That's No Bull

Fullsteam Brewery

2011-02-26T16:44:00.001-05:00

I clearly do not get out much anymore, for what caught my attention as I slowly drove in the dark along Geer Street behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Bulls ballpark and headed uncertainly toward Rigsbee Avenue was a colorful neon sign that read--what did it read? Fullsteam? That was where I was headed, after all, and I knew that Fullsteam, which I had never been to, was in the vicinity. I stopped the car and took a harder look at the sign. "Motorco," it read, looking rather snazzy, its multichromatic luminescence brought into exorbitant relief against the general darkness of the evening, and in that moment it symbolized for me all that has been developing in Durham over the past few years--putting a place of entertainment where a place of business had been. The patrons in Motorco--I could see them through the large windows of the illuminated bar--looked young, and I thought in that moment that cities are for the young. They are for the young because the young have not had time to see them change. Motorco will always be there! Or so I imagine is the thinking, subconscious as it may be.

To say that Fullsteam is a place of entertainment occupying what was once a place of business is not entirely accurate. After all, the brewery is a place of business, and not that different of a business than the business that used to occupy the building. As I usefully discovered on Endangered Durham, Fullsteam occupies the back half of a building that used to house an RC and then a 7-Up bottling company. So beverages are in its blood.

I was surprised--pleasantly--by Fullsteam. Rather than a cramped, it is a cavernous space with enormously high ceilings and a polished concrete floor. The space is divided into two areas--four really, when you include the very front section of the bar, which has a ping pong table and four or five pinball machines, as well as a floor-to-ceiling panel consisting of controls that were once used to operate an electric bus system, and the room in which the brew kettles do their thing (it bears repeating that this is a bar and brewery). The main room contains eight or so wooden picnic tables, spaced generously apart, and a stage in one corner (on the night I was there, Chapel Hill guitarist Justin Johnson was performing). On the other side of the main room, and separated from it by a wall and glass doors, is the bar proper. The bar has seating for around eight people.

There were a dozen or so beers on tap, including several beers brewed, of course, on the premises. Fullsteam also serves food. On Thursday night there were barbecue sandwiches and tamales. Both were delicious. Indeed, the barbecue sandwich was one of the best I've had and reminded me very much of the barbecue I grew up eating in Memphis.

Fullsteam has an excellent website that explains the brewery's unusual--and exciting--mission. I can't wait to go again.

Fishmonger's

2011-01-16T09:27:00.000-05:00

With all the wonderful new restaurants that have appeared in Durham over the past few years, it is sometimes easy to overlook the ones that were already in business long before the Piedmonts and Federals and Rue Clers opened their doors. Such is the case with Fishmonger's, which has been serving Bull City diners since the early years of the Reagan presidency. It took a visitor from out of town (indeed, out of the country) to notice the oyster special they had on Friday night and to suggest going there for dinner. I am happy to report that the raw oysters, briny and fresh-tasting, were spectacular. According to our waitress, the oil spill last April had disrupted the oyster trade so much that these were some of the first oysters Fishmonger's had gotten this season. I preferred the raw oysters by leaps and bounds over the fried, whose breading was too heavy for the delicate flavor of the oysters. On that note, why anyone breads oysters in anything other than Zatarain's Fish-Fri I'll never know.

We also had the Frogmore stew, which, as many readers will know, is not a stew at all but a combination of shrimp, potatoes, sausage, and corn-on-the-cob boiled in seasoned water. At Fishmonger's, the seasoning is Old Bay. The flavor was delicious--the corn was especially scrumptious, and I took much pleasure in sucking the juice out of the cob, as if it were a crawfish head--and there was just enough boil in the bottom of the bowl to sop with a piece of bread.

Dame's Chicken and Waffles

2011-01-10T20:10:00.001-05:00

Disregarding the absurdity of placing Durham on a par with London, Bull City residents can be proud that the New York Times has listed Durham as one of the forty-one places to go in 2011. I'll return to the list at the end of this post, but for now let me report that the city that the Dukes built was chosen for its downtown food scene, which over the past four years or so has undergone a miraculous efflorescence. The article mentions Scratch, Revolution, Rue Cler, and Parker and Otis (although the last is proximate to downtown rather than in downtown proper).

Readers of the Times who decide, yes, Durham really is a place to go in 2011 should of course eat at all of those fine restaurants; but they will have an incomplete experience if they miss another downtown eatery, Dame's Chicken and Waffles. Put simply, Dame's "classy hen," a fried chicken cutlet atop a waffle, is the best meal one can have in Durham. I will even venture to say that it's as good a meal as one can have in London.

The waffle alone is worth the trip. In fact, it was the best waffle I've had in any restaurant. That the cutlet--actually a whole boneless chicken breast--tasted like New Orleans turned a good meal into a great one. The crust was firm and spicy, and the cutlet came right out of the fryer.

The waffle, which in its misshapen grandeur was nearly the size of the plate, came with maple syrup and a small scoop of vanilla-almond cream butter, both served on the side. The waffle is so big, you will want to ask for an extra serving of each.

At Dame's, one can order chicken wings or drumsticks or quarters; but I recommend the cutlet: one can cut through it and to the waffle underneath and put both on the fork together.

The buttered grits that came as a side dish were good too and far better than the miserable fare that nearly every other restaurant shamefully offers. (Note to my fellow Southerners: Do not, under any circumstances, allow Yankee friends to order grits from any restaurant in the South, and certainly from no restaurant in Durham. Do them, and me, a favor: buy some authentic stone-ground grits [the Crook's Corner grits, which are available at Parker and Otis, do just fine] and cook them yourself at home.)

Quite surprisingly for a downtown restaurant Dame's is open seven days a week, and is open to as late as 10:00 on Friday and Saturday nights. For their hours and menu, visit their website.

Back to the Times's list. What is most significant about it is that it recognizes Durham as its own place. I suspect that even five years ago the Times would have been incapable of thinking of Durham as something other than one of the population centers that make up what essayist Joe Queenan once called the "faceless, amorphous Raleigh-Durham." That, at least in the eyes of one of the world's newspapers of record, Durham has succeeded in claiming its own identity is reason to be proud indeed.

Stitches Tailor Shop

2011-01-08T08:03:00.002-05:00

I have never understood why being "comfortable" means looking like one just rolled out of bed. I hear this from men who dress casually when they go out in public--and by casually, I don't mean chinos and a polo or collared shirt (which is what casual really means), but shorts (elastic band, no belt), a T-shirt (always untucked and usually with a childish image on it), and tennis shoes, sandals, or worse, flip-flops. That kind of deshabille is especially thoughtless when the man is in the company of his appropriately attired partner or spouse. Have you seen these couples in the grocery store on a Sunday morning? La femme is wearing a blouse and skirt; l'homme, in contrast, has raided his five-year-old son's dirty laundry. Whenever I see a man in public dressed worse than Macauley Culkin in Home Alone, I often think of something that the one-time Raleigh resident and comedian David Sedaris said about male U.S. tourists in Europe: they look like they've shown up to mow somebody's lawn.

But some men do grow up, and when they do, they not only wear slacks rather than shorts, but they take their slacks to a tailor to get altered. And for grown-up men--and grown-up women too--there's no better tailor in Durham than Linda Laws, the owner of Stitches Tailor Shop. But don't take it from me. Two months ago, I brought two pairs of pants to Linda to alter. While I was in the dressing room, I heard someone else enter the shop. When I stepped out of the dressing room, there was Coach K, pair of slacks in hand, sitting on a chair, waiting his turn.

Stitches is in a small white building at 2500 Hillsborough Road, just east of Durham Tire. It's set far back from the road, so it is easy to miss. It's open Monday through Friday from 10 to 6. A pair of pants will cost around $20 to get altered.

The Biggest City in North Carolina

2010-12-29T15:04:00.000-05:00

I first encountered this phenomenon when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin, the phenomenon that renders the largest city in a state practically invisible to those who do not live in that city. When I lived in Madison, nobody--and I mean nobody--ever thought of visiting Milwaukee. They didn't know what they were missing, for Milwaukee is a wonderful place.

I've encountered the same phenomenon in North Carolina. Nobody in Durham--and I mean nobody--seems interested in visiting the largest city in the Old North State. Wilmington, yes; Asheville, yes. But the home of the Levine Museum of the New South? When I suggest a day trip to the city where Mert's Heart and Soul--the best soul-food restaurant in the state--can be found, I'm usually met with blank stares. "What would we do there?" is a typical response.

I don't know how long it's been since you've been to the home of the Mint Museum, but I'm here to tell you it's worth a visit. The several square blocks around the historic Dunhill Hotel is an urban center done right: attractive new buildings and even a few old ones nicely preserved here and there. Most of all, it feels like a big city--heck, it is a big city--and if you are like me, you occasionally need a big-city fix.

During the weeks preceding Christmas, the best attraction within twenty miles of the NASCAR Hall of Fame is the light show at the Daniel Stowe Botanical Gardens. This year, there were over 600,000 lights; the crew began installing them in late September and didn't finish until Thanksgiving. And this is a light show done with taste. There was a stand of crepe myrtles with lights arranged to look like snowflakes and ornaments; it was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen.

Danny's Barbecue

2010-12-23T08:46:00.001-05:00

It's funny, the way the place in which one grew up gets hard-wired, as a friend of mine used to say, into one's system. Last September, on a visit to Memphis, my hometown, I went for a walk through some woods along the Wolf River, a tributary of the Mighty Mississippi. I couldn't really explain it--perhaps it was the particular hardwoods that grow in that area, or maybe it was the feel of the swampy bottomland that lies adjacent to the river--but as soon as I stepped into those woods, I said to Rebecca, who was visiting the city with me, "Now this is what woods are supposed to look like."

I had a similar reaction the moment I stepped into Danny's Barbecue last night on Highway 54 in Morrisville: "Now, this is what a barbecue restaurant is supposed to smell like," I said to Rebecca, who was again with me. It did not surprise me, therefore, that the barbecue was, just as I gathered from the photographs on the restaurant's website, much like the barbecue one finds in Memphis. Danny, the owner, is from Florida, and he says his barbecue is just like the kind he used to eat in the Sunshine State. My point is that this is not traditional North Carolina barbecue. The meat is cooked in a wood-fired smoker, for thirteen hours, and served with sauces--a sweet tomato-based, a spicy tomato-based, a mustard-based, and a vinegar-based--on the side. Tender and moist, the pork we had was coarsely chopped and delicious.

I just learned about Danny's a couple of days ago, doing a simple Internet search for barbecue restaurants in Durham, so I was astonished to find out that the restaurant has been in business for over fifteen years. "We're in Bob Garner's books," Danny told us after we had finished our meal. I have those books; how could I have missed them? But sure enough, Danny's is in them; I checked as soon as I got home.

"Next time try the turkey," said Danny, who wore a red sweatshirt with the words "Bah Humbug" across the front. "Next to the pork, it's our most popular item. In fact," and here he turned to the kitchen and kindly asked them to put together a small sampling of his turkey, beef brisket, and ribs. (As if I weren't already making plans to come back!) I took the sampler to a couple of friends of mine, who both pronounced the food "fantastic." One of them, after she finished the meat, ate what was left of the sauces with a spoon.

Danny's has several side dishes, including field peas; that alone wins several points in my book. They were excellent, although the Brunswick stew was disappointing, as it had virtually no meat in it. The baked beans were a dark brown and sweet and delicious.

Much to my delight, Danny's plates come with Texas toast. As great as the barbecue and field peas were, I most enjoyed tearing off a piece of the Texas toast and sopping it in the baked-bean "juice."

For dessert, I had to try the banana pudding. For those of you who care about these things--and I do--it was topped with whipped cream rather than a meringue. I prefer a meringue topping, but the pudding was nevertheless some of the best I've ever had.

For diners used to the all-you-can-eat feeding troughs at the buffets that impair the American character (not to mention the American waistline), Danny's will seem a shade pricey for the amount of food that comes on a plate: four ounces of pork, a slice of Texas toast, and two side dishes were over six dollars. Danny's has three locations. The one closest to Durham is on Miami Boulevard, near the Durham Freeway, but it is open only during lunch on Monday through Friday, serving, Danny proudly reported, over three hundred diners a day. The other two are in Morrisville on Highway 54 and in Cary.

Is Durham a Good Barbecue Town?

2010-12-20T15:56:00.001-05:00

Here is an irony: North Carolina is considered a good barbecue state, but it has not a single good barbecue city. (Lexington is too small to count.) As a recent post on the BBQ Jew explains, no North Carolina city made the list of the top barbecue cities in a poll conducted by Travel + Leisure magazine. But I did not need a poll to tell me that. I knew already that neither Durham nor Raleigh--nor Greensboro nor Charlotte nor Winston-Salem--is a good barbecue city. To be sure, there are good barbecue restaurants in each city; but not one is a good barbecue city.

What makes for a good barbecue city? For one, there needs to be lots--I mean lots--of barbecue restaurants. Durham, with a population of over 200,000, has, what, eight? The Q-Shack, Bullock's, Dillard's, Hog Heaven, Backyard Barbecue, Ole NC Barbecue, Danny's, and Dickie's, which is a chain restaurant. Am I missing one or two? And only one of them, Bullock's, has a high profile. For a city of Durham's size to be a great barbecue city, I'd say at least two dozen barbecue restaurants are needed. We certainly have that number or more of taquerias. In fact, if Durham is anything, it is a great taqueria town.

For another, a good barbecue city would have two or three barbecue restaurants, each with its devoted fans, that are in an ongoing friendly rivalry with each other. Philadelphia is a good cheese-steak city in large part because of the longstanding rivalry between Pat's and Geno's.

It could be argued that the Triangle is a good barbecue area. The barbecue at Allen and Son in Chapel Hill is as good as I've had anywhere, North Carolina or otherwise. Backyard Barbecue is the best in Durham; in Raleigh, the Pit is my favorite. Those three together make a formidable group. Too bad they are not in a single city.

Black-Eyed Peas

2010-12-15T11:11:00.001-05:00

Here in the South, it is traditional on New Year's Day to make collard greens and black-eyed peas--not cooked together, of course, as some people have mistakenly done, but as two separate dishes. It's a shame that neither is the best of its class--I much prefer turnip greens to collard greens, and cream peas to black-eyed peas. Still, tradition is tradition, and at any rate black-eyed peas must have some kind of hold on me, because on the drizzly, chilly Saturday of this past weekend, as I walked out of the gym and to my car, I was suddenly overcome by a craving for black-eyed peas. I cursed the craving, for I knew that however good black-eyed peas sounded, their taste would disappoint me. They just never hold up their end of the bargain. Edible, yes, but never soul-satisfying in the way that rice and gravy or baked spaghetti or hot brown-and-serve rolls dipped in the syrup from baked canned sweet potatoes are.

Still, just as tradition is tradition, I had this craving and it was not going to go away. Luckily for me, my gym is just a few doors from a Kroger. As I walked to the Kroger, I mulled over the likely seasoning meats. I didn't want to use ham hocks, as they often leave small pieces of bone in the peas and I can never get much meat from them anyway. I decided I would use a boring ham steak--after all, I was making boring black-eyed peas--and that was the culinary direction in which I was headed until I noticed a display of country-cured hog jowls. Weren't hog jowls, parading under the Italian name of guanciale, all the rage in foodie New York restaurants just a short while ago? I dropped a pound package in my cart.

All I will say is this: black-eyed peas flavored with hog jowls are like no black-eyed peas I have ever had before. Here is my simple recipe. (Note: If you'd rather skip cooking your own and go out on New Year's Day, the Slow Food Triangle group is serving black-eyed peas and collard greens at the Fullsteam Brewery; for details, click here.)

2/3 pound country-cured hog jowls (see the notes below)
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
1 pound dried black-eyed peas, washed and picked over
Enough cold water to cover the peas by a quarter of an inch

1. The hog jowls came in slices, like bacon. Cut them into one-half-inch to one-inch pieces, and cook them for three or four minutes over medium heat in a six-quart pot, stirring often.

2. Add the onions, black pepper, and red pepper flakes, and cook for five minutes or so, stirring often. (The onions should soften but not burn.) Do not add any salt, as the hog jowls are salty enough in themselves to sufficiently salt the peas (but see the notes below).

3. Add the dried black-eyed peas and the water. (Despite what you may have read or heard, there is absolutely no reason to soak dried beans overnight, or for any length of time, for that matter.) Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium low. Partially cover the pot (the lid on my pot was just barely askew, so only a little bit of heat and steam could get out) and let the peas cook, stirring often, for two to three hours, or until the peas are tender and a thick gravy has formed. Serves 4-6.

A few notes. I do not salt my food as much as other people. I found that 2/3 pound of the cured jowls made for a pot that was almost too salty for my taste. Adjust the amount of jowls according to your tolerance for or love of salt, but keep in mind that if you use less than 2/3 pound of the jowls, what you lose in saltiness you will also lose in flavor from the fat. For me, 2/3 pound was just the right balance: 3/4 pound would have produced a pot that was too salty, whereas 1/2 pound would have produced a pot that was too lean. During the cooking you may need to add a quarter cup of water now and again to keep the peas from getting too dry. You may also need to adjust the heat: the peas should be bubbling but certainly not boiling and certainly not sticking to the bottom of the pot. (By the end of the cooking my burner was not even on 2.) If the peas are sticking to the bottom of the pot, either the heat is too high, there is not enough liquid in the pot, or both. You could serve the peas over a little bit of rice, but I did not, simply because I hadn't thought about cooking any rice and by the time the peas were done, I was too eager to eat, having tasted how delicious they were during the cooking.

Stuckey's

2010-12-12T08:13:00.001-05:00

Last week I was suddenly seized by a nostalgia for Stuckey's. So on Saturday I drove to the Stuckey's that's closest to Durham, the one off the Haw River exit (exit 150) on I-85. I knew before I got in the car that I was destined for disappointment. For I knew what I was going to encounter--or I knew what I was most certainly not going to encounter.

To say that there is a Stuckey's in Haw River--or in nearly any other place in these United States--needs to be qualified. The Stuckey's in Haw River is nothing more than floor space rented in a nondescript structure whose other floor spaces are rented by a Dairy Queen, a Krispy Kreme, and a Wilco. That's a far cry from the Stuckey's stores that used to exist, mostly in the South, stores that were in their own building complete with a distinctive teal-colored roof. On our interminable and fractious family drives between Memphis and New Orleans, up and down the entire length of Mississippi in the 1970s and early 1980s, the Stuckey's stores along I-55 and I-59 were where we would always stop, a precious reprieve from the cramped arena that was the family car. Each store had an extensive line of Stuckey's-brand candies and nuts, but Stuckey's was most famous for its pecan logs, pecan rolls, and pecan divinities. In the back right-hand corner of every Stuckey's was a grill that served hot dogs and hamburgers. There were souvenirs and toys and books; and most delightful for squirmy, bored, and irritated travelers like my siblings and I were games that one could actually play in the car. On the side of each building was an image of a fancy horse-drawn carriage and, under it, the words "Pecan Shoppe," the quaint spelling of shoppe for shop, much like Milton's spelling of hee for he, fascinating me to no end. For a good image of a typical Stuckey's store, click here.

In the 1980s the Stuckey's stores in Mississippi started to close and were replaced by fireworks shops and porn shops. I wondered if any stand-alone stores were left, so I visited the Stuckey's website and emailed the company. Much to my surprise, I got a response the next day. There are a few stand-alone stores remaining, mostly on the east coast, but there is one in Mississippi too, in Hattiesburg near the I-59 exit. I know exactly where it is: it is one of the ones at which we used to stop.

At the Stuckey's in Haw River the nuts and candies are still there, as are the pecan rolls, pecan logs, and pecan divinities. There are still souvenirs: shot glasses with the North Carolina flag printed on them, for instance. There are coffee mugs that say "Grumpy Old Man" and vanity license plates that read "I'm spending my children's inheritance." There are wooden carvings of horse and eagle heads with flared nostrils and hot-and-bothered visages, symbols of at least one vision of America. Oddly enough, there are also Curious George jack-in-the-boxes.

Econ 101, Election Style

2010-10-31T11:27:00.003-04:00

For the past week and more I have been reflecting on Bob Geary's fine cover essay that appeared two weeks ago in the Independent. In it, Mr. Geary argued that the Democrats have a problem: unlike the Republicans, they cannot articulate a vision of the country and the economy; they have been scared into abandoning their traditional form of governing, which involved taxing the rich and spending the revenues on projects and programs that help the the working and middle classes--that is, the majority of Americans--and are groping for an alternative. It's not that there isn't a vision to which most, if not all, Democrats would subscribe; there is, and it would include a commitment to peace, full employment, a more equal distribution of wealth, a single-payer health care system, and alternative and sustainable sources of energy. But in their determination to avoid being labeled "tax and spend liberals," Democrats are making a mess of their campaigns and come across as unfocused and uninspiring.

As I've thought about Mr. Geary's essay, what has struck me is the degree to which Democrats--and Republicans and Americans in general--have turned a blind eye toward the true workings of the economy. Somehow, enough of us have bought into the conventional economist's picture of the economy, a picture that is in sympathy with the Republican Party's vision of the economy that Mr. Geary also describes, an economy in which as many decisions as possible are left to the private sector. In the conventional picture--which can be found in any standard textbook--the economy emerges as a benign and smoothly functioning system that rewards workers based on their productivity. It is a system in which competition and self-interest root out financial malfeasance and would-be financial predators. It is a system in which the solution to virtually any problem can be found in the market: the right combination of prices and incentives can produce any outcome we desire. Most significant, it is a system in which people understand the choices available to them and the costs and benefits of those choices--or, as Ronald Reagan once offered without a trace of irony, the only people who are homeless are the people who want to be homeless.

I'm willing to grant that all of the above is, to varying degrees, true. Yet anybody who reads the papers and lives in the real world knows that the economy is not just about markets and competition; it is just as much about custom, cronyism, corruption, inheritance, emulation, exploitation. It is no accident that the economics enshrined in the textbooks read in school is the product of people who, as the dissenting economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said, always knew where their next meal was coming from.

