INDY Week May 10, 2023

Raleigh

CONTENTS

Durham

Chapel Hill

6 Local elections boards are dealing with harassment, an influx of public records requests, and the spread of disinformation. BY

8 A North Carolina woman felt forced to sell land she owned after racist vandals destroyed her property and video of the damage went viral.

10 Some college athletes are making big money from endorsements. Could they be paid as university employees next?

13 Durham's city council voted to permanently protect a heron rookery located on city-owned land.

ARTS & CULTURE

14 Tre. Charles speeds into the music industry with a haunting sound and a mindful message about slowing down.

16 On new solo release Between the Blades, Mipso’s Libby Rodenbough finds political arguments for cosmic inspiration. BY

18 Talking with folk musician Josh Ritter ahead of his Carolina Theatre performance stop in Durham.

19 Local dance groups are a way for Chinese American youth to connect with community and traditional culture.

THE REGULARS

3 Backtalk 4 Quickbait 20 Culture calendar

W E M A D E T H I S

PUBLISHER

John Hurld

EDITORIAL

Editor in Chief

Jane Porter

Managing Editor

Geoff West

Arts & Culture Editor

Sarah Edwards

Staff Writers

Jasmine Gallup

Lena Geller

Thomasi McDonald

Copy Editor

Iza Wojciechowska

Interns

Sarah Innes, Nathan Hopkins

Contributors

Spencer Griffith, Brian Howe, Kyesha Jennings, Jordan Lawrence, Glenn McDonald, Nick McGregor, Gabi Mendick, Shelbi Polk, Dan Ruccia, Rachel Simon, Byron Woods

CREATIVE

Creative Director

Nicole Pajor Moore

Graphic Designer

Izzel Flores

Staff Photographer

Brett Villena

ADVERTISING

Publisher

John Hurld

Sales Digital Director & Classifieds

Mathias Marchington

CIRCULATION

Berry Media Group

MEMBERSHIP/ SUBSCRIPTIONS

John Hurld

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A

Last week we took a sweeping look back at the origins of the INDY from its founding in the 1980s up to its sale from Steve Schewel to Richard Meeker in 2012. While we tried to recognize as many contributors as we could over the years on the written editorial side of the paper, we didn’t give space to a crucial contingent of contributors to INDY journalism from the past four decades: its photographers, illustrators, art directors, and many other creatives who have infused the paper with life through their work. JUSTIN COOK, a former staff photographer for the INDY, sent us the following note via email sharing his disappointment.

As a former INDY staff photographer (2013-2015), I am deeply disappointed to see that “The INDY at 40” package, particularly the 4,000-word Paper Route piece, contained not a single reference to the paper’s storied staff of photojournalists who contributed real reporting to the paper during its 40-year run. This is a tragic omission.

I know time and column inches are tight, but there wasn’t even an online gallery. No mention of Lissa Gotwals, MJ Sharp, Alex Maness, D.L. Anderson, Jeremy Lange or Alex Boerner. Where are Wendy Walsh and Alma Blount? For all the talk about inclusion, Black trans photographer Jade Wilson is nowhere to be seen.

We constantly generated our own stories and tried to report on Durham’s under-represented communities. This often required deep relationships with people who distrusted the media. It exposed us to tragedies and joy that we will never forget.

Kudos to Brian Howe for attempting an ambitious telling of the INDY’s origin and evolution. No history

can ever be told completely, but the truth is that our images and the work of the INDY art department carried the paper week in and week out.

Every INDY issue is the result of planning and editorial decisions. It’s clear that editors decided visual journalists were not a priority to this package. This says volumes about what the INDY brass believes is important to the INDY story.

I am proud of my work at the INDY, and look back fondly on that time in my life even though it wasn’t easy. If the purpose of journalism is to create “a healthy, inclusive, pluralistic democracy,” that requires a holistic understanding of the newsroom grounded in respect, which is lacking from this INDY at 40 coverage.

I sincerely hope that attitude changes through the INDY’s new partnership with The Assembly.

indyweek.com backtalk@indyweek.com

@INDYWeekNC @indyweek

I C K B A I T

Budget Breakdown

WUQith inflation on the rise, Wake County is considering raising property taxes to compensate for the increased cost of staff and services, according to the proposed budget for fiscal year 2024. An additional tax increase of 1 cent per $100 would pay for new school construction and renovation. Education makes up the biggest slice of the budget by far, but with affordable housing still a major concern for residents, the county also plans to invest nearly $20 million in new and existing initiatives. The county expects to approve a new budget June 5, after getting input from the public.

Proposed Tax Increases

3.25

• Adds $65 million to the budget

• Equals about 65.2¢ for every $100 of property value

• The owner of a $300,000 home would pay about $98 more in FY 2024

• Wake County needs more money to counter the impacts of inflation (averaged 8.6 percent last year)

• Construction and renovation of public schools and Wake Tech facilities

Wake County FY 2024 Budget Proposal

$1,864,435,000

$1.06 billion Education

• Wake County Smart Start (Pre-K) $5,173,828

• WCPSS operating $634,262,316 (increase of $40 million over FY 2023)

• Wake Tech operating $32,494,813 (increase of $2.4 million over FY 2023)

• WCPSS debt and capital $329.1 million

• Wake Tech debt and capital $56.1 million

$721.8 m i l l i o n Wake County Operating

15% 4% 4% 4%

General Government Infrastructure Public Safety Community and Environmental Services Human Services and Housing

• 2¢ increase in Special District Fire Tax (ONLY applies to people in unincorporated ares of Wake County and Wendell)

• 20 new positions for Wake County EMS

• $19.9 million for capital housing investments (affordable housing preservation, development, shelters)

• $1.3 million for home repair assistance to lowincome homeowners

• $20 million more (39 percent increase) for WakeBrook, core behavioral health crisis response facility

• Wake County living wage increasing to $19.64/hour and $40,851/year

• New 240-acre park (Beech Bluff County Park)

Next Steps

May 8 Budget work session

May 9, 15, 16 Budget public hearings

May 19 Public comment period closes

May 22 Budget work session

June 5 Board will consider adopting budget

Source: wake.gov/budget

Election Exhaustion

Last month, Republican lawmakers scored a major victory in their years-long campaign to restrict voting rights when the NC Supreme Court ruled in favor of gerrymandering, voter ID, and a law that denies parolees their right to vote.

Meanwhile, these same lawmakers are ignoring the fact that the only legitimate attacks on elections are coming from within their own political party.

Ever since the 2020 election, when former president Donald Trump falsely declared that the results were rigged, claims that election results are illegitimate have been on the rise.

In 2022, several prominent North Carolina Republicans who denied or cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election, including U.S. Senator Ted Budd, were elected to office. This year, two members of the Surry County Board of Elections were dismissed from their posts after refusing to certify local elections in November.

“From the 2020 election and even into the 2022 election, [we see this] continued disinformation about the election process itself,” says Katelin Kaiser, a voting rights lawyer for the Southern Coalition of Social Justice, “[like] voters receiving calls that Election Day is not today or that they need to turn in their absentee ballot on a day that’s not Election Day.”

For the past few years, local boards of elections have also been under heightened scrutiny. Some election workers have received threats, while others have been assaulted by so-called poll watchers. Gary Sims, who has

served as the director of the Wake County Board of Elections for eight years and is set to retire at the end of this month, can attest to the phenomenon personally.

“The world we live in has changed when it comes to elections,” says Sims, who has been in the business for more than 20 years.

“After 2020, who would have thought? I had to call the police on somebody for trying to break down the front door of my house. I have an armed officer every day in my office. We have to get our board members now to park behind barbed-wire fences when they come to board meetings.”

In the meantime, the elections department has also been swamped with public records requests, mostly from extreme conservatives who have outright stated on websites or social media that their goal is to impede the work of election officials.

“[The requests] are intentionally designed to bog down elections people,” Sims says.

“We have a network that follows and monitors their Telegram groups and conspiracy websites. That’s where they say, ‘OK, here’s our next action item. Start plastering your county boards with this.’”

“People are basically copying and pasting these public records requests,” Sims adds.

“It’s not a matter of ‘Hey, can you send me this?’ It’s just so voluminous, what they’re asking for, and you can’t get to the next record because you’re still dealing with the one you got. We see five or six pop up in one day sometimes.”

The intent of these requests is “absolutely” obstructive, Sims says. Many of them

are mapped out by conspiracy theorists like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who is infamous for denying the results of the 2020 election. (Lindell is now being sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems and has been ordered to pay $5 million in an election fraud challenge with which he has so far refused to comply.)

The influx of public records requests— which in Wake County grew from 16 in 2018 to 60 in 2020 and 171 in 2022— has had the intended effect. Managing these requests has become a full-time job, prompting Wake County to hire a new public records coordinator last year, Danner McCulloh.

“There’s so much that goes into administering [elections], and just receiving all these requests every day, whether they’re small or large, we have to keep everything on track,” McCulloh says. “It does take a team.”

