Pictures courtesy of Catch Light Studio

Uptown: You get to travel all over the country in your role as Chef on Assignment for Johnson & Wales. What are you seeing in the way of food trends that may be coming our way?
PR: Different regions of the country tend to pick up on various trends at their own pace and with their own regional spin, such as we saw with the organic and the farm-to-table trends a few years ago. The trends tend to start on the West Coast, then slingshot to big cities like New York and Chicago, and then radiate their way out to other cities where chefs or savvy food businesses make them their own. In the south, Birmingham (Ala.) has recently been very influential, as well as Charleston and also Chapel Hill. Charlotte has also gotten on board, albeit later than the leading food towns, with its growing participation in the Slow Food Movement as well as the growth of local farmers markets and food growers. But we’re in danger of missing what promises to be the next big trend, perhaps one of the most exciting developments in years. I’m talking about the food cart phenomenon.

Uptown: What on earth is the food cart phenomenon? Are you talking about taco trucks?
PR: Taco trucks are a tiny tip of the iceberg. I’m really talking about mobile food trucks inside of retro-fitted carts, complete with cooking gear, grills, ovens and the like. These are movable feasts capable of turning out a limited menu, but they do it extremely well. Let me give you some perspective. In Portland, Oregon, which is probably the epicenter of the food cart scene in the U.S., there are over 250 food carts, featuring every sort of food imaginable. Wood-fired pizza trucks, Korean fusion taco trucks (imagine a carne asada taco garnished with kim chee – it’s fantastic!), French fried potato trucks that also serve poutine (the national potato dish of Canada – crispy, twice-fried potatoes covered with fresh cheese curds and brown gravy. Hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. Yes, it’s a gut bomb but it sure tastes good!), health food cart, wild and crazy food carts, dessert trucks, smoothie carts, Cuban sandwich carts, crepe trucks, and on and on. Portland has even designated empty parking lots, licensing some of these food cart operators to permanently park there. In other words, they’ve created a number of “food cart courts,” which become instant festivals for anyone looking for fun and fellow food freaks. During business hours you see a lot of businessmen eating at the carts – it’s the new power lunch forum.

Uptown: Sounds like fun – when are we going to see those here?
PR: Well, currently we have one food cart here that could be competitive in Portland. That’s the Harvest Moon Grille, which could hold its own anywhere, especially with their amazing pork and grits <editor’s note: see page __ in this issue for a story about this cart>.  The problem is that the folks who issue permits are worried about crime and, probably, also about the unfair competitive advantage that low-overhead carts present to what we call brick and mortar restaurants. It’s a delicate balance to make something like a food cart scene work. There were probably a few negative incidents around some of the taco trucks awhile back and that kind of soured the authorities on the idea of food carts in general. But the other side of the coin is that these food carts are fabulous entrepreneur laboratories, maybe the first step to a later incarnation as a true brick and mortar restaurant. This is what happened in Portland, as the food carts there have become part of the cultural identity for the city, highlighting the creativity and diversity of the area. There’s so much excitement and buzz about the carts there that some of the trucks move to different locations every night and Twitter to their followers, who show up en masse, like a spontaneous rave or happening. We have nothing like that here yet.

Uptown: Do you see something like that ever happening here?
PR: I’m not sure. In my six years living in Charlotte I’ve seen a growing interest in food and such, but we’re also somewhat conservative and don’t really like to take too many out-of-the-box chances. But I could see it happening in areas of town like NoDa and, if we get the Center City year-round farmers market we’ve been hearing about, it could be an ideal location for something like a food cart court. Once the city makes it easier for the start-up cart operations to do business we could see all that latent creativity come to fruition.

Uptown: Yes, but do you think it will really happen?
PR: Let me put it this way: If we don’t do it first, Atlanta probably will and then we’ll just be playing catch-up, still waiting for the next wave. I’m convinced that this is the biggest wave, the one we’ve been waiting for. It’s already happening in L.A., Chicago and New York City. In fact, some of the brick and mortar restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are now reverse engineering it – they’re sending out their own food carts to capitalize on the interest and also to allow them to make some fun foods that they don’t do in their restaurants. I hope we catch this wave soon so I don’t have to go to Atlanta or one of those other cities for my kim chee taco. I’m telling you, though, it’s worth the drive.