I hope Democrats read Bob Geary's article and take up the agenda he outlines. At the very least, Democrats should heed Mr. Geary's warning that the income inequality that they and the Republicans have made possible cannot be sustained if we want a healthy, functioning democracy.

W. S. Merwin

2010-10-29T11:24:00.004-04:00

"'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?' What's so remarkable about that line?" W. S. Merwin, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, asked an audience of around one hundred people last night in the Gothic Reading Room on Duke's West Campus. "Everything. It's perhaps the most remarkable line in the English language."

Mr. Merwin was the latest in a long line of luminous literary figures who have visited our city as part of the William Blackburn Series of Visiting Poets and Fiction Writers. He recited Shakespeare's line as he explained that poetry is often made up of lines and phrases we hear everyday but do not impress us as remarkable--until they are set in the context of a poem. "'That is no country for old men.' What is remarkable about that line from Yeats?" Nothing, perhaps, but, as Mr. Merwin explained, sometimes a line acquires a momentum of its own, like a train leaving a station, and the poet must be ready to jump on it and let it take him where it may.

One's experience of a poem is acutely personal. After reading "The Animals," one of his early poems, Mr. Merwin suggested that every person who just heard it will react to it in a different way. He told his audience about a letter he once received from a young man. The young man claimed that one of Merwin's poems, "Little Horse," had kept him from going to Vietnam. Just why the poem had that effect--indeed, why any poem has a particular effect at all--must remain a mystery.

Mr. Merwin was introduced by James Applewhite, a professor emeritus in the Department of English at Duke and a considerable poet in his own right. "A maker of souls": that is what Professor Applewhite called Mr. Merwin. Each member of the audience was given an attractive broadside on which was printed "From the Start," a poem in Mr. Merwin's recent collection titled The Shadow of Sirius. The printing was by Officina Briani, an artisan printer in Raleigh, and was designed by Jan Martell, a designer in Durham.

Baseball: A Primer

2010-10-26T09:10:00.000-04:00

Usually out of an unconscious sense of cultural superiority, English-speaking peoples often forget that countries other than those in the Anglo-American realm may not know our literature and movies and music, may not be familiar with, for instance, a classic novel such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.

Then again, I am often reminded that other countries quite precisely know very well our cultural touchstones, the high and the low, the Jonathan Swifts as well as Taylor Swifts. (How could they not, powerful as we are?) I was reminded of that on Friday when, in a discussion of Gulliver's Travels, at Satisfactions--where, by the way, the meatball supreme sandwich is fantastic, the best of its kind I've ever had--a young Bulgarian jumped right in and offered a few observations on Swift's (Jonathan's, not Taylor's) great satirical work.

"Wait a minute," I interjected, paying little attention to what he had actually said. "People read Gulliver's Travels in Bulgaria?"

In fact they do, he told me. Astonished, I remained mute as he returned to discussing the novel.

A few moments later, a young Japanese man weighed in with his own reflections on Gulliver's Travels.

"Wait a minute," I interjected again. "People read Gulliver's Travels in Japan?"

All during our conversation, every television in Satisfactions was tuned to Game 6 of baseball's American League Championship Series. At our table were the Bulgarian, the Japanese fellow, a Chilean, a Brazilian, and me. From time to time my Japanese friend and I reacted to a play in the game--of course, the only two who had any idea what in the world was going on. "What are they doing?" the young man from Chile asked, waving his hands in exasperation. "They are running around, standing around, throwing the ball around . . . Why?" How can one possibly explain to him, in media res, that there were runners on first and second with two outs (I'd first have to explain what was an out and what was the significance of having two of them) and two strikes on the batter (ditto), that the runners were therefore running with the pitch (a piece of strategy that would need explaining), that the batter hit a ball into the stands in such a way that it was foul (explaining the concept of "fair" and "foul" would be necessary and difficult as well) and thus didn't count (and what might that mean?), that therefore the runners had to return to their original bases, and that, of all things, some man who looked old enough to be the players' grandfather had to reach into his pocket, take out a new ball, and toss it to the pitcher?

"I should write a primer on baseball," I announced, thinking of the baseball-challenged friends seated at the table with me. I was kidding.

"I think you should," said the Bulgarian. He was serious. And I could see on his face that he was eager to learn everything he could that was significant about Anglo-American culture--or at least in this case, American culture. I was surprised. Then again, I shouldn't have been. After all, they do read Gulliver's Travels in Bulgaria.

Local Food

2010-10-20T16:54:00.003-04:00

The efflorescence of the food and restaurant scene in Durham has been extraordinary to say the least. When I moved to Durham in 1999, there were Foster’s, the Magnolia Grill, Pop’s, Parizäde, and Nana’s—actually, not bad for a city like Durham at that time; but there was nothing else that could not be found in any number of other middling American cities. Since then—and especially over the past six or seven years—the list of restaurants that could hold their own in the New Yorks and Bostons of this country has grown to an impressive length. The Q-Shack, Four Square, Watts Grocery, Piedmont, the Federal, Toast, Parker and Otis, Scratch, Vin Rouge, Guglhupf, Rue Cler—the list could be even longer. And one should not overlook the Durham Farmers’ Market, which, I learned today at a lunchtime presentation at the John Hope Franklin Center, was recently voted the sixth most popular farmers’ market in the country--and that for a farmers’ market that didn’t even have its own space until just three years ago.

The presentation was by Sam Poley and Phoebe Lawless, and the topic was Durham’s local food movement. Mr. Poley was the chef at the defunct (lamentably so, I should add) Restaurant Starlu and is today on the staff of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau; Ms. Lawless is the chef-owner of Scratch, the new downtown bakery at 111 Orange Street. The two attributed the rise of the movement primarily to the diversity, values, and spirit of Durham residents and to the proximity of lots of farms. They discussed the virtue of eating local foods in season—tomatoes in July and August, for example—and how the local food movement struggles to balance that against the public’s expectation that all foods be available throughout the year. There is a subset of Durham residents who understand the virtue of eating foods in season and who appreciate it, Mr. Poley and Ms. Lawless said; and those are the people who are behind the success of the local food movement.

But most people still demand their fruits and vegetables all year round—and that’s where the reality of running a business can clash with the ideal of preparing and serving foods only in season. Mr. Poley, who is also one of the founders of the Only Burger food truck, said that for a short time the food truck tried to offer tomatoes only when they were ripe locally. “But people get mad—they get really mad—when you tell them in February that they can’t have a slice of tomato with their hamburger,” he explained. Ms. Lawless, whose bakery will face its first winter growing season this year, said that balancing the commitment to using locally grown ingredients in season with her customers’ wants will be a challenge. “I suspect we may use a lot of chocolate come wintertime,” she said.

Also discussed was the cost of locally grown foodstuffs. Since they are produced on a small scale, local meats and produce cost more than their mass-produced counterparts and thus are out of reach of Durham's many low-income families.

It is still a mystery to me why the local food movement has reached a certain level of success in Durham. Yes, there are people in Durham who appreciate and support locally grown food; and yes, there are many farms in the area. But there are other mid-sized American cities with the same kind of people and close to lots of farms, and what makes Durham so different from them? Perhaps the real reason lies in the food culture that was created and nourished in the 1980s by Bill Neal in Chapel Hill, who promoted the use of native Southern ingredients at Crook’s Corner. Perhaps somehow, someway, the work that Bill Neal started nearly thirty years ago has ripened into the local food movement we hear about today.

I say that the local food movement has reached a certain level of success only. Surely, some of the recent press about the Durham food scene exaggerates when it claims that local foods are so omnipresent on restaurant menus that it is easier to point out what isn’t local. Mr. Poley told us that there are 552 restaurants in Durham. But of those, I can’t imagine that more than a dozen are committed to serving potatoes grown in Rougemont and pigs raised in Bahama. Still, thanks to people like Mr. Poley and Ms. Lawless, we have those dozen, and that’s a very good start.

The Hammer

2010-10-18T16:14:00.003-04:00

Just like the proverbial loaded gun in the corner, the hammer lay on its side in the percussion section amid the gong, xylophone, and glockenspiel, waiting, just waiting, to be used. It was a brown, wooden hammer, one too large for any normal human purpose, with a rectangular head the size of a cinderblock and a handle three feet long if it was an inch. It had a primitive, and utilitarian, look, the look of a tool our ancestors would have used to smash in the head of a tiger or a bear--or an enemy of the tribe.

When the percussionist at last picked it up an hour into Gustav Mahler's Sixth Symphony, I shook Rebecca, who I think had fallen asleep, and pointed excitedly toward the stage. "He's fixin' to use the hammer," I whispered. "Look!" Down went the hammer. Splat. Beautiful.

The percussion-rich and triple-forte-laden Sixth Symphony was performed Thursday night in UNC's Memorial Hall. (It is called Memorial Hall for a reason: headstones memorializing deceased Old North Staters line the interior walls of the hall.) At least in the balcony, the rows are close together, such that there is not much room for people to pass by. Soon after I took my seat, a man who looked ninety years old and was dressed in blue jacket and a blue tie pointed three seats to my left and said, "That woman purports to be my wife." "Happy purporting," I told him cheerfully, as I stepped completely out of the narrow row to give the chuckling man room to safely pass.

The performance was by the Mariinsky Orchestra of St. Petersburg under the direction of Valery Gergiev, the superstar conductor who resembles a scowling and weary-visaged Ernest Borgnine. The maestro--who, we were informed by an usher, asked that people who exited the hall during the performance be kept from reentering--entered from stage right, took a quick bow, and immediately got down to business. (What's his hurry? Didn't he understand that most people in the audience had come to see him?) He conducted without a baton and without standing on a platform. From time to time he hurriedly brushed with his left hand the hair out of his eyes.

Six Lanes of Heaven

2010-10-14T08:08:00.001-04:00

After work yesterday, I had to go to Dick's Sporting Goods, which is in No Hope Commons--er, New Hope Commons, the ungainly strip mall that sits in a swale at the intersection of Mount Moriah and 15-501. I did not want to go, mainly because I expected there would be lots of traffic on 15-501, and if there's one thing I can't stand, it's a lot of traffic. Actually, I don't mind traffic at all; if everyone remained civilized, it wouldn't be bad in the least bit. But few people remained civilized behind the wheel of a car. Instead, they metastasize into Jimmy Johnson wannabes who insist on driving 60 miles per hour and repeatedly changing lanes when there is a lot of traffic. I mean, this ain't Martinsville!

But much to my surprise, the traffic at 5:00 p.m. was light--so light that I figured something must be wrong. Or different. Yes, different. The stretch of 15-501 between Garrett Road and Mount Moriah has finally been widened to six lanes (that's three lanes going south, and three going north). More significantly, the third "lane" that ended 500 feet going south beyond Garrett Road no longer ends. And at least for this one trip, that made a lot of difference. I made it to Dick's and back home in less than thirty minutes.

Widening 15-501 is, of course, no long-term solution. I imagine 15-501 being replaced entirely by a long canal, a narrow river even, with weeping willows lining its banks, a waterway reserved for punts and punters.

Sunday Morning Coming Down

2010-10-10T13:28:00.007-04:00

Sunday morning, before the sun rose above the tallest trees, as I walked along Markham Avenue in one of Durham’s prettiest neighborhoods, Trinity Park, I turned a question over in my mind that I have turned over in my mind many times before: Can we all be rich, or can only some be rich, and only then because others are poor? There on Markham, on a quiet Sunday morning in Durham, the sunlight was pretty and the trees were pretty; the houses were pretty, and so were the gardens in the front yards. Everywhere I looked, everything was pretty! I was aware of my great fortune, the fortune of living in a place and a moment in which loveliness and freedom and quietude coexisted in such abundance. The entire scene was so beautiful, I marveled that not every single soul in Durham had congregated on Markham. But I was the only soul on the street. I had block after block all to myself. Even the inhabitants of the attractive houses that I was walking past were indoors; most had not ventured outside yet, judging by the numerous morning newspapers still resting on the sidewalk in their blue plastic bags.

It was a mix of private beauty and natural beauty, a mix of what only a property owner had the right to enjoy and what could not be denied to even the most indigent human being. The sunlight, the birdsong, the trees—they were all there, gratis, for anyone to see and hear. Even a view of the pretty houses, in the absence of high and solid fences, was there for anyone who wished to look. But to walk among the small gardens, to take a seat on a front porch . . .

I once wondered out loud to a German visitor why parks in America were so woeful compared to the splendid parks in Europe. His answer was simple, yet it was one I had not comprehended before. In Europe, he explained, most people live in small apartments, usually with no outdoor space at all. To compensate, Europeans build and maintain lavish parks and inviting public squares. In America, our private spaces are roomy and attractive: we all have big back yards with our own private gardens. There is not much need, he said, for public parks in such a country.

In an irony that should not be surprising, the best "public" parks in Durham are actually on private land. I'm thinking of the Sarah P. Duke Gardens and the magnificent lawns on Duke's East Campus. As for public squares, I don't think we have any, at least not one that would naturally be the place for Durhamites to congregate if we had to (or wanted to) congregate quickly and spontaneously. Durham Central Park? The plaza on Corcoran? American Tobacco? Again, the only place that currently functions as a public square is not on public property at all but at the outdoor areas at the Streets at Southpoint. God help us if that's where we all needed or wanted to gather when we needed or wanted to gather somewhere fast.

South Ellerbe Creek Trail

2010-10-08T15:54:00.006-04:00

The American city leaves much to be desired. Left to evolve in an unorganized, ad-hoc fashion, the Detroits and Dallases and, yes, Durhams of our country have no center--commercial, cultural, or otherwise--and no integrity of design, guided by no urban aesthetic or sense of proportion and beauty. Miraculously, there are streets and street lights that work, and clean, running water can be found in nearly every home; the citizens are by and large orderly; and the trash gets picked up, faithfully, every week.

Miraculously, too, there are "amenities" in every city, usually a park that is extraordinarily well maintained. In recent years, linear or "rails to trails" parks have been popular--even in New York City, whose High Line has been a success, and even in my historically regressive hometown, Memphis, where a long-defunct east-west railroad line has just now been turned into a paved trail.

Durham, of course, has its own linear parks. The biggest one is the American Tobacco Trail. But recently I have found myself walking along the South Ellerbe Creek Trail, which runs from West Trinity, near the intersection of Washington and Trinity, to West Club and Washington and then beyond. The first time I walked along the trail was two weeks ago on a drizzly Sunday afternoon. The trees whose branches form a canopy over most of the trail had that early autumn look--yellow leaves mixed with green leaves, trunks black from the wet. "Look," I said to Rebecca, spotting the red leaves of a sassafras tree. She broke off a small branch and held it up to her nose. "Does it smell like root beer?"

The blacktop trail twists and turns past a transformer station and then along the creek itself and at one point over a charming little bridge that spans the creek. Along the way one passes a large, rectangular, fenced-in meadow and a power-line tower that is also enclosed by a high fence and around which grass and vines have grown wild and tall. From time to time a cyclist scoots by, and a few people may be seen walking their dogs. But at several points one could just as well be in a vast forest. There are only the trees and the underbrush and the inaudible murmur of the barely moving creek.

The Corner Store

2010-10-05T22:51:00.002-04:00

I met with a visitor from Albany, New York, today, and as I toured her around Perkins Library on Duke's West Campus, she stopped in her tracks and said, "I have an observation to make about Durham. Where are the corner stores?"

Where are the corner stores indeed? They used to be there--at least, the old-timers tell me they used to be there, and in some neighborhoods one can see buildings that used to be a grocery store or some kind of retail establishment. I explained to her that most neighborhoods used to have corner stores. For example, Morehead Hill, where I used to live, used to have seven grocery stores, according to someone who grew up in the neighborhood. (Then again, the block I now live on used to have seventeen houses but now has only three.) But I suspect that once the strip mall on University and Forest Hills was built (the strip mall with Compare Foods), the grocery stores in the neighborhood went out of business. That would have been forty years ago or so.

Of course, there still are corner stores--some along Fayetteville come to mind, and there is some kind of community store on Driver. And there are plenty of stores on corners, although they are not, in the true sense of the term, corner stores.

I suppose I am lucky. I can walk half a mile in one direction to a Food Lion and half a mile in the other direction to the BP on Ninth and Main. A half a mile is not exactly on the corner, however. It is entirely possible to live somewhere in Durham and not be within half a mile from a retail establishment. And even if one is, walking there may not be easy or pleasant.

If a store is in a strip mall, does it qualify as a corner store? I somehow think not.

I was grateful for my Albany visitor's observation. Visitors are sometimes the best guides to one's own city (and let's grant for the moment that Durham is a city). A fellow from London who spent the past year here never got over the fact that a train passed right through the middle of town several times a day, stopping traffic and blowing its horn; he thought it was positively retrograde. A Brazilian told me I don't live in a city; I live in a forest. A visitor from Atlanta said Durham is beautiful and looks like Atlanta must have once looked. My oldest, best friend, who still lives in Memphis, doesn't believe that Durham is the South.

Speaking of Memphis, I was there a few weeks ago and had the best donuts in my life. Now, that is something Durham does not have: a good donut shop. Put one of those on the corner, and we'd be in business.

Bull City Connector

2010-09-14T07:50:00.001-04:00

Forty years ago or so, Fred Smith started Federal Express with one central idea: to deliver packages from one locale to another overnight, all of those packages needed to be shipped to a single location, or "hub," first, where they would be sorted and then re-shipped to their final destinations. Even a package that was being sent from Raleigh to Durham would be shipped to the hub before being sent to its intended address in the Bull City.

The hub system that made Federal Express a success was in time adopted by other concerns whose business was to transport items from one place to another. Unfortunately, those concerns were airlines and municipal bus companies. What works for packages does not work for people.

What makes the Bull City Connector, Durham's new bus service that runs along Main Street between the Golden Belt on its east end and Duke University on its west, such a fine service and the best thing to happen to this city since the restaurant revolution began around seven years ago, is its independence from the hub system that renders traveling via DATA buses all but hopeless. That it is free is beside the point; what makes the service attractive is its convenience.

What we now need is the equivalent of the Bull City Connector running along all the major thoroughfares in Durham. Imagine traveling by bus from one end of Roxboro to the other without being detoured to the Durham Station Transportation Center and put in purgatory for half an hour. In other words, what we need is a bus service that turns its back on the perfidious hub system and puts its passengers first.

The Big Uneasy

2010-08-31T18:00:00.024-04:00

Yesterday, a former Duke student stopped by the professor's office that adjoins mine. I heard the student report that his wife was now in law school. She is interested in real-estate law. He has been working various jobs in finance and wants to go to graduate school in economics. Both are bright, enterprising, and enthusiastic.

I thought about those two young people last night as I, along with fifty or so other viewers, watched The Big Uneasy, humorist and social critic Harry Shearer's new film about the levee failures in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. (Mr. Shearer lives part-time in New Orleans.) The film made the case that the flooding in New Orleans was not due to the hurricane per se but to the faulty construction of the levees, levees that, if properly made, would have kept the water out of the city. The lion's share of the blame was put on the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps was depicted as incompetent, at least when it comes to large civil engineering projects. The incompetence, in turn, was explained as the legacy of the way the corps is used and protected by the the several members of Congress, each of whom stands to win points with their constituents by securing public engineering projects for the home district.

I do not doubt Mr. Shearer's thesis. But as the movie wore on, I began to believe that the corps was being unfairly blamed. Under the circumstances, I suspect that the corps did the best they could--given the incentives that were in place and the culture in which the work was performed. That their performance was inadequate is a different matter altogether--and should come as no surprise. Why should we have expected anything other than substandard levees from the corps, when the corps is part of a public sector that we have turned our backs on as we have decried it as a locus of waste, inefficiency, and ineptitude? Why should we have expected anything other than substandard levees when they were constructed by the very entity--the government--that the most popular president in modern memory told us was The Problem?

The real blame lies with us collectively. We have convinced ourselves--incorrectly, of course--that the public sector is inevitably fraudulent and ineffectual. Inextricably bound up with that erroneous conclusion is our willingness to underfund the public sector so we can enrich the private. No wonder the two Duke students with whom I began this post are seduced by the status and remunerative promise of the private sector. Until I start hearing Duke students say they want to work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers--and the other departments and offices of government--the Big Uneasy will remain just that.

Paperhand Puppet Intervention

2010-08-24T14:51:00.005-04:00

I am increasingly astonished when a group of people take extraordinary pains to produce something beautiful purely for the sake of producing something beautiful. That was the thought that ran endlessly through my mind on Sunday night as I sat in the idyllic Forest Theater on the campus of UNC and watched "Islands Unknown," the latest production by the superb performance troupe known as the Paperhand Puppet Intervention. The charming program consisted of eight short pieces, in each of which a young girl and various animal companions (often a goat) tour an island--an island of libraries, an island of animals, and an island of mustachioed land-grabbers, among others. (Not content with only land on this here earth, the mustachioed men attempt to claim the moon as their possession.) A live band, featuring drums and keyboards and an upright bass, accompanied the show.

Lest one get the wrong impression, this was not a puppet show in the tradition of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie or the Muppet Show. Most of the "puppets" were not puppets at all, but human actors wearing oversized masks. What puppets there were were often large and scary--at least to the toddler a few rows in front of us who started crying and had to be taken out of the outdoor amphitheater by her father.

I began by saying that Paperhand produced beauty for beauty's sake. That is not entirely true, for the story came with heavy-handed warnings about the destruction of the planet by us thoughtless humans. "Enough" was the refrain in one piece in which deforestation, pollution, and other ills of our expanding human society destroyed the once healthy and abundant habitats of our feathered and four-legged friends. Needless to say, the audience was sympathetic to the production's message--but, alas, my fellow theatergoers, we are past the point of no return. All the hybrid cars in the world will not save our planet.

A word to the wise: Forest Theater, with its stone and concrete seats, is not comfortable. Bring one of those lawn chairs that sit just a few inches above the ground. You'll be glad you did.

Krispy Kreme

2010-08-13T12:13:00.001-04:00

Three weeks ago I got in the car and drove to the Krispy Kreme--the only Krispy Kreme in the entire Triangle--to try the Cheerwine-cream-filled Krispy Kreme doughnut. I needn't have gone. The special doughnut, which was available only during July, was not sold at the Krispy Kreme store; it was available only at selected supermarkets. Uggh! On the way over, I complained to Rebecca about having to drive thirty minutes to get to a Krispy Kreme store, that there was only one in the entire region. In Atlanta, I remarked, there seems to be a Krispy Kreme on every corner. Heck, I even ran into one on the streets of London, England!