How to run an election

Conspiracy theorists and disinformation aren’t the only new challenges elections administrators are facing. Elections changed drastically during the COVID pandemic, when staff had to figure out how to get people to the polls safely, and again after the pandemic subsided, when the rates of early voting and mail-in ballots skyrocketed.

In 2020, 83.6 percent of the 5.5 million North Carolinians who voted did so either

early or by mail. That’s a big jump over the roughly 66 percent of voters who voted early or by mail during the 2016 general election. And the trend has continued. In 2022, the majority of North Carolina voters (58 percent) continued to vote early or by mail. That’s slightly more than the 54 percent of voters who voted early or by mail in 2018.

Those jumps don’t come without cost. With inflation on the rise, Wake County budget director David Ellis recently estimated that the Wake County Board of Elections will spend an additional $32,000 during the 2024–25 fiscal year to mail out absentee ballots and other voter materials. The cost of running elections is on the rise, and some county departments are struggling to keep up.

A recent report from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice reveals that some county departments of elections in North Carolina have seen a “consistent decline in funding,” including Cumberland, Richmond, and Onslow Counties. Others remain underfunded in the face of growing populations, despite regular increases to their budgets.

Even Wake County, which currently has the highest election department budget in the state at $10.2 million, could use a few thousand more dollars for four or five additional staffers, according to Sims.

In terms of funding, the Wake County Board of Commissioners has been supportive of the elections department, Sims says. But he and others are still trying to get hundreds of thousands of people to the polls,

Local boards of elections are dealing with harassment, an influx of public records requests, and the spread of disinformation.

produce more than 100 different types of ballots, and audit hundreds of campaign finance reports, all with about 40 full-time employees.

“We have to be very efficient in what we’re doing,” Sims says. “Once we get to election time, when we go to a seven-daysa-week operation, with 14- or 15-hour days, you want to make sure you’re not working your staff into a burnout situation. I’m not saying I’m not properly staffed, but I think if you ask anybody in any department, people … [are] the number one need.”

Wake County’s elections department “has not experienced a higher-than-average turnover rate due to burnout,” according to Sims. But the same can’t be said of other, more rural elections departments. Earlier this year, in Virginia, an entire county’s elections staff quit amid false claims of voter fraud.

Why is election funding important?

In the effort to keep elections free and fair, funding county elections departments is key. The report from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice highlights a slew of practical concerns for elections directors: a need to update voting machines so they don’t fail on Election Day; a need for in-house tech support to manage the computers, printers, and other technology staff regularly use during elections; and a need for more office space.

But in addition to those practical concerns, the report also highlights larger problems, one of which is a need for livable wages for election and poll workers, according to Kaiser.

“We’re seeing this trend in North Carolina of experienced and trusted election officials leaving … because of the stress and the burden and the [fact they don’t] have a livable wage for their family and themselves,” Kaiser says.

Most elections directors also “expressed frustration at the rise of election-denier conspiracy rhetoric,” adding that “the lack of voter education exacerbates the spread of conspiracy theories,” the report states.

In the counties where elections budgets are being reduced, “that decline in funding

is directly related to voter experiences,” says Kaiser. For voters, that could mean driving 45 minutes to an early voting site, waiting in long lines, casting ballots on outdated equipment, or being confused about when, where, and how to vote.

Not many people pay attention to the

amount of money being given to their county board of elections, but it’s essential. Research from the Southern Coalition for Social Justice has shown a correlation between the amount of money spent on elections and voter turnout.

“We’ve seen, for example, that Onslow County actually had one of the worst voter turnouts in 2022 and they also spent the least amount of money on elections per voter,” Kaiser says.

“That ties into counties not having many voting sites … or having extremely long lines on Election Day, or not having accessible information about voting …. It creates a climate where voters feel like ‘What’s the point? This is not an easy process for me.’”

It’s to that end that the Southern Coalition for Social Justice is trying to mobilize people to advocate for more election funding, Kaiser says.

“We have people who are engaged, who are wanting to ensure that elections are free and open and transparent and participatory,” she says. “Our whole goal with doing this research … is to engage people and provide transparency. To say that there is something that we can do. We can continue to advocate for particular [budget] line items that impact the community and build a stronger understanding about why election budgets are so essential.”

If given more money, many elections directors talked about “better engaging the public through more voter outreach and education,” according to the report.

“Directors almost always mentioned their desire to launch innovative programs to encourage the public to learn more about the work of elections officials, advertise elections in public spaces, and make the entire elections process—voter registration, in-person voting, and absentee voting—more accessible for all,” the report states. “They cannot further reach the public and achieve these goals due to their lack of funding.” W

“We’re seeing this trend in North Carolina of experienced and trusted election officials leaving [their jobs].”

Hate Crimes

A Charlotte woman felt forced to sell land she owned in Salisbury after her property was vandalized and video of the damage went viral.

The street in Salisbury where Angel Pittman tried to start her business is named Celestial Drive. Her experiences there have been anything but heavenly. More to the point: Pittman’s life on Celestial Drive has been hell.

In February, Pittman paid off the balance of the $10,000 for the plot of land she had purchased.

This month, Pittman put the land up for sale after someone spray-painted “F—— You N—— B——” on one of the three buses she parked on the property and damaged the other two and after her next-door neighbor acted in a most unneighborly fashion when he told her to “get the f—— out of my front yard” while brandishing a black handgun.

“It looked like a Glock,” Pittman says.

From the time she was a teenager, Pittman had dreamed of transforming an old school bus into a mobile hair salon. She was inspired and encouraged by her dad, who owns a food truck.

When Pittman learned that one of her clients sells old school buses in New York for $1,000 each, she bought three of them. She wanted to repurpose two of the vehicles into tiny houses and transform the third into a hair salon. Land is expensive in Charlotte, where Pittman lives with her parents. So her mom, Darlean Hopes, who is a realtor, found the grassy lot buttressed by a stand of trees for sale on Celestial Drive.

“The grass was pretty high, but it was cut when I purchased it,” Pittman says. “It was a nice little parcel of land.”

Pittman and her parents drove the three buses to the lot. About a week later, in September, Pittman returned to Celestial Drive with her dad, Michael Pittman Jr.

“As soon as dad pulled up in the truck, we saw in big letters the word ‘n——’ on my bus,” Pittman says. “They had wrote ‘b——’ and ‘f—— you’ on the [hood of the bus].”

Pittman says she “immediately started recording” with her phone camera. But she and her dad were hesitant

about getting out of the truck, thinking the vandals may have set booby traps in the grass.

The passenger windows had been sprayed black. Someone had knocked the bumpers off the vehicles. The glass door had been smashed on one of the buses. Windows were shattered.

“It’s like they had a party out there and destroyed my buses,” Pittman says.

Her nearly three-minute recording of the destruction went viral, with about 5.1 million views on TikTok and 3.4 million more on Instagram. The snapshot of racial hatred was picked up by the national online news site The Root and even went across the pond, where it was reported in an edition of The Guardian in London.

Pittman’s grandmother later told the INDY that “a lot of people have reached out to [Pittman]” after viewing her video of the racist vandalism of her buses. One of the people who reached out was NBA basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal, who told her “not to worry” because “they have her back.”

Full disclosure: Pittman’s grandmother is my aunt, Barbara “Coo” Pittman. She and my uncle Michael were sweethearts since ninth grade in the 1960s. They have been married for more than 50 years and reside in Guilford County. My aunt Coo is a sweet, devout, and unfailingly polite woman. She endured Jim Crow; witnessed the beginnings of the civil rights movement while growing up; and was a junior in high school in 1969, when schools in Richmond County integrated, 15 years after the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools.

My aunt Coo has never stopped believing in the American Dream, and when it comes to her granddaughter Angel, she believes in what former First Lady Michelle Obama once said: “Every girl, no matter where she lives, deserves the opportunity to develop the promise inside of her.”

After observing the damage to their buses, Pittman and

her dad called 911 and waited for a law enforcement officer to arrive. They got back into their truck and drove slowly down Celestial Drive.

Pittman says she saw for the first time a Confederate flag flying high in the yard of the home in front of her grassy lot.

“I had never seen that before,” she says about the traitorous, deeply racist flag.

Pittman also noticed “three or four statues.” Someone had outfitted the garden gnomes in Ku Klux Klan robes and hoods.

She also saw a “swastika symbol on the trailer” that sat on the left side of her property.

“That was not there before as well,” she says. “When we came before, I didn’t see any of that stuff, and we looked around when we first came here.”

“I was thinking, ‘What in the world is going on here?’” she says. “It was like [her neighbor] had all types of ‘I don’t like Black people’ stuff taped to his whole house.”

It got worse.

Pittman says her armed neighbor whose yard featured the Confederate flag and KKK gnomes stood on his porch and asked, “Can I help you with something?”

Pittman says her dad told the neighbor no and that’s when he replied, “Well, get the f—— out of my yard, and get them f——ing buses off my land.”

“That’s when he showed us a gun,” Pittman adds.

