That’s Raleigh’s Style

What Do You Know About Bacon?

May, 30, 2008 , by Peter Eichenberger

“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” I was hectored during my grad-school years. Unfair, thought I, given the source: a critical theorist whose view of writers was like the butcher’s on meat, “You’re just a pig, what do you know about bacon?”

In the past, this insurgent semiotician dallied with the popular notion that the richest vein for elucidating meanings behind signs is the subjective perspective of the naif. Experience and an enhanced interest in double-speak induced a tactical shift for sick self-amusement, a focus on public utterances of the most studied and cautious variety. The more ferocious and scrupulous the statement of a target entity given to vigilant self-analysis, the more studied and cautious a behavior, eerily the more unintended clarity sometimes emerges.

A signal moment of Raleigh’s version of the Music Man, the annual Home Tour/Artsplosure, came upon learning the reference behind Bloomsbury Estates. That’s the newest of the new category of the “estate condominium,” rising from the mud where stood the the original Wake Courthouse in the tiny village of Bloomsbury, in a piney wilderness before Raleigh was Raleigh. The Bloomsbury of the new is an anglophilic attempt to raise the ghosts of a neurotic, self-absorbed aristo-literary unit noted for madness and risque lifestyles, a not-so-bold stab at conjuring a mileau as far from Raleigh as one could be, ideologically and geographically. I’ll take the Virgina Woolf please.

But that’s Raleigh style: scrupulous effacement of hints or references to the past, the authentic, what was, in exchange for a false pastiche: lofty, disassociated references that sound good on paper, especially when the titles celebrate what was ground up in the maw. A glance at a random list of housing developments should amply display the point: Stonehenge, the Lakes, anything with “wood” in the name—you get the idea. With a nod to the site’s past, a punishing ground obliterated following just enough of a look, some shovel tests, to enable the developers to affirm that “we did it,” I suggest the code name for Bloomsbury Estates be Gallows Hill; you know, come sleep with the dead.

Now that the suburban strip-mining has extended past the fuel break-point, time to repackage that which was kicked to the curb decades ago, freshen things up for a whole new market with steel, styro and concrete, an extension of the theme of old authenticity exchanged for hoo-hah, pushed to the material world. While synthetics may not deliver the touchy-feelys of wood, fake might just be a good thing. “Traditional” construction materials and practices created an expanding ring of instant slums, one owned by a friend in the opening pages of a tragicomic opera, her house literally rotting to dust and mold via faulty ventilation and construction/design/materials failures, rendering it unlivable with few recourses not involving
lawyers and contractors. I know. I began helping build some of the now-rotting crap following the day I didn’t bother going back to Broughton. Oh the things we were bade do after the not-so-nosy inspectors baulked and moved on, There’s a lot you can cover with staples and glue. I’m not proud; the boy hadda do something to live. Buyers of the new dee-luxe subdivisions in the sky should be grateful the builders left fewer opportunities for sloth, budget, and rot by making the jump to non-biologically sourced materials.

Artsplosure? Familiar and non-threatening bait to lure the rubes downtown, tip a few and maybe empty their pockets. No slur meant to actual artists—you and I know who you are—but the commonest recurring observation by more than a few interviewees was that the offerings and the whole mood was what one finds at a mall kiosk, emblematic of the embalmed street-scape city luminaries have in mind for a formerly alive, albeit neglected downtown. Many actual artists I know can’t go the bucks it takes to play Artsplosure; I sure don’t see
them lining up for Bloomsbury. To be a player in the art-town biz, it takes habitat. Raleigh is busy erasing that, so eager are they to lure high-profits.

For bottom feeders like me, a perk of the Home Tour is that since the city goes right for the bucks, every time, the developer’s bait: drinks and snacks, make nicey of a clammy, synthetic experience like the come-on for another condomondo, Hue, held at Mosquito, right around the corner from the site. Hue “donated” funds to the city and for that, received the privilege, a patent of sorts, to host a Home Tour sanctioned sales job with all the urbane groove of the Detroit Auto Show, amid Mosquito’s lurid reds and tile, thematically ‘twixt a
subway platform and a set for Clockwork Orange.