But the times, they are a-changing. Just last Sunday, after managing to find a parking space on Franklin Street, I got out of my car and noticed a big sign in the window of an empty storefront: "Coming Soon: Krispy Kreme." So whaddaya know? It seems there will be a second Krispy Kreme in the Triangle.

Truth be told, I am not crazy about Krispy Kreme (I prefer Dunkin' Donuts, but I am not crazy about them, either). When I was twelve, I could eat twelve doughnuts. Now that I'm forty-five, I can eat maybe two. But I do like the idea of Krispy Kreme, and I'm sure I'll find my way the the new Chapel Hill location soon enough.

Scratch

2010-08-07T09:48:00.001-04:00

Sometimes around 9:00 at night, I used to get cravings for some of the classic Southern pies I had read so often about in my cookbooks and in contemporary "Southern" fiction--"Southern" in quotation marks, because what often gets classified as Southern fiction is the product of writers who construct in their fiction a South that I doubt has ever existed, a South in which biscuits and black-eyed peas are being fixed in every kitchen, a South in which three-legged dogs with thrift-store harmonicas strapped around their necks are trotting by every brick courthouse in every little town. Southerners, and especially Southern writers, are determined to believe that our region has a monopoly on the weird and the colorful and the idiosyncratic. We--and here I mean Southern whites of a certain class--want so much to believe! I want to believe! I want to believe that, because I live in the South, I can find, at 9:00 at night, at our local version of the Whistle Stop Cafe, a good piece of chess or sweet potato or buttermilk pie. But I know it is a will-o'-the-wisp.

As is, apparently, finding a good cinnamon roll in Durham on a Friday morning. I woke up yesterday morning craving a good cinnamon roll. And I don't mean the airy, flaky, pecan cinnamon roll one finds at Whole Foods, but a doughy, dense cinnamon roll with raisins and lots of icing, one that I can really sink my teeth into--a Pillsbury cinnamon roll, but fresher tasting. That--and my failure to get out of bed in time to go to the Food Lion to pick up a can of Pillsbury cinnamon rolls--is what brought me to Scratch, the new bakery downtown at 111 Orange Street. No, of course not: Scratch did not have the cinnamon roll I was looking for. Neither, for that matter, would have Guglhupf or Mad Hatter. But I, along with Rebecca, who joined me for the trip, decided to go to Scratch anyway simply because we had not been there before. The closest thing Scratch had to a cinnamon roll was a sticky bun with peanuts and sorghum. We each had one of those. The buns were small but packed a lot of sweetness. We also split a tasty buttermilk (buttermilk!) doughnut muffin, which was covered in anise-flavored sugar. We ate our goodies inside; Scratch has a pretty interior, with walls of brick and light blue and yellow. High on a shelf behind the cash register were giant jars of pickled corn cobs. A few pies, including something called a Shaker lemon pie, were in the refrigerated case just below the register. Bacon advertised as the best in the world and sealed in waxed paper was for sale in another refrigerated case.

But back to pies. There are a few places to get good pie in Durham. Foster's has good pie--but it closes before 9:00 p.m. Francesca's also has good pie and is open late--but I don't think I can count on finding a buttermilk or sweet potato or chess pie there. Besides, at both of those places a slice will cost you a pretty penny. For the money, the chocolate cream pie at the C & H Cafeteria is your best bet--but, again, it closes before 9:00.

Bulls Game; or, Bring on the Noise!

2010-07-27T21:23:00.002-04:00

Thirty years ago, I used to go to minor league baseball games in Memphis. The Memphis Chicks (short for Chickasaws, as in Chickasaw Indians) were the Double A farm team of the old Montreal Expos. The Chicks played in Tim McCarver Stadium, a stadium whose amenities, such as they were, made it more appropriate for a college team than a professional one. It had artificial turf and, for the fans, nothing but bleacher seats, those long strips of aluminum with no backs and hence no back support. The games were quiet affairs, with no promotions or contests in between innings--exercises in patience and suffering, really, with no concessions other than hot dogs and beer and sodas and bad vanilla ice cream that was served in miniature plastic replicas of batting helmets in the colors and with the logos of Major League teams. Except for the season when the electrifying Tim Raines was on the team, the games would draw only two or three thousand fans. They were, as I said, quiet affairs. Everybody bemoaned the low attendance and lack of interest in the Chicks and in minor league baseball generally. What could possibly be done to attract more fans to the games?

Add lots of noise--lots of loud noise--it turns out. For if there is one thing that distinguishes the minor league games of thirty years ago from those of today, such as the Bulls game I attended last Friday night at the DBAP, it is loud, and almost incessant, noise: songs and excerpts of songs, protestations to cheer and make even more noise, run mercilessly through the PA system. Oh sure, the ball parks today, with their classic look, comfortable box seats, and cup holders big enough to hold a spare tire, are vastly superior to the ones that were in operation in the twilight years of the Carter administration. But the biggest difference is the aural spanking to which every fan with halfway decent hearing is subjected.

It's too bad I love baseball as much as I do, for not even the obnoxious noise can keep me away. But it does do funny things to me. To wit: At every Durham Bulls home baseball game, the Bulls mascot, Wool E. Bull, races a three-year-old kid around the bases. Wool E. goes in one direction, tripping and traipsing the whole way, stopping to pick flowers or wave to the crowd, while the three-year-old kid goes in the other, running in single-minded determination for all he's worth for what is actually a considerable distance (120 yards). Wool E. lollygags and slows himself just enough so that, every time, the three-year-old kid beats him by a single step. The crowd cheers, and the kid, red-faced, gasping, and often quite confused by what just happened, is helped to a place behind home plate, where he gets his picture taken with the defeated mascot.

One night--just one night--I want to see Wool E. Bull beat that kid home. I blame my curmudgeon on the noise.

Green Flea Market

2010-07-20T20:27:00.002-04:00

On Sunday at the Durham Green Flea Market, a woman was selling plastic cups filled with slices of watermelon. I picked up a cup and handed it to her. The watermelon was cut in long, thick pieces, like giant matchsticks. She took the cup and removed the plastic wrap that was on top. She cut a lime in half, put one half in a small, hand-held metal juicer, and squeezed the two halves of the juicer together, letting a torrent of lime juice fall onto the watermelon. She picked up a salt shaker and shook some salt onto the watermelon. "Chili powder?" she asked, then immediately offered "No?" I understood; after all, I look more like a native of Morehead City than Mexico City. Rebecca, though, picked up the container of chili powder and sprinkled some on the melon. Or rather dumped some on the melon, as it came out fast, out of a large opening.

What was absolutely delightful about that experience was the unexpected way in which the woman dressed the watermelon. I thought I was purchasing a cup of plain, cut watermelon. I would not have thought in a million years to squeeze fresh lime juice on it or to season it with chili powder. I suppose that it would not have occurred to the woman, who was from Latin America, to not add the lime juice and chili powder. Still, she could have refrained from doing so and I would have been none the wiser. I began to imagine that she had been aware of my innocence, that she knew I was unaccustomed to dressing my watermelon with lime juice and chili powder. I would have been satisfied with plain watermelon. But she gave me more, and I felt grateful.

Bobbitt Hole

2010-07-17T14:25:00.000-04:00

How odd to live in a city without a major body of water. Yes, Durham has the Eno River, but the Eno runs along the northern edge of the city, far from any part of town that is commercially or culturally significant, and for all intents and purposes it is a country stream rather than the kind of centrally located waterway that would have brought commerce and trade to Durham in the city's formative years. Then again, the city's formative years came after the Civil War and therefore after the advent of the railroad, which rendered waterways all but unnecessary. Nothing dates the postwar provenance of a Southern city more reliably than the absence of a major river. Consider Atlanta, the New South city nonpareil: also without a major body of water, Atlanta did not boast even 10,000 residents on the eve of the Civil War and did not become the capital of Georgia until after Johnston surrendered to Sherman at Bennett Place, just a few miles northwest of a railroad station that would later become Durham.

But if the Eno could not deliver a New Orleans or a Memphis or a Charleston--to say nothing of a Washington, D.C.--to this part of North Carolina, it has delivered something equally marvelous in its own right, the kind of scenic and secluded place that I thought existed only in short stories and faulty memories. The Eno has delivered Bobbitt Hole, a fine swimming hole at the end of Bobbitt Hole Trail, a loop trail in the Cole Mill access portion of the Eno River State Park. Being no "wind and water man," to borrow a line from the poet Charles Olson, I was apprehensive about entering the hole's dark waters, thinking of its deepest parts and imagining swirling currents that might suck, as through a straw, a grown man to his demise. And if the water itself didn't get me, perhaps a snake or snapping turtle would. And who knew what slimy things were waiting for the soles of my feet in the shallow parts of the water.

And shallow parts there were, much to my relief and delight. Indeed, several yards from shore I could still touch the bottom. The water was warm and, on a Friday afternoon, Rebecca and I had Bobbitt Hole almost entirely to ourselves. After two hours of floating and swimming in its opaque waters, I had become comfortable, almost at home.

Durham may have no major body of water, but then again one cannot usually swim in the Mississippi or the Potomac.

Allen and Son

2010-07-15T10:38:00.001-04:00

I have been on vacation this week, and I thought about taking a day to drive four hours to Hemingway, South Carolina, to eat at Scott's BBQ. Scott's, as you may surmise--I was willing to drive four hours to get there--is no ordinary barbecue restaurant. They cook solely over wood coals made from wood they split themselves.

As, of course, does Keith Allen, the owner of Allen and Son, the well-documented barbecue restaurant on Highway 86 and Mt. Sinai Road, just a mile north of exit 266 on I-40. Allen and Son is no secret, of course; the restaurant has been the subject of feature stories in numerous food and travel magazines. It is also no secret (at least to those who know me) that I consider Allen and Son to have the best barbecue in the Triangle. I know there are people out there who do not share my opinion; at the same time, I know there are people out there who wouldn't care for Hector Berlioz's song cycle The Nights of Summer. I suppose I am no more astonished at their tastes than are certain people when they discover that I do not like mayonnaise or do not subscribe to cable or satellite TV.

If you are one of those who do not see what all the fuss over Allen and Son's barbecue is about, then at least go for the homemade vanilla ice cream. Allen and Son has several good desserts (I especially like the key lime pound cake; I find their cobblers, however, disappointing). Yesterday they had a sweet potato pie; it tasted like sweet potato caramel and, paired with the vanilla ice cream, was alone worth the visit.

Important note: The restaurant is closed on Sundays and Mondays, and on Tuesdays and Wednesdays it closes at 5:00 p.m. Always call ahead (942-7576) to make sure they are open.

King's Red and White

2010-07-13T11:42:00.000-04:00

They were bringing in watermelons by the grocery-cart-full on Sunday at King's Red and White. An athletic and cheerful-looking young man scootered one cart after another through the narrow aisles and into the produce section. In no time the enormous cardboard box he was putting them in was nearly overflowing with watermelons; he had no choice but to begin lining up the rest of them on the floor under the refrigerated produce shelves.

The old man working in the meat department stood by a cornucopia of country ham slices, country ham ends, and strips of fatback. "Do you like cheese?" he asked a customer who happened to walk by. He held out to her a chunk of hoop cheese. Another customer began rummaging through the country ham. Soon, talk of red-eye gravy swirled around the ham and cheese and fat.

I do not go to King's much, but whenever I do, I always wonder why I don't shop there all the time. They have lots of jars--large jars--of Old South watermelon rind pickles. They have lots of jars of local honey. They have lots of jars of local jams, jellies, and preserves. If any grocery store is liable to have local produce, it is King's.

A few weeks ago I went to King's with Rebecca. "They know little Emily there; she's in there all the time," Rebecca said, referring to her fourteen-year-old neighbor who lives about a mile from the grocery store. "Emily was just in here yesterday," the cashier said as she rang us up. She sighed. "They sure grow up fast."

It is a small miracle that King's, which, incidentally, is on the corner of East Club and North Roxboro, is still in business. (Indeed, there was another King's, at the intersection of University and Chapel Hill Street, that closed a few years ago.) It is not a modern supermarket; it opened in 1956 and I would imagine still looks much like it did back then. Prices still appear on little stickers, and the cashiers still enter them into the cash register by hand. For more information, see the recent post on Endangered Durham.

Joe's Diner

2010-07-10T17:25:00.000-04:00

I live in Durham. Perhaps you live in Durham. But what does it mean to say one lives in Durham?

Joe Bushfan, the owner of Joe's Diner, at 2102 Angier Avenue in east Durham, tells the story of people who live near his diner who have never been outside the neighborhood. Before he opened the diner, when he was operating a hot dog cart near it, he offered free hot dogs to anyone who had a driver's license. But as he told the Herald Sun's Monica Chen in a story from earlier this year, nobody had one. “I’d take them to Walmart and they’d be looking around, picking up six-packs of sodas and be like, ‘Wow.’ They’ve never even been outside this neighborhood.” What does it mean to say that they live in Durham?

What does it mean to say that I live in Durham? I have lived in Durham for eleven years, and although I have been outside my neighborhood, for the first nine of those eleven years I lived in only half a city. No regular business of mine ever took me to an office or restaurant, and certainly not a home, east of the main public library. Once or twice in those nine years I worked up the courage to venture to the former Coleman's on East Pettigrew, and once I met a complete stranger in a house on East Geer to play music. But those were isolated cases. For all intents and purposes, the streets and neighborhoods east of the public library were, to me, some other city. They were the black part of Durham, the poor and dangerous part of Durham, the part of Durham in which no white man had any reason to be.

That all started to change two years ago, when a friend of mine bought a house in the Cleveland-Holloway district. As a result, I found myself spending more and more time in east Durham, so much so that, today, my former impression of east Durham sounds somewhat naive. It certainly sounded naive last Friday afternoon, when I went with that same friend to lunch at Joe's Diner, which is on the corner of Angier and Driver, an intersection at which is a small commercial district whose importance has been emphasized on Endangered Durham. It certainly sounded naive as my friend and I, after lunch, walked around the neighborhood to take a closer look at houses that were for sale and at the other storefronts around Joe's. And it certainly sounded naive while we were in Joe's, where black people and white people were eating.

I say somewhat naive, because at present the commercial district and the immediate environs of which Joe's is a part are are still struggling. The houses that are for sale are in poor condition; most storefronts need repair and beautification; and not all spaces are occupied. At the same time, Joe's looks like it will succeed, and just two doors down is the new Trosa Grocery with its bright, clean interior. On some days Mama Jean's barbecue truck is parked in the area (it was not there on Friday), and the space that will become her restaurant has signage in front. On the other side of Driver from Joe's is a Caribbean restaurant.

Joe's itself is wonderfully long and narrow--just like a diner should be--and amply spiffed up from its former days as Crabtree Pharmacy, with walls freshly painted in yellow gold egg and a marble-top counter with blue and chrome siding. (The old blue and white signs for the pharmacy hung on the wall.) Ceiling fans hung from the original pressed-tin roof. On the walls just outside the scullery were large cursive letters that read "Believe"; a Jesus fish magnet was on the front of the grill. On the acrylic window separating loaves of bread from the counter were flyers promoting the Gateway to College program at Durham Tech, a petition in support of 751 South (a proposed mixed-use development), and an advertisement for rooms at Jones' Homes ("Clean and Sober Living"). A large display case contained photographs of the interior of the old pharmacy and of Driver Street from nearly one hundred years ago. As for the food, excellent reviews can be found on Carpe Durham and Girls with Guts. I had the patty melt, which was good. I will register my obligatory complaint about plastic utensils and plastic cups.

Joe's was doing a good business on that Friday, and Joe himself was there making the rounds, saying hello and checking in with his customers. The five or six small tables that were along one wall were occupied, as were all but two of the counter seats (we took those). And the cliche about "blue collar and white collar workers rubbing elbows" that one finds so frequently (and annoyingly) applied to certain kinds of restaurants--well, that one turned out to be literally true in this case. I had on a white dress shirt, and at one point two men dressed in light-blue work uniforms were seated next to me.

Retiring the Blog

2008-11-17T14:16:00.000-05:00

Just a post to say I'm retiring this blog. Thanks for reading, and I look forward to still keeping up with the other Durham and Triangle blogs.

ACC Soccer Tournament

2008-11-10T20:04:00.003-05:00

The heck with the ACC basketball tournaments. Beginning Tuesday evening, the men's ACC soccer tournament begins at WakeMed Soccer Park, formerly SAS Field, in Cary. The Demon Deacons of Wake Forest, last year's national champion, are the top seed. Duke is the fifth seed, UNC, the seventh, and State, the eighth.

The Cary soccer park, which is just a mile or so off of I-40 exit 290, is a fantastic place to watch a soccer match. Yours truly was present for the women's final on Sunday between the perennial Goliath UNC and the surprising Hokies from Virginia Tech. UNC won, 3-0, in a game that was, alas, rather uninspired. The ball was in the air far too often, both teams repeatedly kicking the ball downfield to open space and hoping that their player would outrun the other team's player and get to the ball first. In most cases, the UNC player won.

The men's final is this Sunday. Kickoff is at 1 p.m.

Obama Wish

2008-11-06T09:48:00.005-05:00

Remember Jimmy Carter?

President Carter, who was in the White House from 1977 to 1981, talked straight to us. He told us we faced an energy crisis that required changes in the way we lived. He acknowledged severe problems in the economy, referring to the misery index, the sum of the inflation rate and the unemployment rate, which, in June of 1980, had reached a high of 21.98. The news was bad, but the expectation was that we would face our problems rather than bury our heads in the sand.

Unfortunately, Americans, and especially the rich, got tired of thinking about problems. Damn it, they said, we want to enjoy life! Let the good times roll! Ronald Reagan got the message, and during his presidency, he sounded one theme, and one theme only: everything is alright, and would be even better with more tax cuts.

This simpleminded wishful thinking was the Reagan legacy, which, until very recently, infected large numbers of Americans. But I am hopeful that our long period of willing self-deceit is over. I am hopeful that President Obama will mobilize Americans to acknowledge and confront our problems. Even the greatest country in the world is not perfect.

Happy to Be Wrong

2008-11-05T10:03:00.004-05:00

When Barack Obama was nominated by his party this summer as the presidential candidate, I said he'd be lucky to get 40 percent of the vote in the general election. (In my family, by my estimation, he got perhaps 25 percent of the vote.) When certain of our countrymen and countrywomen went gaga over Sarah Palin, I said it was over: McCain will surely win. As recently as this weekend, despite the polls, I insisted he was not going to win the presidency. Polls do not elect presidents, I said; even the votes that are cast do not elect presidents; as we learned in 2000, it's the votes that are counted that elect presidents, and I could not be confident that the votes that are counted on November 4 will reflect accurately the national will.

"There's no way," I insisted, "America will elect a half-black man with a funny last name, a black wife, and two black children to the White House." But we did. And just because it happened doesn't mean it is not extraordinary. Four years ago, to say nothing of forty years ago, what happened yesterday was unimaginable.

But because it happened, it also shows what is possible. Will this start our country on a new direction for the next forty years? Here is a change I would like to see: our public sector restored to a status equal to the status of our private sector. If, by 2012, I hear Duke students saying they want to work in government, I know President Obama will have made a difference.

Official Election Prediction

2008-11-04T10:18:00.001-05:00

Using pollster.com as a point of reference, McCain will win every state that is a tossup (including North Carolina), every state that is leaning Democratic (including Virginia), and every state that is leaning Republican. Obama will win every state that is strong Democratic. In the end, Obama wins by the slimmest of margins, 273 to 267.

Sweeney Todd

2008-11-03T06:45:00.009-05:00

What might it signify that the two greatest American musicals of all time take place in--London?

Along with My Fair Lady, the superb Sweeney Todd represents the very best in a musical canon containing some pretty stiff competition. Sweeney is about a London throat-slitting barber and a London meat-pie-making opportunist who--well, let's just say that together they make carne-filled pastries that Dr. Hannibal Lecter would love. Yesterday, Duke University's Hoof 'n' Horn players, a troupe of student actors, completed two weekends of entertaining performances of the Stephen Sondheim musical. Sweeney, with its dissonant melodies and unorthodox and changing time signatures, is a challenging musical to perform, and Hoof 'n' Horn turned in a performance deserving far more than the eight dollars this reviewer paid for his ticket.

Then again, to measure the performance in monetary terms misses the point, for the performances are actually a gift from classmate to classmate, friend to friend. I dare say that the members of Hoof 'n' Horn would have spent the same number of hours rehearsing had there been only one scheduled performance. It was a gift to me too, witnessing the love and gratitude exchanged between the students on stage and the students in the audience. What a wonderful time of life it is, for them and for me.

A Christian Nation

2008-10-30T07:34:00.003-04:00

Many Americans claim that America is a Christian nation. Unlike most people I know who profess to be Christians, I read the Bible from time to time, so I have an idea of what a Christian nation would look like. (For the same reason, I know that the anti-Christ will not be a black Muslim man but a sea beast with seven heads and ten horns, thank you very much.) Although I am not a Christian (I'm not a believer, that is), I am sympathetic to a good deal of Jesus' teachings, and the thought has crossed my mind that I would create my own Christian Party and run for office one of these days. Hmmm. I can hear my speech now . . .

"As president, I promise to each and every one of you that I will eliminate the military. We are going to be a country devoted to peace and turning the other cheek, for as Jesus said, 'Blessed are the peacemakers; for they shall be called the children of God.' Furthermore, I will implement the most progressive tax system the world as ever seen, making sure we dispossess people of their material possessions as much as possible and give them to the poor. For as Jesus said--and say it with me--it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. As your president, I will not let our fondness for riches get in the way of our desire to go to heaven! We will become a nation committed to the care of the weak, the vulnerable, the outcast. 'Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me.' . . ."

