made.

Persons who speak Spanish and do not speak English, or have a limited ability to read, speak or understand English, may receive interpretive services upon request prior to the meeting by calling 1-800- 481-6494.

Aquellas personas que hablan español y no hablan inglés, o tienen limitaciones para leer, hablar o entender inglés, podrían recibir servicios de interpretación si los solicitan antes de la reunión llamando al 1-800- 481-6494.

4 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

Raleigh Durham | Chapel Hill

PUBLISHER Susan Harper EDITORIAL

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

Erica Hellerstein, Sarah Willets

MUSIC EDITOR Allison Hussey COPY EDITOR David Klein FOOD EDITOR Victoria Bouloubasis LISTINGS COORDINATOR Kate Thompson THEATER AND DANCE CRITIC Byron Woods RESTAURANT CRITIC Emma Laperruque STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER Alex Boerner CHIEF CONTRIBUTORS Drew Adamek, Elizabeth

Bracy, Timothy Bracy, Michaela Dwyer, Spencer Griffith, Corbie Hill, Jill Warren Lucas, Sayaka Matsuoka, Glenn McDonald, Neil Morris, Angela Perez, Hannah Pitstick, Noah Rawlings, Bryan C. Reed, V. Cullum Rogers, Dan Ruccia, David Ford Smith, Zack Smith, Chris Vitiello, Patrick Wall INTERNS Emma Parna Gomes, Maddy SweitzerLammé

PRODUCTION+DESIGN

PRODUCTION MANAGER Christopher Williams GRAPHIC+EDITORIAL DESIGNER Steve Oliva

OPERATIONS

BUSINESS MANAGER Alex Rogers

CIRCULATION

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

Michael Griswold, JC Lacroix, Richard David Lee, Joseph Lizana, James Maness, Gloria McNair, Jeff Prince, Timm Shaw, Freddie Simons, Marshall Wade, Gerald Weeks

ADVERTISING

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Shannon Legge SENIOR ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Lee Coggins,

Ele Roberts, Sarah Schmader

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVES Stephanie Miller,

Joshua Rowsey

CLASSIFIEDS ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE Mike Callahan

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P.O. Box 1772 • Durham, N.C. 27702 DURHAM 320 East Chapel Hill Street, Suite 200 Durham, N.C. 27701 | 919-286-1972 RALEIGH 227 Fayetteville Street, Suite 105 Raleigh, N.C. 27601 | 919-832-8774 EMAIL ADDRESSES

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All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without permission.

backtalk Blind Attack We begin this week with Douglas Williams, who writes that the more he reads our August 30 feature about The Lakewood restaurant moving into the Lakewood neighborhood, the angrier he gets: “You have, perhaps indirectly, chosen to issue what I would call a blind attack against this restaurant and consequently against the owner and employees of the restaurant. I chose my word here carefully—blind, a word which I think describes your negligence in accurately describing the issue that you perceived The Lakewood to be in the center of.

“I will start with your words and your tone.

You begin by saying that The Lakewood ‘occupies’ the old Davis Baking building. Immediately, I read this as confrontational. And even more, you further almost scoffingly say: “The Lakewood is literally illuminating that corner of the neighborhood by the same name.’ Again, I read this as judgmental and confrontational: this place is stealing this neighborhood and its name. I hardly need to go on, paragraph after paragraph of this tone. ‘A table at the back that used to be ....’ Unless I misread your words, your personal view here is made quickly. Too quickly in my view.

“Why, I ask myself, do you choose to tie together the pain and suffering of Durham’s gentrification with the people of The Lakewood restaurant. I think that you were at least tragically unfair in doing them that injustice. You are blaming good people, people that are part of the solution, not the problem, for the ills we in Durham face. It offended me; it literally—to use your word—makes me sick to read your words that fall so hard on these good people.”

On our website last week, we reported on both an impromptu march that the activists who tore down the Confederate monument in downtown Durham embarked on and their later claim that they were denied service in the new Central Park Tavern, which they attributed to racism.

“It’s unfortunate that the perceived experience of a small group of people can over-

shadow the reality of the situation at Central Park Tavern,” writes Ryan Plankenhorn. “I’m a white guy who lives across the street in the oft-maligned Liberty Warehouse Apartments, so I’m sure that many of you won’t care, or believe, what I have to say. The reality is yes, the owner is an old white guy. But this old white guy employs several loyal people of color. Their livelihood, as much as his, is affected by this fabricated controversy. Furthermore, the clientele that is here on a daily basis is much more diverse than any of the other establishments on Rigsbee.

“That’s what I love about Central Park Tavern—it’s a neighborhood bar that, to me, seems like more of a reflection of what Durham was like ten to twenty years ago. Real people, without a thought about differences in skin color, drinking and dancing and enjoying life.”

“It seems to me that the object of these people is not the removal of statues but the destruction of our country,” adds commenter Bob Vela.

“Their statement that our system of capitalism must be destroyed leaves one to wonder what successful system they plan to use to replace capitalism. Perhaps the worldwide successful communist or socialist systems? We have seen how great those systems have been. The poor have never been used as greatly as by the socialist and communist systems. These young, overeducated, underlearned children need the spanking their parents failed to give them years ago.

When you have idle minds and they have no cause to rebel against, you manufacture one.”

Connie Chastain Ward offers similar thoughts—and a defense of the Confederacy: “These empty-brained kids worship a political ideology responsible for the murder of one hundred million people in the twentieth century. Confederates and slave owners were moral giants compared to murderous communists and their vacuous worshipers like these.”

“These children need the spanking their parents failed to give them.”

Want to see your name in bold? Email us at backtalk@indyweek.com, comment on our Facebook page or indyweek.com, or hit us up on Twitter: @indyweek.

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 5

triangulator

MONEY TALKING

This year’s Durham mayoral race is shaping up to be one of the city’s most expensive yet. Here we take a look at the three major candidates’ donations and what percentage of them have come

from Durham. These totals, which run through August 29, don’t include donors who have given $50 or less in the election cycle.

Individual contributions in North Carolina are limited to $5,200.

INDIVIDUAL DONATIONS

FARAD ALI $38,800 (118)

Average donation:

Outside Durham

$418

$51,635

51.9%

$30,100 (9)

$47,804 $1,994 (3)

$9,545 (90) $1–150

$151–500

$501–800

48.1%

$19,000 (19)

$801–1,000

$1,001–5,200

Total:

$99,439

Outside Durham

INDIVIDUAL DONATIONS

PIERCE FREELON Average donation:

$230

47.2%

$47,236

52.8%

$26,250 (83) $17,907 (310) $1–150

$750 (1) $151–500

$501–800

$7,000 (7)

$801–1,000

$1,001–5,200

Total:

$89,457

Outside Durham

INDIVIDUAL DONATIONS

Inside Durham

$42,221

$37,550 (10)

STEVE SCHEWEL

6 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

Inside Durham

$18,847 (181)

$35,850 (115)

Average donation:

$227

Inside Durham

79.7%

$55,422

$800 (1) $1–150

$151–500

$501–800

$7,000 $7,000 (7)

$7,000 $7,000 (2)

$7,000

$7,000

$801–1,000

$1,001–5,200

$14,075

20.3% Total:

$69,497

+THE COP SHOP

You’ve probably driven by the Durham Police Department’s West Chapel Hill Street headquarters plenty of times and not given much thought to it. Or maybe you’ve thought more about what goes on inside it than the building itself.

It’s a largely glass structure with hints of classroom-chair blue, bookended by brown walls that display the police department’s badge. Pretty unremarkable, right? Not so, says Preservation NC. As the city seeks public input on what to do with the building once the DPD’s new headquarters opens on East Main Street next year, the historic preservation group wants residents to know this isn’t any ordinary municipal building.

Constructed in 1958, the building was designed by architect Milton Small to serve as the office of Home Security Life Insurance. According to Cathleen Turner, regional director of Preservation NC, it has been placed on the study list for the National Register of Historic Places. This isn’t just a hint at the structure’s architectural significance; it also means it’s eligible for state and federal tax credits that could be put toward renovations.

“Preservation NC strongly encourages and supports the preservation of this iconic mid-century modernist building and will support the City in this endeavor,” Turner wrote to the city council.

According to an N.C. State archive, Small designed fifty-seven buildings in North Carolina, including the Duke Primate Facility, the Raleigh Municipal building,

WRAL’s building in Raleigh, and several facilities on the N.C. State campus.

The Home Security Life Insurance building, which an N.C. State archive calls an “elegant skyscraper,” was given an Award of Merit from the American Institute of Architects North Carolina in 1959.

In some black-and-white photos from its heyday, it looks downright swanky. The building’s past seems even more germane, considering that Carpenter Motor Co., built in 1923, was torn down to make way for the new police headquarters.

Turner is pushing for information about Small and the availability of historic tax credits to be included on the project website, where residents can fill out a survey on how they think the building should be used.

The city is also hosting two public input sessions—on September 21 at seven p.m. and September 25 at five-thirty p.m.—at the Durham Armory.

+DOWN THE PIPELINE

In a coup for environmentalists, the Department of Environmental Quality delayed a decision on whether to issue a permit for the controversial Atlantic Coast Pipeline, a multibillion-dollar, six-hundredmile project that would carry fracked gas through Virginia, West Virginia, and eastern North Carolina.

The DEQ faced a September 18 deadline to deny or permit the water-quality certification needed to construct the pipeline.

The requirement comes from the federal Clean Water Act, which stipulates that states must certify that proposed pipeline

projects won’t violate water-quality standards before being built. The proposed ACP, which would traverse eight counties in North Carolina, would pass through more than 560 waterways in North Carolina.

The letter issued last week by the DEQ requests “additional information” from Duke Energy and Dominion, the two companies involved in the pipeline’s construction, asking for “more site-specific detail to ensure that downstream water quality is protected.”

The companies have one month to respond to the DEQ’s inquiries, and the agency will then have two months to decide whether to grant the certification.

The pipeline has met with fierce criticism from environmental activists, who say the proposed route would adversely affect water quality and would lock the state into a fracked gas economy when renewable energy sources are widely available. Supporters say it would bring jobs and infrastructure to depressed parts of North Carolina—though a federal environmental impact study issued in July projects that the pipeline will result in just twenty permanent jobs in the Old North State.

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, meanwhile, is slated to issue its final decision on the pipeline in mid-October.

Even if the FERC approves the project, however, if the DEQ denies the waterquality permit, the ACP will be barred from construction. triangulator@indyweek.com This week’s report by Erica Hellerstein and Sarah Willets.

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INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 7

indynews

Bigotry in Pictures

A NEW EXHIBIT LAYS BARE HOW WHITE PRIVILEGE HAS INFLUENCED DURHAM’S PAST AND PRESENT

BY SARAH WILLETS When she moved to Durham two months ago to teach at the Central Park School for Children, Randi Harrison decided to check out the Liberty Warehouse apartments, located conveniently just down the block.

She was shocked by the prices.

“As a black person, the skin I’m in, I thought having a certain degree from a certain university would still cover me, and in that case it didn’t,” says the Columbia University graduate.

The memory came back to her Friday night, looking at a photo of the tobacco warehouse amid renovations, a black woman holding two young children in the foreground. It was part of a new exhibit at the MDC building on Main Street called Uneven Ground: The Foundations of Housing Inequality in Durham, NC. Harrison attended the opening reception with friends, interested to learn more about the history of her new home. The exhibit covered a lot of ground—from the arrival of colonists and the beginnings of slavery to Durham’s rapidly changing modern landscape, as captured by the photographs of local artist Moriah LeFebvre. But it was the words of Brenda Bradsher that stuck with Harrison the most.

In conversation with LeFebvre, who created an original work for the exhibit, Bradsher, now in her seventies, recalled children playing on Grant Street, where she has lived her entire life. It was a community back then, she told LeFebvre. But under urban renewal, a national program in which local governments were given money to clear so-called blighted neighborhoods, much of the historically black Hayti community was razed to make way for the Durham Freeway. The highway cuts Grant Street near the former site of the Fayetteville Street public housing complex, now just concrete pads and overgrown grass where apartments once stood. LeFebrve captured the eerie sight and overlaid a picture of neighborhood kids from Bradsher’s photo album.

Bradsher’s firsthand account brought 8 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

A display included in the Uneven Ground exhibit to life a familiar history of divestment and exploitation of communities of color.

“It was moving for me,” says Harrison.

“A lot of the history I kind of know because it’s consistent across our country. I think it’s different having lived it than learning it.

[Bradsher] would know nuances we’d never understand.”

Uneven Ground is a project of Bull City 150, a collaboration between the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity and the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. At its core, Bull City 150, created ahead of Durham’s sesquicentennial in 2019, seeks to expose how white privilege has influenced Durham’s past and present.

Twenty-five panels take attendees through Durham’s history, beginning with its founda-

PHOTO COURTESY OF BULL CITY 150

tion on stolen land and stolen people.

For Tia Hall, one of the project collaborators, this time period produced the figure that stood out to her most, even as someone who has long studied inequities in Durham: at the start of the Civil War, one in three residents of Orange and Durham counties was enslaved. She wonders whether the same ratio of people today isn’t sharing in Durham’s prosperity.

“Even though you are seeing systemic things happening here, I hope you walk away with an understanding of the humanity of the people who were impacted,” she says.

From there, attendees learn about early landowning patterns, vagrancy laws, and segregation. One panel shows black neighborhoods in 1937 in relation to the city’s

parks and incinerators. Another explains how neighborhoods that were redlined by the Home Owners Loan Corporation didn’t receive city services until decades later, creating a cycle of disinvestment.

“If you lived in a neighborhood that was demarcated as red or yellow, our city government and national government said, ‘We don’t invest in those communities. Those are communities that are poor investments,’” Hall says. “They weren’t underwritten by the banks for housing, but those were also the places that were relegated solely to black people.” Neighborhoods designated as green or blue were off-limits to those who weren’t considered white, which at the time included Jewish, Irish, and Italian residents, Hall says.

A significant portion of the exhibit is dedicated to Hayti, from the community leaders who helped make homeownership a reality for black families to the drastic change in the neighborhood’s landscape as a result of urban renewal. The exhibit offers insight into how a program now synonymous with destruction was approved by black and white voters and supported by elected officials.

“We hope that going through this sort of provocative piece reminds people that these are decisions that we made at a very purposeful level, not solely based on a flawed character,” Hall says.

Other panels look at discriminatory real estate practices, which included different prices for renters of color, and the “invisible walls” that still persist between white communities and communities of color. It’s an invitation, Hall says, to think more deeply about why these inequalities exist and how they continue to manifest.

“What’s the new iteration of land being stolen?” says Hall. “We give it a gentle name like displacement, but displacement is violence.”

The exhibit will be on display October 20 and November 17 as part of Durham's Third Friday events. On November 14, Bull City 150 will host a housing policy discussion. swillets@indyweek.com

news

Mind Your Manners

THE DURHAM CITY COUNCIL WANTS TO ESTABLISH RULES FOR OFFICIALS’ SOCIAL MEDIA USE

BY EMMA PARNA GOMES AND SARAH WILLETS The Durham City Council approved a policy on Monday directing elected and appointed officials on how to use social media.

Three council members voted against the new policy—Charlie Reece, Jillian Johnson, and Steve Schewel—after the director of the N.C. Open Government Coalition raised concerns that some of its provisions could violate the First Amendment. Ultimately, the version that passed Monday— the city’s first-ever social media policy for elected and appointed officials—omitted a section that posed the clearest free speech problems, but dissenters still had qualms about the policy.

The policy has two goals: to ensure posts

by officials are easily archived and retrievable and to establish guidelines on how officials should use personal and professional accounts. The policy “strongly encourages” public officials to have both. (Reece and Johnson, the council’s most prolific social media users, already do.)

The city began considering the policy before the anti-white-supremacist rally downtown last month. Reports of a KKK appearance spread in part via Johnson’s Twitter, prompting Mayor Bill Bell to call for elected officials “to be more responsible.” After the rally, the city added a provision saying officials should be “honest and accurate when posting information.”

In an email to the council, Open Government Coalition director Jonathan Jones said the policy errs in saying posts may be considered public records. He also said the policy was unclear on record retention, leaves out text messages, and overly regulates speech.

“In the limitations on elected and appointed officials’ speech, I believe there is too heavy-handed of an approach that seems to direct council members as well as other appointed officials as to what they can and cannot say about city business,” he wrote. “Because the only recourse in your policy is censure, and you can ostensibly censure each other for your speech until the cows come home because that is

part of the political process, it is not a First Amendment violation per se. But it leaves the impression that council members (and other elected officials) are more limited in what they can say than they are.”

Initially, Reece proposed sending the draft back to the council’s procedure committee, but Bell suggested some version be approved so that “nobody goes off the reservation.”

After it became clear that Bell had a majority, members set about suggesting revisions.

The policy was passed with the caveat that it be reviewed by the city manager and the city attorney’s offices, and be revisited during the council’s work session on Thursday. backtalk@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 9

news

Could It Have Been Caught?

WAKE COMMISSIONERS ARE ANGRY ABOUT THE REGISTER OF DEEDS MESS, BUT THEY’RE NOT READY TO POINT FINGERS

BY THOMAS GOLDSMITH

RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE RECYCLE

THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS THIS

10 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER PAPER

Wake County officials made clear their disappointment Monday about the loss of $2.3 million—perhaps more—from the Register of Deeds office. But they rejected the idea that responsibility should rest on any person or agency beyond the as-yet-unnamed thief.

More than an hour of questioning of county finance officials and an outside auditor elicited a number of reasons for the theft, including the once-bright reputation of former Register of Deeds Laura Riddick.

“I can clearly understand how something like this could have easily been missed, given the professionalism of the office that it was coming from,” said commission chairman Sig Hutchinson. “I’m cool with the question of, Could it have been caught? The answer is, I don’t think it could have been caught.”

Commissioner John Burns said it’s inappropriate to point a finger at anyone. “There can only be one place that the blame should be cast, and that would be the person who decided to steal public money,” he said.

In the end, commissioners signed a memorandum of understanding with the Register of Deeds office giving the county the right to audit it—a right already explicit in state law. In other words, the agreement changes nothing about the relationship between the two bodies.

During Riddick’s tenure in the elected post, from 1996 until March 2017, at least $2.3 million went missing from money paid in cash for marriage licenses and other vital records. The actual amount missing hasn’t been determined because records either don’t exist or were kept in a different system before 2008. Johnna Rogers, Wake County’s deputy county manager, said Monday it’s a “possibility” there are more funds unaccounted for.

The apparent amount taken each year grew from 2008, the first year for which there are records in the system, Rogers said.

Riddick stepped down earlier this year, citing bad health, and has declined to answer questions from the INDY. Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman, along with

the State Bureau of Investigation, is pursuing a criminal investigation in the case, which could result in indictments. Riddick, among those being investigated, is cooperating with the probe, Freeman said.

Earlier this year, Freeman said the process could be concluded this month. Now she says that investigators are still making progress, so there’s no definite end date. The district attorney says the probe might obtain records predating 2008.

The county’s internal auditor, John Stephenson, called the embezzlement the worst he had ever seen. The office had an average daily cash collection of between $2,200 and $3,200, of which nearly half often didn’t make it into the books, he said.

“What exactly do I tell the public and my constituents?”

While commissioners decline to pass blame, they had plenty of questions about the shortfalls in governance that led to the missing money.

“What exactly do I tell the public and my constituents when they ask what took so long?” Commissioner Jessica Holmes asked.

“What exactly I am supposed to tell them?”

The answers to that question can be grouped in several rough categories.

One is the tradition—not supported by state law—that elected county officers run their own shops, free from county oversight.

“You’ve got a separately elected official who has full autonomy in that office,” Rogers explained.

Rogers and finance director Susan McCullen agreed that state statutes give county staffers the right to audit any county agency that handles cash. But for the last several years, the county declined to do so. While

Stephenson audited other departments, he didn’t do so for the Register of Deeds. That decision was based on Riddick’s reputation for running a tight, efficient operation.

“Just from our regular interactions with her and how she was so customer-focused, there just wasn’t any indication that she wasn’t at the top of her profession in providing service,” Rogers said.

But why didn’t red flags go up, board members asked, when 40 to 50 percent of cash was walking out the door every day?

“Because this had been going on for so long, there wasn’t anything to show there was a dip,” Rogers said.

Partisan politics, or the desire to avoid them, also played a role. Both Riddick and Wake County Sheriff Donnie Harrison are Republicans, while the Board of Commissioners has no GOP members. The commissioners were worried about how initiating such inquiries would look.

“If the first thing we did was to say that we were going to investigate the two county departments run by Republicans, the headlines would have been entirely different,” Burns said.

