Indy Week 12 21

The HB 2 Faustian Bargain p. 6

raleigh 12|21|16

Is It Curtains for Small Theaters? p. 12

Can the Community Music School Stay Open? p. 15

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on stands

now

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WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK | RALEIGH 6 If local governments are courageous, there might be opportunity in the HB 2 compromise.

VOL. 33, NO.49

8 “Mr. Cooper will still be governor. He gets to move into the mansion.”

11 D.C. Republicans have been rewarded for violating democratic norms. So why wouldn’t the NCGOP? 12 With the closing of Common Ground Theatre, other small theaters fear a domino effect.

15 Community Music School has always operated without a safety net. Now it needs a lifeline.

20 Ten local albums issued a decade ago hinted at what was to come or heralded the end of an era.

26 At the N.C. Chinese Lantern Festival, you’ll see a twenty-foot-tall dragon that weighs eighteen thousand pounds.

27 The director of Whiplash’s movie musical, La La Land, is breezy fun if you submit to its Technicolor charm.

DEPARTMENTS 5 Backtalk 6 Triangulator 8 News 11 Soapboxer 17 Food 20 Music 23 Culture 29 What to Do This Week

A display at the N.C. Chinese Lantern Festival at Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary (see page 26) PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

30 Music Calendar 33 Arts/Film Calendar On the cover: DESIGN BY SHAN STUMPF

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Raleigh Durham | Chapel Hill

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backtalk

Malcontent Thugs Over the weekend, the INDY reported on state representative Michael Speciale’s comments about the hundreds of people who crammed into the legislative building last week in protest of the surprise fourth special session.

Specifically, this comment, which the New Bern Republican posted on Facebook Friday: “A group of malcontent thugs who are likely paid and bussed in to disrupt the business of those who represent the people detracts from the ability of the peoples [sic] government to effectively do their [sic] jobs.”

Speciale wasn’t the only Republican who suggested the protesters were hired guns; Representative David Lewis was similarly dismissive. “I asked a couple of the protesters what they were protesting,” Lewis told reporters Thursday.

“They weren’t sure. They were sure that they had been paid, got free lunch and transportation.”

Some of these maligned “malcontent thugs” responded, both on our Twitter feed and our website’s comments section. So we figured we’d use this space to give them their say.

Chuck Lewis: “No one paid me on Tuesday and Thursday to support the NAACP effort to shine a light on the Republican power grab in the state house.”

Janine Latus: “I’m heading to the state house in an hour. No food, no free transportation, no lunch. Get serious.” @jbphebus: “I was not paid to walk the few blocks to yell at the trash that is the NCGOP for hijacking the state.” @Juselkus: “We paid for lunch in the basement ourselves, don’t need to get paid to donate my time for this purpose.”

Natalie Herr: “I was there and I know exactly why. Special session 4 was illegally planned in secret as a power grab and a jab at Cooper’s support.”

Marena Groll: “I was there to bear witness against the immorality of the actions of some of these legislators. I was born and raised in Fayetteville. I am presently living in Durham.

No one paid me, but I want to know if someone paid those legislators to undermine the

incoming governor. Have any investigations been conducted into their financial dealings?”

Aylett Colston: “I was there Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. I was born in North Carolina, grew up here, and now I am raising my children here. I was there because I love this state and its people, and I cannot sit by and watch as the elected leaders entrusted to act in the best interest of North Carolinians do harmful things, like when they passed HB 2. My friends who had planned on joining me on Tuesday ended up not being able to go—but they still wanted to help. I asked them to send food—and they did. I personally took delivery of pizza and water that was sent in on Tuesday, and none of it was paid for by the NAACP or any organization. I should have been home with my children getting ready for Christmas, but because the General Assembly has continually betrayed the very spirit of honest, open dialogue and debate upon which our country was founded, well, I felt that there was no choice but to go and bear witness.”

Irgeffner: “I am outraged at these claims.

I was at the legislature much of last week.

Everyone who I came into contact with (dozens and dozens of people) were there missing work, rearranging childcare plans, or canceling other appointments to volunteer their time and stand up for justice, civil discourse, and the rights of the citizens of our state in the House of the People.”

Finally, chappa hillian makes an important point: “The tactic is Trumpian misdirection.

Say something outrageously untrue and laugh while people do cartwheels to refute it. All the while, what aren’t people talking about?

The real issue, of course. The clearly unethical attempt—forget legal, I’m talking ethics— to steal the governor’s power because they couldn’t steal the governor’s office.”

“No one paid me to support the NAACP effort to shine a light on the GOP power grab.”

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 | 12.21.16 | 5

triangulator +MANDATE SCHMANDATE

Despite the protests and arrests that surrounded last week’s fourth special session, Republicans had an easy time moving their agenda through because they have supermajorities in each chamber—enough to override any veto. And they’ll maintain those supermajorities when the new legislature is sworn in.

In the state Senate, Republicans netted one seat in the November election, bringing their total control of the chamber to thirty-five out of fifty seats. In the House, the Republican caucus won 75 seats out of 120. Meanwhile, Governor-elect Roy Cooper barely scraped by, winning his office by a little more than ten thousand votes.

So, on the surface, that comparison would suggest that they have a mandate—at least more of a mandate than Cooper has—which in turn would appear to lend some legitimacy to their efforts at weakening the incoming governor’s power. But in terms of raw votes, is that really the case?

If you look at the numbers, not really.

Nearly 4.8 million people voted in North Carolina this year, a turnout of 69 percent.

Nearly 99 percent of them cast a vote in the gubernatorial election: 48.4 percent for Cooper, 48.2 percent for McCrory, and 2.2 percent for Libertarian Lon Cecil, with the rest—1.2 percent—not voting. But far fewer voters checked boxes for House and Senate candidates farther down the ballot.

In all North Carolina Senate races, Republicans won just over 48 percent of voters— thanks to the way districts are drawn, enough to garner 70 percent of Senate seats—while Democrats got 38 percent and Libertarians won 2 percent. Twelve percent didn’t vote or wrote in a candidate. In several cases, there was no need to vote; twelve Republicans ran unopposed, as did six Democrats, meaning the major parties decided not to contest more than a third of all Senate races.

In taking 63 percent of House seats, meanwhile, Republican candidates were backed by just 45 percent of voters, while Democrats (and two unaffiliated candidates, who would have likely caucused with the Democrats) won 41 percent. More than 13 percent didn’t 6 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

WHAT GERRYMANDERING LOOKS LIKE The winning margin in each of this year’s N.C. Senate contests

REPUBLICAN

76-100% 56-75%

DEMOCRAT

55-45%

55-45% 56-75% 76-100%

Information graphic by Shan Stumpf. Source: N.C. State Board of Elections

NOTE: Winning percentages may total less than 50 percent in races in which more than two candidates appeared on the ballot.

vote in a House race. Thirty-one House Democratic candidates and twenty-seven Republicans ran unopposed, meaning nearly half of House races went uncontested.

To put it simply: Republicans are not as popular as their supermajorities suggest. In fact, House Republicans received fewer cumulative votes than the governor-elect whose legitimacy they’re seeking to undermine, and Senate Republicans only won eleven hundred more votes than Cooper—even though Democrats didn’t contest a dozen seats.

+ABOUT THAT HB 2 REPEAL Just when you thought the year in North Carolina politics had finally come to a merciful end, well, welcome to special session number five.

On Monday afternoon, the outgoing Governor McCrory called a special session for Wednesday, in which legislators will—theoretically—repeal HB 2, the controversial law that led directly to McCrory’s narrow defeat

last month. This followed the Charlotte City Council’s decision, at the urging of Governor-elect Roy Cooper, to conditionally repeal the antidiscrimination ordinance that was the casus belli for this imbroglio.

Plenty of open questions surround this Faustian bargain. Among them: Will House Speaker Tim Moore and Senate leader Phil Berger make good on their end? Even if they wanted to, can they gin up the votes? Will the repeal have conditions, or will lawmakers stuff the bill with other things Democrats find unpalatable?

There’s also a very real question about whether Democrats have effectively ceded the moral high ground. After all, as Moore and Berger gleefully noted, Charlotte—with Cooper’s blessing—twice rejected similar deals offered by legislative leaders. “Today,” they said in a statement Monday, “Roy Cooper and [Charlotte mayor] Jennifer Roberts proved what we said was the case all along: their efforts to force men into women’s bathrooms and shower facilities was a political stunt to drive out-of-state money into the governor’s race.”

Ignore the trans-baiting rhetoric, and they kind of have a point. What’s more, Charlotte’s repeal was a tacit admission that its defense

of LGBTQ rights was partly to blame for the economic damage the state incurred, and Cooper’s involvement with the deal signaled that, as governor, he’d be willing to compromise on protections for the marginalized in the name of economic development.

Still, there’s potential here. If the legislature fully repeals HB 2—a big if—then there’s nothing stopping progressive counties and municipalities from passing ordinances similar or even identical to Charlotte’s. Of course, the legislature could override such measures, but this time Cooper would be there to (presumably) veto. And that means, to overturn the veto, Republicans would have to muster up supermajorities willing to relitigate the HB 2 fight and suffer another backlash. They might not see that battle as being worth their energy.

The question is, are local officials courageous enough to take advantage of this opportunity?

Carrboro alderman Damon Seils told the INDY Monday that he worried Charlotte was giving up too much. “The Charlotte ordinance still held a lot of symbolic power,” he said. “The idea that it’s being put up for bargain—something feels off about this.” He did point out that, if HB 2 dies, a town ordinance

MDD Study

prohibiting discrimination against contractors would go back into effect. “I would like for Carrboro to do something more,” he added, suggesting that a Charlotte-like ordinance wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

The same goes for Durham, where city council member Jillian Johnson says serious discussions about passing an antidiscrimination ordinance are taking place. “I’d be totally down with it,” she says.

In Wake County, Commisioner Matt Calabria says, “I hesitate to count my chickens before they’re hatched.” He points out that, soon after taking office, he and Commissioner John Burns coauthored an ordinance protecting county employees from discrimination. “I’m proud of what we have done and hope we can continue to demonstrate the values of openness and kindness.”

“I support nondiscrimination protection for transgender people,” says Raleigh city council member David Cox. “I still need to understand the specifics of what other communities will be doing, so I can’t commit at this time. … Please check back in a week or so.”

Don’t worry. We will.

+SLAP TO THE FACE On Monday, the Durham City Council was debating spending more than $1 million to

add eighty cars to the police department’s fleet—on the face of it, a seemingly mundane agenda item.

But Umar Muhammad didn’t see it that way. To Muhammad, an organizer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice who spoke during the council meeting’s public comment period, it was a “slap to the face” that the board was considering such a move in the aftermath of the controversial November 22 police shooting that left thirty-four-year-old Frank Clark dead. (The INDY obtained a postmortem photograph that appears to show that Clark had a bullet wound in the back of his head, though an autopsy has not yet been released.) What’s more, Muhammad charged, the city has remained silent on the fate of the officer who fired the fatal shots, Charles Barkley, a man Muhammad said “we told you” about.

“The police officers can do whatever they want to do, and you’re gonna reward them with police cars?” Muhammad asked. “The cars that were sitting in McDougald [Terrace] when Frank Clark was killed, there’s nothing wrong with those cars.”

He was also angry at council member Eddie Davis, who last week told The News & Observer, “Since there hasn’t been an outcry, it doesn’t appear to me that the public confidence has been compromised at all.”

Muhammad read those words back to the council, then said, “The family of Frank

Clark is in the room today, and I don’t know where you’ve been listening. We’ve been crying. This is a slap to the face. We’ve been crying about Barkley. The community deserves an apology for your comments.”

Later, the council went into a closed session, during which coucil members discussed incidents previously reported by the INDY [“The Cop Who Killed Frank Clark,” December 7; “Disorderly Conduct,” December 14] involving Barkley and two other officers present at Clark’s death. The council will ask Governor-elect Roy Cooper to expedite the state’s investigation into Clark’s shooting and is considering making public the officers’ personnel records. Council member Steve Schewel says the council has also requested a detailed explanation from the District Attorney’s Office once it determines whether to charge Barkley with a crime.

The board also unanimously approved a letter of support for the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit project, despite skepticism that the funding gap created by the legislature—which set a state funding cap of 10 percent of the total project cost, when the original plan called for 25 percent—can be closed. Just where Durham will come up with the money isn’t immediately clear. triangulator@indyweek.com

The Frohlich Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill is looking for individuals who would be interested in participating in a clinical research study. This study is testing the effect of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) on mood symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder.

Transcranial current stimulation is a technique that delivers a very weak current to the scalp. Treatment has been well tolerated with no serious side-effects reported. This intervention is aimed at restoring normal brain activity and function which may reduce mood symptoms experienced with Major Depressive Disorder. We are looking for individuals between the ages of 18 and 65, diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder currently not taking benzodiazepines or antiepileptic drugs.

You can get compensated up to $280 for completing this study. If you are interested in learning more, contact our study coordinator at: courtney_lugo@med.unc.edu Or call us at (919)962-5271

This week’s report by Jeffrey C. Billman, Paul Blest, and Ken Fine.

PERIPHERAL VISIONS | V.C. ROGERS

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 “Post Mortem” INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 7

indynews Sneak Attack INSIDE THE LEGISLATURE’S SURPRISE ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACY

BY PAUL BLEST

A

leader s Senate Democratic t of a Dan Blue II walked ou us meetuc ca hastily convened orter rep a n, oo ing Wednesday aftern ed. en pp ha t jus asked him what had He paused. t,” he eventually “If I could figure it ou what’s going on.” replied. “I don’t know , Blue and his About a half hour prior , in the third ted vo d Senate colleagues ha year, to pass a special session of the ckage for victims $200 million relief pa w and the wildfires of Hurricane Matthe

8 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

ina. Then—after in western North Carol nt Governor Dan na gathering with Lieute Moore, and lawyers Forest, Speaker Tim Senate leader Phil on the Senate floor— unced a fourth speBerger abruptly anno Republicans would cial session, in which tion of Governor ec respond to voters’ rej tively taking an ax Pat McCrory by effec s of Democratic to the last few vestige power in the state. ed national outThat move has spark al action from leg rage and threats of Cooper and Governor-elect Roy

“I don’t think this is what the founders had in mind, and I don’t think this is the way democracies or elections work.” legislative Democrats. But this session also showed that many North Carolinians weren’t going to take lightly this affront to democracy. Over the course of two days last week, nonviolent actions organized by the state NAACP and its towering president, the Reverend William J. Barber II, brought the fight to committee hearings and the Senate and House galleries.

