Bull City Rising

B.B. King to headline Durham Performing Arts Center opening

Grand opening news from the folks at the Durham Performing Arts Center: An official opening date is at hand for the $45 million DPAC taking shape in the eastern half of the American Tobacco Campus.

November 30 it is, just in time to welcome legendary guitarist B.B. King for what's being called the "Bull Durham Winter Blues Concert."

We don't get the winter blues in Durham the way one does in the northeast or, heaven forbid, the upper midwest, but look for a night of red-hot blues to keep away any darkness from the shortening days.

Tickets will go on sale Sept. 27 according to the N&O (which has a blurb on the event posted at their web site) and will run $38-$68 a ticket.

Nasher "Shaft" screening, Barkley Hendricks exhibition free through Sunday

The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke is wrapping up its many-months long exhibition "Barkley Hendricks: Birth of the Cool," a showing of paintings by the Philadelphia-born artist in what's been the first career retrospective of this post-war creative's work.

The exhibition closes this Sunday, July 13, but if you're an ID-carrying Durham resident, admission to the museum and the exhibition are free (as always, sponsored by the folks over at the Herald-Sun.) It's a good chance to see a great exhibition in its last days, and hey, if you're a Bull City resident who's never been to the Nasher, it's an opportunity to see one of the major new additions to Durham's cultural landscape.

Also, tomorrow night the Nasher is presenting a free screening of the 1971 film "Shaft" at the museum. (The screening is free for all museum patrons; non-Durhamites do have to pay to enter the Nasher.)

This 1971 film by Gordon Parks officially launched the historic Blaxploitation movement. Richard Roundtree is the ultra-cool detective in this groundbreaking film that would spawn two sequels and a big-budget remake in 2000. It’s an action-packed thrill ride through the rough-and-tumble streets of early 1970s New York City and features one of the most recognizable theme songs in movie history (for which Isaac Hayes won a best song Oscar in 1972). Based on the novel by Ernest Tidyman.

Also worth keeping on the radar: the Nasher is gearing up for the opening of "El Greco to Velazquez: Art during the Reign of Philip III" on August 21. Co-sponsored by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, and showing only in Durham and Boston, the exhibition is being heralded as one of the most significant showings of the European masters' work in the U.S. and one of the singular art exhibitions in the southeast.

(How much traffic's expected for this little showing? Boston's MFA expected a quarter-million visitors during their run of show, while we understand that freshman orientation week planning at Duke has given logisitical consideration to such a major show opening in the midst of the move-in period.)

Exhibition tickets are now available for purchase from the Nasher's web site.

BCR to Gearino: Why "Bull Durham" will always be a uniquely Durham story

Kudos to the Independent Weekly for an interesting and thoughtful series this week on the 20th anniversary of the movie "Bull Durham," including a first-person account of one man's greatest Bulls game ever, a remembrance with legendary Bull and Hall of Famer Joe Morgan, and a look at locations and extras from the 1988 film.

Still, the most intriguing piece is one from ex-N&O writer G.D. Gearino, a "longtime Raleigh resident" who decides to take on the mythos of the movie in a conventional wisdom-tweaking column titled "Bullshitty."

While Gearino takes on "Bull Durham" over the accuracy (or lack thereof) of its depiction of the minor leagues and the quality of the film's acting, he reserves his parting shot for what he sees as the anonymity of Durham's canvas in the movie:

None of this would matter, though, if the film had succeeded in portraying Durham in all its interesting, flawed, diverse, chaotic glory. The fact that a movie this bad is hailed as great is only one stumper to be pondered here. The other is why so much civic pride has been piled on a film that shortchanges the real place it sought to portray.

Aside from the scenes at the old Durham Athletic Park and a few shots of the downtown skyline, nothing in the movie gives you any sense of Durham as a specific, unique place. For all that it imparts about that history-rich city, it might as well have been filmed on a studio backlot....

This is why I've been puzzled for two decades by Durham's embrace of a movie that treats it as just another Nowheresville. The city portrayed in Bull Durham is just as colorless and uninteresting as Durham residents frequently declare Raleigh to be. Yet they adored the film when it came out, and 20 years later have launched themselves into a new round of celebration.

Welcome to the white-bread world, y'all. It's amusing to see you embrace your inner blandness.

Ah, Mr. Gearino. Where to begin?

There's no denying that the film's choice of Durham is, on the face of it, accidental -- save for producer Thom Mount's love of his hometown. There is no scent of tobacco described over the town, as Gearino decries; there is no Nuke-Crash scene set on the campus of Duke; there's no sense of Annie going down to meet an old friend down at RTP.

Still, Durham is the perfect spiritual location for the film, for the Bull City shares with every Class A minor leaguer the same pedigree: that of the relentless underdog.

