Month: August 2003

Since its birth on September 5, 1882, Labor Day has provided every workingman and woman at least three crucial with things: an excuse for a picnic; a chance to sit in shore-related traffic; and an occasion to complain about work. For the al frescolunching and OBX traveling this Labor Day, you’re on your own. But when it comes to capturing just how miserable work can be, C-VILLE can get you started. From roller-skated table-waiting and street corner traffic-counting to cigar-making, box-packing and propaganda-spreading, 15 Charlottesvillians here unleash their horror stories from the job market. If nothing else, on this workforce holiday, you might find yourself grateful that you don’t have to pick coffee beans all day.

James Watts

Manager and cook

Garden of Sheba

In 1998, I was in need of some quick cash, so I took a job picking coffee beans for a day while visiting Guatemala. Not only was the job located high in the mountains but the weather was too cool in the morning, and far too hot in the middle of the day.

At the time, I thought it might be an adventure—until I realized how many actual beans you had to pick to make one U.S. dollar.

If I had owned the field, as if it was my coffee, maybe I would have seen it differently. But at that rate, picking one bean at a time, I knew it would take me years to get one day’s wage. I only lasted half of the day.

 

Susan Payne

President

Payne, Ross and Associates

In the early 1970s my mother made me take a job at the Vermont State Fair, so I worked at the "pig in a blanket" bar, a fancy name for selling corndogs out of a sweaty trailer. I was about 18. Eventually I made friends with everyone in the traveling circus.

I hung out with all of them from the bearded lady to the sword-swallower every night at the beer tent and little did I know I was making friends with them for life.

More than five years later while attending the Virginia State Fair with my new husband, [L.F. Payne, former U.S. Representative for Virginia’s Fifth District], lo and behold, who should run up to me but all of the same people from the traveling circus.

They all recognized me, ran up and started saying, "Hello Susan," and my husband must have really been wondering about the person he had just married.

 

Devon Sproule

Singer-songwriter

I waitressed at a restaurant in Woodstock, New York, called Heaven. I partly waitressed and partly answered the phone to take take-out orders. So it started with me answering the phone, "Hello, Heaven. This is Devon."

The worst day I had there I came in 15 minutes late and it turned out the boss had fired all the cooks. He was the only cook that day and I was the only waitress. In addition to yelling at me for being late, he was the most demanding and perfectionistic gay restaurant owner I had ever met. Every time there was a mistake in the order he would blame it on me. As a waitress you want to offer people breaks on things, and he would remind me to charge an extra 90 cents if someone ordered the black currant sauce instead of whatever else. At the end of the day I was literally in tears, and he said, "Guess it’s time to take off the roller skates, huh?" It was the only nice thing he said to me all day.

 

Saul Barodofsky

Owner

Sun Bow Trading Company

The year was 1966 and the President was Lyndon B. Johnson. I became a research investigator for the Office of Economic Opportunity under the President’s Commission for Manpower in Los Angeles, California. I supported the President’s Commission and actually took the job thinking I could make a difference. Instead my experience was utterly hellacious.

On my first day, I wore a suit and I was immediately told I was overdressed. When I asked them what was wrong they said it looked too expensive, and that I was making everyone else look bad. I told them I only owned one suit, and they said, "Well then, wear a sport coat."

For 20 hours per week, another part-timer and I collected data on the program, which was set up to retrain potential workers at different companies. That data then made work for 23 separate people in the LA office. For three months, I carried around this personal letter from President Johnson stating that he would personally appreciate it if the person I was talking to would give their full cooperation.

For one national moving company, for example, I learned that the "retraining" of potential workers amounted to 1,200 hours worth of lessons on sweeping and 3,000 hours on properly moving boxes.

And these companies actually got tax write-offs for this, while we taxpayers paid for this supposed training in which no one, in reality, was given any work experience. I would continue to ask these employers I was talking to, "What percentage of these trainees actually go to work for you?" They’d consistently respond, "Uh, we’d have to get back to you." I’d say, "Can you just guess a number, be it even a very vague number?" And they’d say, "We’d have to get back to you."

The best part is that they told me if I stayed the course, I could go to exotic and exciting places to have conferences, which is what most of these people spent their time doing. I couldn’t do it. I decided I would never work for another employer again. And I never did.

 

Cindy Stratton

Vice-chair

Albemarle-Charlottesville Branch

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

I worked as a carhop at Shoney’s on Barracks Road in the 1960s. People pulled their cars up to the monitor and placed their order, and I had to bring it out on my roller skates. I could barely even roller skate. But the worst part was my too-short black poodle skirt and dirty white blouse, full of not only food stains, but dirt from repeated falls on my skates.

Generally I tried to wait until I rolled inside to drop a tray of food, which didn’t always work. Luckily for me, shortly after I started, they decided to do away with the carhops on roller skates theme. I only lasted about three months.

When I look back on that I know I’d rather clean people’s houses than ever do that again.

 

Andrew Holden

Living Wage Activist 

The worst job I ever had was three jobs, a few years ago. I’d wake up at 4am, be on the road by 5 and arrive at my first job, working the line at the Plow & Hearth factory, by 6 in the morning. That job lasted until around 3 in the afternoon, though in December, 16-hour days weren’t uncommon.

I was employed seasonally, which meant I would get an extra 50 cents an hour—bringing my pay up to a whopping $6.50—if I lasted until after Christmas. A lot of people quit early, since the job meant working in a rush all day in silence, packing boxes and breathing in dusty, dry air from the mass quantities of cardboard in the warehouse.

After that I’d head home and rest for a few hours while waiting for my next job, at 6pm, washing dishes at the Tokyo Rose. Atsushi Miura’s a great boss, and he pays well. No complaints.

