Gorgeous magnolias, purple living room, and gooey mold on the ceiling

By Mel Keister (Lanham) ('93-'95)

Originally I lived in the Mona Lisa room with Sally. Then I lived in the little pink room upstairs, then moved across the hall into Erik's old room. The upstairs rooms were the BEST.

There was an older lady who lived next door. She was the house mother for one of the sororities. She was a sweetheart, and she also asked us girls about our lives. I don't know if she chatted with the guys much.

I was always cleaning that place - especially the dishes. And the downstairs bathroom would get this virulent-looking gooey mold on the ceiling, all brownish-black, that looked like it would drip on you.

Painting the living room purple was a bitch! Looked cool though. I'm sure whoever came after and repainted it was cursing my soul.

I had heard the place used to be a garden showplace (maybe someone else had heard it from a neighbor?), even having been photographed for a magazine. There wasn't much left of that, but in the spring, these odd-looking lilies would pop up in the far back yard, right in the middle of the grass. Like red alliums, but with no leaves - just a big ball of delicate flowers.


And there were these gorgeous magnolias, but they were being killed by the wisteria, so I got Steve to help me save the trees. He wasn't into it, so I promised we could dress up in ridiculous outfits first. Wish I still had that picture!

Oh, God! And those creepy spider crickets! They were always in the bathtub! Jay was so freaked out by them - I used to get the critters for him. It was so fun saving the day for Jay. He was always making those huge pots of spaghetti.

Pink House For Rent...Again!

In a twelve-year rewind, the Chi's have once more (at least temporarily) abandoned their ill-timed plan to sell the Pink House to a deep-pocketed single family, and instead put the place back up for rent.


It's been renovated again, and now features amenities like carpeting on the stairs and hardwood floors nearly everywhere else. When I visited recently, courtesy of the contractors who had just finished re-painting inside and out (covering the Mona Lisa with yet another coat of white), the place was sparkling. But there was clearly still work to be done, because the downstairs bathroom looked as grungy as ever. Leaning over the tub to take a picture, I half expected spider crickets to come swarming out of the air vent.

The current asking price on a Pink House rental? Thirty-two hun a month, or roughly twice what I remember our crew last paying when I moved out fifteen years ago. After figuring in inflation, that's nonetheless a steep rate for a five bedroom (or 4 1/2, taking Jay's room into account) student crash-pad. And since today's kids are less likely to want to share bathrooms than the Gen-X'ers who came before them, and even Chapel Hill's sorority girls who deal a little coke on the side have lately fallen on hard times, maybe it's no wonder the place is still available (as of 9/20/09) six weeks after I first saw the for rent sign.

UPDATE 10/25/09 – As Fall Break 2009 for UNC students drew to a close, I drove down North Street on my way to the Franklin Street post office. Lo and behold, no renters yet.

UPDATE 11/26/09 – The day before Thanksgiving, and I finally got the memo that Hell closed down nearly a year ago. While checking out the debris piled at the top of the outside stairs (including Hell's soft pretzel cabinet), evidence the space is still being excavated, I looked up through the chain link fence and saw a bicyclist zoom through the deserted parking lot of the Phi Mu sorority house. Curious, I noticed the rider was headed for the Pink House. Could it be rented? There did seem to be a couple of trucks parked in the back yard.

No, it was only the blogger next door on his way home. I introduced myself and explained I used to know the old couple who previously lived in his house. He was remarkably cool for being accosted at dusk outside his own crib by a quasi-cyber stalker, and said the place is still sans residents. And he thought Sylvia's initial rental asking price this go-round had actually been $3600, thirty-two was at a discount.

Mona Lisa's Ghost

In June of 2008, current owner Bernard Chi, son of our original landlady Sylvia Chi, put the Pink House up for sale. It had withstood eleven more years of rentals since being renovated in 1997. The asking price was $625,000, reduced to $612,500 by the fall after no takers materialized. With the local real estate market finally feeling the trickle-down effects from the national recession, it was a tough time to be marketing a rundown, modestly-sized former rental property that had been well lived in by students for most of its 70 year existence (the house was built in 1936).

Visiting the property on a recent afternoon, days after the first snowfall in Chapel Hill in four years, I found the Pink House empty, with a real estate agent's lockbox on the door, but no for sale sign out front. I was struck by how little some things had changed, at least on the outside. From the ancient porch light fixture, to the stonework still crumbling in the exact same places it was when I moved out in 1994, to the battered mailbox with one hook still broken from a long-ago Pink House party.

It was like stepping back in time, except that I have occasionally been by the place over the years. The last time was probably in 2004 or so, when I met some of the nice Christian girls living there and they proudly showed me the hideous mural of the Old Well they’d painted on the living room wall.

