Green means stop?

On February 25, shortly after Amelia Abreu’s story about the Green Means Go! collective (“Good to Go!,” February 10), the group’s performance space in Denton was closed indefinitely by the city fire marshal for numerous code violations, including inadequate parking facilities and doors that opened the wrong way. Unfortunately, the indefinite shutdown looks more like a permanent one now. After collecting the group’s rent on the morning of March 1, the owner of the building Green Means Go! occupied evicted them that afternoon, giving them until the end of the month to return the building to its original condition. The group’s landlord was unwilling to share the costs of the high insurance premiums required to keep the space (located just off Interstate 35) going or the extensive repairs needed to get clearance from the city’s various code-enforcement agencies. The members of the group, obviously, are bitter about the latest obstacle thrown in their way.

“We now have 10 times the knowledge we had before and [know] what it will take to open a venue in this town,” one of the members, Cory Kilduff, wrote on the Denton Dallas Show List’s message board, located at people.unt.edu/~klo0002/. “We will not be fucked by the building inspectors, fire marshals, or landlords again.”

So, for the second time in as many months, the collective — Kilduff, Chad Ferman, Jeremy Harris, Brett Tohlen, Zack Kerr, Mike Weibe, Fadi Al-Assad, and Stephanie Burchard — is homeless. The situation is remarkably similar to the legal hassles Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios endured much of last year, except that in Rubber Gloves’ case, they owned the building; the Green Means Go! gang wasn’t so lucky. You can be sure the group will turn up in a new space sometime in the near future (apparently, a new venue is already in the works), though the most important question isn’t where the future home of Green Means Go! will be located. Sadly, the question seems to be how long the city of Denton will wait before it shuts them down again.