The slow pace of government helped prevent discovery of the thefts. Proposals to allow Register of Deeds customers to use credit and debit cards—which Riddick suggested—have been in the works for years.

Those changes are expected to go online in December.

“This is not as easy as going out and buying a little machine and sticking it on your phone,” outgoing county manager Jim Hartmann said, showing a rare touch of impatience.

In addition, Stephenson’s small staff was busy with other projects, including a Medicaid investigation that saved the county $2.2 million. And in the grand scheme, $2.3 million over several years in an annual budget of more than a billion dollars is considered a relatively small amount. tgoldsmith@indyweek.com

VALID ANYTIME

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 11

VOTE , DAMMIT! The INDY ’s

2017 endorsements for Raleigh, Cary, and Durham

12 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

I

t’s easy to get riled up about Donald Trump. His brief—but somehow seemingly endless—reign, punctuated by nods to white supremacists and rank malfeasance, has served as a catalyst for protests and marches all over the country.

But as much as Trump is a focal point of our collective animus, most of the decisions that affect your day-to-day life—school funding, property taxes, infrastructure, zoning, building codes, trash collection—are made closer to home. And yet our local municipal elections are marred by abysmal turnout. In October 2015, just 11 percent of voters showed up in Wake County; in Durham County, less than 8 percent. Some of these races came down to just a couple hundred or even a few dozen votes.

Which is to say: vote, dammit! It really matters!

As always, our endorsements are designed to help you make informed decisions.

And, as always, we’re up front about our biases: the INDY is a progressive newspaper, dedicated to economic and social justice. We evaluate candidates through this prism, also factoring in experience, pragmatism, effectiveness, and their ability to articulate a cogent vision. We’ve posted candidates’ answers to our detailed questionnaires on indyweek.com so that you can see for yourself what they stand for, regardless of whether we endorsed them.

This week, we’ll be endorsing in Raleigh, Durham, and Cary’s municipal elections, all of which will be held October 10, with early voting starting Thursday. Our endorsements in races being held on November 7—including elections in Orange County municipalities and for the Carrboro-Chapel Hill City Schools Board of Education—will be released October 18.

See you at the polls.

RALEIGH

MAYOR: NANCY MCFARLANE For three consecutive elections, Nancy McFarlane has cruised to easy wins. Two years ago, the unaffiliated McFarlane defeated Republican Robert Weltzin by a fifty-point spread. Two years before that, she beat Weltzin by fifty-one points. Two years before that, she claimed the mayor’s seat in a three-way race by thirty-one points. She’s never faced a serious challenge.

Charles Francis would have you believe he’s no Robert Weltzin.

And he’s not, in at least one meaningful way: Francis is a proud Democrat in an increasingly Democratic city.

Heretofore, McFarlane, a former pharma executive, had been MCFARLANE able to play it both ways, winning votes from progressive Democrats as well as independents and some Republicans.

But this year, the Wake County Democratic Party, with a strong African-American candidate out to make his mark, endorsed Francis in the nonpartisan election.

With a background as a federal prosecutor and a bank founder, Francis has some old Raleigh connections to call on (including some prominent Republicans), creating some awkward moments for old-line Democrats who

always felt comfortable with McFarlane.

What’s a Cameron Park Dem to do?

(There’s also a Republican in the race, Paul Fitts, but you needn’t worry about him.)

Francis says his priority would be “improving the quality of life for our citizens,” including through affordable housing. “We have leadership at City Hall that is satisfied with increasing affordable housing units by the dozens instead of by the hundreds,” he says.

He also wants to improve the city’s mass transit options and champion job recruitment.

McFarlane has bristled at Francis’s criticisms that she’s aloof and has done too little for low-income people. But he has a point.

Her move to replace the city’s nineteen citizen advisory committees—citizen groups that pro-development types love to whine about— with an ill-defined citizen engagement board was a misstep. (She quickly backed off.) And Francis is also right that the money the city has invested in affordable housing isn’t enough.

Additionally, he could criticize the plodding city bureaucracy as well as the self-defeating decision to eliminate free nighttime parking in downtown garages. There’s also the fact that McFarlane hasn’t quite been the champion of social justice we’d like to see.

But Francis’s critiques of Raleigh’s quality of life seem misplaced. The mayor’s team frequently touts a poll that found that 91 percent of Raleigh’s residents rated the city’s quality of life as good to excellent. People are moving to the city in droves, businesses are flourish-

ing, taxes are reasonable, if rising. If nothing else, McFarlane has kept in motion the downtown wave that former mayor Charles Meeker started. And, in what’s likely to be her legacy, she helped push through the deal to turn the Dorothea Dix property into a destination park.

Francis hasn’t made a compelling case that McFarlane deserves the boot. Does city government have room to improve?

Absolutely. But has it gone completely off the rails? Not by a long shot. As the saying goes, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Francis has a lot to offer Raleigh. But McFarlane deserves one more term.

AT-LARGE: RUSS STEPHENSON AND NICOLE STEWART

We’ll get the easy one out of the way: longtime council member Russ Stephenson, an architect and urban planner, has more than earned reelection. He is smart, engaged, and progressive, and has long been a champion of equity.

Now the hard part. With incumbent MaryAnn Baldwin bowing out, six newcomers join Stephenson in seeking two at-large seats. (The top two vote-getters win.) Of them, three deserve consideration: Stacy Miller, Zainab Baloch, and Nicole Stewart.

Miller, an attorney who had a brief STEPHENSON appointed stint on the council in 1997, has raised gobs of money, even holding a fundraiser on the elite sands of Figure Eight Island.

“Every time I turn my head,” he says, “Raleigh’s on someSTEWART body’s top-ten list, but everybody’s not on that top-ten list. We can do much better.”

Baloch, meanwhile, is a twenty-six-yearold Muslim of Pakistani descent working on her master’s studies in public administration at UNC-Chapel Hill. Baloch offers more than just much-needed diversity: she’s an advocate for mental health care who speaks forcefully about addressing the city’s affordable housing crisis.

We see a bright future for Baloch, but we’re siding with Stewart, the thirty-five-year-old development director at the N.C. Conservation Network. Clearly passionate and knowledgeable, Stewart would be a valuable voice

for the environment and smart growth. She’s won the backing of Wake County Commissioner Jessica Holmes and former mayor Charles Meeker (note: he’s the father of one of Stewart’s husband’s business partners), who said Stewart would “bring the next generation of progressive leadership and vision” to the council. We agree.

DISTRICT A: DICKIE THOMPSON

Two years ago, Dickie Thompson eked out a win in the city council’s only runoff election, besting Republican Eddie Woodhouse by a little more than a thousand votes. A Democratic ally of McFarlane and chairman of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport Authority, Thompson is a Raleighite through and through. He’s generally a probusiness vote, but he also stresses the importance of workforce and affordable housing, especially on mass transit routes, and public participation in the planning of Dix Park.

Opponent Alex Moore, a thirtyyear-old married father of two, prides himself on being a good budgeter who lives debt-free and would like to tighten THOMPSON the reins on spending. Having spent only $100 on his campaign so far, however, Moore is a long shot at best. Thompson deserves your vote.

Wednesdays Aug. 2 - Oct. 25 • 5 pm - 6:30 pm Market Plaza between Wilmington & Fayetteville Street

DISTRICT B: DAVID COX

Veteran politician John Odom has often seemed like the quintessential city councilman. A friendly backslapper, he knows everybody—except, perhaps, for the oftentouted sixty-plus people who move to Raleigh every day.

Incumbent David Cox comes across differently. He’s soft-spoken yet intense about his desire to constrain development in his sprawling north Raleigh district. Two years ago, Cox—then best known as a leader in a successful neighborhood battle against a supermarket—defeated Odom for the District B seat by 262 votes. Odom, then a Republican, now unaffiliated, is back for a rematch.

Cox is a man who’s not afraid to say no.

He’s been an advocate of smart growth and citizen participation, particularly after McFarlane sought to reduce the COX

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INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 13

influence of citizen advisory councils earlier this year. In 2015, the INDY endorsed Cox over Odom, arguing that “beyond an appetite for any and all development … we’re not quite sure what Odom’s bringing to the table these days.” We haven’t changed our minds.

DISTRICT C: COREY BRANCH

In 2015, Corey Branch scored the biggest upset of the Raleigh municipal election, defeating incumbent Eugene Weeks by fewer than three hundred votes. This year, he’s up against two main challengers: Libertarian Olen Watson, a construction company owner who is flush with unconventional but intriguing ideas, including increasing density zonings throughout the city and implementing “no-stop ticketing” to reduce police profiling of minorities; and Triangle Downtowner publisher Crash Gregg.

Watson or Gregg would be the first white person to represent District C in thirty years, and a victory by either would likely mean the Raleigh City Council would become an all-white body. That’s not an ideal outcome.

But that’s not why we’re endorsing Branch. We’re doing so because he’s served the city and his district well, stressing the need for economic develBRANCH opment and better policing in southeast Raleigh, as well as addressing the dearth of grocery stores in the area and access to transportation.

Branch is the type of young African-American political leader the city needs.

DISTRICT D: KAY CROWDER

Kay Crowder has established her own distinctive place on the council after being appointed to the seat of her late husband, Thomas Crowder, in 2014. At times, Crowder has been almost reflexively anti-development, which isn’t always a good thing.

Still, she’s balanced out some of the council’s more kneejerk pro-growth representatives, and she opposed the mayor’s effort to create a community engagement board.

CROWDER Her opponent, Bobby Plott Jr., has raised very little money and has no public profile. Barring the unforeseen, Crowder should have clear sailing to another term.

14 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

DISTRICT E: STEF MENDELL

The label “Midtown” fits comfortably now on Raleigh’s North Hills area, though it may have seemed a stretch when it was first introduced.

Its chief presence in elective office is council member Bonner Gaylord, who’s running for a fifth term. Gaylord works as general manager of the former shopping mall known as North Hills, which was somnolent when businessman John Kane took it over, reimagined it, and expanded it into a roaring success. With donations from Kane and other major players, Gaylord has assembled a staggering campaign chest of nearly $180,000, more money than he could possibly spend. He’s citing affordable housing, jobs, and transportation as the chief responsibilities of city government.

Gaylord’s principal opponent is Stef Mendell, a retired international communications consultant. Mendell wants the city to innovate, using proceeds from the sale of city property and tax incentives to bolster affordable housing, MENDELL while considering tax abatement to help people stay in their homes. She’s also talking about finding solutions to challenges such as stormwater runoff and the scrapedoff houses and oversize replacements that are changing Raleigh’s older neighborhoods.

Gaylord’s done a decent job, and his substantial campaign fund indicates he may be eyeing a move up the ladder in 2019, should McFarlane not seek another term. But we think it’s time for a new voice to speak out for Midtown neighbors. Mendell fills the bill.

TRANSPORTATION BOND: YES

In June, the city council voted unanimously to place a $206 million transportation bond—paid for by an annual property tax increase of $26 for a $200,000 home—on the ballot. City officials are pitching this as a way to keep up with Raleigh’s rapid growth, and they’re right. Yet another tax increase may be somewhat unpalatable, but so too is being stuck in traffic forever.

DURHAM

MAYOR: STEVE SCHEWEL

Of course the INDY is endorsing Steve Schewel, right? After all, he founded the paper in 1983. His values are our values, embedded in our DNA. So this should hardly be a surprise; indeed, we debated whether to endorse in this race at all.

But we decided to anyway—not because we’re obligated, but because Schewel is by far the best candidate in the race. (To be clear: Schewel sold the INDY in 2012 and has no ties to the paper. No one involved in our editorial deliberations was employed here when Schewel owned the paper.)

Schewel’s most formidable challenger is Farad Ali, whose credentials are solid enough. He’s president of the N.C. Institute of Minority Economic Development, chairman of the Raleigh-Durham International Airport Authority board, and a former oneterm city council member.

Running under the slogan “One Durham,” Ali stresses the need to make sure everyone’s voice is heard in public policy conversations. He also correctly cites income inequality and the rising poverty rate as two of the city’s most pressing issues.

Ali would be a fine mayor, in much the way Bill Bell has been a fine mayor.

But of all the candidates, his mayoralty would most repreSCHEWEL sent a continuation of the status quo—a cautious, Chamber-friendly progressivism.

Pierce Freelon, on the other hand, would mark the sharpest break with the Bell era.

At just thirty-three years old, he would be the city’s youngest mayor, something he considers a feature, not a bug. He’s fluent in the language of social justice, pledging to pass a robust antidiscrimination ordinance and turn Durham into a sanctuary city in open defiance of state law. He speaks passionately not just in praise of the activists who took down the Confederate monument but also of the need to address systemic racism. He ambitiously pitches a program to guarantee living-wage jobs for unemployed residents, though we’d like to see more meat on that bone before we weigh in on its merits.

In short, Freelon is this year’s most exciting candidate. Were he running for city council, we’d likely be behind him. But that’s not the circumstance in which we find ourselves.

Schewel, on the other hand, both exceeds Ali’s experience and marries it with Freelon’s activist inclinations. Schewel’s knowledge of the city and its government is unparalleled, and his commitment to social justice causes is indisputable. He’s been walking the walk in Durham for more than three decades. In the late seventies, he successfully fought a highway plan that would have gutted a black neighborhood.

“I spent the next twenty years helping to create the black-white political movement that gradually defeated the white conservatives who had ruled Durham for decades and replaced them in office with the progressive biracial majority we have now,” he writes.

On the council, he’s formed a progressive bloc with Jillian Johnson and Charlie Reece; during his first council campaign in 2011, he pushed for dedicated funds for affordable housing, which the council passed the next year. He’s since advocated for using city-owned properties downtown to build affordable housing.

In his eleven thousand-word (!) response to the INDY’s questionnaire, Schewel writes exhaustively about, well, everything: racial tensions and density bonuses, minority business capitalization and mass transit, trash pickup and gentrification. There’s not a significant issue facing Durham that Schewel hasn’t put a lot of thought into—and he is an endless font of ideas for addressing them, too.

He’s the mayor Durham needs right now.

WARD 1: DEDREANA FREEMAN

Earlier this year, Cora Cole-McFadden, the longest-serving city council member, passed up an expected mayoral bid to seek reelection. She deserves credit for being a voice for equity, both on the council and in her previous job as the director of the city’s Equal Opportunity/Equity Assurance Department. She was a trailblazer, the first African-American woman to run a city department. In office, she’s pushed to bolster the city’s women- and minority-owned businesses.

Still, we think it’s time for a change in Ward 1—a decision owing primarily to the quality of her two challengers.

First, we want to give a shout-out to Brian Callaway, the coordinator of energy and sustainability for Durham Public Schools and an impressive newcomer to the city’s political scene. Callaway has offered thoughtful ideas for tax reforms and policing concerns. His criticism of the Sheriff’s Office—over which the city council has no control—is spotFREEMAN on, and he has smart proposals for downtown development.

But we’re endorsing DeDreana Freeman, a well-connected, well-regarded community organizer and nonprofit administrator.

She was instrumental in helping her Golden Belt neighborhood receive a historic INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 15

designation, she’s served on the city’s planning commission for the last three years, and she’s also been president of the InterNeighborhood Council of Durham. She’s a strong advocate for affordable housing and rightly argues that the “penny for housing” the city passed in 2012 didn’t go far enough.

With her background on the planning commission and her pledge to take direction from her constituents, Freeman would be a strong voice for responsible neighborhood development.

WARD 2: MARK-ANTHONY MIDDLETON

The People’s Alliance’s interview committee recommended that the PAC endorse pastor and longtime activist Mark-Anthony Middleton for the Ward 2 seat. But then, at the group’s endorsement meeting, some McDougald Terrace residents made a persuasive case to PA members for John Rooks Jr. With much respect for their enthusiasm, we think the PA’s interview committee had it right.

Both talk about the need to address the city’s equity and income gaps, but Rooks is floating a naïve idea to enact a five-year moratorium on downtown development.

While he’s correct that the city needs to focus on revitalizing underserved neighborhoods, it’s not an either-or situation.

Middleton has many of the same overarching goals, but he also has the experience to achieve those goals in practical and realistic ways. He has a proven depth of knowledge and has long been a fixture in conversations about housing and policing through his prominent role in Durham CAN; he often clashed with former police chief Jose Lopez and was part of the city committee that selected C.J. Davis to replace him.

Middleton has offered a detailed proposal to link police budgets to “things that lessen the likelihood of contact with law enforcement,” including job training and education. In addition, he’s proposed what he calls the Ready Durham initiative, a “partnership between the city, educational institutions, and exceptional corporate citizens to prepare our low-income, educationally chalMIDDELTON lenged, and unemployed residents for participation in our renaissance above and beyond housekeeping, food service, and other low-wage jobs.”

He’ll serve Durham well on the city council.

16 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

WARD 3: VERNETTA ALSTON

Ward 3 incumbent Don Moffitt has mostly been a good council member. He asks good questions about city finances and wants to leverage city property for affordable housing. But in this year’s contest, we think Vernetta Alston better reflects Durham’s values and identity.

To put it simply, Moffitt hasn’t been as bold a leader as we believe Alston would be. As a queer woman of color and—in her day job as an attorney for the Center for Death ALSTON Penalty Litigation— an advocate for the wrongfully convicted, she would invigorate the council with new and often-absent perspectives. Throughout the campaign, Alston has demonstrated an ability to organize and energize voters with a platform centered on immigrant and LGBTQ advocacy, fair policing, and responsible growth, all rooted in a fundamental understanding of why inequality exists in Durham today.

“Durham must be the standard-bearer for our progressive values,” she writes.

“The only way we can accomplish that is by electing progressive leaders to our city council.”

We couldn’t agree more.

CARY

AT-LARGE: EDWARD YERHA

Edward Yerha has ably served on the Cary Town Council since 2012 and was a proud proponent of the Cary Community Plan the town council passed earlier this year.

He argues that Cary is headed in the right direction. But in the years to come, he says, town officials must “make effective use of Cary's dwindling supply of undeveloped land” and encourage a variety of housing options to increase affordability.

His opponents are George McDowell, a retired lawyer, and Jeff Alan De Deugd, about whom we could find little information. McDowell’s top objective, according to his website, is to “properly plant one million additional trees” within Cary’s borders.

In his responses to our questionnaire, McDowell fleshes out that single-minded platform: “My detractors pigeonhole me as a one-trick pony, concerned only with trees, and ignoring the facts that trees purify our air and water, anchor our soil, greatly reduce stormwater runoff, and pull massive amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it,” he writes. “In addition, they enhance our quality of life through

increased beauty of our surroundings and by inducing greater psychological well-being.”

McDowell raises important points, to be sure. But there’s a reason a host of Cary officials as well as state representative Gale Adcock and Wake County commissioners Sig Hutchinson and Erv Portman are supporting Yerha. He’s a smart, consensus-building public servant who, in the words of Mayor YERHA Harold Weinbrecht, “understands the complexities of blending environmental interests with business interests, has the experience and integrity to do the right thing at the right time, and is not afraid to stand up for what he believes.”

While the town council should pay attention to McDowell, we endorse Yerha.

DISTRICT A: JENNIFER ROBINSON

The District A race pits incumbent Jennifer Robinson against Majid Mohadjer and Radha Ravi Varma. Mohadjer hasn’t raised any money and doesn’t appear to have a significant campaign presence. Varma, a software developer and self-described conservative who has lived in Cary for four years, wants to end “aggressive overdevelopment” in west Cary and ban new home developments until local schools have their attendance caps lifted.

ROBINSON He also wants to ban plastic bags and doesn’t think the town has enough undeveloped land to accommodate affordable housing.

Robinson, who has served on the council for eighteen years and works for SAS as director of local government solutions, is versed in the intricacies of town governance and has made her mark as an effective leader. She argues for smarter development, including increased infill and density in certain areas, as well as for improving the town’s infrastructure and looking at new options to shore up the town’s tax base. In this race, she’s the better choice.

DISTRICT C: KENNETH PRESTING

In District C, incumbent Jack Smith faces newcomer Kenneth Presting. Smith is the council’s longest-serving member—to mark his twenty-fifth anniversary on the council, his colleagues named a park after

him in 2014—and is now seeking his eighth term. In his lengthy service, Smith has distinguished himself as an advocate for preserving Cary’s small-town charm and its quality of life.

But in our view, it’s time for Cary to go in a different, more progressive direction—not on account of Smith’s shortcomings, but because voters have the opportunity to elect Presting, a self-described “Bernie Sanders democratic socialist,” though his political views tend to be much more nuanced than that.

In his response to our questionnaire, Presting brings up— unsolicited—the fact that Cary has no abortion provider and promises that if elected he would work to change that. He also wants PRESTING the town to spend money collecting data on gun violence.