Lewis Shiner's "Black and White" fictionalizes Durham's hard Hayti story

The story of race relations in Durham are a frequently told tale, from the well-told story "The Best of Enemies" to the recent documentary film "Durham: A Self-Portrait."

Now it's time for Raleigh-based graphic novelist and writer Lewis Shiner to get into the act with a novel, "Black and White," published this month by Subterranean Press.

The novel -- which is prominently featured at The Regulator on Ninth St., which will host a reading with Shiner next Friday, July 11 -- mixes modern-day and urban renewal-period Durham, telling a family's story intermingled with a fictionalized tale of race relations in the difficult South during the civil rights era. As the Los Angeles Times' Sarah Weinman writes in her book review this Sunday:

The novel's quiet start introduces Michael, an Austin, Texas-based fledgling comic book illustrator who, at age 35, thinks himself "too old . . . to spend this much time with his parents" even as his career and romantic prospects leave him with limited options. The terminal cancer diagnosis of Robert, his father, and Robert's insistence on spending his dying days in Durham, N.C., give Michael a new purpose and bring him back to his birthplace, where he will hear his dad's last confession: involvement in a murder four decades ago in the heart of the once-bustling black Durham neighborhood of Hayti, which has lain fallow ever since, after deeply embedded racial hatred brought it down in flames during a riot.

The admission opens a Pandora's box of twists that shred Michael's supposed origins to ribbons and are revealed in a mixture of lengthy flashbacks and multiple viewpoints growing seamlessly out of Shiner's narrative. The tiered structure presents, with startling emotional acuity, an array of characters and allows the reader to see them in their truthful, monstrous, sympathetic glory.

Although the N&O was a little more mixed in its praise for the novel in its own review, printed in Sunday's paper, the early buzz on the book ("Motherless Brooklyn" author Jonathan Lethem calls it "both a page-turner and an urban documentary with a big, fierce heart") coupled with its Bull City canvas make it natural summer reading for Durhamites looking to see a more-fictional perspective on our hometown.

If you've had a chance to read the just-released novel, post your thoughts here in the comments; I'll add my own once I've had a chance to pick up and digest the book myself.

Golden Belt: Pre-leasing going well, artist studios almost all reserved

Some good news from the folks over at Golden Belt, who report that pre-leasing of the nicely designed live/work loft apartments is going well ahead of schedule. As of this writing, a little less than half of these units are pre-leased, according to a representative of Scientific Properties.

Which is a very decent clip indeed, especially when you consider that the entire complex has yet to open, and represents a first foothold in an historically disinvested part of the Bull City.

Meanwhile, the artist studio spaces adjacent to the residential section are almost completely reserved at this point, with just a small number remaining.

The first artists residential units are slated to get their inaugural occupants on July 1, with nine loft residents able to move in then. Another round comes in mid-July, with the remaining units available August 1. The artist studios will begin to be occupied on July 17.

Scientific notes it's still working on more announcements to come in the next few weeks, including a likely announcement of Golden Belt's first artist-scholar studio in residence. Scientific is also gearing up for the Jacob Lawrence exhibition -- the first of its kind outside of NYC -- in the coming months, as announced on WUNC's The State of Things back in May.

No definitive word yet on restaurant or entertainment/live music tenants for the complex, though the hint of more announcements to come in the coming months holds promise for more news of interest from the east-of-downtown redevelopment.

(For more on Golden Belt, see the earlier BCR posts on their residential and office/work spaces.)

Somerhill soft-opening video teases new downtown eats?

Last weekend, the Somerhill Gallery held its soft-opening in its new downtown Durham digs, having relocated from a Chapel Hill shopping center to the Bull City's Venable Center, a redevelopment by Scientific Properties just east of the future County Courthouse site.

The folks at Somerhill have posted a video account of opening day; if you haven't been to the Somerhill yet, it's a great way to see the beautiful, light-filled interior of the converted industrial space.

It also may be home to a new restaurant soon. Somerhill's owner, Joe Rowand, makes the intriguing announcement a couple of minutes into the video that the space next to him in the Receiving Room secton of the Venable will be home to a new restaurant to be announced shortly:

"And I think... soon they're going to announce a restaurant next door soon. I think that's pretty fabulous. It's in my lease that it can only be a restaurant, and I think we're getting close... But there's so many nice new restaurants, every day at lunch it's, where can I go today?"

Look for the Somerhill to hold its grand opening in July, currently targeted for the 12th. And check out the video on YouTube for a preview of the gallery:

Shooting the Bull: Podcast for June 22, 2008

In this week's edition of "Shooting the Bull," Barry Ragin and I chat with Colin Crossman of the Triangle Apartments Association to discuss proposals in both Durham and Raleigh to further regulate landlords in the name of targeting problem properties. Thanks as always to the folks at WXDU for the opportunity to host this weekly show.