Republicans claimed—without evidence—that protesters were paid, bussed in, and motivated by “left-wing” agitators.

No one paid Gretchen Garrett, who on Friday sat on the third floor of the legislative building, stone-faced on her knees, head held high, shortly before becoming one of about eighty protesters arrested last week. As hundreds of other protesters gathered in the rotunda between the House and Senate galleries chanted, “We the people, our house!” behind her, she explained why she was here.

“I don’t think this is what the founders had in mind, and I don’t think this is the way democracy or elections work,” Garrett said.

“It’s just not right. It’s not right. And this is the only thing I can do.”

S

peaker Moore told reporters on Wednesday that the decision to call the fourth special session had only been made

that morning. But petitions sent to legislators dated December 12—the Monday before the special session began—showed otherwise, as did the sheer length of some of the bills that were filed that day, such as the nineteen-page House Bill 19.

“You don’t write those bills in hours,” Senate Democratic whip Terry Van Duyn told the INDY. The special session began a sprint to file as many bills as possible. Ultimately, both chambers combined to produce twenty-five new bills. Several of those bills were introduced by Democrats and went nowhere.

Others, such as a regulatory reform bill and a bill creating stronger regulations for commercial dog breeders, were rehashed from earlier sessions; they, too, failed to move. Bills expanding classroom-size limits and boosting infrastructure near charter schools, meanwhile, cleared the House but not the Senate.

But the legislation that did pass both chambers signaled a sweeping attack on the powers of an incoming Democratic governor and the razor-thin Democratic Supreme Court majority.

Senate Bill 4 capitalized on the bogeyman of voter fraud to render a new, “bipartisan” State Board of Elections and Ethics Reform ineffectual, as it would require a three-fourths majority on a body with an equal number of Democrats and Republicans. (The board would alternate chairmen between the parties; the Republicans would get the even years, which happen to be the years in which presidential, Council of State, and legislative races occur.)

SB 4 also responded to Democrat Mike Morgan’s ascendance to the state Supreme Court—which, as the INDY has previously reported, likely came about because voters wrongly assumed, based on his ballot placement, that he was a Republican—by reintroducing partisan elections for both the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals, and by making it more difficult for constitutional challenges to go to the Supreme Court, which now rests in Democratic hands. An hour after it passed, SB 4 won McCrory’s signature.

In addition, the legislature confirmed two McCrory nominees to the Special Superior Court, including his thirty-four-year-old budget director, Drew Heath, and his nomination of Yolanda Stith, wife of McCrory INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 9

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chief of staff Thomas Stith, to fill an open seat on the Industrial Commission. The latter produced an outcry of cronyism from Democrats; shortly after the confirmation, N.C. Democratic Party chairwoman Patsy Keever called for an investigation into “blatant public corruption.”

But the real roundhouse kick to gubernatorial authority was House Bill 17. Sponsored

by Representative David Lewis, R-Harnett, HB 17 requires all cabinet appointees to be confirmed by the Senate, transfers significant executive oversight over public education to the new Republican superintendent of public instruction, and reduces the number of McCrory-era bureaucrats who can be replaced by the Cooper administration from 1,400 to 425. McCrory signed it Monday.

During the special session, N.C. Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse summed up just how Republicans feel about the power the new governor should have: “Mr. Cooper will still be elected governor. He gets to go move into the mansion.”

Complicating these matters is the fact that the legislature is operating with districts that were struck down as unconstitutional in August by the U.S. District Court, which then ordered the legislature to redraw the districts and set new elections for 2017.

To critics, this suggests that the legislative session was illegitimate.

But there’s a separate potential legal issue here: in January, the N.C. Supreme Court ruled that the legislature’s usurpation of the governor’s appointment powers was unconstitutional. Some Democrats think the same logic could apply here.

Asked whether the constitutionality of the entire session could be called into question, Berger was defiant. “The Democrats’ tactic over the past four years has been to resort to the courts,” he told reporters Friday night. “All of the news reports about that decision are really a bit premature as far as I’m concerned.”

A

fter the shock of Wednesday’s events wore off, the atmosphere during the rest of the week was thick with tension. During an NAACP press conference on Thursday, attorney Alan McSurely took repeated jabs at the presence of the N.C. Republican Party’s executive director. “I want to welcome Dallas Woodhouse,” McSurely said.

“I know this is the first meeting he’s been in since the last two or three days that hasn’t been composed of all white people.”

After a few more, Woodhouse began screaming at McSurely about the “Christmas Massacre” of 1976, a talking point Republicans frequently used last week, referring to when former Democratic governor Jim Hunt demanded the resignations of 169 employees of his Republican predecessor.

Meanwhile, the General Assembly was awash in protest. Protesters sitting in the third-floor gallery booed and chanted both Thursday and Friday, and Forest, the president of the Senate, and Moore repeatedly shut the doors on them. Those arrested on Thursday included historian Tim Tyson and N.C. Policy Watch reporter Joe Killian, who presented media credentials and was arrested anyhow.

On Friday, the protests continued, as did the arrests. That afternoon, several hundred protesters gathered on the third floor again, with Barber instructing people to knock on the doors of the gallery that they’d been locked out of. This led to a testy exchange with General Assembly police chief Martin Brock.

“All political power derives from the people,” Barber told the crowd. Brock began arguing with Barber about whether or not people would be able to knock on the glass Eventually, Brock said he would arrest everyone who didn’t leave the building. Several people, including Gretchen Garrett and a man in a Santa Claus costume, staged a sitin and were arrested.

In the absence of any actual power, the Democratic caucuses threw their support behind the protests. McSurely told the INDY on Thursday that “the entire Democratic caucus is in support of mass demonstration,” a sentiment echoed by Van Duyn.

“I’m grateful to the protesters. I don’t think we’d be hearing about this at all in western North Carolina if it weren’t for them,” she said. “What [the Republicans] did, with the process they put in place, completely cut the public out in any other way but through protest.”

As for Cooper, the governor-elect released a statement Thursday night that was exactly one sentence long: “Once more, the courts will have to clean up the mess the legislature made, but it won’t stop us from moving North Carolina forward.” pblest@indyweek.com

soapboxer

The Politics of Nihilism

THE NCGOP’S COUP D’ÉTAT IS THE NATURAL EVOLUTION OF THE OBAMA RESISTANCE—AND FORESHADOWS THE ERA OF TRUMP

BY JEFFREY C. BILLMAN What happened last week in Raleigh wasn’t exactly a surprise. After all, for weeks, rumors spread that the General Assembly, in response to Democrat Mike Morgan’s election to the N.C. Supreme Court, was considering packing the court—rumors fueled by top Republicans’ refusal to deny them.

In the end—after N.C. Republican Party executive director Dallas Woodhouse mocked journalists for reporting on these rumors, though on Monday, Governor McCrory took credit for killing the courtpacking scheme—Republicans chose a different means of subverting democracy. The covertly planned, hastily announced special session was designed both to neuter incoming governor-elect Roy Cooper and to remind Cooper’s voters who’s really in charge. It was a ruthless exercise in power for power’s sake.

Or, as Representative David Lewis, R-Harnett, told reporters, Republicans wanted to “establish that we are going to continue to be a relevant party in governing this state.”

It’d be tempting to ask Lewis and his ilk— as Joseph Welch once asked Senator Joseph McCarthy—“Have you no sense of decency, sir?” But the truth is, when you have power, decency is irrelevant. In North Carolina, the Republicans have power, and by God they’re going to use it. That this power is derived from an illegitimate source—a racist and nakedly partisan gerrymander, recently ruled unconstitutional by a federal court— doesn’t cause them a flicker of shame.

The purported justification for this power grab is rooted in a generation-old grudge: that forty years ago, then-Governor-elect Jim Hunt fired GOP appointees and, thirty years ago, Democrats limited the political appointments Republican Governor

Jim Martin could make. But these post hoc rationalizations are just that, and they elide what’s really going on here—an erosion of the norms by which democracy functions.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, nor was it conceived on Jones Street. Rather, it’s a byproduct of hardening polarization and a zero-sum-game mentality in which the ends—the cultivation of power—justify the means. And that’s why, more than the harm any individual bill will cause, the coup effected by Republicans last week matters.

This same mentality has pervaded Washington, D.C., throughout the Obama presidency. Before Barack Obama even took the oath, Republican leaders had declared a stout and rigid determination to never negotiate or compromise, to stand resolute behind unwavering and unified obstinacy against everything Obama proposed, to break the federal government and then blame the president for it being broken.

They were rewarded for this strategy with big victories up and down the ballot in 2010 and 2014. And it continued this year, when the U.S. Senate declined to give Obama’s nomination to the Supreme Court so much as a hearing, an unprecedented move that, yet again, proved successful.

Donald Trump took this norm-shattering to a new zenith, running a campaign that flagrantly trafficked in conspiracies and lies and called for a political opponent to be imprisoned. He, too, prevailed.

So why wouldn’t N.C. Republicans— who’ve spent the last four years manifesting a right-wing fever dream—follow suit?

This is hardly the first time the state’s Republicans have extended a middle finger to democracy in their quest for hegemony: the legislative and congressional gerrymanders

This is hardly the first time N.C. Republicans have extended a middle finger to democracy.

testify to that, as do the legislature’s efforts to redraw districts for Wake County’s commission and school board and Greensboro’s city council. So too did Republicans’ votersuppression scheme, which sought to make it harder for African Americans to vote (it was also ruled unconstitutional). And then there’s HB 2, which overrode local nondiscrimination and living-wage ordinances and, more important, sent an unmistakable signal to municipalities to not step out of line.

But this latest example is the most egregious, not only because democracies are dependent on losers accepting the outcome, but also because, as Paul Waldman wrote

Monday in The Washington Post, “There’s a shamelessness to the way Republicans change rules, trample over long-established norms, and generally act as though any result except one in which they win is inherently illegitimate.”

They do it because they can, and because no one can stop them. This is what the politics of nihilism—the politics of ruthlessness and shamelessness—looks like. And, quite likely, it’s what the politics of the next four years will look like, too. The rejection of democratic mores has worked out pretty well for the GOP. No reason to stop now. jbillman@indyweek.com

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FADE TO

BLACK

COMMON GROUND HAS CLOSED, AND SONOROUS ROAD COULD BE NEXT. IS IT CURTAINS FOR SMALL, AFFORDABLE THEATERS IN THE TRIANGLE? STORY BY BYRON WOODS PHOTOS BY ALEX BOERNER

Common Ground director Shelby Hahn removes seats after the theater's final show.

T

he small, independent companies that have often defined the cutting edge of theater in our region have long made a virtue of doing without.

For decades, their productions have embraced the essence of drama, frequently without opulent costumes, lavish sets, or theater spaces specifically designed to accommodate them.

Minimalism is attractive to many young theater artists, but beneath that aesthetic fig leaf lies an unwelcome economic fact. A lack of money among emerging artists and the absence of informed,

12 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

effective infrastructure and support from civic institutions and foundations have often forced small groups to stage their works as inexpensively as they can.

As a result, theater companies and artists who cannot afford to rent or buy a place to stage their works remain the largest group in the region’s community of practice. In the absence of affordable city-sponsored facilities appropriate for small-scale productions, these artists seek refuge among a few local companies willing to share their venues. When that fails, they resort to streets,

parks, and storefronts, or former factories and warehouses, some without electricity or heating.

So when a group of stage artists led by Rachel Klem and Michelle Byars opened Common Ground Theatre in Durham in January 2005, with the express purpose of serving itinerant artists and companies, it was a big deal. Within weeks of opening, Common Ground had booked most of its first year of productions. In 2009, it won an Indies Arts Award for helping to change the face of the performing arts in Durham.

It is doing so again, but, this time, there is no

cause for celebration. Last month, executive director Shelby Hahn announced that Common Ground would cease operations after its ninth production of A Trailer Park Christmas closed last weekend.

Then, last week, another development rocked the theater community: Sonorous Road Productions, an intimate venue that also offers production services and classes in filmmaking and theater, announced that it would close its headquarters on Oberlin Road in May. Its building has been sold to N.C. State University, which is seeking to build an office. The fate of the theater, which, for the last year, has been doing for Raleigh what Common Ground did for Durham, remains in doubt, hinging on the availability of an affordable, appropriate place to relocate.

In two months’ time, regional theater’s largest sector—the one with the fewest options for rehearsal and performance space—faced the loss of one venue and the likelihood of losing another. The community reaction has been swift. The improv comedy scene that regularly used Common Ground for classes and performances was forced to scramble to find other venues, according to Open Mind Improv founder Dan Sipp.

And the closing left One Song Productions, a high-school-student-run theater troupe, without a venue for its winter production of A Bright New Boise.

Some companies have become reliant enough on Sonorous Road and Common Ground to be existentially threatened.

John Honeycutt, cofounder of South Stream Productions, says Sonorous Road’s closing could put the company out of business. The group has had difficulty finding affordable hosts for productions like Time Stands Still, and civic facilities are even more expensive.

The city of Raleigh operates a small-scale theater: the K.D. and Sara Lynn Kennedy Theatre, a 125-seat black box space at the back of Duke Energy Center for the Performing Arts. But mandatory individual fees for insurance, in-house production personnel, box office services, security, and sound that most productions need can quickly triple or quadruple the minimum rental rate of $400 per performance. Depending on where South Stream produced its shows, rental fees alone could range from $6,500 to $14,000—two to four times what the company would pay Sonorous Road for an upcoming production of Blackbird.

