What: Father & Son Antiques

When: Mon - Sat 11 - 6, Sun 12 - 5, Closed Wed.

Where: 107 W. Hargett St. Raleigh, NC 27601

Why: It’s a deceptively large, 3-floor treasure hunt through 20th century Americana. Clothes for guys, gals and tots, toys, furniture, music, and tchotchke mix with art so fresh the paint’s still wet.

Here’s just a taste of what you’ll find.

X marks 10,000 square feet filled to the brim.

Satisfy your cravings for both monkeys and art!

Depictions of nature.

Let’s go upstairs, shall we?

Someone got a little lost in the vintage denim.

Hand me my parasol, will you darling?

The woman in the mirror say’s hello.

Vinyl heaven…

Oh, Jackie O, where do I begin?

“It’s an art gallery, honey!”

Peeking out from the most unexpected places are over twenty paintings, like this one, by former Raleigh resident and current LA artist David K. Rose. Here’s a link to his site.

Stay tuned for the next "Go There Now" destination.

It doesn't take photos or videos. Or play music. The "delete" button is powered by the eraser of a #2 pencil. But it's tough, lightweight and cheap. It goes with me everywhere. Recently, I realized how glad I was to have it.

I went off to write at Foster’s Market, a leisurely café popular with Duke students, families and foodies. It has a big back room and a do-what-you-will mentality. I decamped, opened on my browser and was met with an error message.

NO NETWORK CONNECTION

Steve Jobs was speechless. Bill Gates was aghast. Suddenly, my laptop was an unwieldy doo-dad and my connection to a gazillion other voices was silent. (Kind of a relief, actually....)

There’s been a lot of talk recently of integrating the online and offline worlds. Foursquare. Geo targeting. Sixth Sense technology. Augmented reality.

It’s easy to assume the Internet is everywhere, like an invisible aura in our iPhoned and iPadded iWorld. Without it, things just are: a wooden table, a notebook, a pen.

So “No Wi-Fi” was a shock of cold water. It wore off when I remembered my trusty “iPad”– a pad. It’s cheap, sparkly, and pocket-sized.

I pressed the ink down onto the paper. My document was saved from the start. I couldn’t lose power. I was the power. Some of my favorite ideas are scribbled in notebooks like this. At a restaurant. In a doctor’s office. Before a gym class.

My "iPad" can teach my laptop a thing or two about versatility.  And it reminds me to be just as flexible.

“A bottle of Silk Hope wine is fitting for any Carolina occasion, from fine dining to an afternoon picnic, from vegetarian cuisine to a backyard pig-picking.”

I expected a vineyard straight out of a Napa Valley postcard. What my friend and I pulled up to was a metallic tube, a climate-proof, above ground cellar at the foot of rolling grape-filled hills. 

The owner/planter/vintner/sommelier/host was the only one there. Wally Butler was his name. He had a silver-streaked ponytail that said, “My office is God’s green earth. I punch in and out when the sun tells me to. Mother Nature is my boss. I make wine.”

I’m no oenophile, even if I can use the word properly in a sentence. Only recently have I begun to really taste wine, to notice the subtle variations beyond color and general category.

That said, our white sheets of tasting notes listed varieties I had never heard of. If anyone ever tells you the only grape that grows in North Carolina is the Muscadine, they haven’t been to Silk Hope.

There was Chambourcin. A French-American Hybrid. The French consider it “inferior”, but they’re missing out. It makes a red perfect for white wine drinkers or a voluptuous white with depth the color of rosewater and scotch.

Vidal Blanc. A hybrid of the Trebbiano and Rayon d’Or grapes. It’s sharp, like a clean sword going down your throat.

Traminette. My favorite. A child of Gewürztraminer (AKA Riesling) and a French something or other. It tastes like Goethe had an affair with a Southern Belle, all syrupy sweet talk and sharp wit.

We tasted and talked for three hours. About the troubles of lingering Blue Laws and a rigid mentality. About how the NC Wine industry has grown from 8 wineries to well over 40. About how Wally’s son is starting a mushroom farm.

Before we left, my friend and I split a case of wine and grabbed brochure of all the wineries in the state. Little ones. Big ones. All of ‘em, just waiting for us to arrive.

The Silk Hope Winery
2601 Silk Hope Gum Springs Rd
Pittsboro, NC 27312-6957
(919) 545-5696

It’s got to suck to be a vegetable. Think about it − bugs bombard you, kids can’t stand you, and you always end up playing second fiddle to an entrée. Surely, a cruciferous plant or two has sadly muttered, ‘No one would miss me if I was gone.” But life without produce isn’t pretty.