Fried Chicken

2008-10-28T08:27:00.002-04:00

Along with grits and greens and black-eyed peas, fried chicken is one of a handful of dishes associated almost exclusively with the South. Yet very few Southerners fry chicken at home anymore, and today it's nigh impossible to find pan-fried, as opposed to deep-fried, chicken in restaurants. (One exception is Watts Grocery, which sometimes has pan-fried chicken on the menu. I've also read that Nofo in Raleigh has pan-fried chicken once a week.) The reasons are not hard to fathom. Pan-frying chicken is a dirty, time-consuming job and does not lend itself to the large-quantity cooking required of most restaurants.

A home cook can read all the recipes she (or he) wants, but there is no substitute for experience in this matter. I pan-fry chicken at home maybe once a year. This year, I've done it twice, including last weekend, so if I may, let me offer here a few tips.

1. Use a cast-iron skillet, such as the one made by Lodge, or an enamel cast-iron skillet, such as the one made by Le Creuset.

2. Do not put too much oil in the skillet. The oil should be no more than a quarter-inch deep; otherwise, as you put the pieces of chicken in the skillet, the oil will be displaced to the point where it will cover the chicken, and then you are not pan-frying. Of course, if you put a real excessive amount of oil in, then you risk displacing the oil to the point where it spills out of the pan, and then you have a fire and burn hazard on your hands.

3. Keep the handle of the skillet turned into the range. Frying chicken can be dangerous, and the last thing you want is to bump against the handle and send your pan full of hot oil all over the place.

4. On a related note, keep children out of the kitchen while you are frying chicken.

5. If you need to fry two batches, consider using two skillets simultaneously. As chicken fries, some of the coating, which is usually flour, falls to the bottom of the skillet and burns. Frying a second batch in that oil is OK (a third or more is out of the question), but it is less desirable than frying it in clean oil.

6. Bring your chicken to room temperature before frying it, as cold pieces of chicken will bring down the temperature of your oil.

7. Heat the oil to temperature on the lowest setting possible. One trick to successfully pan-frying chicken is to get the oil hot enough without getting the skillet itself too hot. I recommend heating the oil on medium, even slightly below medium if you can manage it.

8. Be patient. Heating the oil to temperature can take fifteen minutes or so.

9. Use only thighs for frying. Being the flattest pieces on the bottom as well as the top, they will fry much more evenly than, say, breasts. If you do not like thighs, try frying only the same kinds of pieces (e.g., all breasts or all legs); that way, all the pieces will cook in the same amount of time.

10. Once your chicken is in the skillet, turn it over only once, but rotate it on the side it is cooking on from time to time, to insure even cooking. Let it fry for about ten minutes a side (slightly less if you are frying breasts). And do not cover the skillet. If you are successfully managing the heat of your oil, there is no need to turn the chicken more than once and no need to cover the skillet.

Good luck!

Bare Soundz

2008-10-27T10:34:00.004-04:00

The foot is the unsung hero of the percussion instruments, as anyone who attended last night's performance by Savion Glover now knows. Mr. Glover and his co-performers, Marshall Davis Jr. and Maurice Chestnut, treated a capacity crowd to electrifying, polyrhythmic tap-dances in Duke's Page Auditorium. There was no music except the music made by the performers' feet. Each dancer was on a short platform that was miked, which enabled the audience to hear the remarkable variety of percussive sounds that the three men produced, sounds ranging from a pianissimo tapping to a forte bass and played at all manner of tempi, but mostly presto and then some.

The crowd, I should say, was the most enthusiastic I've ever been a part of at Page. After every dance--and at many points during each dance--people cheered and shouted and carried on in raucous appreciation.

The performance was the second of four performances in Duke Performances' Shuffle and Pick series, a series exploring the African origins of banjo and tap. The next performance in the series will be January 22, 2009, and will feature Otis Taylor, a banjo player.

State Fair

2008-10-23T10:08:00.004-04:00

William Faulkner once observed that when we are young, we think people are capable of only good; when we get a little older, we think people are capable of only evil; and when we get a little older still, we realize people are pretty much capable of anything.

I thought about Faulkner's observation last night after I had demonstrated one of those unconscionable lapses in judgment to which I am occasionally prone. I was at the North Carolina State Fair, and for reasons that still elude me, I paid a dollar to see Tiny Tina, at twenty-nine inches tall billed as the world's smallest human being. It wasn't the fact that I paid money to see Tiny Tina; that there was an admission fee was immaterial. It was the fact that I had agreed to view a human being on display, that I had participated in what I quickly realized was a dehumanizing act. I suppose I didn't really think there would be a human being behind the three-sided stand on the other side of which sat Tiny Tina. I remember being startled to see a living, breathing, and in all other respects normal-looking person sitting among various personal effects. I was so startled, in fact, so ashamed of myself, and so suddenly desperate to leave the tent that I hardly noticed anything other than a handwritten sign announcing for a dollar one could get a picture taken with Tina.

When I looked around the three-sided stand and came face to face with Tiny Tina, she did not smile or scowl or show any expression at all. I don't even think she made eye contact with me. She looked sad, miserably sad, and I darted out of the tent and went behind a funnel-cake stand and sat under a neon-blue lamp, wanting to cry.

Grayson's Cafe

2008-10-22T14:28:00.004-04:00

It's hard to get a good sandwich these days, especially in an area such as the Triangle, which has no sandwich tradition. Perhaps a case can be made for the barbecue sandwich; but around here, the plate seems more traditional than the sandwich, and most barbecue restaurants put their sandwiches on budget-priced buns that are usually not even toasted and usually not up to the job.

But there are a few superb sandwiches around. The pork sandwich and the Italian sandwich at Federal are two, as are the meatball sandwich at Rockwood Filling Station and the chopped brisket sandwich at the Q Shack. To those must be added Grayson's chicken a la francaise sandwich, which might be the best of them all. A la francaise--in the French manner--means, in this case, pan-fried with an egg coating. The chicken is then topped with a sundried tomato preserve and spinach leaves. And the bun, a thick, soft, focaccia-style bread, is divine.

Krystal Kreme

2008-10-18T09:44:00.004-04:00

For reasons I will never understand or accept, Krystal does not have any restaurants in the Triangle. What is Krystal, you ask? It's the Chattanooga-based chain of fast-food restaurants famous for its small, square hamburgers. The hamburger is a thin patty, and the complete sandwich comes with pickles, onions, and mustard. In Memphis, where I grew up, Krystals were the late-night munchie of choice; an order of a dozen hamburgers for the car (which usually meant Rusty and me) was not uncommon.

Also for reasons I will never understand or accept, Krispy Kreme does not have any restaurants in the Triangle. OK, there is one in Raleigh, but one store hardly counts in the most populated region of no less than the donut company's home state. Although I live in Durham, I am not above leaving my house at 9:45 p.m. to drive thirty minutes to the Krispy Kreme on Peace and Person in Raleigh to get a few Hot Nows.

Imagine my delight, then, when I learned that, in Marietta, Georgia, from where I'm blogging this morning, not only is there a Krystal and a Krispy Kreme, but the two are right next to each other. They are neighbors on busy Cobb Parkway, just across the street from the famed Marietta Diner. Last night, en route to downtown Marietta, we stopped at Krystal to get Krystal hamburgers, then, an hour later, returning from downtown, we stopped at Krispy Kreme to get Hot Now donuts. Now that, my friends, is livin'.

Eno River Association

2008-10-17T07:00:00.008-04:00

India may have had Gandhi, but Durham had Margaret Nygard, and to anyone who loves the Eno River, and especially the city and state parks along its banks, Margaret Nygard should be revered as a modern-day saint.

As Jim Wise tells us in Durham: A Bull City Story, in the 1960s, with the growth of Research Triangle Park, developers began salivating over land along the Eno River. They had visions of damming the river and creating Eno Lake, complete with shoreline properties for the well-paid executives who were being force-marched to central North Carolina to run the new offices of IBM and other outfits. The city began planning an Eno Loop highway that would take commuters around Durham to their jobs in what used to be known as "dark corner" of the county.

Enter Margaret Nygard, a Durham resident who organized an effort to stop the development and preserve the natural state of the Eno River basin. According to Mr. Wise, things came to a head in 1970, when, on the land that would become West Point on the Eno, Ms. Nygard and other preservationists stood in the path of the bulldozers of a Charlotte developer.

The organization she founded in 1966, the Eno River Association, is stronger than ever. The association has worked to protect the water quality of the Eno and its tributaries and more than 5,500 acres of wild land in, among others, West Point (a city park on North Roxboro), the Eno River State Park, and the Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area.

Today, the association is best known for its annual Festival for the Eno, which takes place at West Point every July. "Through the festival, we hope to raise awareness about the association's land and water protection work and educate the public about issues confronting the environment," Robin Jacobs, the executive director of the Eno River Association, says. "It's our way of connecting people with the river." The festival has inspired a series of imaginative promotional posters that may be seen around town in the weeks leading up to the popular event. All money raised from the festival is spent on preserving land along the Eno.

During this fall season, I can think of no better way to spend a weekend afternoon than hiking in one of the many parks and recreational areas that owe their existence to the prodigious efforts of Margaret Nygard and the Eno River Association.

Early Voting Update

2008-10-16T15:15:00.002-04:00

The polling place in the Old Trinity Room on Duke's West Campus has been active today, this first day of early voting. I have seen many employees and students with "I voted" stickers, and each of the three or four times I have walked through the West Union Building, I have seen a line of people waiting to enter the Old Trinity Room to vote.

Early Voting

2008-10-16T11:22:00.003-04:00

A two-week period of early voting began today in Durham County. From now until November 1, including Saturdays and Sundays, registered voters can cast ballots at one of several polling sites: the Old Trinity Room in the West Union Building on Duke's West Campus; the Board of Elections Office at 706 Corporation; the Parish Center Meeting Room (formerly Holy Cross Catholic Church) at 1400 Alston Avenue on the NC Central campus; the East Regional Library at 211 Lick Creek Lane; the North Regional Library at 221 Milton; Forest View Elementary at 3007 Mt. Sinai Road; and Southwest Elementary at 2320 Cook Road. Click here for the Board of Elections schedule.

According to pollster.com, North Carolina is a battleground toss-up state, with Senator Obama having a slight lead in the polls.

Six Plates

2008-10-15T07:30:00.003-04:00

In nearly every way imaginable, Europe has it all over America, except for two things: bathrooms and water fountains. I love Europe, but with no public water fountains, one can spend a small fortune (and one usually does) on potable liquids. And just try waltzing into a coffeeshop or bar for a quick pee. (New York, are you listening?)

I found myself thinking about America's two advantages (or at least our omnipresent and freely accessible lavatories) as I marveled at the posh interior of the men's restroom at Six Plates, a wine bar on Erwin Road in Durham. The walls were red, and instead of paper towels, there were cloth towels, the color red to complement the walls. There were so many bottles of lotions and potions on the vanity that I needed a second or two to identify the soap.

Six Plates serves tapas-sized portions of food. I had a pumpkin risotto. The risotto itself was delicious (especially if you love sage), but the brussels sprouts it came with had a vinegary flavor I did not like.

(Note: Six Plates is on the back side of the building on the corner of Erwin and Lasalle, so it is not visible from Erwin.)

Dave's Produce

2008-10-13T14:46:00.005-04:00

On West Main Street, on the sidewalk across the street from Brightleaf Square, Dave's Produce has set up shop. Today, Dave's had apples (red delicious, golden delicious, and macintosh), sweet potatoes, white potatoes, and scuppernongs. The scuppernong, as some readers know, is a Southern grape (a scuppernong arbor figures prominently in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom). They are perfectly round, with a thick, edible skin and a sweet, strong flavor that does not taste at all like the grapes normally available in grocery stores. Put a whole one in your mouth and bite down; the flesh will pop out of the skin. With your tongue, work the two or three seeds out of the pulp and spit them out--or if you don't want to bother, chew them along with everything else.

"I'm also selling this incense, in case you want to include that in your story," Dave said, holding up a cellophane package of "Patti La Belle type" sticks of incense.

Dave's Produce operates Monday through Friday, from around 10 a.m. till around 3 p.m.

Wachovia Loans $8 Billion to NRCC--What?

2008-10-10T13:06:00.003-04:00

Eyebrow-raising news reported on the blog of the Institute for Southern Studies. Wachovia, which lately has been denying loans to all and sundry customers, has somehow extended an $8 million loan to the National Republican Congressional Committee. For the complete story, click here.

Efland Ruritan Rodeo

2008-10-09T07:23:00.015-04:00

[Note: A long post (2,000 words) follows. Many thanks to Jennifer Deer for leaving the rodeo and going back to her car to kindly search for a notebook for me.]

Calf catching was not an official event at last Saturday night’s Efland Ruritan Rodeo, but don’t tell that to the seventy-five or so youngsters who, at the invitation of Dusty the rodeo clown, scrambled off of the metal bleachers and ran into the rink that had been set up in Vick Sharpe Field on the grounds of the Efland Ruritan Club. “Efland, y’all been busy. Look at all these kids!” Dusty said as the children, many dressed in full cowboy regalia, gathered around him in a wiggling, squirming mass on the dirt surface of the arena. Far across the way, one little boy who looked about three was having a hard time. “C’mon, little fella,” Dusty said, crouching and waving the boy his way. “You can do it.” The little fella might have taken all night had it not been for a good Samaritan girl of about seven who skipped out, took the boy’s hand, and led him to Dusty. The crowd applauded. “Isn’t that sweet,” a woman on the bleacher behind me said. Dusty, being the good clown that he is, told the kids to go here and then there and got them so turned around that half the kids ended up bumping into the others (and laughing all along). He finally got them bunched against the fence on one side of the rink. Once they were reasonably settled, clear on the other side of the arena five calves were let in; they stood still and gazed blankly, clearly unaware that they were about to be set upon by dozens of chortling, pint-sized humans. Each calf had a ribbon tied to it, and every child who pulled one of the ribbons off would win a cowboy hat. “Are you ready?” Dusty asked. “Then go!” Over the PA system the theme from Green Acres began playing as the children sprinted across the dirt toward the calves, who by now had sensed something was up and had begun trotting in circles, looking in vain for someplace to hide.

Saturday night’s rodeo was an event of the Mid-Atlantic Professional Rodeo Association, which is based in Indian Trail, North Carolina, a small town a few miles south of Charlotte. The rink that night was a large rectangle filled with reddish-brown dirt in the outfield of Vick Sharpe Field, where Eflanders normally gather to play softball and baseball. A temporary metal fence surrounded the rink, which was about sixty yards long and forty yards wide; the fence was made of thick horizontal bars that cowboys could easily climb to escape a stampeding bull. Metal bleachers lined three sides of the rink, and on this cool, clear October night, every seat was filled.

Tonight there would be many of the classic rodeo events: saddle bronc riding, bareback bronc riding, calf roping, team calf roping, bull wrestling, and bull riding. Every event has its own technical requirements. In bareback bronc riding, for instance, it’s not enough just to stay on. The cowboy holds onto the horse with one hand—actually, he holds onto a rigging that resembles a suitcase handle—and must begin with his heels over the break of the horse’s shoulders. He has to ride the horse for eight seconds in order to earn points. He loses points if he touches the horse with his free hand or breaks the motion of his body rhythm.

The main event at a rodeo is normally bull riding. “Sportswriters have deemed bull riding the most dangerous sport in the world,” the emcee, who in many ways was the star of the show, announced over the PA system. “They say skateboarding is an extreme sport; but I’ve never seen a broken down piece of plywood get up and come after you.” The bulls had names like Gunsmoke, Joe Cool, and Road Rage.

Saturday night’s rodeo ended with something never held before in Efland: bull fighting. The fighter, who dressed in a red shirt and red shorts, had to elude the bull for forty seconds while keeping as close as possible to the charging animal. He also had to maneuver the bull so that it was between him and a blue barrel; as the bull knocked his horns against the barrel, the bullfighter tapped it on the head.

The gates had opened at 6:00 p.m., and during the ninety minutes between then and the start of the rodeo, country music played nonstop over the arena’s PA system. The atmosphere was like a carnival or state fair, as rodeo-goers rode a mechanical bull, stood in long lines for barbecue and funnel cakes, and sampled the free tobacco products at the green Tahoe Smokeless tent. Women wore T-shirts that read “American Honey” and “Southern Boys Rock.” There were families with children, groups of old men in denim and cowboy hats, and spirited teenagers, hormones in high gear as they bent in single-minded focus through the crowds. Boys and girls flirted, showed off, and made out. From time to time a cowboy, complete with boots and spurs, chaps, and a cowboy hat, passed silently through the crowd, looking for all the world like an extra on the set of an old Western. But this was no movie set, and these cowboys were no actors.

The rodeo organizers, the Efland Ruritan Club, had established a makeshift parking lot on the grounds in front of the club’s main building, which faces U.S. 70, just west of the I-85 interchange. One side of the lot was for spectators. The other side was for the cowboys (and cowgirls) and their horses. As I neared the arena, I began to smell the horses, and soon I could see the animals, around two dozen of them, each tethered to a trailer. In front of the lot was a metal sign with professionally painted letters that said “Cowboy Parking.”

A few yards outside Vick Sharpe Field, two women were handing out flyers for an organization named FreedomWorks. “We’re a nonpartisan group in favor of low taxes,” they said as they offered literature to passersby. One side of the flyer accused Barack Obama of having no plan to reduce energy costs and gas prices. The other side labeled Bev Perdue a “big spender” and a “big taxer.” When I politely refused the flyer, the women seemed surprised. “Are you from Chapel Hill?” they asked.

At 7:30 sharp the country music stopped and “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers, a teen sensation in the early 1970s, began. It was time for the rodeo. The emcee, who was standing on a raised platform in one corner of the rink, exhorted the crowd. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is not golf. Tiger Woods is not on the green lining up a putt. This is rodeo! Born and bred of the competitive spirit that tamed the Wild West. Our riders can’t compete at the championship level without YOU. It is YOUR responsibility to get the blood pumping in the cowboys and cowgirls. Use those metal bleachers and lemme hear ya make some noise!”

The emcee, as it turned out, was just getting warmed up. He reminded rodeo-goers that in one month there will be an election to decide who will take our country into the next decade. He reminded them that “they” have taken the phrase “One nation under God” out of our public buildings. He made a vague suggestion that the phrase had also been taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance.

And then things got really weird, at least for the secular and uninitiated, for he next told the crowd to make welcome “our” Christian flag. The crowed whooped and hollered as a woman in a cowgirl outfit on a brown horse cantered into the rink and paraded the Christian flag, its white field and red Latin cross unfurling in the night air. She circled the arena several times before bringing her horse to a stop. While she rode around the rink, “Amazing Grace,” Bill Gaither Trio style, played over the PA. The emcee continued. “But there’s another flag, and this one needs no introduction,” he said. He asked all veterans, past and present, to stand. “If it were not for our fighting men and women, you would not have your right to do what you want on a Saturday night. They protect the blanket of freedom under which each one of us sleeps at night.” As the crowd riotously applauded, “You’re a Grand Old Flag” began sounding over the system, and another woman, this one with blond hair and riding a white horse, entered the rink parading Old Glory. She was dressed in a blue shirt with white stars; her left chap was blue with white stars; her right had red and white stripes. “How many of y’all are proud to be an American tonight!” the emcee asked. Over the PA a recorded prayer was played. Let us leave tonight in a “more Godly and Christian way” until we reach that “final arena in the sky” where we will stand before “our final and ultimate Judge.” “This world is Yours, Lord; we’re here for only a little while.”

Throughout the evening, the emcee narrated continuously, announcing the next rider and exhorting the crowd to give the cowboys and cowgirls “some of that Efland hospitality” when they were thrown to the dirt: “Pick him up and dust him off, why don’t ya.” The emcee coached the cowboys and cowgirls as they tried to rope a calf or ride a bull. “Stay on your feet. Use your pick-up men. Grab the slack out of the rope; you caught him with the long one. Flank him. From your feet to your seat—now drop him.”

He and Dusty kept up a running slapstick routine in between the events, with the clown as the butt of most of the jokes. The highlight of the evening was “Roman riding,” in which Dusty rode two small horses at once. “Dusty, what are you doing?” the emcee asked exasperatedly as his partner fussed with something behind the horses. “If I’m gonna ride both horses at once, I’m at least gonna tie their tails together,” Dusty joked. Once on the two horses, Dusty pretended to fail miserably at riding the tandem, getting turned around, on his back, on his stomach, all the while pretending to be frightened or hurting. The emcee challenged him to do a handstand, “with your legs sticking straight up in air like the handles of a post-hole digger.” Eventually Dusty stood up, his left foot on the saddle of one horse, his right foot on the other, and took a triumphant turn around the rink. But he had more tricks up his sleeve. There were two poles with a flame coming from the top of each one. Dusty “split the flames,” one horse passing to the left of the poles, the other passing to the right, as Dusty’s crotch passed just inches over the flames.

Unaccountably, I had arrived at Vick Sharpe Field without a pen, so my first order of business was to round one up. I stepped to the unattended counter of the Streets of Laredo Western Store, which tonight operated out of a converted trailer. Mounted on the wall next to the cash register was an acrylic box of pens. With no one to wait on me, I was contemplating putting a dollar bill into the box and taking one of the pens. But just as I reached for my wallet, a boy of six or seven and dressed from head to toe in a red cowboy outfit trotted to a position behind the counter, put his styrofoam cup of hot chocolate beside the cash register, and asked, “Can I help you?”

The trailer was crowded with people oohing and aahing over the cowboy shirts, the cowboy hats, and the cowboy vests that were for sale. Plastic toy horses, some as tall as twelve inches, filled one of the shelves; against the wall behind me hung dozens of wide, rhinestone-studded belts, their big buckles imprinted with Rebel flags and ferocious eagles. On another shelf was a set of coasters with color illustrations of Dale Evans lookalikes; “Rodeo Girl,” one of the coasters said. Someone next to me was admiring the leather and rhinestone cell phone holsters.

“Could I borrow one of those pens for the evening?” I asked the carmine-clad buckaroo. He reached up on his tiptoes and grabbed one.

A woman’s voice behind me sternly said, “Be careful with that hot chocolate around the register.” It was his mother, also dressed in a red cowboy outfit. The little cowboy rolled his eyes.

I took the pen out of his tiny hand. “Thanks, pardner,” I said.