Pittman shared videos of the incident that shows her vandalized buses and the gaunt, bearded white man with tattoos on his forearm and a black pistol in his hand.

Pittman says her dad backed the truck up onto their grassy lot and waited for the police. It was about an hour and half later, at 11:53 a.m., when Rowan County sheriff’s deputy C.J. Blackwell arrived at the 1000 block of Celestial Drive, according to an incident report obtained by the INDY

Blackwell reported that the three 2006 Chevy Express buses were targets of vandalism.

The incident report did not state whether the damage done to the buses was a hate crime. And Blackwell closed his investigation without making an arrest.

Pittman says that after surveying the damage Blackwell said, “Oh! They do this all the time,” and the culprits “didn’t like their new neighbors.”

“They let us know how they feel all the time,” Pittman recalls Blackwell telling her.

Capt. J. McDaniel recently told the INDY that the sheriff’s office had received calls about Pittman’s neighbor prior to her move into the neighborhood, but he says Blackwell told him the Confederate flag and KKK gnomes were at the home months before her arrival.

Not so, says Pittman.

“When we arrived to close [on the sale of the land] there were no signs of hate toward Black people,” she says. “None of the flags, statues, and symbols were there.”

No arrests have been made in the case. An armed, irate neighbor notwithstanding, maybe those racist gnomes did it. And whoever did it will likely disregard the no-trespassing signs the sheriff’s office advised the Pittmans to erect on the property.

Given the rash of shootings by armed, tense, and fearful men across the country, Pittman and her family should feel fortunate.

“We’re looking for a lawyer,” she says. Still, the racist destruction backfired. Pittman set up a GoFundMe page to remove and repair the buses and so far, thousands of people across the country and abroad have donated nearly $120,000.

The KKK-robed garden gnomes won’t see a dime. W

“I was thinking, ‘What in the world is going on here?’ It was like he had all types of ‘I don’t like Black people’ stuff taped to his house.”

Pay for Play

Some college athletes are now making big money from endorsements. Next up: whether they should be paid as university employees.

During spring practice, UNC-Chapel Hill star quarterback Drake Maye rises at 5:45 a.m., eats breakfast, attends a short football meeting, and participates in drills until 10:30 a.m.

He races to get to his first class by 11 and finishes with another at 1:30. He attends a series of football meetings in the afternoon, including watching video of games and practices, and typically finishes at 7:00 p.m.

“That’s a long day,” said his father, Mark Maye, a former UNC quarterback who described his son’s schedule to The Assembly. Maye has three other sons who played or still play college sports, including former UNC basketball standout Luke Maye. “I’ve really come around to the idea that they are more like employees.”

College athletes are considered amateurs—but they are the essential components of what has become a multibillion-dollar entertainment enterprise.

As coaches, administrators, and TV executives made more and more money from college football and men’s basketball, various college athletes laid the legal groundwork for why they should be paid for their labor. But none of those lawsuits fundamentally changed the business.

That is, until 2021, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that college athletes could be paid by outside sources for use of their name, image, and likeness—essentially, for endorsements. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was blunt in his concurring opinion.

“The NCAA’s business model would be flatly illegal in almost any other industry in America,” he wrote. The NCAA, the governing body of college sports, had built “a massive money-raising enterprise on the backs of student

athletes who are not fairly compensated.”

Since then, some college stars have signed lucrative deals. The mother of Armando Bacot, a UNC-Chapel Hill basketball star (and business major), told Sports Illustrated last year that her son was set to earn more than $500,000 in 2022.

Drake Maye might have turned down a lot more than that.

At a press conference in December, UNC football coach Mack Brown said that Maye “was offered a lot of money to go” to another program, which is against NCAA rules; University of Pittsburgh coach Pat Narduzzi then said that two schools offered Maye $5 million, presumably in endorsement deals, to transfer. Narduzzi was complaining on a talk radio show about new rules that allow players to transfer every year.

“We’re the mini-NFL,” Brown recently told Sports Illustrated. “That’s where we are headed. We will never see amateurism again. It’s gone. I hate it.”

With all this money flowing to star players, college sports fans might have assumed that compensation for college athletes was a settled issue.

Far from it. The biggest, thorniest, most polarizing matter lies ahead.

The marketing and advertising deals available to college athletes don’t include compensation from the universities themselves. The next evolutionary step is becoming more and more likely: treating college athletes as employees— and compensating them accordingly.

In December, the Los Angeles region of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) found merit in an unfair

labor practice charge filed on behalf of University of Southern California football and basketball players seeking recognition as university employees.

The NLRB said the university, the Pac-12 Conference, and the NCAA had “misclassified scholarship basketball and football players as mere ‘student athletes’ rather than employees entitled to protections under the law.” The issue will be heard by a federal administrative law judge and ultimately could be appealed in federal court.

The NLRB’s Chicago office previously found that Northwestern University football players spent 1,750 hours a year on football, or an average of 36 hours a week. They spent 50 to 60 hours a week during the August preseason; 40 to 50 hours during the season; and 12 to 25 hours in the spring.

In that case, the Chicago office said the Northwestern players should be considered employees, but the full NLRB declined in 2015 to assert jurisdiction.

Some analysts believe the full NLRB will decide to hear the Southern Cal case. The NLRB only has jurisdiction over private employers—including private universities such as Southern Cal—but if the players win, the NCAA would be forced to address the issue for public universities also.

Jay Bilas, the ESPN analyst, lawyer, and former Duke University basketball player, is unequivocal that college athletes should be paid as employees.

“Right now, [college] athletes fit every criteria you would have in an employee,” he said. “They’re under the dominion and control of the university. They’re told when to play and when not to. To me, it’s very clear.”

Disrupting the business model

Wake Forest University law professor Timothy Davis, one of the nation’s leading authorities on sports law, views the issue as a question of fairness.

“Advocates for athletes, as well as the public, see the enormous amount of revenue that is generated by college sports, primarily men’s basketball and football,” Davis said. “They think it’s unfair, out of balance. The sense is they should share in some of the revenue.”

The money keeps growing. Athletic departments for Division I schools (the highest level of college sports) make money from ticket sales, royalties and licensing, donor contributions, and student fees. But the biggest source is revenue from media rights, which includes television and digital streaming.

The NCAA, which draws nearly all its income from a media-rights deal for the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, receives $1 billion annually for March Madness. Most of that money goes to the universities.

Same with the College Football Playoff, which is separate from the NCAA. It’s expected to secure a new deal with an expanded 12-team field for nearly $2.2 billion per year.

The Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) has a media rights deal worth roughly $500 million per year. (That’s considerably less than the Big Ten’s new seven-year $7 billion deal.)

Three of North Carolina’s four ACC schools—UNC, Duke, and NC State University—have annual athletic revenues of more than $100 million, and Wake Forest University has $85 million. (Ohio State University generates the most nationally, with $252 million for the 2021–22 fiscal year.)

College administrators feel the pressure to change—but they don’t want to. Paying athletes would disrupt their business model, especially if they had to compensate athletes in every sport. UNC, for example, has 28 varsity sports.

If all college athletes had to be paid, some universities might cut sports, both men’s and women’s. The federal law called Title IX requires universities to treat male and female athletes equally, but it’s unclear if that law would apply if football and men’s basketball players were paid from revenues generated from their sports. Those are the only two sports that typically make money.

In a recent article in The New York Times, University of Notre Dame’s president and athletics director urged Congress to block athletes from being considered employees.

“College athletics is a treasured national institution,” wrote Rev. John Jenkins and Jack Swarbrick. “Professionalizing teams, treating athletes more as employees than as students and weakening the vital connection with the educational mission of their colleges will rob college athletics of its special character.”

Traditionalists agree. If college athletes become employees, they’d fall under the same wage and hour guidelines as everyone else, said state labor commissioner Josh Dobson. They’d have to make the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, and would get overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week.

But Dobson hopes that doesn’t happen.

“There’s something majestic in college sports, to me, that makes it special, makes it unique,” said Dobson, a college sports junkie who roots for Appalachian State University. “If you go down that road, I think there’s the potential to dilute college sports.”

Supporters of the status quo view the athlete-university

relationship as a partnership. In exchange for a scholarship, an athlete gets the chance to compete at a high level, often with good coaching and in good facilities, and potentially become a professional or Olympic athlete.

“People have viewed it as a one-way street, that we’ve held the athletes down,” said former NC State basketball star Debbie Antonelli, who served as director of marketing for Ohio State athletics and is now a college basketball TV analyst. “I don’t think we’ve done that at all.”

In the 1990s, Louis Perkins played tennis at NC Central University, and was an Academic All-American. Now he’s Central’s athletics director. “Being a student-athlete, in modern times, yes it’s a job,” he said.

But Perkins doesn’t know how he would pay athletes in 15 varsity sports. “That’s not an option,” he said. He’s working with a tight, $12 million budget.

The wealthier athletic programs, like those in the ACC, might be able to pay athletes. But schools with smaller budgets “are nowhere near ready for this,” he said. “It will further separate the haves from the have nots.”

