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ch-scene - Re: On Durham and identity

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Subject: RTP-area local music and culture

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  • From: Chris Calloway <ifoufo AT yahoo.com>
  • To: RTP-area local music and culture <ch-scene AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: On Durham and identity
  • Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 16:38:30 -0700 (PDT)

--- "betsyshane AT gmail.com" <betsyshane AT gmail.com> >
(I've heard arguments
> that carrboro is
> cheap enough, or comperably cheap and I don't really
> know the orange
> county housing market)

wonderous thread with many furry spikes like a
*freaking scene bibliography*. wtf. long after butch's
rekkids are forgotten, this will be his legacy: a
steady stream of "scene" dissertations. woot!

lived raleigh 10 years. durham 15. moved to carrboro 1
year ago. couldn't afford chapel hill. ($1500/mo for
600 sq feet? that's like manhattan, damitol.) can
barely afford carrboro. best deals in carrboro are way
out by the plaza, if you don't mind apartments. some
nasty ass apartments on north greensboro just got
carved up into condos for a quarter mill apiece, which
is also about what tiny four squares go for here also.
durham much nicer and cheaper. but have strong belief
in living near work. mustn't waste the precious
petrol. and durham will soon enough price itself out
of the market, too, what with all the people moving
there. i moved from one neighborhood to the next
fleeing rent increases on mill houses as yuppies moved
in. almost everyone i've ever known from chapel hill
lives in durham now. every once in awhile i'll run
into an old familiar face on the bus to franklin
street. but this is happening less and less. most all
the familiar faces are in durham, a thousand miles
away, and i'm meeting lots of new faces, although most
of them work in chapel hill and live in durham.

i've seen the same 500 hundred people at shows around
the triangle for the last 30 years. weird. i was saw
about 300 of them all at the same time at kings a
couple of years ago. then going to the db's three
months ago was like stepping into a time warp.
suddenly the place looked like the station on a
saturday night. i saw people i went to high school
with in winston. when i saw them, it's not like i
recognized them from across the room. i would just see
someone standing, or fidgeting, or walking in a
certain way and would think, that looks like the way
so and so used to stand/fidget/walk. and on closer
inspection it would turn out to be them, even though
the looked nothing like they used. that's when you
know you've been in the same state too long. but i
like it here.

petty crime in chapel hill and carrboro is totally out
of control. can't park a car anywhere without a window
getting smashed out. at least in durham they just
steal your bombed out car once every fifteen years. in
chapelboro it's file a small insurance claim every
week. i'm pretty sure it's just drunks acting out.
last week it was a friend sleeping on my floor
overnight. in the morning a cop was standing by her
car with the driver's window smashed out. the cop said
there were windows smashed out all over town. it
matched the big crack someone had put on her front
window the week before. then she went home to
pittsboro where crackheads had broken into her house
and were dealing out of her bedroom. nice. i heard
stories like that in durham. i hear more of them here.
maybe it's because the dth actually prints a pretty
complete police blotter. i'm not very scientific about
it. but more shit has happened around me here in one
year than in all the time i was in durham.

population density of durham must be understated by
method which nate invokes. i live halfway up north
greensboro and nothing is within walking distance
except a bait shop converted into a taco stand. it's
like being in a wasteland. i walked home in a warm
rain from the 506 in the wee hours of new years day.
it took forever. in durham, biking to hangouts was
easy. the saving grace is i can take a cab between any
two points in chapelboro for about $7. yeah, there is
free bus service here. it just stops at a time in the
evening right before you need to go anywhere. it's
about to get bike weather again, though. so more
freedom for less money. i am not a citizen of the
triangle. it takes something pretty special to make me
drive down 15-501 or i-40. these things happen maybe
once a year. it's nothing against those other places.
i like them, too. i feel sorry for the peeps in
rollywood right now, what with their nice places going
away. but driving is simply more hazardous and
expensive than i feel comfortable with most of the
time. and i'm not fond of the idea that every citizen
of the triangle should be saddled with 50 grand of
debt in perpetuity just so we can build a monorail
between the restaurants dishing out shrimp and grits
on either side of our fine metropolis. live near your
work and work to live. then go have some shrimp and
grits near where you work and live. when you get tired
of that, maybe it's time to cook at home for awhile.

speaking of, i'm pretty sure there's more super fine
food in durham. and dang, when you add up all the
money being spent on slow roasted monkey butts on
fennel coulis within the bakatsias empire around ninth
and markham, whoa, you might could make some
unsubstantiated correlation between the faux creative
class and your rising star of grittiness. but the two
tops are lantern and vin, making a sandwich of durham.

i was dragged kicking and screaming to durham from
raleigh long ago. nothing to do there then except go
see bad white boy blues at halby's and the occasional
ugly americans at the hofbrau or corrosion of
conformity at some historic church. within a year
everything changed, and that was pretty much
concomitant with the rise of college radio in both
durham and chapel hill. i'm pretty convinced that is
the magic spice and we can pretty much trace the good
effects of both back to either ken friedman or mike
woodard. individual efforts can have long lasting
effects on many more people. anyway, there have been
weekly shows in durham pretty much continuously since
then. even when people said there was nothing to do
there, there were always shows at the kaffeehaus,
deliberately under publicized in order not to lure the
off campus "elements" onto campus. even during the
summer. nobody knew. they were just spontaneous
happenings. we knew and that's all that mattered.

once a bunch of us pretty much squatted in a space
above an itinerant restaurant in downtown durham. it
was like jo and joes on steroids with time
compression. we knocked the plaster off the walls down
to the bricks, hung art, and brought in a bunch of
bands. a bunch of people came. we had a month long
party. by the next month it was gone, but not before
we had gone spelunking through all the adjoining
abandoned spaces like a department store closed since
the 60s. some of those people like jim k went on and
made their own more permanent, though not permanent,
spaces. stuff like this would happen all the time.
when it was happening, we would talk about how if we
made it permanent, it would disappear, because the
bohos moving in to make a place fashionable is only
the precursor to the gentry moving in to make it
expensive and full of assholes. today all those places
are condos in the durham renaissance. yes, a scene is
all about change. jo and joes was too wonderful to
last. be careful what you change. it can have long
lasting effects for many more people, long after you
are gone.

i booked a show at 506 last month. all the bands were
from durham. glenn made it easy. the only downside was
the sound, which blew chunks. everybody complained
about the sound and had a great time anyway. there
were fights. somebody got fired. it was fun. i figure
that sound guy owes me $75, though, cuz i know that
room can sound good when somebody who knows what the
hell they are doing is on the case.

the big touring band thing is occasionally useful. i
saw deerhoof at the cradle a couple of months ago and
it was the best single band i'd seen in ten years,
even with just the one guitarist.

don't underestimate the ladies in chapelboro compared
to durham. two women were just re-elected to the top
spots at xyc this week. i've always noticed more women
working at internationalist. the best band in town are
two women. the list goes on. everywhere i look, there
are women all around here. wtf.

finally, a plug for my friend's really hard work:

http://www.signalfest.com/

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