I’d head home around midnight and be up at 4am to do the whole thing over again. On Sundays I did janitorial/gopher work for Blue Ridge Mountain Sports.

Aside from just being exhausted and smelling like dead fish, the worst part was thinking it would never end. My insurance carrier had dropped me and I was paying most of my earnings directly into the 12 pills I have to take every day (for a genetic disease). There were a few times when I fell asleep at the wheel and almost drifted off the road on Route 29, which I’m not proud of, but it happened. I sold off most of my stuff to make ends meet, got a couple Madison County speeding tickets, and missed my family and friends terribly.

Eventually I just gave up on surviving with a job, and found life was a lot better without one. Some of my new streetpunk friends taught me about dumpster diving for food, and I eventually fell into a small anarchist commune house on the outskirts of Charlottesville. I’m still working hard of course, but now it’s to produce a better society, not more wealth for the already rich.

 

Jill Hartz

Director

UVA Art Museum

I think my worst job was during a college summer, when, because I was a fast typist, I took office jobs. I worked for an insurance company where I had to transcribe all day long interviews with people who had accidents, including car accidents where people had died. As a young person it was traumatic and frustrating to be inside every day during the summer. But it was a difficult job.

 

Horace Gerald Danner

Co-owner

Dr. Ho’s Humble Pie

My worst job was one in which I had to wear a three-piece suit. I learned very early on that I never wanted to do anything that required me to wear a suit and tie. Even now, if I have to go to an event, or a funeral, I’ll wear one of those straight collar shirts that don’t even allow you to wear a tie.

In 1985, I took a job as a glass salesman in the D.C. metro area. One other co-worker and I were considered "Beltway Bandits"—visiting large companies who bought glass in the greater D.C., Baltimore and Philadelphia area.

I basically spent all day driving around and telling jokes and being jovial to these big-wig guys who were buying glass for one building project or another. It was horrible.

Along with my three-piece suit, I had this slicked-back hair and I weighed about 200 pounds.

Sadly enough, that was the most money I’ve ever made in my life. But it definitely wasn’t worth being rich, fat and about to have a heart attack.

 

Susanna Nicholson

Director

Union Yoga Loft

The best part of this particular job is I was fired on my birthday, which in some ways was a present. I went to work for a small, essentially vanity publisher in Northern Virginia and I did it because Eugene McCarthy had a manuscript there. I was told that he was too perfect to edit. They asked me instead to market these huge boxes of a book called Feeding Fido: A Gourmet Guide to Feeding Your Dog. It was a cookbook with incredibly time-consuming recipes dog owners could make for their dogs. I had to call around, go to cable station after cable station trying to push this.

The funny thing is, I’ve done window washing, but usually you find nice people in the grungy jobs. I remember once I did dishwashing but the guy next to me was a retired member of the Australian Navy who would recite Shakespeare. The worst part is these so-called glamour jobs—I worked for Us Magazine and I was forced to write a positive review of a Bruce Willis film, one of his bombs, and I had to write three positive lines for Us to be able to interview him. The next day my review was reprinted in an ad in The New York Times in big bold letters. You get a feeling in your gut, that stomach-churning feeling, when you realize you have your "dream job" and it turns into ashes.

 

Fran Smith

Graphic Artist

I worked for Blackstone Cigar Company. I sewed tobacco leaves together so that the little climbers from Puerto Rico could climb up to the rafters to hang them. We took the green leaves and sewed them on machines, 32 leaves per lath. Then Puerto Rican guys would come and climb to the top of the barn and hang the leaves to dry. It was in Simsbury, Connecticut. It was cigar tobacco, not cigarette tobacco.

I got this job because I wanted to go to college and I wanted to earn money. I could get hired there at 13. Because I was so big I got hired to be a supervisor, so I was a supervisor to kids my own age. After a few months they upped my salary to $2.25 an hour and that’s where my trouble started.

If you couldn’t get 32 leaves together sewing you could turn the machine down so you could do it slower. I told this one girl that if she couldn’t do it fast, she would have to have another job. So she went to Betty Jean, the power girl from North Philly, and told her that I said I was going to kick Betty Jean’s ass. Well, Betty Jean rode the bus with me back to Bristol. She sat behind me and it was an unusual day because the black kids and white kids were sitting together on the bus. I had no idea what was coming. Betty Jean said, "I heard today that you were looking to kick my ass." And then she hurt me pretty bad. Put a nail file on the inside of my mouth. I still have a scar over my eye from where she hit me. I got one good punch in and then she pulverized me. I walked home and my father said, "What happened to you?" I said, "I just walked into a wall." He said, "Whatever wall you walked into you better face it tomorrow. " And I did.

The next day I waited for her. I knew she smoked pot at 10 o’clock. I waited for her to come out from her potty break. I was much taller than her. I grabbed her hands and twirled her around until she was dizzy. I got her on the ground and punched her lights out. That girl’s face was a mess. It was to a point that if I was going to keep this job and get respect, I had to do this. It was not about being vicious. After that we became friends. She said, "Hey you’re tough." Then nobody could play us off each other. Betty Jean and I went to this girl who set us up and we just looked at her. She left.

 

Alex Gulotta

Executive Director

Legal Aid Society

Sometime between college and law school I worked at the Gunite Steel foundry in Rockford, Illinois. They had a steel foundry and an iron foundry, making wheels and brake drums for semi trailers. It was the best job and the worst job. The best because it was cash, baby. I was working my way through college, and it was good money. If you didn’t care about the conditions you worked under, it was the best summer job you could come by.

Working conditions…how should I put it? You couldn’t find OSHA in your alphabet soup. Dante’s Inferno is a fair comparison.