Durham does the Supermarket Shuffle

Cities across the country did too. It's easy if you’re a supermarket; just step back from your urban surroundings to the wealthier, White suburbs nearby. Then watch as the city you left behind dips into the sadly ironic state of “malnourished obesity.” Here, fast food is your staple, feeding you both too much and not enough at the same time.

Areas like this are called Food Deserts (everything has a catchy name nowadays), places where markets with fresh food are more than 2 miles from a community.

The corner of Angier and Driver Streets in East Durham was one of those for 50 years. That ended on May 13th with the opening of TROSA Grocery.

TROSA Grocery
2104 Angier St.,
Durham NC

This year, MSN named Durham the 11th fattest city in the U.S. Next year, maybe Durham will be a little lower in the rankings.

Photo by Joseph Levinski

As much as I’d personally like Ms. Palin to join the BP suits in physically plugging the hole, I’m talking about tea.

Not Oolong or Darjeeling or fancy-blends like Fairy-eyelash flower or Lotus-sutra mint but straight-up Lipton tea-flavored tea. A 100-count box, with each individual bag sewn together by hand, by me, with needle and thread.

It was my sixth grade science project. This was the Spring of 1989, right after the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.8 millions gallons of crude into the Prince William Sound. Inspired by Exxon’s slow-going cleanup efforts, I filled the biggest casserole dish I could find with salt water and a quart of Wesson Oil and submerged my 100-bag mass. It was Operation Tea Party, and while it didn’t get every last drop of oil, it soaked up enough for me to get an A.

BP should try this. Lipton tea would get a boost and hey, what do they have to lose? I’ve read the headlines, seen the live video feeds and heard the poor excuses. Like millions of Americans, I’m upset by the current comedy of errors. I’m also sad, and scared, that with all the science that money can buy, BP is still getting an F.

I drive underneath this bridge 5-7 days a week. It’s right by the Alston Ave exit on NC 147. Long abandoned, it was, as someone on Waymarking.com put it, “An ugly green thing.” On St. Patty’s Day, it became a brand new thing, one that would hopefully be good luck.

The Ugly Green Thing, courtesy of J. Wenatchee/Waymarking

See, this bridge connects two sides of the predominantly African-American Hayti (pronounced Hay-tie) district of Durham. The naïve would call it a ghetto, but before 1965, it thrived. There were Black-owned businesses, including a bank, library, hospital, and an insurance company. Voices strummed, plucked and wailed Piedmont blues, jazz, gospel and R & B into the night. Among them Nina Simone, Blind Boy Fuller and the Rev. Gary Davis.

Then a knife cut Hayti in two. A stretch of the highway was laid down right in the center of town, destroying businesses and displacing hundreds. A bridge was built in 1970 to heal this wound, but it festered. The bridge was dark, and the people desperate enough to rob and kill, to turn “Black Wall Street” into gangland. The bridge was closed in 1995; access blocked by massive iron bars and a chain-link fence.

Then something strange happened. People of all colors and classes moved into Durham. New businesses started opening up. People went downtown and stayed there for dinner and a show. Per capita crime rates dropped in half. So city council decided it was time to rebuild that bridge and put the two halves of Hayti back together again, or at least try.

Opinions were just as split. Voices from the News & Observer and the blog Bull City Rising showed passion and hatred on both sides.

“More waste of money just to placate racial and class equity.”

“This is the selfishness and small-minded thinking that has divided the Bull City for so long.”

“This area is so full of drugs and the bridge is just going to spread the crime out.”

“Let 'em rot in their own criminal juices. Note the sarcasm please. “

“Why can’t they [the Hayti residents] get anything nice?”

They did.

It took two semi tractor-trailers to move the 192 ft. long steel bridge to it’s new home.  It has an open structure with good visibility; a bike lane, a walking path and an LED light that arcs over the bridge, colored “Durham Blue.”

The new highlight of hump day is Building 3 on Golden Belt’s seven-acre campus. Back in the day, textiles were made here. Now it’s art, in 35 individual studios.

While the big “ta-da” for new exhibitions still takes place on third Friday’s, you can get a more intimate experience on First Wednesdays. Where Friday’s have people jostling for position holding plastic cups of Gallo, Wednesdays are just art.

Literally. The labyrinthine galleries were filled with artists doing their thing. They looked up and talked to you.

My first conversation was with steam-punk jeweler, Madelyn Smoak. We talked about her studio décor: parts of old fences brought indoors to house brass cicada rings and necklaces made of watch parts, old photos, and recycled miscellany.