He nodded his head and, as naturally as a wild horse will buck a rider, slowly slid his fingers across the white brim of his red felt cowboy hat.

Ted Who?

2008-10-08T16:24:00.004-04:00

Did you watch the presidential debate last night? Who do you think did better, Ted Weill or Barack Obama? What about the exchange between Brian Moore and John McCain? Or Cynthia McKinney's opening statement--did you see the look on Charles Jay's face?

The answer to all of those questions is, of course, no, as Mr. Weill and Mr. Moore and Ms. McKinney and Mr. Jay were not in Nashville last night--nor were Mr. Barr or Ms. LaRiva or Mr. Calero or Mr. Admondson or Mr. Nader or Mr. Keyes. The ten people just mentioned are the presidential candidates of some of our so-called third parties. The new Independent Weekly, which came out today, has a useful, if brief, guide to the Libertarian Party, the Constitution Party, and the like, put together by editor Lisa Sorg. There is also Ms. Sorg's interview with Brian Moore, the candidate of the Socialist PartyUSA, as well as a helpful list of voting myths debunked by the general counsel for the state's Board of Elections, in a column by Fiona Morgan. And Matt Saldana delves into the split between Ron Paul and Chuck Baldwin, the Baptist preacher who is the Constitution Party's presidential candidate.

In the November election, there will be three parties represented on the ballot: the Democratic, the Republican, and the Libertarian. In addition, three candidates have qualified for write-in votes: Ms. McKinney of the Green Party, Mr. Moore of the Socialist Party USA, and Mr. Nader, an independent. As Ms. Sorg wryly notes, remember to bring something to write with if you plan to vote for one of the latter.

Blue Coffee Cafe

2008-10-04T13:09:00.011-04:00

There's no doubting whom the owner of Blue Coffee Cafe is voting for this November. In one window of the downtown Durham coffeeshop there is an official Barack Obama poster with the words "Change We Can Believe In." Hanging from the ceiling inside is a T-shirt imprinted with a Time magazine cover photo of the Illinois senator. In another window is a pictogram with a bear, a rock, a capital O, and an outline of the state of Alabama.

And why not? The presidential candidate himself stopped by in May for a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake.

Working behind the counter this Saturday morning and wearing a black Obama T-shirt that read "Do You Believe" was Tanya. In between taking orders and making espresso coffees she raved about the cafe's chicken salad and cakes. "People especially love the pound cake and the red velvet cake," she said. "They call and order a slice ahead of time so there will be some left when they arrive."

Blue Coffee has been in business for several years. Its first owners were two young women who moved to Durham from Seattle. The current owner, Gwen Mathews, bought the business three years ago. Located on Corcoran and Parrish, the cafe is open on Saturdays from nine to three, and during the week from seven to seven. The interior is spacious, with high ceilings and large windows that look onto the new plaza with its bronze statue of a bull across the street. Outside are two of the many black metal tables, inlaid with chess boards, that the city has installed throughout downtown. A couple sat at one of the tables sipping coffee and eating muffins. At the other table sat a young woman talking quietly into her cell phone, her daily planner spread open in front of her.

Tanya was a regular customer at Blue Coffee before she began working for the cafe a year ago. "We survived all the construction downtown over the past few years," she said. "Our customers are loyal to us, and we are loyal to them."

Sweetbreads Sweet at Watts Grocery

2008-10-01T13:28:00.005-04:00

One of the most disappointing things about adulthood is learning that so many fellow adults are timorous eaters, picky and fastidious to an exasperating fault. He doesn't eat green peas; she doesn't like tomatoes. That person likes only "mild" fish, and his wife doesn't eat mushrooms or cauliflower or lima beans. Thank God people like that do not find their way into a kitchen. Thank God people like Amy Tornquist do. On a recent visit to her restaurant Watts Grocery, I had a thymus--that is, a sweetbread--open-faced sandwich. Its name may come from a Greek word meaning "warty excrescence," but the thymus makes a delectable, if rich, sandwich, especially when placed on homemade English muffins. Combined with a sliced homegrown tomato and mushrooms, the sandwich was the perfect late-summer treat.

Occoneechee Orange Speedway

2008-09-29T00:01:00.006-04:00

[Note: In a departure from the usual style of post, what follows is a 2,000-word feature story on Saturday's fundraiser for the Occoneechee Orange Speedway.]

Long before Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.—heck, long before Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough, and Dale Earnhardt Sr.—there were NASCAR drivers like Worth McMillion. Mr. McMillion began running modified stock cars in the 1940s, and by 1960 was racing in the Grand National Division. “I used to recruit my pit crew at the site of the race, right before the race,” Mr. McMillion, now eighty-two years old, explains. “It was a different time then.” He once let another driver borrow his car for a race. “The driver needed badly to earn some points, and his car was not in great shape. He won the championship that year.”

Among other distinctions, Mr. McMillion competed in the last race held at Hillsborough’s Occoneechee Speedway, in 1968. He was one of several drivers honored at Saturday’s car show in Hillsborough. The show is an annual fundraiser put on by the Historic Speedway Group, a nonprofit organization created in 2007 to preserve the speedway and raise awareness of its significance to the region. At one time or another, there were no fewer than twenty-seven race tracks in North Carolina—and that includes only those that hosted NASCAR events. The Occoneechee, a mile-long oval, is no doubt one of the most historic. It is one of only three tracks remaining from NASCAR’s inaugural season of 1949, and it is the only dirt track used that season that is still extant.

After the last NASCAR race at the Occoneechee forty years ago, the track was left to slowly decay and be reclaimed by the sycamore and the pine. But recently things have changed. In 2002 the Occoneechee was listed on the National Register of Historic Places; it was later purchased by the Classic American Homes Preservation Trust, and in 2003 the path of the former race track was turned into a walking trail. Then last year a group of twelve volunteers founded the Historic Speedway Group. “Our goal is to teach people the history of the Occoneechee Speedway, to let them know the treasure that is in their own backyard,” says Kaylin “Kat” McGee, one of the founding members of the group. I spoke with her at Saturday’s fundraising event, which was held in a large field behind an office park just a stone’s throw from the speedway track. The group had a successful year in 2007, restoring the old ticket office (which now houses a museum of the Occoneechee) and the ladies restroom, as well as regrading the dirt track. “By bringing attention to the history of the speedway, we hope to encourage people to support its restoration,” Ms. McGee said.

A secondary goal of the group is to prevent a proposed bypass around Hillsborough from being built. “All projected routes for the bypass take it right through this property,” Ms. McGee said. “If the bypass is built, we’ll lose the speedway.”

On Saturday morning I drove the ten miles from my home in Durham to one of the park-and-ride lots from which shuttle buses took visitors to the car show. The lot was in front of the Home Depot on NC 86, just south of the I-85 exit. Across the street was a shabby convenience store and an even shabbier produce stand at which I bought two pounds of purple scuppernong grapes. In the parking lot of the Home Depot I noticed a red Dodge Silverado with a vanity license plate from Virginia. On the left side of the plate was a color portrait of Robert E. Lee, under which were the words “The Virginia Gentleman 1807-1870.” Across the bottom of the plate was Lee’s name.

The shuttle was an old yellow school bus (the words “Durham Public Schools” had been painted over but were still visible). A temporary sign that said “Welcome to Fellowship Baptist Church, Durham, NC” was in one of the windows. The driver, a cheerful looking man around thirty, greeted passengers with a “Hey, buddy, how ya’ doin?” as they boarded the bus. Most of the passengers were men forty years old and older, and not surprisingly, there were numerous comments about how small the seats on school buses had become over the years. “I guess there was a lot less of me back then,” one man said merrily.

The bus lurched a half mile north on 86, turned right onto Elizabeth Brady Drive, and let us out at the park-and-ride pick-up and drop-off point. I began walking up Elizabeth Brady Drive to the car show. Along the drive were tents set up by the Marine Corps League, the Cub Scouts, and Angel Food Ministries. Four men from the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Kiwanis Club, when not sharing laughs, were furiously grilling dozens of hamburgers.

I came to a table full of memorabilia from the old Dukes of Hazzard television show. Entertaining the small crowd that had gathered in front of the table was a Boss Hogg impersonator, dressed in the character’s trademark white suit and white hat. I asked him his name. “My name is Thur—” He stopped himself abruptly. “My name is J. D. Hogg, Jefferson Davis Hogg,” he said, then reached into his jacket and pulled out a Georgia driver's "license" with the name J. D. Hogg and a photograph of him decked out as the Boss. His real name was Thurman Wood III. He was younger and taller than the real Boss Hogg, and a lot more genial. As he tugged on the lapels of his jacket, I spied a remote control replica of the General Lee, the orange 1969 Dodge Charger in which the Duke brothers took many a whooping and hollering joyride, heading in my direction. It nearly collided with my feet. Its controller somewhere out of sight, the toy car stopped, backed up, and careered across the tar-paved road.

Next to the table with the memorabilia was a large tent with a sign announcing Tom Sarmento, lead mechanic on the set of the Dukes of Hazzard from 1979 to 1985. I introduced myself to Mr. Sarmento, who had a bushy grey mustache and round wire-rimmed glasses. “We used 317 General Lees during the course of the show, and nearly a thousand patrol cars,” Mr. Sarmento, who lives in Charlotte, said. Today he operates the Hazzard County Stunt Team, making several appearances a year at events around the country. He was there with one of his stunt cars, a lookalike of the General Lee, with its matte orange exterior, the number 01 in black on the side, and the Rebel flag on the roof.

Nearly two hundred cars were on display at the show. Many were from the 1950s, such as the 1956 two-door, 210 Bel Air Chevrolet owned by Randy Cruthis. Mr. Cruthis is from Randleman, North Carolina—“Richard Petty country,” he said. “I live right across the road from his shop.” Mr. Cruthis drives his Bel Air to an area show nearly every weekend. “I’ve put 14,000 miles on it since it was redone. It’s a good, dependable car.”

Sitting in folding lawn chairs beside a 1965 Dodge Rambler were John Williams and Milton Petway. I pointed to the car and asked if they would call the color blue. “Yes, that’s blue,” Mr. Williams said. “Carolina blue!” Mr. Petway corrected. Mr. Williams is from Haw River, North Carolina. He bought the Rambler a few years ago from the nephew of the original owner. “The lady who first bought the car lived down the street from me. I had my eye on it from the very start. She died twelve years ago and her nephew inherited the car. He kept it in the garage; never used it. A couple of years ago I got my chance and bought it from him.” The car, which looked brand new, had 92,000 miles on it.

Some of the cars on display dated from before World War II. One beauty was a 1940 Packard owned by Bill Werner, who lives in Cary, North Carolina. He has owned the car for eight years. “I wanted something different,” he explained. “I didn’t want a Ford or Chevy—a lot of people have those. When I found this Packard, I knew it was what I wanted. I bought it from a guy who had salvaged it from a junkyard. He fixed it up and then sold it to me.” The exterior was original and was painted a beautiful two-tone red and off-white. It had a red padded running board and wire wheels instead of hubcaps. “That really makes it special,” Mr. Werner said of the wire wheels. The running gear is modern; the engine is from a 1985 Dodge police car. “I wanted a car I could drive. We call that a ‘driver.’ I love old cars and I wanted something I could cruise in. I’ve put 20,000 miles on this car since I fixed it up. That’s why you see nicks here and there. It isn’t perfect. But it isn’t supposed to be. It’s a car I can actually use.”

Mr. Werner made sure I knew he was here today not only to show his car. “I am mostly here to support the effort to preserve the old dirt race track. I don’t want to see it go.”

At one end of the field was a stage. The Castaways, a local cover band, played “Crazy,” “Shake Your Booty,” and “Big Bad Leroy Brown.” After the set, one of the organizers of the fundraiser asked for all the drivers who had raced on the Occoneechee track to come up on stage and be recognized. “If it hadn’t been for them, we wouldn’t have NASCAR today,” he said of the twenty-five or so men, nearly all now in their eighties, who squeezed together for a group photograph. One of the drivers was Marvin Panch, who raced at Occoneechee in 1963. He won seventeen races on the NASCAR circuit, his biggest victory coming in 1961, when he won the legendary Daytona 500. Mr. Panch first got into the racing world by building cars for other racers to drive. “When I was a young man in Oakland, California, a driver on the circuit won a race in Oakland with one of my cars,” Mr. Panch, who lives in Daytona, the site of his great victory, said. “He was supposed to race in it again the next week. But he never showed up. So I got in the car and raced instead.”

Worth McMillion also got his start by building cars for other drivers. Racing is in Mr. McMillion's family. His and his wife Gloria’s middle son is a race car driver himself, and their youngest son, Scott, manages the metal shaping department for Hendrick Motorsports, one of the biggest names in NASCAR today and whose Lowe’s team features Jimmie Johnson, the defending NASCAR champion. Scott will soon open his own metal shaping business in Mooresville, north of Charlotte. Sadly, their oldest son, Mac, was killed in a car accident at age sixteen. Mrs. McMillion has written a novel, Whirlwinds Whirl Around, about two siblings trying to cope with their grief after losing a brother at a young age.

Before I left the show, I climbed onto a flatbed trailer pulled by a John Deere tractor and went on a tour of the old dirt speedway. As we headed down a narrow path for the speedway, I saw a white-clad figure emerge from a green port-a-potty. "There's Boss Hogg," a woman on the trailer shouted.

The original track of the Occoneechee is now a walking trail, a dirt path around eight feet wide. What used to be the speedway’s infield is a forest of hardwoods and pines. The tour guide pointed to a road that ran from the track. “That’s where the drivers came down and entered the track,” he said. One straightaway ran parallel to the Eno River, whose banks were not more than twenty feet away. Near the end of the tour we came to the original grandstand, fifteen rows of concrete bleachers built into the side of a hill. The concrete was broken in several places; weeds and vines had forced their way through numerous cracks. Pine trees had sprung up and interrupted the view.

As I went to catch the shuttle bus back to my car, I again saw Kaylin McGee. I told her I had spoken to some of the drivers who had raced at the Occoneechee. “Bringing the drivers together who used to race at the track, that’s the best part of this,” she said. “That’s what brings me joy.”

Foodie Small Town Is Us

2008-09-26T11:05:00.004-04:00

There is a very nice article in the current issue of Bon Appetit about the local food scene in Durham and Chapel Hill. Bearing the title "America's Foodiest Small Town," the article profiles several area farms (Bluebird Meadows, Peregrine Farm, Maple Spring Gardens) and documents the close connection between the farms and our local restaurants (Parker & Otis, Piedmont, Magnolia Grill). "Eat local?" the writer asks. "I was practically eating out of the farmers' hands." Thanks to Steve Cohn at Duke University Press for bringing it to my attention.

Wise Guy

2008-09-20T17:39:00.007-04:00

Fred Wise (at right) is an artist who two years ago moved from Atlanta to Durham. He is one of many artists showcasing their work this weekend at CenterFest, an arts festival taking place in downtown Durham.

I overhear Fred introduce himself to a woman who visits his booth. "I have met so many people today who have recently moved to Durham," the woman remarks. I strike up a conversation with the painter. Fred and I have the misfortune of being congenital fans of woeful NFL football franchises. As I admire his painting of a nude woman brushing her teeth, Fred says to me, “If Rankin Smith had run his insurance company like he ran the Falcons, he’d be on the street,” Rankin Smith being a former owner of the Atlanta Falcons. I try to one-up him with a story of John Meacom, the first owner of the New Orleans Saints. “Meacom paid big bucks to sign an aging Jim Taylor, whose glory days with the Green Bay Packers were long behind him. The coach and general manager advised him not to do it, but Meacom did it anyway, simply because he liked the idea of having Taylor on the team.”

Of the nude woman brushing her teeth we see her back, from the waist up. There is a wonderful sense of movement and countermovement in the painting, and the red color of the toothbrush is striking against the lighter hues that dominate the canvas. Fred’s images are often abstract, relying principally on color and brushstrokes for their effect.

Fred has around a dozen large canvases for sale, along with fifty or so small watercolors and pen-and-ink drawings. CenterFest ends at 6:00 p.m. today and will resume tomorrow at noon.

Give Me a Sign

2008-09-16T07:07:00.001-04:00

One of the fortunes of living in a state that is not up for grabs in this November's presidential election is being spared the glut of political signs and commercials that assault the senses in states such as Ohio and Florida. There are far fewer signs in Durham this year than there were in 2004--and there weren't that many then.

But living in a state that will undoubtedly go Republican does not prevent me from all political considerations. Here, as I see it, are the biggest issues and problems facing the United States as we look to elect a new president in under two months.

1. Values. All of the significant problems we face, to one degree to another, follow from our prevailing values: consumption; anti-intellectualism, or to put it positively, ignorance; nationalism; pride; the present. Each of those values need to be turned around. Instead of consumption, conservation; instead of ignorance, knowledge, especially self-knowledge; instead of nationalism, globalism; instead of pride, humility; instead of the present, the future.

2. Energy. We need to develop and convert fully to sustainable energy sources. That will require politicians who can tell the oil companies no.

3. Health care. Presently, health care is a site for profiteering--for pharmaceutical companies, for insurance companies, for medical specialists. It is not ethical to profit off of people's suffering. We need to recognize health care not as a good or service but as a right. At the same time, we the people must accept our share of responsibility for the mess we are in. We cannot live any way we want to and then expect to get a pill that will solve our problems.

4. War in Iraq. Who knows why we are in Iraq or what our goal is? Both of those need to be determined. If the purpose is to secure oil fields for our own use, the government needs to tell us that. Stop the deceit.

5. Economy. The economy is an issue, but I don't think there is much that we can do about it. The economy is so global that no one country can have much of an impact.

6. Public sector. We have developed the most sophisticated and advanced private sector in the history of the world. At the same time, we have let our public sector languish. It is high time we strike a balance and invest in the public sector. I will know we have turned a corner when we stand up and say, "Let's make our public schools the best the world has ever seen."

7. America's world relation. In recent years we have been the global bully. We need to acknowledge that we cannot unilaterally pursue our interests. We have to accept responsibility for our unique position in the world and become a cooperative and constructive partner.

8. Ethical inquiry. We need to make ethical inquiry the centerpiece of our educational system and, indeed, our way of thinking. What is the purpose of an economy? What is the function of a nation? What is just? How should one live one's life?

I do not know if either candidate is seriously addressing those issues.

Strange Sign

2008-09-12T10:23:00.004-04:00

A strange sign has appeared in my neighborhood:

The Group of 88 is, as many will recognize, a reference to the group of 88 Duke faculty members who sponsored a controversial advertisement the day after the news broke of allegations of rape by members of the university's lacrosse team. The sign, I would imagine, refers to the fact that Dale Earnhardt Jr. drives the #88 car on the NASCAR circuit. I've seen at least three of these signs in the area around West Main Street and Swift Avenue.

"When it's springtime in Alaska, it's forty below"

2008-09-10T10:54:00.005-04:00

Last week, as I took a turn around a neighborhood in northwest Raleigh, I saw in a couple of front yards my first McCain-Palin signs.

I am no believer in either party or, for that matter, in our government. Far from acting in the public interest, the president and legislators of both parties are committed to clearing the way for profit-maximizing commercial activity. There is little attempt to balance other concerns. Our elected officials, and, increasingly, the unelected cronies they bring with them to Washington engage in an elaborate public performance to conceal what is in fact a private agenda.

That they succeed in concealing it from the masses is less a testament to their skill as frauds as it is to our, the public's, indifference, distraction, and impressionability. The three have been taken to a new height with our national fawning and tittering over Sarah Palin, a person most Americans, including this one, had never heard of just two weeks ago. (I am not even certain that John McCain knew of her existence two weeks ago.) I can only hope that we come to our senses, and quickly at that. From what I've read, Ms. Palin believes that Jesus is coming, and soon at that. What implications might that have for her decision-making? Shouldn't we take that seriously?

Run, Don't Walk

2008-09-08T06:53:00.003-04:00

I've never understood the behavior of the Walk/Don't Walk signs that purportedly give pedestrians clearance and the right of way to cross intersections. Why, for instance, do pedestrians need to press a button to activate the signs? Why don't the signs automatically say "Walk" when the traffic light turns green? Even further, why are the traffic lights green, and not red, when the signs say "Walk"? Shouldn't traffic from all directions have a red light while pedestrians have the "Walk" sign? I find it amusing that the signs that explain the symbol for "Walk" (an abstract human figure in white, walking) say, in effect, "Walk--but look out for turning cars!"

Yesterday morning, a Sunday, I found myself on foot at the intersection of Anderson and Erwin Roads, waiting to cross Erwin heading north toward West Main Street. The traffic on Erwin had a green light, so I had the "Don't Walk" sign. But being a Sunday morning, there was hardly any traffic at all. I could have easily crossed against the light. But wait--I wondered what would happen if I pushed the button to cross the street. With no traffic, would the sign behave the way it does when there is a lot of traffic, which is to let a couple of minutes or so pass by before giving pedestrians the clearance to cross? I pushed the button; the traffic lights governing Erwin Road immediately turned yellow, then red. Within mere seconds, I had the "Walk" sign.

So that's it. Once the button is pushed, it is not a preset amount of time that must pass; it is the traffic that must pass. The next step for the city is to program the signs so that the "Walk" sign is activated immediately, even when there is traffic. And make the traffic lights red in all directions.

"Whan that Aprill . . ."

2008-09-04T08:05:00.004-04:00

I am auditing a course on Chaucer at Duke and it has afforded me at least one glimpse into how education has changed over the past twenty-five years. The professor, a young woman named Emily Huber who is an expert reader of Middle English and an authority on despair in medieval literature, asked the class how many of us had to memorize in high school the first eighteen lines of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Of the fifteen or so students in the class, only two hands went up: this forty-three-year-old's and another student's.

I was reminded of a scene in Reynolds Price's novel The Promise of Rest. The main character is an English professor at Duke (thinly disguised as the author himself) who asks his students to memorize large sections of Milton's great elegy "Lycidas." One student asks the professor if it isn't more important to understand the poem rather than memorize it. "No," the professor responds flatly.