Most of the college students are on the night shift, so lunch is about 1am. The foundry is well over 100 degrees at that time, and you’re wearing a hard hat, safety glasses, a mask, earplugs, a long-sleeved shirt with leather arm covers, long pants and steel-toed work boots. You’re in this little cocoon.

There’s a job students would do called "skull pulling." Essentially, they’d melt metal in a huge oven that would tip and pour molten steel into big cauldrons, maybe 8′ tall and 6′ around. When you pour steel into a mold, some of it bubbles over. While it’s still red hot you have to break off the extra steel or it screws up the mold. You get a hook about 12" long and this little shovel, and for hours you "pull the skulls," these pieces of red-hot steel and dump it in a bucket. That’s your job. In the daytime, it would get to 130 degrees, and the guys who would do that job would pass out, so they’d round up college students to keep the line going. What got me through it was the fact that you worked on various aspects of the job. The concept of doing one thing all summer was death.

The crowning blows were "shutdowns," where everyone had a week off and the maintenance people would come in and work. We spent an entire week crawling down into these sub-basements that flooded regularly and get filled with this black, gritty, muddy sand. Our job was to spend all day shoveling this smelly muck into buckets someone would haul up and dump.

The dirt, the loud noise…it was almost awe-inspiring. The force and power of the machines were incredible. You cannot help but respect people who work in a place like that for a living, because it’s such hard work and the conditions are so disgusting––at least that’s how it was in the late ’70s.

I think that job influences me every day. I’ve worked a lot of labor jobs to work my way through school––working at grocery stores, blacktopping roads, painting houses. I respect the jobs people have to do because I know some of what’s involved, and I have to say it motivated me to stay in college.

I hope my kids have a period where they do different jobs. I can’t think of a better way to teach them about how the world really works.

 

Paul Curreri

Singer-songwriter

It’s really difficult to narrow it down. I was just making a list of all my bad jobs. The first on the list was telemarketing tickets for the Broadway musical Rent. The boss insisted for our morale on having the music from the show piped in all day, every day. We had to keep track of exactly when we made our calls. We have to make three a minute. So you’re writing down 3:31, 3:31, 3:31, 3:32 and in the meantime this music, "I will liiiiight a candle…" is playing in the background.

For two years I had a job called traffic engineer. But it was in reality traffic counting. From 7am to 7pm four days a week you sit on a corner at an intersection and push a button on a thing that looked like a GameBoy with a drawing of an intersection on it and a button above each lane. On the fifth day you entered your "data" in an office. It was used for timing traffic lights and it was cheaper to have two college kids do it than to pay for those strips that do it automatically. I figured out how to beat the system. For 54 minutes I would just sit there reading or sleeping or whatever and for the last 6 minutes I would record the traffic and push each button 10 times. The worst thing was that while I was doing that job I was taking medication for acne, so I couldn’t sit in the sun. So I literally had to sit there with a pillowcase over my head with a floppy hat on top of that. No kidding. I have a picture of it from the Richmond Times-Dispatch. People thought I was a burn victim or the Elephant Man or a member of the KKK or something.

There’s the mailroom in New York City where I would have to leave, because I was breaking down crying all the time. I realized I was just moving and lifting heavy stuff all day. My boss didn’t like me all that much and one day I knocked on her door. "Why don’t you just have a monkey do my job?" I asked her. Then I said, "I realized the monkey couldn’t read to see where the mail would go. That’s why you hired me."

I’m a vegetarian and the job I had for only one hour was in a steak house in Knoxville, Tennessee. I carried these enormous slabs of meat draped over my arm into the room where they would be cut into steaks. I didn’t last too long there.

 

Jen Sorensen

Cartoonist

I think probably the most colorful job I ever had was when I was a waitress in a Pennsylvania Dutch family restaurant. I had this big, teal green oversized jumper that was very matronly with white socks and white sneakers and a ponytail. But that wasn’t the worst part of the job. I had to serve this dish called hog maw. It’s a Pennsylvania Dutch delicacy that consists of pigs’ stomachs that are stuffed with sausage and boiled potatoes. People were very enthusiastic about hog maw and very excited when it was on the menu. I would actually see trays of pig stomachs loaded into the oven—I actually worked that into a comic strip once. It’s not that it was bad, it was just kind of bizarre. The worst part was having to serve more tables than I was capable of serving.

The actual worst job I ever had was working in Hoboken in a coffee shop that seemed to be run by Mafioso-type guys. I can’t be sure that they were mobsters, but they were very intimidating and tough. One guy, when he was trying to make a point, was yelling at me once and threw a big pointed knife on the floor at my feet. There was definitely something shady going on there.

 

Browning Porter

Graphic artist, musician

When I finished my undergraduate degree at UVA in 1989, my plan was to take a job in my dad’s sign shop in Manassas, make signs by day and write poems, novels, screenplays, etc., by night. The first job given to me was strange, hopeless and horrible.

The shop had a client who was one of those builders responsible for throwing up McMansions all over the NoVa sprawl. Still giddy from the over-the-top opulence of the Reagan era, they had a notion to adorn each of their signs with a brass medallion about the size of an extra-large pizza, tricked out with their corporate logo in bas relief. When they learned how ridiculously expensive this would be, they still insisted that the shop imitate the effect by whatever means necessary.

My dad had no idea really how to do this, and so someone referred him to an expert sculptor who needed the work. The guy had been working for the Smithsonian, building giant fake rocks for one of their dinosaur exhibits. Apparently he knew how to do anything. His name was Viktor, and he was an unreformed Romanian Communist—somewhat of an insider in the Ceausescu regime—who had fallen out of favor and fled to America. Apparently before he had immigrated to this country, he had specialized in creating monolithic statues of party leaders, the kind that got hauled down and danced on by the oppressed masses only a few years later. Somehow this character landed in Manassas where he fashioned a method of casting giant fake brass medallions out of plastic for my father.

