distra

This entry is dedicated to the closing of my favorite coffee shop/ bar of all time, Vincents Ear...........

On December 16th Vincents Ear will be holding a raffle to help pay their leftover debts etc. Tickets can be purchased at Vincent's Ear, Lava, and Hip Replacments. They cost $2.00 and you could win one of these great prizes...

A free piercing at Liquid Dragon

Origional Art by may local artists including MOE and Justin Rabuck

Gift Certificates to Green Eggs and Jam, Hip Replacments, Downtown Books and News, and more

Haircut from Adorn

Tile artwork by Heinz Kossler

A Painting by illustrator Robert Zimmerman

plus much much more!!

Due to gentrification and other circumstances beyond our controll Vincent's Ear will be closing its doors on Sunday December 18th. Our hearts are broken. For over ten years Vincent's Ear has provided an creative outlet for musicians, painters, and artists of all kinds. We would like to thank everybody that has supported us over the past decade, including the bands listed below(too many to even list).
There are a handfull of shows between now and Dec 18th, so hopefully you will all come out, drink some tall PBRs and say goodbye to Vincent's Ear.

In no way is this list complete. If you would like to add names to this list, email chadinaction@netscape.com

Against Me

Ahleuchatistas

ALARMIST!

Alasadair Roberts,

All Austronauts

American Analog Set

Amish Jihad

Anomoanan

Barbez

Bardo Pond

Barn Burning

Black Castle

Black Cat Music

Black Goat Ensamble

Bonfire Madigan

Butchies

Buzzsawyer

Calla

Cantwell Gomez and Jordan

Captain Last

Cat Power

Chicago Underground Duo

Circulatory System

Congratulations

Crank County Daredevils

CRIPES ALMIGHTY!

Crooked Fingers

Cub Country

Danielle Howle

Dave Jones

Dead Things

Des Ark

Dig Shovel Dig

Dodd Ferrelle & The Tinfoil Stars

DragonMoose

DrugMoney

Drums and Tuba

Dynamite Brothers

Engine Down

Enon

Experimental Dental School

Fat Day

Fing Fang Foom

Fisher

Found Objects

Friends Forever

Gavra

Giddy Motors

Go Machine

Good Friday Experiment

Hale Zukas

Harvest Records

Impossible Shapes

Instant Death

Isotope 217

Jascha Ephraim

Jem Crossland & the Hypertonics

Jett-Rink

John Todd

John Wilkes Booze

Kid Commando

King Cobra

Le Tigre

Les Messieurs Du Rock

Lion Fever

Lo La Lafavre

Lockgroove

Lube Royale

Lying In States

Mad Tea Party

Malarkies

MANBAND

Manband

Mandarin

Maserati

Modern Day Urban Barbarians

Mother Jackson

Neptune

Nevada

New Black

Nice Guy's Help Club

nightsbrightcolors

North Elementary

Of Montreal

Old Time Relijun

On The Take

Ostinato

Pepper's Ghost

Piedmont Charisma

Radio Berlin

Rat Attack

Rather Honey

Rayford

Remains of the Day

Reverend Glasseye

Risk Relay

Royal Trux

Sclix

Scrappy Hamilton

Secret Lives of the Freemasons

Shark Quest

Soladura

Sound of Urchin

Sticks & Stones

Sticks and Stones

Stinking Lizaveta

STRANGE

Sue Garner with Angel Dean

Suran Song In Stag

The 6th Great Lake

The Bite

The Black Lips

The Building Press

The Butchies

The Capitol Years

The Chicago Underground Duo

The Comas

The Court And Spark

The Dozens

The Films

The Gerbils

The Impossible Shapes

The Labiators

The Merle

The Nein

The Oranges Band

The Planet The

The Port Huron Statment

The Radar Brothers

The Rosebuds

The Sex Patriots

The Smegmatics

The Unholy Trio

The White Stripes

The WIYOS

Timinaction

Tober

Tracy and The Plastics

Trans Am

Triage

Tribolotomee

Tulsa Drone

Volante

Wayne Robbins & the Hellsayers

Wendy and Carl

Whirlwind Heat




Here is the story from the Asheville Citizen Times:

ASHEVILLE - Vincent's Ear, a coffeehouse whose edgy patrons and performers are as repelling to some people as attractive to others, is closing.