If Sonorous Road were suddenly removed from the scene, Honeycutt concludes, “I don’t know where we would go.”

As these developments revealed the fragile underpinnings of the area’s vibrant independent scene, they also raised pressing

The cast and crew of A Trailer Park Christmas embrace after their final show at Common Ground. questions. How do regional venues achieve sustainability, and what caused a celebrated place like Common Ground to lose its viability over the long term?

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any factors in Common Ground’s failure weren’t the theater’s fault.

For one, the itinerant theater sector shrank during and after the economic downturn circa 2008. After the scene “ballooned to maximum density ten to twelve years ago,” according to Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern artistic director Jaybird O’Berski, notable groups including Both Hands Theatre, Common Wealth Endeavors, Flying Machine Theatre, Party Girl Productions, and Ghost and Spice Productions, the original anchor company at Common Ground, ceased operations, one by one.

Surviving companies also reduced their seasons and, in recent years, increasingly chose to stage their shows in other venues, first in Durham, then in Raleigh. Because of its location, Common Ground had always been vulnerable to such shifts. Founder and board member Rachel Klem recalls that

there was “a moratorium on space in downtown Durham” when she went looking for an affordable, appropriate site for her venue in 2004. “Everyone was still waiting for the boom to happen,” she says.

The only viable spot she found was hardly ideal: a warehouse space on a side street in a nondescript industrial/rural neighborhood five miles north of downtown, just before Hillsborough Road becomes U.S. Route 70.

It was not, and never would be, a compelling nightspot for young audiences.

“Nothing else was out there,” O’Berski says. “You couldn’t make an evening of it.”

Understandably, when new locations like the Trotter Building, Shadowbox, the Cordoba Center for the Arts, 539 Muze, and the Durham Fruit Company started opening closer to Durham’s nightlife, companies began migrating there. Between 2012 and 2014, Little Green Pig Theatrical Concern staged works including The Wooster Group’s Diary of Anne Frank at the Shadowbox, Our Town at the Trotter Building, and Richie as a pub crawl through the same district. For almost four years, the group

showed no work at Common Ground, until it coproduced Black Ops’ September 2015 debut, The Shipment.

This fall, when the group returned to Common Ground with a production of Maccountant, O’Berski says the production made almost a third of what it could have at Manbites Dog Theater, a larger venue that has been an anchor of Durham's entertainment district since its move to Foster Street in 1998.

Meanwhile, Raleigh groups with venues became increasingly open to guest productions in recent years, and itinerant companies based in the capital no longer needed to drive across the Triangle to produce work.

Though Tiny Engine got its start at Common Ground in 2014, it staged its latest play, Creature, at North Raleigh Arts and Creative Theatre. In 2005, Bare Theatre restarted at Common Ground after years of dormancy, but in recent years it has staged summer shows at Raleigh Little Theatre and three productions at Sonorous Road. Its last Common Ground show, Titus Andronicus, took place more than a year ago.

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"Even after a successful year of acclaimed shows, the audiences didn't seem to carry through from show to show.”

Throughout the region, artistic migration brought productions nearer to where artists actually live, and to established entertainment districts. Both factors disadvantaged a black box theater on the far northwest edge of Durham. In the end, Hahn concludes, Common Ground never had a core audience.

“Even after a successful year of acclaimed shows,” he said, “the audiences didn’t seem to carry through from show to show.”

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ut other factors in the decline were more within Common Ground’s control. The venue had been critically understaffed for years. When Klem took a job at N.C. State, she ceded management of the space to arts administrator Devra Thomas in January 2013 for reasons that became clearer as she reiterated the job description: answering phone calls and thirty to forty emails a day, looking for next month’s clients, meeting people, giving tours, booking space, checking ticket sales, and “worrying because you’re also doing marketing, press, and publicity.”

But wait, there’s more. Common Ground’s executive director was also responsible for technical direction, writing grants, updating the website, programming, and teaching classes. And there was the building’s daily maintenance: cleaning toilets and caulking holes. The company also had to find and manage help—which, without funds to hire anyone, was basically volunteer work.

Hahn found it difficult. “Not many would agree to working for a small stipend or no stipend,” he says. “And when I couldn’t fill any of those positions, it all fell on me.” Plus he was earning very little money. Thomas and Klem both confirmed that they made nowhere near a living wage for a more-thanfull-time job; some months there would be no pay at all. The story is common throughout the region’s smaller theater venues. O’Berski

says that working in them virtually has to be a labor of love.

“One member of that couple has to have a steady income,” he says, “because the other’s working for mostly nothing.” Michelle Murray Wells, artistic director at Sonorous Road, confirms this.

“I question whether people realize what it takes, not just emotionally but financially,” she says. “I have not gotten a penny for what we’ve done in eighteen months. Sometimes that’s just really hard.”

Insufficient staff and infrastructure lead directly to insufficient grant writing, marketing, and bookings. Those lead to insufficient programming, audiences, and funding, which, in turn, maintains existing inadequacies in infrastructure and staff, continuing the downward spiral.

And, as Trisha Lester, acting president for the North Carolina Center for Nonprofits, notes, without a functional board of directors to secure resources and raise funds for the group, “the quintessential starvation cycle” that many nonprofits experience continues uninterrupted. “Clearly [Common Ground] was not sustainable,” she says.

As a result, says O’Berski, the theater never evolved. “It looks exactly as it did ten years ago,” he says. “The lobby and exterior never got more inviting. It was still a black box theater with limited seating and really limited lighting and technical capability.” So it’s not a shock that Common Ground is closing—it’s unbelievable that it lasted for twelve years.

Meanwhile, small theater companies in Raleigh anxiously await the fate of Sonorous Road. Should the group find a workable space, itinerant troupes will be eager to perform there for audiences largely unaware of the sacrifices it takes. Still, none of them will know how long the show can go on.

These issues form a cautionary case study for all of the area’s theater venues. With multiple spaces all but entirely dependent on the continued labor of the director’s spouse, our theatrical ecosystem is treading on eggshells.

“It’s the thing nobody in theater wants to admit,” says Thomas. “The economics of the ecosystem do not work. The numbers in the current model do not add up.”

Changing that broken model, in Thomas’s view, involves adding classes in arts administration to the region’s professional theater programs. It also involves strategic support from foundations, and from city and state governments, to help existing companies develop sustainable infrastructures and venues that are affordable and appropriate.

As long as running an independent theater venue is funded mainly by blood, sweat, and tears, the bloodletting will continue.

Twitter: @ByronWoods

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SCHOOL of HARD KNOCKS A Raleigh nonprofit that brings music education to low-income kids finds itself in dire financial straits B Y D AV I D K L E I N

ormally, at around four in the afternoon, a cozy stone house at the Tucker Street and Boylan Avenue intersection in Raleigh becomes a hive of happy activity as kids clamber in with instruments in tow. The sounds of scales and warmups usually drift through the halls every day of the school year. But since late October, when the Community Music School suddenly announced that it would immediately suspend operations and possibly close for good, the happy hive has been stilled. Instead, it’s “mournfully quiet,” according to Erin Zanders, the school’s operations manager. And the future is very much in doubt for roughly 120 kids of modest means who are currently enrolled there, the seventeen-person staff of instructors, and future generations of Raleigh youth seeking affordable musical training.

In its twenty-three-year existence, Community Music School has educated more than two thousand students. Though the school’s scope has expanded over the years to include music technology and a newly instituted musical theater program, CMS’s focus is providing private music lessons that cost a dollar an hour and performance opportunities to kids ages seven to eighteen, who otherwise might not have access to them. The school loans students a bass, a sax, a violin, a guitar, or another instrument of their choice, and they learn from one of the paid staff.

The lone requirement is that the child must receive free or reduced lunch at school.

These days, the math is stark: CMS needs to raise $100,000 by the end of January. As of press time, about a third of the funds have been collected. And though a few fundraising events are scheduled within the next few weeks, including a Christmas Eve benefit, the school needs a few large donors to step in to right the ship.

How could a robust, low-overhead nonprofit enterprise, coming off a year that saw a record number of applicants and expanded programming, suddenly find itself $100,000 in the red? In November, the board released a statement on its website attributing its woes to “insufficient fundraising, unexpected timing delays in anticipated grant revenue, program expansion, increased personnel costs and unforeseen financial bumps.”

Rose Kenyon, a member of the board of directors, characterizes the financial crisis as completely unexpected, the result of a “perfect storm” of contributing factors. Two in particular have done the worst damage: the school’s lack of a ded-

COMMUNITY MUSIC SCHOOL BENEFIT: HONORING THE LEGENDS WE LOST IN 2016 Saturday, Dec. 24, 9 p.m., $10 The Pour House, Raleigh www.thepourhousemusichall.com INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 15

The exterior of the Community Music School in Raleigh PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN icated funding arm and its lack of a reserve fund.

“We’ve always survived financially a bit on the skinny side, and we didn’t really put the effort and the money, the resources, into building a more robust fund-development program,” Kenyon says.

The school had long operated by funneling the money it gets back into the program, without setting any aside in reserve. It has survived via grants, individual contributions, and a number of corporate donors, including the Raleigh Arts Commission and the John W. Pope Foundation. But according to Kenyon, those funds are no longer enough to cover the operating costs of the school. Outside money only takes care of about a third of those costs, she estimates.

The board attempted to address its lack of a development arm last year by hiring a new executive director, Hope Hancock, an experienced fundraiser with the SPCA and the Humane Society, but with no background in music or education. Still, CMS hired Hancock, "at some expense," according to Kenyon, with the idea that the move was an investment that would eventually pay for itself.

“It really didn’t work out,” Kenyon says of Hancock’s tenure. “We learned you can’t just push a magic button—it’s going to take more time and effort to get that up and going.”

Hancock was at the helm when CMS programming started up again in September and the board first comprehended the hole it was in. But how did the board, charged with the financial stewardship of a company that operates without a financial safety net, not have a better handle on the numbers? Kenyon says it wasn’t aware of the shortfall due to miscommunication between the company headquarters, which was switching over to a new financial reporting system.

“There was just confusion in who was sort 16 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

of on top of it. That’s why in a way it surprised the board,” Kenyon says.

Still, the board failed to indicate that the school was facing a serious financial crisis.

The October 5 edition of the school’s online newsletter led with Hancock’s “From the Director’s Chair” column, assuring parents and the school community, “We’re off to a great year.”

So when CMS announced on October 27 that it was pulling the plug, no one was expecting it. Mairym Azcona, who has five children in the program, is among the parents shocked by CMS’s abrupt halt. She checked her phone at a red light and spotted an email from Zanders. When she saw that classes had been suspended, she pulled her car to the side of the road so she could cry.

“I love this school,” she says. “This school has done wonders for my family.”

Matt Douglas was similarly shocked by the board’s move. The local horn player has worked at CMS since 2012, developing the school’s music technology curriculum, starting a composition and songwriting program, and advocating for additional technology programming.

“The board really shot themselves in the foot by suspending classes,” he says. “It’s hard to convince people to give a bunch of money to something if that something isn’t functioning.”

Douglas, who has also planned and participated in several benefits on the school’s behalf, says the faculty would have been open to doing some of its work pro bono or accepting delayed payment—minor sacrifices, he says, compared to what’s presently on the line. But Kenyon says the board rejected those options, reasoning that with the school out of cash, shutting down the school was more responsible than incurring new financial obligations.

Those hard numbers aside, it’s hard to quantify the value of CMS’s work in providing a musical education to two thousand kids from underprivileged circumstances. The program fosters genuine self-esteem and validation among an extremely vulnerable group of young people, and it has surely changed many lives for the better. The school has a little over a month to pull together the remainder of the sum it needs to keep its doors open.

Kenyon says the school is in active talks with multiple sources, seeking to drum up a few significant donations from new sources.

Douglas, meanwhile, is optimistic that the school will reopen, but the financial obstacle cannot be minimized. If it shutters, Raleigh children stand to lose out on life-changing educational opportunities—an immeasurable loss for the school’s current and prospective students alike. dklein@indyweek.com

indyfood

Consuming Blackness FAMED NIGERIAN CHEF TUNDE WEY STIRS UP A CONVERSATION ABOUT RACE AND FOOD THAT WAS ALREADY SIMMERING IN DURHAM

BY VICTORIA BOULOUBASIS Visiting chef Tunde Wey preps beef trotters for his Nigerian-inspired dinner at The Durham Hotel. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

A

t Durham’s Food World supermarket, visiting chef Tunde Wey putters around a mountain of masa sacks to get to aisle four, where a sign labeled “African” marks shelves lined with plastic bottles of alligator pepper and fermented locust beans—just what he needs. He wanders back to the produce section where Andrea Reusing, chef of The Durham Hotel and Lantern, waits by a pile of perfectly bruised plantains.

“How many do you need?” she asks.

“Twenty-five fingers,” he announces and then turns away. Reusing quickly, and correctly, surmises that he means twenty-five whole plantains, each nearly triple the size of a Chiquita banana.

She squeezes to check for ripeness and bags about five at a time, tossing bundles into a cart already full of Wey’s staple ingredients.

Two African yams, at least six pounds each, with skin the texture of tree bark, nestled atop two massive bags of dry black beans.

Beside them is a bag of finely milled gari, another type of tuber. (Africans call it manioc; it’s commonly known as cassava.)

These ingredients are for an elaborate Nigerian feast at The Durham Hotel, based on a repertoire Wey has developed in just three years as a professional cook, assisted by regular calls to his mother back in Lagos.

Wey, who is based in New Orleans, visited Durham last week as part of his Blackness in America pop-up dinner series. It was the final stop on a nine-city tour in which more than a dozen events combined dinners with charged discussions of race.