But Viktor didn’t quite fit in with the sign shop. He worked at his own pace—that of a party apparatchik, I suppose—and drank vodka all day long. When he spoke at all to co-workers, it was usually to disparage American capitalism or to hit them up for money. No sooner had he cooked up the first batch or so of medallions, than he quit. By the time I came home to work, he was long gone, and I had never met him. No one else knew how to do what he’d been doing, so it fell to me, the returning prodigal college boy, supposedly smart, to figure it out.

I was given Viktor’s big rubbery handmade molds, several dozen gallons of raw plastic goop to pour into them, a tiny vial of chemical catalyst, an old mechanical postal scale with which to measure out the catalyst, and a sort of dusty, wheezy Darth Vader-ish gas-mask to wear so that I didn’t asphyxiate. This stuff had fumes so deadly that I was also given an empty industrial warehouse all to myself in which to mix my vile concoctions. My dad had been able to rent very cheaply when the upholstery business it had housed went belly up, and so it was a very creepy, lonely place, filled with the hopeless skeletons of furniture and spiders.

One of my co-workers, an affable West Virginia country boy named Kenny, had found Viktor fascinating, and liked to visit me on his smoke breaks to tell me stories about him. "Viktor," he told me, "always used to wear them Walkmans on his head. I asked him once, ‘Viktor, what on earth are you listening to on them Walkmans all the time?’ And you know what he told me? ‘Classical music and static.’"

Casting the disks was a tricky business. The goop sort of looked like corn syrup and smelled like nail polish remover. One whiff of it without the Vader mask was enough to make you fall over dead of cancer. Too little catalyst in the plastic goop and the disks would turn out soft and sticky and gum up the mold. Too much catalyst and the chemical reaction would overheat and bake the disk right into the rubber. It didn’t help that the amount of catalyst called for in one casting was far less than the margin of error of my decrepit postal scale. I began with five molds, and after my third week I had ruined all but two of them. I was nervous, isolated and hypochondriacal.

Everyone in the shop listened to the same classic rock station, but I’d grown sick of their single 24-hour playlist scrambled fresh every day. (You knew you’d hear Strawberry Alarm Clock’s "Incense of Peppermints." You just didn’t know when.) I bought myself a Walkman, and I became addicted to NPR’s news in the afternoon, and soon I didn’t bother to change the station in the morning when they played Bach and the Mozart. The reception was lousy though, back in my ghostly upholstery shop, and so the station went in and out as I stalked around the premises, muttering chemical miscalculations to myself. One day I realized with a sudden horror that I was listening to nothing but classical music and static.

When I ruined the next-to-last mold, I got permission to purchase an expensive digital scale, and my father coaxed Viktor back for one day to show me what I was doing wrong. Viktor was very thin, white and humorless. He wore jeans and a blue denim vest without a shirt, so that his pale, round little vodka belly protruded over his belt. Sure enough, he never removed his headphones, and their wire seemed inextricably tangled in his long, greasy black hair. He talked like a sullen, mumbling Dracula.

He and Kenny and I went back to my empty warehouse to watch him work his magic. He refused to wear the Vader mask, and, in fact, kept a lit Marlboro in his mouth the whole time he stirred and poured the toxic goop, while Kenny and I stood well away and waited for him to burst into flames. He didn’t bother with the scale either, but somehow eye-balled the correct amount of catalyst, tapping it out of its vial as if it were pepper in a pot of borscht. He seldom spoke or met our gaze, and when he’d finished casting the medallion, we all stepped outside to smoke.

"Viktor, I understand that you know all about statues," said Kenny. "I was wondering what you thought of the Statue of Liberty." Viktor sneered, mumbled something about the doomed Romanticism of the bourgeoisie. And Kenny said, "Well, I think it’s a pretty good statue. There’s just one problem with it. It ought to have a No Vacancy sign on it." Viktor spit and flicked his cigarette into the weeds.

Viktor’s casting worked just fine, and he collected his pay and left. I learned nothing from his demonstration except that I had no aptitude for working with toxic and persnickety chemicals, and soon I’d ruined the last of Viktor’s molds. One of my co-workers stole my digital scale, and it no doubt was put to good use weighing out perfect quarter-ounces. My Dad convinced the client that they couldn’t afford even fake brass medallions for all their signs. I gave up on Manassas, and moved back to Charlottesville to join a band and get an MFA in poetry. I still make my living in graphic arts.

 

Meredith Richards

Vice-Mayor

City of Charlottesville

When I was in college, I would spend my summers as a temp working for ManPower. Most of the jobs lasted a week or two and they were replacements for people on vacation. The worst one I can remember was bad not because of the people but because of the task. It was in a construction trailer in the middle of nowhere. Nothing for miles around, but me and a bunch of men. They were doing legal construction contracts and I had to day in and day out sit in this sweltering trailer typing letter-perfect contracts on legal paper on an IBM Selectric, and every time I made a mistake I had to rip out the paper and type again. It was terrible.

I remember a lot of stressful and tough jobs during that period as a temp. Sometimes people would call a temp because they had so much work they were overwhelmed. You’d arrive Monday morning and never lift your head from your work until Friday evening. Other jobs were bad because they were boring and you had nothing to do but answer the phone. I don’t envy people who work in temp agencies and I did that for four summers.

Once upon a time, Virginia had clear air. From the northern end of Shenandoah National Park, people often say, you could look east and see the Washington Monument, more than 65 miles away.