John Currie, Wake Forest’s director of athletics, said he

The three-judge panel did not appear swayed by the NCAA’s core principle that athletes shouldn’t be paid. A decision is expected later this year.

Increasingly, the debate is shifting to how compensation would work. How much would the athletes be paid? Would they get overtime? Would they be eligible for a retirement plan? Could a coach fire an underperforming player?

The day after the lawyers argued in Philadelphia, California state representative Chris Holden introduced the College Athlete Protection Act. Holden, who played basketball at San Diego State University, spoke with reporters outside the historic Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena.

The bill calls for football and men’s basketball players in California to be paid up to $25,000 annually. Colleges also would be required to cover the costs of athletic scholarships for six years, and pay medical expenses for college sports injuries, even after graduation.

Some envision a hybrid form of compensation for the profitable sports—football and men’s basketball.

Amy Perko, CEO of the nonprofit Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and a former Wake Forest basketball player, envisions treating athletes like medical school residents. “They’re under contract, being paid a salary, but they’re still part of the educational mission,” she said.

Nonrevenue sports could be preserved through student fees or direct financial support from the university, said Holden Thorp, former chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill.

“All the Division II and III universities are paying for [sports], and you never hear that some faculty at a D-II school got upset about the cost of the athletics program,” said Thorp, who was the provost of Washington University in St. Louis, which is in Division III.

Dewayne Washington was an NC State football star in the early 1990s, then had a 12-year NFL career and now serves on the school’s board of trustees. He’s concerned that the player-coach relationship would change to an employee-boss dynamic. But overall, he said, paying college players wouldn’t be bad, just different: “Over time, we’d get used to it.”

doesn’t consider playing a college sport to be work. And he said Wake couldn’t afford to pay players without cutting other parts of the athletics budget.

But he said college administrators need to recognize that the public has long viewed the athletes as employees—and that change is coming.

Bilas, the former Duke player, is unmoved by the nostalgia some feel toward the amateur model.

“Amateurism doesn’t do anything for the athlete—doesn’t make them a better athlete, person, or student,” he said.

“It just means the school has total control and they don’t have to come out of pocket with regards to anything in the way of payment. I’ve always thought that was wrong, to the point of being immoral.”

“The train is moving”

The U.S. Court of Appeals’ Third Circuit in Philadelphia heard oral arguments on January 18 for the case Johnson v. NCAA. Trey Johnson, a former Villanova University football player, argued that under the Fair Labor Standards Act, Division I athletes are employees and thus entitled to minimum wage and overtime pay.

“The train is moving,” said Washington. “I don’t think you can stop it. We’ve got to have some guardrails so we don’t fall off.”

The Duke Model

David Grenardo has been waiting for this moment for six years. Few people have given as much thought to how colleges could pay athletes as the former Rice University football player.

“Could it be done? Absolutely!” he said. “It happens every single day in all the industries in the United States. There’s plenty of money to go around.”

Grenardo graduated in 2002 from Duke Law School. In 2017, when he was teaching at another law school, he published a paper called “The Duke Model” that laid out a statistics-based system for compensating college football and men’s basketball players. He is now a professor at the University of St. Thomas law school in Minneapolis. (Duke University has not endorsed Grenardo’s plan and declined comment for this article.)

The Duke Model features tiered payments based on playing time and bonuses for outstanding performance. Grenardo says it can be adapted for any college sport, men’s and women’s.

“Amateurism doesn’t do anything for the athlete, doesn’t make them a better athlete, person, or student. It just means the school has total control ... I always thought that was wrong.”

It includes base compensation derived from playing time and bonuses for athletic and academic performance. Conferences would determine how much money was available to compensate athletes and would set limits on pay to maintain competitive balance. Each school would submit its financial data to the NCAA.

The base compensation for football players in the largest conferences (such as the ACC) who start every game would be $40,000.

Players who led the team in various statistical categories, such as passing, rushing, tackles, and interceptions, would receive a $5,000 bonus per category. Players who received all-conference or All-American honors also would receive a bonus, as would teams who won postseason games.

A star running back could receive $40,000 in base compensation; $10,000 in bonuses for leading his team in two statistical categories; $22,500 for individual honors; and $9,500 for team success, for a total of $82,000.

Grenardo calculated that a backup player could make $29,500.

The total for a team with one first-team All-American that made it to the semifinal round of the playoffs would be less than $2.5 million.

That kind of season “would reap millions of dollars in revenue for the university, some of which should be allocated to pay the players for achieving those successes for the school,” Grenardo wrote in his paper.

Universities can afford to pay their players, he wrote. One option: they could reallocate coaching salaries. He used the University of Kentucky basketball program as an example.

In men’s basketball, the base compensation would be based on minutes played. A player who averaged 35 minutes a game would receive $35,000. Players who led the team in scoring, rebounding, blocked shots, or steals would get a $5,000 bonus. As in football, there would be bonuses for individual honors and team success.

Grenardo calculated that a basketball

team that won its conference championship and made it to the Final Four with a national player of the year and two all-conference players would have a total compensation of $571,800. In 2017, Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari had a salary of $7.4 million.

“The incentives align with the players— the more they play, the more they get paid,” Grenardo said. “It aligns for the coaches as well. They want the players to want to play more, and they want to play the best players.”

Even smaller athletic departments could figure out a way to reallocate money to pay their athletes, he said.

Grenardo’s plan compensates football and men’s basketball players. If universities had to meet Title IX requirements, they could spend an amount equal to that compensation on women’s sports, which “could lead to a significant increase in spending on

women’s college athletics,” he wrote.

Grenardo pushed back when asked if a system like this could lead to issues with team chemistry and jealousy. Players wouldn’t just be competing for playing time; they’d be competing for pay.

“All those issues are nonsensical to me,” he said. “I’m not going to play worse and jeopardize my playing time to make somebody else look worse.”

Grenardo believes paying college players is inevitable. He says that universities should take the initiative to adopt a model like his before something else—possibly more expensive—is forced upon them by Congress or the U.S. Justice Department.

He also has published a free-market plan in which schools would compensate athletes based on their market value, although teams would have a salary cap to maintain competitive balance.

He said: “All I care about is, eventually, they start getting paid.” W

“The incentives align with the players— the more they play, the more they get paid. It aligns for the coaches ... They want the players to want to play more, and they want to play the best players.”

For the Birds

Durham’s city council voted to permanently protect a heron rookery located on city-owned land.

At a Durham City Council meeting, you can expect to see a diversity of ethnicities, genders, religions, and opinions in the audience. Last Monday’s meeting also included a diversity of species. Hand-painted blue birds, raised on wooden sticks, sat interspersed among the audience members, making a special guest appearance.

The birds in question? Artistic representations of the 160 great blue herons and great egrets who have built a home in northeast Durham. In the halls of city council, on the first night of May, the birds’ future was decided.

In a 4–2 vote, the council voted to assign 215 acres of city-owned property to a dedicated nature preserve, ensuring permanent protection by the state of North Carolina.

The Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Durham, proposed the measure, along with the NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The two groups have pushed to protect this city-owned parcel of land, one of the few sites in North Carolina’s Piedmont region where great blue herons and great egrets nest.

During the meeting, five passionate advocates took the stand to argue for permanent protection, and four joined via Zoom. Passion for this cause extended beyond the podium. Throughout the evening, as the audience waved their illustrations of the great blue herons mounted on wooden sticks, council members described being inundated with emails calling for a dedicated nature preserve for the rookery.

“We need all of these plants, we need all of the wildlife, we need all biodiversity to continue to live,” Durham resident Bonita Green said over Zoom. “It needs to be dedicated as a state nature preserve so that we can preserve this wildlife for the animals, as well as for humans for our physical and mental health.”

Council members were united on the importance of the land’s preservation. “The question is not whether or not we should protect it—but how?” said Mayor Pro Tem Mark-Anthony Middleton.

Throughout the meeting, environmental jargon flew through the air, representing a fundamental conflict. City staffers proposed the creation of a city-controlled registered heritage area to protect the rookery, while the environmentalists proposed a dedicated nature preserve through the state Natural Heritage Program. Both dedicated nature preserves and registered heritage areas advance conservation efforts and protect regional biodiversity. David Fleischer, a city general services department representative,

said a dedicated nature preserve designation cannot be undone.

“It is truly permanent and perpetual. The only instance in which it could be undone is an act of the governor and the Council of State,” he said.

Council member DeDreana Freeman advocated for the dedicated nature preserve throughout the meeting.

“This council has been responsible for building in a wetland numerous times,” she said. “So … the permanency of having state protections in place feels like we’re working towards climate resilience and not against it.”

Some notable dedicated nature preserves in North Carolina include Eno River State Park and Jordan Lake game lands. Contrastingly, a registered heritage area can be undone at any point by the city council. Some local registered heritage areas include Duke Forest and Bennett Place Forest.

Proponents of the Ellerbe Creek proposal urged the council to pursue state protection.