Duke may not be a center of Chaucer research, but it is one of the best places to work on the American poet Walt Whitman. The Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library has one of the most important collections of the poet's manuscripts in the world. Currently, in the lobby of Perkins Library there is on display a copy of Whitman's Leaves of Grass with handwritten emendations and glosses by the author.

By the way, Middle English, Chaucer's English, is the English that existed after Old English (practically a foreign language) but before Modern English, the English of Shakespeare and Spenser. Middle English was spoken before what is known as the Great Vowel Shift occurred. Therefore, the vowel sounds are different than in Modern English. For instance, where today we might pronounce a word with a long /i/, in Middle English the sound would be a long /e/.

El Greco to Velazquez at the Nasher

2008-08-22T06:25:00.003-04:00

Yes, of course you should see “El Greco to Velazquez,” the current exhibition at Duke’s Nasher Museum of Art. The exhibition is impressive not only for the works of art themselves, but for the extraordinary number of museums and churches and other institutions from which the paintings in the exhibition are on loan. This was not an easy collection to assemble. The work of planning and organizing the exhibition must have been staggering, and hats off to the persons responsible.

As I meandered through the galleries, I spoke intelligently about the paintings—if speaking intelligently means muttering such profundities as “look at the color!” and “look at the detail!” “It looks almost like a photograph!” “Look at the mushrooms down there!” “Check out the lion at his feet!” “Now, that’s cool!” “Look at her face!” “I wish I had a cape like that!”

Art is an unsettling element in human civilization. We know it is important; we just can’t say, with any certainty, how. Or maybe we believe it is not important, but we are obliged to pretend it nevertheless is. I do know this: Our experience with art is confined almost exclusively to museums. How many American classrooms and homes have an easel? I also know this: This week, the students are moving in on campus (classes begin on Monday), and, as members of the elite corporate and professional class, many of their parents will dutifully tour the exhibition. Those parents have made sure their children have visited the best museums in Rome, in Paris, in Chicago, in New York. But God forbid their children should be art history majors, much less artists.

Drinking at Duke

2008-08-20T01:00:00.006-04:00

As reported in the headline story in Tuesday's Herald-Sun, President Richard Brodhead of Duke University has joined other university presidents in suggesting that Congress reconsider a 1984 law that effectively raised the minimum drinking age to twenty-one. Many of the comments on the story decried the problem with alcohol that Duke students have.

As a reminder, not all Duke students have a problem with alcohol. There are scores of Duke students who do not drink at all or drink very little. Having said that, it is unquestionable that there is a culture of drinking at Duke. The problems related to the drinking culture include vandalism, disorderly conduct, and, most destructive and violent of all, sexual assault.

I have worked at Duke for nine years and have overheard or been present for many conversations with students about drinking. Generally speaking, they feel an imperative to drink; it is almost a biological imperative. They maintain it is a foregone conclusion that students are going to drink. There is no use trying to stop them; the university's responsibility should therefore be to create a "safe" environment for drinking to occur.

One question that rarely gets asked is, Why do we get so hot under the collar about student drinking in the first place? No doubt one reason is that it sometimes leads to destructive and violent behavior. And certainly the residents of Trinity Park have a legitimate complaint. It is a shame that our law enforcement officials have not, in this case, protected and preserved the public peace. Yes, Duke students who live in Trinity Park have a right to "party"; but residents of Trinity Park have a right to peace and quiet and not getting their lawns urinated on.

Another reason we are so bothered by student drinking is this. We imagine universities as mini-utopias, places where bright young people and dynamic professors come together to learn and grow and discover, all in a carefully planned, often lovely built environment that in so many ways functions better than the larger cities of which they are a part (compare the service provided by the Duke bus system and that provided by DATA and you'll see what I mean). The subtext of our complaints about student drinking is that students should be more interested in philosophy and literature and economics than they are in drinking and partying; they should be more interested in visiting the Nasher and attending screenings of art films than they are in squandering a night at Shooters or The Down Under. We are bothered by evidence that perhaps we cannot create and sustain a utopia after all.

If students feel the need to drink, perhaps we should ask if college, especially a residential one such as Duke, is the best place for young people just out of high school to spend their time. Why are there so few attractive options for high school graduates? Why is college or the military often the only one?

I wish Duke success in its ongoing attempt to curb illegal drinking and the destruction and violence it sometimes visits. I doubt, however, that lowering the drinking age will have that effect.

Back Porch Music

2008-08-18T08:00:00.002-04:00

Why do white people like the blues so much? Why do black people avoid blues concerts like the plague--at least when they take place in venues such as American Tobacco? Why do I ask myself those questions?

Such was the self-interrogation that ran through my head as I, along with around 175 other concertgoers (of whom all but four or five were white), sat in Bay 7 at the American Tobacco Campus on Friday night for WUNC's Back Porch concert. Headlining the first half of the show were John Dee Holeman and Cool John Ferguson, two blues musicians. The set began with John Dee Holeman playing a couple of solo pieces. Then he was joined on stage by a bass player and a drummer, the two-man rhythm section livening things up. The next performer was Cool John Ferguson, a fabulous blues guitarist who plays a right-handed guitar left-handed; that is, he plays a right-handed guitar upside down, so that the treble strings are on top and the bass string are on the bottom. I liked his set (especially his opener, his version of "Mustang Sally"), although the finale, when all four musicians were on stage, was more noise than music.

I have tried to like the blues, but I can muster only so much appreciation. My thoughts about the blues were once summed up nicely by one of my former guitar teachers: the blues are fun to play, but boring to listen to. (Note to any white male readers over the age of 30: Do not, under any circumstances, let yourself be caught in public playing the blues.)

Being the white, middle-aged American that I have become, I enjoyed much more the second act of the evening, Dana and Susan Robinson, a folksinging duet from just outside Asheville. Here was the reality they faced: Cool John Ferguson had played a rocking, raucous, electrified set that exhilarated the crowd. How could two acoustic musicians (Dana on guitar, Susan on banjo) possibly follow that? They did it with understatement--the set began with an a cappella song by Dana; humor--"Now for something completely different," Susan said with an apologetic laugh; and top-notch musicianship. And soul. The two were soulful singers and performers who were committed to the music they were making.

Part of the fun of the evening was seeing in person several staff members from WUNC: Patty Painter-Wakefield, Frank Stasio, Freddy Jenkins, Keith Westin.

The next Back Porch concert is on Friday, September 5. Performing will be the Steep Canyon Rangers.

Triangle Free Press

2008-08-15T05:37:00.002-04:00

Just under a month ago, on July 16, 2008, a major new study of well-being in the United States was released. The study was published by Columbia University Press and was an initiative of the American Human Development Project, which is funded by Oxfam America, the Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Annenberg Foundation. Published as The Measure of America: American Human Development Report, 2008–2009, the study is 256 pages long and is based on data from the U.S. Bureau of the Census. The three authors—a former deputy director with the United Nations Development Program, the lead author of a report on water and sanitation produced by the U.N. Millennium Project, and a leading statistician from Brazil—held a press conference on Capitol Hill to announce the findings from, as described on the publisher's Web site, this "first-ever human development report for a wealthy, developed nation."

Sounds like a front-page news story to me. But I guess that's why I'm no Horace Greeley. The story went unreported in the major dailies. Not even the hometown Washington Post covered it.

One can read about it, however, in the August edition of the Triangle Free Press. The Triangle Free Press is a monthly, sixteen-page newspaper produced in the Bull City. It republishes stories about news that is typically underreported, if reported at all, in the corporate media. Most of the stories were first published on Web sites of interest groups and other advocacy organizations. The Free Press is available in dispensers on Ninth Street, inside the Regulator bookstore, and at public libraries and bus stops—“where working people hang out,” said Jan Martell, one of the paper’s editors.

“The Free Press concentrates on news that wouldn’t be reported in the News & Observer, the Herald-Sun, or even on National Public Radio,” Ms. Martell said. “We try to even things out a little bit.”

As Ms. Martell explained, she and the other editors (there are four altogether) spend dozens of hours every month reading Web sites for stories to publish in that month’s edition. Only stories that meet the editorial team’s standards for credibility and that receive consensus approval are selected for publication.

“We hope the stories we choose inform readers about ways in which they can be more effective in dealing with problems day to day,” Ms. Martell said.

Back to that major new study. According to the story published in the Triangle Free Press, “The Measure of America provides a wealth of data demonstrating the profound and deepening social decay of the United States. . . . the report documents, using government figures, the dramatic decline of American society relative to other advanced industrialized countries and the mounting social disparities within the U.S.”

A special thanks to the advertisers in this month’s edition of the Free Press: The North Carolina Green Party, Martell Design, Tree Huggin’ Cleaners, Vaguely Reminiscent, and the Regulator Bookshop.

Buckhorn Village Voted Down

2008-08-14T09:42:00.010-04:00

A member of the Orange County planning board has informed me that the board last night voted to advise against rezoning the parcel of land intended for Buckhorn Village. The decision now rests with the county commissioners. Buckhorn Village is a proposed "destination shopping" center that, if approved by the commissioners, would be built near Efland, just west of Hillsborough, near the intersection of interstates 40 and 85. Craufurd Goodwin, the member of the planning board, said the meeting lasted six hours and the vote was 5-3. The planning board is an advisory board to the county commissioners. The commissioners take the board's advice into consideration, but do not have to vote as the board advises.

Biscuits, Whole-Wheat Style

2008-08-13T07:47:00.007-04:00

An unfortunate irony of living in the South is that, in the South, it's hard to get good Southern food. Take biscuits. Other than at Biscuitville, a fast-food chain restaurant, where can good biscuits be found? The biscuits served at area restaurants are too salty, too greasy--and just plain too big. All the Southern cookbooks I have read (and I've read a lot) are practically unanimous in instructing cooks to cut the biscuits into two-inch rounds. I've yet to find a biscuit in Triangle restaurants that isn't at least twice as big around as that, including the ones at Biscuitville.

All modesty aside, one can get good biscuits from my kitchen, but my kitchen is not a restaurant. And therein lies a clue to the problem. Southern food is home-cooking. It's long been my belief that it doesn't lend itself well to the needs and exigencies of commercial kitchens. Take greens, for instance, which, if fresh, require lots of labor to clean and prep. And they cook down like you wouldn't believe. A restaurant would need to cook twenty, maybe thirty pounds of greens to have enough for a dinner shift, and twenty or thirty pounds of fresh greens takes more time to prep than kitchen managers can usually afford. That's why most Southern restaurants resort to frozen greens.

But back to biscuits. I made some this morning using whole-wheat flour (I simply substituted whole-wheat flour for all-purpose flour in my usual recipe). They came out just fine. I'm beginning to wonder if all those superstitions about biscuit-making (use only White Lily flour, for instance) are just those, superstitions.

As disappointing as biscuits are in Southern restaurants, grits are even more so. But that's a whole other topic.

TV Creep

2008-08-11T11:35:00.000-04:00

Maybe because I spent the first six years of my life in New Orleans and in even swampier areas downriver from the Crescent City, I somehow manage to keep my equanimity when I see a roach. When I turn on the kitchen light at night and find them scurrying around the green-and-brown tile floor, I don't start; I just stand there and watch them whirl around and come to a stop, waiting for my next move, which is usually to ignore them. Even in restaurants, I can tolerate the occasional roach. Needless to say, I'd rather not see one in my meal, much less bite into one while I'm eating my meal. But if I see out of the corner of my eye a roach scampering along a distant baseboard, my appetite suffers no ruin.

But there is something else infesting restaurants all over Durham, the sight and sound of which can turn my stomach and sour my appetite. This vile thing is becoming more and more inescapable in our city's eateries and can be seen even in the classy restaurants that in the past would have been free of it. This thing I'm talking about doesn't fly, doesn't crawl, doesn't lay eggs, but it visits its own brand of contamination on an establishment nonetheless. This thing I'm talking about is the television.

It used to be that televisions were found only in sports bars. That was fine. That's why I would go to a sports bar. But now, televisions are showing up in other kinds of places. Why, Rockwood Filling Station? Why, Watts Grocery? Why the abominable TVs?

In Ernest Hemingway's short story "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," two waiters, an old one and a young one, are closing a cafe for the night. The young one is eager to go home; to him, the cafe is just a cafe. The old one knows better. "Each night I am reluctant to close up because there may be someone who needs the cafe," he says. The young waiter reminds him that there are other places still open for people to go. "You do not understand," the old one says. "This is a clean and pleasant cafe. It is well lighted. The light is very good and also, now, there are shadows of the leaves."

I am still searching for my own clean, well-lighted cafe. Whatever it will have, it will not have a TV. I am becoming less and less hopeful that I will find it.

Obama Truck

2008-08-09T10:17:00.007-04:00

Barack Obama's campaign is the first in my memory that has inspired homemade signs of support. Here are pictures of a truck at Parker & Otis this morning. Kind thanks to the owner, who allowed me to take the photographs.

(The message on the side of the truck reads "Middle-class hard working white gun-owning male in his 50s for Obama.")

Dark Knight

2008-08-07T09:04:00.017-04:00

Judging from the mere dozen or so people who were at the 8:05 showing last night of Dark Knight at the Northgate Mall, it appears that the movie's hold on the American public is over. I dearly hope so. Most top-grossing movies are at least good; not so with Dark Knight. Thank God we seem to have gotten it out of our collective system in only two theater-stuffing, popcorn-eating, soda-gulping weekends. Had the viewing been spaced out more evenly over five or six weeks, the entire country might have found itself doing its own bit of cosmetic surgery, Joker-style, to put a permanent smile on its face.

In Dark Knight, Gotham is terrorized by the Joker, who, for reasons that are never clear to me, is the only hope the city's crime bosses have of regaining their ill-gotten stashes of cash. But the Joker is motivated less by the considerable cut of the money he has been promised and more by the thrill he gets from blowing up buildings, killing prominent members of the city, and playing deadly games with Gotham evacuees on cruise ships. For his part, Batman searches his soul and searches it again (and again) as he tries to decide if his own brand of vigilante justice does more harm than good to the citizens of Gotham. In the end, he realizes that he and he alone can be whatever the city needs him to be, hero or anti-hero, virtuous or venal. He is, as Commissioner Gordon explains to his son at the end of the movie, the dark knight.

Better minds than mine can make something of the fact that the country's favorite movie has, as its two main characters, a relentlessly homicidal maniac (the Joker) and a wildly wealthy heir by day and a law-breaking vigilante by night (Batman). Dark Knight is loud, louder, and loudest, with fisticuffs, explosions, and murders galore, galorer, and galorest. The plot spins out of control as Batman is a hero, then not, then a hero again, then not, then again, then--well, you get the point. Equally nauseating and overdone is the DA's use of a coin toss to decide his course of action, action being a euphemism for shooting someone in the head or not shooting someone in the head. O had he turned his gun on himself only a few minutes into the movie! That would have spared me a lot of irritation.

The movie couldn't even preserve what was good about it. The love interest, played by the irresistible cutie-pie Maggie Gyllenhaal, perishes in an explosion of explosives-rigged oil barrels. My interest considerably diminished with the exit of the lovely Ms. Gyllenhaal, Batman and the Joker chase each other around for another wearisome forty-five minutes.

For another point of view, see the review on the blog Elrond Hubbard.

Chicken Liver

2008-08-06T12:08:00.000-04:00

The older I become, the more certain I am that beautiful friendships are made between two people who share a love of something special that unites them, something that they, and they alone, see the good in while the rest of the world, in an ever growing crescendo, is telling them no. In other words, beautiful friendships are made between two people who share a love of liver.

Liver, especially chicken liver, has been on my mind ever since I ate at the new Rockwood Filling Station last Wednesday night. The restaurant has several pizzas, but the only one that matters is the one topped with caramelized onions and chicken livers. Why order anything else? To be fair, the livers are too thick to be an ideal topping for a pizza; perhaps they should be chopped instead of left whole. I plucked some of them off with a fork and put them straight in my mouth. But whatever problems their dimensions pose, their flavor makes up for them, and then some.

I refuse to believe that people do not like liver. It must be a ridiculous affectation, a "just because" hardheadedness that is unbecoming in an adult. Maybe most people were not treated to liver cheese sandwiches as I was growing up. The liver cheese had that wonderful thin strip of white fat around the edges; I loved to carefully pull the strip of fat off and eat it separately before I bit into the sandwich itself. Or perhaps most people didn't have a local chain of fried chicken liver restaurants like Jack Pirtle, as we did in Memphis. My best friend and I would get a dozen chicken livers for ninety-nine cents from the drive-through and eat them as we drove around the city.

Rockwood Filling Station is on University and James, next door to the Q-Shack. The Wednesday evening I went it was packed by 6:30, so go early. The area around University and James, with Nana's, Rockwood Filling Station, and the Q-Shack, all popular restaurants, has precious few parking spaces, so be prepared to park, perhaps on James on the other side of 15-501, and walk.

Durham Public Library

2008-08-04T11:59:00.006-04:00

To know a city's soul and character, look no further than its public buildings. Public buildings represent a city's aspirations. They symbolize the degree to which a city and its residents are committed to the commonweal and the ideal of e pluribus unum.

As reported in a post from July 30 on Bull City Rising, the Durham public library recently held a forum on the future of the main branch downtown. Among other things, the library will almost certainly stay in its current location in its current building. The current location opened in 1980 and is more than ten times bigger than its previous location on East Main.

Needless to say, a library should be more than just a building where books are shelved. It should inspire civic pride, learning, and reading. There should be elegant landscaping and park-like grounds; there should be a grand entrance; there should be a reading room where the great books are shelved.

The Salt Lake City library is an inspiring vision of what a public library can be. Thanks to The Archer Pelican for directing me to the pictures.

A good way to keep up with our library is to read the blog of director Skip Auld. There is also a blog written for teenage patrons.

Family Bible

2008-08-01T20:50:00.001-04:00

Melissa Delbridge has written a marvelous book. Family Bible is a collection of stories about growing up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the 1960s, stories that are rich in detail and remarkably candid. Here is the author relating the first eyewitness account of sex she ever heard:

"Well, how'd it look?" I asked.
Alleen shrugged. "I don't know. Like he was lying on top of her bare-assed and wiggling around and breathing like he'd been out mowing the lawn. And she was lying on her belly underneath him, moaning and carrying on with her titty hanging down over the sofa cushion."
Alleen never failed to impress me. I'd never seen a titty big enough to hang anywhere.

An archivist at Duke University, Ms. Delbridge conveys the complicated situations that arose in a segregated society by focusing on the slight but significant adjustments black people had to make in order to avoid trouble. One summer, a black housekeeper named Jimmie Nell drove the author and her friend to a public pool. "The moment she parked, we jumped out and ran, lured by chlorine and echoing laughter. Jimmie Nell called us back, needing to hold our hands, not to protect us, but to make clear her reason for entering the pool." And you know you're into something good when, halfway through a story about her father's foiling an attempted robbery at a bait and gun shop, Ms. Delbridge observes, "Unfortunately, Daddy did not have time for clothes, either." But it was the following detail about her father's way of flirting with her mother that got me hooked on the book. In the car on their way to a family picnic on Hurricane Creek, her mother driving, her father opened a can of beer and "passed me the first sip and when he took the frosted can back, he brushed it along my mother's thigh like it was an accident, only real slow." Now that's cool.

The stories in Family Bible take us swimming in Hurricane Creek, Queen City Pool, and the Mimosa Park Country Club (the author changed the names of people and places "when it felt right") and getting immunization shots at the Tuscaloosa County Health Department. We're with the author when she loses her virginity, outdoors on an Indian mound. We see her parents' separation and divorce and her mother's remarriage to a man who sexually abused his stepdaughter, the author. "The first man who ever fell in love with me," Ms. Delbridge says of her stepfather in the opening sentence of "Billy Boy," a sentence that becomes more and more heartbreaking as the story of abuse and the author's leaving home for good at seventeen unfolds.

The last story of the book, the poignant "Girls Turned In," is about girls who "turn in on themselves when things get too bad," who "scrunch back down inside themselves so tightly that nobody in the world can get a hold on them anymore." I might imagine the author was once one of those girls. If so, she has somehow found the ability to turn the other way. The stories in Family Bible are personal stories, stories that took courage to tell. They are stories that ultimately belong to the author, and I am grateful she has chosen to share them.

Hark! The Herald

2008-07-30T12:33:00.008-04:00

I have not yet looked at today's print edition of the Herald-Sun, and since the layout of the online edition seldom reflects the most important headlines, I would have missed today's editorial by Herald-Sun editor Bob Ashley announcing ten more job cuts at Durham's only daily had it not been for a post in Bull City Rising.

The editorial is brilliant in its own way. It goes through a dozen or so paragraphs of preamble to set up in sleight-of-hand fashion a context in which Mr. Ashley can affirm the paper's commitment to good journalism while delivering the discouraging news that the Herald-Sun is further reducing its staff. He does such a good job of slipping in the news that my colleague, after reading the editorial, did not realize the job cuts he mentioned were cuts from this week; she thought he was referring to cuts from long ago. We both chuckled over the pledge to "be more rigorous in avoiding extraneous information." Does that mean paring stories down to a lead and a couple of supporting paragraphs? Why not simply run a list of headlines along with the corresponding lead sentences?

I tend to look sympathetically on the Herald-Sun. It is often criticized, but how can a single paper adequately cover a city as large and complex as Durham? I doubt very much Mr. Ashley enjoys being in the position he is in. I suspect he is caught up (as we all are) in forces that go far beyond the problems of a small, mid-city daily. The conventional wisdom is that newspapers have to make cuts because advertising revenues are down, and advertising revenues are down because people don't read print editions of newspapers as much anymore. I can't help but believe the problem is more complicated than that.

Hardly a Hardee's, Hardly a Man

2008-07-29T13:37:00.010-04:00

As I walked to the food court at Duke South on Tuesday in search of lunch, I suddenly knew I could take the implied insult to my manhood no longer. It was time to "man up," as Tony and Mike say, and get a real meal. It was time for a Hardee's Thickburger.

A funny thing happened, however, on the way to Robert Bly-dom. The Hardee's in Duke South, I discovered, was no more. It had closed a few weeks before.

It's not so easy to be a man.

I got at least one thing out of it: My dinner plans were now clear. But a question arose: Would any Hardee's do? Or should I seek out a special Hardee's, a nice Hardee's, the kind that, I don't know, doesn't talk back, doesn't nag, let's me be me, understands who I am?