We’ve found a lot to like about Presting beyond his liberal stances on hot-button social issues. He says he’d ally himself with council members Lori Bush and Edward Yerha, and he talks smartly about traffic congestion, fare-free public transit, and the town’s reliance on large parking lots. (He favors more expensive underground garages.)

Presting would shake things up, and in this case, that’s a good thing. backtalk@indyweek.com

THE INDY’S 2017 VOTING GUIDE RALEIGH

Mayor: Nancy McFarlane At-Large: Russ Stephenson and Nicole Stewart District A: Dickie Thompson District B: David Cox District C: Corey Branch District D: Kay Crowder District E: Stef Mendell Transportation Bond: Yes

DURHAM

Mayor: Steve Schewel Ward 1: DeDreana Freeman Ward 2: Mark-Anthony Middleton Ward 3: Vernetta Alston

CARY

At-Large: Edward Yerha District A: Jennifer Robinson District C: Kenneth Presting

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 17

indyfood

Bean Counters

TWO BARISTA CHAMPIONS PUT NORTH CAROLINA ON THE COFFEE MAP. THEIR NEW ROASTERY IS NOW OPEN.

BY DREW ADAMEK

I

n the cluttered workroom of Back Alley Coffee Roasters in Wake Forest, a champion is being made.

At a small bench flanked by an industrial-size coffee roaster and five-gallon plastic buckets filled with coffee beans, Kyle Ramage, the 2017 U.S. Barista Champion, is meticulously pulling espresso shots. He’s practicing under the watchful eye of Lemuel Butler, the 2016 U.S. Barista Champion.

Together they take deliberate sips of each shot, commenting on flavor notes, balance, and acidity. To a layman, their descriptions of hints of lemon, lush red fruits, and either an astringent or mellow finish seem apropos of fine wine. But for them it is the vital language of competition and quality.

Butler offers advice and Ramage adjusts his grinder, pulls two more shots, presses the grounds into the portafilter with multiple tools, and produces a coffee slightly more acidic than the first. It is a subtle but notable difference that, over time, will guide him toward producing one of the best cups of coffee in the world.

The pair will repeat this process for hours and hours over the next several months, tasting hundreds of espresso shots as Ramage trains for the 2017 World Barista Championship in Seoul, South Korea, in November.

For the second consecutive year, a Triangle barista will represent the U.S. at the international competition, going shot for shot against the best baristas in the world.

“It’s amazing that two winners in a row have come from the same place,” says Cindy Ludviksen, managing director of the Dublin-based World Coffee Events organization which hosts the U.S. Barista Championships.

“When you think of places super notable for coffee, you never think of Durham or Raleigh.”

She raises an interesting question: how could two Raleigh neighbors and veterans of Durham’s coffee scene (Butler worked at Counter Culture for eleven years and Ramage at coffee grinder manufacturer Mahlkonig USA for four) beat dozens of well-known expert baristas from coffee meccas like San 18 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

National barista champions Kyle Ramage and Lem Butler at their new roastery.

PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago—two years running?

“Being a competitor from the Southeast who’s made it to finals so many times is huge because the rest of the country looked at the

Southeast like there’s not a lot of great coffee here,” says Butler. “Winning these championships put the Southeast on the coffee map.”

Their success results from the maturation of the Triangle’s coffee culture.

“They are products of their environment,” says Ludviksen. “The coffee scene, which grew out of the food scene, has now evolved with a focus on better quality, better sourcing, and more attention to craftsmanship. Taking pride in what you are doing is part of the landscape. It’s an important part of the culture.”

The scene’s success is partly the result of decades-long, direct relationships between coffee growers and Triangle coffee roasters, like Carrboro Coffee, providing access to higher-quality competition coffee. In turn, these roasters, especially Durham’s Counter Culture Coffee, have helped produce more knowledgeable, sophisticated baristas. Cafe owners support regular barista competitions, or throwdowns, creating vibrant rivalries that elevate the Triangle’s talent pool.

And a local ethos of collaboration and camaraderie among baristas has empowered competitors to hold their own on the world stage.

“Competition is always a team effort,” says Ramage. “People who do well don’t do it on their own.”

But how can making coffee be a competitive sport? The short answer is control. A barista is responsible for numerous factors—temperature, grind, roast, timing—that determine coffee’s quality. Second, a barista is charged with guiding the consumer through the sensual experience of that coffee. At competitions, baristas are judged on their ability to precisely control how they make the coffee, but also how they accentuate or modify the coffee’s natural attributes.

Then they must present it to the judges, almost like a performance.

“Brewing the best coffee on the planet is ideal, and you describing that well is also the ideal,” says Ramage.

At the competition, Butler and Ramage had some help from Counter Culture. They both used the roaster’s Finca Nuguo, a rare coffee only produced on a five-hectare plot in Panama that costs $100 per pound. It took Counter Culture years to develop a strong enough relationship with the growers to access the coffee.

Despite his aversion to boasting, Butler leads the competitive pack in the Triangle.

He’s the most decorated barista in competition history, winning five regional championships and the 2016 national championship.

He finished fourth at last year’s World Barista Championship in Dublin.

Until just a few weeks ago, he worked at Counter Culture Coffee in wholesale customer support and public outreach. That’s where he met Ramage, who was a student in one of his training classes. Ramage worked at Jubala Coffee in Raleigh. Over the course of several years, the pair bonded after frequent encounters at competitions.

But it wasn’t until Butler began training for last year’s championship that their partnership formalized; Ramage became his coach.

“I needed someone to taste my coffee because sometimes, when you are stressed, your taste buds give out,” says Butler. “And when you are competing you need someone to tell you what you need to hear, instead of what you want to hear. Kyle was that person.”

As coach, Ramage traveled with Butler to Dublin’s world competition, so it was natural for Butler to return the favor when Ramage began training this year.

“Lem is a great, hardworking barista who puts in lots of training hours. He’s helped me to keep pushing to be better,” says Ramage.

And he has certainly improved. He performed dismally in last year’s competition; although he’s not sure why, judges described his coffee as bitter and he was knocked out in the preliminary round. But he came roaring back this year as the first non-cafe or coffee-roaster employee ever to win the national championship.

The pair is now gearing up for Ramage’s appearance on the world stage—and for a new partnership. They bought Back Alley Coffee Roasters in Wake Forest last month.

The stress of a new business has made practicing much more demanding, but it’s a challenge they welcome.

“We’d been talking about a business partnership for years, but the right opportunity never came up until Back Alley came up for sale,” says Ramage.

They’re keeping the Back Alley name for a little while, with plans to rebrand as Black and White Coffee Roasters. A launch of the new brand is slated for early October. They hope to double or even triple the shop’s current roast coffee sales, increase online sales and plans are in the works to expand the small cafe to offer food and more coffee options. They hope their competitive practice translates into better experiences for customers and inspires employees to elevate their craft.

“What we’re instilling in our baristas on the floor is a very competition-minded way of making coffee,” says Ramage. “They’re making very competition-like beverages out there.”

That inspiration extends beyond the shop. Butler and Ramage are role models for the next generation of Triangle baristas. Shane Hess works at Jubala Coffee and finished twelfth at this year’s U.S. Barista Championships. He looks to Butler and Ramage with pride.

“The fact that two barista champions have come from the Triangle means so much to me. It encourages me that I could one year win it, too,” says Hess. “It also inspires the baristas in the Triangle that what we serve is world-class. It is easy to follow shops on the West Coast and think that they are doing something incredible and different, but the truth is we are producing the same quality coffee they are.

Lem and Kyle prove that!” food@indyweek.com

FOOD BRIEF

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 24 LA FIESTA DEL PUEBLO 2017 We’re right in the middle of Hispanic Heritage Month, and we can’t think of a better way to celebrate all the rich beauty of Latino culture than by attending the annual La Fiesta del Pueblo. This year promises to be the biggest gathering yet. However, there’s one major glitch: you’ve only got seven hours to indulge in food from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Cuba, and the Caribbean while also dancing to tropicana, mambo, salsa, Mexican folklorico, and mariachi. The festival also features a variety of vendors with goods from local artisans and Latino specialty stores. Best of all, bachatero Toby Love is headlining. My borrowed advice from Celia Cruz: La vida es un carnaval. Go for it all.— Araceli Cruz RALEIGH CITY PLAZA, RALEIGH, NOON–7 P.M. www.elpueblo.org/eng/la-fiesta-del-pueblo-2017

T

er

To advertise or feature a pet for adoption, please contact eroberts@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 19

S E PTE M B E R

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indymusic

Raising the Bars

DURHAM’S FORTIFIED BEATS N BARS FESTIVAL PROMISES A HIP-HOP-HEAVY WEEKEND THAT’S STRONGER THAN EVER

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12/29-31

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126 E. Cabarrus St.• 919-821-4111 www.lincolntheatre.com 20 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

T

he sound of screeching steel pierces tranquil early fall air with vexatious intensity as a CSX train travels its route between Durham’s Ramseur and West Pettigrew streets, passing the parking lot behind The Pinhook.

“We’re going to have to schedule our lineup so that this doesn’t interrupt people’s sets,” says Jonathan Harmon, who scrunches his face in acknowledgment of the freight’s uncomfortable presence.

In less than a week, the dull utilitarian lot behind The Pinhook will be transformed into the main stage area for the Beats N Bars music festival, of which Harmon, more

Crystal Taylor, Jonathan Harmon, and Kyesha Jennings PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER commonly known in music circles by his stage name The Real Laww, is a managing partner. The other members of the team, Crystal Taylor and Kurrell Rice, aka Professor Toon, trickle into the lot with bewildered looks on their faces. Rice is coping with a cast on his right leg from a severe ankle injury, and Taylor has been dealing with a week of media appearances and event planning as the latest iteration of her festival draws closer.

There’s a look about them that I’ve seen in the military. They’re the commanding element of an A team that has hit every checkpoint on its way to the main objective:

haggard and worked raw, but ready for the satisfaction of an accomplished mission.

Everything has fallen into place so far, and the signs of success are all there, but it’s way too early to relax. After all, Beats N Bars 2017 is the group’s most ambitious undertaking to date.

The event in name is Taylor’s baby (she founded Beats N Bars last year), but she joined forces this year with Harmon and Rice, who created The Durm Hip Hop Summit in 2012 with a similar spirit of fostering community in Durham’s hip-hop culture. The pair also benefited from its collective experience of booking a music

festival, which has enabled them to use each other’s skills to elevate the festival from a weekend-long showcase of local talent to an event that gives local artists the opportunity to perform on the same bills as internationally known artists like Nitty Scott and Cyhi The Prince.

Unlike other Triangle music festivals that use hip-hop as a highlight, Beats N Bars is a hip-hop head’s music festival. But it still remains an underdog among biggername events like Hopscotch, the Art of Cool Festival, and Moogfest. Underdog or not, though, Beats N Bars fills a void in the local events landscape, focusing on bringing an underappreciated faction of hometown artists into the spotlight. This year’s expanded offerings are efforts to make the festival even more successful. To help make that happen, the organizing team turned to Kickstarter to get some additional funding, with a goal of $25,000 to secure bigger headliners and cover additional production costs. After a thirty-day campaign in June, they not only hit their mark, but exceeded it by almost $5,000.

“We didn’t know what to expect when we started because hip-hop is so touchand-go in the area. Everyone is always in their little cliques at shows, so we don’t see a unified front all the time,” says Taylor.

movement worth supporting is happening right here in Durham.

According to Harmon, setting weekly goals was essential to hitting the fundraising mark and showing growth to existing and potential funders. Once the team demonstrated that the festival was growing, they attracted a generous funder, who chooses to remain unidentified. Stories about crowdfunding campaigns that flop, just a few thousand dollars short of a lofty goal, are commonplace. That could’ve been the case for Beats N Bars, but the mystery funder tipped the scales, transforming a modestly successful campaign into a certifiable hit.

“Kickstarter was a win. Remember when Butler was an underdog school in the tournament, but they got a few wins and now they’ve been in the tournament every year? You can’t really call them an underdog anymore because you expect them to be in the fight. I would say, after this year we could be compared to a midmajor university,” Rice says.

That said, the festival’s accomplishments extend beyond meeting its financial or booking goals—its staff is a feat of excellence. Taylor, Harmon, and Rice oversee the festival, along with program director and co-owner Kyesha Jennings (who is an

BEATS N BARS FESTIVAL

Friday, September 22 & Saturday, September 23, Various times, Free–$100 Various venues, Downtown Durham www.beatsnbarsfestival.com

The “clique” problem can stunt the success of local rappers. Triangle hip-hop tends to exist inside of an echo chamber, with excitement and support over certain acts bouncing off the same people—usually other rappers—in different directions but rarely penetrating the awareness of casual listeners. Many people living in Raleigh and Durham have no idea that a vibrant hip-hop scene exists in their neighborhood.

In order to get to a place where they could meet their goal of twenty-five grand, Taylor and company realized that they needed to expand their reach beyond the insular hip-hop scene and access more casual fans. They attacked this objective with a two-pronged approach: They held free pop-up performances in neighborhoods all over Durham, which brought awareness of local artists from the Beats N Bars lineup to the broader public. Meanwhile, artists promoted the pop-ups to their own fan bases, which brought out a crowd of enthusiastic onlookers, making it abundantly clear to all that an artistic

occasional INDY contributor), but it’s also held together by a support staff of “dopeass black women,” in Harmon’s terms, who see to facets like publicity, social media, and artist relations.

“We’re women out here getting shit done,” says Taylor. That spirit of entrepreneurism without gender or color lines is a significant factor behind Beats N Bars’ elevation. To its organizers, the festival is a better representation of Durham than any income-vs.-living-expense figure Forbes can come up with.

Harnessing the power that comes with the sense of community Beats N Bars has nurtured in Durham will be essential as the festival grows. Taylor aims to see her project reach the same level of prominence as bigger hip-hop festivals on the East Coast, like A3C in Atlanta and Broccoli City in Washington, D.C. With her airtight efforts, the goal is attainable—not just for her and her cohorts, but for Triangle hip-hop as a whole. music@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 21

music

LIARS

Saturday, September 23, 9 p.m., $17–$19 Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro www.catscradle.com

Whetted Bliss

LIARS’ NEW ALBUM, TFCF, IS A BREAK-UP RECORD—BUT NOT QUITE HOW YOU’D EXPECT

BY NOAH RAWLINGS

L

iars is a band that has never stood still. Its musical fascinations have led it from dancey post-punk to dark, atmospheric experimental music, to straightforwardly structured noise rock. It’s looked to history and lore for source material—2004’s They Were Wrong So We Drowned was about witch trials in the mountains of Germany, written in the woods of New Jersey—and other works have reflected the sounds and sensations of the environments in which they were written and recorded, namely L.A., New York, and Berlin. The one constant throughout Liars’ fluctuating sounds and stories has been the songwriting partnership of vocalist Angus Andrew, who also plays guitars, and synths, and multi-instrumentalist Aaron Hemphill.

In May, however, Hemphill announced that he was leaving the band. Though the departure was on good terms, it’s had a weighty sonic and thematic impact on TFCF, Liars’ eighth LP. The record is almost entirely the creation of Andrew, who lived and recorded in a studio nestled in an Australian national park during its making. TFCF recounts Andrew’s self-exploration as Liars suddenly became a solo project, and documents the impact of a new environment upon new music.

We caught up with Andrew to discuss Liars’ latest sonic and structural transformations, the spontaneous nature of songwriting, and making music in a space of unclassifiable in-betweens.

INDY: Many of the songs on this record feel dark or ominous, and it also seems to be your most introspective record yet. But it also features perhaps the sweetest, most melodic Liars song to date: “No Help Pamphlet.” Do you consciously subvert your melodic impulses in favor of less structured, more experimental songwriting?

ANGUS ANDREW: No man, you know, people sometimes ask me, “Have you ever tried just writing some pop songs and making some hits,” and I’m like, Man, I’m trying! Every time I sit down I’m trying to do something like that. I’m never shying away from or trying to expel anything. Honestly, it’s just how things sound when they come out. That’s a good example of a song where you write it, and you hear it and you’re like, Woah…

Did that really happen? ’Cuz it doesn’t sound like me, and I don’t think many people are going to think of it as Liars, but that did happen.

Those are the best moments. I really enjoy those moments where something happens that you can’t plan for. I don’t have the kind of skill involved to be picky about what happens, it’s like, Let’s just sit in the studio for a few months and just see what happens.

22 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

When I was thinking about that song it sounded to me like, Oh god, people are just gonna think I’ve just been sitting around listening to Syd Barrett and other sixties folk-pop stuff and really trying to make that happen. But if I tried to do that it really wouldn’t turn out that way. It’s really just the result of putting things together.

There are a lot of songs on this record that have multiple fidelities coexisting on a single track—a trebly, fuzzy acoustic guitar may be paired with a clean, bassy synth, creating a strange, almost dissonant effect. What was the impetus for mixing For richer or poorer, Liars' Angus Andrew PHOTO BY ZEN SEKIZAWA like this?

I was interested in using into a cliché. Because essentially it’s a breakup record, but all sorts of different sounds. I wanted things to have an not in the typical sense of lovers—it’s [between Andrews and organic feel; I didn’t want things to come out as if they Hemphill] a creative relationship—that’s a very well-worn were super processed by the computer. I think things got road, so it’s a little scary. It can dip into some real pastiche, and put together that might not ordinarily be put together. Part you don’t really want that. But maybe buffering right up to that of what inspired me was being in nature, in this environline, and giving it a little bit of an edge, is what makes it work. ment where—you know, this classic way of talking about it—there’s no straight lines, there’s no right angles; things I understand that you recorded this record in isolation. Selfcome together in ways that you probably couldn’t plan out. imposed isolation is a theme that’s come into the work of a I think that’s where I was coming from: the sound of lot of creative types that can easily become pastiche. But waves crashing on the beach, and trees, and the sound of it’s also a real thing that you went through and experienced. birds—this symphony that’s going on, but it’s not “right.”

It’s similar to the thing for me between just purely experiThese things aren’t working together; they’re working in mental and pop music. Neither one of them is right for me, opposition in a way. But the combination of them is really because even though I love experimental sounds, and I love interesting, and I think that worked with what you’re talkto listen to drones and all that, for me, the challenge is…it’s ing about, with the different fidelities. somewhere in between, and that’s where things become interesting. Sometimes it’s too easy to put things in their There’s also such an interesting mix of emotion. “No Help boxes. And the challenge is to find something that’s not so Pamphlet” still features these sad lines like, “People are easily boxed in. strings that we never untie.” music@indyweek.com Yeah. The record as a whole treads this line of bleeding over

The meeting will take place on Thursday, September 28 at Mount Sylvan United Methodist Church located at 5731 N. Roxboro Road, in Durham from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. Interested citizens may attend at any time during the meeting hours. NCDOT representatives will be available to answer questions and listen to comments regarding the project. Please note that no formal presentation will be made. Citizens will also have the opportunity to submit comments and questions in writing. Comments received will be taken into consideration as the project develops.

The public can view maps displaying the location and design of the project as they become available online at http://www.ncdot.gov/projects/publicmeetings.

Anyone desiring additional information may contact Mr. Mark Reep, PE at (919) 900-1635 or by email at Mark.Reep@hdrinc.com. All comments must be received no later than Thursday, October 12, 2015.

NCDOT will provide auxiliary aids and services under the Americans with Disabilities Act for disabled persons who wish to participate in this meeting. Anyone requiring special services should contact Ms. Diane Wilson via e-mail at pdwilson1@ncdot.gov or by phone (919) 707-6073 as early as possible so that arrangements can be made.

Aquellas personas que hablan español y no hablan inglés, o tienen limitaciones para leer, hablar o entender inglés, podrían recibir servicios de interpretación si los solicitan antes de la reunión llamando al 1-800-481-6494.

FINDER

The N. C. Department of Transportation will hold a public meeting in September regarding the proposed project to widen N. Roxboro Road and add dedicated right turn lanes in both directions of Latta Road (S.R. 1448) and Infinity Road (S.R. 1639). Sidewalks will be added on the north and south sides of both Latta and Infinity Road from the intersection at N. Roxboro.

soon

GUIDE TO THE TRIANGLE

TIP No. U-5516

Coming

THE INDY'S

NCDOT TO HOLD PUBLIC MEETING SEPTEMBER 28 FOR THE PROPOSED INTERSECTION IMPROVEMENTS AT THE INTERSECTION OF U.S. 501 (N. ROXBORO ROAD) WITH LATTA ROAD (S.R. 1448) AND INFINITY ROAD (S.R. 1639) DURHAM COUNTY

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 23

24 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

music

Golden Opportunity

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER’S NEW HALLELUJAH ANYHOW IS A CONCENTRATED EFFORT FROM A WELL-OILED MACHINE

BY DAVID KLEIN

O

ccupying the nebulous realm where neo-psychedelic country meets soulful Americana, Durham’s Hiss Golden Messenger has steadily raised its national profile since breaking out with Lateness of Dancers in 2014. Before a North American tour that includes arena dates with Mumford & Sons, the band already has a follow-up LP to last year’s Heart Like a Levee, which ended up on a slew of best-of lists in country and folk. Those songs had experienced a complex evolution before being issued on record. By contrast, Taylor had little time to ruminate on Hallelujah Anyhow, due Friday on Merge Records.