Wey’s visit had the distinct allure that all famous chefs seem to carry: chill vibes, unex-

plained genius, and new, exciting ideas to dazzle our palates. He may be an untrained chef—he’ll tell you he’s just a cook and that his food is “OK”’—but his story has been chronicled all over national media, from The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to The Splendid Table. He came to Detroit from Lagos at age seventeen, propelled by his mother’s hope that he would become a doctor. He jokes that he spent a semester in fencing class instead. He realized he preferred to write and entertain.

He briefly co-owned a restaurant with friends before deciding, at age thirty, to push back against the uninteresting idea of “new American” cuisine and decide for himself, a Yoruba Nigerian, what that meant. Blackness in America started as a subtle protest, Wey says, for black people to take up space at

the dinner table and have “a difficult conversation” that “doesn’t suit conventional attitudes and expectations.”

Wey came to Durham at the invitation of Reusing and Shorlette Ammons, an outreach coordinator for the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) and North Carolina A&T University. Ammons, like many food types, first heard of Wey upon reading his essay in Oxford American, the magazine that called him a “provocateur.” He and venerated food writer John T. Edge published back-to-back essays centered on a dinner conversation they had with each other, copublished under the title “Who Owns Southern Food?” Wey says he didn’t really understand the racial implications of “black” until he came to America.

“Since I started the dinner series, a strange thing has started happening,” he wrote.

“From white perches, my opinions are being sought. In these conversations, I felt a tipping toward me of some odd power. A tentative deference was offered in exchange for my ‘black’ experience. My words were being elicited as a means to contextualize these folks’ white privilege and power—and maybe subconsciously to defend it.”

A

mmons was struck by the bold perspective of Wey’s essay. “I thought, OK, this doesn’t happen too often, where this young up-and-coming cat challenges the privilege of this well-known, well-meaning liberal white class,” she recalls, laughing. “And it was refreshing in a kind of gangsta way.”

Ammons’s own food-systems work is rooted in changing that narrative; she calls it decentering whiteness.

“It’s about shifting what we value, and that comes from our shared work and shared culture,” she says. “Not necessarily the coopted experience of culture.”

Before Wey arrived in Durham, he read Ammons’s report, “Shining a Light in Dark Places: Raising Up the Work of Southern Women of Color in the Food System.” It details the drastic imbalance in the food system, where racial and gendered hierarchies exist explicitly, affecting public perception of who belongs. Through CEFS, Ammons leads racial-equity training for people interested in the food system.

Wey knows that in 2016, a black man commanding a kitchen—let alone an uncomfortable discussion in mixed company—is still a INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 17

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burgeoning phenomenon. Calling out white supremacy isn’t the gentlest way of dealing with racism, which is why he does it with food. But that hook is not meant to be a diversion, so he rarely goes into explaining what’s on the plate.

“When I started cooking, even apart from these dinners on race, I said I wanted to make Nigerian food commonplace without it being exploited,” Wey says. “I didn’t want to be anybody’s fantasy. My sort of reticence in speaking about the food is because there are so many opportunities when we’re talking about race for people to get distracted. Either through humor or pedantic speech. I didn’t want food to be the third thing.”

Ammons and her collaborators kept the Durham dinner invite-only. Attendees, black and white, were selected based on their work in the community and to ensure balanced access across racial and economic lines.

Before the first course was plated—a salad of fresh mint leaves and chewy beef trotter dusted with ground Cameroon pepper—musician and historian Justin Robinson led about fifty guests in a Georgia Sea Island song: “Throw me anywhere, Lord/In that old field.”

Robinson performed in a deliberate bellowing tone, and diners clapped excitedly at his command. I wonder how many realized that “The Buzzard Lope,” as folklorist Alan Lomax documented it, refers to how enslaved people were not given proper burials, but merely cast into the field in which they had been forced to labor.

“We are creating a black space prioritizing the experiences of black folks here,” Wey said after the song, launching the discussion. “It’s going to be informal. It’s going to be impolite.”

Ammons and Wey prompted guests to think about a time when they challenged a stereotype of their identity group. The resulting discussion became convoluted and tense.

Some guests spoke profound personal truths; others pushed for a chance to empathize, while struggling to grasp something Wey said: “We are led to believe that whiteness is neutral.”

In public discourse surrounding the movement for black lives, and especially since the presidential election, many communities of color are expressing the need to take a break from the emotional labor of teaching white peers about racism.

“A lot of times [at the dinners] it’s black folks emoting, sharing, teaching,” Wey reflects later. “White folks are distancing and trying to empathize in a way that doesn’t attempt to understand the daily reality of race.”

W

hile many can agree with Wey’s idea, not everyone agrees with his approach. Robinson thinks the free-for-all

discussion needed clearer guidance to reach a point of harmony.

“To me that dinner was a performance piece for white people, and I didn’t go there for that,” Robinson says. “What I wanted to happen was there to be an exchange between what he had to offer and what people in the room had to offer.”

Last Friday, at another event at The Durham Hotel—this one public—with Wey and Ammons, many of the dinner guests returned to air out their lingering ideas and criticisms.

At the dinner, Jesse Huddleston, who helps run the Durm Talks series about race and culture at Beyù Caffè, had noted that the “song of anti-racism, justice, and liberation is a challenging one. It’s a song that some people don’t want to sing.” On Friday, he added that he had been skeptical of Wey’s motivations and the implication that these conversations weren’t already happening in Durham.

“I know plenty of people who are having these conversations,” Huddleston says. “So I thought, ‘Who the fuck is Tunde and why is he in Durham when we’ve been having these conversations?’”

Some African-American guests thought Wey’s identity as an African made him a safe outsider—someone more readily accepted by a white America, especially when adding the element of food. Most of the criticisms of Wey seem to imply that he is offering up not just food, but also black identity for white consumption.

“Maybe I have played into this very insidious aspect of white supremacy,” Wey admits, “which is to consume.”

The instinct to take and consume is very American—a normalized part of this country’s history. In the context of food, the best wishes still embody the racism underlying systems designed to be exclusive. By way of example, Ammons mentions the black youth in her hometown of Goldsboro, who are up against fatal rates of diabetes, lacking access to healthy food choices. She also points to restaurant culture.

“The Durham local food movement is a gentrified version of what used to be Southern food,” says Ammons. “And that culture is now lost. It’s why we [black communities] are not involved.” Ammons wanted to bring Wey to Durham because he speaks directly to the impact that people of power, including the food elite, make with their well-meaning but often tone-deaf intentions. His intimate, confrontational work reminds us that we can change that.

“The race conversation is more public than I can ever remember in my lifetime,” Ammons says. “I feel like something is stewing.” vbouloubasis@indyweek.com

food[eat this]

Easy Being Green

PIZZERIA MERCATO’S ITALIAN MENU REVEALS A SOUTHERN SURPRISE: A BOWL OF COLLARDS

BY MADDY SWEITZER-LAMME

You may have arrived to dinner at Pizzeria Mercato thinking the pizza would be the most exciting part of your meal, but you’d be wrong. In the hands of Gabe Barker, a bowl of collard greens feels like a celebration and a homecoming.

Pizza, no matter where you get it, is both a festive food and an everyday staple. We eat it after soccer games and for birthdays, but we also order it in while standing in front of an empty refrigerator on a Tuesday night. For many North Carolinians, collards play a similar role. We make them daily without much thought, and also serve them as holiday foods—for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and for good luck on New Year’s Day. This connection occurs to me as I feast on the collards at Pizzeria Mercato, which are delivered before my pie arrives. The pies are wonderful, but what keeps me coming back to Mercato is the constant stream of surprises that flows from the vegetable section of the menu. The collard greens have stuck with me since I ate them

back in January, just after the restaurant’s grand opening. The dish is one of a few that Barker was eager to bring back from that opening-day menu.

At each step of cooking, Barker stays true to his Southern roots while incorporating a pronounced Italian influence. Just like the great Southern home cooks I’ve known, Barker blanches the greens and cooks them in pork fat. But, breaking from tradition, his fat comes from guanciale, a type of bacon made from hog jowls that’s common in Italian cooking. Once cooked, he folds in fatty, chewy pieces of cooked guanciale and sprinkles delicately crunchy, sour, peppery slices of Calabrian chili on top.

The dish is emblematic of what Barker intended the restaurant to be: a celebration of local produce, adapted with Italian flair.

The collards come from Brinkley Farms in Creedmoor, better product than what Barker says was available in San Francisco. (Barker worked the line at California’s famed Pizzeria Delfina.) The dish is both

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Collards add a dash of Southern comfort to Pizzeria Mercato’s menu. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

are glossy dark green ribbons, studded with the chewiness of the pork and the brightness of the chili. My tempo picked up as I ate, as if I were gobbling up a pint of ice cream, eagerly savoring the next spoonful.

Even if you lack any interest in waxing nostalgic about the evolution of Southern food or intellectualizing the significance of a bowl of vegetables, this dish is still a revelation. And if you do want to wax nostalgic, these collards are still better than your mother’s collards, because they aren’t trying to be your mother’s collards. They’re just trying to make you think of them.

Twitter: @awomanwhoeats

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familiar and exciting—a little like coming home and a little like taking a trip to Italy.

Nostalgia is present in every bite of these collards, yet Barker doesn’t lean too hard on it. (My father, a Californian who has never fully come around to Southern food, ate these collards with a spoon, fighting me for the last bite.) Just as his parents did at Magnolia Grill, the young chef reminds us that Southern food is a cuisine to be proud of. Going head to head with fancier cuisines, it shows us how to feast on our roots anew.

The dish is rich, acidic, satisfying, and familiar without being boring. The collards

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MAKERS’ MARK How do these ten Triangle records hold up a decade later?

According to a list compiled in the INDY—then, still the Independent Weekly—in early December 2006, local bands in the Triangle released about one hundred-fifty records into the world, give or take a few.

Listening to many of them feels as much like opening a forgotten time capsule as visiting old friends.

For some bands, these records were modest beginnings of mighty careers; for others, they marked the end of an era. We take a look back at what some of these records meant then, and what they still mean today.—Allison Hussey

american aquarium

antique hearts // self-released

American Aquarium’s Antique Hearts, released a year after the band formed as a crew of rowdy undergrads itching to make some noise, barely hints at the potential that’s since earned the band packs of die-hard followers nationwide.

In the Triangle’s flagging alt-country scene, the group was often sandwiched between emo and punk bands on bills at the now-defunct Brewery, where the crunchy guitar tone that occasionally rears its head on Antique Hearts may have seemed less out of place than it does within the American Aquarium canon. On “Ain’t No Use in Trying,” frontman BJ Barham—the only member of American Aquarium who’s still in the group—gripes that “one more person quit the band today.” The group’s revolving-door lineup stabilized just a couple of years later, once Barham quit school and prepared to make American Aquarium a full-time touring venture with like-minded musicians. Antique Hearts is an uneven debut, but it does reveal early glimpses at what’s become a signature theme of Barham’s songwriting: the rural Carolina native pining for the big city while keeping a constant eye on home. —Spencer Griffith

20 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

annuals

be he me // Ace Fu

As Superchunk uperchunk slid into hibernation, Raleigh’s young Annuals bloomed into one of the Triangle’s biggest indie exports with its debut LP. Be He Me was a grandiose, imaginative effort, especially considering that all of the band’s members were in their early twenties at the time of its release, and it earned the band TV slots on MTVU and Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

Annuals had a knack for building songs that were equally intricate and gorgeous, with elements from synths to pedal steel all getting a fair shake in the mixes. Much of Be He Me keeps a wide, loose focus, as on tracks like “Brother,” “Fair,” and “The Bull and the Goat,” while “Carry Around,” with frontman Adam Baker crowing “I’ve got magic everywhere I fuckin’ look!” in its intro, remains a charming delight. The band’s second LP, 2008’s Such Fun,, didn’t quite capture the same attention as its predecessor, and Annuals played its farewell show in 2013. —Allison Hussey

caltrop

caltrop // self-released

Caltrop’s self-titled debut wasn’t supposed to be its first release. The then-nascent band had cut a few songs in Chicago to use as a four-track demo, but when the band mixed it back in Chapel Hill, the members liked the songs so much that they decided to self-release them as an EP. As such, Caltrop sprung into existence almost fully formed. From the outset, Caltrop excelled at taking metal and the blues to strange, intense places. Cloudy psychedelic breaks yield to blues-metal thunder near the halfway point of the Herculean “What in Life That Is Worth/ What Is Cement Truck.” The piercing guitar leads of Adam Nolton and Sam Taylor crack against Murat Dirlik’s rumbling low end on “Exponential Invaders,” and Jason Aylward’s nasty snare and tom rolls guide the darting “Dr. Motherfucker.” Aylward left the band after the release of Caltrop; veteran drummer John Crouch replaced him on Caltrop’s two proper full-lengths, 2008’s World Class and 2012’s ten million years and eight minutes, which would find the quartet honing righteous, rangy metal into one of the finest heavy outputs in the South. Caltrop called it quits in February 2015, not too long after passing the decade mark itself. —Patrick Wall

carolina chocolate drops

dona got a ramblin’ mind // music maker

When the Carolina Chocolate Drops released their debut album, Dona Got a Ramblin’ Mind, nobody could have expected where it would lead for the band. At the time, an all-black string band playing straight-up old-timey folk and sounding like they’d just fallen out of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music seemed like an endeavor destined strictly for the fringes. That the trio’s fiddle, banjo, and harmonica licks could serve up such an intoxicatingly authentic feel only made that prospect seem more likely. Before they ever started incorporating more modern styles into their sound, it seemed implausible that they would earn a Grammy, become one of the biggest, most celebrated acoustic acts around, and give the world a celebrated new solo artist in Rhiannon Giddens. But that just goes to show you how little we really ever know at any given time. —Jim Allen

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

MS

chatham county line

speed of the whippoorwhill // yep roc

Listening to Chatham County Line’s third album, Speed of the Whippoorwill, in the context of the five records they’ve made since—especially this year’s Autumn—can retroactively redefine the band. At the time, it seemed like the Raleigh group was banking just enough eternal bluegrass verities with barnstormers like “Company Blues” as well as back-porch pickin’ parties like “Lonesome in Caroline.” But Chatham County Line also gamely busted out of the tradition with melodically and lyrically forward tunes like “They Were Just Children” and “All the Ladies in Town.” The band has since evolved into an unplugged Americana band with bluegrass roots, making the Whippoorwill-era outfit seem like Bill Monroe & His Bluegrass Boys in comparison. —Jim Allen

hall of justus

soldiers of fortune // abb

The public dissolution of the Triangle hip-hop trio Little Brother began shortly after the release of its 2005 album, The Minstrel Show, and the fallout signaled the larger disintegration of its fifteen-member collective, Justus League. Several Justus League acts had just released stellar projects of their own, but Little Brother’s impending breakup had already taken its toll on team morale. Justus League boss man Big Dho salvaged as much as he could from the drama by forming the Hall of Justus label and debuting it with a compilation that paired his old crew with affiliates like Jozeemo, Joe Scudda, Skyzoo, and Sean Price. At its core, Soldiers of Fortune wasn’t much of a departure from Justus League’s usual formula of chain-linked boom-bap, but the supplemental splash of bully raps from Jozeemo and Sean Price on “Tired” and the clubready showboating of “Jus Chillin” distanced the project from its roots.