Her cicada ring

She sells on Etsy under the name Mad Art.

Next was the studio of Michael Prim. “I’m painting Beethoven’s Sonatas,” he said. On a long strip of paper I could see the dives and leaps, lulls and crashes of a song outlined in black. “Coloring the sounds is next,” he said. I left thinking of what it would be like to have synaesthesia, when senses mix and you can hear colors, smell sounds and taste words.

At the Edge of Chaos, from Prim’s current Entering New Worlds collection

The main exhibit was mixed media and collage by Wendy Spitzer. She wasn’t there, but in her place a page from a vintage Brownie Handbook asked “How do you show your love?” and reminded me to “Do what grownups tell you too”, farther down a collage said only,  “experimental.”

Experimental?

As I walked out, an artist poked his head out of his studio and thanked me for coming. “I wish there were more of us here”, he said. “Next time.” Yes, next time.

First Wednesdays at the Golden Belt
11:00 a.m. to 4 p.m., Building 3
807 East Main Street in Durham

Durham is getting national attention for it’s new, healthier oral fixation: food.

Last week there were two articles about us in the New York Times. The first was a profile on Coon Rock Farm’s latest project, the Eno Restaurant. What makes it so newsworthy? Everything served will be grown, raised and prepped by Coon Rock farmers. Even the waitstaff will tend the fields.

Why? To remind us that hamburgers aren’t made by the King or Ronald McDonald and that vegetables don’t spring from the earth pre-cut, in vacuum-sealed bags.

Durham wants you to be connected to the food you eat. But in times past, Durham wanted to connect you to something very different: tobacco.

The city’s shift from tobacco titan to gourmet upstart is the subject of the second NYT article. Chefs and owners of the city’s best restaurants recall the transition, as tobacco warehouses found other commercial uses (like McKinney’s home) and the soil switched, as a reader Tweeted, from “smoke the view to eat the view.”

Forkfuls of restaurants are mentioned by name, and the writer sounds like he actually visited us before he wrote the article, so it’s definitely worth a read.

Just want the juicy bits?  Well here’s where to get them:

Piedmont
Six Plates Wine Bar
Watts Grocery
Vin Rouge
Rue Cler
Neal’s Deli
Nana’s
Magnolia Grill
Zely&Ritz

Streaming HD Public Broadcasting on the web?

Doctors that make webcam house calls?

Time travel? 

Hey, it could happen. After all, 1 Gigabit per second is fast. 100-times-faster-than-the-connection-you’re-using fast.   And it just may come to Durham.

See, we’re competing to be THE location of Google’s trial 1 Gbps fiber-optic network- Google Fiber. It’s a hot bid, and some cities have gone so far as to change their names to impress the almighty G.

Like Topeka, which is now Google, Kansas or Sarasota, now Google Island, Florida. Duluth, excuse me, “Google Twin Ports,” even jokingly called for all first-born male children to be named “Google Fiber.”

In the midst of this Google arms race, Durham is taking a different road, not flaunting how far they’ll go for Google Fiber, but how far they’ll go with it.

 The Durham community has created a site to gather support, show their credentials and share ideas. And that’s where you come in. 

Durham needs you to visit HiFiberDurham.com and post what you would do, could do, and will do with Internet that makes anything possible. 

Us in an eye-catching nutshell:

Image by Nick Jones

Durham just had a Breathalyzer test, and our blood alcohol content is well below .08%. According to Men’s Health magazine, our fair city ranks as the seventh least drunk city in the U.S.

Our sobriety was topped only by Newark (who needs booze when you have guns?), Miami (only because tanning lotion is zero proof), Salt Lake City (Surprise!), Rochester and Yonkers (Cold enough to freeze liquor?) and believe it or not Boston.

Boston? Now, my mother’s family is from Beantown, and I have first hand knowledge of the city’s tippling tendencies. The city least able to hold their liquor: Frenso, California. I blame it on Schwarzenegger.

So just how did they come up with these “scientific” results?  They looked at fun stuff like death rates from alcoholic liver disease, the body count from booze-fueled car crashes, DUI arrests and the number of admitted binge drinkers. Fair enough. But judging by these statistics, it’s not that Durhamites don’t drink, it’s that we’re darn smart about it.

Whether it's a whiskey at Whiskey, a PBR and a show at the Pinhook, a game of pool with Jack and his buddy Coke at the Tavern, or a pint of some of that wacky European football at Bull McCabe’s, Durham knows how to guzzle responsibly.

P.S.

The cost of all these drinks? Cocktail peanuts considering we’re one of the top five most affordable cities in America. Bottoms up!