Today that almost never happens. Average visibility from Shenandoah has decreased from 115 miles to just 25. Shenandoah perennially appears on lists of the 10 most threatened national parks in the country, including one published by the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA). It’s also the second most polluted park in the nation—topped only by Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee—according to Dan Holmes, an air pollution expert with the Piedmont Environmental Council (PEC).

Stretching 101 miles from Front Royal to Rockfish Gap, Shenandoah is a narrow swath of woodland that curves along the crest of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Throughout the park, a section of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail parallels Skyline Drive, the north-south parkway that defines the Shenandoah experience for most visitors. Within park borders are more documented plant and animal species—well over 2,000—than in all of Europe.

At its southern end, Shenandoah National Park just happens to share a border with Albemarle County, and while the park contributes tourist dollars to Albemarle, it may be getting something a lot less useful in return: pollution.

 

“The views here at the park are the main reason we have a national park to begin with,” says Christi Gordon, Shenandoah’s air resource program manager. “Scenery is fundamentally important to the purpose and national significance of the park.” With 90 percent of visitors experiencing the park from their cars, it’s safe to assume that long, lovely views (as opposed to wildlife sightings, or the challenge of a mountain hike) are their primary reason for coming. During the warm months and the fall foliage season, pullouts on Skyline Drive are rarely empty of cars, their occupants taking in a view as expansive as that from an airplane window.

Those occupants also spend $45 million each year in the counties that surround the park. Unfortunately for those counties, the number of visitors at Shenandoah has decreased dramatically in the last decade—down from 2 million to 1.5 million. Theories vary as to what could have caused a 25 percent drop in the number of visitors—Quinn McKew, a policy analyst at the NPCA, thinks the park suffered first in the late ’90s, when flush economic times allowed more overseas travel, and again after the September 11 attacks, when tourism decreased nationwide.

Air pollution is probably part of the cause too, McKew says. “The number of Code Red air quality days has been going up over the last couple of years,” she says. On a Code Red day, ozone levels are so high that the public is discouraged from driving unnecessarily or doing strenuous activities like hiking—exactly the wrong weather for a visit to Shenandoah. “While air quality has been improving across the nation, it’s getting worse in the park,” says McKew.

Holmes says that on hot, humid summer days, a phenomenon called climatic inversion traps pollutants (ozone, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur dioxide are some major ones) that would normally be carried northeast by the jetstream. So, when visitors stand on Skyline Drive and look east toward Albemarle County, for example, they see little more than a heavy haze, instead of a rolling carpet of trees and farmland. On the worst days, visibility is less than a mile, according to McKew.

Gordon says that the park’s ozone pollution “is still getting worse overall.” As air resource manager, she can do little more than monitor the crisis. Shenandoah’s pollution problems are hardly within her jurisdiction to change.

 

The emissions clouding Shenandoah are, in fact, amazingly well-traveled. Sulfur pollutants, says Gordon, come from industrial burning of fossil fuels, and originate in a variety of places: the Ohio River Valley, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, among others. Coal-burning power plants, constructed before the 1977 Clean Air Act and exempted from its requirements in “grandfather” amendments, are the biggest source of such emissions.

“They basically have a permit to pollute,” Holmes says. “What the grandfather sought to do was say ‘We know these things will be replaced soon. We won’t require them to do pollution control updates.’” Decades later, many of the dirty plants are still around, and still spewing thousands of tons of pollutants a year. Besides obscuring views, their emissions contribute to acid rain and stunt forest growth.

While out-of-state polluters are a big problem for Shenandoah, Virginia itself is hardly blameless. “There’s a significant amount of evidence to show that Virginia is responsible for a lot of its own pollution woes,” Holmes says. For example, according to PEC data, nearly 300,000 tons of sulfur dioxide were generated in Virginia in 2001. Large coal-burning power plants accounted for 73 percent of these emissions. (There are smaller coal-burning plants, too—in fact, one is located right here in Charlottesville, and is owned by the University of Virginia. Built in the 1950s, the plant produced 430 tons of sulfur dioxide in 2001.)

And, since energy deregulation took effect in 1998, the power industry has proposed a raft of new plants in Virginia—30 in all, with 16 approved so far. With 22,183 megawatts already in production in Virginia, and last year’s peak demand at around 19,000 megawatts, Holmes says the new plants are unnecessary. “We have a surplus right now,” he says. “At what point is all this power going to become superfluous and shipped out of state?”

Frank Burbank, a spokesman for the Department of Environmental Quality (which approves new plants), says his agency is only responsible for making sure plants will comply with existing guidelines. “It’s not our decision whether or not we need them,” he says. “If someone comes to us saying ‘We want to open a plant and here’s our application,’ we review it as an individual project.”

While new, non-coal-burning plants are usually cleaner than the smoke-belchers of yore, Holmes believes the proposed plants are still a serious threat to Virginia’s air quality and to Shenandoah National Park. “Shenandoah is by far the most threatened national park when it comes to new proposed [pollution] sources near its boundaries,” he says.

Holmes and McKew are both particularly galled by a proposal by Competitive Power Venture, a power company, to build a plant just five miles from the northern entrance to the park. “When you compare it to a coal facility, it’s not bad,” Holmes says. “But it’s equivalent to 5,000 new homes with two cars apiece. It’s another step in the wrong direction.”

McKew agrees and says the NPCA supports a moratorium on new power plants until their potential effects can be better studied. Burbank refused to comment on this idea.

 

Speaking of cars, from Skyline Drive you can see thousands of them—even on a hazy day. Interstates 81 and 64 are major arteries, not to mention 29N. And several busy urban hubs—including Charlottesville—are within a quick drive of the park.