Although the back parking lot is currently still rented out to students, and it was the dead of winter, I thought I saw signs of growth stirring, as if the back yard was struggling to reclaim its former state of nature. And maybe it was the afternoon sun reflecting off the window pane, or just wishful thinking, but I swear that once I looked hard enough, I could still see the Mona Lisa in the front room...

smiling beneath all that white paint.

Sad to see the Pink House go, but everything has its cycle

What's the deal with the (718) area code? Are you living in Brooklyn now? And which other Pink House alums are up in New York?

I really only saw Jess for about 10 minutes, but the paintings she showed me some photos of looked really good, like she's definitely matured as an artist. She said she had stuff up in several galleries.

...

Business at the store is definitely picking up, but I won't be satisfied until it's booming. We just hit 500 video memberships this week. More of our tapes are renting on a regular basis. We finally got our adult section out on the shelf. We're trying to get a Lost City catalog produced so we can drum up some mail order business.

And the underground lounge we're running (the 333 Lounge) is going strong. This past Saturday we had 75 heads roll through from 11 pm - 4 am (actually this particular event was still kicking at 5 am) who paid to get in ($3 each). That was the highest amount we've done at the door yet. It would be really cool if you end up coming down this fall on a weekend when we're running one, so you can check out the rebirth of Club Zen before we get shut down by the Chapel Hill fuzz on some wack pretense.

Ok, enough about the nuts and bolts of my shady plans to become a wealthy high-roller and destroy the entire foundations of capitalism from within.

What I need to do is send you a copy of this article that Ian Williams wrote as his "farewell column" for the Independent, where he was writing a bi-monthly column that was pretty good. It was all about his finally leaving Chapel Hill, and about the Pink House simultaneously reverting to a renovated rental property suitable for lease to sorority chicks. Seems the Pink House was the very first place Ian went to an off-campus party when he arrived in town as a freshman back in 1985, so it held a special place in his heart that made it all the more fitting for it to end up as the last place he'd live before finally leaving town. You'll like this article, I'm sure.

...

I told you that N'Gai moved in with me, right? Oh my god, I just remembered him telling me that he now works with Shyam Patel, who just got a job doing graphic design alongside him at the Chapel Hill Newspaper. Crazy. I haven't talked with Shyam in like eight months, but I guess he's still in town. Incidentally, Jay had the Pink House's final number switched over to his new house, on the corner of Pritchard and Carr streets (his friend Gerald's place).

...

Yeah, it was sad to see the Pink House go, but everything has its cycle. Denizens like the ones we knew will move in again sometime in the future. Anyway, it was time I stopped feeling like I could flow through the Pink House every time I was downtown or bored and wanting to get into some trouble. Not that I've really been doing that sort of thing lately, mind you.

The only really fucked up things about the house's demise is that (a) they ripped out every shred of vegetation in the entire back yard, all the way back to the chain link fence, and put down gravel so the new dumbasses wouldn't have to park their freaking cars on the street, god forbid, and (b) some miscreant painters that Jim Lilley (Sylvia's current property manager) hired to do touch-up work and paint the ceilings goddamn painted over the Mona Lisa.

We initially figured it was the crew of spaced out UNC students and their girlfriends who Jim Lilley brought in to paint the majority of the house, inside and out, and who were in there painting for two weeks, taking breaks every day to smoke bowls on the roof outside your old room. Then one of them came through the Lost City the other week and when I asked him why they'd done it and under whose orders it was done, he acted totally freaked out, and swore up and down that they hadn't done it, that Jim specifically told them not to paint over it, since it was one of only two murals by the artist left inside houses in Chapel Hill, and it must have been the other painters who came in after them.

This tragic occurrence serves as the focal point for Ian's article, where he concludes it was such a typical thing to have happened - in Chapel Hill, anything (or anyone) that stays around too long gets painted over.

When are you coming down in the fall? If you want to crash, you're welcome to sleep on our futon. Let us know...

- e-mail to Lydia

Leaving Mona Lisa

Independent Weekly, 8/20/97

by IAN WILLIAMS ('95-'97)

So I'm moving away from Chapel Hill. This surprises me as much as it does my friends; I've been saying the same thing about moving out of North Carolina since about 1989, and never actually bothered to do anything about it. Now everything I own is in a truck bound for Los Angeles, and I have one more day to contemplate my existence in a town that has been my biggest scourge as well as my salvation, a place I've loathed as much as loved.