Owners of the building have given the business until Dec. 31 to leave, but owner Joan Morris said the 12-year-old center of musical and artistic experimentation will likely close Dec. 18.

"Half the town hates us, and half the town loves us, it seems," Morris said. Vincent's Ear has no plans to reopen elsewhere, said Rick Morris, her former husband who books music at the North Lexington Avenue establishment.

Vincent's demise is fueling ongoing concern by many downtown patrons, residents and workers about gentrification, a term used when people with money displace less affluent folks whose arts and creativity make an area desirable to live in.

Though supporters of "Vincent's," as the place is known to fans, were to meet Monday night to talk about the future, the future appears over for Vincent's, Rick Morris said.

"It's not financially feasible to relocate," he said. "The debt on this place, we can't financially find another place. So this is the end of Vincent's Ear." Changing character

Vincent's opened May 1, 1993, as a showcase for local musicians, as well as national acts, such as the White Stripes, Chicago Underground Duo, Isotope 217 and the New Jewish Radicals. About two weeks ago, the building's owner, Dawn Lantzius, informed it that she was not renewing its month-to-month lease, Joan Morris said. Morris said all of her dealings around the lease were done through Lantzius' niece, Renee Lantzius.

"Since she (Renee) has not returned any of my phone calls," Morris said, "I can't get (the lease) extended so we can have time to even think about relocating or having time to sell off equipment and try to recoup some of my losses."

Dawn Lantzius of Biltmore Forest declined to be interviewed for this story. Several messages left with Renee Lantzius were not returned. Attempts to reach John Lantzius, Renee Lantzius' father who like Dawn Lantzius owns several buildings on North Lexington Avenue, were also unsuccessful.

"I feel that this is clearly Renee trying to clean up the street," said Kitty Brown, whose Sky People Gallery and Design Studio is owned by John Lantzius. Brown also works with the Arts2People project, an urban mural nonprofit organization that three weeks ago started painting a 196-foot-long mural on a wall on "North Lex," as the street is sometimes called.

Brown said Renee Lantzius showed up and told the painters to dismantle their scaffolding, effectively putting at least a temporary end to the project. The painting was on a lot, near the Interstate 240 overpass, where the John Lantzius family announced in early October that it would build a large housing project.

A press release announcing the project stated that Lexington Village would have 102 new, affordable rental apartments "desperately needed in the downtown where condominium prices have made housing unaffordable." One quarter of the units would be rented "at substantially below- market rates," according to the release.

Renee Lantzius, the contact listed on the press release, did not return Citizen-Times' requests for more information. The announcement said it would be designed to help "the needs of Asheville's burgeoning creative and entrepreneurial community."

There are skeptics.

"The Lantziuses are chipping away at that bohemian character," said Sue Millions, an artist and Vincent's patron. "Why move to a community with a vibrant character and eradicate that character?" Gentrification?

Millions used to live in Wicker Park, a multi-ethnic Chicago community so culturally on edge that "you couldn't get a cab for the life of you," she said. But it had a great arts scene, so good in fact that young urban professionals started showing up at the Busy Bee, a popular diner, with laptops and a desire to move in.

"I had to move every eight months. It was `sorry, we're putting a sushi bar here,' " Millions said.

Something similar could happen on North Lex, Kitty Brown worries.

"All you'll have," she said, "is yuppies looking at each other and saying, `What happened to all the artists?'''

City Planning Director Scott Shuford does not see a wholesale displacement downtown of the disenfranchised. Gentrification downtown has seen the Fine Arts Theatre replace an adult movie theater, he said. It has seen people moving into refurbished apartments and condos above shops downtown, he said.

For the most part, owners of downtown buildings have striven to maintain, not change, the character of their neighborhoods, he said. Peter Alberice, an Asheville architect who recently began a residential project (33 condos, several offices and one shop) at 12 S. Lexington Ave., said he believes that downtown neighborhoods have done well in holding on to themselves.