Charlottesville and Albemarle may be adversely affected by industrial pollution blowing in from other places. But they generate plenty of pollution too, mostly through auto emissions. Whereas power plants and other industrial sites are known as “point sources,” since their emissions can be traced to a single point on the map, vehicle exhaust is a “non-point source”—a nebulous haze attributable in part to each person who drives.

Jeff Werner is the PEC’s field officer in Albemarle County and specializes in land-use issues. He says sprawl not only encourages driving, thereby increasing pollution, but chips away at the beauty of the countryside—and that both these effects detract from visitors’ experience in Shenandoah. He imagines disappointed park visitors: “‘It was hazy and gray and all I did was look down on a bunch of swimming pools and houses. Let’s go to West Virginia next year.’”

Smog hanging over Albemarle not only affects the view from the park, but may also physically travel to the park, Gordon says. Scientists had long assumed that prevailing winds always carried pollution eastward, but recent data suggests the movement of air throughout the state is more complex. “Some of these more recent findings defy conventional wisdom when we consider that Eastern Virginia is important to air quality in the park,” she says.

It’s tempting to point to Skyline Drive itself as part of the problem—after all, it’s a road, and one that sees its fair share of gas-guzzling RVs. But Gordon says vehicle emissions within the park are miniscule compared with those from the eight counties surrounding the park.

If anything, emissions on Skyline Drive point out the fact that a pollution crisis is made up of many smaller problems, and that Shenandoah cannot be considered separately from its surroundings. “Pollution is incremental; it all adds up,” Holmes says. “Pollution generated in Albemarle County does affect the park.”

 

And the park, in turn, affects Albemarle County. “For us the Skyline Drive and Shenandoah are a pretty significant part of our product mix,” says Mark Shore. As the director of the Charlottesville Albemarle County Convention & Visitors Bureau, Shore promotes an industry that pours more than $300 million into local coffers annually—and that’s not counting restaurant and hotel taxes. “Scenic beauty ranks high on the list for visitors”—not just in the park, but throughout the region.

So has declining visitation in Shenandoah meant a hit to tourism here at home? Not so far, Shore says. “The great thing about this area is there are a lot of things to see and do,” he says, making Albemarle more resilient than communities banking on only one tourist attraction. “I think for us the significant issue is, is there going to be a general decline in the scenic beauty?” he says. “Scenic assets are fairly unrecoverable. We are supportive of the preservation of open space and scenic vistas.” Meanwhile, his office continues to send visitors to Shenandoah and hope for the best—even on Code Red air quality days.

John Holden is the manager of Blue Ridge Mountain Sports, in the Barracks Road Shopping Center, and a hiking guide in the West Virginia mountains. He says that his store hasn’t seen any significant drop in business because of Shenandoah’s declining visitation. “While air pollution affects visitation to the park, overall feelings about the park are positive,” he says. Still, he believes that pollution in Shenandoah may be preventing some out-of-state visitors from coming in the first place. “Certainly the negative publicity for the park has taken those people and sent them to other places,” he says.

 

In June, the NPCA released a report on Shenandoah, authored by McKew, which can only be described as gloomy. It details serious budget shortfalls that hamper park officials’ ability to manage pollution, as well as staff shortages, outdated management plans and development encroaching on park boundaries. For “stewardship capacity,” the park was given an overall score of 63 out of 100. For stewardship of air quality, the score was just 38. But McKew says park officials are doing the best they can.

“The stewardship capacity rating in the report was never designed to reflect the park’s management of itself, but how well they were given the tools to manage the resources,” she says. While costs went up 31 percent between 1980 and 2000, she says, the park budget increased only 24 percent. “The park’s done a very good job of making ends met, trimming a little thing here, a little thing there,” she says. “Now they’re seriously looking at cutting visitor services,” like ranger and visitors centers.

McKew believes the Federal government is to blame. “Ultimately the responsibility runs right back to Congress,” she says. “It’s Congress that controls the legislation and money and staffing levels in our national park system. They’re ultimately the stewards.”

McKew and others also complain that the Bush administration is trying to weaken pollution controls. Though the administration claims its proposed “Clear Skies” program will reduce emissions and make pollution regulation less convoluted, environmentalists have attacked it for not requiring industry to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. The existing Clean Air Act, they say, has bigger teeth.

Notably, the power industry favors the Clear Skies plan. “The current administration seems intent on weakening preservation and protection of natural spaces for the sake of economic short-term gains,” says Holden.

 

From Congress to the State DEQ, all levels of government have some responsibility for fixing air pollution. Though he’s not making excuses for the Feds, Jeff Werner emphasizes local solutions to local problems. He says that looking down from Shenandoah is more than a momentary disappointment. “Why would people in Albemarle and Charlottesville be concerned that some elderly couple from Iowa was not impressed with the view from Skyline Drive?” he asks. “Well, because it indicates that something is happening. Air pollution is telling us something.”

The PEC recently produced a mock newspaper called the “Albemarle County Clarion” that warns of high-density development in Albemarle’s designated Rural Areas—95 percent of the County—which are zoned for up to 110,000 homes. (There were 33,000 in 2000 when the last Census was taken). “Albemarle should either revise its ordinance to be consistent with the intent of its Rural Area policy, or rename the Rural Area the ‘Suburban Area,’” he says.

The PEC’s strategy primarily focuses on frightening middle-class homeowners with visions of scenery ruined by cheap-looking sprawl. But Werner says sprawl menaces more than the view. “It’s the dispersed development that we’re concerned about,” he says. “That does create the need to drive everywhere.”

Tobin Scipione, director of the Charlottesville-based Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation, agrees and says that auto emissions, in turn, are a culprit in some health problems. “School nurses and doctors will tell you that there’s an air quality problem in most places. They’re seeing growing incidents of asthma and upper respiratory problems in children and seniors.”