It was late on an unusually warm June afternoon, and Richardson and I sat alone, talking on the patio of the Common Market Southend. The 26-year-old had spent a few years in a much hotter place, and he had made the drive up from his Lake Wylie home to tell me about it. In Iraq, scalding afternoons topped 120 degrees, and some of the locals weren’t OK with him being there. They proved how they felt by trying to kill him with little pieces of exploding hot metal shot in his direction. In the Marine Corps, he didn’t make a living dodging automatic weapons fire, though; he was paid to seek it out. His job description included finding the enemy and enticing him to shoot at him. And then shooting back at them even harder. Richardson’s eyes are ice blue and serious, and he speaks with a Long Island, N.Y., accent softened by a decade living in the South.

He’s been on the receiving end of no less than 15 IED (improvised explosive device, or roadside bomb) attacks in Iraq. As he explained the “pucker effect” – how certain anatomy puckers in anticipation of trouble when driving through dangerous intersections, serving as an accurate sort of sixth sense, the after-work beer crowd streamed in and quickly filled the surrounding tables. Boisterous laughter began to drown out the rumbles of thunder growing in the distance.

“You always knew something bad was about to happen when all the Iraqi civilians would suddenly vanish from normally crowded areas,” Richardson said.
“The force of an IED explosion is massive,” he continued. “My first one happened in Fallujah. A pretty good-sized IED exploded underneath our truck as we rolled over. When we stopped, everyone checked in on the radio, and there were no casualties. The vehicle was mangled, and there were a couple of concussions, but everyone was fine.

“Then the corpsman (medic) started yelling that he couldn’t feel his feet.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

Richardson’s 5-foot-9-inch frame is burly, and he could be the all-American good guy in a cable TV action show. He projects an intensity that must have served him well in the Marines. So far he had delivered each of his answers in a methodical, factual manner that would make the Corps proud.

“His feet were fine though,” he continued. “The explosion had blown a piece of shrapnel up through the floor right up between his boots, and they were just numbed from the force of the blast and the vacuum created by the shrapnel. He was back on patrol the next day.”

Richardson did have the benefit of riding in the armored Humvees that were a favorite topic of the media a few years ago. It was a huge improvement over the unarmored “thin skinned” trucks that were easily destroyed early in the war. But getting blown up by an IED is still not ideal, and the armor makes it only about as safe as a face shield protecting a hockey player from bodily harm. He continued talking as dark clouds rolled in overheard.

“Another time we got hit by a pretty small IED. I mean it was so small that our truck wasn’t even really damaged that much. A piece of shrapnel slipped in between a tiny gap in the armor plating, though, and came in through the back seat and hit one of our guys.

“He was talking the whole time, and they got him back to medical pretty fast.” He paused for a minute, looking down, rolling his thumb over the graphics on the can of Monster.
They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.”

“He was fine. I mean, he was talking the whole time. They just couldn’t stop the bleeding.” He nodded his head, looking up, as he repeated this to both of us.

“They told us the next day that he didn’t make it.”

The joke told two tables over was a hit and the group erupted in raucous laughter. A single girl at the next table lit another cigarette, and the first few drops of the summer thunderstorm began to fall.

Richardson’s initial job in Iraq involved keeping one of the most bomb-riddled stretches of highway in one of the meanest places in the world – Fallujah – clear of danger for convoys. The road was a critical supply line for coalition forces.

“We were basically a heavily armed highway patrol,” he continued. “Insurgents would come out almost every night and plant new IEDs, and we’d deal with them the next day. This wasn’t official policy, but it was pretty much understood that if anyone was going to get blown up by an IED, it was to be our patrol and not one of the convoy vehicles.”
When I asked him how he felt about that, he shrugged. “All part of the job I guess.”

