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.

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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.

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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).

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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

Black and white social segregation at UNC-CH

(Editor's note - "The Theoretical Framework Behind Pink House Jams" would have been an appropriate subtitle. This could have been a direct rebuttal to a senior thesis being written around the same time somewhere across town, when its author wasn't hard at work administering the bass-ackwards policies of SBP John Moody, a document later known as How Not To Improve Race Relations on College Campuses.)

Living together and being able to party together - these two things allow people to chill with one another in relaxed, spontaneous, unstructured social situations. After these two developments are facilitated, all other aspects of social integration between people will flow - from eating dinner together at Lenoir, going out in public in interracial groups, studying together, sitting together in class, whatever.

Living together

The South Campus high rises had just been constructed when black students began arriving at UNC-CH in large numbers, during the late 1960's and early 1970's. At this point, many North Campus dorms had not been renovated in decades. The high rises were brand new, and therefore the most appealing dorms for incoming black students to choose to live in. Over the years, the center of Carolina's on-campus black student community has thus been maintained on South Campus.

If unaware of this racially segregated housing dynamic before coming to campus, white and black students quickly find out about it upon arriving as freshmen. New black students face peer pressure from other black students to remain on South Campus. Most white students who choose to live on-campus as upperclassmen gravitate North, whether to be closer to classroom and library facilities or for more race conscious reasons, i.e., to be closer to the center of on-campus "white" student life.

The only official student/administration response to this dynamic in recent years has been the RHA-conceived Residence Hall Diversity Program, in which one hundred eighty or so spaces in the North Campus residence halls are specifically set aside for black students. To date, this program has been a failure. Almost no black students have applied to make the move North.

RHA and the Department of Housing have been so backwards and uncreative about publicizing the program that people hardly know it exists. Those that do resent the program's paternalistic, top-down, imposed from above approach.

What needs to happen at this point in time is for activist black students to take advantage of the program's existence, and organize to make sure every black spot is filled. A void exists that committed leaders could fill, helping lead a movement of black students en masse to North Campus.

Ideally, there should be two established on-campus black communities, on both South and North Campus. To think that there can only be one is short sighted and ultimately, hurts the black student community by making it difficult for black students to enjoy a sense of community anywhere but in the dorms which are the farthest away from classrooms, libraries, the main cafeteria, and the student union.

Besides, the rooms in North Campus residence halls are nicer than ones in the South Campus high rises, they're bigger, and the buildings themselves are surrounded by trees, grassy quads, and the arboretum, instead of parking lots, roads, and traffic.

I lived on South Campus myself my freshman year. The one thing I liked about it was living surrounded by friends of all colors. But Hinton James was a huge, ugly, prison-like building, and it was damn too far to walk.

Partying together

There are few opportunities for black/white social interaction at Carolina. Particularly, it is almost impossible for black and white students to party together.

When black and white students started going to the same nightclub on Franklin Street, Club Zen, on the same nights, the management closed it down.

White frats have fraternity houses, which allow them to throw off-campus parties that white students attend. Black frats have no such fraternity houses. Black frats are only able to throw great hall parties in the student union. Even if black frats had their own houses, however, they would most likely throw jams that would be attended primarily by black students.

Why don't more white students have a love for and appreciation of black music? Why don't more white students attend great hall jams?

The answer has to be seen in terms of why more black students don't attend frat parties. Unless you set social situations up as consciously non-threatening to all participants, and ensure that no unequal power dynamics exist, you can't realistically expect people from different cultures to voluntarily come together. The problem with having social events centered around historically white or black fraternities is that it creates situations where one group is forced to venture onto another group's "turf" in order to participate socially.

It is only normal for both blacks and whites to feel uncomfortable going to a places where members of one group will be indeliably marked as "outsiders." Where discomfort exists, it is not possible for people to chill with one another.

White students also have an advantage in that their social lives include going to off-campus private parties, thrown by white students who live in off-campus houses. Some landlords in town won't rent to black students. But even excluding the racism exhibited by these landlords, vacancies in most off-campus housing is not publicly advertised. Rather, spaces in houses are passed down among friends, year by year. There is nothing deliberately discriminatory about this. However, black students have only been a large scale presence at Carolina since the early seventies, so going back through the years, these patterns of off-campus housing sucession tend to inadvertently benefit white students as a group.

Black students living off-campus are thus largely restricted in their housing choices to apartment complexes. And you can't throw a major jam in a two-bedroom apartment.

How the children of the 70's brought back Disco

"Disco Mania: Bee Gees And Leisure Suits Live," New York Times, 5/6/91

Campus Life: North Carolina

By KYLE YORK SPENCER

Photo: Students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have become fascinated with the look and mood of the 1970's by reviving its clothes, music and slang. Students attended a recent party at a local club where they danced to disco music and, some, wore bell-bottoms. (Duane Hall for The New York Times). Courtesy of Elizabeth Dryman Deifell.

