News in Raleigh

From New Wave, to Bluegrass, to Breakdancing, this week in live Raleigh music is full of some great shows.  Here are a couple that are highly recommended.

Irish pubs.  Downtown Raleigh has a handful of restaurants/bars that attach this “slogan” to the end of their name, but are they “public houses” in the true sense of the word?  Most of them are massive, serve pseudo-Irish food, and are more like mazes than the shotgun bar space that most authentic Irish pubs are known for in Ireland and the UK.  The James Joyce in Durham is one of the few spaces in the Triangle that actually resembles a true Irish pub (clientele: career drinkers, locals and raconteurs), but then again it is owned by an Irish lad.  The newly finished Smoking Times is another such bar.  Historically, the public House is synonymous with neighborhood bar and Raleigh needs more of these.  When The Landmark Tavern opens today, Raleigh may gain just that, a big city pub with the small town atmosphere.

More Info Below the Fold

The song starts:  Cash, Rules, Everything, Around, Me, C.R.E.A.M. get the money dollar, dollar bill y’all.  From my understanding, rappers Raekwon and Method Man from The Wu Tang Clan weren’t referring to Raleigh in the y’all part of that lyric.  But, looking at the names of a few new restaurants and bars in downtown, you’d assume that cash did rule everything around here.

Yesterday Walmart announced they would be significantly slowing expansion in 2008, canceling over half of 270 planned new stores.  One of the canceled stores was planned for south east Raleigh.  WRAL quotes one citizen:

“Southeast Raleigh is being left out in the wilderness, so to speak,“ said resident Dwight Spencer.
...
“We were looking at Wal-Mart as a hope”

But this kind of philosophy is disheartening at best.