Taylor, now in his late thirties, has been writing songs since his teens, and he surrounds himself with musicians with a similar level of lifetime immersion. To record the ten songs on Hallelujah Anyhow, Taylor gathered several of his treasured musical cohorts over about two weeks in late June and early July, in a studio in Durham. It’s a novel approach for someone whose records have reflected a sometimes painstaking approach in the studio.

Most of the core band—coproducer/bassist Brad Cook, keyboardist Phil Cook, guitarists Chris Boerner and Josh Kaufman, saxophonist Michael Lewis—played on Heart Like a Levee. Also on hand was drummer Darren Jessee of Ben Folds Five and Scott Hirsch, Taylor’s former partner in Court & Spark and Hiss Golden Messenger when it began as a duo in 2007. Taylor also gathered an all-star vocal group, including Tift Merritt, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, Tamisha Waden, Skylar Gudasz, and Mac McCaughan. The skilled ensemble deftly gives flight to the musical influences that Taylor often proudly wears on his sleeve, sonically and lyrically, throughout the record.

Shortly after the LP was complete, Taylor released a statement that alluded to “clouds of fear and destruction” but concluded with “Love is the only way out” and a declaration that this music would be full of hope.

Spiritual overtones are not unexpected from Taylor, whose songs often touch on faith and doubt and whose band and de facto alias could pass for the name of a Bible character.

HISS GOLDEN MESSENGER Hallelujah Anyhow Merge Records HHHH

Even so, Hallelujah Anyhow feels like anything but a sermon.

Beginning at an easy gambol with “Jenny of the Roses,” Hallelujah Anyhow starts to take wing three songs in on “Jaw,” where a swooning three-note phrase serves as a leitmotif amid sublime interplay of horns, guitar, and mandolin. It’s the kind of moment

the band seems to delight in and one where it is most distinctly itself.

From there, the record begins to invoke Taylor’s sources in rather more overt ways. “Harder Rain” seems to feint in a Dylan direction, but it does so by way of the world-weary feel of a song by The Band, replete with perfectly stinging Robbie Robertson-style accents and New Orleans horns. “I Am the Song,” with its forward-pushing mid-tempo chug, is a dead ringer for a Tom Petty tune—you almost expect Mike Campbell to come in wailing solo over the top. It should sound fantastic at some of those arena shows.

“John the Gun” lifts the title of a chilling song by Fairport Convention, British folk-rock inventors, but capers into an Astral Weeksstyle fandango replete with joyous scatting in the Van vein. “Domino (Time Will Tell)” nods to one of Morrison’s hits, but sonically it feels wrought from the same hazy blend of Stax Records, Muscle Shoals, and Delta blues that the Stones concocted on Exile on Main Street. In closing, Taylor, ever the folklorist, takes us to church with the stirring gospel cadences of “When the Wall Comes Down,” an invitation to lose our shackles and the source of the LP’s hopetinged shrug of a title.

Outside of a lengthy interview with Uncut, Taylor has avoided talking about the album, stating his wish for HGM to be seen as a touring band and not a vehicle for putting out records. The glorious alchemy the ensemble achieves here, in an extremely compressed recording process, goes beyond musical skills and touches on a fellowship.

That’s a promising prospect. dklein@indyweek.com

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

INDYWEEK.COM INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 25

indysports T

he Durham Bulls won the International League championship on Friday. It was their fifth title and eleventh finals appearance in the last fifteen years—an extraordinary accomplishment, especially in the volatile context of Triple-A minor-league baseball, where rosters change almost daily under a major-league “parent club” that promotes and demotes players at its whim, rendering the notion of a coherent team dubious. Credit Durham’s success to the Tampa Bay Rays—with whom the Bulls have had an affiliate agreement since 1998 and who keep the team stocked with good players and a stable coaching staff—and the Bulls’ local management, which maintains a superb facility and fosters an energetic environment at Durham Bulls Athletic Park.

Most of the credit goes, of course, to the team. But what is the value of the championship to them? They are not really Bulls, after all, but employees of the Rays, who have dispatched them to this Triple-A corral. They’re trying to get out of Durham, and those who are still here missed their best chance just before the postseason began. Triple-A is the minor leagues’ top level, right below the majors. Every year on September 1—almost the end of the minor-league season but the beginning of the monthlong pennant drive in the majors—a procedural allowance known as “roster expansion” lets the big-league club call up extra players. Most are summoned from Triple-A, robbing teams like Durham of their best players on the eve of the playoffs.

Thus it’s common for do-or-die games to feature replacements from the lower minors making Triple-A debuts in uniforms they’ve never worn, alongside some teammates who toiled in Durham all summer but didn’t get called up to the majors. They may be joined by a few detached big-league ringers on late rehab assignments, working out the last kinks of injury. There’s no bonus for winning the championship, and minor-league pay is negligible. Post-season stats aren’t officially logged. There’s little to play for but fatigue and injury risk.

It’s not just the players whose investment may be questionable. Attendance plunges after Labor Day. The Bulls average more than seven thousand fans per game during the regular season but often draw fewer than half that many in the playoffs. School has started, the summer crowds are gone. And press coverage nearly disappears as football 26 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

Postseason Blues THE BULLS ARE CHAMPIONS. BUT DOES IT MATTER?

BY ADAM SOBSEY

Hit Grass Win Salad: a typical Durham Bulls postseason attraction PHOTO BY D.L. ANDERSON season hogs media attention.

Neglected playoffs are the minor leagues’ necessary exchange in their deal with the majors. With no control over rosters’ competitive quality, minor-league baseball is marketed as summertime fun, not as a professional sporting event. Theme nights, fireworks, etc.: attraction by distraction. The appeal is to the casual fan who comes to one or two games a year. The postseason, excluded from season-ticket packages in case the Bulls fail to qualify, is for diehards whose enthusiasm far exceeds their numbers. Even when the Bulls win championships, they’ve lost their audience.

So why not end the Triple-A season on August 31? The team with the best record could be league champion. Big-league clubs could call up players they want without crippling Triple-A affiliates at a critical time.

The abandonment of fans and media would be avoided. The season would no longer end in depleted isolation.

But that’s precisely the reason to keep, and even love, the Triple-A playoffs.

Last week, in game two of the first playoff round, the Bulls led Indianapolis 1-0 in the third inning, but Indianapolis had the bases loaded with one out and their cleanup hitter ahead in the count, 3-1: a dangerous

moment. He hit the next pitch hard, but the Bulls turned a rousing, inning-ending double play, the kind that looks routine yet requires deceptive athleticism, taut execution, and practiced teamwork. On his way to the dugout, Bulls pitcher Yonny Chirinos waited for third baseman Daniel Robertson, who had started the double play with a nifty grab, and offered him a grateful high five for bailing him out of trouble. Robertson played just eleven games with Durham this season, which he spent mostly in the majors and out with an injury. He leapt into the high five, uplifted by the adrenaline of triumph and instinctive comradeship. Durham went on to win, 2-0. A few days later, Robertson homered and drove in four runs to lead the Bulls to their championship-clinching victory over Scranton.

It’s easy to forget, on a summer night at the ballpark, that the Bulls are among the very best ballplayers on earth. But watch the way they pour themselves into their sport, even in the empty-stakes, empty-stands playoffs. They dive simply because there’s a ball to catch. The uniform they share gives them team pride. They strive for championships because, to the truly elite competitor, anything less is nothing. This must be what Camus understood when he wrote that everything he knew of morals he owed to soccer. And he certainly knew that when we are deprived of our best resources, our promise of reward and appreciation, and when nothing results from the outcome of our toil but more toil, that is when everything is asked of us and our efforts become their purest.

Our American moment is of simultaneous, paradoxical abandonment and coercion: power consolidating by excluding, culture at once separating and homogenizing, truth and comity eroding, and with them the American ideal that marries local individuality to federal interdependence. These players grace us by a distant authority, yet they are Bulls for as long as they wear the uniform, carrying our home and hopes and history on their backs. The championship is not for them, who will be gone soon enough.

They play for themselves and one another, driven by higher convictions and goals. The trophy they leave for us to cherish. To show gratitude for that hard-won gift under such onerous circumstances, and to praise their prodigal giftedness, is an act of the staunchest, most virtuous resistance. arts@indyweek.com

NCDOT TO HOLD PUBLIC MEETING ON OCTOBER 9 REGARDING THE PROPOSAL TO MAKE IMPROVEMENTS TO THE INTERSECTION AT U.S. 15-501 AND GARRETT ROAD (S.R. 1116) IN DURHAM, DURHAM COUNTY STIP Project No. U-5717 The N.C. Department of Transportation will hold a public meeting regarding the proposal to make improvements to the intersection at U.S. 15-501 and Garrett Road (S.R. 1116) in Durham County.

The meeting will take place on Monday, October 9, at Cresset Church located at 3707 Garrett Road in Durham from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Interested citizens may attend at any time during the above hours as there will be no formal presentation. NCDOT representatives will be available to answer questions and receive comments regarding the proposed project. Citizens will also have the opportunity to submit comments and questions in writing. All written comments and questions need to be submitted no later than Monday, October 23.

The purpose of this project is to reduce congestion and improve traffic operations at the intersection of US 15-501 and Garrett Road.

For additional information, contact Zahid Baloch, Division Project Delivery at 2612 North Duke Street, Durham, NC 27704 or by e-mail: zbaloch@ncdot.gov, or by calling (919) 707-6012.

Project information and materials can be viewed as they become available online at http:// www.ncdot.gov/projects/publicmeetings. NCDOT will provide auxiliary aids and services under the Americans with Disabilities Act for disabled persons who want to participate in these meetings. Anyone requiring special services should contact Tony Gallagher, Environmental Analysis Unit, NCDOT at 1598 Mail Service Center, Raleigh, NC 27699-1598, by phone (919) 707-6069 or by e-mail at magallagher@ncdot.gov as early as possible so that arrangements can be made.

Persons who speak Spanish and do not speak English, or have a limited ability to read, speak or understand English, may receive interpretive services upon request prior to the meeting by calling 1-800-481-6494.

Aquellas personas que hablan español y no hablan inglés, o tienen limitaciones para leer, hablar o entender inglés, podrían recibir servicios de interpretación si los solicitan de la reunión llamando al 1-800-481-6494.

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indystage

Site Terrific

A NIGHT WHEN THE DURHAM DANCE SCENE JUST WORKED

BY MICHAELA DWYER AND BRIAN HOWE

D

urham’s rich independent dance scene is experimental in the truest sense: rather than just putting strange things in easily legible contexts, its artists frequently reinvent context with each performance, experimenting with the tacit contract between audiences and performers, not just with the work itself. In a city keenly aware of its own rapid gentrification, whose landscape is defined as much by construction projects as by established places, these experiments are focused in site-specific ways: If I put dance here, what happens to the dance? And what happens to the city?

Of course, experimentation, by definition, doesn’t always get results. But last Third Friday, something magical happened when a rather perfect night somehow coalesced from the weird alchemy of the shape of the city, the mood of its people, and the events arrayed in its arteries. Performances by Stephanie Leathers, Anna Barker, ShaLeigh Dance Works, and Ginger Wagg—not to mention, over at the Pinhook, Yes to Nothing, a theater work with similar context-focused values—combined to model the Durham dance experiment at its best, at once accessible and challenging, entrancing and cerebral, socially mobile and artistically stable, and meaningfully intervening in a city in flux.

A

s I climbed down beneath the street and into Arcana, everything seemed copacetic—except for the woman lying on the floor, almost motionless, in what appeared to be a giant clump of rotted nautical rigging.

This was dancer and choreographer Stephanie Leathers, who would spend the next four hours deliberately working through the possibilities of the ropes in this particular physical and social space, as Tom Rau sat with keyboards and consoles, filling the dim room with percolating, songful ambience.

Leathers’s ongoing Sunday SITES project, which usually pops up in transient urban spaces on Sundays, makes the rapid pace of development its explicit context, asking, “How do we illuminate tensions between the 28 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

Stephanie Leathers at Arcana

PHOTO BY BRIAN HOWE

human body and the civic landscape we’re so rapidly revising?” But bringing the project to a destination like Arcana instead of a construction site or an empty storefront incisively altered the question, substituting the social landscape for the civic.

I had sought this out, but most people were there in search of nothing more than a warm-up drink early on a Friday night, and their reactions formed a large portion of the art. Many visitors seemed to shift easily between watching Leathers, taking pictures, and returning to their conversations. Still, charged interactions inevitably occurred.

Leathers tied her rigging to a chair inhabited by a man who was deep in a group conversation, her movements gently tugging it. For a while, he seemed to grapple with whether to anchor the chair for her or move over a seat.

When he eventually did, the chair tipping over felt like the climax of a drama, before it was gradually subsumed in Leathers’s implacable, almost oblivious performance.

Later, when she had dragged the rigging around an obstacle near the bar, a newcomer walked up to her with an expression of

friendly concern. “Are you stuck, ma’am?” she asked, and began untangling the ropes.

Leathers didn’t react, but stood stock still, her hair covering her face like a ghost in a Japanese horror movie. The good Samaritan soon went back to the bar with a puzzled laugh. As I ascended back to Main Street and rode my skateboard along the new currents Leathers had unleashed into the night, toward Empower Dance Studio, I imagined how those unexpected interactions, those little gifts from the city, might shape the experiences of their recipients later, making them look anew, if only for an evening, at everything they see. —Brian Howe

B

eneath the hulking shell of CorcoranParrish Street construction, Empower Dance Studio is holding it down—“it” being downtown’s cultural vitality amid big infrastructural changes. Empower offers movement classes that emphasize self-confidence and positive images of dancers from all backgrounds. It’s also increasingly prominent as a dance venue, one of a scarce few downtown.

Empower has a compelling new presen-

tational partner in Proxemic Media, which inaugurated its Third Friday Dance Series there last Friday. (The event was postponed from last month, following Third Friday’s cancellation because of a rumored white supremacist rally.) Proxemic asks and answers a question I’ve long had about Third Friday’s predominantly visual-arts focus: Why not include dance and performance?

I arrived between the 8:30 and 9:30 sets, just in time to catch the tail end of the first program: a snippet of Ginger Wagg & Wild Actions’ Frivolous Artist, which will premiere next spring in DIDA’s fourth season.

In a utilitarian blue jumpsuit, Wagg shuffled around the ground-floor studio, dramatically lined with mirrors and lit by footlights.

She rattled a toolbox in sonic conversation with Wild Actions’ warped industrial sounds as Blakeney Bullock, completely cloaked in dark fabric, slithered to and fro. In one electrifying moment, Wagg attempted to hook a knob from her toolbox between Bullock’s exposed toes. Just beyond, a young boy surveyed them, his eyes gleaming.

This short performance looked completely different from real.live.people.durham’s “what about this?” and other false starts, Anna Barker’s exploration of self-critique and the solo creative process, and an excerpt from ShaLeigh Dance Works’ rousing group work I Promise, also slated for the DIDA season. It was a smartly curated evening that balanced the urgency and attentiveness demanded by live performance with Third Friday’s lowstakes attitude (Proxemic ran a crowdfunding campaign to pay performers and keep the shows—and even the wine—free).

The event felt like a generous artistic haven amid Durham’s broader buzz, and a simple but effective model for future dance presentations in its dual affirmation: acknowledging the labor of local dance artists and demonstrating to audiences that we can expect to engage with this work in on a more regular basis, in a centralized location.

—Michaela Dwyer arts@indyweek.com

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 29

stage

THE CAKE HH Through Sunday, Oct. 1 PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill www.playmakersrep.org

The Cake PHOTO BY KEN A. HUTH

Eat It Too

IN THE CAKE, BEKAH BRUNSTETTER EDITS REALITY TO IGNORE THE EVERYDAY CONSEQUENCES OF BIBLE BELT HOMOPHOBIA BY BYRON WOODS

B

ekah Brunstetter’s new drama, The Cake, is a rare thing in our current moment: a calculated apologia for conservative Southern Christianity and the antigay bigotry its practitioners have inculcated in their families—and have attempted, through legislation, to impose on everyone else. This is intimate terrain for Brunstetter, whose father, a former North Carolina senator, sponsored the Amendment One ban on 30 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

same-sex marriages, a bill passed in 2012 and ruled unconstitutional in 2014.

Because I, like Brunstetter, was raised in a decidedly conservative Christian family, I have no interest in punishing an artist for the sins of her father. But when the playwright claims, as quoted in this production’s playbill, that her goal “has always been to humanize conservative values” and “see what’s human about [them],”

STAGE BRIEFS DOG SEES GOD: CONFESSIONS OF A TEENAGE BLOCKHEAD HHHH Through Sunday, Oct. 1 North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre, Raleigh It’s a mistake to consider Dog Sees God a satire of Peanuts. Rather, Bert V. Royal’s dark comedy is an extension of Charles Schulz’s beloved creation.

At the comic strip’s creative height in the sixties and seventies, before corporate interests homogenized it, Peanuts exposed the anxieties of childhood in a modern age. With disarming humor, Schulz probed the fully formed needs and half-formed neuroses of children rehearsing the injustices of the adult world. Peanuts portrayed “a society as complete and as dangerous as Balzac’s,” as critic Christopher Caldwell observed.

In Royal’s rewarding update, a decade has passed, the gang is in high school, and the social drama has clearly escalated. After the sudden death of the strip’s one escapist

Brunstetter invites such critical scrutiny.

The playwright is clearly pulling strings—and punches—in her script’s opening moments, when Macy (Christine Mirzayan), a thoroughly unsympathetic young visitor from Brooklyn, grills the laid-back, matronly Winston-Salem baker, Della (an accomplished Julia Gibson), on sugar’s alleged addictive qualities. In an improbable mix of Rachel Maddow and food critic Gary Taubes, Macy’s culinary ambush-journalism fires rapidly, apropos of nothing, at her clueless host: “Have you explored stevia slash do you feel a social responsibility to provide products with less sugar slash do you feel a guilt?”

Humans generally don’t talk like that, but boorish, invasive, crusading liberals from the North apparently do. Clearly, we’re not intended to like this stereotype as she ridiculously bullies a guileless Southern elder.

Only after those all-important sympathies are established does Brunstetter fill in the rest of the picture: Macy is marrying Jen (Jenny Latimer), the daughter of Della’s deceased best friend. Jen has returned from New York not only to ask Della to bake a wedding cake but also to seek a blessing of her union from a surrogate mother. Given Della’s brand of conservative Christianity, that may well prove beyond her.

character, Snoopy, angst-ridden protagonist CB (Leo Brody) seeks solace among his peers.

Yeah, good luck with that. Tricia and Marcy (Anna Brewer and Anabel Butler), adolescent versions of Peppermint Patty and Marcie, are self-centered party girls, while CB’s drama-geek sister (an impressive Liz Webb) changes personalities as often as she changes clothes. The Pig-Pen character (William Booth) is a chauvinistic germophobe who’s bullying the Schroeder character, gay pianist Beethoven (a remarkable Bryan Bunch). Ironically, the only real empathy comes from a teen version of Lucy (a sparkling Hannah Woodcock) and a stoner Linus (Liam Yates).

Director Pete Comperatore, who clearly knows the dynamics of modern high school, propels this strong ensemble beyond the script’s occasional shortcomings to fully explore the trials of adolescence until a heartfelt ending brings compassion to this high school hell. Good grief, indeed. —Byron Woods

CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR HHHH½

Through Sunday, Oct. 1 UNC’s Swain Hall, Chapel Hill

As my family gathered to mourn my uncle's death, cable news was stuck in a loop. An endless procession of commercial aircraft crashed into waiting skyscrapers. It was September 12, 2001, and the trauma was being permanently burned into American psyches on seemingly every channel. As playwright Christine Evans notes, research shows that visual reiterations of traumatic events can significantly reduce post-traumatic stress. But the therapeutic dosage is much lower than what we experienced after 9/11: a deadening overdose whose toxicity worsened the effects.