Perhaps if Big Dho would’ve stuck to his guns, Hall of Justus would now be on the same level of Jamla Records, built by Justus League cofounder 9th Wonder. But maybe it’s OK for an empire to fall, as long as it sounds good on the way down. —Eric Tullis

portastatic

be still please // merge

By the time Mac McCaughan released Be Still Please in October 2006, Portastatic had more or less gone from side project to center stage. Every year removed from 2001’s Here’s to Shutting Up, Up it looked as though Superchunk, McCaughan’s legendary indie rock band, was winding down for good. But Be Still Please, in a way, portended Superchunk’s return.

When it ran concurrently with Superchunk, Portastatic served as a clearinghouse for ideas that didn’t quite jibe with McCaughan’s main gig. But the moods and motifs that McCaughan explored on Be Still Please set the stage for the warm, nostalgic fuzzies of Superchunk’s late-period rockers. Opener “Sour Shores” wouldn’t sound out of place on 2013’s I Hate Music; drive the guitars on “I’m In Love (With Arthur Dove)” a little harder, and the song could’ve been the lead single on 2010’s Majesty Shredding. Be Still Please would be Mac McCaughan’s last proper album as Portastatic, and Superchunk returned to (mostly) full-time status with Majesty Shredding.

McCaughan released a synthy solo record, Non-Believers, last year under his own name. —Patrick Wall

roman candle

the wee hours revue // hollywood

In the early aughts, when Chapel Hill’s Roman Candle burned as bright as its namesake with heartfelt, hard-hitting rock songs, The Wee Hours Revue was its record that almost wasn’t. The Wee Hours Revue, the band’s major-label debut, was a complete reconstruction of the band’s first record, Says Pop, boasting cleaner, more focused production. However, problems with the label meant the album was shelved for two years before its 2006 release, and the record never got the promotional push it deserved.

It’s a shame that The Wee Hours Revue got sandbagged the way it did; songs like “You Don’t Belong to This World” are some of the best shout-along anthems to ever come out of the area. Roman Candle got caught up in collapsing musicindustry machinations once again shortly after the record’s release, but even that wasn’t enough to extinguish the flame— it released two more records, Oh Tall Tree in the Ear in 2009 and Debris in 2013. —Allison Hussey

the never

antarctica // trekky

Billed as a “storybook record” and accompanied by a picture book illustrated by band member Noah Smith, The Never’s Antarctica was a major undertaking for a little Chapel Hill band. From a folk-pop base, the band built a narrative that followed the seasons changing from summer to winter and a tale about fleeing an evil witch. Even in the moments where Antarctica teeters on the edge of twee, it remains a cohesive, pretty LP. The Never fizzled out just a few years after Antarctica, and Ari Picker left the band the same year as its release, but Picker would go on to craft stunning records with Lost in the Trees. It’s impossible to listen to Antarctica now without hearing early inklings of Picker’s grand ambitions. —Allison Hussey

deyarmond edison

The Bickett Residency, Vol. 1 // self-released

In early 2006, DeYarmond Edison, a quartet of Wisconsin natives in their mid-twenties who’d relocated to Raleigh together, convened at the Bickett Gallery for a creative residency that focused on each member examining his musical strengths and weaknesses and pushing himself to grow artistically. The resulting recording of this project became The Bickett Residency, Vol. 1. Each member—Phil Cook, Brad Cook, Joe Westerlund, and Justin Vernon—leads a section of the record, which shifts among folk standards, jazz-inspired freakouts, and phased keyboard instrumentals. The Bickett Residency proved to be an important crucible from which DeYarmond’s Edisons members would chase their respective ideas for the next several years: it’s easy to hear the musical seedlings that would yield the wooly freak-folk of Megafaun, the colorful intricacy of Grandma Sparrow, and the distinct mournfulness of Bon Iver. Even as DeYarmond Edison spun out into different projects, The Bickett Residency arguably helped make it all happen. —Allison Hussey

INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 21

INDY WEEK’S BAR + BEVERAGE MAGAZINE

ON STANDS FEBRUARY 22 RESERVE BY JANUARY 11 22 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

indyart

Time, Released

A FIFTY-YEAR-OLD TIME CAPSULE IN LAKEWOOD DIVULGES CONTINUITY IN DURHAM’S SHIFTING URBAN LANDSCAPE

BY HANNAH PITSTICK

T

he people who buried a time capsule at what’s now the Scrap Exchange fifty years ago were not joking around. They sealed the memorabilia in an airtight metal box, welded it shut, reinforced it with rebar, and planted it under an 800pound slab of concrete.

“It’s been a big ordeal to get this thing out,” says the Scrap Exchange’s Jeremy Parker, who helped figure out how to excavate the box. “They did everything in their power to make sure that it was going to be a good opening for us today.”

On December 19, 1966, Durham locals, including Lakewood Shopping Center developer Ran Few and Center Theater manager Charlie Lewis, gathered to celebrate the theater’s reopening. It had moved to Lakewood from downtown, where the Durham Hotel stands now. As a part of the celebration, Few and Lewis buried a time capsule to be opened in December 2016.

When the Scrap Exchange, Durham’s pioneering creative reuse center, purchased the former Center Theater building at 2050 Chapel Hill Road in 2013, the owners knew it came with a time capsule and immediately began planning for its opening. On December 16, the Scrap Exchange threw a party to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary—and to finally discover what was in that box. More than 500 people showed up to find out, and to hear speakers including Mayor Pro Tempore Cora Cole-McFadden and county commissioner Brenda Howerton.

Cole-McFadden went to school at Lyon Park, now Lyon Park Community Center, mere blocks away from the Scrap Exchange.

“I feel so good about being in this space,” she said. “I came to the movies here fifty years ago, so it brings back such fond memories of the rich history of Durham that so many people don’t know and therefore cannot appreciate.”

The Bulltown Strutters led the crowd in a parade to the front entrance, where the time capsule was lifted out of the ground and

Time in a bottle: Gary Lewis holds up a copy of Television magazine found in a time capsule from 1966 that was opened at The Scrap Exchange in Durham on Friday night. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER brought inside. There, it was opened by Dana Few Pope, the daughter of Ran Few, and Gary Lewis, the son of Charlie Lewis. The audience, which included several people who were at the 1966 ceremony, pushed forward, anxious for the reveal.

First, Lewis and Pope spoke about their memories of the Center Theater and Lakewood Shopping Center. For Pope, they included the tradition of Santa flying into the shopping center on a helicopter every holiday season. Lewis, who worked in his father’s

theater, remembered being popular for his access to movie passes.

Then, together, they slowly peeled back the metal top of the time capsule.

“I was so afraid this stuff was all going to be soaking wet, but it’s in perfect condition,” Pope exclaimed upon peering into the box. Lewis and Pope began pulling out items in pristine condition, including a register of names of people at the 1966 burial, reels of film of the enshrining ceremony, a photo of Mick Jagger, a Durham Morning Herald with

a headline about the Vietnam War, and a letter from Durham Mayor Wense Grabarek to his 2016 counterpart. (It was sealed, so we’ll have to ask Mayor Bell what it says.)

According to Pope, who attended the 1966 ceremony at age seven, attendees were invited to add personal items after the Few and Lewis families put in theirs.

“Is there anybody here who put something in?” she asked the crowd on Friday. A few people raised their hands, including Duffy McDonald, who said he remembered throwINDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 23

SOUTHERN ACCENT On view through January 8

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

Collection of Ronald Swartz and Ellen Johnson.

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

2001 Campus Dr., Durham 27705

nasher.duke.edu/southern

Former Scrap Exchange director Pat Hoffman, center, and current director Ann Woodward, right, laugh with the large crowd in attendance. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

"It brings back fond memories of the rich history of Durham that so many people don't know." ing in a school photo and a penny. Moments later, Pope pulled out a pocket-size blackand-white photo of a young McDonald.

Several people had traveled long distances for the reveal. Lewis flew in from Texas, while Betsy DeCampo drove in from Morehead City to read a letter her father, Eugene Holland Moore Jr., wrote to her brother.

“My father was at the time-capsule burial and put a letter in it to my brother, but my brother passed away,” she said, slightly teary-eyed after reading the letter privately.

“It’s just sort of emotional because I can feel them both.” Included with the letter were photos of each Moore family member and a dollar bill from 1963.

“He said he hoped the value would go up,” DeCampo said with a laugh.

For Gary Lewis, who was almost fourteen when the theater opened in Lakewood, walking through the building where

24 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

he spent his adolescence taking tickets,A short p selling concessions, and smoking cigarettesthe openi out back with friends caused overwhelming nostalgia.

“I remember the smell of it,” he says. “It was new, and there was the smell of fresh popcorn—it was like a circus.” He says the theater was technologically advanced at the time, with stereo sound and rocking- MOR chair seats. l Af Lewis says his father would have loved l A N to see this impressive reuse of the space, l A f which will soon become even more impresthe sive. The Scrap Exchange has purchased l A b 82,000 additional square feet of The Shop- l Tri pes at Lakewood and 10.35 acres of land to l "Th be developed into the Reuse Arts District Ch (RAD) and the National Center for Cre- l A S l An ative Reuse.

Co The expanded facilities will feature more exhibition space, a thrift store, and architec- l Pic tural salvage. A floor-to-ceiling wall of con- l WT cepts by N.C. State architecture students is l A 1 currently on display in the Scrap Exchange's l A b Cameron Gallery as part of Unpacking the l A 1 Past, Designing the Future. The exhibit pres- l A l ents the history of the Lakewood Shopping l Fac Center, and now, it also displays the contents l Lis oth of the time capsule through February. l Af “I see this, very soon, as the national cenl Al ter for creative reuse,” Cole-McFadden said Sh of the Scrap Exchange's expansion. “Some Ins people say Durham is already on the map, Lan but this will really be the stamp.”

Lak arts@indyweek.com

WH

Wo

A short parade with the Bulltown Strutters announced the start of the festivities before the opening of the time capsule. PHOTO BY ALEX BOERNER

WHAT’S IN THE BOX? MORE STUFF FOUND IN THE CENTER THEATER TIME CAPSULE l l l

l l l

l l

l l l l l l l l

l l

A film by Ralph Lynch A New English Bible A fifty-cent piece presented to the president of the Lakewood Merchant Association A book titled Durham: City of Industrial Education and Medicine Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church bulletin "The True Aristocrat" by Trinity Avenue Presbyterian Church minister William Compton Bennett A St. Christopher’s medal A newspaper from Dec. 18, 1966, headlined “Bill Dooley Appointed Football Coach at UNC” Pictures of the old and new Center Theater WTVD television programs A 1966 phone book A box of transistors A 1966 coin set A letter to longtime Durham public schoolteacher Eugene Holland Moore III Facts about the League of Women Voters List of N.C. General Assembly members that says “Democrats unless otherwise indicated” A fact sheet about the Durham Children’s museum A list of stores in the Lakewood Shopping Center, which included Butler’s Shoe Repair, Carolina Camera and Music Center, Center Theater, Eve’s Insurance, Flower Craft, Four Winds Gift and Linen, Harris Nursery and Landscaping, Home Savings and Loan, Kroger, Lakewood Barber Shop, Lakewood Beauty Salon, Model Cleaners, Top Value, Winn Dixie, and Woolworths

INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 25

art

N.C. CHINESE LANTERN FESTIVAL Through Jan. 15, 6–10 p.m. Tues.–Sun., $10–$15 Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary www.boothamphitheatre.com

Because the Night IN THE N.C. CHINESE LANTERN FESTIVAL, SICHUAN ARTISANS LIGHT UP THE DARK IN CARY

BY SAYAKA MATSUOKA

A giant dragon roars at the N.C. Chinese Lantern Festival A little more than two months from now, lanterns of all shapes, sizes, and colors will light up the streets of China’s cities. At the end of the Chinese New Year, children will carry paper lanterns as they marvel at the handmade creations that have taken over their towns. While the lantern festival has been celebrated in China for centuries, its major introduction to the Triangle came last year when the N.C. Chinese Lantern Festival first came to Koka Booth Amphitheatre in Cary.

This year, illuminated lions, bright yellow Alice in Wonderland-like flowers, and intricate swans light up the night and leave visitors awestruck at the festival, which returned to Koka Booth last month and runs through January 15. Tianyu Arts & Culture, Inc., the company responsible for the festival, is based in Zigong, a city in the Sichuan province where the lantern festival is said 26 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

PHOTO BY BEN MCKEOWN

to have originated. There, artisans gather yearly to craft detailed lanterns that lure tourists from all over the country. According to Alison Newell, the marketing manager of the company, lantern making is a highly specialized skill that often runs in families, resulting in generations of makers.

