Picture this: you are leading the pack around a dirt track race in the sixties, somewhere near, say, Rockingham. As the dust starts to clear from your victory lap, you emerge from your muscle car and make your way to the podium. The woman waiting there, beaming with your trophy in hand, might look a […]
York Wilson
Posted inMusic
Small Town, Small Station, Big Signal: How Hillsborough’s WHUP-FM Has Become One of the Triangle’s Best Experiments
A Simple Story of WHUP’s Great Letters and Logo The first time I tuned into WHUP-FM, a low-power radio station centered in downtown Hillsborough, I prepared for disappointment. The show coming from my speakers was called She & Her, “an hour-long talk and music show about millennial women.” As someone who is neither millennial nor […]
Posted inMusic
The Simple Story of WHUP’s Great Letters and Logo
The first thing you’re bound to notice when you log onto whupfm.org is its gorgeous logo—due, in large part, to the work of former McKinney creative director and original WHUP board member Ellen Steinberg. To my mind, WHUP has the best logo of any radio station, ever. It’s a perforated can on a microphone stand, […]
Posted inNews
Picturing poverty
I knew almost nothing about Billy Barnes when I was asked to interview him and select some of his photographs for a spread in the Independent, but 10 short minutes into our conversation I started to think: This guy is a North Carolina state treasure. Billy, a native of Winston-Salem, is charming and exceedingly modest; […]
Posted inGuides
Building inside the box
“Why is it so hard for these guys to understand? Putting a two-car garage on the front of a house is butt ugly!” As we drove by yet another new development in southern Granville County, I pretended to shiver with disgust. I looked over at my fiancee, but she hadn’t even shrugged at my question. […]
Posted inGuides
Durham on 100 bucks a week (or less)
People who bitch about not having enough money to do anything fun usually have one thing in common–a lack of imagination. What I found most striking when I first moved to Durham was the social resourcefulness exercised by its inhabitants. With a never-ending circuit of house parties, happenings and impromptu get-togethers, anyone with a phone […]
Posted inNews
Bowling for Durham
Don’t believe the hype. The Public Enemy lyric immediately came to mind as I watched a News 14 Carolina report on a new documentary film called Welcome to Durham that was set to screen at the Hayti Heritage Center the following evening. The news segment showed clips from the film. Black teens throwing gang signs […]