One thing I was struck most by in director Joseph Megel’s thoughtprovoking StreetsSigns Center production of Evans’s compelling drama, Closer Than They Appear, was the quiet desperation with which Hannah (stage veteran Elisabeth Lewis Corley), a doctor using virtual reality to treat Iraqi veterans, uses

the technology to pursue her own ghosts, including her enigmatic daughter, Marian, supposedly a soldier. But when sessions, text messages, and voice mails don’t make her manifest, we sense a digital dead end lurking in this virtual labyrinth.

The same goes for Zayneb (a luminous Smita Misra), a young woman who sends out YouTube dispatches on the deteriorating conditions in her hometown, Fallujah. When help does not arrive, Zayneb asks the world to bear witness: “Tell them people lived here.”

The virtual sessions, hauntingly realized

by Jared Mezzocchi and Christopher Baine, do help Michael (an authoritative Trevor Johnson) with his PTSD. But we cannot share in his optimism at the last.

In a military setting, effective treatment means a soldier’s going back into battle.

Researchers are now developing this same technology not to treat existing trauma, but, chillingly, to rehearse and desensitize soldiers in advance of trauma to come. Michael’s midshow prophesy is already coming to pass: “What’s done is done/will be done/and done again and again.” —Byron Woods

“Humans don't generally talk like that, but boorish, crusading liberals apparently do.”

The main argument against The Cake involves the less felicitous, more common scenarios that tend to play out whenever gay people stand up for themselves. Like Chapel Hill, Winston-Salem is unlike much of North Carolina; the inhabitants are considerably wealthier, more cultured and educated. In focusing on a neighborhood where everyone remains civil, violence is never threatened, and Jen has the privilege to escape, Brunstetter’s work ignores the far grimmer reality that many more LGBTQ people face, in our shattered state, at the hands of good Christian folk like these.

But that story’s not as comforting as this one. So someone else will have to tell it. bwoods@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 31

indypage I

am a transgender man and a recovering heroin addict. In March 2013, a dear friend and social worker picked me up from my ex-girlfriend’s house, where I was languishing on her sofa, stuffed with Ben and Jerry’s and what was probably fentanylenlarged heroin. It was one of the few times toward the end of my run when I was satisfyingly wasted. Still, I knew it was over; the junkie game is rigged for failure, and mine was destined to end in an institutional stay or death. Because I had a good friend looking out for me, I could choose the institution.

My experience in rehab in the RJ Blackley Alcohol & Drug Abuse Treatment Center in Butner, North Carolina, was largely positive. I was asked if I wanted to be on the men’s or women’s ward, a question that apparently was pure luck of the draw. Trans men who came after me were not necessarily offered this choice.

But after I was finished with the twenty-day treatment, I could find no halfway house, Oxford House (a group housing situation where recovering addicts self-regulate by following house rules), or other long-term rehab that had a place for an out transgender man. Calls were made but the lack of responses spoke volumes. Places that might have had space, such as homeless shelters, seemed terrifyingly unsafe.

Now there is a place in Durham where gay and queer and trans people can land. While it is a private institution with few openings, it is a far cry from anything I could find in 2013.

Daniel Wilson is executive director of LaVare’s House, the only recovery house in Durham whose focus is entirely LGBTQIA. LaVare was Wilson’s mother’s name. She suffered throughout her son’s addiction, enabling it on some days but always loving him, believing he would someday overcome.

When she died, Wilson honored their relationship by creating LaVare’s House with money from her estate.

When I shared with Wilson the impossibility of finding a sober house after I got out of treatment, his animated response was candid in the way I recognize in sober people.

“If you asked me my opinion on transgender people [before LaVare] I would have told you they were confused,” he says. “But then I get into this thing here and start taking transgender people in, and boy, did my eyes open. I could open three houses today and have ’em full. That’s a crisis, in my opinion.

32 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

After Addiction

LAVARE’S HOUSE IS THE ONLY ADDICTION RECOVERY PROGRAM IN DURHAM WHOSE FOCUS IS ENTIRELY LGBTQIA

BY SAM PETERSON

Sam Peterson PHOTO COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR People are concerned and sympathetic, but they’re like me before I went into this: they don’t know and they don’t understand. It’s gonna take education and time.”

The transgender population is notoriously difficult to statistically define. For starters, there is no one way to define “transgender,” and many of us cannot or are afraid to out ourselves. The one way statistics are conclusive is that transgender women of color suffer more violence, often leading to mur-

der, than any other members of the LGBTQ community. Violence and death from outsiders loom large.

“I try to stay focused on the bigger picture, which is, try to get as many people sober as possible in the gay community, because I didn’t want people to have to get sober while they’re in the closet,” Wilson says. “When I was in an Oxford House, I would go to the gay bars on the weekend and ‘let myself be gay.’ I’d have one tonic

and lime and just be gay and relax. That lasted a very short time until I was drinking and drugging again. I won’t blame my relapse on this, but what it did do was make me have secrets—and for us addicts, keeping secrets is a deadly thing.”

T

he secrecy required for me to “pass” for male in treatment was exhausting. It was terrifying being in the general population with white supremacists, gang members, and good old boys. My recovery is a testament, in part, to my finely honed personal survival skills. But some trans and gender-nonconforming people may not have those skills. Recovery from addiction demands full-throttle focus—a vulnerability and an honesty that preclude deception.

I spoke with a LaVare’s House resident named Marcus, a black transgender person who was five months sober. He had as complicated a nest of gender, sexuality, and presentation as anyone—the masculine pronouns are by Marcus’s choice—but he did share with me, emphatically, that as soon as his recovery had a firmer hold, he would transition from MTF. He shared with me that his pastor father had tried to “beat the gay” out of him.

It has been a joy to watch Marcus and other folks at LaVare’s House emerge from the seemingly self-imposed devastation addiction imposes to become something closer to themselves. For us, merely to be alive is sometimes miraculous. And to see gay, queer, lesbian, and trans people thrive, despite whatever drama and discomfort necessarily comes with learning how to navigate one’s healing mind, much less the world, is nothing short of triumphant.

This historical moment we find ourselves in offers some insight into how we might proceed, how communities transcend the bureaucracy, the draconian public policies, and the gambles our state legislature takes with our lives every day. Addiction recovery in the Triangle is a testament to the hardiness of Southern character, which has survived some of the worst our country has had to offer. Here in the South, we seize freedom with our own hands.

Sam Peterson is the author of Trunky (transgender junky): A Memoir of Institutionalization & Southern Hospitality, released in November 2016 by Transgress Press.

lax. That as drinkblame my was make cts, keep-

indyscreen

MOTHER! HHHH Now playing

Daddy Issues

GENESIS, THE GOSPELS, AND REVELATION PLUNGE THROUGH to “pass” A PSYCH-HORROR LOOKING GLASS IN MOTHER!

exhauste general BY NEIL MORRIS ists, gang In Darren Aronofsky’s Rorschach test of recovery a film, a husband (Javier Bardem), idenely honed tified only as “Him,” is a poet with writtrans and er’s block. Meanwhile, his wife (Jennifer may not Lawrence), identified only as “Mother,” addiction tends to their Victorian fixer-upper. Their nerability tranquility is interrupted when he brings ption. home a mysterious man (Ed Harris), resident soon followed by his mischievous wife nder per- (Michelle Pfeiffer) and their sons. These He had as interlopers are barred from one room in ality, and the house, which contains a crystalline uline pro- object of great significance to Him. ut he did Calamity follows, and the house fills t as soon with mourners for whom the poet shows he would more concern than he does for his wife, with me who chases them away and then redirects “beat the her outrage at her husband. A pregnancy

seems to restore the couple’s happiness arcus and and the poet’s inspiration, but when new erge from fanatics make a pilgrimage to his home, vastation the results are disastrous. omething There is some sidelong symbolism about ely to be artist-muse and celebrity-fan relationnd to see ships, but the film’s ostentatious presenple thrive, tation conceals deeper themes. Mother! is mfort nec- a biblical speed-walk through Genesis, the o navigate Gospels, and the Book of Revelation, though world, is its purpose isn’t ecclesiastical. Aronofsky, a

humanist, filters an environmental mesourselves sage through the theological construct, we might making this a companion to his Noah, a cend the story of catastrophe and a god who’s either c policies, absent or who lets bad things happen. ure takes Lawrence’s character is central but subrecovery jugated as a deferential housewife who he hardi- is ignored and brutalized for finding her h has sur- agency—the divine feminine, so often supy has had pressed in Judeo-Christian doctrine. The e freedom male deity is dominant but flawed, suscep-

tible to vanity, neediness, and distraction.

His craving for adoration is such that he ky (trans- sates his supporters on his home and famitutional- ily, which leads to a depiction of the Crueleased in cifixion and Eucharist that’s incendiary s. mainly because it’s so literal.

THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE HH Opening Friday, Sep. 22 The latest LEGO flick is what skeptics initially feared the franchise would be, before Phil Lord and Christopher Miller elevated The LEGO Movie into something witty and poignant. Charlie Bean applies his safe Cartoon Network sensibility to this spinoff about young ninjas protecting the land of Ninjago. Each ninja embodies an earth element—fire, water, lightning, etc.—and offers little character development. The exception is Lloyd Garmadon, the Green Ninja, whose life is complicated by the fact that his estranged father, Lord Garmadon, is Ninjago’s would-be conqueror. (Basically, imagine walking around high school with the name “Lloyd bin Laden.”) After he unwittingly unleashes a live-action cat named Meowthra, contrivance joins the ninjas with Lord Garmadon on a quest concocted by sensei Master Wu (Jackie Chan) for “the ultimate, ultimate weapon.” But it’s just a Star Wars-esque device to help Lloyd find the good in his father. We’re left to make do with weak puns, weary popculture references, and a waning sense of discovery. —Neil Morris

Mother! is a religious allegory as provocative as Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Lars von Trier’s Dogville, but without the former’s piety or the latter’s minimalism. It’s prone to pretension and bedeviling narrative detours, and halfway through, I had no desire to ever see it again. By the end, I couldn’t wait to. arts@indyweek.com INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 33

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

MAC DEMARCO

After breaking out in late 2012 with 2, Mac DeMarco quickly became the poster boy for a particular strain of indie rock, a hard-partying Canadian scamp making music for fellow young funloving slackers who maybe didn’t know what to do with themselves yet. He’s spent years touring tremendously hard, keeping up his mischief making, and the resulting exhaustion has slowly peeked through in his songs. It’s clear he’s done a lot of growing up in a relatively short chunk of time, and his latest record, May’s This Old Dog, is a more muted, clear-eyed reflection on the realities of adulthood. DeMarco has always boasted strong guitar and songwriting capabilities, but at times it felt like his persona was so big that it obscured his genuine talent; on This Old Dog, DeMarco settles into a more even balance between the two. That’s not to say DeMarco has totally turned a corner in favor of grown-up play-acting—he and his bandmates still have plenty of rascally charm to spare. The Garden opens. —Allison Hussey THE CAROLINA THEATRE, DURHAM 8 p.m., $25–$35, www.carolinatheatre.org

Mac DeMarco PHOTO THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

AKOUNAK TEDALAT TAHA TAZOUGHAI

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 & SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

Purify yourself in the waters of … Lake Chad? This adaptation of Prince’s Purple Rain takes the tale of sex, jealousy, and music-industry machinations out of Minnesota and transplants it to the city of Agadez in West African country of Niger. It’s not a one-to-one adaptation of the Prince classic—especially not in the film’s depiction of the relationship between its male and female leads—but those changes make the cultural cross-pollination even more fascinating. Mdou Moctar, a talented guitarist in his early thirties, stars in the film, which is also the first fictional Tuareg-language movie. And no, he doesn’t whip out a cover of “Baby I’m a Star,” but his detailed, angular playing is some of the best of his home region. Moctar himself comes to Kings in early October with a full band in tow, so consider this an effective primer on his talents. —Allison Hussey KINGS, RALEIGH 8:30 p.m., free, www.kingsraleigh.com

BY COLEY BROWN

ESCAPE TO FREEDOM

Nearly eight square miles of downtown Raleigh is built on plantation land: five thousand acres of former cotton fields that once were Mordecai Plantation. Today, it’s seldom mentioned that one of eastern North Carolina’s largest plantations was less than a mile away from the state capitol. Even less is said of the people who worked in slavery there until the late nineteenth century, though the few words that remain in print are damning.

“According to three narratives written by former slaves, Henry [Mordecai] was not kind to the slaves that lived and worked at Mordecai,” notes a document on the City of Raleigh’s webpage for the Mordecai Historic Park, where the plantation’s mansion stands. For the third consecutive year, MOJOAA Performing Arts, a black-owned family theater company, stages a historical performance there, with a twist: an interactive, simulated slave run in which actors will “guide and thwart” audiences as they attempt to escape the bonds of Our Peculiar Institution. —Byron Woods MORDECAI HISTORIC PARK, RALEIGH 6/7:30/9 p.m., $15, www.mojoaa.org

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

ARTICULATING VALUE AT THE LIVING ARTS COLLECTIVE (P. 44), BEATS N BARS FESTIVAL IN DOWNTOWN DURHAM (P. 18), THE CAKE AT PLAYMAKERS (P. 30), CIRCUS 1903 AT DPAC (P. 43), CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR AT UNC’S SWAIN HALL (P. 31), DEER TICK AT HAW RIVER BALLROOM (P. 37), DOG SEES GOD AT NRACT (P. 31), LIARS AT CAT’S CRADLE (P. 20), QUEST AT THE HAYTI HERITAGE CENTER (P. 44), RALPH STEEDS AT ADAM CAVE FINE ART (P. 41) 34 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22–SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1

SILVER LINING

Timing is everything. Months after the show was booked—and one week after eight Florida patients died in a nursing home in the aftermath of Hurricane Irma—the dark comedy Silver Lining focuses on five women in a British elder care facility who gradually realize that no one is coming to rescue them from a major flood. Sandi Toksvig’s play, which premiered to mixed reviews in England in February and makes its U.S. debut here, addresses not only the substandard warehousing of the elderly but also the forced invisibility of women beyond a certain age in the theater. As the waters rise, the quintet reassembles its life skills, in what might just be a geriatric version of The Great Escape.

The cast includes Freyja Helmer-Sindemark (The Greeks), Karen Morgan Williams (A Piece of My Heart), and Laura Bottomley. —Byron Woods SONOROUS ROAD THEATRE, RALEIGH Various times, $14–$18, www.sonorousroad.com

9.20–9.27

DUKE SLEEP DISORDERS CENTER SLEEP RESEARCH STUDY If you are between the ages of 18 and 65 and have sleep apnea, primary insomnia, or normal sleep habits, you may be qualified to participate in a three-week study for an investigational sleep monitoring device.

Eligible participants will receive a free comprehensive evaluation for sleep disorders and may be eligible for compensation.

For more information, call 919-681-0934.

Pro00054498

Yinka Shonibare’s “Eleanor Hewitt” (front) and El Anatsui’s “Lines That Link Humanity” (back) at NCMA PHOTO COURTESY OF NCMA SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

THREADS OF AFRICA: A CELEBRATION OF ART, NATURE, AND PEOPLE

This summer, North Carolina Museum of Art opened an impressive new African art gallery to better showcase its expansive collection of more than sixteen centuries of African art—and now it’s time to celebrate. On Saturday, the museum hosts Threads of Africa, a day full of festivities celebrating African culture abroad and in North Carolina.

Durham artist Maya Freelon Asante will guide participants in making tissue-paper quilts, while Braima Moiwai will perform stories of West Africa. Chef Kabui will host culinary stations showing the past and present of African foods, and representatives from the North Carolina Zoo will bring African insects and animals for visitors to interact with, including a ball python. The daylong festival culminates with a sold-out show by Grammy winner Angélique Kidjo in Museum Park, where concertgoers can bob to her Afrobeatinspired jams. —Katie Jane Fernelius NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART, RALEIGH Noon, free, www.ncartmuseum.org INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 35

9/21 QUICKSAND W/NO JOY ($20/$24) 9/22 UGLY GOD ($25/$28) 9/23 LIARS W/ BAMBARA ($17/$19)

TU 9/26

9/24 CARRBORO MUSIC FESTIVAL (FREE SHOW! 2 PM- 11 PM) 9/26 BONE THUGS N HARMONY W/ SHAME ($27/$30) 9/27 PSYCHEDELIC FURS LD W/ BASH & POP SO OUT 9/29 PINBACK AUTUMN OF THE SERAPHS 10TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR W/ MESSTHETICS ($20) 9/30 TIMEFLIES: TOO MUCH TO DREAM TOUR W/ DAWIN, LOOTE ($25/$28) 10/2 RAC W/LPX ($22/$25) 10/4 CAMERON ESPOSITO AND

RHEA BUTCHER: BACK TO BACK $32.50 (SEATED SHOW)

10/5 LIQUID STRANGER AND MANIC FOCUS W/ FREDDY TODD ($17/$20) 10/6: WXYC 2000'S DANCE ($5 STUDENTS /$8 GP) 10/7 LANY THE LANY TOUR PART 2 LD W/ DAGNY SO OUT 10/9 BERMUDA TRIANGLE W/ MUSIC BAND ($20)

BONE THUGS N HARMONY

SA 9/23

11/4 KNUCKLE PUCK W/ MOVEMENTS WITH CONFIDENCE, HOMESAFE 11/5 JOYCE MANOR / WAVVES W/ CULTURE ABUSE ($20/$23) 11/6 WAX TAILOR: SOLO SET & GUESTS W/ DIRTY ART CLUB ($20/$23) 11/7THE STRUMBELLAS W/ NOAH KAHAN ($22/$25)

11/14 COUSIN STIZZ W/SWOOSH, BIG LEANO ($15/$18) 11/15 THE STORY SO FAR W/TURNSTILE, DRUG CHURCH 11/16 YELAWOLF ($25/$28)

12/17 HORTON’S HOLIDAY HAYRIDE STARRING REVEREND

10/16 KALI UCHIS W/ PHONY PPL ($15/$18) 10/17 THE DIGITOUR PRESENTS WES TUCKER ($25) 10/20 YEP ROC 20 -- NICK LOWE, JOSH ROUSE, LOS STRAITJACKETS, ELI PAPERBOY REED, SPECIAL GUEST TBA 10/21 YEP ROC 20 -- DAVE ALVIN AND PHIL ALVIN WITH THE GUILTY ONES, CHUCK PROPHET WITH THE MISSION EXPRESS, JEREMY & THE HARLEQUINS, DRESSY BESSY, THE FLESHTONES

11/30 CUT COPY

10/27 AMINE W/ TOWKIO ($22/$25)

COSMIC CHARLIE

10/29 GRYFFIN W/ AUTOGRAF (DJ SET), AYOKAY ($17/$20) 10/31 JR JR W/ CHAD VALLEY ($16/$18)

10/8 JESSICA HERNANDEZ &

11/13 DAVID BAZAN W/ MICHAEL NAU ($15)

1/22 AND 1/23/18 SHOWS! SAY ANYTHING ($22/$27; $40 FOR 2-NIGHT PASS)

11/18 MODERN ENGLISH W/ ENTERTAINMENT ($20/$23)

10/12 HOLLY BOWLING ($15/$17)

1/27/18: TENNIS

10/13 WITT LOWRY W/ BO RANSOM

11/30 THE WEATHER STATION W/ JAMES ELKINGTON

5/25 PETER HOOK & THE LIGHT ($28/$31)

10/14 MATT POND PA W/ WILD PINK ($15/$17)

TWO

CAT'S CRADLE BACK ROOM

9/20: SAVING SPACE SHOWCASE #13 GOWN - SPEED STICK - BANGZZ. NONPROFIT BENEFICIARY: THE RECYCLERY 9/21 COLTER WALL AND

TYLER CHILDERS SOLD

W/ TIM LANCASTER

OUT

9/22 STOP LIGHT OBSERVATIONS W/SONDORBLUE, C2 ($10/$12)

9/25 THE CRIBS W/ PAWS ($18/$20) 9/27 TOGETHER PANGEA W/ DADDY ISSUES, LALA LALA ($12/$14)

10/15 ZENSOFLY, JOOSELORD MAGNUS, BRASSIOUS MONK, J ROWDY & THE NIGHTSHIFT 10/16 THE NATIONAL PARKS W/ RIVVRS 10/17 RACHEL KIEL ALBUM

RELEASE

10/18 SH-BOOMS 10/22 PICKWICK W/ THE ELWINS ($12/$15) 10/23 TREVOR SENSOR ($10/$12) 10/24 JESSICA LEA MAYFIELD W/ BLANK RANGE ($15) 10/25 THE ALTERNATE ROUTES W/ NICK FRADIANI 10/27 THE MOVIELIFE W/IRON CHIC 10/31 RATBOYS W/ DAGS

