Dear digital Chroniclers,
This is a dispatch from the other side. This is a letter lovingly composed in bits and bytes.
Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Prashanth Kamalakanthan. I am the new online editor for Recess, and I am excited for the newness that stretches boundlessly ahead of us.
Can you see its horizon? Neither can I.
In short: Playground, the Recess blog, is open again. In the coming weeks, expect experiments in text, audio, video and photo brought to life in our collaborative online sandbox. Spread the word. Share it with your friends. And come play.
To kick us off, I’ve composed the first installment in a weekly series called “Prashanth’s Picks.” Published at the end of each week, I—your attentive editor and careful companion—will share the best of what the Triangle’s weekends have to offer. I’m talking community gatherings of all shades and flavors: the artistic and cultural lifeblood pulsing through the Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill communities.
(And if you think I’ve missed a truly bright spot in the Triangle tapestry, I’d always love to hear from you. We’re making the future together.)
Here’s what’s exciting me most this weekend:
Friday
· American modernist painter Archibald Motley’s very first retrospective opens this weekend at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke. The pieces span from the African American experience of the '20s and ’30s all the way out to the artist’s extended stay in Paris. Be careful, though: the energy is intense. It just might zap you.
· Also opening today is the Ackland Art Museum’s America Seen: The Hunter and Cathy Allen Collection of Social Realist Prints at UNC Chapel Hill. It’s a gritty collection, celebrating the dignity of working Americans in a time of painful financial crises, sharp social inequalities and mass movements for social justice: the 1920s through the 1940s.
· 9pm: Queer rapper Le1f plays the Pinhook in Durham. This dude studied ballet and modern dance at Wesleyan, for Pete’s sake. He’s signed to Himanshu Suri’s (from Das Racist, R.I.P.) label Greedhead. Do you know who he is? Do you get down to these moody, pumping rhythms? If not, here’s your big shot.
· 10pm: Salsa Night at the Saucy Crab. (Try saying it five times fast.) It’s a final Friday thing (the final Friday of each month, that is) at the Durham restaurant. As announced: catch “DJ David Dice playing the hottest salsa, merengue, bachata, and reggaeton.” Drink specials. Free salsa lessons. And actual salsa, too (not free).
Saturday
· 1pm: Durham’s 16th-annual MLK/Black History Month Parade kicks off at W.G. Pearson Elementary and travels up Fayetteville Street to the NCCU campus. The theme of this year’s parade is “Celebrating Black Women in American Culture,” and it’s shaping up to be a big celebration indeed.
· 2:30pm: Carrboro’s Really Really Free Market (a first Saturday thing) is on again this weekend. As the name suggests, everything really, really is free: furniture, art, advice, friendship, food, food smells, clothes, music and good old communal vibes.
· 8pm: Emanuel "Manny" Ax performs at Duke’s Baldwin Auditorium. Usually part of a two-piano repertoire with his wife Yoko Nozaki, her unexpected illness makes tonight’s a solo show. A sorry occurrence, to be sure. But all the better to ride the vibrations emanating from this Grammy-winning pianist’s mind, whom the Los Angeles Times admiringly wrote was “at one with the music.”
Sunday
· 1pm: Prison book wrapping at Chapel Hill’s Internationalist Bookstore and Community Center. Meet up with local volunteers to help send much-needed free literature to folks incarcerated in Mississippi and Alabama.
· 3pm: Sundry Poets, featuring Alice Osborn, Scott Owens and Tim Peeler at Quail Ridge Books & Music in Raleigh. The independent bookstore’s occasional Sunday afternoon poetry reading series continues this week with three brilliant North Carolina poets reading from their volumes. The poet Dave Manning will moderate.
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