A common ambush tactic of Iraqi insurgents is to plant an obvious IED, knowing that an American patrol will stop when they spot it. Insurgents then rake the vehicles with small arms fire, rocket-propelled grenades, and the occasional Chinese- or Russian-made heavy machine gun. This was how Richardson’s first firefight began.

“What was that like?” I asked, realizing I had moved toward the edge of my seat. “Did you take it personally when you realized for the first time that someone you’d never met was trying to kill you?”

“Yeah, it got my attention when I could hear incoming rounds hit the truck, but you don’t really think about the danger when you’re in the midst of the fight,” Richardson said. “They weren’t coming that close to me anyway.” He laughed. “For the most part the Iraqis can’t shoot for shit.”  Richardson went on to describe how they identified two MAM’s (military aged males) shooting at them from an irrigation ditch about 200 meters away. Even despite his rigid, chronological delivery of the facts of the story, and frequent use of military terms, I could still see the angry orange muzzle flashes and tracers slicing up a postcard-pretty desert sunset. Palm tree silhouettes swaying in a warm desert breeze.

“We killed one and the other guy took off. We searched a nearby house but didn’t find anything. I remember right after all that happened a really big sandstorm rolled through.

“It was ominous.”

He glanced over at the group of hipsters comparing tattoos at the next table, and back to me.

“I was never really scared during a firefight. Instinct and training take over and you know you have to kill them before they kill you,” he confided. “It’s afterwards that you really think about it. Kind of like, ‘Did I actually really do that?’

We get hundreds of press releases every day, with the vast majority lasting just long enough for a finger to hit the “Delete” key. But this release caught my attention. It was from someone named Khobi Brooklyn and announced that a “Pure Electric Super Car” was coming to Charlotte. When I saw it I thought it better be the Tesla or someone’s press release was going to get an extra forcefully executed “Delete.” It was, and Brooklyn offered a test drive of the only all-electric (read: no gas at all) high-performance sports car on the market, the Tesla Roadster. The Tesla team was going to be in Charlotte in the next couple of days and wanted to know whether I’d be interested in driving it. Hell yeah.

The typical manufacturer that comes through town offering rides in their cars carries with them a large production of multiple sales reps, factory reps and press agents. Rolls Royce flew through town and brought along eight cars, set up shop in front of the Bobcats stadium, and had an NFL football team-sized entourage. With Tesla I thought it would be similar, so through e-mail I asked multiple times where they were going to camp out, and where we could meet up. They were a bit hesitant about disclosing their location and talked about their schedule being in flux, so we could decide on a location when we spoke over the phone the following week. OK?

Five days later I get an e-mail from Dan and his traveling partner, Shaun, about scheduling a time to meet to drive the car. The day after that I give Shaun a call and it sounds like Shaun is standing in the street somewhere in uptown and I ask whether I can schedule a time to drive the car. “Well”, he says, “I think the weather is supposed to be bad tomorrow, and we’re headed up to Lexington over the weekend anyway, so how about now?” Without hanging up, I grab my stuff, head out the door of the office, and get the location of where they have the car displayed to the public. He mentions a cross street near the Carillon Building and explains they are parked on the street. On the street? Entourage, fireworks, press agents? Nope.
Walking past the Carillon, I see a guy sitting near the park texting. And lo and behold, parked on the street, along with everything else, surrounded by nothing but the curb, is a $157,000 all-electric Tesla Roadster. Wow.

I capture a couple pics of the car and ask to see the “engine.” The Tesla is a mid-engine roadster and all you can see when popping the back hood is the top of its lithium ion (read: laptop) batteries. And of course a week’s worth of dirty clothes for Dan and Shaun. They are literally just driving the car around the East Coast, stopping in cities to talk with potential customers and the occasionally lucky media rep. Just a week’s worth of T-shirts, underwear and shampoo. It’s more like a college road trip than a press junket, except instead of Mom’s sedan, they are driving a car that does 0-60 in under four seconds without a single drop of gasoline.

I sign something I didn’t read, absolving Tesla of all responsibility for my driving, and Dan hands me the keys. Luckily I whitewater kayak and am used to folding my 6-foot-1 frame into tight spaces because the driver’s side seat is similar in size to the cockpit of my whitewater boat. Tiny.