There’s even a team of brothers who worked on the lanterns in Cary this year, says Jessie Li, the project manager for the company, adding that one of the brothers works as a welder, creating the frames for the lanterns, while the other first came as a cook.

Li, who grew up in China, says that the Cary festival is as authentic as the ones people would see in her home country. All of the lanterns are handmade, a process that begins with designing the frames. Then welders transform the designs into reality with steel and iron pipes, and electricians wire the insides with light bulbs that bring

the lanterns to life. Fabric artists (generally women, Li notes) glue brightly colored silk brought from China on the frames, giving them their texture. Finally, painters add detailed touches, infusing some realism into the otherwise fairy-tale-like displays.

For this year’s festival, which features more than thirty large lanterns, eighteen Chinese artisans came to work onsite for twenty days. Surveying the ample festival grounds, knowing the intricate process required to construct these pieces, it seems impossible that so much could be made by hand in a mere three weeks.

But Li explains that many of the smaller pieces were constructed in China and then shipped to North Carolina. Only the larger lanterns, like the crowd-pleasing two-hundred-foot dragon and the festive entryway, were made on site. Li says these pieces were some of the most difficult to construct

because of their size and weight. The dragon, for instance, stands twenty-one feet tall, weighs in at a massive 18,000 pounds, and took a fifteen-person crew and a crane to construct.

Cary’s festival may not have the traditional sticky dumpling balls or lion dances one usually sees in China, but performances by traditional Chinese dancers and jugglers add a layer of authenticity to an already spectacular display.

“I think it’s important for everyone to experience different cultures,” says Newell.

“And this is an authentic event.”

And, in a time when xenophobia and talk of banning people of other cultures issues from the lips of the president-elect, events like this are all the more important, providing a lantern of understanding in what, lately, has felt like a dark night.

Twitter: @whatsaysaid

All That Jazz

IN LA LA LAND, THE DIRECTOR OF WHIPLASH CONFECTS A GOLDEN-AGE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL WITH BREEZY CHARM

L.A. traffic gets a lift: La La Land

PHOTO BY DALE ROBINETTE

Denied a best-picture Oscar for Whiplash, writer-director Damien Chazelle again explores the conflict between ambition and humanity in La La Land, this time turning to the tried-and-true award bait of the self-referential film set in Hollywood. It’s a romance, but its lesson is decidedly bittersweet: true love is incompatible with materialism or professional advancement.

Mia (Emma Stone) is a barista on the Warner Brothers backlot whose doe eyes are full of dreams of becoming as famous as the stars who turn heads in her café. She pings from one failed audition to another, hoping to land inane roles in inane projects—“Goldilocks and the Three Bears from the perspective of the bears” and “Dangerous Minds meets The O.C.” Sebastian (Ryan Gosling) is a starving pianist who bought a stool just because Hoagy Carmichael once sat on it. He’s a disciple of “pure jazz,” daddy-o, but he can’t hold down paying gigs at cocktail lounges because he won’t stick to the stodgy play list. Jazz may be

dying, he says, “but not on my watch.”

Mia and Sebastian don’t exactly meet cute, but that’s soon rectified in a song-anddance sequence set atop the Hollywood Hills against a pastel sunset backdrop, a throwback to Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen that’s eventually interrupted by a ringing cell phone. With love comes inspiration—hers, to write a one-woman play, his, to open a jazz club called “Chicken on a Stick,” in homage to Charlie Parker.

At some point, you just give yourself over to the breezy Technicolor charm of La La Land and its star-crossed love story. Steeped in the nostalgia of Hollywood’s golden age musicals, this city symphony celebrates Los Angeles’s distinctive milieu. Chazelle got the Angels Flight funicular reopened just for filming, and Mia and Sebastian soar into the stars inside the Griffith Observatory planetarium. The setting is a dazzling daydream with a melancholy undercurrent, “a place where they worship everything and value nothing.” Chazelle shoots in Cinemascope,

FINDER

BY NEIL MORRIS

GUIDE TO THE TRIANGLE

now

HHHH Opening Sunday, Dec. 25

THE INDY'S

indyscreen

on stands

LA LA LAND

using long takes during the musical numbers, starting with a sweeping showstopper set amid the sprawl of the Harbor Freeway.

Gosling and Stone, in their third on-screen pairing, won’t be mistaken for Astaire and Rogers, but they ooze chemistry. Gosling never fully inhabits his role, and his transformation from insouciance to besottment feels slapdash, but Stone is luminescent. One moment when a film projector’s beam illuminates her face is breathtaking. She has the countenance and the chops of a classic movie actress who is still plumbing the reservoir of her abilities.

In a far-too-brief bit of exposition, a frontman (John Legend) tells Sebastian that jazz is defined by its tension between tradition and revolution. The same is true for cinema. La La Land gloriously mingles various epochs of American filmmaking. The story is pat, with the ersatz quality inherent in genre films. But movies are a journey and a presentation, not just a destination.

Twitter: @ByNeilMorris

INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 27

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1/20 RUN THE JEWELS W/ THE GASLAMP KILLER AND SOLD SPARK MASTER TAPE, CUZ OUT 2/23 SHOVELS & ROPE W/ JOHN MORELAND (TIX ON SALE 12/9) HAW RIVER BALLROOM 1/27 KURT VILE AND THE VIOLATORS W/ LUKE ROBERTS

2/25 BLUE CACTUS ALBUM RELEASE SHOW W/ NICK VANDENBERG AND MOLLY SARLÉ ($10)

3/6 COLD WAR KIDS W/ MIDDLE KIDS 3/11 SON VOLT ($22/$25)

2/26 KEVIN GARRETT ($12/$15)

4/1 PATRICK WATSON ($20/$22) DPAC (DURHAM 4/20 STEVE MARTIN AND MARTIN SHORT WITH

3/5 ALL THEM WITCHES W/ IRATA ( $12/$14) 3/7 MOOSE BLOOD W/TROPHY EYES, BOSTON MANOR, A WILL AWAY ($15/$17)

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**Asterisks denote advance tickets @ schoolkids records in raleigh & chapel hill order tix online at ticketfly.com ★ we serve carolina brewery beer on tap! ★ we are a non-smoking club 28 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23

FUNKTASTIC VOYAGE

If you need one more chance to blow off some steam before the holidays hit, Motorco has a hell of a funktion lined up. The bill features Young Bull, a relatively new project led by Tahmique Cameron and Gabe Fox-Peck. The pair’s August LP, Sopadelic, is a satisfying blend of soul, funk, jazz, and hip-hop.

Brooklyn’s Ben Negative, meanwhile, doubles down on hard-charging, dancefriendly electronic tunes—just thirty seconds of “You and I Won’t Stop” is enough to bring you back from the dead (or at least from your post-holiday party sluggishness). Galdytron and Capelli Musik join, too. The whole shindig is presented by Runaway, the Durham clothing brand that’s getting as good at booking parties as it is slinging streetwear. —Allison Hussey MOTORCO MUSIC HALL, DURHAM 9 p.m., $7–$10, www.motorcomusic.com

WHAT TO DO THIS WEEK

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS

FOOD ALL DAMN WEEK

JUST SIT AT HOME

Write the great American novel, or at least outline a couple of chapters. Organize your clothes by “wear” and “never wear,” then add each item from “never wear” back to “wear,” because you never know. Teach your cat to flush the toilet.

Clear your inbox, even months-old emails from exes and surveys for dubious magazine subscriptions. Paint your nails, remove the polish, and paint them again. Watch Treme all the way through without stopping to rewatch The Wire. Learn the ondes Martenot, or at least the ukulele. Stare at cobwebs, then stare at a broom (maybe something will happen). Go to the movies. Listlessly click around on Facebook. Eat junk food. Play board games with your family, if that’s what it takes. You have to figure out something to prevent you from stumbling around in your PJs all week, because other than the few worthy events we scavenged for our arts calendars, there really is nothing to do, unless you’d like to see eleven different Nutcrackers. It’s a holiday wasteland out there; enjoy the annual rite of relearning what humans do with unstructured time. —Brian Howe YOUR COUCH, TRIANGLE-WIDE What is time again? p.m., $elf-esteem, www.hulu.com

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22

DAM THIS YEAR

The recent Indies Arts Award winners of Durham Artists Movement (see last week’s issue) are leaving the Parrish Street loft gallery that, for the last six months, has helped them transform from a loose collective into a growing organization. But they always knew that would likely happen with the expiration of the lease they took over from the Carrack Modern Art when it moved. Saba Taj, Catherine Edgerton, and the dozens of other artists who make up the radically intersectional group are moving out full of new energy and big plans, which include securing a sustainable space for DAM’s art making, social support, and community activism sometime next year. But first, it’s time for one last party at 111 West Parrish, which doubles as a fundraiser for the group’s next phase. At seven on Thursday night, DAM members give music, poetry, and other kinds of performances in a blowout billed as “DAM This Year.” And, we have no doubt, DAM next year, too. —Brian Howe

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26

BOXING DAY DANCE PARTY PRESENTED BY FUTURE ISLANDS

No, former hometown heroes Future Islands are not playing a teeny-tiny post-Christmas show in Raleigh. Its members are just deejaying this Kings shindig, but even so, it’s hard not to have faith in a party driven by some of the nation’s finest purveyors of dance-friendly jams. Start early on your New Year’s fitness resolution and dance off all those holiday sweets and drinks, or use it as an excuse to keep up your partying until 2017—it should be very merry either way. Proceeds from the party benefit the long-running Helping Hand Mission, which has focused on direct community support in Raleigh since 1972. —Allison Hussey KINGS, RALEIGH 9 p.m., $8, www.kingsraleigh.com

DURHAM ARTISTS MOVEMENT, DURHAM 7 p.m., donations accepted, www.durhamforall.org/dam

WHAT ELSE SHOULD I DO?

COMMUNITY MUSIC SCHOOL BENEFIT AT THE POUR HOUSE (P. 15), N.C. CHINESE LANTERN FESTIVAL AT KOKA BOOTH AMPHITHEATRE (P. 26), JIM WATSON’S CHRISTMAS AT THE CAVE (P. 31), ANDY WOODHULL AT GOODNIGHTS (P. 35) INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 29

music

12.21–12.28

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR

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CONTRIBUTORS: Elizabeth Bracy (EB), Timothy Bracy (TB), Grant Britt (GB), Allison Hussey (AH), David Klein (DK), Dan Ruccia (DR), David Ford Smith (DS) NOTE: HOLIDAY HOURS MAY AFFECT RECURRING EVENTS. CALL VENUES AHEAD OF TIME BEFORE MAKING PLANS.

FR 12/23 TH 12/29

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WED, DEC 21

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

STAND Since the spring, UP protesters in North Dakota have been fighting against the Dakota Access Pipeline, a massive oil pipeline currently under construction that stretches from North Dakota to Illinois, threatening water safety and disrupting sacred Sioux lands. In the fall, the peaceful protests against the pipeline rose to international attention when militarized police retaliated against a growing group of water protectors with violent force. The Obama administration and the Army Corps of Engineers denied the easement near Standing Rock in early December, but the fight is far from over: water protectors are still at Standing Rock holding their ground. Raleigh groups Zephyranthes, Second Husband, and Naked Naps have teamed up with Dark Water Rising’s Charly Lowry and the Warpaint Singers to raise money for continued support of those who are still camped at Standing Rock. —AH [KINGS, $10–$25/8:30 P.M.]

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

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ALSO ON WEDNESDAY

Your Week.

Every Wednesday. indyweek.com

BLUE NOTE GRILL: The Herded Cats; 8 p.m. • THE CAVE: Evil Wiener Christmas Extravaganza; 9 p.m., $5. • CORNER TAVERN: Chris Overstreet; 9 p.m. • HUMBLE PIE: Peter Lamb & the Wolves; 8:30 p.m.

• IRREGARDLESS: The Holland Bros.; 6:30 p.m. • MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL: Triangle Brass Band: Holiday Stories; 7 p.m., $5–$10.

• NEPTUNES PARLOUR: Bloodworth Combo; 9 p.m., $5. • POUR HOUSE: Zoocru, The 4 Korners; 9 p.m., $8–$10.

THU, DEC 22

convene sporadically to perform jangly pop-rock marked by a pronounced Southern twang, with hooks that haven’t dulled over time. The Geb opens, its frontman one of four fathers of students from Raleigh’s Joyner Elementary School featured in tonight’s lineup.

Proceeds from the door will benefit the J.Y. Joyner Foundation, earmarked specifically to fund teaching positions lost due to budget cuts. —SG [KINGS, $20/8 P.M.]

Newtonanny to a throwdown that rivals your most depraved office party, with better music. Show off your most offensive Christmas sweater and matching socks in the Hideous Christmas Couture contest while you enjoy the rootsy down-home twang of Newton’s holiday band, which features special guests Lance White, Phil Lee, Jeff Hart, Steve Eisenstadt, and Lindsay Rosebrock. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, FREE/7 P.M.]

Ivy Stone

2ND WIND: 2 fer; 7:30-9 p.m. • THE CAVE: 31st Annual Jim Watson Christmas Show; 8 p.m., $8. See box, page 31. • IRREGARDLESS: David McKnight, Bruce Emery; 6 p.m.

• RUBY DELUXE: SPCLGST + Friends; 10 p.m.

ROCK Ivy Stone bills itself BLOCK as a “fresh young band that really knows how to rock a stage.” This is debatable.

The band cites the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guns N’ Roses, and Jimi Hendrix as its main influences, so if those aren’t your speed, perhaps look elsewhere. Local openers Suspicious Figure are indeed so suspicious that they don’t have music online. With Sticks and Bricks and Rosa Lee. —DS [DEEP SOUTH, $5/9:30 P.M.]

