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#Durham

5 posts5 participants0 posts today
Public
David Allan

Overlooking the Durham Coast at Easington in North East England, a three-deck pit cage that once transported miners to coal seams far below and out under the sea. Now standing as a silent memorial to all those who worked and died winning the black stuff.
Some years ago, I had the opportunity to descend the shaft at Wearmouth Colliery in a cage just like this. Not only that, but I got to experience the journey from the shaft bottom to the coal face, which was some 11km out under the North Sea. The lump of coal I prized off the coal face still sits upon my bookcase!
#england #durham #coast #landscape #photography

On the Durham Coast at Easington in North East England, a three-deck pit cage serves as a memorial to all those who toiled far below, winning the coal that once powered the nation.
Public
David Allan

Eyesight testing aside, there are lots of other reasons to visit the lovely market town of Barnard Castle in Co Durham, North East England. I'll give you the Grade I listed medieval castle ruins, which tower above the peat-stained River Tees and Bowes Museum for starters.
For anyone puzzled by the 'eyesight testing' reference, click on the link below.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_

After a period of relatively little rain, the peat-stained River Tees is running shallow as it winds its way below the medieval ruins of Barnard Castle in Co Durham, North East England.
#england#durham#englishheritage
Public
David Allan

Durham city's Grade I listed Kingsgate Bridge, spanning the River Wear and connecting Bow Lane with another example of brutalist architecture, Dunelm House, housing Durham Students Union.
The bridge, opened in 1966, was the last structure ever designed by Sir Ove Arup.
Dunelm House was part of the national music circuit, during the 60's and 70's, with names like Pink Floyd and Procol Harum performing.
Interestingly, following a gig in 1969, members of Free wrote the song 'All Right Now' in their dressing room in the building, which later became their biggest hit!
#england #durham #architecture #butalism #photography

Two examples of brutalist architecture on the banks of the River Wear in Durham, North East England. Bathed in bright spring sunshine, the Grade I listed Kingsgate Bridge, connecting Bow Lane to Dunelm House, which houses Durham Students Union. The bridge, opened in 1966, was the last structure ever designed by Sir Ove Arup. Dunelm House was part of the national music circuit, during the 60's and 70's, with names like Pink Floyd and Procol Harum performing. Interestingly, following a gig in 1969, members of Free wrote the song 'All Right Now' in their dressing room in the building, which later became their biggest hit!
Public
Ross Grady

TL;DR: If you live in the #Triangle area of NC and you are interested in live music:

http://roks.me

So: For ~22 years or so I ran a website called trianglerock.com which aggregated show listings for venues around central NC (primarily #Raleigh, #Durham, #ChapelHill).

It started out entirely manually assembled, and I gradually automated portions of it. But for ~reasons~, namely:

  • I intentionally wanted each band/artist, and each venue, to be an entity in a database, so that it could be searchable later (via a search interface I never finished building)
  • I was a completist & that meant seeking out show listings in social media & other non-scrape-able places
  • I didn’t list everything, and for shows I personally cared about, I included some preview verbiage I wrote myself

it always required a few hours a week of manual labor.

When the pandemic hit & all the venues shut down, I sort of belatedly reached the conclusion that I was tired of spending a few hours a week on it . . . so I never started it back up again after venues started re-opening.

(I also don’t go out to many rockclub shows anymore, because too many of the rockclubs around here (with a handful of exceptions, thank you, you know who you are) are depressing black-painted concrete-floored boxes with zero character, disgusting bathrooms, and noplace to sit.)

A few times over the past few years, people have mentioned to me that they missed the site (including multiple venue owners / bookers / promoters) but my careabout number remained super-low.

A couple of weeks ago, though, I was at a show, seeing an amazing band from Toronto called The Weather Station, and chatting with a few old friends. Two topics came up multiple times:

  • our mutual surprise that there weren’t more people there
  • my old friends’ characterization of me, when introducing me to their kids / partners, as “umm, how do I explain Ross? Well, he used to run this website . . . “

Partly I was like “dude I am standing RIGHT HERE you don’t have to past-tense me like that” but also in talking to them they did genuinely bemoan the difficulty in keeping track of shows since I quit.

I still don’t want to spend any significant amount of time collating show listings.

But nearly all the venue websites these days are using some kind of WordPress plugin or other framework that generates predictably-structured HTML. I had already written parsers for a few of them back in ~2018 or so . . . so it wasn’t much effort at all to expand my parser collection.

The result is a minimal static site that is just a date-sorted aggregation of all the listings I can scrape: http://roks.me

(Yeah, http – I don’t feel like doing even the minimal LetsEncrypt dance here, and if ppl are worried that a static html site is too risky to load via http then they probably aren’t leaving their houses to go to rock clubs either.)

One thing that amused me & also made me feel old was realizing that ~5 years off the local-music beat also means that I couldn’t write blurbs about most of these shows even if I wanted to, not without doing a LOT of research . . . and I’m not particularly interested in diving back into the world of one million indie-rock and garage bands who are all great people and write decent songs but are also, ahem, very similar to 7000 other indie-rock and garage bands I have personally seen over the past 40 years of going to shows.

roks.meroks.me
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