Other than “spotted dick,” what food has a less appetizing name than liver mush? It’s almost as if they don’t want you to eat it. But if you’re from central North Carolina, you know liver mush as crispy, creamy comfort food. The main content is pig’s liverplus whatever porcine scrap is at handspices for taste, […]
Chris Vitiello
Bio: Chris Vitiello lives in Durham and writes for INDY Week on art, music and hockey.Twitter: http://twitter.com/chrisvitiello
Posted inGuides
Bridal fleas & rattlesnake neckties
Belhaven is a tiny town on the Pungo River in Beaufort County. But there’s something there that no true North Carolinian should missthe weird and wonderful Belhaven Memorial Museum, home to one of the country’s most eclectic collections. It’s free, and open daily from 1 to 5 p.m. (except Wednesdays). An improbable gathering of thousands […]
Posted inGuides
Unholy Rollers
What does it take to cut the mustard in roller derby? First, you need to be able to skate your butt off. Next, you need a really killer nickname. Aurora Thunder has all that. She’s psyched for the July 27 matchup between the Chapel Thrillers and the Raleigh Ruckus at Durham’s Wheels Fun Park. The […]
Posted inArt
Durham artist Stacy Lynn Waddell’s sparkling studio is a “fantasy-making machine”
At her Main Street studio near Durham’s Golden Belt area, nationally noted artist Stacy Lynn Waddell offers coffee and a bowl of spicy Thai potato chips. It’s in reaching for a chip that the plywood floor, which sparkles densely with gold glitter, catches my eye. The effect brings a subtle magic to the mundane attic […]
Posted inCulture
Art review: Ritual and repetition in the Ackland’s annual MFA exhibit
The annual MFA art exhibition at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Ackland Art Museum used to be a frustrating show. After two years of studio work, the graduates would have to choose just a piece or two from a substantial body of work and fit them into the galleries whether or not they worked alongside those of their […]
Posted inArt
The first annual Bull City Sculpture Show raises Durham’s public art profile
Bull City Sculpture Show Opening Gala, Durham Central Park, Fri., May 2, 6:30 p.m. Bronze Pour, George-Watts-Hill Pavilion, Sat., May 3, 10 a.m. Walking Tours, throughout downtown, Sat., May 3, 1-3 p.m. Hardly any visual art form is as interactive as public sculpture. Almost daily, kids clamber onto the stoic back of “Major,” the life-sized […]
Posted inArt
Blood Harmony
UNC-Chapel Hill student J Gray Swartzel’s arresting thesis show recalls Cindy Sherman. Swartzel’s frank, gender-bending photographic portraits of himself and his family crash through traditional gazes and poses with complex psychodynamics. See the artist’s turn as Manet’s prostitute from “Olympia,” attended by his mother—who appears in another image dressed in his father’s war uniform. The […]
Posted inCulture
Art review: America the beautiful, terrible and exhausted
The New Found Land: Engravings by Theodor de Bry from the Collection of Michael N. Joyner America Seen: The Hunter and Cathy Allen Collection of Social Realist Prints Ackland Art Museum Through April 13 Every country documents itself. How it does so is at least as informative as the documents themselves. Two exhibits closing this […]
Posted inMusic
Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra reanimates forgotten jazz
Brian Carpenter’s Ghost Train Orchestra Friday–Saturday, Apr. 4–5, 9 p.m. $10–$24 Motorco Music Hall Charlie Johnson’s Paradise Orchestra. McKinney’s Cotton Pickers. Reginald Foresythe and his New Music: They made some of the hottest jazz ever, right? You’ve never heard of them? “People forget that this was popular music then,” says trumpeter and arranger Brian Carpenter. […]
Posted inArt
New art exhibits explore African ethnography and 20th-century African-American identity
Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist Paintings by Archibald Motley Nasher Museum of Art through May 11 Theater of Belief: Afro-Atlantic Costuming and Masking Photographs by Phyllis Galembo Gregg Museum of Art & Design; African American Cultural Center Gallery, N.C. State through May 11 Weems Art Gallery, Meredith College through March 3 You think you know […]