Interestingly, no one knows just how bad local air pollution is in the first place. Other counties in Virginia have air-quality monitors—small machines that measure the amount of ozone at ground level—and there’s one in Shenandoah National Park. On a recommendation from the Department of Transportation, the Charlottesville-Albemarle Metropolitan Planning Organization has considered siting a monitor in Albemarle County, but so far none exists. Werner says the MPO may be afraid of what the monitor would show. “When you begin to determine you have pollution, a lot of localities are concerned about what the implications are,” he says. “Once you have the data you have to pay for it.”

Specifically, if ozone levels were high enough, Albemarle could be declared a Nonattainment Zone by the DEQ. This would make road-building projects much harder to implement. “You have to actually prove that any transportation project will not exacerbate the current situation, which is very hard to do,” says Holmes. Chances are, a monitor in Albemarle would deliver bad news. “Every single county [in Virginia] that has a monitor is classified Nonattainment,” he says. “That tells you something.” In fact, the American Lung Association has recommended that the entire state of Virginia be declared a Nonattainment Zone.

Scipione says that air pollution data, cheerful or not, is something the County needs. “There’s a very real, very human issue, which is that the people of this community need to know what the quality of the air is,” she says.

 

Ultimately, Shenandoah National Park is just a long, skinny bit of land around which humans have drawn an arbitrary line. As a national park, its pollution problems receive special attention. But as part of a greater ecosystem, it’s a bellwether for its entire region. “You can’t create small zones of ecological diversity and expect them to stay diverse without creating connections to other zones,” says Holmes.

McKew says there is a need to update the basic philosophy behind national park protection. “The truth about the national parks is they were created with an eye toward finding the interesting places and protecting them because they were seen as good tourism destinations,” she says. “There’s a movement in conservation circles to expand the thinking so these aren’t islands, they’re considered part of the larger ecology.”

The urban symphony 

Asleep like the dead in a womblike curl of blankets, the silence is perfect. Snoring is the only sound, like a tree falling in the woods over and over, except no one is awake to hear it.

Then at 6am my alarm clock honks, honks, honks, prying my eyes open. I go into this dark morning, as I do every day, gently as the Incredible Hulk. Bad noise! Stop noise! Smash!!! Let some other early bird have my share of the worms. I want peace and quiet.

So I wrestle the enemy, the snooze button, lose, and try to enjoy the gentler sounds of waking up—the hissing, sprinkling shower, the gurgling coffee machine. I turn on CNN, hear the stern authority of voices more alarming than any clock, and turn it off.

It’s an hour when reasonable people ought to be sleeping, but even now the sounds of bustling, striving life fill the city. People jog, sneakers pounding the sidewalk. Delivery trucks huff down deserted streets, beneath tree canopies alive with the conversations of birds. Keys jingle, engines turn over, a dog barks. On Douglas Avenue, a forklift rumbles and steel beams clank as workers building the Belmont Lofts begin their day. In an adjacent yard, a rooster crows.

As the city wakes up, the sounds of us working, living and playing rise up like instruments in a symphony. This can be music, like the murmur of voices outside a coffeeshop. Or it can be noise, like the jackhammer outside your window. Regardless, the sounds we make tell a story. Light reflects off buildings and people, telling us what Charlottesville looks like, but the sound waves flowing in our streets and through our walls tell us what we’re doing.

Most of the conversations about Charlottesville’s future focus on what the city will look like. Sound, although often neglected, is a powerful force that influences how we perceive our environment. As Tony Hiss writes in his book The Experience of Place, the sensorial qualities of a city—the shapes, sounds and textures of our homes, offices, neighborhoods and streets—communicate feeling and experience, whether we consciously notice them or not.

"Whatever we experience in a place is both a serious environmental issue and a deeply personal one," Hiss writes.

In a growing, changing environment like Charlottesville and Albemarle, Hiss would argue that paying attention to sound helps us to better understand the place where we live. And as our places change, through population growth, demographic shifts and real estate development, sound can tell us what we’re gaining, and what we’re losing.

As the City and County grow, the sounds grow richer, more diverse, louder. Quiet becomes a luxury item. "The sound of Charlottesville is the sound of a community evolving into its next phase," says Bill Morrish, an architecture professor at UVA. "The question is, is it music or is it noise?"

Charlottesville and Albemarle each enforce noise laws that try to regulate how different places sound. Nevertheless, noise continues to provoke conflict in neighborhoods as varied as Keswick, Belmont and the Fashion Square Mall [see sidebars]. Our pursuit of silence is a big reason suburban sprawl has gobbled up Albemarle’s farmland. As City Council plans to increase the allowable density in Charlottesville, matters of noise are included in the debate.

"The issues about noise are symbols for the larger issues about us living together," says Morrish. "This city is going from one set of rhythms to a diverse set of rhythms. It’s happening in many places, and it’s happening fast. How are we going to mix these things?"

 

Groove equations

It doesn’t matter whether you’re working, dancing, making love or making a city—finding your rhythm is always a good thing.

"Why is it that you can be engrossed in a book, completely oblivious, but if a Brazilian rhythm comes on the radio you can’t help but start tapping your feet," wonders Dave Van Valkenburg. "Rhythm has the power to move the body without your even desiring it."

To earn his doctorate in psychology at UVA, Van Valkenburg is studying the galloping sensation people perceive when they hear a series of tones played at a certain speed and frequency—in hipper parlance, "the groove." He’s trying to figure out why music has the power to move us in such irresistible ways, and how people hear a roomful of instruments and perceive the sounds as a symphony.