“There is protection, and there is permanent protection,” said local resident Dave Connolly. “The staff’s recommendation is reasonable and should be good enough for today but might not necessarily protect the egret sanctuary for the future.”

Ricky White, executive director of the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association, said more funding is available to dedicated sites than registered sites. He also attempted to ease concerns regarding state involvement. Permanent protection “doesn’t mean that the state can then do random things to the property. It just means that the state can monitor the activities of the property, and if it’s not being conserved, then they can act legally to enforce that,” he said.

In order to accommodate infrastructure concerns, the proposal was amended prior to the meeting to allow for an 800-foot-wide carve-out for future parkway construction. During Monday night’s discussion, council member Jillian Johnson raised other questions regarding the impact of the new designation on future Durham development. In

response to questioning by Johnson, Fleischer noted that the vast majority of the area in question is not developable because it sits on a floodplain. Of the 215 proposed acres, only “a small, about 30-acre section” could potentially be developed, he said.

Council members Johnson and Middleton voted no on the proposed motion.

“I think we’re all committed to preserving this land—there’s no controversy there,” Middleton said. “But I can’t support this motion tonight. I think there are too many unanswered questions …. We can achieve protecting this land, and the birds, without moving with lightning speed tonight.”

In the end, the motion moved forward and the council reached what Mayor Elaine O’Neal described as “step one” of a long process of ensuring protection for the city’s winged residents. W

Awake at the Wheel

Tre. Charles speeds into the music industry with a haunting sound and a mindful message about slowing down.

Ilike Tre. Charles’s music all the time, but there’s a special way it hits early in the morning. When emails, songs, and pitches are swarming around me with stressful speed, new Tre. is about the only thing that will drown it all out for a few minutes, laying me back in my chair to breathe. Drawing on an itinerant 32-year life’s worth of influences—emotional ’90s rock and ’00s hip-hop, neo-soul and alternative R&B, choral music and canons—the Durham resident, whose given name is Trey Charles Horton, has arrived at a style I think of as ambient soul. His songs come in clouds of trappings: skating drum machines and hovering plug-in strings, stretched and shifted vocal harmonies, and long-tailed reverbs and delays that hum like cathedrals. This labyrinth of sound, blurred at the edges yet sharply etched in the middle, is where we find his just-woke-up voice and glinting guitar, his fingers tweezing jazzy splinters from thick barre chords.

The overall effect is calming, but in a transfixing, time-halting way, like dancing candlelight.

“I used to get so annoyed when people would tell me, ‘Your music is so relaxing,’” he says. “I guess that’s just the natural way I play. I love the big, lush reverb sound. I love the space, the scope, all that room to feel the song.”

He’s a big guy, with a deep, inquisitive voice and soft, open features. He has a background in modeling; you could easily picture him wearing a big quilted coat and small smile in an Urban Outfitters ad. We spoke over several convivial meetings at Durham spots like Queeny’s and Corpse Reviver.

“I used to love singing in big parking garages and churches because I loved how big my voice could be,” he goes on, “and there were so many people telling me, ‘You shouldn’t do this; you’re not that good at it; you should probably stick to something else.’ They wanted to put me in a box, and I

let them for a long time.”

One wall of that box was being a Black man plastered with stereotypes of aggression that were at odds with his inner wells of feelings.

“Now I’m like, naw, this is who I am currently,” he says. “It might not be who I am tomorrow, but it’s who I am now.”

Currently. is the four-song EP that Tre. Charles has been working on and releasing bits of since 2019, when a neardeath experience got him started on his music career, making videos and playing more than 300 brewery, venue, and festival gigs. His music’s invitation to slow down is made plain in soft, measured, taut laments about life in the toofast lane like “Lately.” and “Stressin.”

The EP is a concise gem, never doing any more or less than needed musically. But it does raise a question: Can you pursue vulnerability and mindfulness in an industry that runs on hardness and hustle?

Tre. Charles lived in Syracuse, New York, until age 10, when his family started moving around a lot for his father’s work as a civil engineer. In North Carolina, home was mainly the Concord area. He sang baritone in his high school chorus, a role he didn’t like. He could sing low, so it’s what he was assigned. Now he sings in a hushed, expressive tenor that fits just inside the pocket of his quietly booming arrangements.

“Moving around a lot, music was one of the things I could have as a constant,” he says. “And I was always picking up new music in different areas I would go to.”

He got into skate and surf stuff in Florida and California, ’90s R&B like Boyz II Men and Jodeci and contemporary tastemakers like Frank Ocean and Sampha, the golden age of DatPiff and Dipset mixtapes, all kinds of things. But when he started college at UNC Pembroke, he says, “I played some cowboy chords, and that was it. C, G—I couldn’t play an A because I didn’t know how to get the three fingers right there.”

He was then pursuing modeling and acting. He got a county tourism commercial here, a community college bill-

board there. The exposure was good, but the money wasn’t, so he packed his belongings in his Jeep Grand Cherokee and headed for LA to give it a bigger try. The living situation he’d arranged turned out badly, so he stayed for just a few months, playing his guitar on a rooftop, journaling, and feeling the need to change course.

Afterward, he landed in Richmond, Virginia, working at a country club and testing the edges of the music scene. But he had studied restaurant work in college, and he was getting more and more sucked into that world, moving to Charlotte for a job in 2016.

“I still wanted to be in the music scene, but I didn’t have the confidence to get in there,” he says. “In high school, people knew me as someone who sang, not as a singer, so that’s where the imposter syndrome came in.” He started making videos, mostly covers, but he felt aimless for the next few years, until January 2019, when everything changed.

keep pursuing something I don’t love, living for the idea of safety or happiness or success.’ So it was kind of a divine intervention, like, stop.”

“Stressin.” came first and has built up respectable numbers for an emerging artist, with its beautiful feel of gentle rolling and blossoming.

“I had a lot of life experience and creativity pent in,” he says. “The mentality I had was that I was going to be more vulnerable because I wasn’t necessarily a person to share my emotions. But I always connected to songs that were super sad and had a lot of pain.”

He set about really learning guitar, studying YouTube videos until the chords matched what he felt. “The minimal sound is more relatable to me personally” than the Auto-Tuned one that some industry folks have urged upon him, he says. (For the record, it’s a terrible idea.)

“You can dress it up and make it seem prettier, but it’s supposed to be this raw

It happened in the wee hours of the morning. One moment, Tre. Charles was driving to Florida for a restaurant ownership training program. He had his guitar and a Mac with him, but it still felt like he was just running on tracks.

Then he saw a flash of bright light. The next thing he knew, he was very cold and didn’t know why. His car’s horn was blaring, and his turn signal was ticking. “And I just heard the air,” he remembers, “the night air, because the windows were smashed open.”

He was pinned in the car, with badly injured knees that made doctors fear he’d never walk again, though you’d never guess it from his easy saunter now.

He had been working at 5:00 a.m. most days, exercising too much, and not resting enough. Half-asleep, he’d turned the wrong way onto a one-way ramp—the symbolism would seem contrived had it not really happened—and ran head-on into another car. (The other driver sustained a broken bone.)

“I was just happy to stop going for a while,” he says of the long recovery to follow, “because I was going and not knowing where, not having a compass. When I was in the wreckage, I was like, ‘This could be over so quickly. I don’t want to

emotion. I like taking one simple shape and letting each part shine and move around and be intricate. Instead of just a G, it’s a dance of G. It’s like a mantra, and you can hear different things in it.”

As his guitar skills developed with enviable speed, he started taking any gig he could get as long as it paid something, though he’s starting to break into better rooms, having opened a show at the Cat’s Cradle Back Room in April. Last year, he did his first independent tour, which took him through New York and Toronto. Then he put performing mostly on pause to toil on his EP, trying to make the transition from an artist who catches your ear to one you’ve gone to see.

As for making the concert grind align with the message, well, if being a working musician isn’t always therapeutic, finally being heard is.

It’s all a promising work in progress, anyway, as expressed by the period that appears at the end of all of Tre. Charles’s titles—his interpretation of stopping to mind the details. One notices that it takes on another subtext in the middle of his name, of a person suddenly starting over, freed and unfinished at the end. W

“When I was in the wreckage, I was like, ‘This could be over so quickly. I don’t want to keep pursuing something I don’t love.”

Earth Signs

On Between the Blades, Mipso’s Libby Rodenbough scours personal grief, spiritual exhaustion, and political arguments for cosmic inspiration.

There’s a quiet moment on Libby Rodenbough’s new song “Easier to Run” when she sings “I’m a sensible engine / I’m a well-tuned machine.” Blanketed in delicacy, it’s easy to overlook the statement’s sneaky self-confidence. From age and experience comes wisdom, Rodenbough intones—and it’s normal to be mystified by such maturity.

“As you get older, things burn a little less intensely,” the Durham musician tells INDY Week over tea at Namu on a sunny Monday afternoon. “You’re a little remote from your own pain. That’s necessary for survival, but it’s also sad to realize.”