Whenever you move away from a place, you develop these bookending thoughts that take you back to the first day you came. I've been thinking a lot lately about the moment I first pulled into Chapel Hill with my dad - I was a 17-year old spaz, so addled from five loveless years at a military-style prep school that I looked upon the flower gardens in front of the Morehead Planetarium with the kind of glee that newborn sea turtles must feel when they make it to the ocean unscathed.

"It's just as I imagined it would be," I beamed to my dad, who was still married to my mom at the time. That changed pretty quickly, as did the restaurants we tried that first night (Magdalena's and that gelato place). In fact, nothing in my life was ever the same after Aug. 20, 1985; when he let me out in front of Hinton James dormitory, still wearing my prep-school black corduroys in the 95-degree heat, the worst parts of my childhood died off and flaked away.

The first party I ever went to was at this place called the Pink House, then inhabited by a rowdy bunch of senior history majors who threw get-togethers where like-minded female English majors would sit around, sip wine and dance to the Smiths. I went into the front room of the house and was instantly struck by a gorgeous, humongous mural of the Mona Lisa painted on the wall, an ancient remnant of some long-gone art student's passion.

The Pink House Mona Lisa, icon of Chapel Hill PHOTOS BY IAN WILLIAMS

When I asked the occupant about the painting, he stopped filling his bong long enough to look at it mystically, saying it had been there as long as he'd been in school. I gazed at Mona's curious smile uneasily, feeling as though I were lost in the intoxicating haze of an ancient Freemason ritual. There was an unspoken brotherhood in this town that I had yet to figure out.

The actual act of going to college seems like a distant idea to me now - probably because I didn't do much of it. I recall spending most of my afternoons outlining columns for the Daily Tar Heel, languishing in the Pit while chatting up cute in-staters from religion class, going out at night and talking with strangers thirsty for experience. I can't even remember graduating. It was just another Sunday, and I wasn't leaving anyway. There seemed to be more unfinished business, as if Chapel Hill had a joke for me it still wasn't telling.

The town began to take on the feel of a commune. I would find myself consoling people I barely knew in the bread aisle at Harris Teeter, giving drunk half-friends rides to Time Out at 4 in the morning. My CD collection was decimated by each party. One time, a woman I was dating in 1995 gave me a tape of early '80s music as a present, and it turned out to be the eighth generation of a tape I'd made for someone else in 1991.

People would ask me why I'd stayed so long after college, and I'd tell them I didn't need to leave; everyone else leaves instead. Living in Chapel Hill means inheriting a vastly different town every September, and it isn't just the storefronts that change. Generations of friends come and go, and worse - entire kinds of people change their ethos. I've seen the college kids go from being spontaneous pleasure-seekers to sallow automatons. When I was a freshman, there were kegs in the dorms; if anyone had heard you say that there would be a day when no alcohol of any kind would be allowed at UNC's parties, they would have laughed you out of the quad. Nowadays, freshman think it's exciting when their Teague dorm room has internet jacks.

College administrators, addled by litigation issues and their own sense of johnny-come-lately morality, have inflicted this New Era of Boredom behind the smokescreen of a "war on the anti-intellectual atmosphere," and it's a shame. I realize it's hard to whine about this stuff without sounding like a frothing, alcoholic, bitter hippie - but if these sophomores aren't given the chance to down a few tequila shots and howl at the moon, I'm going to really hate their poetry.

I was lucky; I got in just under the wire. I lived in two of Chapel Hill's pastel-colored party communes - one of them being the Purple House on McCauley Street. Before it was renovated a few years ago, the Purple House was a notorious shithole where anything was possible. Once, during the "bang, bang on the door baby" part of the B-52s' "Love Shack," my roommate Salem put his head through all the windows of the upstairs, in time with the beat. I think he spoke for us all that night.

Being in your mid-to-late 20s is a hard proposition for a Chapel Hill male. You had better cure cancer or develop an AIDS vaccine, because even sainthood won't stop the base conclusion that everyone will draw: You are here to have sex with the freshmen. I spent so long dodging claims that I was a lecherous Lothario that I gradually retreated into a dark depression. My passions were fine - I managed to put out a couple of books during this time - but I was still a total mess, and wanted desperately to move away.

That's when the other pastel-colored party house, the Pink House, had an opening. I moved right in. The Pink House was a place where everyone had a story; indeed, I think most people believe it existed only in an alcoholic dream. We had bacchanalia there that kept the Chapel Hill Police Department from running under-budget. In February, when there was an open-mic and break-dancing contest right on the counter where I made tuna sandwiches, I finally felt like I was an integral part of this town. The brotherhood, for what it's worth.

A few months into my Pink House journey, I got to move into the front room. And there she was, in all her radiant, gigantic glory - the Mona Lisa.