When Dayna Baird, a senior English major at the University of North Carolina, packed her polyester bell-bottoms and sent them home, she had not yet received her invitation to the 1970's disco night at the local dance club here. But when the invitation arrived, she immediately called her parents in Dublin, Ohio, to send back the pants.

Ms. Baird is an avid disco dancer who knows the name of the Brady Bunch's singing group and who owns a leisure suit. She is not an oddity here. She is one of hundreds of students who have caught on to a 1970's craze.

Many attribute its popularity to the first annual 70's dance held in the student union on Feb. 9. About 500 students turned out to model leisure suits, show off disco steps and demonstrate their knowledge of '70's trivia. Since then, the music of K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Abba and assorted other '70's bands can often be heard at fraternity parties, local clubs' parties, and sometimes even the cafeteria.

'Can't Get Enough of It'

"I don't think it's really big," Ms. Baird said. "But the people who love it really love it."

The resurgence of clothes, music and slang from the 1970's may not be big, but local shopkeepers and disc jockeys say it is affecting their business. At Time After Time, a vintage clothing shop in Chapel Hill, bell-bottoms and acetate shirts are making a comeback, said a clerk, Kelvin Nivens.

At WXYC, the campus radio station, a disk jockey, Erik Ose, a sophomore history major from Providence, R.I., said, "When we play a 70's song, something say from the Bee Gees or Earth, Wind and Fire, the switchboards light up. People can't get enough of it.

At the Skylight Exchange, one of Chapel Hill's cafe-bookstores, 70's music blares in the background, and employees are frequently caught touching up on old dance steps.

To hear aficionados tell it, being a '70's fan is not always easy. "Sometimes I think I'm so weird," Ms. Baird said. "I don't know why I'm so into this."

Katie Milbrooks, night manager of the Skylight Exchange, said she recently sold a "Saturday Night Fever" soundtrack to a customer who insisted on a bag because he didn't want to be seen carrying a disco album.

Mr. Ose suggested that the 70's music and fashion revival represents a kind of rebelliousness. "Disco was shunned for so long, it was made out to be the evil entity," he said. "Since its inception, it's never been so cool to like disco. As time passes, people will realize this."

For many fans, the 70's look and talk still is not cool, which is what makes it hot. "It's so cheesy that it's cool; it's so bad that it's great," said Stacy Philpott, a junior psychology major from Asheboro, N.C.

Polyester Clings Together

"Everyone looked so disgusting then," said Susan Hunter, whose house is full of 70's paraphernalia. The Chapel Hill resident, who graduated last spring with degrees in French comparative literature, calls the era "hideous" but "dynamite."

Mr. Philpott admitted that to avoid ridicule, most 70's fans do not flaunt their leisure suits on a daily basis. "They dress up when they get together -- but never alone," he said.

Recently, Mr. Philpott and Ms. Hunter had an opportunity to do just that when they were hosts to a Karen Carpenter theme party honoring Ms. Carpenter, the singer who died in 1983.

Some fans say that by latching on to the 70's, they are coping with the past and coming to terms with their childhood. Ms. Baird said it reminded her of elementary school, when she practiced dance steps in the basement with girlfriends.

Mr. Philpott said his fascination with the 70's represents a return to lost innocence. He said that when he was young he listened to the Village People and was unaffected by the Watergate scandal.

Ms. Hunter explains the resurgence quite simply. "We are children of the 70's," she said.

Club Zen

Club Zen was the joint. Featuring early morning sets by legendary DJ's like Darin Johnson. Of my two favorite memories of the place, both from around the spring of '91, one was seeing a performance there of an incredible play produced by Quince Marcum about AIDS. The other was taking over the dancefloor one afternoon for a retro 70s photo shoot that accompanied an article Kyle York Spencer wrote as a campus stringer for the New York Times about the rebirth of disco. The powers that be shut down Club Zen once the dance night crowds eventually got too black, too gay, too integrated, and overall, too funky.

On Sunday nights, local bands would play.

"(Monica Swisher, former Local 506 co-owner) later worked at Club Zen in Chapel Hill (above Ye Olde Waffle House), a dance club that featured local bands every Sunday night. "All the people from Pepper's Pizza, everyone would come up," she remembers, as bands like Superchunk, Teasing the Korean and others played some of their very first shows."

- End of an Era? by ANGIE CARLSON, Indy Weekly, 8/22/01

I never attended this particular gig, but the poster hung on my walls at the Pink House (and probably the MOVE office) for years. In this photo, circa Spring '93, it's visible near the upper left corner.