The *real* end of an era
grady
grady at ibiblio.org
Wed Feb 20 07:56:41 EST 2008
For a brief period after I moved here, the best place to see shows in
Durham was a weird narrow downstairs room (with the stage on the long
side) called Under the Street. No, I wasn't there for the fabled Sun Ra
show, but I saw a lot of the Triangle's bright lights there.
Needless to say, Durham being Durham, UTS closed just as the early-90s
"next Seattle" hypestorm was peaking.
Cut forward a few years (to ~2002), and for a time the space experienced
a renaissance as Bully's Basement/The Basement. It was probably most
notorious (among women, anyway) as the bar where they'd connected the
hot-water line to the toilet, but it also anchored the emergence of the
newly-visible (always present, but often more underground) Durham Scene
(whatever that is). Saw a bunch of great Sames shows there, an amazing
show by the pre-Wigg Report band Rosa Begosa, one of the few Triangle
appearances of Asheville's Piedmont Charisma, etc.
So of course it had to die after a year or two (this still being Durham).
Today I learned via blog that following a long fallow period, the room
is now the MidSouth Fencer's Club:
http://archerpelican.typepad.com/tap/2008/02/mid-south-fence.html
http://midsouthfencersclub.org/
(Fencing being that thing you do in the white suits and the mesh
face-masks and the long skinny sword-like things)
Which is actually probably an excellent use for such a long skinny room.
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