That dichotomy permeates all 33 minutes of Between the Blades, Rodenbough’s second solo album. Out May 12 on Sleepy Cat Records, its eight tracks are bathed in creative exaltation and catchy hooks, building a sonorous world free from genre constraints and committed to boundless artistic exploration.

“My music is referential to American folk music, but it causes me such anguish to hear how toothless and incurious most contemporary Americana is,” she says. “It doesn’t take a point of view at all. One of the goals for this album was to take inspiration from folk music that simultaneously makes you feel at home—rooted and connected to tradition—but is simultaneously destabilized, curious, and even confused. The best folk music is familiar and strange at the same time.”

That spirit of intensity pulses on “Another World” and “Sleeping Hard,” which cloak their generational anguish in gentle pop constructs. The former condenses arguments

that Rodenbough had with her father in 2016 comparing Bernie Sanders’s idealism and Hillary Clinton’s pragmatism. It also draws from the book The Dawn of Everything: A New Human History by historians David Graeber and David Wengrow.

“I really believe the world can be radically different,” Rodenbough says, “and I’m not satisfied by politicians who are proposing insultingly incremental changes to a very fucked-up world. To me, that’s quite optimistic, actually— not cynical.”

“Sleeping Hard,” though, is admittedly more pessimistic, addressing the “spiritual exhaustion” that Rodenbough says comes from “colonialism and the colonizer mind-set that pervades our systems.” With a lyrical nod to iconoclastic folkie and steamboat pilot John Hartford, Rodenbough turns a languid rock song into a sly send-up of slick investment bankers, dive-bar creeps, and anyone still subscribing to Manifest Destiny scripts.

“This daily low hum of stress is like a slightly unreachable discomfort that overlays even my happiest moments,” she says. “When all those things are swirling around in my head, I wish that I could go back to sleep—and stay asleep for a really long time.”

Yet Rodenbough says those liminal moments—halfawake, driving, or even flying—often yield the most inspiration. Melodies often appear “out of the blue” as she visualizes her violin fingerboard, she says, with vowel and consonant sounds that start as nonsense “and then, somehow, miraculously, begin to correspond to real words” that

have a meaning.

“I love that moment when a song is coming to life in my bedroom,” she continues. “But for it to feel complete, I need other people to hear it.”

To make Between the Blades, Rodenbough convened with Alex Bingham, Saman Khoujinian, Joe Westerlund, and Jay Hammond in January 2022 at Bingham’s Bedtown Studios in rural Virginia. The group recorded live in the same room for six days. (Kate Rhudy, Matt Douglas, Will Van Horn, and Anna Jacobson added extra layers of backing vocals and instrumentation later in the process.)

The record’s coziness is exemplified on “Make Light,” which features jagged, off-kilter instrumentation overlaid with Rodenbough’s vocals. Recorded while she was under a blanket, the rest of the band had only subtle auditory cues to follow.

“That was a good team-building experience,” she laughs. “I didn’t want a lot of preciousness in the arrangement of the album.”

Collective grief punctuated the proceedings—Rodenbough’s mother died less than a year before the session, and several other collaborators were grappling with their own personal losses during the recording.

“I encouraged everyone to try to make as many sounds on their instruments as they could without drawing any boundaries,” Rodenbough says. “It cracked me up to call the album Between the Blades, too—that sounds so metal, and it’s such a soft album.”

Such a fiercely tender contradiction fits with Rodenbough’s professional arc. She’s spent the last decade touring the world and releasing six critically acclaimed records with her indie-folk band Mipso; earlier this year, she joined burgeoning indie pop star Indigo De Souza as a supporting musician. This eclecticism keeps Rodenbough centered.

“Art is part of a gift cycle,” she says. “You receive inspiration, and then it’s your duty to the art to give it out to the world.”

“Astrology” speaks to that cosmology. Originally written about a past lover and their ongoing influence on her, Rodenbough says the song has evolved considerably.

“The metaphor is basically people as stars,” she says, “and since I wrote that song, my mom died. Now when I sing it, I’m singing for her. All the profound things that went into our parent-child relationship are not lessened by her not being alive anymore, which is strange. All the experiences we shared are a constellation that I can read like a horoscope.”

Unlike most horoscopes, Rodenbough’s songs are concise, without an ounce of superfluous fat. That was on reverential display last Wednesday, when she played an intimate show in Durham at Perfect Lovers, swapping instruments before each song and mixing solitary grace with playful backing grooves from Bingham, Westerlund, and Louisa Stancioff.

On “Astrology,” Rodenbough hugged her handheld Yamaha Reface synth so closely to her face that, she joked, “it feels like we’re going to kiss.” She mixed in songs from her first album, 2020’s Spectacle of Love; a piercing new instrumental she contributed to Magic Tubers Stringband’s compila-

tudes more room to sprawl.

That’s the space Rodenbough is trying to give herself as her career blossoms.

“I’m not good enough technically to call myself a classical violinist,” she says. “As a kid, nobody would have thought of me as a musical talent. It’s a good reminder that you have no idea what things are going to flourish in you. I don’t think I’ve landed yet as a musician. I’m just feeling around the dark and discovering new things.”

That includes work inside and outside the music industry. Over the last few years, she’s recorded and played with local artists like Joseph O’Connell (Elephant Micah), Phil Moore (Bowerbirds), and Jake Xerxes Fussell. In 2022, she worked as a paid canvasser for rural political organizers Down Home NC. This week, she’s balancing the release of her new solo album with rehearsals for Indigo De Souza’s mostly sold-out national tour.

“I’m really excited about not knowing what the next chapter of my life is going to be like,” Rodenbough says. “I’m 32 and Indigo is 25, but after only playing with her for a month, I’ve met this new group of musicians who have already changed my life.”

She also speaks lovingly of her collaborations with Kate Rhudy and Skylar Gudasz in their one-off Ask Me Anything formation—a trio dispensing relationship advice and songs across the Triangle in 2022.

“We were all egging each other on to be more defiantly confident, fearless, and brazen,” Rodenbough says. “And less afraid of embarrassment. That’s poisonous to making art or doing anything outward.”

That honesty yields powerful dividends on Between the Blades, which is comprised of soothing transmissions from the teeter-

tion You Better Mind: Southeastern Songs to Stop Cop City; and a devastating cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Seems So Long Ago, Nancy,” before closing the night with the new album’s final song, the swirling sound bath of “Waking World.”

Rodenbough’s next solo gig will come on a much bigger stage: June 22 at Haw River Ballroom, where the cavernous room might just give the new album’s emotional multi-

ing edge of grief, scathing slices of keen observation, and cockeyed celebrations of sweeping human failure.

“I really believe in my songs,” she says, recalling that self-assured “sensible engine” line. “It helps me articulate the difficulty of being alive and how I contend with all the things I can’t change. This music is a document of that process—and maybe it can be helpful to other people.” W

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

“You have no idea what things are going to flourish in you. I don’t think I’ve landed yet as a musician. I’m just feeling around the dark and discovering new things.”

May 16, 8 p.m.,

Signs of Life

Ahead of a Carolina Theatre show, Josh Ritter talks creative compulsions, parenting, and living inside big questions.

Josh Ritter makes folk music that is searching but grounded, with an eye toward the future as it turns over the myths of the past. I’ve been listening to his music since high school and associate it with raw, formative periods—driving home from basketball practice, windows open, a burned CD (sorry!) of Golden Age of Radio floating over browning cornfields—in which I moved from inherited certainty to a belief, one threaded throughout Ritter’s music, that it is possible to make a life asking, and even living inside, big questions.

Ritter’s 11th album, Spectral Lines, released April 28, is dedicated to Ritter’s mother, a dedicated neuroscientist who died in March 2021. Over 10 songs, the album picks up and continues stitching that signature searching thread, with weird, rich storytelling transposed over playful sonic experiment, including a snippet from the Perseverance rover on Mars, as Ritter looks for signs of life on planet Earth.

Those signs can be hard to find—”If the world is getting kinder/ I haven’t noticed yet / And if we’re gonna make it /Things are gonna have to change,” he intones on “Someday”—but listening to Ritter, it’s still hard not to feel buoyed.

The musician will perform at the Carolina Theatre on Tuesday, March 16; ahead of the show, INDY Week caught up with Ritter as he took a walk in Williamsburg.

INDY WEEK: I saw on Twitter that last night you had a kind of wild dream about time being something that we consume as sustenance.

JOSH RITTER: One of the most important things for me to do is just express some

of the random questions and thoughts I have—not because they’re individually special but because I believe that a lot of people have all kinds of interesting little insights or intuitions.

How do you get those insights to stick—do you have a dream journal, do you take notes throughout the day?

I have that kind of belief in my own creative process that intuition, that aha moment, is not rare—it’s not a rare thing, but it is private, and it has no power unless you bring it out into the world. Over time I believe we’ve changed our idea of the muses into a thing that we express our admiration of—but the muses for me are like an angry little devil on my back, and my only way of getting it off my nerves is expressing the things that come to me. Frankly, it’s not like it’s a pleasurable thing; the constant weird thoughts and intrusives. Sometimes the only way to deal with them is to be like, “I’m going to make this monster real.”

