The Rosebuds are playing Saturday Night, September First, at the Downtown Event Center (formerly Martin Street Music Hall, formerly Retail. Am I forgetting anything? Lizzies’s?). Do you see how much fun these people are having?
Archive for August, 2007
The Raleigh blog Over The Top just announced the July winner of their “Over The Top Award”. If you live in Raleigh, you may have noticed a castle under construction on Glenwood Avenue. It’s hard to miss this giant house shoehorned into an average size lot across from the Carolina Country Club. Take a look at the winner.
Click on the image above to view the youtube video
We were happy to discover this 1987 video of John Swain. Swain was a character, and his shop The Record Hole is a prime example of what was great about Old, Weird Raleigh. He used to share space with a used book and magazine store in the building that is now Blue Flame Tattoos. Later he moved across the street to the College Beverage building. In both spaces he sold records and talked music with everyone from beach music DJs to punk kids. He passed away in the early 1990s, and we miss him.
Thursday night was date night at the Leebowitz household and the Mrs. and I were unanimous in our excitement about seeing Superbad. Our babysitter arrives at 6:30 on date nights; just in time to talk for a while, change clothes and drive to a local theater for a 7PM movie and then, dinner. We’re spoiled and we watch 9-out-of-10 films at either Mission Valley, the Colony or the Rialto. We have an Ambassador Entertainment season pass that covers all three and they serve beer and wine, which is really nice. But Superbad didn’t show at Mission Valley until 7:40, which doesn’t allow enough time to have dinner before, or after, the film. We chose the 7:00 showing at Carmike Cinemas on Atlantic Springs Road and arrived at 7PM to a 15-plex theater with just 5 cars in the parking lot, accompanied by what appeared to be a dirty diaper in a plastic bag, in the exact spot we saw a dirty diaper in a plastic bag over 8 months ago. We purchased our tickets, walked to the very end of a vast corridor and enter our auditorium at 7:00 sharp.
Who knows how long the commercials had been running at that time but from 7:00 til 7:15, we sat through commercials for Coca-Cola, athletic shoes, video games and The National Guard. Followed by 5 previews for upcoming releases. At 7:20 PM, I was thinking: “Outside-The-Beltline really is different! People wouldn’t stand for this downtown!” and wondering if Carmike Cinemas subjects everyone to this barrage of advertising, or just their theaters that tend to serve minority populations. At 7:30, as the previews ended and we watched a promotion for DLP Digital Projection, I realized we’d spent more than 10 minutes driving to the theater and we could have attended the 7:40 at Mission Valley and actually saved time and enjoyed some micro-brew beer with the film. Really, when you’re paying $7.50 to see a film, shouldn’t you be able to avoid the commercials you’re forced to endure with broadcast television? And if theater chains are struggling for survival in the face of home theaters, DVD rentals and new technologies, shouldn’t they work harder not to embody the worst of the commercial television experience?
I enjoyed the film more than the Mrs.; I thought it was SuperAwesome, but Carmike Cinemas and films that start a full 25 minutes later than the published time are SuperAwful. The whole experience renewed my appreciation for the theaters that treat me well.
John Kane wants the public to subsidize the cost of constructing the parking deck at his new shopping center, North Hills East. There’s been plenty of discussion about the subject in Raleigh, with Bob Geary panning the idea and Rick Martinez, (N&O subsidized hack of the John Locke Foundation) championing this model of corporate welfare. Mayor Meeker displayed a mensch-like demeanor that makes us almost excited about his next term. Dr. Assad Meymandi (Psychiatrist, Neurologist, Philanthropist and conservative activist) wrote a letter to the N&O to voice agreement with Rick Martinez. Letters from other conservatives followed, criticizing Martinez and Meymandi for abandoning the conservative belief that market forces should dictate the outcome. The truth is, “Market Forces” might have been the conservative mantra in the time of Barry Goldwater but now “conservatives” use the phrase only when it suits their needs, because they aren’t conservative, they’re just pro-business regardless of the cost to society. William Kunstler described Globalization as “primarily a way of privatizing the profits of business, while socializing the costs”. Isn’t that what John Kane is really asking of the public? Continue reading ‘Parking Dick’
Leebowitz’s recent post mentioning the Frog & Nightgown made me think of other local places that were once wildly important but are now mostly forgotten and not Google-able. In Durham there was the Hofbrau, underneath the parking lot of what’s now the Whole Foods Market on Broad Street. What’s the story on this space? It was a German-themed bar, underground, right next to Duke campus. I know this because I went there a couple of times to see bands play, but that is extent of this poor toad’s memory. When did it begin, and why did it end? Google says nothing on this. The Internet coughs up a bit more information on Raleigh’s own Cameron Village Subway, which lurked beneath what’s now the public library. A warren of nightclubs, with a video arcade and a stereo store thrown in the mix, it was the white hot entertainment center not just of Raleigh but of the entire Triangle in those heady years of the late 70s and early 80s when 18 year-olds could drink legally. We miss it.
