Esperanza SpaldingCarolina Theatre, Durham May 9, 2012 Esperanza Spalding makes an audience genuinely happy. Her music and the spirit of it are infused with a 20-something-year-old’s truth serum, which shows up in the form of between-song monologues about young love in the present day, and tender reconnection with pre-colonial ancestry. “Espey,” as her band mates […]
Shirlette Ammons
Posted inCulture
In memoriam: Peter Eichenberger and perfect corners
D.L. AndersonPeter Eichenberger I met Peter Eichenberger on a random weekday morning in that infamously smoky backroom of the real Cup A Joe on Hillsborough Street. It was among my first few times hanging there. As a 20-something expatriate of academia eager to stage my own disappearance, I stumbled into Cup A Joe on a […]
Posted inArt
To Kill a Mockingbird’s South 50 years later
To Kill a Mockingbird By Harper Lee HarperCollins; 323 pp. “The Colored balcony ran along three walls of the courtroom like a second-story veranda, and from it we could see everything.” Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird I honestly didn’t recall my first reading of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. To jog my memory, […]
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Nic Brown’s Floodmarkers is Category 5
Floodmarkers By Nic Brown Counterpoint, 208 pp. Carolinians know the perversity of a hurricane that threatens to push inland. It’s an invasive move on the part of the storm, going beyond its normal boundaries of water and coast to pry under-penned trailers off their already shaky foundations, rip the roofs from factories and force school […]
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Hip Hop Against Racist War extravaganza in Durham
Amaris’ tone magnifies as she reaches the nucleus of a poem about her “issues with the word revolution.” Her voice lulls and peaks, tatting the crimson walls of Durham’s Blue Coffee Company as the quaint gathering of hip-hop warriors stand poised and attentive. Tonight, listening is a dangerous weapon. “Born into a solution/So I don’t […]
Posted inGuides
Arts Access, Inc.
Imagine you are taking in Theatre In the Park’s production of Finale. When the lights come up, Edwin Booth is locked away in the basement of his own theater preparing to open a trunk that once belonged to his brother (and President Lincoln’s assassinator), John Wilkes Booth. Booth is writhing with displaced guilt, his conscience […]