What follows is hard to describe: The engine cranks but there is no sound, no gasoline fumes, and no power steering. The wheel is tiny in my hands, and is similar in size to the go-karts at Victory Lane. I pull out into traffic and jerk into my lane. “Instant on” is the term I would use. The accelerator feels like it’s tied directly to the rear wheels, and there is no lag whatsoever.

At the on-ramp to Independence, we are stuck behind a carbon fuel-based pickup truck from the ‘80s. But after the on-ramp we quickly join the flow of traffic. And I floor it. There is no tachometer, but instead a dial that displays wattage use. I redline that, and with the engine quietly whining in the background we are thrown back in our seats. I think Dan is trying to tell me something but I’m laughing too hard to hear him. Amazing.

~ Todd Trimakas

We are all responsible for a couple things that have been in the news lately. First, the massive oil spill in the Gulf. Every single one of the 42 gallons in each of the roughly 5,000 barrels leaking daily is our fault. And if that wasn’t enough, each of the 29 miners who died in early April in the coal mines of West Virginia should weigh heavily on our shoulders. Both of these incidents are a direct result of our collective decisions.

Starting with the oil spill, and I looked up the numbers to be sure, as of 2009 there were 1.7 million barrels of oil pumped from the Gulf every day. And this oil spill that’s more than likely still going to be growing long after this magazine is delivered is only leaking three-tenths of 1 percent of the daily oil production in the Gulf. In other words, even under these abominable conditions the oil companies in the Gulf are still operating at a 99.7% rate of effectiveness. Statistically insignificant, in most cases it probably wouldn’t even be worth mentioning. Heck, a combination of progesterone and estrogen is only 99.7% effective in stopping unwanted pregnancies but we still call it birth control. So it is surprising that most of the public is focusing on BP and figuring out what they did wrong, and how they should be punished. While I feel just the opposite should be happening, that in light of this oil spill we should be praising the oil industry for such a long history of amazing efficiency and safety. How can we expect any person or organization to be perfect, and 100 percent safe? That seems to me to be completely unrealistic.

I feel like we should instead turn the mirror on ourselves and take responsibility for our complete and utter dependence on oil. Sure we pump gas into our cars and trucks at the average of 20-30 gallons a week, but we also fertilize our yards, pave our streets, clothe ourselves, protect our food, carpet our houses, paint our bedrooms, brush our teeth, shampoo our hair, repel bugs, cover our cuts and bruises, color our lips, protect our heads and the list could go on and on. We cannot wake up in the morning without touching, breathing, drinking and eating oil each and every day. If our dependence on oil wasn’t so overwhelming and complete, the BPs of the world would not be in the Gulf, and we would not be watching with horror as large tar balls wash ashore in the marshes of Louisiana.

And then there is coal, which produces 54 percent of all the electricity in the United States. The 29 miners who died were two miles underground not because of a particularly dangerous hobby, or because of an interest in caving, but because they were extracting coal from the earth. They were in pursuit of coal because we demand our Miller light to be chilled to 40 degrees prior to enjoying, and because we want to watch the latest installment of “Sex in the City” in high definition realism with 5.1 Dolby surround sound in a fully air conditioned theater, and we expect nothing less.

With all this said, I’m not going to be walking home or sweating in my office and this editorial was not produced on an old manual Smith Corona typewriter. I am as much to blame as everyone else; I just think we should be willing to shoulder our responsibility for these events that are destroying the environment.

~ Todd Trimakas

I find that as pop listeners, we’re often pressured to feign an interest in jazz, the allegedly “smarter” of the two musics.  Apparently, as we reach a certain age, it’s time to stop listening to this and start listening to that. Usually this results in the purchase of “Kind Of Blue” and a metaphorical washing of the hands before returning to Zeppelin “IV”. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Christian Scott is a 26 year-old Grammy-nominated jazz trumpeter. His third studio album, “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow,” is unquestionably jazz and slyly pop. On the whole, it carries much of the smooth swinging, melodic complexity and socio-political inspirations that drove jazz records of the ’60s and ’70s. Scott is a master of tone, as able to coax velveteen whispers from his horn as he is to color a motif with brash squeals. But despite Scott’s own instrumental prowess, and the fact that the record bears his name, the sound is that of a band effort. Jamire Williams’ precocious percussion backs Scott’s improvisations with agile phrases that – whether driving an upbeat number, or plying brushed rhythmic textures – speak as much as Scott’s trumpet. Matthew Stevens’ guitar dashes countermelodies as delicate tone and high-tensile-strength confidence.