The Loneliest Monk
Published by August 15th, 2007 in Art, Good Stuff, Durham, Music and RDU. 3 Comments
North Carolina’s own Thelonious Monk will be the focus of an 18-event tribute at Duke University.
“Following Monk” opens in Durham on Sept. 15 with the Kronos Quartet performing music commissioned by the festival, including three world premiere arrangements of “Round Midnight.” The tribute ends Oct. 28 with a solo piano performance by Barry Harris, who lived in the same apartment with Monk during his final years. The jazz genius died at age 64 in 1982.
In between, the Following Monk Institute will offer guided tours of Monk’s birthplace in Rocky Mount, and the plantation in Newton Grove where his ancestors were slaves and where his relatives still live.
In a career that spanned 40 years and six continents, Monk only played a major engagement in his home state once. In May of 1970, the Rocky Mount native did a weeklong run at the Frog & Nightgown Jazz Club, on Medlin Drive in Raleigh.
Thelonious Monk’s Homecoming revisits that legendary 1970 performance. The two living band members from the Frog & Nightgown dates, Paul Jeffrey and Leroy Williams, will appear on sax and drums, respectively.
In addition to a full-length rendition of the Frog & Nightgown setlist, Monk’s Homecoming will feature a never-before-heard recording of the shows made by Paul Jeffrey, who went on to spend 20 years running the Jazz Program at Duke. A conversation with the musicians precedes the show and will include Center for Documentary Studies writer Sam Stephenson, who has conducted extensive research on the 1970 shows.
Click here for the schedule and more info.
P.S. Apologies to Tabitha Soren for the title. I don’t believe this urban myth is true, although it is certainly entertaining.
The Carolina Theatre Cinemas celebrate their reopening this Friday with free movies. You can visit the box office in advance to pick up free passes.
Enthusiast George Smart, Jr. has uploaded his research on modernist houses built in the Triangle. Some less well known houses appear here, along with publicly available information on the owners and some of the sale data, and photos jacked from sonic matrix. Let’s hope this site spurs further enthusiasm, and doesn’t give errant developers ideas for more teardowns.
The next time you want to give your dog an unusual walk, or throw a Frisbee in a huge open quad, and be inspired while you’re at it, check out the government mall between Salisbury and Wilmington just north of the Legislature building. Host to large demonstrations, over-flow soccer games for tykes, and even hot-air balloon launches, this unbroken lawn (which forms the living roof of a parking deck) is also home to probably the best piece of public art in Raleigh. The Education Wall, finished in 1992 after 4 years of work, was the first outside art purchased under the Artworks for State Buildings program and indeed sets a high bar for public art in Raleigh. Created by sculptor Vernon Pratt with the assistance of Georgann Eubanks and others, the images are sandblasted into Texas red granite and are accompanied by benches of various granite types with information and more quotes engraved thereon. When I wrote about this piece in The Independent, I was mainly paying homage to my favorite writer, Fred Chappell, whose quote dominates the image from a distance. Once you get close, the raw granite behind John Coltrane’s musical bars, the surprising tragedy that ends one of the bench stories, the Braille translation and other diverse texts, really create a powerful presence that informs the entire sterile grassland that surrounds this piece. Support for public art has always been a little sketchy in these parts, but the Education Wall seems to please all concerned. It’s a start. And this post is just a start at looking at public art in Raleigh. Old and recent controversies, roaming art wolves, Andy & Opie’s malaise - there’s a lot of fat to chew here! Now if someone could just tell me what happened to the 40 foot wooden version of Sir Walter Raleigh that got carved in North Hills Mall in the late seventies…
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