Not much to say today … just a cute shot of recently-groomed Sydney at Duke University.

I have never hesitated to profess my love for the City of Durham - in part, because it shares a name with the region of Ontario I grew up in … but mostly because it’s a cool city.

Kevin at Bull City Rising did a fantabulous job of explaining why Durham is great - and taking a few well-deserved shots at some of Durham’s less articulate student journalists.

Nothing profound to write about today … but I did enjoy a beautiful day at Oakwood Cemetery and the Duke University campus.  Here’s some shots for your viewing pleasure.

Wade Edwards - the son of presidential candidate John Edwards - is buried at Oakwood Cemetery.  Regardless of your politics, it is a shame that Wade lost his life at the young age of 16.  The sculpture marking his gravesite is huge; at least ten feet tall.  It wasn’t hard to “get low” and silhouette this shot with the sun behind the adjacent cloud.

Recall my earlier post about Jim Valvano.  I stumbled across his grave - literally - while I was traipsing around Oakwood.  Someone thoughtfully left a Duke basketball parking pass on his grave … and I wanted to subtly work this into the shot.  I think this photo works … what do you think?

I admit - I have a hard time with the military sections of graveyards.  The sun was still low enough in the sky to cast long shadows, and I continued my experiments with silhouettes.  I really like the way the sun shines through the flag here; maybe there’s even some metaphors in this that I won’t explore right this second.

I don’t know Walter Caswell Lewis.  Two things caught my eye about his stone, though.  First is the name “Caswell” - the surname of North Carolina’s first governor.  The other thing was the mention of the purple heart.  I had no idea what this meant, but it sounded cool … and the Wiki page I linked to explains it.  Again - I think the shadow works nicely in this shot. (editor’s note: it was only after I posted this that I realized the name on this stone is spelled CaRswell - definitely not the same as Caswell.  But what the hell - it’s still a nice shot.)

Fallout shelters are another thing I had to lookup.  This must be some sort of creepy reminder of the Cold War, and I’d probably rather it come down.  Honestly, if a nuke falls near here, an old brick building that was built during the Hoover administration will not be the first place I run to.

No photography trip in the triangle would be complete without a few brownies from Duke University.  My first stop was the chapel, where I attempted to do some justice to shot that didn’t work out so well the last time.  This is one of those rare shots where the shadows just “work” - and I can attribute it mostly to luck.

These spires contrast brilliantly against the blue sky.  I don’t recall which building they were on; somewhere, perhaps, between the chapel and the athletic complex.  And it’s these details that make Duke such a wonderful place to photograph.  I can’t imagine that all of these architectural oddities were planned entirely, and I’d like to imagine that some brilliant architects wandered around the university and randomly added these touches as construction took place.

I won’t even attempt to pronounce his last name … but he’s an important coach at Duke.  And this is where students are camped out for basketball tickets that go on sale in March.  Yes, you read correctly - they are camped out now (January 28th) for tickets that go on sale in March.  Insane, or the pinnacle of college foolery?  You be the judge.

Alas, the tired photographer and his faithful companion.

The basement was packed with people; standing room only. I arrived a few minutes before 7:00 and made my way to the back of the room after receiving a blue bookmark with the number “111″ on it. I would be the one-hundred and eleventh person to have former Duke lacrosse coach Mike Pressler sign my copy of his recently-released book, “It’s Not About the Truth”.

My regular readers will recall that I’ve been less than sympathetic towards the lacrosse players involved in this scandal. I recall vividly reading about this when the news first “broke”, and I remember chatting with my wife about it over dinner. My premise was simple: how could a house full of boys so full of privilege and machosim not be guilty of something? This was Duke, after all - an ivy-league league university set in a city not lacking for problems. Surely a few of them had gone overboard and done something.

I even have to admit feeling a bit smug about the news conference in front of the Durham jail some months later. The Durham County Jail is not a place for well-coifed kids in ties and jackets to hold press conferences, and it all seemed a bit too well orchestrated.

I went to tonight’s book signing feeling rather indifferent towards the case. Nifong has been disbarred and faces a world of headaches. There’s a sentiment shared by many in Durham that this has gone on for long enough, and we simply need to move on.

I was not, however, prepared for the full force of Pressler’s sincerity.

They say that you can judge a man by the enemies he makes. My first impression was simple: I couldn’t imagine Mike Pressler having a single enemy in the world. He fielded question after question from the audience with a grace and literacy lacking in many of our leaders, and his emotions were heartfelt and sincere.

What hit home wasn’t so much the talk about the case itself; Mike went into some detail about the anguish that this case brought onto his own family. A letter written to the president of Duke University by Pressler’s daughter is recreated verbatim in the book; one would be completely lifeless to not feel the weight of her words.

I was one hundred and eleventh in a line of one hundred and eleven people. By the time I made it up to the signing desk, I had already made it to page 115 in the book. My exchange with Pressler went something like this:

“You know, Mike, up until a few weeks ago I thought those kids were as guilty as shit.”

Mike paused and looked me straight in the eye - not sure exactly how to respond. There was a glimmer of hurt in his eyes, but he didn’t break eye contact as he said, “well, at least you’re man enough to admit it.”

I had intended to say a lot more, but I think he understood the hurt look in my own eyes. So much is often said without words.

On the drive home, I went past 610 North Buchanan Boulevard. If you didn’t know the address, you would never notice this house; it’s a rather decrepit looking bungalow set among many larger houses, in the shadow of a huge university across the street. I wonder what will become of it; even with the allegations dismissed and innocence proclaimed, there’s still an incredibly haunting feeling about the place, as if someone had died there.

As if.