She was a bit worse for wear, with the occasional paint streaks here and there from those who had accidentally nicked her head when they painted the rest of the room. But she was still breathtaking. When you drove away from North Street, you could see her eyes follow you all the way to Airport Road. Such a fragile being, this layer of paint in a heavily populated house fraught with late-night fistfights and impromptu indoor hockey. So much could have happened to her, but didn't. She was the icon of Chapel Hill for me. I lived with her for two years, writing these Indy articles and other works while she stared.

Finally I turned 30, and knew I couldn't stay in Chapel Hill anymore. Besides, the Pink House was to be renovated for the new occupants (we were kicked out for being slobs) and my brother had found this great house in Hollywood. Packing all my things into a Ryder truck, I moved out and camped in Carrboro until I got my last paycheck. But before I left, I made the landlord and painters promise - as the last resident had done to me, and and so on back through the years - that the Mona Lisa should be left untouched. They looked at her in awe, and agreed.

Yesterday I realized that there was one thing left in the Pink House that I needed to rescue, so I went back into the skeletal remains of the building. I snatched the object and was walking away, when I decided to take one last look into the room I'd first walked into 12 years before. And she was gone, leaving just a wall with freshly coated paint, white globules still dripping to the floor. Even worse, someone had dropped a ladder into her, creating a gaping hole where her mesmerizing smile once was. My heart stopped beating for a second or two.

I'm not sure what poetic conclusion I can draw from all this; all I know is that I felt so incredibly sad. I did my best to foster the brotherhood of Chapel Hill, but this is a town that paints over anyone who tries too hard to stick around. Now I can go too.

Pine State

Perahps the most legendary of several outfits with claim to the title of Pink House house band, Pine State first secured their reputation as out-of-control rock'n'rollers at...what else, a series of raucous Pink House parties during 1994-95.


December, 1994 performance at the Cradle. Charlie Speight is on lead vocals and washboard.

Fronted by Charlie Speight, who shared the Mona Lisa room with Chris Palmatier in '94, Pine State also featured regular Pink House guests from the early 90s like Chris "A.C." Lee on guitar, Mike Shoffner on drums, and Dan Partridge on miscellaneous instruments (officially described by the band as "junkyard percussion, rants, screech vocals, saw and whistles").

R.I.P. Ericka Kurz (1968-1993)

I think I'm past my initial shock at the news of Ericka's death and my profound grief that followed. I was definitely grieving for a while there this week, walking around campus all out of focus and lost in worlds of thought about her, and all the times I could remember spending with her. I kept turning the details of how she died over in my head, and lost a lot of sleep the first couple of nights after you called me, just feeling miserable and agitated, all fucked up in general.

Ericka and Raj at Pink House, Spring '92.

Now I'm at a stage where everything's receding a little bit, which is both good and bad. Until my exams finish, I absolutely have to focus on studying. But at the same time, I feel like my mind unleashed this torrent of memories about Ericka this week that now, already somehow, I don't remember as well any more. It's funny how memory works like that. I want to think about Ericka, and write everything down about her that I can recall, but again, I feel like I can't sit down, start, and not finish. It's got to be the whole nine or else I'm going to further mess with my memory circuits and not be able to conjure up intense mental images of her again for a long time.

- Letter to Dana, 5/2/93

(Note from 10/28/10 - Impossibly hard to believe it's been 17 1/2 years since Ericka was murdered. That seems like such an eternity, and yet I still think about her and miss her like crazy. From the time I met Ericka at the first SEAC organizing meeting of the fall '89 semester in Hamilton Hall, I had a mad crush on her. (In Caroline Philson's words, me and probably every other guy - and girl - in SEAC). Only I was a freshman, and she was a junior, so there was little chance that was going to happen. But we became friends.

Pink House, Spring '92. Photo courtesy of Raj Krishnasami.

I wish I had written down my memories of Ericka like I'd planned to back then, because I'd love to remember every detail of all the times I spent hanging out with her late nights around her kitchen table on Short Street, passing through the familiar beaded curtains to find her (and often her housemate Banu, or other pals) eating ice cream or occasionally cooking up something more nutritious. Dropping by the SEAC HQ's, both office #1 on Franklin Street, then #2 on Rosemary, and watching her work day and night to make sure SEAC would continue taking things to the next level. Plotting with her on an ultimately unsuccessful plan to secure an off-campus house on Mallette Street that would double as an office space and crash pad for national staffers. Driving her to Raleigh one afternoon at breakneck speed through rush hour traffic because she had to file some important paperwork by 5 pm for SEAC's national incorporation. Going out to her Mom (Jennie Knoop)'s Granville County farm for a retreat and sitting under the stars together with all our fellow SEAC'ers in front of bonfires late into the night, feeling young and idealistic and full of life.