Have you had periods where you feel like you’ve repressed those creative urges and, as a result, things became difficult?

Absolutely, that’s a really good question. Sometimes I’ve allowed myself to put on a little bit of a mask. There are times on stage where I operate as a truly beautiful human and feel like I really belong. But there are other times when I’m playing the nice guy, the “aw shucks” guy, when there’s something truly cataclysmic going on. Over time now I’ve realized I don’t have time for that—

it just takes too much energy. If I have weird preoccupations now, I’m going to follow them. If I hear things that don’t make sense, I’m going to write them down, get them out there. It’s almost like cleaning out an attic that never gets clean. You bring stuff down to the street and hope that someone finds something useful in there, but the stuff in the attic just keeps filling up.

Tell me about Spectral Lines. At what point in writing did some of its themes start to coalesce?

I realized over time that the songs that compelled me and fit in that collection—I write lots of songs, and they don’t always fit—but the ones that all started to feel like they belong in the same room together were about very simple emotions and ones that I felt were not me going off on some tangent but me trying to express my own feelings of weakness and fragility.

The album is dedicated to your mom. Is she in some of the songs?

My mom was a fascinating woman— someone who is truly compelled by their work and a very interesting thinker. One of the most important things that she gave me was the idea that I could look at something that everyone else was looking at and see something that no one else sees. She

always told me that, and it gave me an identity. She gave me the soft confidence, or whatever it was, to find my way in a conventional world while thinking truly bizarre things, and made me proud of it.

How did your parents impact your own parenting style?

I guess we all raise our kids, in some fashion, like, “Well, I’m not gonna do what my parents did.” There weren’t big things like that—my childhood was wonderful, I basically lived in the woods and went home and heard my parents talk about a job they loved.

One thing I did think about a lot was, how am I going to raise my children in relationship to God? I wanted to get down to the fundamentals of “What can I give my children?” I found that oftentimes in society in my upbringing, my questions were stifled, my body was stifled. I was terrified of the rapture and of hell.

I do feel like I can raise my children with the knowledge that the world is full of amazing and beautiful things that are far beyond our ability to understand. And we can appreciate those things and we can take part in them without having to lock ourselves in a box designed by humans. W

Tradition in Motion

Local groups like the Ruby Slippers Chinese Dance Club connect Chinese American youth with community and traditional culture.

Like many high school students, Anna Zheng has a busy schedule of calculus homework, SAT preparation, and planning summer beach trips with friends.

But the way she spends her Sundays is a bit different: leading over 30 dancers, some as young as eight years old, through Chinese folk dance routines. The troupe, named Ruby Slippers Chinese Dance Club, rehearses at a Cary-based dance studio, tucked into a nondescript strip of small businesses.

Under fluorescent lights, floor-to-ceiling mirrors reflect an entourage of teenagers, most of Chinese American heritage, moving in sync with the lulling melodies of flutes, cymbals, and strings. The elegant music echoes throughout the rest of the building—relatively empty on an early weekend morning—with the occasional straggler catching a glimpse of the dancers’ routine from the hallway.

“Ruby Slippers has a big connection to my culture,” Zheng says. “Ruby Slippers is a real tie between my identity as a Chinese person as well as my love for dance.”

The high school junior serves as president of the Ruby Slippers Chinese Dance Club, a nonprofit affiliate of the Raleigh Academy of Chinese Language, a local Chinese language school. Founded by 10 passionate dancers in 2006, the club has since expanded to form two performance troupes of over 30 members.

Unlike in most dance programs, students are the primary leaders of the club. Zheng is an instructor, alongside a student board of 11 other high school dancers who teach and mentor younger students. They develop choreography, organize performances, and collaborate with local organizations.

Zheng says that the club’s tight-knit com-

munity has helped it thrive over the years.

“The people who’ve graduated and were teachers are just, like, part of the club; we’re still connected,” Zheng says. “There’s a real sense of connection between everybody because it’s not just, like, a teacher telling you what to do. [We’re] student leaders, so everybody has a way to express their individuality.”

Ruby Slippers is a testament to the thriving—and burgeoning—arts scene within the Triangle’s Chinese American diaspora, with a handful of local organizations tailoring traditional Chinese dance to performers of all ages.

Cary Chinese School, an organization similar to the Raleigh Academy of Chinese Language, offers classes in Chinese dance for elementary-school-aged dancers. Teenagers on the NC Youth Performing Team perform folk dances at local cultural events across Wake County. Triangle Chinese Dance Club—mostly composed of middle-aged dancers, many of whom are parents—is an outlet for dancers who still hold an affinity for the art form.

The popularity is, in part, due to the steadily increasing Chinese American population, with a recent joint study between UNC-Chapel Hill’s Asian American Center and Carolina Demography indicating that the statewide Asian population grew by 64 percent between 2010 and 2020.

“This past year we had a record number of prospective dancers at our annual auditions, [and] I think this shows that Chinese dance is popular among the youth,” says Duke University Chinese Dance representative James Liao, describing the range of backgrounds the club’s members hail from. “Some of our dancers had years of Chinese dance experience before coming to Duke.

However, many also did not come from any dance background and decided to join our group to learn.”

Many dances that these groups perform center around narratives inspired by traditional Chinese folklore that depict ancient legends or mythical creatures.

“There’s always intention behind every movement, even down to your fingertips,” Zheng says of the routines.

Despite its deep roots in Chinese history, the form only began appearing in official dance curricula in China during the 1950s. Chinese immigrants would later bring the dance to the United States, teaching dances to family and friends during parties or celebrations. Now it offers Chinese American youth a chance to reconnect with their heritage.

“I always say that Chinese dance is one of the best ways to introduce Chinese culture and history to people,” says Cheer Pan, cofounder of the Pan America Chinese Dance Alliance (PACDA). “A lot of people only consider ballet and modern dances serious forms of dance. And Chinese dance [is just] as valuable [and] takes as much effort and training.”

Pan was born into a family of dance educators, and both her parents serve as instructors at the Beijing Dance Academy. PACDA promotes Chinese dance education and cross-cultural learning for younger generations of dancers and hosts competitions

that youth dance clubs, like Ruby Slippers, can participate in. These competitions bring together dance troupes and programs across the country and allow young dancers to improve upon their practice. They also serve as opportunities to spark curiosity about Chinese culture.

But regardless of whether young dancers choose to pursue the art form beyond high school, Pan believes in its importance in increasing visibility for Asian American culture and in diversifying mainstream dance.

“It’s important to send a message that there’s not just one form of beauty,” she says.

Zheng has a similar attitude and says that she sees Ruby Slippers dancers as cultural ambassadors in the community. Recently, the group performed at Cary’s Taste of China festival, an affiliate of the Chinese-American Friendship Association of North Carolina, and hosted a booth, selling baked goods and sharing information about Chinese culture.

“What we do in dancing, as well as what we do as a group, is a way to educate people about how Chinese culture is,” says Zheng.

Reflecting on her journey from a young age, she found that it is the community of fellow Chinese American dancers that she is most grateful for. “I’m really appreciative of the opportunities it’s given me and has raised me as a leader,” Zheng says. “It’s been a community.” W

C U LT U R E CA L E N DA R

Lizzo performs at PNC Arena on Wednesday, May 10.

music

Feist: Multitudes $38. Wed, May 10, 7 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Lizzo: The Special 2our $119+. Wed, May 10, 8 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Queer Country Night Wed, May 10, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

shame $18. Wed, May 10, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Transviolet: Body the Tour $18. Wed, May 10, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Dopapod $20. Thurs, May 11, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle, Carrboro.

Hans Gruber and the Die Hards $10. Thurs, May 11, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Live Jazz with Marc Puricelli and Friends Thurs, May 11, 7 p.m. Imbibe, Chapel Hill.

Local Produce: Bardo Bloom B2B Kiki, Bijana, UTLT BXTC Thurs, May 11, 8 p.m. The Fruit, Durham.

Miko Marks and Rissi Palmer $15.

Thurs, May 11, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

SONAM Spring Concert for Musical Empowerment

Thurs, May 11, 7:30 p.m. Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham.

Mahler Symphony No. 1 $63+. May 12–13, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Pitbull $60+. May 12–13, 8 p.m. Koka Booth Amphitheatre, Cary.

The Gaslight Anthem $35. Fri, May 12, 6:30 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Leonid & Friends: A Tribute to the Music of Chicago $30+. Fri, May 12, 8 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Nappy Head Funk Army / Shrub(b) / King Akira $12. Fri, May 12, 9 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Primordial Tides $10. Fri, May 12, 8 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

Stevie Nicks $101+. Fri, May 12, 7 p.m. PNC Arena, Raleigh.