I discovered Duke University about two years ago. My first exposure to Duke came shortly after moving to North Carolina in 2001, but I never took the time to really explore it until the summer of 2005, when I started thinking deeply about the city we call Durham. Sadly, I’m not the only one thinking hard about Duke right now; I say “sadly”, because it’s not for the right reasons.

My wanderings in and around Durham have taught me that it’s a liminal place of contradictions; a curious juxtaposition of many opposing forces that find a tenuous, if not dynamic equilibrium. The “City of Tobacco” is now the “City of Medicine”, and many of the old tobacco warehouses and cigarette factories are now being converted into trendy apartments and condominiums. The modern suburbia of the Southpoint area is minutes from Hayti - a derogatorily misspelled moniker for a beautiful, historically African-American part of the city that was largely obliterated by the construction of Highway 147. A drive down Fayetteville St. rewards the patient observer with the sights of many old, beautiful homes. It was one such drive that opened me up to the music of blues legends like Blind Boy Fuller and Reverend Gary Davis, thanks to a historic plaque.

It’s impossible to miss Duke University as one heads west from Downtown Durham. The change is almost painful; decrepit blue-collar postwar homes give way to grand, superbly-restored century homes. The stone wall around Duke’s East Campus is darkly symbolic: look, but don’t touch. “We’re inside, and you’re not”, it whispers, like the tall iron gates around the White House. You can’t help but wonder what it’s like on the inside, and I quickly learned that this mystique is the very thing of myths and urban legends.

The biggest surprise about Duke wasn’t that I could stroll around campus and vicariously fulfill my own unfulfilled educational goals, but that the people at Duke are so damn nice. Case in point: when I asked about borrowing a book from the library (and after discovering I didn’t have enough cash on hand to pay the requisite “community borrower” fee of $35 per year), the evening librarian — without hesitation, and certainly not by my asking — lent me the balance owing from her own wallet, and told me to pay her back when I had the cash. These are the kinds of gestures that people remember for a long, long time, and I’m citing only one of many kindnesses that have been extended to someone who is only a member of the community.

What jarred me about the lacrosse rape allegations weren’t so much the charges themselves, but the circumstances surrounding the incident. Frat house behavior wasn’t something I was exposed to in Canada, and Houston Baker’s stinging letter about the “regular underage drinking and out-of-control bacchanalia” hit me hard. Like the City of Durham itself, there were deep contradictions with Duke’s appearance on the surface, and this case had the potential to shake the institution to its core.

That, it did not. The District Attorney screwed up the investigation and prosecution on an unprecedented magnitude, the fallout from which we have only begun to observe. It started as a lynching of three wealthy white kids; now it’s the lynching of a DA who manipulated the case for his own political goals. When the lynch mob is done with the DA, they’ll turn to the police and the “group of 88″ members of the Duke faculty that dared to ask some difficult questions we’re no closer to acknowledging, much less answering.

What remains taboo is the culture that allowed this situation to promulgate in the first place. A culture of economic privilege and deeply-seeded racism, and the “look but don’t touch” airs that bolster the lynch mob’s need for simplicity and focus. George Bush put it best when he said that”you’re with us or against us” - what better way than to distill a situation with such complex socioeconomics and such a long history down to such shallow politicking?

In a Duke University report from 1993 titled “We Work Hard, We Played Hard”, author William Willimon asks a poignant question on page 7: “We say ‘We work hard and we play hard.’ But would we ever claim that we think hard?”

Willimon answers his own question, in part, on page 50: “My main criticism of Greek life is that we have allowed it to monopolize student social life. Not that fraternities want to be the virtually the sole social life on campus. Students need to take more responsibility, and to exercise more creativity for their social life.” Like it or not, a culture that permits this “out-of-control bacchanalia” allowed the circumstances leading up to these terrible allegations to exist in the first place.

In a situation so fraught with complexity, this recipe is remarkably simple: young men, alcohol, the financial wherewithal to hire “exotic dancers”, and two hundred years of racial divide. One need not graduate from a prestigious university to see the potency of this mix.

The DA and the “exotic dancer” both made mistakes on a grand scale. Let’s not forget that these young men also made mistakes, with consequences that could have been avoided by nothing more than some forethought and common sense, and a little restraint. Did they deserve to do a handcuffed perp-walk for it? In retrospect, we say “no” - but imagine for a moment the cries of injustice had the accusation not been taken seriously. In the context of a legal system that presses charges only in the presence of compelling evidence, it was both appropriate and expected.

The damning email sent by one of the lacrosse players (with language I wouldn’t even think about reproducing here) shortly after the evening of the alleged attack was perhaps the most inflammatory, and the most telling. Whether it was meant seriously or as a parody (I’ll leave this debate to the thousands of other blogs that have dissected it) is moot; a thoughtful human being would consider the events of that evening flammable enough to leave unprovoked from these sorts of taunts.

And this is all we’re left with: a gaping hole, once filled by the sophomoric antics of kids too inebriated by the ignorance of youth to think critically about the culmination of the events they orchestrated, and left vacant by the vapid incompetence of a district attorney. With the lynch mob’s attention turned to Nifong’s prosecution, will we ever get any closer to answering the looming questions that remain on the Duke campus?

I really hope the people of this university take the opportunity to “think hard” about the machoism, the privilege of wealth, and the non-thinking conformity that fostered, and even supported this behavior. It’s nothing less than a blight on a fine institution in a fine city; the Durham I know deserves much better.

PS - one of the cries I have heard from the lynch mob is a call-to-action to prosecute the women who made these false accusations. She is due every right to the presumption of innocence that these boys were denied, but I do agree that the matter needs to be investigated. If blame is going to be leveled against the lacrosse players for exercising bad judgment, a healthy dose of blame (and prosecution in a court of law, if true) needs to be shared by a woman who would spread such flagrant lies.