9/28 DRIFTWOOD W/ DRISKILL ($12/$14)

11/2 LARRY KEEL EXPERIENCE W/ JON STICKLEY TRIO ($!6/$20)

9/29 LAIRS, ARSON DAILY, NOISE LIGHTS ($7/$8)

11/3 ALL THEM WITCHES W/ KING BUFFALO

9/30 SWEET SPIRIT W/ TINNAROSE, ERIC SLICK (FROM DR DOG)

11/4 THE HOTELIER W/ OSO OSO, ALEX NAPPING ($13/$15)

10/1 ELECTRIC SIX W/ GROVES ($13/$15)

11/5 TERA MELOS W/ SPEEDY ORTIZ, PROMM

11/1 CRANK IT LOUD PRESENTS: W/SORORITY NOISE, GREAT GRANDPA

10/5 GREAT PEACOCK W/ THE HIGH DIVERS ($10)

11/2 THE ENGLISH BEAT ($18/$20)

OCT 6: MAGNOLIA COLLECTIVE,

11/3 JD MCPHERSON W/ NICOLE ATKINS ($16/$18)

10/7 MAX FROST W/ NAWAS ($12)

11/16 CITY OF THE SUN ($10/$12

10/4 TROUT STEAK REVIVAL W/ DEAD HORSES ($12/ $15)

CITIZEN

THE HEAD AND STOP LIGHT OBSERVATIONS THE HEART

10/11 NOW, NOW W/DEM YUUT ($13/$15)

HORTON HEAT, WITH THE BLASTERS, JUNIOR BROWN, BIG SANDY ($25/ $28)

W/ THE STARS EXPLODE ($16/$18)

10/28 DEADHEAD MASQUERADE BALL FT

MO 10/2 @RED HAT AMPHITHEATRE

11/15 MO LOWDA & THE HUMBLE

9/24 CARRBORO MUSIC FESTIVAL HIP HOP/ VARIETY SHOWCASE (FREE)

10/26 SAN FERMIN W/ GRACIE AND RACHEL ($15)

FR 9/22 @CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM

THE DELTAS

10/24 TED LEO AND THE

10/25 JOSH RITTER & THE ROYAL CITY BAND W/GOOD OLD WAR ($27.50; INCLUDES ALBUM DOWNLOAD)

THE CRIBS

10/10 BANDITOS W/CALEB CAUDLE

9/23 CMF KICKOFF EVENT URBAN SOIL W/ CHRISTIANE (FREE)

PHARMACISTS

QUICKSAND

MO 9/25 @CAT’S CRADLE BACK RO0M

11/12 LUNA W/ ELEANOR FRIEDBERGER ($20/$23)

10/12 TURNOVER W/ ELVIS DEPRESSEDLY, EMMA RUTH RUNDLE ($17/$20)

10/15 BROTHER ALI ($16/$18)

TH 9/21

11/11 SAINT MOTEL W/ GIBBZ ($22/$25)

11/18 CULTS ($19/$21)

10/14 RIVER WHYLESS W/ THE GRAND SHELL GAME ($14/$16)

UGLY GOD

LIARS

10/10 MURA MASA W/ JOEY PURP ($17/$20)

10/13 CHELSEA WOLFE** W/ YOUTH CODE ($20/$23)

FR 9/22

REESE MCHENRY & THE FOX, AMIGO

11/7 THE WORLD IS A BEAUTIFUL

PLACE AND I AM NO LONGER AFRAID TO DIE W/ ROZWELL KID, ADJY ($15)

11/11 ARKELLS W/ IRONTOM ($15) 11/12 OVERCOATS ($10/$12)

12/1 ALLAN RAYMAN ($18/$20) 12/5 DAVID RAMIREZ: WE’RE NOT GOING ANYWHERE ($15/$17) CAROLINA THEATRE (DUR)

12/6 THE MOUNTAIN GOATS W/ JENNY BESETZT MOTORCO (DUR)

10/13 GUIDED BY VOICES ($26/$30) 11/3 BLITZEN TRAPPER W/ LILLY HIATT 11/4 BORIS W/MUTOID MAN, ENDON ($18/$20) 11/30 THE DISTRICTS W/ SUN SEEKER ($15/$17) DPAC (DUR)

O

11/13 AND 11/14 SHTW OWS! BON IVER W/ AERO FLYNN 11/25 ST. VINCENT THE RITZ (RAL)

10/26 PORTUGAL.THE MAN W/LIDO RED HAT AMPH (RAL)

10/2 THE HEAD AND THE HEART W/ THE SHELTERS HAW RIVER BALLROOM

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CONTRIBUTORS: Jim Allen (JA), Elizabeth Bracy (EB), Timothy Bracy (TB), Grant Britt (GB), Charlie Burnett (CB), Kat Harding (KH), David Klein (DK), Charles Morse (CM), Noah Rawlings (NR), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS), Patrick Wall (PW)

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 22

DEER TICK

Sooner or later, if a band sticks around for long enough, it’ll venture far enough from its initial sound to be able to follow that divergence with a “return to their roots.”

Just about every group worth its salt has been through that progression at some point, and now it looks like it’s Deer Tick’s turn with the arrival of two new albums, helpfully titled Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Deer Tick Vol. 2.

Those who have been following the Deer Tick tale from the beginning (or at least took the time to catch up with what they missed) will recall that when Providence, Rhode Island’s favorite sons first popped up a decade ago, they were a sonically scrappy crew.

The group’s mix of raw-boned, punk-informed rock ’n’ roll and acoustic, folk-flecked Americana never laid down any particular lines of demarcation between the rocking and the rootsiness. Deer Tick simply let it all melt together into something that ultimately became its signature sound.

But by the time Deer Tick got around to recording its fifth album, 2013’s

Negativity, the band was ready to try something a little different. So it enlisted producer Steve Berlin (a longtime Los Lobos member) to take its sound someplace else.

Berlin took a hands-on approach, restructuring most of the songs the band brought in and lending a new degree of

sonic sheen to the Deer Tick approach, even though one could scarcely call the resulting record slick.

Four years on, Deer Tick has seemingly decided that it likes things to be a bit messier. It’s also apparently had enough songs for a double album, but instead of going the traditional double-LP route, the band decided to release two separate new albums. And for the first time, the band has indulged in a little bit of stylistic segregation. Deer Tick Vol. 1 is an acoustic-based affair that sticks to the folk-rock and alt-country side of the ensemble’s musical personality, and Vol. 2 is where the band gets its rocks off, literally, getting into a real Replacements-a-go-go. Of course, seeing Deer Tick on its current tour, you’re more likely to encounter its traditional mishmash of back-porch sounds and gritty, greasy rockers. But hell, that’s the whole point of that “return to their roots” thing anyway, right? —Jim Allen HAW RIVER BALLROOM, SAXAPAHAW 8 p.m., $22.50, www.hawriverballroom.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF MICK MANAGEMENT

WED, SEP 20 CAROLINA THEATRE: Drew Holcomb and the Neighbors, Devon Gilfillian; 8 p.m., $25. • CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Saving Space Showcase: Bangzz, Speed Stick, Gown; 9 p.m., $5-$7. • THE CAVE: Essex//Muro Residency; 9 p.m., $5.• IRREGARDLESS: The Barred Owls; 6:30 p.m. • KINGS: Grieves, Dem Atlas, Danny Blaze; 9 p.m., $13-$15. • KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Lorraine Jordan; 5:45 p.m., $5. • LINCOLN THEATRE: John Mark McMillan, The Brilliance, LaPeer; 7:30 p.m., $18-$35.

• LOCAL 506: Verite, Tigertown; 9 p.m. • THE MAYWOOD: The Rocketz, The Silver Shine, Motorbilly; 8:30 p.m., $10. • POUR HOUSE: Dada, Sound and Shape; 8 p.m., $15.

• RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: Ms. Lauryn Hill, Nas; 6 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: Goth Night with DJ Bela Lugosi’s Dad; 10 p.m. • SLIM’S: Reese McHenry & The Fox, The Feeds, Loose Jets; 9 p.m., $5.

THU, SEP 21 Dori Freeman COUNTRY Dori Freeman has CROONS an enviably

sweet, country crooning voice. She’s a talented songwriter and skilled guitar player, who puts an end to the nostalgia for classic country tunes—she won’t have you longing for supposed “good old days.”

Born in a small Appalachian town, Freeman sings about heartbreak and struggle with grace. Dolly Parton would be proud. With Phoebe Hunt & the Gatherers and Brother Roy. —KH [STAG’S HEAD,$14–$17/8 P.M.]

Quicksand CAN’T In its early SINK ‘EM nineties heyday, Quicksand was nominally a hardcore band, though the band’s deft balance of gut-level metal riffing and angular post-punk melodicism made it a contemporary of seminal forward-thinkers Helmet and Cave In. “Illuminant,” the advance single from November’s Interiors, picks up where Quicksand left off twentytwo years ago. The song flexes brain and brawn, its sledgehammer riffs arcing

upward in sky-glancing hooks, punctuated by an exacting rhythm section.

No Joy opens. —PW [CAT’S CRADLE, $20–$24/8 P.M.]

Colter Wall CANADA SaskatchewanCOUNTRY native Colter Wall renders his comedically maudlin country and folk tunes in a growling, Cash-like basso profundo, the better to emphasize the hard-living preoccupations of material like the rueful “Sleeping on the Blacktop” and the class-anxious “The Devil Wears a Suit and Tie.” As with Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell, the ghosts of seventies Outlaw Nashville loom omnipresent, but Wall largely delivers on the hard promises of his legendary influences. Tyler Childers opens. —EB [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $15/8 P.M.] ALSO ON THURSDAY ARCANA: Mamis and Papis; 8 p.m., free. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Randy McAllister; 8 p.m., $10. Carolina Lightnin’; 7-9 p.m., free.

DEEP SOUTH: Lazaris Pit, Lake Chamberlain, Hats for Rain; 8:30 p.m., $5. • LINCOLN THEATRE: Battle of the Broker Bands; 5:30 p.m., $14$17. • POUR HOUSE: Secretary Pool, JPhono1, Drug Yacht; 9 p.m., $5.

• RUBY DELUXE: Flower Power with Zensofly; 8 p.m. • SLIM’S: Redneck Nosferatu, Dissin’ Terry; 9 p.m., $5.

FRI, SEP 22 Hank, Pattie & The Current FRESH Led by an ‘GRASS adventurous pair of local bluegrass vets— Kickin Grass vocalist/fiddler Pattie Hopkins Kinlaw and Béla Fleck disciple Hank Smith—Raleigh quintet Hank, Pattie & The Current matches Smith’s progressive mind-set with Kinlaw’s soulful vocals on arrangements spanning the spectrum from modern to traditional. Asheville’s Fireside Collective opens with feisty modern string band tunes. —SG [FLETCHER OPERA THEATER, $15/8 P.M.]

N.C. Symphony: An Evening of Rachmaninoff NOT JUST Rachmaninoff all PIANO too often gets pigeonholed as a piano composer, but his orchestral music also has plenty to offer. To open the 2017-18 season, the N.C. Symphony offers a cross section of his orchestral output. The Rock is an early, Rimsky-Korsakovinspired tone poem, while the Symphonic Dances, his final work, summarize the colorful breadth of his style.

In between, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini turns a virtuosic work for violin into an equally virtuosic work for piano and orchestra. —DR [MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, $18–$79/8 P.M.]

world in which early-seventies Elton John was kidnapped and forced to join the Meat Puppets. Cosmic Punk and Jokes&Jokes&Jokes open. —EB [THE STATION, $7/8 P.M.]

Ugly God GOOD/ Being an ironically BAD bad rapper is an inexplicable current hip-hop trend. Ugly God fits that description, but he’s loveable and funny, which lets him get away with it in a way that similar acts have failed to do.

His single “Stop Smoking Black & Milds” is a hilarious rant to a neighborhood girl who has terrible breath due to her smoking habits. —CM [CAT’S CRADLE, $25–$75/7:30 P.M.] ALSO ON FRIDAY

Thirsty Curses GLAM Raleigh’s Thirsty PUNK Curses brings an energetic, vaguely unhinged charm to its well-crafted glam-punk. Tunes like the piano-driven “Neon Sign” and the sinister boogie “Holy Moley” suggest a bizarro

ARCANA: Calapse; 10 p.m., free. • BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Jonathan Scales Fourchestra; 7 & 9 p.m., $15. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: 8-Track Minds; 9 p.m., free. Duke Street Dogs; 6-8 p.m., free. • CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Stop Light Observations, Sondorblue and C2 & the Brothers Band; 8:30 p.m., $10-$12. • THE CAVE: Totally Slow, Pink Drinks; 9 p.m., $5.

INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 37

DEEP SOUTH: Emo Raleigh Presents: Get Sad Y’all; 10 p.m., $5-$10.

• HAW RIVER BALLROOM: Deer Tick; 8 p.m., $22.50-$24. See box, page 37. • LINCOLN THEATRE: The Breakfast Club, Shoot to Thrill (AC/ DC Tribute); 9 p.m., $10. • LOCAL 506: Dream Machine, Dr. Mudd and the Alamo; 9 p.m., $7. • THE MAYWOOD: Kurgan, Deathcrown, Chaosmic, Origin of Disease; 9 p.m., $8. • MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC HOUSE: Lizzy and Omar; 8 p.m., free. • THE PINHOOK: Beats and Bars Hip Hop Festival; 8 p.m. See page 20. • POUR HOUSE: Antiseen, Blood Red River; 9 p.m. • THE RITZ: Hanson; 8 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Luxe Posh; 10 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Keith Ganz Quartet; 8 p.m., $10-$20. • SLIM’S: No Anger Control, Snake & The Plisskens; 9 p.m., $5.

SAT, SEP 23 Ciompi Concert No. 1 QUARTET For its first concert +1 of the season, the Ciompi Quartet offers two different string quintets in two very different moods. Mozart’s third viola quintet—he wrote six total—bursts with his usual cheerful, melodic explosions.

Meanwhile, Schubert’s lone cello

LANNDS

quintet is possibly the most beautiful piece of music ever written. Rachel Kuipers Yonan joins on viola, and Brent Wissick on cello. —DR [DUKE’S BALDWIN AUDITORIUM, $10–$25/8 P.M.]

LANND From Jacksonville, SCAPES Florida, LANNDS makes spacious-sounding pop music infused with echoing handclaps, warm synth pads, and yearning vocals. Keen attention to dreamy, sometimes strange electronic textures may make prefixing “pop” with “indie” or “alternative” useful when describing the group, but LAANDS’ heavy hooks, expansive choruses and lyrics centered on lost love suggest that its pop ambitions are of prime importance here. With Janxx. —NR [RUBY DELUXE, $5–$7/8 P.M.]

Holy Ghost Tent Revival ROCK & Since forming in SOUL Greensboro a decade ago, Asheville septet Holy Ghost Tent Revival has evolved from a rowdy string band with fiery punk spirit and a touch of Dixieland into a soulful, banjo-less crew studded with horns and sprinkled with synth, its timeless sound seemingly derived from piles of classic pop-rock records and the Stax catalog. Opener Emma’s Lounge describes its style as “folk wave”—a wild, futuristic kaleidoscope of psychedelic party tunes. —SG [POUR HOUSE, $10–$15/9 P.M.]

Madeline Kenney LOOPY With a new record POP barely three weeks old, Madeline Kenney hits

FR 9/22

THIRSTY CURSES W/ COSMIC PUNK, JOKES&JOKES&JOKES 8PM, $7, 21+

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STS9 Vicente Amigo PHOTO Duke Coffeehouse with her dark songs, full of looping guitar chords and vocals. Her lyrics and guitar riffs are equally cutting. Our Earlier Stuff Was Better opens with a comedy set. —KH [DUKE COFFEEHOUSE, $5, FREE WITH DUKE ID/8:30 P.M.]

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JAM ON Since 1998, Sound IT Tribe Sector 9 (aka STS9) has been fusing jam rock and electronica into what some refer to as “jamtronica.”

If the Grateful Dead had grown up going to raves and taking ecstasy, it might sound similar to this. Expect an impressive light show and a whole lot of dancing. —CB [THE RITZ, $25–$99/7:30 P.M.]

BLUE WED: TAD WALTERS RANDY MCALLISTER DUKE STREET DOGS 8-TRACK MINDS MONTHLY BLUEGRASS/AMERICANA/ OLD TIME JAM SPONSORED BY PINECONE JOHNNY FOLSOM 4/BRUISED ORANGE: A TRIBUTE TO JOHN PRINE RISSI PALMER TUESDAY BLUES JAM

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stepped up to the plate with his latest album, Sky Ladder. His freestyle flow sounds like he’s not even trying until you listen to what he’s saying, and it’s clear that still waters run deep.

With Cult Days, Sharkmuffin, and Youma. —CM [KINGS, $13–$15/8 P.M.]

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W/ SAM LEIDIG, TEGUCIGALPAN 8:30PM, $6, 21+

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ANA POPOVIC TAS CRU SCOTT SHARRARD & THE BRICKYARD BAND CHRIS O’LEARY BAND TOMMY CASTRO & THE PAINKILLERS BARRERE & TACKETT + CRAIG FULLER: 3 MEMBERS OF LITTLE FEAT UNITE TERESA JAMES ERIC GALES

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Drew Tucker METAL There’s someBARS thing magical about the vibraphone: the warm ping of its top end, the uncanny thrum at the bottom, the satisfying warble and ring when its motor is running. Its place in jazz runs deep, through players like Milt Jackson, Lionel Hampton, Bobby Hutcherson, Khan Jamal, and (more recently) Jason Adasiewicz. Drew Tucker, often seen in an “It’s not a xylophone” T-shirt, does that tradition proud, with a graceful approach that utilizes all the instrument’s wondrous colors. —DR [BEYÙ CAFFÈ, $15/7 & 9 P.M.] ALSO ON SATURDAY ARCANA: Jo Gore; 10 p.m., $8.

• BLUE NOTE GRILL: Johnny Folsom 4, Bruised Orange: A Tribute to John Prine; 8 p.m., $8. • CAT’S CRADLE: Liars; 9 p.m., $17-$19. See page 22.• CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Carrboro Music Festival Kickoff: Urban Soil, Christiane and the Strays; 8:30 p.m., free. • COASTAL CREDIT UNION MUSIC PARK AT WALNUT CREEK: Brantley Gilbert; 7 p.m. • CRAFTY BEER SHOP: Sleepy Tom, Sterling Scott & Roger Mauldin; 2 p.m.-midnite. • DEEP SOUTH: Breathe Deep, Midnight Ramblers; 8:30 p.m., $5. • DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER: Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular; 8 p.m.

• HILLSBOROUGH STREET: Live & Local: Roots Festival; 12-9 p.m. • LOCAL 506: Circus No. 9; 9 p.m., $8. • THE MAYWOOD: Paper Dolls, I Am Maddox, Cold Comfort, Ryan Dunson; 8:30 p.m., $10. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: An Evening of Rachmaninoff: NC Symphony Classical Series; 8 p.m.

• MOTORCO: The Black Lillies, Pinto; 9 p.m., $15-$18. • MYSTERY BREWING PUBLIC HOUSE: Mysti Mayhem; 8-11:30 p.m. • THE PINHOOK: Beats and Bars Hip Hop Festival; 5 p.m. See page 20. • RED HAT AMPHITHEATER: Newsboys; 6 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: Will Campbell Quintet; 8 p.m., $10$20. • SLIM’S: Lacy Jags, A Band Who Won’t Be Named; 9 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Jazz Saturday with Syncopated Changes; 2 p.m., free. Jazz Saturdays; 2 p.m., free.

SUN, SEP 24 Vicente Amigo STRING Like his musical KING mentor, Paco de Lucia, Vicente Amigo is a master of the flamenco

guitar who has infused a centuries-old tradition with modernity, individuality, and dazzling virtuosity. As the world’s premier exponent of his craft, he’s collected the expected big awards, along with raves from people like jazz master Pat Metheny, who called him the greatest guitarist alive. He’ll be performing with his longtime quintet, a singer, and a dancer, for the full flamenco effect. —DK [DUKE’S PAGE AUDITORIUM, $10–$45/7 P.M.]

Carrboro Music Festival TOWN Every segment of TUNES the Triangle shows up for this free end-of-summer party. So whether it’s a cappella, Americana, uke rock, hip-hop or doo-wop music you want, you’re covered.

And the festival’s footprint has jumped a few sizes of late, with nearly thirty venues participating this year, so if Cat’s Cradle is too rock-clubby for your tastes, you can catch a show at a local watering hole, or heck, the PTA Thrift Shop or Carrboro Family Vision.