There's a good-looking Hardee's, I thought, as I rounded the bend on 15-501 heading north toward Biscuitville and Guglhupf and Foster's. I pulled into the parking lot and went inside.

Let me spare the introductions and plunge right in: it was a damn good sandwich. It comes with the works, so if you're like me, you'll want to ask them to hold the mayo and mustard and the American cheese. And I was pleased to see that, at Hardee's, they still bring your order to your table. But the hamburger looked--well, kinda small, almost ordinary, not nearly as thick as I remember seeing on the commercials. But size isn't everything. Right?

One final note: If I must, Tony and Mike are Tony Kornheiser and Mike Wilbon of the Washington Post and ESPN's Pardon the Interruption.

McClatchy

2008-07-28T00:05:00.000-04:00

The McClatchy Company, which owns the Raleigh News and Observer, made headlines several weeks ago when it announced hundreds of job cuts at its newspapers, including the N&O. Needless to say, McClatchy isn't everyone's idea of a modern-day John Peter Zenger. It is a publicly traded company, which means its first responsibility is to its shareholders, which means its primary concern is the bottom line.

I have become used to thinking that corporate America, of which McClatchy is a part, is partly to blame for the scant coverage of the Iraq War in the traditional print media. (The primary culprits, of course, are in the Bush administration.) I was therefore surprised to come across links to the company's coverage of Iraq on the blogroll of Baghdad Bureau, a blog maintained by the New York Times on news from Iraq. McClatchy sponsors two blogs: Baghdad Observer, by their Baghdad bureau chief, Leila Fadel; and Inside Iraq, by Iraqi journalists working for McClatchy (the names of the journalists are withheld for their own protection). The McClatchy Web site also has an archive of the company's reporting on U.S. intelligence with respect to Iraq and the case made for going to war.

For stories on the coverage in McClatchy newspapers on the company's decision to cut jobs, including the story in the N&O, see this item in the Columbia Journalism Review. The company's stock price, by the way, has declined considerably since May, closing at $4.25 at the end of the trading day today.

Timber

2008-07-26T15:29:00.007-04:00

Scores of mature trees beside the railroad tracks on West Main, especially at the intersection of Main and Broad/Swift, have been felled and removed. I don't know why. I saw no signs and came across no reports in the media.

The effect on the landscape is significant. I am sure I will get used to it, but for now, the right of way along the railroad tracks looks startlingly unsheltered.

A few years ago I remarked to someone who has lived in Durham far longer than I that the city has a lot of trees. "Not like it used to," she replied. I guess not.

Recently, a visitor to Durham from Brazil said to me, "You don't live in a city; you live in a forest." I thought of the times I used to go to the top floor of the library tower at Memphis State University and look across the city to the Mississippi River to the west. I would see the white top of the Midsouth Coliseum, the brown tower of the Purina factory, and trees, nothing but trees.

Durham, along with 3,215 other communities nationwide, is an official Tree City. To qualify as a Tree City, a community has to meet four requirements: it must have a tree board or department; it must have a tree care ordinance; it must observe Arbor Day; and it must spend $2 per capita on a community forestry program.

No More Hellhound on My Trail

2008-07-25T21:34:00.006-04:00

If there's one thing white liberals like--and I know, because I am one and I have populated my life with them--it's the blues, especially the Delta blues, the acoustic-guitar blues of Charley Patton, Son House, and, above all, Robert Johnson. I often believe the admiration--perhaps I should more modestly say interest--I have felt for blues musicians was the expression of an obligation: an obligation as a Memphian (Memphis being the northern terminus and commercial capital of the Delta), an obligation as a guitar player, an obligation as a member of the class that visited the blues on them in the first place.

Many years ago I bought a box set of the complete recordings of Robert Johnson. I never opened it. I took it from house to house, state to state, until it finally came to rest, still in its shrink wrapping, under a cheap shelving unit that held a defunct stereo system.

Enough had finally become enough. If I wasn't going to listen to it, I should at least exchange it for something I would listen to. I took the set to Offbeat Music and traded it and $1.01 for a used CD of Sir Edward Elgar's violin concerto, a 1997 recording by Kennedy (formerly Nigel Kennedy) and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (Simon Rattle conducting). As soon as I got home, I put it on and listened rapturously to the entire 53-minute composition.

Offbeat, by the way, has a large inventory of used classical CDs, for those who wish to build a classical music library inexpensively. Even their used copies of the budget Naxos label are discounted. If you act now, you may also find a box set of the complete recordings of Robert Johnson, in mint condition and perhaps at a sale price. I hope it finds a good home.

I Hear America Singing?

2008-07-22T18:45:00.004-04:00

I once remarked to a friend that America is not a singing culture. Being the argumentative sort, he disputed me, but I remained dangerously convinced of my own opinion. I still am. Notwithstanding the omnipresent iPods and ear buds and the multi-billion-dollar industry that pop music has become, I maintain that America is not a singing culture. If you don't believe me, next time you are in a group of four people, try to identify a song to which everyone knows the words and the tune.

I suspect, however, that things were different in the past. To wit, there is the current exhibition at Duke's Perkins Library of sheet music from the Civil War. Most of the title pages are lavishly illustrated and bear evocative titles such as "Grand Secession March," "Freemen, Rally!" and "The Prisoner's Hope." Particularly attractive are items from an "illustrated songs on notepaper" series; each notepaper, which is about the size of a 5x7 index card, contains the complete lyrics to a song and a color illustration at the top. One is of "Oh Jeff! Oh Jeff! How Are You Now?" which shows Confederate president Jefferson Davis wearing a red dress in futile disguise as he is apprehended by Union soldiers. At the bottom of each notepaper reads, "Ten illustrated songs on notepaper mailed to any address on receipt of 50 cts."

"Music was a pervasive and distinctive element of the overall atmosphere surrounding the Civil War," begins the entry on Music in the Encyclopedia of the American Civil War. Sheet-music publishing was a booming industry at the time. Even in the South there were scores of independent music publishers, with New Orleans and Augusta, Georgia, the centers of the industry. One name that appears on the sheet music published in New Orleans is Werlein; up until the 1990s there was a Werlein's Music Store on Canal Street in the city.

The exhibition is in the display cases next to the Rare Book Room on the first floor of Perkins.

Crepe Myrtle and Drought

2008-07-21T20:13:00.010-04:00

Even in the midst of a lingering drought, during a rain-scarce season when something, one would think, has got to give, it has been a great summer for crepe myrtles. Nothing was more apparent to me as I walked along several blocks of Englewood, just west of Ninth Street, on a humid Monday night. The sidewalk was lined with dozens of crepe myrtles, their branches bending with white and pink clusters of flowers, elegant ones with slim, straight trunks, but gnarled ones too, tall, with thick, rough trunks and in the growing twilight looking for all the world like visitors from a forest in a Grimms' fairy tale.

The beauty of the crepe myrtles notwithstanding, the present drought points to the folly of large numbers of people putting down stakes in an area with no major river in sight. Durham was never meant to be the population center it is today. And as it grows--which it seems destined to do--the threat to our water supply presented by even moderate droughts will grow with it.

Eventually, we will get a surfeit of water and things will balance themselves out--right? But for now, Durham is in Stage III of its water-restriction ordinance, which, among other things, bans residents from watering their lawns and gardens except on Wednesdays and Saturdays between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. or (not and) 5 p.m. and 8 p.m. Residents are not to use water "for any unnecessary purpose or intentionally waste water." According to the North Carolina Division of Water Resources, Durham County is in a "moderate drought." The division reports that "using a 30-day running average of 28.17 MGD [million gallons a day] through July 6th, there are 13 days of water remaining in Teer Quarry (now offline) and 201 days remaining in Lake Michie and Little River. There are approximately 43 days of supply below our intake structures. This gives a total of 257 days of supply remaining (as of July 6, 2008)."

"Hello, This Is Duke University, and I'm Talking to You"

2008-07-18T08:37:00.005-04:00

Duke University has installed new emergency alert sirens and spent Wednesday and Thursday testing them. I was not surprised when I heard the tests on Wednesday. After all, I was in my office on campus. I was surprised to hear the test late Thursday afternoon, as I was going about my business--not in my office, but in the private confines of my living room, which is located a half mile as the crow flies from the Chapel.

According to an article in Duke Today, the sirens are part of Duke's new emergency mass alert system (part of which includes campus-wide emails in the event of a reported crime on or near campus) and are intended for people outdoors. "People in most buildings will not hear the outdoor sirens," Aaron Graves, associate vice president for campus safety and security, is quoted as saying.

North Carolina State

2008-07-16T15:51:00.002-04:00

Agronomy is one of those old-fashioned words whose heyday was in the nineteenth century, the last century of an epoch as old as human history itself, an epoch when getting more out of the soil was the only thing standing between a winter of hardship and a winter of hardship and hunger. The Oxford English Dictionary has only two quotations involving the word, one dated 1814, the other, 1881. Agronomy is still used, of course, but one would hardly consider it a part of everyday language. A computer search of all editions of the New York Times from 1980 to the present turns up only 163 documents in which the word may be found.

I enjoy encounters with unfamiliar words, so imagine my delight last Friday morning to find agronomy in attractive metal letters adorning the front of a building on the campus of North Carolina State University. I suppose I should not have been surprised; after all, State is an important center of agricultural research. But the word nevertheless startled me; it seemed fresh.

I toured the campus last Friday with a rising senior from Durham. When we found ourselves on the agricultural side of campus, we felt we had entered a strange world. Poultry Science. Agronomy. Animal Science. Horticulture.

It was my first time to visit the State campus; I am sorry it took me so long. The campus is hilly with lavish green spaces and an attractive area near the library for students to hang out at. The view from the front of the 1911 building is one of the finest views of a campus I have come across. In the library, I found the umbrella-like privacy screens around the computer stations funky. Has anyone seen those before? What are they called?

Meredith Monk at the ADF

2008-07-13T11:10:00.007-04:00

Imagine a world in which Meredith Monk makes sense.

That was the thought running through my head last night as I watched the famous performance artist, dressed in white and in whiteface, looking like a porcelain figurine, sit still, twitch and swing her arms, repose on the floor, short-step backwards and forwards and sideways across the stage, and make noises with her voice in a thirty-minute performance at Page Auditorium on Duke's West Campus. As the audience entered the auditorium, Ms. Monk, now in her mid-sixties, was already seated on stage, on a low stool on a four-foot-tall box across which was draped a flowing white rug. When the lights went down and the audience fell silent, she remained still and quiet. It occurred to me that this could be the performance, her own iconoclastic version of John Cage's 4'33''.

But then an arm moved. Why the arm? Why now? A recording began of a piano playing a theme over and over; Ms. Monk jumped off the box and onto the stage floor; for the next twenty minutes, she did her inscrutable thing. The recording, finally, stopped; relief came over the audience; the performance was ending. But it didn't end. There was a five-minute coda, with more gestures and ululations, and then the stage lights dimmed to black. Now it really was over.

The applause was moderately enthusiastic, except for the dozen or so people who hooped and hollered in appreciation for someone who has been a legend in the arts world. I was glad I got to see her perform. But I am still left imagining a world in which Meredith Monk makes sense.

Margaret's Cantina

2008-07-11T06:36:00.004-04:00

More than one visitor or temporary resident of the Triangle has observed to me that many of the good restaurants in the area are in strip malls. Most of those observers have come from the Northeast, where, apparently, strip malls have only bad restaurants or no restaurants at all.

One of the good-restaurants-in-a-strip-mall is Chapel Hill's Margaret's Cantina. Margaret's, as it is simply known, is in the Timberlyne Shopping Center on Weaver Dairy Road, near Airport Road and I-40. The dish to order at Margaret's is the pollo asado, or rotisserie chicken. And order the half chicken. Don't for a minute think about being abstemious and ordering the quarter chicken, unless you are the kind of person who enjoys profound regret for dessert.

The chicken at Margaret's is cooked on a rotisserie and finished on a grill. When I sat down to my order last night, I dug into the breast first, saving what would undoubtedly be the best piece, the thigh, for last. To which I can only say: Dear breast, I'm sorry I underrated you. You were tender and moist and full of flavor and more than a match for my thigh. Please accept my apologies. (Not that the thigh wasn't every bit as scrumptious as I expected.)

For side dishes (can we retire the ugly shorthand "sides" now?) I had the black beans and the green beans. To my mild surprise--Margaret's is not a white tablecloth restaurant--the green beans were fresh; I would have liked them cooked just a tad more. Thick pita points rounded out the fare.

Margaret's is a popular restaurant, so expect to wait for a table if you are in a party larger than two. There is outdoor seating for those who like that kind of thing.

Oxford American

2008-07-09T06:43:00.010-04:00

Two weeks ago, after defiantly holding out for nineteen years, I decided to join the rest of my friends and become a person of taste and learning, so I took out subscriptions to Harper's and the Oxford American. (I've made showy proclamations about subscribing to, not to mention actually reading, the New York Times too, but I'll be damned if I pay $24.95 a month to have the daily crossword puzzle delivered to my door when I can get it from the Duke library for free.)

I am glad I did. On Monday I received my first issue of the OA, no. 61, the one with a photograph of a girl on one knee holding a blue ribbon in one hand and a small, golden pig in the other. I'm glad I did because I might not have read otherwise the fine article about north Georgia's Chattooga River, the river that stood in for the fictional Cahulawassee in the movie Deliverance. The article was written by Bronwen Dickey, who is the daughter of the man who wrote the novel Deliverance and who has a Durham connection, as she is a recent graduate of Duke University and has lived in Durham from time to time since.

In my work at Duke, I encounter mostly economics majors, which is to say business-major wannabes who regard a gold-digging career on Wall Street with the same cheerful certitude with which I regard death, taxes, and Binx Bolling's despair. For that reason it is a relief to become acquainted with Duke students on the other side, so to speak. One was Bronwen, and it is gratifying to see her become such a success.

There are other Durham and Triangle connections in the issue. Hal Crowther has a profile of the historian John Hope Franklin; there's an account of food in the Wake County Public Safety Center, otherwise known as jail; and there's a review of Lawrence Taylor's autobiography (Taylor is a former Tarheel who became one of the greatest linebackers in pro football history).

I have had my quarrels with the OA over the years, quarrels that can be boiled down to one anguished, eat-your-heart-out lament: Why didn't I start that magazine? Damn.

Bulls Game, Cincinnati Style

2008-07-07T14:30:00.001-04:00

On Saturday night, even though I was in Cincinnati, I attended a Bulls game.

It must have been a Bulls game, or at least a minor league game of some sort--maybe even a little league game. At the end of every half inning there was some kind of entertainment or diversion: the “kiss cam”; the “cheesy dance cam”; the “air guitar cam”; the in-stadium roving reporter whose spontaneous interviews with fans were shown on the giant monitor in left field; the foot race between three anthropomorphized cartoon baseballs; calliope music from the fake showboat in left-center field; innumerable electronic exhortations to fans to clap and make noise. Every Reds batter came to the plate accompanied by a three-second excerpt from his personal anthem (usually a head-banging anthem); even the great Ken Griffey Jr. was not exempted from the indignity.

And did I mention the cheerleaders? Since when did major league baseball teams—since when did baseball teams in any professional league—have cheerleaders? Yet there they were, after several half innings, lined up along the top of the dugout roof, kicking and pom-pomming and looking miserably out of place.

Why this determination to entertain the public at every second? Is that really what people want? Can we not sit in relative quiet for three minutes before the next half-inning starts? Are we that infantile and short on attention?

At least the Bulls do not have cheerleaders. Not yet.

(Still) on Assignment: Cincinnati

2008-07-05T13:59:00.005-04:00

In Over-the-Rhine, one of Cincinnati's poorest neighborhoods, whole blocks of row houses stand boarded up on a scale I haven't seen since the early eighties. It is the neighborhood in which a race riot broke out in 2001 after a white city policeman was acquitted of murdering a black teenager. Once inhabited mostly by German immigrants and their descendants, Over-the-Rhine gradually became predominantly black as highway construction projects and urban renewal forced black residents out of their neighborhoods to other areas of the city.

At the heart of Over-the-Rhine is the Findlay Market, Ohio's oldest continually operated public market. I went with a couple of friends on the Thursday before Independence Day to buy a pork shoulder for the holiday meal. The market is in a cavernous building with a high ceiling and a concrete floor. Inside are approximately fifty vendors, including many meat vendors.

What struck me about the market was the demographic mix of customers that day. In Durham, thousands of times I have been in places where there was scarcely a black face in sight; I have also been in places where I was one of only a few white faces in sight. But I don't think I had ever been in a place where there were far more blacks than whites, yet still an appreciable number of the latter--one white face for every three black faces, I would say--until I visited the Findlay Market in Cincinnati. I will remark that every meat vendor was white.

On Assignment: Cincinnati

2008-07-04T09:42:00.004-04:00

The Ohio River, which forms the border between Kentucky to the south and its namesake to the north, emptying into the Mississippi where Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri meet, is, whatever its importance as a navigable waterway, one of the most effective and significant "walls" in our nation's history. The Ohio was the wall over which runaway slaves climbed to reach relative freedom in the North. The river is a cultural wall as well. The architecture just north of the river is unlike the architecture in any place south of it. Cincinnati, for instance, which is on the Ohio, is full of row houses and stout brick and stone structures (very "Germanic," my friends in Cincinnati say) of the kind rarely seen in the South. It's as if the architectural styles that emerged in the Northeast migrated south and west until they reached the Ohio, at which point they came to an abrupt and definitive halt.

What, I wonder, are Durham's Ohio Rivers? What "walls," real or imaginary, tangible or conceptual, bring movement to a halt? I'm often attuned to, for lack of a better term, topographical walls, the effects, often psychological but sometimes physical, of elevation and man-made elements and such that can influence our decisions to take one direction and not another. Take the combination of circumstances that discourage people from walking from the DBAP to downtown proper. Blackwell Street is not level; it rises as it extends from Jackie Robinson Place to Main Street; then there are the railroad tracks to cross (how often have I been told not to play on railroad tracks), and then the downtown loop. There is distance, too: from the corner of Jackie Robinson and Blackwell to Corcoran and Main is, I would estimate, a quarter mile: a greater distance than most Americans are willing to walk in a single stretch.

Outdoor Dining

2008-07-03T04:57:00.005-04:00

Ah, outdoor dining. It's so fun. It's so liberating. But is it ethical?

On Tuesday I had lunch at Toast, a new restaurant in downtown Durham where West Main and Chapel Hill Street meet. Toast has an outdoor dining area. As I sat indoors, I watched as a man in a wheelchair--he did not look like a resident of easy street--went from one outdoor table to the next, interrupting each party's meal. From the uncomfortable looks on the faces of each diner, I could only surmise the man was asking for money. When he decided to leave, he did not take the easy way out but instead maneuvered his wheelchair through the middle of the tables and forced two or three diners to scoot their chairs in to make room for him to pass.

What are the rules governing eating in our culture? When I was a boy, my mother would grab me by the arm and hurry me past the Shoney's in the local mall. "Don't look at people when they eat; it's not polite," she would say. My great-aunt told me over and over again not to waste food: "There's people starving in China," she intoned. Children come first: "Plenty times I went to bed hungry so your daddy could have something to eat," my grandmother often said.

There are several Durham restaurants now that offer outdoor seating. But I am not at all certain that dining outdoors in a city with poor and hungry residents is a ethically unambiguous act.

The Grocer Has No Clothes

2008-06-29T14:11:00.011-04:00

Just as there are people out there who believe that song lyrics represent profound attempts to come to terms with the big questions--do the two guys on Sound Opinions know how ridiculous they sound talking about Lil Wayne and Coldplay as if they were Robert Lowell or W. B. Yeats? "It's when Lil Wayne actually abandons the alliteration and opts instead for a series of pleonasms in perfect iambs that his lyrics become timeless meditations on the contemporary human condition," I can almost hear them say--there are people out there who believe the produce at Whole Foods is somehow better than the produce at the Food Lions of the world.

I don't know what they are seeing. Yesterday I had to buy a few extra peaches to supplement the local peaches I had purchased on Saturday at the farmers' market. No problem, I thought: I'll just walk to my neighborhood Whole Foods (it really is in my neighborhood, just a half-mile away) and buy a few locally grown peaches. As much as I am skeptical of Whole Foods, as I walked down West Main Street in the ninety-degree heat, I thanked my lucky stars that the holier-than-thou grocer was there when I needed it. This is precisely why there is a Whole Foods, I thought: so I don't have to drive 20 miles on a Sunday to the state farmers' market in Raleigh to buy a few local peaches.

I entered the store. My eye was caught by a beautiful and bountiful display of blueberries. I began to pick up a carton--until I saw they were from California. As in, two thousand miles away. As in, when blueberries are in season in North Carolina. Same for the raspberries--Driscoll brand, no less, the same brand I see at Food Lion. But the peaches! Surely the peaches--no, they were from California too, or were "regionally" grown--a euphemism for "hey, they're not from a sandhills orchard, but they are from South Carolina. Smile." South Carolina? I can get South Carolina peaches at Food Lion. I must confess: if the peaches had been ripe, I would have bought them. But they were all hard as rocks--just like the peaches I see in, you guessed it, Food Lion. I am sure both grocery stores were supplied with peaches from the same commercial truck.

Hmmmm. I want your peaches/I want your dress/I want your number/Give him your mess. "Only Dudenhefer is bold enough to juxtapose peaches and dress, and what he does at the end is subvert all our expectations by switching the perspective from the first person to the second. It's touches like that that make this a great album and my choice for the best debut album of the year. Now, pass the peach pie."

Grady's Barbecue

2008-06-29T09:45:00.017-04:00

In the remoter reaches of Wayne County, near Dudley, North Carolina, and just a few miles from the Neuse River, at the intersection of Arrington Bridge Road and Sleepy Creek Road you'll find a small, windowless, white building of siding and cinder blocks in which is served--and let's put this argument to rest for once and for all--the best barbecue in North Carolina.

