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Hi! Happy weekend.
Hello! Happy Friday.
This weekend brings us one last Hopscotch post of the year, from writer Jordan Lawrence, who spent an impressively prolific weekend bouncing around music sets. Read on for Jordan’s enthusiastic festival rundown—“Wednesday pushed Karly Hartzman’s folk-ish quietude and feral punk fervor to thrilling extremes, as the singer wryly observed that many 40-somethings were hanging on for the last part of the band’s set in Moore Square during indie rock perennials Guided By Voices’ set in City Plaza (“Don’t you guys have somewhere to be?” she quipped.)”—or just to pour over INDY photojournalist Angelica Edwards’s photos of the event, including one of a very bored-looking David Yow surfing the Moore Square crowd.
If you were not able to make it to Hopscotch (I thought it was fantastic and about lost my mind during the St. Vincent set; understandably, though, not everyone can swing three contiguous concert nights) remember that the CAROLINADAZE concert headlined by Janelle Monáe and Moses Sumney is tomorrow and that other small festivals, like Sleepy Fest, are just around the corner.
Thank you for reading! Have a great weekend. Much more next week.
Perhaps the least indie-rock-star photo from Hopscotch I could’ve chosen (“grandpa comedian” Joe Pera performs a set); you’ll have to read the full story for more. Photo by Angelica Edwards.
elsewhere in the culture section
This weekend marks the 42nd anniversary of landmark protests that took place right around the corner in 1982. Warren County is historic for many reasons—read this New Yorker feature on Soul City, Floyd McKissick’s dream of a utopia for Black capitalism—chief among them that it was the chosen dumping site for 40,000 cubic yards of soil laced with toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that a Raleigh company had leaked alongside miles of rural roadways, under the cover of night, in 1978, looking for a cheap disposal shortcut. Soon, the state discovered the illegal dumping and needed to dispose of the contaminated soil.
Bypassing more expensive, out-of-state sites, former Gov. Jim Hunt chose a soybean field in Warren County—majority Black, one of the lowest-income counties in the state; Chatham County was also on the shortlist—as the new landfill. Even though the site did not meet regulatory criteria, endangering the county’s water table, the EPA waived the regulations and approved the site.
Perhaps the state and federal government expected Warren County residents to take the news easy; they did not, and a new documentary, Our Movement Starts Here, documents how the six weeks of protests that followed, as residents skipped work to put themselves in the path of trucks carrying the contaminated soil and were mass-arrested, laid the groundwork for the Environmental Justice movement.
It’s a remarkable story; one of so many testaments to the progressive Southern spirit that endures across the state—and a guiding light as we enter a new era of climate change. As the documentary came through town, this week, playing at Duke University last night, I spoke with filmmaker John Finley Rash about the film, the protests, and how environmental justice struggles continue to play out across the state.
Also: The Chatham Arts Council has some very ambitious plans for the relationship between the arts and the local school system. Read more here!
ICYMI: Behind the scenes of the Bull Durham musical, what performing arts shows to pencil in this fall and what visual arts exhibitions to see, a radically reimagined new arts space, a local comic artist’s empathetic art documenting the war and suffering in Gaza, and Thomas Sayre’s sunflowers.
out and about in the triangle
No links today. Next week!
— Sarah Edwards —
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