Rosemary Street runs through it

I was driving back to the store today and happened to turn onto East Rosemary Street at Boundary, so I passed by the house where I lived during the summer of 1990, and that got me to thinking about how central to my life Rosemary Street has been over most of the time I've lived in Chapel Hill. The Pink House was a block behind East Rosemary on North Street, the second national SEAC office was on East Rosemary, the MOVE office & the first Lost City location overlooked West Rosemary, and the second Lost City is at 402 West Rosemary Street.

Even the side streets running off Rosemary Street have been important. Ericka Kurz lived on the corner of Church and Short Street, a block from Rosemary. Jyoti & Swati's Plastic House was right behind La Rez on Pritchard Ave., one house off Rosemary. I started running my used furniture business working out of Chris Pedigo's apartment on Pritchard, also storing stuff at the Plastic House, inside the Pink House garage, and throwing yard sales at both Pritchard locations. And of course, Jay Murray has kept the Pink House vibe alive for five years on the corner of Pritchard and Carr.

Too Many Schemes

I guess you really did have only two minutes to talk earlier this morning. Sounds like me about this time last year conducting all my long distance phone business using several dozen 5-minute phone cards I swiped from inside cereal boxes.

...

It's been a transitional past six weeks or so for a number of reasons. I found out mid-January that we needed to re-locate the PAC's office space by March 1st, so I've had to scramble around looking for other potential spaces. I finally found one that will be cheaper than the one we're in now, since we'll be sharing it with a friend of mine who needs a temporary home for his business.

Simultaneously, I and some of the other DJ's that I've been working on this for-profit mail order business venture with (including Lem) have decided to also rent another space, where we're planning to open a combination record/culture store by day that will function as an underground, members-only nightclub by night. This particular space is actually right underneath the old MOVE office, and it was the site of the original Cat's Cradle back in the early 70s.

So I've kind of been running around trying to get these details together.

I've also been promoting various parties with Lem and the fellas at other rented spaces around town, and still selling a ton of used furniture to kids on campus. It was so bizarre, there was this unexplained rush of kids calling up the "furniture cooperative" looking for loveseats and shit, right in the middle of the year when people generally don't want to buy jack. But seriously, I'm getting out of the furniture business! Before it's...too late! Ha ha. Anyway, so I've also been busy with that.

- e-mail to C-line

Fuck Jesse Helms!

Sounds like things in your life are upward bound, which is cool. How'd you get to meet Diana Ross, and why are you speaking in eighty languages a day?

...

All I can say about the outcome of the elections in North Carolina is Fuck Jesse Helms! That bastard managed to locate 1.3 million dumbasses who were willing to vote for him. How does he do it?

Anyhow. At least if Jesse dies within the next six years then Gov. Hunt can appoint Harvey to his seat. After all, he is 75 years old. Actually, I'm even happier about the fact that now I can fundraise against Helms for at least another 6 years. Whether I'll be down here that long is another question.

Oh, and we did manage to beat two backwards-ass Republican Congressmen, former Rep.'s Fred Heineman and David Funderburk, who represented the two districts covering Orange, Durham, Wake, Chatham, and a bunch of surrounding counties.

Overall, we registered more than 10,000 young voters through MOVE, plus distributed 20,000 additional voter registration forms and 50,000 voter guides around the state.

There's a Pink House party tonight, and I think Lem's going to be DJ'ing. You should see his little girl Donya, she is so adorable. She's almost two years old now, I think.

Speaking of mutual friends, I also talked to Derek Shadid the other day, he called me up earlier this week to offer his condolences about the election. I'm definitely going to make a road trip out to Oklahoma City to see him around January or February.

When I went up to DC for the AIDS quilt recently, I stayed with Caroline Philson, who just started this year at Howard Law. It was good to see her, except that she's living in a really fucked up part of town, and there were four gunshots across the street from us while I was there.

- e-mail to Lydia

Phone tag with Mr. Lumsden

Dear Mr. Lumsden,

Greetings and salutations. I got a call from you a while back, and left at least one message in return. Anyhow, send me e-mail or something.

...

P.S. - You'd never guess who's coming to a rave with me tonight to help register voters - a volunteer by the name of Mr. N'Gai Wright.

- e-mail to Dana

Possible names for '96 anti-Helms voter registration coalition

(Editor's note from 2013 - recently on Facebook, Susan Comfort noted that Mark Chilton and myself were schooled by our time in SEAC (Students Engaged in Acronym Construction) to think up catchy names for some of our future political projects - for example, Musicians Organized for Voter Education (MOVE). She was right, and to prove it here's the list I came up with while trying to brainstorm what to call a sister organization to MOVE that could register more voters when Jesse Helms was next up for re-election, in 1996).

Democrats Organized for Voter Education (DOVE)

Stop Helms - Organize Voter Education (SHOVE)

Liberals Organized for Voter Education against Helms (LOVE a Helms)

Student Coalition for Voter Registration

Democratic Youth in Action

People for a Progressive North Carolina

Coalition for a Progressive North Carolina

Progressive United North Carolina (PUNC)

Congressional Club - Not!

Progressive Congressional Club

Revolutionary Citizens Coalition

Young People's Liberation Army

Voter Education Revolves around Youth (VERY) Project

Radical Revolutionary Liberation Power Movement

Coalition Against More Power to Helms (CAMP)-NC

Progressives Organize - We'll Educate Rednecks (POWER)

Just Educate Some Students Everyday (JESSE)

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.