"UNC-CH students protest Exxon recruiting & policies," N&O, 10/20/90. From right: Lisa Abbott, Ericka Kurz, Jimmy Langman, Alec Guettal, David Biggs, Erik Ose. Dan Coleman and Greg Gangi are near the far left.

Last year I re-connected with former SEAC National Office staffer and Threshold editor Eric Odell. He wrote an eloquent tribute to Ericka that was read at her memorial service (also at her Mom's farm), and promised me he'd look for a copy to re-post here at some point. As time continues to pass, it bothers me more and more that Ericka's story remains largely untold. Although I did recently stumble across a long blog post that her Mom wrote in 2006, which is the most detailed account of her life and death available online. Ericka helped change the world in her not-quite-25 years (Dec. 5, 1968 - April 25, 1993), and had the potential to do so much more if she had lived longer. Her death was a heartbreaking tragedy and outrage.)

For more info about Ericka's organizing work with SEAC, visit The Ericka Kurz Archive.

Mandated to be Painted Pink

Dearest Kyle, whassup wit you? Super Clint and DJ Erik here, profilin' and stylin', hanging out with a posse of Pink House miscreants. We got your letter months ago, but our general slackness is totally to blame for not having written back to you sooner. Ohmigod, Kyle, you would most definitely have loved going to school with us in Chapel Hill this past year! There's been such a panoply of craziness and coolness that's followed our every move, Clint and me. Yo, check out this latest issue of the DTH, in four color bold type, five column headines, it reads, "Erik and Clint assume titles of Supremely Cool Beings ruling Campus Life in all respects!"

Did you hear about that in Paris? We totally took over the entire town and made it over in our likenesses. Now, everybody's houses and even the campus dorms are mandated to be painted pink, and for fun on Saturday nights, you get to do one of two things in thousand-seat assembly halls we've constructed on Franklin Street - either go register to vote, or attend a poetry reading!

Kyle, you sounded like you were having a great time in your letter. And we read your article that was published in the Raleigh N&O, which was most informative. Our eyes got all misty and our souls grew heartsick, thinking about our little Kyle, all by herself and bravely conquering the land of "the Eiffel Tower, escargot, and Bridgette Bardot."

Seriously, g, are you still down for the cause that involves you and Caroline living with us next year in the Pink House? You guys could split the very spacious room that Clint and I have been sharing all year, with one of you sleeping on a futon, and the other on this beautiful, woodgrained single loft that I will let you use. There's a ten-foot high painting of the Mona Lisa in your room, closet space, high
ceilings, the works.

- Letter to Kyle in Paris

Clint and Mel's "Unexpected Encounters" on General College

There is so much to love about this episode, starring not one but two former residents of the Mona Lisa room. Flea (Mel Lanham) speaks out about the sorry state of the world in the Pit, and gets repeatedly reprimanded by her older sister who's in a sorority. Cain (Clint Curtis) keeps a flock of co-eds in rapture listening to his poetry, which irritates a bunch of frat stars to the point of pulling some Brady Bunch-style shenanigans on him, pretending to the "higher power" Cain has been attempting to contact. While chilling at Lenoir, Cain asks the timeless question, "What is the center of all energy?" And chews through the scenery in one avant-garde shot after another, any one of which would have made Kenneth Anger proud.

Meanwhile, Flea has the best line in the show when she asks her sister how she's supposed to express her views if she can't preach in the Pit..."by holding a chug-a-lug contest to raise money for abused children who probably got that way from alcoholic parents in the first place?"

Then attracts Cain's attention when he points her out to his dateless, Woody Allen-esque pal Aubery (Jim Rash) as "The one they call...Flea." Next, Cain and Flea have a super intense scene together, reflecting on how hard it is to be different!

Too freaking much. And then a lot more shit happens that left me in stitches. Including the outbreak of a SEX SCENE that doubles as a MUSIC VIDEO featuring original soundtrack and on-camera performance (both uncredited) by yet anotha Pink House head, Jasme Kelly! The WTF quotient keeps exponentially escalating here.

But there's more. The show ends with an official video by DADA VEDA for one of their most memorable tracks, "Chaos Has Its Own Order," co-directed by Clint, with scenes of the band performing, where else...in the Pink House living room.

General College provided early exposure for UNC undergrads like Billy Crudup and Haley Koch who would go on to bigger and/or more infamous starring roles. But this episode shows Mel and Clint had enough talent to outshine them all.