I'm referring of course to Grady's (pronounced with a short a) Barbecue. It's not necessarily obscure--Bob Garner has an entry on it in his Guide to North Carolina Barbecue, and on the walls of the tiny dining room there are copies of stories about the restaurant published in newspapers and magazines. But it's not one of the places one normally hears about in conversations about North Carolina barbecue.

It should be. It should be mentioned in the same breath as Wilbur's, the Skylight Inn, Stamey's, Lexington No. 1, and Allen and Son. The barbecue reminds me of the Skylight Inn's: it comes from the whole hog, and there are plenty of small bits of skin mixed in with the meat. The meat is moist without being greasy (although I don't mind greasy) and is mildly seasoned with red pepper flakes: in other words, quintessential eastern North Carolina barbecue.

For an extra treat, approach the restaurant from U.S. 13 and follow the white, crossroads signs to Dudley for glimpses of rural North Carolina. I came across fields of tobacco and even more fields of corn--a change, I believe, now that the tobacco quota system has been eliminated and with all the talk of using corn-based ethanol for fuel.

Important note: Grady's takes cash only. Have some on hand, as there are no ATMs in the vicinity. Ten dollars should suffice for a meal and one of their delicious desserts, which are kept chilled in a small refrigerated case in the dining room. And bring an extra eight or nine dollars to buy a pound of barbecue to take back to the Triangle with you.

Second Amendment

2008-06-26T14:09:00.008-04:00

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down on Thursday a law banning handguns in Washington, D.C., and in so doing affirmed that Americans have a Constitutional right to bear arms.

It is remarkable that the second amendment, as worded, is in the Constitution. It is the only amendment, and in fact the only item in the entire document, that expressly deals with a right to possess an object. (The thirteenth amendment, which prohibits slavery, avoids explicit mention of owning or possessing and of the person to be owned or possessed.) If the second amendment were worded in a way that was consistent with the wording of the other items in the Constitution, it would read something like, "The right of each State to secure its freedom with respect to the several other States, Congress shall make no law abridging or prohibiting the right of a State to form a well regulated Militia."

In North Carolina, to purchase a handgun or receive it as a gift requires a Pistol Purchase Permit, which is obtained from the county sheriff. The North Carolina Rifle and Pistol Association argues that the requirement is a holdover from the Jim Crow era, permitting at the time sheriffs to arbitrarily deny blacks the right to own handguns. The association claims that sheriffs still issue permits in an arbitrary fashion and that, with the passage of civil rights laws and the advent of the National Instant Check System, the requirement is obsolete and should be eliminated.

Durham County is the only county in North Carolina that requires residents to register their handguns.

In 1995 the state passed a law allowing qualifying citizens to carry a concealed handgun. According to statistics from the State Bureau of Investigation, between December 1995 and April 2008, in Durham County there were 3,113 applications for permits to carry concealed handguns; 1,324 permits were issued, and 59 applications denied (the rest are still being processed).

Chick-Fil-A

2008-06-26T07:35:00.003-04:00

There must be something in the water at the Chick-Fil-A on Durham's Hillsborough Road. The staff is unfailingly polite and alert. "My pleasure," the employees say when you tell them "Thank you." There are always several copies of the day's newspaper around for diners to read. There is a live rose in a vase on every table--and there must be three dozen tables in the dining room. The mood behind the counter always seems light and cheerful. Even when I went through the drive-through last night shortly before closing to get a small cup of ice cream, the young woman who was working the drive-through window was professional and courteous. As I drove past the front of the store, I saw a large party occupying several tables and laughing and carrying on.

Once I went for ice cream, only to be informed by the young man at the cash register that the machine was not working. He handed me a coupon for a free cone and encouraged me to come back tomorrow. I did. I don't know if I've ever enjoyed an ice cream cone so much.

WWBD?

2008-06-25T07:35:00.007-04:00

After the day I had yesterday, in which someone with whom I have closely worked for the past nine years showed a self-centered side of himself that disappointed me greatly, and after a tense ninety minutes at this little gathering I go to every Tuesday night, I came home in the full realization that there was only one antidote that would restore my senses and all the wonder that is in life. But since Kate Winslet is not exactly down the street (in fact, there is nothing down the street, except for a parking lot), I had to settle for the next-best thing: the frugal and late German composer and dedicated patron of houses of ill repute, Johannes Brahms.

Have you listened to the fourth movement of his first symphony lately? You have to sit through the meandering and mysterious minor-key adagio, but on the other side you come to the life-affirming allegro non troppo ma con brio--fast but not too fast, and with vigor. Late in the movement, the diminuendo, in which the main theme is played with notes at twice the value (half notes, say, instead of quarter notes)--a favorite touch of Brahms--is, to say the least, soul-stirring. (Click here for a YouTube video of Herbert von Karajan, eyes closed and no score, conducting the first half of the allegro portion of the movement. And click here for a clip of Leonard Bernstein conducting more of the movement. All I know is that in my next life, I want to be Leonard Bernstein.)

It took poor Brahms years to complete his first symphony. He was working in the shadow of Beethoven, the greatest symphonic composer of all, and wanted to make sure he knew what he was doing before he came out with a symphony of his own. It probably didn't help matters that he chose to write his first symphony in the key of C minor--the same key as Beethoven's celebrated Fifth.

I believe it was Felix Mendelssohn, and then a host of others, who said that music is too precise for words. To which I say, Say on, Brahms; I hear you.

Back in Durham . . .

2008-06-23T23:12:00.008-04:00

I arrived back in Durham on Sunday night after four days in Memphis, a city I know well: I grew up there and visit it once or twice a year. Drawn to the odious, I found myself comparing the two cities. It's not a fair comparison, given that Memphis is twice the size and then some of Durham. Perhaps that explains why so many more businesses in Memphis than in Durham are open twenty-four hours. Several grocery stores and drugstores in Memphis, as well as the drive-through windows at a number of fast-food restaurants, are open twenty-four hours. I noticed that even an auto parts store, the AutoZone on Summer Avenue, was open 24/7. I think that explains why I love, in Durham, Honey's so much: if it's three a.m. and I need one of their fabulous pecan waffles, I can get one.

Both cities are suffering from an extreme dearth of donut shops. Durham has always been a hard town for donut makers, the new Dunkin' Donuts on Erwin Road notwithstanding. But the sorry state of donut making in Memphis is a new condition, and the drastic decline in the number of donut shops in that city is nothing short of a municipal crisis. Where there were once donut shops (open twenty-four hours, of course) are now "Checks Cashed" emporiums. Fortunately for me, I was staying with a friend who lived in the vicinity of Summer and Waring, where there is still a Howard's Donuts. I made it my breakfast stop on Friday and Saturday morning.

Finally, I am sorry to say that the newspapers in both cities are confused about their true mission: the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Durham Herald-Sun, rather than reporting on news, especially hard news, that happened yesterday, publish feature stories about dogs who visit nursing homes. And on the front page, no less, above the fold. Like most newspapers in America today, they are essentially lifestyle magazines in newspaper format. Also, both find it appealing to dress citizens in orange vests and invite them to stand or sit on medians and busy street corners and try to sell copies of the Sunday edition. It is undignified, for the paper and for the vendors. Imagine if Nordstrom's stationed someone at the intersection of University and 15-501 with a rack of blouses for sale. Would the editor spend his Sunday morning wearing an orange vest and sitting on the median of a busy street surrounded by newspapers for sale? At the very least, erect temporary newsstands for the vendors.

I would not complain, however, if Honey's had people on street corners on Sunday morning selling hot waffles.

Parker and Otis

2008-06-18T07:53:00.007-04:00

There was a time when gourmet food emporiums such as Dean & DeLuca and Zabar's could only be found in the New Yorks of the world. With the Great American Food Revolution that hit its stride in the 1980s, things changed, and today one can find in the hinterland fancy food stores that attractively display and sell discriminating brands of mustard, honey, olive oil, and cookies. The Triangle has been ahead of the curve, with Chapel Hill's Southern Season having opened in 1975. Durham had its own specialty food store as well, Fowler's. Fowler's closed a couple of years ago, but another gourmet emporium has moved into its former location in Peabody Place on Duke Street, Parker and Otis. I love what the owners of Parker and Otis have done with the place in making it their own. Fowler's always seemed a bit disordered to me; Parker and Otis, in contrast, feels comfortable and cheerful.

I also like the way Parker and Otis sets itself apart from A Southern Season. Whereas the latter is dim and cramped and often stressful, Parker and Otis is bright and roomy, an inviting space with high ceilings, brick walls, white beadboard wainscoting, and exposed beams. The display of commercial candy in a converted refrigerated case is charming, and in one of the real refrigerated cases one can find fresh eggs from Latta Farms in Hillsborough and milk from Homeland Creamery in Julian, North Carolina.

Parker and Otis, which serves breakfast and lunch, has a much larger indoor seating area than did Fowler's, and it still has the wonderful covered patio with plenty of seating there as well. Parker and Otis has a dynamite Web site with gorgeous photographs of the interior and plenty of information on their wares, including their line of T-shirts, which are the coolest in town, shirts in solid colors with single words and phrases such as deviled egg and cake written across the front.

When I was there the other day I recognized among its customers Amy Tornquist, the chef and owner of Watts Grocery. Parker and Otis is a popular destination for the staff of the nearby Duke University Press.

The Pit

2008-06-15T21:09:00.011-04:00

[In a departure from the usual style of my posts, what follows is a thousand-word review of The Pit, a new barbecue restaurant in Raleigh.]

Ed Mitchell is one of the premier pit-masters in the United States. When the Southern Foodways Alliance held a symposium on barbecue in 2002, it was Mr. Mitchell whom the organizers, after a long and exacting region-wide search, selected to travel to Oxford, Mississippi, to cook the barbecue for the event. Even before then, Mr. Mitchell’s eponymous restaurant in Wilson, North Carolina, was a must on any serious barbecue tour, one of those destination restaurants to which people would drive one hundred miles or more for a single meal. At his restaurant, which to my distress closed a few years ago, Mr. Mitchell cooked barbecue the only way worthy of the name, slow and all night over wood coals.

When Mitchell’s in Wilson closed its doors, I feared that the state’s barbecue scene had lost forever one of its true masters. I am happy to report that my fears have proven unfounded. As I learned on H. Kent Craig's wonderful barbecue site, Ed Mitchell is back, not in Wilson but in Raleigh. He is the pit-master at a new venture called, aptly enough, The Pit.

The outstanding fact to know about The Pit is that, although a barbecue restaurant, it occupies a spacious and handsomely renovated brick building that, from the outside, looks more like a trendy microbrewery than a barbecue joint. On the inside, it still looks like a trendy brew pub, but with touches normally reserved for fine-dining restaurants. Just beyond the hostess stand—yes, there is a hostess stand, as well as (gulp) valet parking—one can see through a large sheet of plate glass the restaurant’s extensive wine collection. The dining room features white tablecloths, a large, square bar, a plasma TV, and another plate of glass finely decorated with frosted emblems of barbecue cookery. The developers of the restaurant gave a lot of attention to designing a logo (and a fine logo it is, with a beguiling red, yellow-orange, and gray color scheme, a rustic drawing of a hog, and several evocative fonts), which may be seen on a sign hanging from the front of the building and on a large mat just inside the front door.

When our party of five was seated we were handed two oversized menus, a drink menu complete with a list of draft beers, cocktails, and wine, and a dinner menu. Both sported the restaurant’s logo and were printed on medium-weight paper. We ordered drinks, including a scuppernong sangria, a tasty concoction that sent one of my dining companions into a nostalgic swoon for her Tennessee grandfather.

I have prefaced any discussion of the food with the preceding to emphasize the discrepancy between the appearance and atmosphere of the restaurant, on the one hand, and its being a barbecue restaurant, on the other. Now that I have hopefully successfully made that point, let me turn to the food, which on the whole was first-rate, but with room for improvement here and there. The Brunswick stew was more soup than stew but was nevertheless delectable, if the ardor with which two of my dining companions tucked into it is a reliable indication. The poached pear salad, with its grated cheddar cheese and thin creamy dressing, was ordinary.

The main attraction was, of course, the barbecue. We ordered chopped whole hog, pulled pork shoulder (which had large pieces of skin mixed in with it), and, for something unusual, turkey. All three were fresh tasting and flavorful, judiciously seasoned with red pepper flakes and sweetened apple cider vinegar. (According to Mr. Mitchell, The Pit procures its hogs from local farms that let their swine range freely.) The weakest of the three (and weak here is a relative term) was the turkey, which resembled chopped pork but whiter; it could have used some dark meat for depth and moisture, but it had, as it should have had, a flavor that brought to mind many wonderful Thanksgivings past.

There are plenty of side dishes at The Pit, "hot" (collard greens, lima beans, and the like) and "cold" (pickled beets and so forth). The macaroni and cheese was the best I’ve had in a restaurant, baked and dry, like I like it, rather than made in a pot and runny. On the other hand, the collard greens were fresh but salty, and the candied yams were too spiced. To counteract the spices, I sopped up the yam juice with one of the delicious and, I should add, appropriately sized two-inch-square biscuits that, along with hushpuppies, come with every meal.

Dinner prices are higher than one normally expects to pay for barbecue: most entrees started at twelve dollars. For the money, and especially for the modish look of the restaurant, I was hoping for some presentation; but with the exception of a flower on top of the coleslaw, the plates looked much like the plates one gets at Bullock’s or Rick’s Diner or any number of less expensive but good home-cooking restaurants: a serving of barbecue on a large plate and around it the side dishes in small, shallow bowls.

We were dismayed (one companion was "offended" and "outraged") to see on the dessert menu seven-dollar banana pudding and six-dollar sweet potato pie. Those are Magnolia Grill prices, and, as much on principle as on anything else, we passed. (Besides, by then it was almost 9:15 and the Hot Now sign at Krispy Kreme was soon to come on.) I was also disappointed to see on the menu the ubiquitous molten chocolate cake, an overrated dessert that should have been permanently retired from the American culinary scene at least a decade ago. Why not just a simple chocolate cake, such as one finds at Another Thyme?

The service was extremely slow the Saturday evening we visited the restaurant. We arrived at 6:45 (reservations are encouraged) and weren’t served our entrees until 8:00. The waitress referred a couple of times to the building losing power earlier in the day, which backed up the kitchen, and the wait staff in general seemed to be missing a few people. I have no doubt all that was true, for when our food came, none other than Mr. Mitchell himself helped bring it to us. Later in the evening, he emerged again from the kitchen and made the rounds in the dining room, stopping at each table and chatting with the guests. Among other things, he informed us that his former restaurant in Wilson will be reopening as a cooking school devoted to teaching and preserving the art of cooking barbecue.

The restaurant is in the city’s up-and-coming Historic Depot District, at 328 West Davie, near South Dawson. There is the aforementioned valet parking as well as street parking all around.

Hand Job

2008-06-13T11:33:00.003-04:00

Since it should be clear to all but the most occluded minds that some people have time to create wealth because other people are growing their food, making their clothes, and building their houses, the following question arises: What are the responsibilities of the wealthy to the laboring classes that make their pursuit of wealth possible?

The question occurred to me yesterday in, of all places, the men’s restroom next to the Gothic Bookstore in the Bryan Center on Duke's West Campus. It was there that I encountered for the first time the Dyson Airblade, the latest in hand-drying technology. The inventor, James Dyson, who has already made billions with his bagless vacuum cleaner, is quoted in a 2006 story in the U.K. Sun as follows: “We would like to replace all the hand dryers in every public building from now onwards because they are so slow—and there is a health question mark over them. People want their hands dry quickly—they don’t want to hang around. They want to get them dry and not wipe them on their trousers.” (Click on the link to the Sun article for a photograph of the inventor and his machine.)

To Mr. Dyson’s credit, one reason he spent two years developing the Airblade was to save energy. In the Sun article, he claims that the device uses up to 83% less energy than conventional hand dryers. But I wonder how much energy hand dryers use up anyway? At any rate, with all the problems in the world, is it ethical to allow the rich to use their resources to develop such things as better hand dryers?

Mallarmé Chamber Players

2008-06-12T07:15:00.007-04:00

It’s not often one attends a concert at which the composer of one of the works performed is in the audience. It borders on the miraculous when two composers are there. But such was the case last night at the concert by the Mallarmé Chamber Players in Kirby Hall in the Duke University Gardens. The composers in attendance were Anthony Kelley and Thomas Jefferson Anderson. (In fact, there was even a third composer in the audience, Duke's Stephen Jaffe, but his work was not on the program.) Mr. Kelley, who was born in 1965, is on the music faculty at Duke; Mr. Anderson is an emeritus professor of music at Tufts University.

Mr. Kelley’s Sonata Song for clarinet and piano was performed by Nicholas Lewis (clarinet) and Thomas Warburton (piano). According to the composer, the piece was written as an exercise in sonata allegro form, which emerged in the eighteenth century and consists of a theme, its development, and its recapitulation. As Mr. Kelley recounted to the audience, he wrote Sonata Song in his early twenties, so it represents a portrait of the composer at a younger age. In the capable hands of Mr. Lewis and Mr. Warburton, Sonata Song was lyrical and longing, a well-made chanson expressing the heartbreak and craving for beauty that are at the center of a young person’s quest for his or her place in the world.

Mr. Anderson’s Spirit Songs for cello and piano, composed in 1993 and commissioned by Yo-Yo Ma, was a tour de force of dissonance and syncopation, with a wide dynamic range, a mixture of thick and thin textures, numerous rests and complicated rhythms, and, from the cello (brilliantly played by Bonnie Thron), many unorthodox sounds. As I listened, I thought that this was a major American work that will surely enter the musical canon. Based on Negro spirituals, Spirit Songs is a fascinating testament to the continuing possibilities that arise when the fine and the folk are combined.

Last but not least, there was a third piece on the program, the Afro-American Suite by Undine Smith Moore (1904–1989). In four movements, the suite is also based on spirituals, among them “Nobody Knows the Trouble I See” and “Shout All over God’s Heaven,” the latter worked into an ecstatic, vigorous conversation between flute (Debra Reuter-Pivetta), cello (Ms. Thron), and piano (Mr. Warburton) in the final movement.

A recording of Spirit Songs and the Afro-American Suite by the Mallarmé players will be released on the Videmus label in 2009.

Toast

2008-06-11T07:27:00.004-04:00

Who knows what complicated mix of circumstances come together to make a restaurant successful. Location? Perhaps: we all know of restaurants in "good" locations that fail and restaurants in "bad" locations that persist. Food? Again, perhaps; I suspect it is not the food per se but an apt match between the food and the kind of restaurant in which it is served. But although we think mostly of food and location, I believe it is the intangible and the subtle qualities about a restaurant that ultimately account for its success or failure.

Whatever the complicated mix is, Toast has it. I love this restaurant. I love the black and white sign, I love the small size of the dining room, I love the color of the walls and the tiny mirrors framed in yellow. I loved my rapini panini and the chilled squash soup. I loved watching professionals who work downtown walk in, chatting in groups of two and three. I loved that one of the owners was working the cash register and looked happy to be there. I can't wait to go again.

VisArt Video

2008-06-10T06:18:00.003-04:00

VisArt Video, the one source in Durham for the independent, the foreign, the odd, and the arousing, is no more. The writing on the wall was there to see when the location on Hillsborough Road closed several months ago, leaving only the location on Martin Luther King. But that has closed now too. The MLK store was especially valuable for its newsstand. One of my Sunday morning rituals was to shop for groceries at Harris-Teeter then go next door to VisArt to buy the Washington Post.

With services such as Netflix, satellite TV, and Internet downloads, one can argue that video stores are no longer necessary. That may be true when it comes to accessing a particular film; but it is not true when it comes to browsing for a something to watch. That was the real pleasure of VisArt: letting one’s eyes rove over its considerable inventory and discovering things you did not know existed.

It is strange to think that there was a time, and not that long ago, when people would ask of a town or city, "Do they have a good video store there?" That was one of the first pieces of information we were given about Durham when we moved here: that there was a good video store on Martin Luther King named VisArt.

Given the size and location of the two stores, the rent must have been high, so I suppose it is a wonder they stayed in business as long as they did. It remains to be seen what new businesses move in to their former locations.

Locopops

2008-06-09T06:41:00.007-04:00

Imagine you have a plan for a restaurant. Your plan is to sell dozens of varieties of just a single item. What's more, the item is normally thought of as a cheap, sugary confection eaten only by children. What's more, you plan to offer the item in truly strange combinations of flavors, flavors that are not part of the day-to-day palate and that seem to be put together largely by chance. What's more, the item will be priced at no more than $2.25 (talk about depending on volume). What's more, the item is highly perishable, certain to self-destruct after purchasing in less than twenty minutes, especially during the very season when the item will be most in demand. What's more, during the season when the item will be in least demand, it may not be in demand at all. What's more, your restaurant will operate in a space that has no restrooms for customers and seating for as many as--five? six? What's more, it will be located in a tiny, outdated strip mall on a two-lane road with very little parking and a parking lot that is a nightmare to ingress and egress.

When I was a student at Memphis State--bear with me here, a connection will be revealed--the legend was that Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express and also once a student at Memphis State, had written for a class project a business plan for what would become Federal Express. According to the legend, the plan was returned to Fred with an "F" and a note saying "It'll never work." Fred persisted, and his hub-centered overnight delivery service not only worked, but made him a millionaire many times over. Now, that was the legend. I have since learned that the poor-little-Memphis-boy-that-could (a) did not go to Memphis State but to Yale, where he was friends with George W. Bush and John Kerry, (b) far from being a self-made man, used a $4,000,000 inheritance in 1971 to start Federal Express, (c) came from a family of entrepreneurs, as his father was the founder of the Toddle House restaurant chain, and (d) didn't receive an "F" for his project but a "C." Fred has been quoted as saying, "I think the American Dream is freedom." Here's my version: "I think the American Dream is a $4,000,000 inheritance."

Now, here's the connection. Perhaps the founder of Locopops can afford such an unconventional plan (to sell popsicles, no less) because she also went to Yale, also comes from a family of mega-successful entrepreneurs, and also enjoys a $21,000,000 inheritance (today's equivalent of $4,000,000 in 1971). I don't know. What I do know is that the pomegranate tangerine is scrumptious on a hot day. And it's only $2.25.