This morning, the James Beard Foundation announced the semifinalists for its 2016 James Beard Awards. Ashley Christensen leads North Carolina’s copious nominees; the Raleigh chef’s latest venture, Death & Taxes, is among 25 finalists for “Best New Restaurant,” while Christensen herself is up for “Outstanding Chef,” in which she will square off against 19 others. […]
Grayson Haver Currin
Bio: Grayson Haver Currin was the music editor of INDY Week and the co-director of Hopscotch Music Festival.Twitter: http://twitter.com/currincy
Posted inReviews
Record review: Mac McCaughan Goes Instrumental on Staring at Your Hologram
MAC MCCAUGHAN STARING AT YOUR HOLOGRAM Merge Records Does Mac McCaughan possess a musical trademark more distinctive than his voice? Sure, his thin, incisive riffs have long cut through the churn of Superchunk. And yes, his lyrics have often been wonderfully agitated and impudent, whether directed at infamously slack coworkers or at all the people […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Thinking of Going to the Reopened Café Helios in Raleigh? About That…
Café Helios 413 Glenwood Ave., Raleigh At Raleigh’s Café Helios, everyone wants to know if you’re having a good time, all the time. The server and the cashier, the barista and the bartender, the cook and the busboy: Uniformly, they ask how things were, if you enjoyed yourself, how the drip coffee compared to its […]
Posted inFood & Drink
Celebrate! Jubala Coffee Opens on Raleigh’s Hillsborough Street Friday Morning
This morning, I lived a little dream: I had a cup of Jubala coffee—a Finca El Puente, grown in Honduras but roasted twenty miles away at Counter Culture in Durham—on Raleigh’s Hillsborough Street. After several months of on-site woes and construction delays, the North Raleigh institution will open its second location—beneath the new Aloft hotel, […]
Posted inGuides
Some Quickies: Craiglist Encounters, Polyamory Advice, Pube Sculpting, Sex Education, and N.C. Sex Positions
Highlight reels “So, where is the vagina?” Sitting on the couch of Lux Alptraum, several guests take turns answering this most basic sexual question with a plastic model of the female reproductive system. Some of them, actual adults, fumble. Nearly two years ago, Alptrauma writer, comedian, and sex educatorbegan screening the outdated sex-ed videos she’d […]
Posted inGuides
Climbing Into the Swing Set: A First-person Testimonial From a Tar Heel Swinger
Is the Triangle swinger scene dead? That’s what several people told me during the last two months, when I reached out to a few dozen anonymous contacts through Craigslist posts, message boards, and mutual friends. If it wasn’t dead, one admitted, it was so small no one would run the risk of blowing cover by […]
Posted inMusic
Save The Pinhook, Night 3: Megafaun, Tift Merritt and Mac McCaughan Push The Pinhook Within $4,000 of Salvation
Save The Pinhook, Night Three: Bombadil, Mac McCaughan, Loamlands, The Pretty Shitty Dirt Band The Pinhook, Durham Wednesday, Feb. 3, 2016 Late last night, sometime around midnight, Phil Cook did what a lot of people have done since the news broke in December that The Pinhook had made a seemingly insurmountable financial mistake: He explained […]
Posted inMusic
Got Extra Bandwidth? Moogfest’s “Digital Street Team” Wants to Use It
This morning, a friend passed over her invitation to join Moogfest’s “Digital Street Team,” an online militia ostensibly meant to stoke Internet interest in the festival, which comes to Durham for the first time in mid-May. Essentially, street teamers are required to complete a series of pre-assigned online tasks—liking or sharing content from Moogfest or […]
Posted inNews
First, Learn to Lose: A Carolina Panthers Adolescence
During the fall of 1998, my family became very familiar with losing football games. My older brothera high school sports star who excelled on both sides of the ball, thanks to a massive frame and nimble feethad earned a scholarship to become an East Carolina Pirate. Late that summer, he had shipped a few hours […]
Posted inMusic
Record Review: Shirlette Ammons’ Great LP, Language Barrier
LANGUAGE BARRIER (Churchkey Records/SugarQube Records) Shirlette Ammons plays The Pinhook Saturday, Feb. 6, at 10 p.m. Tickets are $10. The voice of Shirlette Ammonssoft in a warm Southern way but somehow toughened by both experience and enthusiasmarrives just two seconds into Language Barrier, the emcee’s first album in five years. “Yeah,” she says defiantly, stepping […]