Shake it up a bit. —DK [VARIOUS LOCATIONS, FREE/NOON]

Frankie Cosmos FRANKLY Frankie Cosmos’s TWEE newest record, Next Thing, is a lot of the same thing: liking dogs, feeling feelings about friends, presenting awkwardness and self-doubt as charming. If you can’t make your way through the layers of off-putting twee-ness you’re not to blame, but if you can, you’ll arrive at what are undeniably memorable vocal melodies. With Ian Sweet and Nice Try. —NR [MOTORCO, $14–$16/8 P.M.]

Alison Krauss & David Gray DOUBLE On the surface it HEADER might not seem like there’s much commonality between Alison Krauss, who has spent the last couple of decades as America’s neo-bluegrass darling, and David Gray, the

Brit who came to fame by blending his folk-rock feel with electronic production.

But both of them have displayed enough artistic adventurousness to confound the conventions of the forms they started out in, and both singer-songwriters bring plenty of passion to their craft. That’s probably common ground enough.

—JA [KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE, $49.50–$75/7 P.M.]

beats surrounding Andrea Lo’s captivating voice. This show will put you into a trance with heavy doses of synths and rolling drums.

—KH [THE PINHOOK, $10/8 P.M.]

before finally getting down to Guy classics like “Stone Crazy” and “Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues.” —GB [MEMORIAL AUDITORIUM, $37–$78/7:30 P.M.]

7 p.m., $7-$10. • NEPTUNES PARLOUR: The Atomic Rhythm All Stars September Residency; 8:30 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: Tony Macalpine, Felix Martin; 8 p.m. • SLIM’S: Archarus, Squall; 9 p.m., $5.

Jay Som INDIE This is a stellar ROYALTY show for any fan of indie rock: Jay Som has released some of the best, most honest, intimate bedroom rock music in years.

She pulls you in with her lyrics and wraps her upbeat tunes around you like a warm hug. Detroit’s Stef Chura and Nashville’s Soccer Mommy open the show. —KH [LOCAL 506, $12–$14/9 P.M.] ALSO ON SUNDAY ARCANA: Alex Winter, Knives of Spain, Breath of Ether; 7 p.m., free. • CAT’S CRADLE: Carrboro Music Festival: Brendan Rice and the Hired Guns, Dmitri Resnick and the Bootleg Beat, XOXOK, Graymatter, Carrborators, Sound System Seven, Bellflower, Doug Largent Trio, The 8:59s; 2:30 p.m., free. • CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Carrboro Music Festival: Hip Hop Variety Showcase; 3:30 p.m., free. • DEEP SOUTH: Live & Loud Weekly; 9 p.m., $3. • LINCOLN THEATRE: An Evening with Mike Gordon; 8:30 p.m. • MOTORCO: School of Rock Cary: A Concert of Modern Alternative Hits, A Tribute to Jack White; noon, $5-$7. • THE PINHOOK: N’Kogniito, Africa Unplugged, Ages of Sages; 8 p.m., $7-$10. • POUR HOUSE: David Gans, The Possums; 8 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: Tropical Escapism with DJ Stone Zone; 10 p.m.

• THE STATION: Carrboro Music Festival: Honey Magpie, Joe Romeo, The Outboards, Blue Cactus, Erie Choir, JPhono1, Flash Car, Object Hours, Sunnyslopes, Pipe, Ruscha, Bitter Resolve, Riddim Macka Sound System with Selector B Steady and Aloriddim; 12-10 p.m., free.

MON, SEP 25 Belle Game HYPNO Two weeks after POP releasing the new Fear/Nothing, Belle Game hits the Pinhook, showcasing mesmerizing electronic

Frankie Cosmos PHOTO

COURTESY OF GROUND CONTROL TOURING

The Cribs

Mutemath

AVANT Having come to ROCK prominence in the early 2000s, when “back to basics” rock was in one of its periods of cyclical ascension, West Yorkshire, England’s The Cribs were always an uneasy fit with that particular moment.

Smart, creatively ambitious, and too subtle for the Jet and Kings of Leon audiences, the trio has been consistently terrific for fifteen years, collaborating with fellow iconoclasts like Edwyn Collins and Lee Ranaldo. PAWS opens. —EB [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $18–$20/8:30 P.M.]

HOLDS Mutemath does STEADY not want for ambition. For nigh on a decade and a half now, the New Orleans quartet has aimed to synthesize Radiohead’s world-weary coolness and The Stone Roses’s shambling shuffle and pop-rock grandiosity to create synth-dance epics. On August’s Play Dead, the band flits between styles: “Hit Parade” is a distorted prog romp, “Stroll On” is lush indie soul, “War” is all strutting pop-rock ballast. That the band never seems to find itself among the chaos is rather expected; that it comes relatively close to its ambitious aim is admirable. —PW [THE RITZ, $15–$27/8 P.M.]

Buddy Guy BLUES In concert, Buddy ORIGINAL Guy impersonates various blues greats, prompting an audience member in a show here a while ago to shout “Play some Buddy Guy!” “Everything I do is Buddy Guy,” the guitarist shouted back. Nevertheless, Guy often detours through artists including Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Clarence Carter, Eric Clapton and Albert and B.B. King

ALSO ON MONDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Verses and Versus DJ Series; 6-9 p.m. • CAROLINA THEATRE: Mac DeMarco, The Garden; 8 p.m., $25-$35. See page 34. • EMPRESS ROOM: Vocal Jazz Jam Session; 8 p.m. • IMBIBE: Grewen and Griffin; 7-10 p.m., free.

• IMURJ: Bluegrass Kickoff with GrassStreet and Alan Barnosky; 9-11 p.m. • LOCAL 506: Wilsen, Young Mister; 9 p.m., $10-$12. • MOTORCO: Flash Chorus;

TUE, SEP 26 Bone Thugs-nHarmony FULL Everything in pop CIRCLE culture comes back around eventually, and now that mainstream rap music has taken a turn toward a melody-driven sound, Bone Thugs-n-Harmony has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity.

The group’s double-time flow was ahead of its time, paving the way for artists like A$AP Ferg. —CM [CAT’S CRADLE, $27–$30/8:30 P.M.]

IBMA Ramble ‘GRASS As bands descend HOPPING into downtown Raleigh for the International Bluegrass Music Association conference, they’ll pack hotel rooms or find nooks in corridors or lobbies for free showcases or informal jams, though a few dozen will also be spread around six venues each night for the ticketed Bluegrass Ramble. Tuesday’s highlights include Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 39

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Paul Kelly AUSSIE Paul Kelly LIFER soldiered through a rough start in the early eighties to find his songwriting voice and become one of Australia’s best-loved writers, capable of sizzling rockers and stirring, detailed meditations on life and death. He’s been especially prolific in recent years with ambitious recording projects.

The recent Life Is Fine includes a work based on a Langston Hughes poem and a “sequel” to Roy Orbison’s “Leah.” —DK [STAG’S HEAD, $25–$40/8 P.M.]

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riffs delivered with machinic precision? Four Great Points.

Yes, music is cyclical and none of what Big Ups is doing is groundbreaking, per se, but the band’s righteous fury nonetheless sounds fresh and vital in 2017 and makes the New York City quartet the shape of punk today. —PW [THE PINHOOK, $10/9 P.M.]

Charley Crockett

THE HOT AT NIGHTS & MATTHEW STEVENS

ArtsCenterLive.org

40 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

one that wouldn’t age particularly well. But Touché Amoré’s latest record and continued touring success demonstrates that, a decade down the line, Jeremy Bolm’s voice still carries conviction enough to rend a heart, and the band is still attuned to

CO-PRESENTED WITH THE NATIONAL HUMANITIES CENTER

SA 10/14

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

NO SHAME THEATRE: CARRBORO

Ebony Hillbillies, and Alice Gerrard with Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer. Catch Front Country, Missy Raines & The New Hip, or Jim Lauderdale on Wednesday. —SG [DOWNTOWN RALEIGH, $30 NIGHTLY/7 P.M. TUESDAY & 6 P.M. WEDNESDAY]

COOL 4 With its jittery CATS start-stop rhythms and plaintive, deep-in-the-mix vocals Atlanta’s Pallas concocts a beguiling mix of pop instincts by way of an aggressively avant-garde sensibility, with songs like “Cast a Lion, Cured a Crow” suggesting something like Patti Smith’s Easter as performed by Shudder To Think. Sam Leidig and Tegucigalpan open. —TB [THE STATION, $6/9 P.M.]

Touché Amoré SCREAM Of all the musical REVIVAL trends of the 2000s, scream seemed like

simple song structures that stick. While the band is undoubtedly generating a new fan base of angst-ridden teens, longtime fans are still likely to find it capable of reaching the same emotional reserves. With Single Mother and Gouge Away. —NR [MOTORCO, $13–$15/8 P.M.] ALSO ON TUESDAY BLUE NOTE GRILL: Smoke, Blues, and Brews; 6:30-8 p.m., $50.

• CAROLINA THEATRE: Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Apocalypse Blues Revue; 8 p.m., $49-$69. • THE CAVE: The Midnight Ghost Train; 9 p.m., $6-$8. • LINCOLN THEATRE: IBMA Ramble: Special Consensus, Mr. Sun, Frank Solivan & Dirty Kitchen, The Lonely Heartstring Band, Forlorn Strangers, New Town; 7 p.m., $10. • LOCAL 506: DeQn Sue; 9 p.m., $8-$10. • THE MAYWOOD: Arkaik, Alterbeast, Inanimate Existence, Septicemic, Antenora; 8 p.m., $12-$15. • RUBY DELUXE: Blursome, Hanz; 11 p.m. • SHARP NINE GALLERY: NCJRO; 8 p.m., $10-$20.

WED, SEP 27 Big Ups CLEAR Big Ups’s roots ORIGINS are pretty easy to divine. Personal-as-sociopolitical and anticapitalist screeds delivered over tight post-punk rhythm sections?

That’s Repeater. Loud-quietloud burst punctuated by furious shrieks? Spiderland and Surfer Rosa. Arty, angular

CUSTOM After honing his BLEND sound busking on the streets of New Orleans and New York, Charley Crockett created an eclectic blend of country blues, soul, and honkytonk with a Creole flavor, from the soulful street-corner rawness of “Trinity River” to the back-porch country feel of “I Am Not Afraid,” and a Cajunized cover of Ernest Tubb’s 1946 hit, “Drivin’ Nails in My Coffin.” —GB [MOTORCO, $12–$14/7:30 P.M.]

Psychedelic Furs 4 EVER Existing alongside NOW the great institutions of eighties rock and more—then slightly overlooked for their achievements—the Psychedelic Furs formed in London in 1977 and shortly evolved into one of the most visionary bands of that kinetic era. Comingling punk’s energy with a noirish sensibility and a Velvet Underground fetish, Richard Butler and company made some of the most memorable and enduring music of the post-punk age, including 1981’s masterpiece Talk Talk Talk. Bash and Pop opens. —TB [CAT’S CRADLE, $30/8 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): Together Pangea, Daddy Issues, Lala Lala; 8 p.m., $12-$14. • THE CAVE: Essex//Muro Residency; 9 p.m., $5. • DEEP SOUTH: Static and Surrender, Canadian Airports; 8:30 p.m., $5. • KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE: Johnny Folsom 4, Candy Thomas Band; 5:45 p.m., $5-$20. • LINCOLN THEATRE: IBMA Ramble: Slocan Ramblers, Jenni Lyn, Front Country, Fireside Collective, The Railsplitters, Hank Pattie & the Current, Sheriff Scott and the Deputies; 7 p.m., $10. • LOCAL 506: Casey Williams, JPhono1, Majestic Vistas; 9 p.m., $6. • POUR HOUSE: IBMA Ramble: Missy Raines & the New Hip, Nefesh Mountain, Molsky Mountain Drifters; 7 p.m.

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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

“Business as Usual” by Ralph Steeds PHOTO COURTESY OF ADAM CAVE FINE ART

RALPH STEEDS

North Carolina artist Ralph Steeds, a retired art professor from UNCPembroke, is also a veteran of the Vietnam War, and this combination of aesthetic and traumatic influences, surrealist vision and social protest, has long been manifest in the works of the expert printmaker. Through the end of October following this opening reception, Adam Cave Fine Art presents a Steeds retrospective consisting of more than forty lithographs and engravings, teeming with fever dreams and anti-war themes.

“Business as Usual” is a spectral landscape of gas masks, bombers, and pestilent insects, while “Is This My America” applies gorgeous colors to a galling scene suggesting what our government prefers to call “enhanced interrogation.” But there’s nothing euphemistic about the vivid, vital vistas of social strife and suffering Steeds prints.

—Brian Howe

ADAM CAVE FINE ART, RALEIGH

7–9 p.m., free, www.adamcavefineart.com

OPENING The Disaster Paintings: Donald Sultan. Sep 23-Dec 31. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org.

ONGOING SPECIAL Brian Allen: “I have EVENT had an accidentally inevitable career,” the Durhambased letterpress printer Brian Allen writes in a statement about his going-away show.

Planning to be an academic, Allen fell sideways into calligraphy, typesetting, graphic design, and, ultimately uniting them all, letterpress. After ten years in the Triangle, he is now closing his letterpress shop on Mangum Street and heading

elsewhere for new adventures.

This retrospective exhibit, conceived by fellow-handprinters Dave Wofford and Sarah Almond, covers more than twenty years of Allen’s handprinted and calligraphic work utilizing “disruptive technologies of the fifteenth and twenty-first centuries;” much of it is priced to sell. It’s a fitting capstone for an inevitable career. Thru Sep 29.

Reception: Sat, Sep 23, 4–5:30 p.m. Horse & Buggy Press and Friends, Durham. www. horseandbuggypress.com.

—Brian Howe Annual Instructor Exhibit: Drawings, jewelry, and photography. Thru Oct 1. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. artscenterlive.org.

Beyond the Front Porch 2017: Work by twelve senior undergraduates. Thru Nov 12. Duke Campus: Center for Documentary Studies, Durham. www.cdsporch.org.

Carefully Cut: Tin-can collage

by Thomas Graham. Thru Nov 2. Alexander Dickson House, Hillsborough. www. historichillsborough.org.

Clay for the Wall: Sculpture by Shannon Bueker. Thru Oct 1.

Joyful Jewel, Pittsboro. www. joyfuljewel.com.

Coastscapes: Paintings by Nancy Hughes Miller. Thru Oct 28. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Collections: Leah Sobsey. Thru Sep 30. 21c

Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham.

Court and Capital: Art from Asia’s Greatest Cities: Thru Dec 10. Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill. www.ackland.org.

Dark Humor: Paintings by Peter Williams. Thru Sep 28. UNC Campus: Hanes Art Center, Chapel Hill. art.unc.edu.

Don’t Quit: The Nello Teer Sr. Story: History of the Teer family in Durham. Thru Dec 15.

Durham History Hub. www. museumofdurhamhistory.org.

The Fabric of Raleigh/The Fabric of Durham: “You were just a face in the crowd,” Tom Petty sang. “Out in the street, walking around.” If Petty captured the

alchemy of a face among many turning significant, Christer Berg, who moved to Raleigh from Sweden in 1995, does it dozens of times in his new photo book.

Firefighters and preachers, cobblers and baristas, dancers and construction workers—all leap out of the daily pedestrian flow before Berg’s energetic lens. “I wanted to skip the planning, styling, and scheduling that’s common with portrait projects, instead capturing people in the moment, going about what they do in an unscripted and authentic way,” Berg says. The result is also captured in a book from Horse & Buggy Press. Thru Oct 1. Betty Ray McCain Gallery, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

—Brian Howe

LAST Fabric of Space and CHANCE Time: Ann Harwell.

Thru Sep 24. N.C. Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh. www. naturalsciences.org.

Faculty and Staff Art Exhibition: Thru Oct 1. Meredith College: Gaddy-Hamrick Art Center, Raleigh. www.meredith.edu.

The Fence: Durham is one of seven cities across the nation— the smallest, compared with the likes of Brooklyn, Boston, and Houston—to host this touring, public photography exhibit, curated from submissions from around the world and based on themes such as “home,” “nature,” and “food.” While Lori Vrba is the only local artist among the fifty included in the touring exhibit, nine area photographers, INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 41

including Bryce Lankard, Leah Sobsey, Gesche Würfel, and Warren Hicks, are featured in a regional showcase. The exhibit wraps the block around the Chapel Hill Street parking garage in a temporary fence and banner of photos. Thru Nov 30. Chapel Hill Street, Durham.

—Brian Howe Fluid: Paintings by MyLoan Dinh. Thru Oct 15. Durham Convention Center. www. durhamconventioncenter.com.

From Isolation to War: Native veteran story quilts. Thru Oct 31. Love House and Hutchins Forum, Chapel Hill.

Gamut: Heather Gordon. Thru Oct 6. SPECTRE Arts, Durham. www.spectrearts.org.

Hearsay: Various artists.

Thru Sep 21. Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh. www. visualartexchange.org.

SPECIAL Homebound: EVENT Brenda Brokke, Leatha Koefler, Amy Friend.

Thru Nov 25. Artist talk: Thu, Sep 21, 6:30 p.m. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Hyperactive: Found materials

by Leigh Suggs and Garry Noland. Thru Oct 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Image of Ukraine: Exploring Ukrainian Culture through Embroidery and Painting: Olena Zintchouk. Thru Dec 8.

UNC Campus: FedEx Global Education Center, Chapel Hill. www.global.unc.edu.

Juxtaposition: Married couple Donald Martiny and Celia Johnson create a profound visual language in this exhibit. Martiny’s works are non-representational, heavily textured threedimensional shapes that he creates on the floor. It’s a physically taxing process.

He uses brushes, brooms, mops, and his hands to push paint into abstract swoops.

The power of pure paint, combined with simple but strong, emotive strokes, is a dazzling convergence that immediately connects with viewers, unbound and unrestricted by the shape of a canvas. And Johnson has long been intrigued by moving around shapes and colors to create puzzles. Her well-organized geometric compositions blend modern sophistication with clarity 42 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

and economy. Her brightly colored encaustic works reflect the minimalist images of the sixties. Thru Oct 27. Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org. —Linda Kramer A Kiss of the Earth: Apt for a work about a season of fecundity, the epochal modernist ballet The Rite of Spring just keeps on giving, more than a century after its legendary premiere. It’s the inspiration for this experiment

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

When you consider the contemporary implications, in a world of virtual warfare, of deciding someone’s fate with a command on a screen, you start to scratch the larger issues Gruffat is probing. Thru Jan 28. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe Love and Forgiveness: Linwood Hart. Thru Oct 1.

Crook’s Corner, Chapel Hill. crookscorner.com.

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

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

Nevertheless She Persisted: Silkscreen prints by Kelly Bodie.

Thru Oct 31. Perch Studios, Carrboro. perchstudios.net.

One is a Crowd: Collaborative self portraits by Ursula Gullow.

Thru Sep 30. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

Darius Quarles: Paintings.

Thru Oct 2. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

Patterns: Monoprints on paper and fabric by Ely Urbanski.

Thru Sep 30. Pittsboro Center for the Arts, Pittsboro.

Places: Paintings by Marvin Saltzman. Thru Oct 7. The Mahler Fine Art, Raleigh. www. themahlerfineart.com.

Reflections Within the Transitioning Grid: Lasercut photography by Merrill Shatzman and libi rose.

Thru Nov 22. Power Plant Gallery, Durham. www. powerplantgallery.com.

Vera Reed: Portraits. Thru Sep 30. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www.artscenterlive.org.

LAST Seen Not Heard: CHANCE Photography by Heather Evans Smith. Thru Sep 24. Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. www. chapelhillpreservation.com.

Small to Large: Delight in the Practice of Painting: Margie Stewart. Thru Oct 23. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Some Assembly Required: Can You Build It?: 3-D paintings and sculpture. Thru Oct 10. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

Studio and Porch Paintings: Joan Vandermeer. Thru Oct 27. Mad Hatter Bakeshop & Cafe, Durham. www. madhatterbakeshop.com.

The SuperNatural: We’ve long since lost sight of the seams, once considered inviolable, between nature, technology, and commerce—though we sometimes imagine we are crossing a boundary when we take thousand-dollar bikes into deceptively wild woods, guided by our smartphones and clad in moisture wicking socks. The SuperNatural wades into this liminal zone, exploring how we see and shape the contours of our planet as the physical refuse of the industrial age shades into the digital refuse of the present. The show includes a generative digital video by Tabor Robak, a virtual reality installation by Jakob Kudsk Steensen, and photos by Lars Jan, among many others. Brooklyn artist Chris Doyle created “Dreams of Infinite Luster,” a digital animation, for the museumhotel’s exterior vitrines. In it, “All the elements are rendered in gold, the color of lucre—the product, engine, and goal of capitalism.” Is a luxury hotel an odd site for post-capitalist critique? Sure. But, as we’ve said, what seams? Thru Jul 1.