If you missed the Sunday night broadcast, you can download or listen to the show from the Internet Archive, or listen to it via this embedded player. You can also now subscribe to the podcast in iTunes, via WXDU's hosted podcast.

DPAC to kick off with Raleigh's "A Christmas Carol" this December

The N&O reported yesterday on their Bulls Eye blog that the $45 million Durham Performing Arts Center will play host to the Raleigh Theater in the Park's production of "A Christmas Carol" on Dec. 5-7 this fall, marking the first "full-scale production" in the largest performing arts center in the Carolinas.

It's a fitting regional nod from the Bull City to the City of Oaks; Ira David Wood III's adaptation of Dickens' story to musical comedy has become a Raleigh institution, one that's stretched into over three decades of existence and which has been a starting point for the careers of many actors over the years, from Frankie Muniz to Michael C. Hall, as the N&O noted in their thirty-year retrospective back in ought-four.

And this year, "A Christmas Carol" premieres in the western half of the Triangle, holding a three-day run in the DPAC before moving along to the smaller Progress Energy Center in Raleigh.

Should be a good (not to mention seasonal) warm-up for the Nederlander/PFM-managed facility.

Restaurant tax moves forward -- is it the irony of the starving artist?

Ray Gronberg went two-for-two today in H-S metro pieces, adding a story on the forward progress of the prepared meals tax along with his East End Connector update.

As we learned back in April, state Rep. Paul Luebke has abandoned his longstanding opposition to the prepared meals surcharge, which would add a 1% additional sales tax onto food bought at restaurants. Durham's delegation has now introduced the bill in both houses of the legislature.

The bill won't begin to be pushed through the legislature, though, until the city and county reach agreement on how they'd split the revenue. Additionally, the imposition of the surcharge would be subject to a referendum.

And just what would the funds be spend on? Today's H-S tells us a bit of the story--

[The bill] specifies that the county can use 3 percent of the revenue to cover the cost of administering the tax.

Of what's left, the county is supposed to devote 80 percent to pay for "civic and cultural amenities," 10 percent for marketing, 5 percent for workforce training and 5 percent to community cleanup.

Reckhow and other supporters of the meals tax tie it to their plans to fund services likely to attract or serve visitors and tourists. The workforce-development money, for example, would particularly target "folks in the hospitality industry," while the reserve for cleanup is there on the theory that fast-food restaurants generate litter.

And just what's intended by "civic and cultural amenities?" We can get an idea from an April 9 H-S story, also by Gronberg:

Prospective beneficiaries include the Durham Civic Center, the county stadium, the Museum of Life & Science, a Durham history museum and a Minor League Baseball museum.

City Council (finally) reaches the budget discussion

(This is a continuation of the June 2 City Council meeting coverage; see the first part of the recap here.)

As predicted, advocates for the arts drew far and the largest group of supporters to Monday night's City Council meeting. Other groups spoke up for non-city agency (NCA) funding, but none as organized and numerous as the arts groups, galvanized by emails and meetings in the weeks since the budget proposal has hit the streets.

Whatever you think about the cuts to NCAs, it's a bit sobering that 95%+ of the 2-hour-plus marathon discussion focused on a few million dollars in spending out of a $356 million budget. Not that this level of civic interest in the arts and youth groups isn't important -- it absolutely is.

Yet one might think that with a higher level of interest in where we spend, you know, the other $354 million each year, we might cough up some funds for these programs in the first place. I'm just saying.

But, no. Three speakers on the $5 million-plus pay parity plan for public safety employees, one of the key budget drivers. Three on, of all things, taxi standards. And one (the very plucky Victoria Peterson) calling for matching funds to meet a state anti-gang grant. Every other speaker focused on the tiny, but emotionally-tugging, non-profit funding.

Hey, Mr. Bonfield - that's your new city for you. Don't worry about back-room politics with Sunshine State developers; you'll get to deal with all the public input you want, anytime you want it. Just think, you inherit all this next year. You can thank us later.

The kids: A number of youth stepped up first to the plate, supporting Duke's Youth Noise Network (YNN) program and the Triangle Champions youth track program. After a round of applause for their patience and their bravery in speaking before such a large crowd, it was off to the races with public comment on a range of topics:

The arts: Sherry DeVries, the executive director of the Durham Arts Council, was the first "big person" to appear before the mic. She noted that she was joined by a number of arts supporters in the room, a number that seemed to reflect a good one-half of those residents.

DeVries called the arts cuts a "devastating blow" to the community, including the hits to the African-American Dance Ensemble, Full Frame Festival, St. Joe's, and the Walltown Children's Theater. She noted the impact of the arts on everything from adding $103 million in Durham economic impact to reducing the drop-out rate among community youth.

She listed three priorities: provide three-year funding committment for the Cultural Master Plan; restore the lost non-city agency funding; and for the scheduling of a joint meeting between city leaders and arts leaders.