Hi! Happy weekend.
And happy post-solar-eclipse week. Were you able to watch it? Here in North Carolina, in my backyard’s path of non-totality, I was transfixed—not just by the tiny red/black disc but by the way the earth’s mood seemed to shift; full of tenebrous light and nervy shadows. But it’s useless to try and perfectly capture the experience, especially when the great Annie Dillard has already done so. From her 1982 essay about the February 26, 1979, solar eclipse:
The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the Earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything. Only an extraordinary act of will could recall to us our former, living selves and our contexts in matter and time. We had, it seems, loved the planet and loved our lives, but could no longer remember the way of them. We got the light wrong. In the sky was something that should not be there.
And if photos of the eclipse itself also fall short, then photos of people watching it will have to do—and these photos from the Times, spanning the totality’s North American swath, are special. Herein are a chicken in glasses, people looking up from gypsum dunes and Niagra Falls boats; couples exchanging vows under the shadow. Here’s an incredible photo of a Waffle House, mid-eclipse and a dispatch from Vermont. Anecdotally, two of my friends were discharged from the hospital on Monday, following the birth of their daughter (welcome to earth, baby Andi!), just moments before the eclipse’s peak, and walked out to a world agape and briefly humbled.
Next week’s issue has a special Earth Day theme. Make sure to pick up a copy!
“There’s always room for more queer spaces,” Naomi Dix says, “and I want there to be more.” Photo courtesy of the subject.
elsewhere in the culture section
Writer Chase Pellegrini de Paur caught up with Triangle drag queen Naomi Dix, who is opening a new queer nightclub and bar in the basement of The Fuit in Durham (!). Dix tells the INDY that the space should be ready by June—just in time for Pride Month: “As a young queer person, I always wanted a place where I could explore who I was,” Dix wrote in a recent Instagram post, “but spaces often lacked representation and diversity and made it difficult to find my community.”
On a very different note, today, April 12, marks the Battle of Fort Sumter, when the South Carolina militia ignited the Civil War. I discovered this anniversary while posting Glenn McDonald’s review of Civil War, a queasy dystopian war film starring Kirsten Dunst as a journalist attempting to go interview a fascist president in his third term. It comes out today. From the review:
Considered in the context of American politics circa 2024, the effect of all this piecemeal worldbuilding is an accretion of creeping dread. The roughest scene features a secret mass grave tended by the great actor Jesse Plemons as a white nationalist soldier. “We’re Americans!” the journalists plead. “What kind of Americans?” the soldier asks. Garland lets the terrible significance of that question linger.
Dreamville took place last weekend in Dix Park (stay tuned for our photos from the event!) and J. Cole released a diss track. Ryan Cocca reviews that, as well as a new Kooley High song, which I’m listening to right now.
out and about in the triangle
Cary’s singular Pimento Cheese Festival is this weekend. Curious to learn more? Take a trip back in time to 2019, when writer Lena Geller wrote about the festival for the “caviar of the South.”
Chapel Hill is getting a couple of new spots: Big Bad Breakfast (what a name), opened by John Currence, formerly of Crook’s Corner. And German and Polish street food truck Flying Pierogi is getting a brick-and-mortar location at the South Green Shopping Center. In Durham, Portuguese wine bar Pinheiro seems to be teasing an upcoming concept with a pop-up event at Kingfisher this weekend. The cocktail bar also has an event next week with John deBarry, a writer and bartender with an “unorthodox approach” to making cocktails.
The Nasher Museum of Art has a new curator: Meet Xuxa Rodríguez, previously an associate curator of art at Arkansas’s famed Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. NCMA’s annual jazz series kicks off on April 27. The Chapel Hill Library’s book sale is tomorrow. The Bull City Pickleback Classic is this weekend
Exhibitions to put on your calendar: The Geometry of the Roman Alphabet at Horse & Buggy. Conner Calhoun’s Like a Fog Holds the Night at LUMP. A photographic homage to Carrie Mae Weems by Freedom Clay at Cultivate Cafe.
To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art opened at NCMA last month and runs through July.
Artist Moriah LeFebvre’s intriguing ten-year project on a changing Durham, Hometown: Inherited, is on display at the Fruit this month. Finally, the artist Saba Taj has a new exhibit, Grief Magic, at Raleigh’s Anchorlight Gallery. The exhibit features paintings of Palestinian birds and Taj has an artist talk at the space tomorrow (and an interview up at WUNC here.)
out and about in the world
I’m excited about the new Maggie Rogers album.
— Sarah Edwards —
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