But as much as “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow” evokes the jazz greats, Scott’s currency is in his breadth of influence, copping R&B melodies, citing Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, and, as he does here, covering “The Eraser,” originally a solo cut by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (a songwriter whose band, it should be noted, owes more than a small debt to jazz).

Here, the melodies meander, and any lyrical quality is relative to tonal expressiveness — but the song remains at the core. It thinks like jazz, but it moves like pop music.

On the other side of the jazz spectrum, free-form bass ace Jason Ajemian, fronting his HighLife combo, has made a collection of songs that move like jazz, but think like pop music. The HighLife’s dual March releases, the “Let Me Get That Digital” LP and “Monsters & Animals” single, both build pop structures from free-improv components. Ajemian’s moaning vocal, playing often at the intersection of bleating indie rock and monastic chant, coaxes some semblance of verse-chorus, but the band’s communication is ultimately what allows the music to mine accessibility from out-minded skronk. Trumpeter Jason Wick and guitarist Owen Stewart-Robinson ably complement each other’s efforts to make their instruments sound like anything but a trumpet and a guitar, respectively. But when Wick and saxophonist Peter Hanson congeal their horns’ timbres, it lends the bands a taste of Fela funk. Marc Riordan’s drums are never complacent, interjecting commentary and offbeat fills before returning to provide a pulse for the songs.

And that’s key, here. Even when the band members veer as far afield as they can muster, the song pulls them back. They’ve effectively made a free-jazz primer of pop fans, and done it perhaps more effectively than any number of jazz-leaning indie rock bands with vainglorious aspirations.

It all does bring us back, though, to how pop listeners try to approach jazz, or why they don’t approach it at all. Matters of timbre preferences – the “I don’t like horns” argument – aside, when the song offers a comforting formality, a momentum and a few memorable points of reference, the canyon really isn’t so wide after all.

Selected cuts for your listening pleasure:

Christian Scott –”The Eraser”


Jason Ajemian & the HighLife – “Monsters”


MGMT – “Congratulations” (Columbia)
Having completely abandoned the fluffy synth-pop mega-jams that turned them from indie darling to mainstream megalith, MGMT has arrived at something unexpected, and unexpectedly good. Fitting they named a song “Brian Eno” as the pop-weirdo’s fingerprints are all over the graceful, panoramic acid-pop MGMT has compiled into its sure-to-be-misunderstood sophomore effort.

Annuals – “Sweet Sister” (Banter)

Separated from their major-label contract, Raleigh’s Annuals ramp up the textures, buttressing soft-pop jams with synth burbles and entangled guitars. It’s more refined than their debut, but looser and more spirited than 2008’s “Such Fun.” And their cover of Johnny Cash’s “Flesh and Blood” is somehow pretty OK
Loxtep

Jakob Dylan – “Women + Country” (Columbia)
Returning to work with T. Bone Burnett, who produced The Wallflowers’ breakout “Bringing Down The Horse,” proved a fortuitous decision for Jakob Dylan. With “Women + Country,” his second solo outing, Dylan’s steering a steady ship buoyed by Burnett’s lush, smoldering Americana signature. Dylan’s country rock shuffles along a well-trod path; it’s as commonplace as a sunset purpling the horizon.

Harlem – “Hippies” (Matador)
There’s not much to Harlem, an ungroomed and unbridled garage rock band from Texas. The band’s real appeal appears in its ability to mine the charm out of surf-rock boogie and R&B swagger, and assemble it hastily. The result sounds something like the soundtrack to a Tarantino movie, if he made actual B-movies.
Friendly Ghost


~ Bryan Reed