Local Band Local Beer: Dark Water Rising SOULFL The venerable and FOLK virtuous scenebuilding project Local Band Local Beer has been pairing Triangle musicians with local breweries for curated nights of music dating back nearly a decade. For this month’s pre-holiday iteration, Robeson County’s Dark Water Rising, comprising members of the Lumbee and Coharie tribes, offers an energetic take on Southern blues and boogie, greatly abetted by magnetic frontwoman Emily Musolino.

Brothers Egg and Kate Rhudy open. —EB [POUR HOUSE, FREE/9:30 P.M.]

The Balsa Gliders

Newtonanny

PTA POP Though its members ROCK are now scattered along the East Coast, Triangle veterans The Balsa Gliders still

THROW Seven years of DOWN seasonal bacchanalia at the Blue Note Grill have honed Rebecca Newton’s

ALSO ON THURSDAY

FRI, DEC 23 Blue Note Grill Christmas Party HOLIDAY Handsome Al and HANG the Lookers is a supergroup of sorts, with Handsome Al, aka Alan Heckle, formerly of Fayetteville-based blues band The Heaters, teaming up with NYC-native saxophonist and keyboardist Dave Youngman, who forsakes his own jazz band for raucous blues-rock backed by former Nantucket drummer Richard Gates. Fronting the band is Emma Davis, the former vocalist of Big Mamma E and the Cool, who belts out big-boned blues and sultry ballads with plenty of country-tinged, twangy soul. —GB [BLUE NOTE GRILL, $8/9 P.M.]

Buchanan Bros Annual Xmas Eve Eve Party PREAnother in a PARTY formidable line of holiday-themed Triangle traditions, this long-running benefit features mandatory formal wear and a full spectrum of entertainment options from the sublime to the suitably idiotic. The

ITY CALENDAR

Brothers Buchanan—multimedia artist Luke and Colossus frontman Sean—have done their level best to throw a tectonic-plate-shifting party every year dating back nearly two decades. Even if you’re not ready, they pull out the stops.

—TB [KINGS, $5/9 P.M.]

Eller, and Chase Bowers open.

—EB [THE CAVE, $5/9 P.M.]

Five Mile Radius

THREE This annual blowout FLAVORS at Schoolkids in Raleigh should send 2016 off with a suitable bang, offering a varied trio of performers who delight in distinctive ways. Al Riggs brings his wry humor and melodic gifts to a holiday-themed set while Jeffro, aka Jeff Holshour from Hank Sinatra, brings hard-edged honky-tonk before it all culminates with The Veldt, long-running Chapel Hill shoegaze pioneers who have resurrected themselves in recent years and are as fiery as ever. —DK [SCHOOLKIDS RECORDS (RALEIGH), FREE/8 P.M.]

NG PLANS.

wdown that ved office ic. Show off hristmas socks in s Couture y the rootsy Newton’s atures White, Phil senstadt, k. —GB EE/7 P.M.]

ROCK Five Mile Radius’s REVUE strafing, riff-heavy guitar assault straddles a fine line between seventies blues-rock pastiche and self-aware aesthetic update. Singer Johnny Sinatra brings some legit Bon Scott swagger to the proceedings, and his rough and ready backing band pulls off early Sabbath doom-boogie and pulverizing Live At Leeds athleticism with well studied moxie. If classic rock is truly a cultural dead letter, these boys haven’t checked the mail recently, and that’s a good thing. Blue Frequency opens, plus Chris Nash and Nash County Line. —TB [DEEP SOUTH, $5/8 P.M.]

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N.C. Symphony: A Candlelight Christmas THURSDAY, DECEMBER 22

ST ANNUAL JIM WATSON CHRISTMAS SHOW 31 A lot of musicians have résumés listing to his parents’ house in Durham where eclectic survival skills, but juggling is a skill few can claim, save for Jim Watson. The mandolinist cofounded the Red Clay Ramblers and stayed with the band for fourteen years before departing in 1986 to pursue other musical interests and hone his juggling skills. Watson never got to the flamingtorch or buzzing-chainsaw-tossing level, preferring instead to work with a smaller, safer medium—padded balls, three at a time, he says. But when he arrives at The Cave for his thirty-first annual Christmas show, expect Watson to stick to his musical magic.

“The ceiling is so low, it’s not really conducive to juggling,” he says.

Even without the parlor tricks, Watson’s Cave Christmas is a longrunning seasonal treat. It started in the eighties, when Meg Rose Sorrell and Bo Porter, The Cave’s co-owners, featured only acoustic music. While talking with Sorrell after a gig there one night, Watson proposed doing a show with sing-along Christmas carols. He went

he grew up, rooted around for a stash of printed songs that he remembered from his youth, and made some copies.

“Some people who were just coming to The Cave to drink beer were a little surprised to be asked if they wanted to sing some Christmas carols,” Watson says of that performance. “And I’d hand ’em these sheets, and some people would actually sing along.”

These days, Watson offers three sets of songs at his Christmas convention, and yes, attendees are still expected to join in on the merriment.

“The second set is sing-along carols, and most people clear out after that,” Watson admits.

“But I still do a third set because I learned these songs, I only do ’em once a year, so I figure I might as well keep doing ’em,” he adds. —Grant Britt THE CAVE, CHAPEL HILL

8 p.m., $8, www.caverntavern.com

FIRE-FREE The title of this concert is a bit of a misnomer: while it is very much about Christmas, the candlelight will be more metaphorical than literal. Instead, the North Carolina Symphony will perform Christmas music spanning three hundred fifty years, from Corelli’s Christmas Concerto and “Winter” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons to Benjamin Britten’s Variations on a Christmas Carol and John Rutter’s recent Five Meditations. The Raleigh Children’s Christmas Chorus will add some extra cheer. —DR [MEYMANDI CONCERT HALL, $21–$73/7 P.M.]

Overwash ALT Melodically adroit ANGST and angsty in the extreme, this Charleston, South Carolina, three-piece would have fit beautifully on the alternative radio airwaves of the early nineties, when all of the world’s embittered latchkey kids finally got their brief hearing in the cultural spotlight. Frontman Alec Young can seem a little weighed down by his substantial sack of woe, but bet against Overwash at your peril: earnestness and hooks have carried more than one band to the big time. Wild Domestic, Ashton

Schoolkids Records & Hank Sinatra Christmas Extravaganza

ALSO ON FRIDAY 618 BISTRO: Randy Reed; 7-9:30 p.m. • ARCANA: One Track Mind Soul/Funk Party; free. • BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Stanley Baird Band; 7 & 9 p.m., $15. • BLUE NOTE GRILL: Duke Street Dogs; 6-8 p.m., free.

• IRREGARDLESS: Angela Bingham Duo; 6:30 p.m. • LINCOLN THEATRE: PULSE: Electronic Dance Party; 9 p.m. • MOTORCO: Funktastic Voyage: Ben Negative, Galdytron, Young Bull, Cappelli Musik; 9 p.m., $7–$10. See page 29. • NASH STREET TAVERN: Hillacasters; 8 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Groove Fetish, The Southern Belles; 9 p.m., $5–$10. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ DNLTMS; 10 p.m. • SOUTHLAND BALLROOM: Smell the Glove; 9:30 p.m., $5. • THE STATION: Dance Hits with Luxe Posh; 11 p.m., free. • THE CLOTH MILL AT ENO RIVER: Berlin Brothers Christmas Orchestra, The Irvettes; 7 p.m., free.

SAT, DEC 24 Naughty or Nasty? A Thirsty Queer Dance Party SHAKE IT Whether you’ve OFF been naughty, nice, or any combination thereof, you’re sure to be welcomed at The Pinhook’s Christmas Eve dance party. DJs PlayPlay and Bitchcraft are on the decks to get you nice and sweaty on this Saturday night.

Even if the holiday spirit doesn’t move you, they sure will. —AH [THE PINHOOK, $5/10 P.M.]

ALSO ON SATURDAY IRREGARDLESS: Glen Ingram; 11:30 a.m. “Multiples” with Ellis, Matt and Pete; 5 p.m. • POUR HOUSE: Honoring the Legends We Lost in 2016; 9 p.m., $10. See page 15. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Luxeposh; 10 p.m. • THE STATION: Jazz Saturdays; 2 p.m., free.

SUN, DEC 25 DEEP SOUTH: 6th Annual Very Funky Christmas; 9 p.m., free. • IRREGARDLESS: Gene O’Neill; noon. Elmer Gibson; 4 p.m. • WEST END WINE BAR-DURHAM: Eric Meyer, Noah Sager & Friends; 4-6 p.m., free.

MON, DEC 26 Mitch Butler JAZZ, UP A Raleigh native and the former director of jazz studies at California State University, trombonist Mitch Butler makes a home-state appearance in Durham. He fronts a formidable quartet that’s equally at home with the hard bop of Monk and Mingus, the late big-band swing of J.J. Johnson, and the confrontational fusion of On the Corner-era Miles Davis. —EB [BEYÙ CAFFÈ, A$10/7 & 9 P.M.]

Lila, Hammer No More The Fingers LOCAL If you’ve followed HEROES Triangle music for a while and aren’t familiar with off-kilter rockers Hammer No More The Fingers, you haven’t done your homework. While the trio’s once-heavy industry buzz has lessened over time, the band has become a reliable local rock fixture. You’d be hard-pressed to find more energetic, devoted fans than Hammer’s cult. Durham rap collective Lila plays fast and loose with genre, usually making some unexpected blends across its sets.

With Drozy. —DS [MOTORCO, $10–$12/9 P.M.] ALSO ON MONDAY CAT’S CRADLE (BACK ROOM): The Merch Holiday Dance Party with DJ Hunicutt; 9 p.m., free. • KINGS: 2nd Annual Post-Xmas Dance Party Presented by Future Islands; 9 p.m., $8. See page 29. • RUBY DELUXE: DJ Lord Redbyrd; 10 p.m. • THE SHED JAZZ CLUB: Sessions at the Shed with Ernest Turner; 8 p.m., $5.

INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 31

TUE, DEC 27

up a crowd-pleasing blend of R&B, funk, and straightforward rock, all rendered with laudable proficiency. Lead singer Leo Flounoy is a literal and metaphorical large presence: his soulful tenor and easy stage presence provide the focal point for the group’s workaday, ragtag charm. The band has hooks and heart to spare.

—TB [POUR HOUSE, $5–$7/9 P.M.]

Emil McGloin & Friends GRAB Los Angeles-based BAG guitar virtuoso Emil McGloin has built a loyal following by virtue of his cerebral take on traditional music, a unique melange of progressive pop, reverential folk, jangly jazz, and clattering junkyard blues. Gifted with a voice by turns soulful and astringent, McGloin is a strained vocalist but an inarguably effective one. Live, anything and everything is on the table—the band has been known to make compelling lurches through several moods and genres in a single setting. —EB [CAT’S CRADLE BACK ROOM, $10/9 P.M.]

Part Time Cooks WORLD Even with a APPEAL profoundly Google-unfriendly name, if 2016’s enjoyable 7:30 was any indication, eclectic South Korean hip-hop duo Part Time Cooks are worth your Boolean operators. That record matched international playboy

WE 12/21 TH 12/22

FR 12/23

SA 12/24 SU 12/25 TU 12/27

ALSO ON TUESDAY BEYÙ CAFFÈ: Akili; 7 p.m. • IRREGARDLESS: Cole Koffi; 6:30 p.m. • RUBY DELUXE: Calapse; 11 p.m.

WED, DEC 28 Dark Water Rising performs at The Pour House in Raleigh Thursday night. PHOTO

BLUE WED: TAD WALTERS/JOHN DEE HOLEMAN 7TH ANNUAL NEWTONANNY DUKE STREET DOGS BLUE NOTE GRILL CHRISTMAS PARTY: HANDSOME AL & THE LOOKERS W/ EMMA DAVIS CHRISTMAS EVE: CLOSED CHRISTMAS DAY: CLOSED OPEN BLUES JAM

NEW Note to real indie BAND rock heads: this isn’t the Soft Power that Mary Timony of Wild Flag and Helium was fronting for a hot minute. No, this new project from local artists Gabrielle Duggan and Neill Prewitt will share the stage with Raleigh-via

Asheville electroacoustic project Oggetto. —DS [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $5/10 P.M.]

War in the Pocket RDU-RVA Scattered Raleigh R&B and Richmond residents War in the Pocket serve

Ill Digitz POST Although “Christmas PARTY in Hollis” and “Dipset X-Mas Time” are a treat, the history of Christmas hip-hop hasn’t always been exceptional compared with other genres. No worries: this post-Christmas, pre-New Year’s gathering with longtime area beatmaker Ill Digitz, of Kooley High and Inflowential fame, brings the spirit, even if the music isn’t specifically seasonal.

Just don’t ask him to play “Ludachristmas.” —DS [NEPTUNES PARLOUR, $5/10 P.M.] ALSO ON WEDNESDAY

Adwela & the Uprising REAL Frontman Adwela REGGAE Dawes leads this ascendant Culpepper, Virginiabased reggae outfit, which has garnered a following with a refreshingly hard-edged take on the genre. Eschewing the risible “party down” attributes of so much home-grown reggae, the Uprising hews closer in intent and execution to the tough, individual-

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

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32 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

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charm with understated, quasi-atmospheric soul production for a pleasurable, often funny ride through modern conscious rap. Local rap phenom Well$ opens. —DS [NIGHTLIGHT, $8/9 P.M.]

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Rescue Dawn / Mourning After

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Rebekah Todd & The Odyssey MAMMOTH INDIGO / Mature Fantasy

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“Christmas and “Dipset t, the p-hop ONGOING eptional enres. No Randy Ada: Photography. Thru tmas, Dec 31. Cup A Joe, Raleigh. ng with cspot.com. er Ill Digitz, owential Ruth Ananda: Painting. Thru even if the Jan 31. Bean & Barrel, Chapel seasonal. Hill. www.beanandbarrel.com. ay — Zola Craft Gallery, Durham. www.zolacraftgallery.com. $5/10 P.M.] Annual Community Art Exhibit: Group show. Thru Dec 31. The DAY ArtsCenter, Carrboro. www. lue artscenterlive.org.