The crowd was very unlike the hip, monied crowd on the looped wide-screen promotional video. Although reportedly for the in-crowd, invitation only, most attendees were like me: stingy opportunists there to suck two ticketed drinks, nosh on the the hors d’oeuvre, and tune out the sales job and its eighties-style “break dancers” stuffed into Hue t-shirts. While the flaccid attempts to conjure a urban groove can pass with no need for analysis, not so do coincidences afoot.

I couldn’t ignore that the promotional video, replete with garish splashes from spilled paint cans, signifying Hue, conjured suggestions of the multi-colored diversity flag. Nor did I fail to note that Hue is located squarely in what could be considered Raleigh’s Gay entertainment quarter, hemmed as it is on Hargett next door to dance dungeon Legends and across the street from the venerable Capital Corral aka CCs.

I spoke later that day to a Russian speaking friend about what I’d seen. Now I know well the thorough nature of the public relations/market research business, but even I didn’t see this one coming.
“What did you say?”
I told him again. He shook his head in disbelief laughed long and loud.
“That word is very similar to the Russian word for prick, you know, cock.”
“You’re putting me on!”
“No, it’s true, I tell you. ” He pronounced the word with it’s messy Russian “kay”.
“Far out. Now we’re getting somewhere. You remember, of course, that Hue is also the name of the Vietnamese port city.”
He studied me. “I know where you’re going with this.”
Whether these coincidences are just that or indications that the Commies secretly won the cold war is up for grabs, but there you are.

Up ‘till Sunday, the weekend and the Tour was true to form, save for units in the Capital Apartments and The Prairie, both fine examples of what can happen with a bit of sensitivity and historic continuity. The Prairie is a Downtown Housing improvement Corporation re-use. The Capital is the real thing, Raleigh’s first apartment building circa 1917, continuously inhabited, although there is a persistent rumor that the owner, Christ Church, has plans to convert the bottom floor to offices, something I first recoiled at, then reconsidered. Having
the actual owner of the building in residence would probably light a fire under the laggardly half-hearted service/maintenance responses from building manager, York Properties.

Further, on the Capital Apartments and the all-new Raleigh downtown revival, one can only wonder about North Carolina State Government’s decision to exert sovereign privilege by grabbing the whole street and the former public parking out front, leaving tenants who lost out in the scramble for the too-few paid spaces to play cat and mouse with the tow trucks. Ah, our autocentric universe.

The most uncharacteristically refreshing slice of the weekend had to be an unsanctioned but tolerated art festival, the real thing. in the shadow of Bloomsbury Estates, on the Kinsey street side of the Boylan Bridge, Rebus Fest is a small, growing exhibition of the sort of spontaneity alien to this town – art, drinks, the home-grown Rock ‘n’ Roll stylings of Kicking Grass, the Loners, the T’s and other local musical luminaries. Shoot, I thought I had popped out of a rabbit hole into Portland, Austin, Santa Fe, or somewhere in Maine, where legitimacy and authenticity are valued like a blue sky, unlike here, where anything outside the lines is hunted and extirpated with the avidity of a hawk in winter, to wit, my idea for a bicycle-drawn book cart, stillborn by a city requirement for a million dollar insurance policy and strict rules about where and when.

The assembled lazed under shade trees, joined by a pedicab sic “rickshaw” fleet, there for the only true groove in town or else to get in on the action. We stayed until the blustery winds rose, heralding the approach of the rains.
“I want this every weekend,” I said to a friend as we pedaled off, “like the Saturday Market under the Burnside Bridge in Portland. Why not here?”
He smiled. “There’d be a lot of high, hot flaming hoops to jump through. Raleigh can’t stomach reality. Plus,” he shot me a look. “the doinks can’t stand competition.”