21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels.com/ durham. —Brian Howe LAST Three Perspectives: CHANCE Paintings by Lolette Guthrie, photography by Eric Saunders, blown glass by Pringle Teetor. Thru Sep 24.

Hillsborough Gallery of Arts. www.hillsboroughgallery.com.

LAST Transformation & CHANCE Contrast: Jewelry

by Linda Azar. Thru Sep 24.

Melissa Designer Jewelry, Hillsborough. www. melissadesigherjewelry.com.

Two by Two: Watercolors

by Amy Beshgetoorian.

Thru Sep 30. Tipping Paint Gallery, Raleigh. www. tippingpaintgallery.com.

War Experience: Personal artifacts, medals, uniforms, maps, letters, photographs, and more. Thru Nov 29. Raleigh City Museum, Raleigh. www. cityofraleighmuseum.org.

We’ve Met Before: Handwoven cloth has a certain rigor, a requirement for stitches to interact with structural integrity rather than spontaneity. Ink, meanwhile, has a quicksilver impulsiveness, a tendency to slip and run unbounded by the necessities of form.

N.C.-raised artist Andrea Donnelly holds this contrast in tension in her new show at NCMA. “Cloth, in its infinite variety and varied significance, is deeply linked to our histories and emotions through the body,” she writes in her artist statement. “Whether it’s woven to hang on the wall or to grace the neck and shoulders, I make cloth that creates connection.”

The images on these large textile pieces evoke bodies, Rorschach blots, abstract flora, and, most of all, memory. Dyed, woven, unwoven, and rewoven, the work contains “a literal record of its own making” as well as an open range of interpretive play for viewers. Thru Jan 28. N.C. Museum of Art, Raleigh. www. ncartmuseum.org.

—Brian Howe Where We Find Home: Recent Southern photography by Ben Alper, DL Anderson, Aaron Canipe, Justin Cook, Phyllis Dooney, Matt Eich, Preston Gannaway, Lissa Gotwals, Jeremy M. Lange, Jared Soares, Aaron Turner, and Will Warasila. Part of the Click! Photography Festival. Sep Thru Oct 14. The Scrap Exchange, Durham. scrapexchange.org.

stage OPENING Maria Bamford & Jackie Kashian: Stand-up comedy. $35. Thu, Sep 21, 8 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. www. carolinatheatre.org.

Cilia: Performance art by Stephanie Leathers. Sat, Sep 23, 5 p.m. Guest Room Project Space, Carrboro.

D.L. Hughley: Stand-up comedy. $28. Fri, Sep 22, 8 p.m. Durham Performing Arts Center, Durham. www.dpacnc.com.

Fragments: Performance art by Gert Scheerlinck. Fri, Sep 22, 6 p.m. & Sat, Sep 23, 3 p.m. Guest Room Project Space, Carrboro.

Todd Glass: Stand-up comedy.

Sep 21-23. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Ray William Johnson: Stand-up comedy. $19. Wed, Sep 27, 8 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Playing With Fire (After Frankenstein): Play. $18$24. Sep 22-Oct 8. Theatre In The Park, Raleigh. www. theatreinthepark.com.

Pride & Prejudice: Play. $23. Sep 21-Oct 1. NCSU Campus: Titmus Theatre, Raleigh.

Super Nerdtendo: Standup comedy and cosplay. $10-$31. Sat, Sep 23, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

ONGOING 7-Stories: Laughing at Death: Storytelling. $5. Sun, Sep 24, 7 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. www. kingsraleigh.com.

Anything Goes Late Show: Sat, Sep 23, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.  The Cake: Reviewed on p. 30. $10-$57. Thru Oct 1.

PlayMakers Repertory Company, Chapel Hill. www.playmakersrep. org.

LAST California Suite: Play CHANCE presented by Forest Moon Theater. $13-$18. Thru Sep 25. Wake Forest Renaissance Center, Wake Forest. www.wakeforestnc/ renaissance-centre.aspx.

 Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead: Reviewed on p. 31.

Thru Oct 1. North Raleigh Arts & Creative Theatre, Raleigh. www. nract.org. ½ Closer Than They Appear: Reviewed on p. 31. $5-$45. Thru Oct 1. UNC Campus: Swain Hall, Chapel Hill. www. piedmontperformancefactory.org.

The Harry Show: Ages 18+.

Improv host leads late-night revelers through potentially risque games with audience participation. $10. Fri, Sep 22 & Sat, Sep 23, 10 p.m.

ComedyWorx Theatre, Raleigh. comedyworx.com.

Improv Noir: Interactive improv comedy. $15-$40. Sun, Sep 24, 6 p.m. The Vault, Durham. www. thisismettlesome.com.

LAST  King Lear: This CHANCE joint production by Raleigh’s Honest Pint Theatre and Fayetteville’s Sweet Tea Shakespeare reduces King Lear to something nearly unbelievable: an ultimately cheerful jaunt around a rustic barn. Previously, director Jeremy Fiebig gambled that changing the frame around Hamlet would emphasize its theatrical magic, underlining that we were watching a troupe perform Shakespeare’s text instead of encountering the playwright’s characters directly.

Why doesn’t the same bet pay off this time? Start with uneven acting and direction; the principals seem miscalculated or less developed than the supporting cast. Then add in a storm scene that diminished Lear’s greatest trial to a tempest in a washtub. A final change to the script leveled Shakespeare’s Everest, in what was the happiest—and the least earned— ending of any Lear I’ve seen. $8-$15. Thru Sep 24. William Peace University: Leggett Theatre, Raleigh. www.theatre.peace.edu. — Byron Woods Late Night Dip: Bucket-style comedy open mic. Fri, Sep 22, 10:30 p.m. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Locals at the Local: Standup comedy by Brian Deans, Dejahzh Hedrick, Dink Kearney, Jeremy Alder, Kenyon Adamcik, Maddie Wiener. $7. Thu, Sep 21, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill. www.local506.com.

No Shame Theatre: Storytelling. $5. Sat, Sep 23, 8 p.m. The ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. artscenterlive.org.

The Ugly Duckling: Ballet.

Thru Oct 1. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

PHOTO BY MARK TURNER

The Monti Storyslam: Choosing Your Battles: Storytelling. $12.

Fri, Sep 22, 7:30 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham. www. motorcomusic.com.

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 26–SUNDAY, OCTOBER 1

CIRCUS 1903

A century ago, before TV and the Internet, a lone institution brought prodigious, death-defying performers and exotic animals from far, far away to American audiences: the circus. The garish, highly skilled denizens of the big top—and its edgier alternatives, like the Ten-In-One and the Single-O—whispered and roared of a world far bigger than the towns in which they performed. Small wonder that “run off and join the circus” remains cultural shorthand for the ultimate escape. The closing of the Ringling Bros. touring circus last May makes this time capsule more precious. It’s a cavalcade of contortionists, acrobats, aerialists, and clowns, abetted by an imaginative, sensitive variation on the wild animal acts of yore: uncanny puppets created by Significant Object, the group that devised the stunning equestrians used in War Horse, depicting an elephant mother and child. Step right up. —Byron Woods

DURHAM PERFORMING ARTS CENTER, DURHAM Various times, $20–$156, www.dpacnc.com

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NCPS Reading Series: M. Scott Douglass, Dana Stone, Bartholomew Barker. Sun, Sep 24, 2 p.m. McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. www. mcintyresbooks.com.

READINGS & SIGNINGS Kristin Cashore: Jane, Unlimited. Sun, Sep 24, 2 p.m.

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

Michael Hardt: Assembly.

Thu, Sep 21, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Randy Johnson: Hiking North Carolina. Mon, Sep 25, 7 p.m.

REI, Raleigh. www.rei.com Kerri Maniscalco & Renee Ahdieh: Hunting Prince Dracula; Flame in the Mist.

Mon, Sep 25, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Annalee Newitz: Autonomous.

Fri, Sep 22, 7 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www. flyleafbooks.com.

Eleanor Spicer Rice: Dr. Eleanor’s Book of Common Ants. Tue, Sep 26, 7 p.m.

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

Hollis Robbins: The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers.

Wed, Sep 27, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Bryant Simon: The Hamlet Fire: A Tragic Story of Cheap Food, Cheap Gov’t, and Cheap Lives. Tue, Sep 26, 7 p.m.

Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www.regulatorbookshop.com.

John Staddon: The Englishman: Memoirs of a Psychobiologist. Mon, Sep 25, 7 p.m. Regulator Bookshop, Durham. www. regulatorbookshop.com.

Daren Wang: The Hidden Light of Northern Fires. Tue, Sep 26, 7-8 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill. www.flyleafbooks.com.

— Wed, Sep 27, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Joseph Wheelan: Midnight in the Pacific. Sat, Sep 23, 11 a.m.

McIntyre’s Books, Pittsboro. www.mcintyresbooks.com.

Vimala’s Curryblossom Cafe, Chapel Hill. curryblossom.com.

Joseph Haydn and the Business of Music in Late EighteenthCentury Austria: Mary Sue Morrow. Fri, Sep 22, 4 p.m. Duke Campus: Biddle Music Building, Durham. music.duke.edu.

Emily Herring Wilson: The Three Graces of Val-Kill: Eleanor Roosevelt, Marion Dickerman, and Nancy Cook in the Place They Made Their Own. Thu, Sep 21, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh. www. quailridgebooks.com.

Gabrielle Zevin: Young Jane Young. Wed, Sep 20, 7 p.m.

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

LECTURES ETC. Curryblossom Conversations: Sacrificial Poets open mic for music, poetry, or anything in between. Thu, Sep 21, 6 p.m.

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 23

ARTICULATING VALUE The Saxapahaw arts nonprofit Culture Mill has spent a year and a Kenan Foundation grant cultivating conversations among local artists and art professionals to explore a question of paramount importance and ambiguity: What is the labor of artists worth, not just monetarily but also socially and ethically, and how might the arts ecosystem be redrawn to safeguard this value? The series culminates in the Articulating Value in the Arts symposium, where perspectives emerging from the conversations will be shared with a general audience and released as a book. Live presentations and discussions will provide various routes into a labyrinthine question. After presentations on topics such as using art to challenge gentrification (The Carrack’s Laura Ritchie), a panel discussion features artist-activist Saba Taj, the N.C. Arts Council’s Jeff Pettus, Culture Mill’s Murielle Elizéon, performer Ginger Wagg, and many others. (Disclosure: INDY managing arts and culture editor Brian Howe is the panel’s moderator.) —David Klein

LIVING ARTS COLLECTIVE, DURHAM

10 a.m.–3 p.m., $15, www.articulatingvalue.com

PHOTO COURTESY OF FULL FRAME

screen SPECIAL SHOWINGS

British spy comedy introduces an American counterpart, the Statesmen. Rated R.

Akounak Tedalat Taha Tazoughai: Donation. Thu, Sep 21, 8:30 p.m. Kings, Raleigh. www.kingsraleigh.com. See p. 34.

 The LEGO Ninjago Movie—Reviewed on p. 33.

Rated PG.

OPENING THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21

QUEST

This documentary by first-time director Jonathan Olshefski takes its name from the film’s protagonist, Christoper “Quest” Rainey, a hard-working husband and father whose home in hardscrabble North Philadelphia has long served as a community hub. The film captures the daily rhythms of his life, from child-rearing responsibilities to the cast of characters who come by to partake in the radio-show broadcast the Raineys produce in their basement. Olshefski spent ten years filming and getting to know his subjects. As a result, the film, coming to the Hayti Heritage Center in the Full Frame Road Show, provides a remarkably intimate portrait of Quest and his family and the bonds of community they help foster. But, inevitably, it also touches on poverty, urban violence, and other social issues surrounding them. —David Klein

HAYTI HERITAGE CENTER, DURHAM

7 p.m., free with RSVP, www.fullframefest.org 44 | 9.20.17 | INDYweek.com

Battle of the Sexes—The true story of the 1973 tennis match between Billie Jean King and ex-champ Bobby Riggs. Rated PG-13.

Brad's Status—A father (Ben Stiller) showing his son East Coast colleges becomes insecure about his life after meeting an old friend in Mike White's comedic drama.

Rated R. Friend Request—Finally, the social-media-based supernatural-psychological horror film no one was waiting for. Rated R. Kingsman: The Golden Circle—The sequel to Matthew Vaughn's uproarious

Stronger—In this biopic, Jake, Gyllenhaal plays a man who lost his legs in the Boston Marathon Bombing. Rated R.

A L S O P L AY I N G The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at indyweek.com. ½ Annabelle: Creation—The new Conjuring film is an adequate scary movie if you’re in a theater packed with people yelling advice at the screen, but genre connoisseurs might be bored. Rated R.  Atomic Blonde— Despite flourishes of ferocity, this Cold War thriller by John Wick codirector David Leitch often seems to coast on its own glib, quirky coolness.

Rated R.

½ The Big Sick— Married screenwriters Kumail Nanjiani and Emily V. Gordon’s autobiographical rom-com truthfully portrays the shifting cultural and romantic landscape of the U.S. Rated R.

 Mother!— Reviewed on p. 33. Rated R.

½ Crown Heights—This true story of wrongful murder conviction solemnly exposes a flawed system but lacks narrative panache. Rated R.

½ Patti Cake$—Danielle Macdonald is terrific and likeable, but writerdirecctor Geremy Jasper chooses twee indie quirks over basic authenticity at every turn in his tale of an unlikely aspiring rapper.

Rated R.

½ Despicable Me 3— This franchise feels just about washed up, but your kids won’t care, because Minions! Rated PG. ½ Dunkirk— Christopher Nolan’s WWII picture is very British and, for better and worse, very Terrence Malick—epic, meditative, and portentous.

Rated PG-13.  It—Blend classic Spielberg with Stranger Things and you get this scary, heartfilled new version of Stephen King’s magnum opus. Rated R.

½ The Mummy— Tom Cruise’s increasing creepiness is the biggest impediment to a serviceable creature feature. Rated PG-13.

 Spider-Man: Homecoming—Getting back to basics, a fifty-five-yearold superhero feels like a kid again. Rated PG-13.  War for the Planet of the Apes—A conspicuous phrase scrawled on a tunnel wall beneath the Colonel’s compound says it all: “Apepocalypse Now.” Rated PG-13.

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events DURHAM COUNTY BOARD OF ELECTIONS Notice of Resolution to Adopt Time for Counting of Absentee Ballots On 8/22/17 the Durham Board of Elections met at its office at 201 N. Roxboro St., Durham, and adopted the following resolution: 1. The Board of Elections shall meet at 2:00 p.m. on Election Day, Tuesday, 10/10/17 at its office to count absentee ballots.

2. Any voter of the county may attend this meeting and observe the count.

3. The results of the absentee ballot count will not be announced before 7:30 p.m. that night.

Bill Brian, Chairman Durham County Board of Elections

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KEEP DOGS SHELTERED Coalition to Unchain Dogs seeks plastic or igloo style dog houses for dogs in need, as well as indoor metal crates.

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Pathways for People, Inc. is looking for energetic individuals who are interested in gaining experience while making a difference! Positions available are:

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

Full Time Day Program Instructors

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Full Time Art Instructor and Full Time General Instructor needed for Day Program in Cary.

95 Friday6 Monday through from 1 19:00am – 4:30pm. Experience 3 2 9 with individuals with Intellectual 9Disabilities a must 4 and 7 college 5 degree preferred.

Please 3 4 1 4 submit resume with cover letter to Rachael 7 at8rachael@pathwaysforpeople.org.

No6phone 6 1 1 inquiries please.

2 6 7 4 8 2 9 1 3

For a list of other open positions please3 go to:

8 3

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www.pathwaysforpeople.org

# 37

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this week’s puzzle level:

# 38

# 86

© 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.

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

9 3 2 7 5 2 5 3 8 4 5 6 5 1 9 3 2 9 5 4 3 7 5 14 2 8 3 6 1 8

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# 39

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solution to last week’s puzzle

4 6 7 5 1 2 | 46 9.20.17 9 3 8 6 4 3 1 7 5 8 2 9

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# 40

7 8 2 5 1 9 4 3 6 If you just5 can’t 9 6 3 wait, 4 2 8check 7 1 out the current 3 1 4week’s 8 6 7 answer 2 9 5 2 5 1 7 3 8 6 4 9 key at www.indyweek.com, 9 3 7 6 5 4 1 2 8 and click “Diversions”.

6 4 8 9 2 1 7 5 3 Best of luck, 1 2 and 5 4 have 8 3 9 fun!

6 7 8 7 3 2 9 6 5 1 4 www.sudoku.com 4 6 9 1 7 5 3 8 2

of 25 # 88 9 1 8 3 2 5 Page 10 4 6 7 9 8 |3INDYweek.com 7 2 5 4 1 6 2 9 1 5 8 7 8 6 3 9 4 2 5 7 4 1 6 3

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EMAIL MIKE FOR ADS CLASSY AT INDYWEEK DOT COM

30/10/2005

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

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

last week's puzzle

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INDYweek.com | 9.20.17 | 47

C.G. JUNG SOCIETY

of the Triangle Area of NC -- since 1983

back page

Jutta von Buchholtz, Jungian Analyst from Birmingham, AL Friday, Sept. 22,2017 7:30pm --$15/$10 “The Archetype of the Foreigner: The Shadowy Other -- Friend or Foe?” Sat., Sept. 23, 2017 10am-4pm--$60/$40 “Working with the Shadow”

Gretchen Heyer, Jungian Analyst from Houston,TX Friday, Nov. 3, 2017 7:30pm--$15/$10 “Creativity and Individuation“ Sat., Nov. 4, 2017 10am-4pm $60/$40 Creative Writing Workshop

Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com ARTIST MARKETING AND BUSINESS ASSOCIATE

Hillsborough artist Sudie Rakusin (www.sudierakusin. com) seeks dynamic professional with wide range of marketing, project management and administrative skills - and the willingness to learn more. Perfect for a selfstarter who loves doing research, brainstorming and solving problems. Must be able to juggle multiple deadlines, while still being open to playful and unconventional idea-generation. Requires maturity, high level of attention to detail and time management skills. The ability to stay focused while working alone, with minimal direction, is essential. Experience with social media, website management, Microsoft Office, Quickbooks and email management required. Must be comfortable around dogs. Starting salary $27,456 for 32hr work-week, plus 3% company match for retirement. Generous paid vacation, holidays and personal days. Location: Hillsborough, NC. To apply, email the following to info@sudierakusin. com: cover letter, resume, writing sample, 3 references, links to any blogs, websites, or social media pages you manage and would like us to consider. Also, describe a project you have managed from beginning to end. Include difficulties you encountered, how you managed them, the final result, and the take-away you got from the project.

Complete applications due Mon Sept 11.

Expected start date is October.

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September 27th at 7pm-10pm and September 30th 12pm-3pm. Be funny, be quick, be confident.

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OPEN HOUSE. SUNDAY 9/24 2-4 PM.

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List Price:$264,900. MLS#TBD Ian Kipp,Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices NC Real Estate Broker Lic#268085 (919) 229-3533

BEGINNING ZEN PRACTICE

Chapel Hill Zen Center with David Guy. Monday evenings, 7:30-9. 6 weeks, September 2nd - October 23rd. $60.

Scholarships available. 919-641-9277 davidguy@mindspring.com www.davidguy.org

Church of Reconciliation, 110 N. Elliott Rd., Chapel Hill Sponsor – C.G. Jung Society of the Triangle JungNC.org

ROBERT GRIFFIN IS ACCEPTING PIANO STUDENTS AGAIN!

See the teaching page of: www.griffanzomusic.com Adult beginners welcome.

919-636-2461 or griffanzo1@gmail.com

ADMINISTRATIVE LEGAL ASSISTANT:

Nonprofit environmental law firm seeks an experienced administrative legal assistant to support a team of lawyers in their work to protect the environment of the Southeast. Outstanding job for the right person. Prior law office experience and an interest in environmental protection are essential. Requires college degree; strong computer, typing, and editing skills; and proven organizational and communication skills. Must be proficient in all MS Office applications. Excellent benefits, competitive salary, paid parking. We are an established organization and EEO employer. To learn more, visit https://www.southernenvironment.org/about-selc/jobs.

Apply by emailing resume, cover letter and 3 professional references to ncjobs@selcnc.org with subject ìAdministrative Legal Assistantî, or by mailing the same documents to Administrative Legal Assistant, 601 W. Rosemary Street, Suite 220, Chapel Hill NC 27516-2356.

No walk-ins or telephone calls please.

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