RNER Annual Holiday Art Gallery et; 9 p.m. • Exhibit: Group show. Thru Jan Social Club; 5. ERUUF Art Gallery, Durham.

ARDLESS: www.eruuf.org.

30 p.m.

LAST Annual Holiday CHANCE Exhibition: Local artists. Thru Dec 21. Visual Art Exchange, Raleigh. www. visualartexchange.org.

Anywhere but here: Group show.

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

The Art of Giving: Mixed media.

Thru Dec 31. Hillsborough Gallery of Arts, Hillsborough. www.hillsboroughgallery.com.

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

FOR OUR COMPLETE COMMUNITY CALENDAR WWW.INDYWEEK.COM

12.21–12.28 to Koka Booth Amphitheatre to celebrate the Chinese New Year. More than twenty LED displays illuminate the woods surrounding Symphony Lake, including a fiery dragon, a pair of intricate swans, and a forest of trees with Santa and Frosty in the middle. While many of these works of art were shipped overseas from China, others were crafted on site by Chinese artisans. The festival also hosts cultural performances and sells artisan crafts. $10-$15. Thru Jan 15. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary. www.boothamphitheatre. com. —Erica Johnson. See story, p. 26.

LAST Christmas at Captain CHANCE White’s: Local, national, and international artists. Thru Dec 24. Captain James & Emma Holt White House, Graham.

Claymakers Instructors’ Holiday Showcase: Pottery. Thru Jan 7. Claymakers, Durham. www.claymakers.com.

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

Anthony Ulinski’s “Barns in Winter, Amherst VA #1” is on view at Artspace this month.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE ARTIST/GALLERY

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

Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

visually dazzling, politically charged exhibit, artists of international renown and local legends alike unravel clothing, costume, and ornament into identity politics, especially those pertaining to race. Through September. 21c Museum Hotel, Durham. www.21cmuseumhotels. com/durham. —Chris Vitiello LAST Eight is Enough: A CHANCE Kick Ass Group Show: John Geci, Elijah Leed, Ben Galata, Jean Christian Rostagni, Abie Harris, Peter Milne, Claire Ashby, and Peter Dugan. Thru Dec 23. Bull City Arts Collaborative: Upfront Gallery, Durham. www.bullcityarts.org.

Dress Up, Speak Up: Costume and Confrontation: In this

Fiber Art of the 21st Century: Ralph Wileman. Thru Dec 31.

Constants and Unknowns: Mixed media by Randy McNamara.

Thru Jan 13. Durham Arts Council, Durham. www. durhamarts.org.

Consummation: St. George.

Thru Jan 21. Naomi Studio and Gallery, Durham. www.

NaomiStudioandGallery.com.

Caroline Coven: Thru Jan 24.

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

submit! Got something for our calendar? EITHER email calendar@indyweek.com (include the date, time, street address, contact info, cost, and a short description) OR enter it yourself at posting.indyweek.com/indyweek/ Events/AddEvent. DEADLINE: Wednesday 5 p.m. for the following Wednesday’s issue. Thanks!

Horace Williams House, Chapel Hill. chapelhillpreservation.com.

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

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

Flight Lessons: Mixed media

by Kim Wheaton. Thru Jan 1.

Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

FREEDOM: The Experiment: Candy Carver, Raj Bunnag, Kenia Brea, Darius Quarles, and William Paul Thomas. Thru Dec 30. The Cary Theater, Cary.

The Great Outdoors: Robert Thurston. Thru Jan 29. Nature Art Gallery, Raleigh. www. naturalsciences.org. #Greenspaces: Paintings

by Judy Crane and Wendy Musser. Thru Feb 27. Betty Ray McCain Gallery, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

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

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

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

Jake and Charlie: Folk Art

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

LAST Janie Kimmel: CHANCE Mixed media. Thru Dec 23. Bull City Arts Collaborative: Upfront Gallery, Durham. www.bullcityarts.org.

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

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

My Favorite Things: Group show.

Thru Feb 4. Lee Hansley Gallery, Raleigh. leehansleygallery.com.

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

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

Nature on Canvas: Brian Moyer.

Thru Jan 23. Herbert C Young Community Center, Cary. www. townofcary.org.

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

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

Plein Air Painter’s Group Showcase: Thru Jan 28.

Artspace, Raleigh. www. artspacenc.org.

Quiet Season: Group show.

Thru Dec 31. Pleiades Gallery, Durham. www.

PleiadesArtDurham.com.

JJ Raia: Photography. Thru Jan 14. Through This Lens, Durham. www.throughthislens.com.

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

Thru Jan 15. NC Museum of Art, INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 33

art

screen

Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.— Chris Vitiello

Craft Collection, Raleigh. www. littleartgalleryandcraft.com.

Selma to Montgomery: A March for the Right to Vote: Photographs by Spider Martin.

Thru Mar 5. NC Museum of History, Raleigh. www. ncmuseumofhistory.org.

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

OPENING WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21

Traces: Drawings, photography, and sculptural objects by Angela Eastman and Sonja Hinrichsen.

Thru Jan 14. Artspace, Raleigh. www.artspacenc.org.

LAST Transgender USA: CHANCE Mariette Pathy Allen: Photography. Thru Dec 22. Power Plant Gallery, Durham.

Life magazine’s famous interview with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, a week after President John Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, serves as a framing device in Jackie, director Pablo Larraín’s biopic. It seems to promise to portray a strong, independent woman, derided and underestimated by her critics as “some silly little debutante,” as Natalie Portman, playing Kennedy, sputters. But the film keeps her locked into her husband’s orbit, from the White House to his death. There’s nothing of her life before or after Camelot, and ultimately, Jackie presents a woman without agency.

Between Kennedy doggedly trying to steer the Life interviewer’s first draft of history and the creation of the Camelot mythology, flashbacks chronicle the hours before and days after her husband’s death in Dallas, Texas. As docudrama, it’s a potent, surreal portrait of grief. An elegant first lady becomes a blood-spattered widow at the speed of a rifle shot, and the wheels of government grind on with uncharitable inevitability. Lyndon Johnson takes the oath of office on the plane back from Dallas; Lady Bird Johnson measures new drapes before Kennedy has moved out of the White House. Meanwhile, Kennedy harangues everyone from Jack Valenti (Max Casella) to Bobby Kennedy (Peter Sarsgaard) about a grand funeral procession to seal her husband’s legacy.

“We have to get this right, Bobby,” Kennedy intones, emblematic of the vapid script.

Still, Portman nails her performance, from her patrician mid-Atlantic accent to

Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art: This is less a simple exhibition than a speculative and critical archive of Southern identity. Slavery, the Civil War, racism, and their complex inheritances?

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

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

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

Transits and Migrations: A Summer in Berlin: Student photography. Thru Apr 15.

Center for Documentary Studies, Durham. cdsporch.org.

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

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

William Noland: Dream Rooms: Long video takes examining technology and intimacy. Thru Feb 5. NC Museum of Art, Raleigh. www.ncartmuseum.org.

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

Dawn Surratt: Photography.

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

Taking Flight: Stephen White.

Thru Dec 31. Little Art Gallery &

food FOOD EVENTS All American Holiday Dinner: $100. Thu, Dec 22, 7 p.m.

Standard Foods, Raleigh. www. standard-foods.com.

Christmas Eve Brunch: Sat, Dec 24, 11 a.m. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

Christmas Eve Dinner: A Merry Meal in the Fairview Dining Room: $75. Sat, Dec 24, 5:30 p.m. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

34 | 12.21.16 | INDYweek.com

JACKIE HH½

OPENING A Festive Christmas Eve Tea: $18-$35. Sat, Dec 24, noon. Washington Duke Inn & Golf Club, Durham. www. washingtondukeinn.com.

Raleigh Downtown Farmers Market: Wednesdays, 10 a.m.

Raleigh City Plaza, Raleigh.

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

Assassin’s Creed—Michael Fassbender’s got assassin in his blood in this videogame adaptation. Rated PG-13.

Fences—Denzel Washington and Viola Davis star in an adaptation of August Wilson’s play about the 1950s AfricanAmerican family. Rated PG-13.

Natalie Portman in Jackie PHOTO COURTESY OF FOX SEARCHLIGHT

her heart-wrenching anguish, disbelief, and poise. But the rest of the cast is unmemorable, if not outright awful.

Sarsgaard is the least convincing RFK ever. John Carroll Lynch looks nothing like LBJ. And while Dutch actor Caspar Phillipson bears a passing resemblance to JFK, all his lines are given to real-life audio of the former president. Songs from

Lawrence and Chris Pratt far from Earth. Rated PG-13.

Sing—An all-star cast enlivens this animated tale of a koala who puts on a singing contest to save his theater. Rated PG. Why Him?—A holiday gathering goes haywire when an overprotective dad meets his possible son-in-law . Rated R.

HH½ Jackie—See review, this

A L S O P L AY I N G

 La La Land—See review, p. 27. Rated PG-13.

The INDY uses a five-star rating scale. Read reviews of these films at www.indyweek.com.

Lion—An Indian boy survives privation until his rescue.

Years later, he must find out what happened. Rated PG-13.

 ½ Allied—Sexual tension, spousal spying, and glossy WWII nostalgia from director Robert Zemeckis. Rated R.

Passengers—An interstellar screwup maroons Jennifer

 Arrival—Denis Villeneuve’s thoughtful

page. Rated R.

the Lerner and Loewe musical Camelot are meant as the iconic coda to an era of lost innocence and historical mythmaking, but it’s unearned by the film’s limited scope and execution. —Neil Morris CHELSEA THEATER, CHAPEL HILL RIALTO THEATRE, RALEIGH Various times www.foxsearchlight.com/jackie

aliens-to-Earth film is less about first contact than first communication. Rated PG-13.  Doctor Strange— Marvel’s magic master’s feisty cape almost steals his movie.

Rated PG-13.  ½ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them—A promising start to a new Harry Potter franchise. Rated PG-13.  ½ Hacksaw Ridge—Mel Gibson clearly identifies with the religious persecution of conscientious objector Desmond Doss. Rated R.  ½ Manchester by the Sea—Casey Affleck’s brilliantly restrained performance powers Kenneth Lonergan’s quotidian tragedy.

Rated R.  Moonlight—Barry Jenkins’s must-see drama deals with a gay black man’s coming of age. Rated R.  Nocturnal Animals— Amy Adams’s emotional authenticity elevates fashion mogul Tom Ford’s glam pulp noir. Rated R.  Office Christmas Party— This holiday comedy follows in the National Lampoon tradition, but dirtier. Rated R.  Rogue One: A Star Wars Story—This war film set in the Star Wars universe takes place just before the first film. Rated PG-13.

stage LA LA LAND FENCES MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 21– FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23

ANDY WOODHULL The comedian Andy Woodhull, who recently released his third stand-up album, Step Parenting, is well named. He comes across like an Andy, an affable type with an open face and a benign air.

That makes it more funny to see his churlishness slip out, as when he slow-burns about his wife’s euphemistic protestations that she’s just “rinsing off” or “only resting my eyes.” Wondering about the purpose of clear nail polish, he strikes a note of Carlin-esque bemusement. On Jimmy Fallon,

ONGOING BIGG Holiday Mashup: Music, storytelling, and dance. $8-$14.

Thu, Dec 22, 6 p.m. Carolina Theatre, Durham. www. carolinatheatre.org.

Campaneria Ballet Company’s The Nutcracker and My Favorite Things: Dance. Wed, Dec 21, 6:30 p.m. & Thu, Dec 22, 6:30 p.m. Cary Arts Center, Cary. www.townofcary.org.

where he made his TV debut, he delivered a bit about head lice with just the right touch of reasonability before veering into a rumination on the fickle nature of friendship. Even treading familiar stand-up territory—sex, exes, body horror, and such—Woodhull’s an experienced joke teller with a willingness to step outside convention, making comedic hay out of his own experience of being a stepparent and other complicated subjects. — David Klein GOODNIGHTS COMEDY CLUB, RALEIGH Various times, $10–$18, www.goodnightscomedy.com

Carolina Ballet’s The Nutcracker: Dance. $27-$112.

Thru Dec 24, 7 p.m. Raleigh Memorial Auditorium, Raleigh.

Home for the Holidays: $10. Fri, Dec 23, 8:30 p.m. DSI Comedy Theater, Chapel Hill. www. dsicomedytheater.com.

Andy Woodhull: Standup comedy. $12-$18. Dec 21-23. Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh. www. goodnightscomedy.com.

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Musical: Musical. $13-$24. Thru Dec 24. Fletcher Opera Theater, Raleigh. www. dukeenergycenterraleigh.com.

INDYweek.com | 12.21.16 | 35

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DANCE CLASSES IN SWING, LINDY, BLUES, CHARLESTON

At ERUUF, Durham & ArtsCenter, Carrboro.

RICHARD BADU, 919-724-1421, rbadudance@gmail.com

INTRODUCTION TO BEEKEEPING CLASS

Jan 9 to Mar 6 - nine Monday evenings 6:30-8:30.

VFW Post, Reedy Creek Rd, Cary - Details and sign up www.baileybeesupply.com 919-241-4236

KEEP DOGS SHELTERED

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

MASSAGE BY MARK KINSEY

Swedish & deep tissue massage for stress relief. If you’re tense, I can help you relax.

Near Duke. MassageByMarkKinsey.com.

NCLMBT#6072. 919-619-6373.

YO U R A D H E R E

Get 170,000 pairs of eyeballs on your ad every week. Call 919-286-6642 for info.

919.286.6642

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Weekly deadline 4pm Monday • classy@indyweek.com