He cited Biltmore Avenue, Broadway and North Lexington Avenue especially as being distinct.

Other people, however, have noted that many people who work in the shops downtown can't afford to live in places such as the under-construction Twenty One Battery Park, where units start about $350,000 and go beyond $700,000.

The condos in Alberice's project will go for between $160,000 and about $450,000, he said. The condos at 37 Hiawassee, sitting above North Lexington Avenue, are being offered at between $80,550 and $223,650.

"With gentrification often comes a lack of diversity, in terms of arts, population, everything," said Adams Wood, an Asheville resident who co-produced the documentary "Boom - The Sound of Eviction," which chronicled the Internet "dotcom" bubble and bust in San Francisco in the late 1990s.

"It takes a really long time to develop the kind of relationships between people and institutions that characterize a really vibrant community," he said. "When you disrupt that (with) a tidal wave of money and soaring evictions and skyrocketing rents, it can really do a lot of damage. You have to consider that you're losing things people really cherish."

Vincent's Ear's demise is the byproduct of supply and demand, said Mac Swicegood, who has been appraising real estate in Asheville since 1974. Buildings on North Lexington are more valuable now, and owners can sell or rent for more.

"That whole area is in transition to a more profitable use of businesses and land," he said. "This transformation has a lot of local people shocked. But that's what's going on." Threatening place?

The same thing that attracts people to downtown - the arts - also scares some away.

The young cigarette-rolling crowd that hung out on the street's sidewalk at night, often lavishly dressed in chains and ripped clothes, makes some people feel threatened to the point that they avoid walking past the gates to the courtyard in front of Vincent's.

"A lot of stuff that went on outside those gates was a problem," said David Brown, an early pioneer of downtown Asheville's revival. He owns seven buildings on North Lexington. "Sometime you go down there (on the sidewalk), and there would be 20 kids with their dogs laying around."

Those crowds were larger when The Body, a Christian outreach program for street kids, and the Asheville Community Resource Center, a youth-oriented collective of nonprofit events and programs, were there. The Body, whose building is owned by Dawn Lantzius, recently left, and ACRC, which Kitty Brown subleased to ACRC, lost its lease in March. John Lantzius owns the ACRC building, county property records show.

"Our 70-year-old parents are walking past these people, and they're asking them for a quarter? No," Nick Peterson said. He owns three buildings on North Lexington and said he's had "many a beer" in Vincent's. Its patrons are fine, he said. But outside the courtyard, he occasionally sees "your serious alcohol, drug addict who's 19 years old," he said. Pioneering

John Lantzius is one of the many people credited for making downtown the vibrant place it is.

In 1977, the landscape architect from Vancouver, B.C., bought the old Westall Lumber Co. building at the corner of Lexington Avenue and Walnut Street, creating a block of shops, cafes, entertainment spots and other businesses now known as Lexington Park. In appreciation of his work downtown, Asheville City Council declared Oct. 10, 2001 as "John Lantzius Day."

Nonetheless, the intentions of the people who own buildings on North Lex are suspect to some patrons of the shops and restaurants there.

"They're trying to clean up Lexington," said Fisher Meehan, whose nationally received band Drug Money played its first gig at Vincent's Ear. "Does it all necessarily need to be cleaned up?"

Heinz Kossler has played Vincent's Ear many times with his ambient electronic group, Soleaeura.

"I do a lot of traveling and play a lot of clubs in a lot of towns much bigger," Meehan said. "In a lot of places, you get attitude from the people the minute you roll in with your equipment. There's not a lot of pretension at Vincent's Ear."

"Those are the very people that (Asheville's) future, our economy, our art scene depends on," David McConville, an Asheville-based video installation artist said of Vincent Ear's patrons and artists. "You have to have a place where people can try out new things and meet new people in their art form.

"(Vincent's leaving) is really a bad sign," McConville added. "It saddens me to think what downtown is going to become."





I am going to miss this place and I feel that this town is about to lose some thing that will never be replaced. I am afraid of what my town will turn out like.

Later for now.............
TJB

I will Leave you with a couple pictures from the summer......


At night from "The Cut"


Courtyard kids


Miss Led
from ACT