Thrio $25. Fri, May 12, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Vienna Teng SOLD OUT. Fri, May 12, 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Angela Bingham with Jim Ketch Quintet $25. Sat, May 13, 8 p.m. Sharp Nine Gallery, Durham.

Catch the Bluegrass Bug with Slippery Hill Bluegrass $5. Sat, May 13, 11 a.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

An Evening with Railroad Earth $29. Sat, May 13, 8 p.m. Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh.

The Georgia Thunderbolts $15. Sat, May 13, 8 p.m. Motorco Music Hall, Durham.

Odie Leigh $15. Sat, May 13, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Pan American Symphony Orchestra: Tango of the Americas $53+. Sat, May 13, 8 p.m. Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Queer Agenda Dance Party with DJ Wicked $7. Sat, May 13, 10 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Shallow Cuts: Duo Lipo $5. Sat, May 13, 9 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

THNG $8. Sat, May 13, 9 p.m. Local 506, Chapel Hill.

The Bronzed Chorus / Wailing Storms $8. Sun, May 14, 8 p.m. Rubies on Five Points, Durham.

Chamber Music Raleigh Presents Grammy Award–Winning Mark O’Connor Duo $31. Sun, May 14, 2 p.m. NCMA, Raleigh.

The Chamber Orchestra of the Triangle: Trumpets and Grieeeg! $9+. Sun, May 14, 3 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Dark Star Orchestra $35. Sun, May 14, 6 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

It Came from Aquarius Records $12. Sun, May 14, 7:30 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

OTNES / Rodes Baby / Ins Kino $10. Sun, May 14, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Six Sundays in Spring: Miss Mini and the Sandman Band Sun, May 14, 5:30 p.m. E. Carroll Joyner Park, Wake Forest.

Frankie Rose / SRSQ / Molly Sarlé

$15. Mon, May 15, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Annie DiRusso $16. Tues, May 16, 8 p.m. Cat’s Cradle Back Room, Carrboro.

Moonstruck and Defending Your Life $10. Fri, May 12, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

The Wizard of Oz Brunch $11. Sat, May 13, 11 a.m. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Raleigh.

Cary at 150 Sun, May 14, 2 p.m. The Cary Theater, Cary.

Brian Dunne / Skylar Gudasz

$18. Tues, May 16, 8 p.m. The Pinhook, Durham.

Jeremy “Bean” Clemons Jazz Trio $8. Tues, May 16, 9 p.m. Kingfisher, Durham.

Josh Ritter and the Royal City Band $37+. Tues, May 16, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Sabrina Carpenter: Emails I Can’t Send Tour $264+. Tues, May 16, 8 p.m. The Ritz, Raleigh.

Please check with local venues for their health and safety protocols.

U LT U R E CA L E N DA R

Moulin Rouge! The Musical $35+. May 3-14, various times. DPAC, Durham.

Switchyard Theatre Company: The Tempest $20. May 11-14, various times. Durham Central Park, Durham.

World Ballet Series: Cinderella

$34+. Thurs, May 11, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

Comedy Night in the Beer Garden

Fri, May 12, 8 p.m. The Glass Jug Beer Lab RTP, Durham.

Royal Comedy Tour: Sommore, Bruce Bruce, Lavell Crawford, and Special K $59+. Fri, May 12, 8 p.m.

Martin Marietta Center for the Performing Arts, Raleigh.

Bored Teachers Comedy Tour $33+. Sat, May 13, 7 p.m. The Carolina Theatre, Durham.

The ComedyWorx Show Matinee $9. Sat, May 13, 4 p.m. ComedyWorx, Raleigh.

Eduardo’s Noche Flamenca $20. Sat, May 13, 7 p.m. Bond Brothers Eastside, Cary.

World Bellydance Day Celebration with Shimmy Mob NC Sat, May 13, 12 p.m. Boxyard RTP, Durham.

Anders and Beverly Gyllenhaal: A Wing and a Prayer Wed, May 10, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Brian Biswas: The Astronomer Thurs, May 11, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

Ellery Adams: Paper Cuts Thurs, May 11, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Carly Goodman: Dreamland Tues, May 16, 7 p.m. Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh.

Jeremy Whitley: The Dog Knight Tues, May 16, 5:30 p.m. Flyleaf Books, Chapel Hill.

like to plan ahead?

like to ahead?

su | do | ku

this week’s puzzle level:

There is really only one rule to Sudoku: Fill in the game board so that the numbers 1 through 9 occur exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box. The numbers can appear in any order and diagonals are not considered. Your initial game board will consist of several numbers that are already placed. Those numbers cannot be changed. Your goal is to fill in the empty squares following the simple rule above.

U Z Z L E S

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

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

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

C L A S S I F I E D S

EMPLOYMENT

Consulting Site Reliability Engineer

Consulting Site Reliability Engineer sought by LexisNexis USA in Raleigh, NC to participate in whole lifecycle of services from inception & design to deployment through operation/further refinement. Minimum of Bachelor’s degree or foreign equiv in Computer Science, Computer Engg, Info Systems, or rltd + 7 yrs exp in job offered or rltd required. EE reports to LexisNexis USA office Raleigh, NC but may telecommute from any location within US. Interested candidates apply by mail to T. Hayward, RELX Inc; 1000 Alderman Dr, Alpharetta, GA 30005. Ref job code: 01183.

919-416-0675

RECYCLE THIS PAPER

Editorial and Research Assistant

Editorial and Research Assistant for book concerning Grand Teton National Park, Wyo. Part time, work from your home. Good computer skills and creativity mandatory. $25/ hour. Start soon. Resume to: teton2021@gmail.com

Senior Data Engineer

Senior Data Engineer, Brightly Software, Inc., Cary, NC. May telecom in US & rprt to Cary, NC site & if telecom, may req trvl to Cary, NC for mtgs. Build new data ingestion pipeline into data cloud & guide future data infrastructure decisions. Reqs Master / Bach in CS, IT Mgmnt, Engg, Data Sci/Anlytcs / rel / equiv. Reqs, if Master 5 yrs / if Bach 7 yrs, exp in: SW / data engg; data integrate (ETL / ELT) devel w/ multi langs incl Java, Scala, Python, PySpark / SparkSQL; build & maintain data pipelines supp variety of integrate patterns; build & maintain data lake / w/h in prod environ wrkng w/ data formats like Parquet, CSV, JSON, YAML / XML; wrkng w/ rel DBs usng SQL & develpng complx SQL queries, stored procedures & UDFs, troubleshoot & perf tuning; usng agile best practices like Jenkins, Git / JIRA; build & rationalize data environs w/ complex variety of data pipelines; 3 yrs: utilizng AWSbased data srvce techs like Glue srvcs fam, RDS, Athena / Snowflake & cloud store & compute incl S3, EC2, Lambda, & Step Functions. M-F 8 a.-5 p. Occasionl outside hrs & wkend spprt req’d. All hires sbmt to drug scrn & BG chck. M-F, 40 hrs/wk. Apply: resume to: heather.copeland@brightlysoftware.com ref job #111495

Software Engineers III

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS III Durham NC area. Develop & guide strategies for software quality improvement. Design & apply SDLC processes. Majority of duties performed via telecommuting with some work from HQ office required. Send res to: Baebies, Inc., hr@baebies.com.

Solutions Engineer

Solutions Engineer Insightsoftware LLC (Raleigh, NC) to be rspnsbl for crryng out tchnlgy eval. stage of sales prcss & wrking w/sales execs as a tchncl advisor & prdct advcte; rspnding to customer requests for info inclding the completion of RFIs & RFPs; dvlpng prototypes for prospects using proprietary sftwre, mdrn Web tchnlgies (HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, REST) & mdrn data tier tchnlgies (rltionl, NoSQL, cloud & in-memory dtbses). Master’s in Cmptr Scnce or IT or a Bachelor’s or foreign educ. equiv. in Cmptr Scnce or IT + 5 yrs of progress resp work exp. In the position offered or related. Must know (thru acad training or work exp.) prvding tchncl consulting on the dvlpmnt of data-centric web apps; & dmnstrtd exp. dvlpng sftwre accrdng to SDLC, Agile methodology, & Content Mgmt Systms. May work from home in the continental U.S. Send resumes to recruiting@insightsoftware.com.

Summer Outdoor Counselor Positions

Piedmont Wildlife Center is seeking employees to run outdoor summer programs in Durham, Orange, and Wake locations. Seeking Day-Camp, Aftercare, and Specialty Counselors. Work outside and connect campers to nature. Programs start in June. To apply: Email your resume to camp@piedmontwildlifecenter.org. Hourly rates range from $12-$14.

LAST WEEK’S PUZZLE

The most recognized award throughout the Triangle is back for 2023—

NEXT UP IS DURHAM COUNTY!

Nominate your favorite Durham County bar, veterinarian, bookshop, museum—whatever it may be, there are over 100 categories in which you can profess your favorite Durham County treasures. Have no fear: Orange/Chatham Counties will have their own nominations soon.

Best Triangle 2023 of the D urham County VOTE.INDYWEEK.COM