Before the 1950s, science mostly focused on visual perception. But as inventions like the telephone and phonograph made sound an increasingly important component of modern life, science began to grapple with the mystery of how we hear.

In his experiments, Van Valkenburg sends his subjects to a dark closet in his lab space in Gilmer Hall. He sits them in front of a computer and fits bowl-shaped headphones over their ears. He plays a repeating pattern of five tones that alternate from high to low.

First he plays the tones slowly, and you can easily hear each individual note. But as Van Valkenburg increases the speed of the sequence, the three high tones group together into a cascading triplet layered atop the alternating bass notes. Now it sounds like two patterns instead of one, and they form one unified galloping sensation. You’re in the groove, baby; and according to Van Valkenburg’s research, everyone generally finds the groove in similar combinations of tempo and frequency.

"That galloping sensation doesn’t have to happen," Van Valkenburg says. "Under some circumstances it does, and under some circumstances it doesn’t. I’m looking for a model to figure out when that would happen, which is ultimately a question of how and why sounds go together."

In essence, he wants to capture a groove equation, a mathematical expression of the phenomenon that makes music so infectious and that makes some songwriters very rich.

Well, it’s not that simple. Van Valkenburg’s experiments use pure sine-wave tones. Changing timbre—the complex overtones that make an oboe’s C completely different than a Stratocaster C—skews the data. Timbre is generally defined as the characteristic of a sound (besides frequency and amplitude) that makes it sound the way it does.

"That’s not a good definition. It says what timbre is not, but not what it is," Van Valkenburg says. "The truth is, we don’t really know what makes an instrument sound the way it does." In other words, nobody’s going to come up with a formula for Jimi Hendrix anytime soon.

Van Valkenburg’s experiments prove, if nothing else, the power of sound. "Some people can do the tests for one or two hours, then they have to stop," he says. "They can’t take the beeping. But one kid came in and did like six or seven hours in one day. He said he dreamed about beeps all night."

Van Valkenburg hopes his research will help him formulate a theory that when we hear complex layers of sound, such as a symphony, our hearing transfers some aural information to our motor system. Tapping our toes and drumming our fingers, he says, may be helping us hear. "It’s almost like you need to move your body to hear the music," he says.

As a by-product of human activity, sound is an important part of how we experience and remember our environment. We can come to associate sounds not only with tapping toes and snapping fingers but with our most intimate loves and fears, too. The sounds of flowing water and crashing waves, for example, rank high among people’s favorite sounds, while crying babies and car alarms are universally loathed.

"You know how a cat’s body vibrates when it purrs, when it’s sitting on your belly? That’s my favorite sound," says Allison Benner, a hostess at South Street Brewery.

A nearby customer, Charlie, says his favorite sound reminds him of the house in the country where he used to live. "It’s the sound of a wood thrush in a dark forest," he says. "It’s a really small, shy bird. You hardly ever see them. But they’ve got this great voice. You can hear them in isolated areas around dawn and twilight."

For 21-year-old Mimi Robinson, the worst sound in the world is someone mispronouncing her name. "It sounds like Jimmy," she says, giving the correct pronunciation. But, she concedes, when the right person says her name the right way on the first try, it could be her favorite sound of all.

 

Can you hear me now? 

A flowing river, a singing bird, a whispered name. Any can sound like music to people’s ears. But unwanted sound—that is, noise—can cause real problems.

The human ear can perceive sounds as low as a single decibel. Sounds greater than 75 decibels (about the volume of normal freeway traffic or a flushing toilet) can set off alarms in the nervous system. When confronted with loud, prolonged noise, the body reacts as if it were in danger. Muscles tense, breathing and heartbeats accelerate and small blood vessels constrict. Such tension raises blood pressure and cholesterol levels, two conditions which are associated with heart problems. Noise above 85 decibels (think of a noisy bar) can cause hearing damage over time. Noises above 140 decibels (like a firecracker or a rock singer screaming into a microphone) are above the human threshold of pain and can cause damage with a single exposure.

As Van Valkenburg points out, we never hear just one sound at a time. Whether we are asleep or awake, our ears detect any noise within hearing distance, a collage of sound scientists call the "auditory stream". We can shut out the sights of the city, if we want, but we have no choice but to live with each other’s sound. There is no eyelid for the ear.

Charlottesville and Albemarle each have noise ordinances that state that people have a right to be protected from excessive sound that "may jeopardize the public health, welfare, peace and safety or degrade the quality of life" (Charlottesville City Code, Section 16-2). Both City and County noise laws both prohibit specific noise, like loud music or machinery, but the primary clauses in both ordinances make it a crime "for any person to create or allow to be created any unreasonably loud, disturbing, raucous or unnecessary noise. Noise of such character, when its intensity and duration is detrimental to the life or health of any person, or which unreasonably disturbs or annoys the quiet, comfort or repose of any person, is hereby prohibited" (Albemarle County Code Section 7-104). Simply put, don’t pollute your neighbor’s auditory stream.

The City and County noise laws apply only to sound generated in residential areas. In Charlottesville, nighttime limits are 55 decibels (the volume of a normal conversation), measured at the property boundary, between 10pm and 6am; 65 decibels (the volume of a busy office) is the daytime limit. Noises audible at a distance of 100 feet are also prohibited.

The same decibel levels apply to multi-family housing. Owners or tenants can ask police to measure sound four feet from the wall, ceiling or floor nearest the source, "with doors to the receiving area closed and windows in the normal position for the season." Theoretically, if you sing in the shower, your neighbor can ask the police to make sure your caterwauling doesn’t break the law.

Vehicles, too, are subject to noise laws in the City, required to stay below 90 decibels at a distance of 50 feet. Vehicles engaged in interstate commerce are exempt.

The County ordinance is much briefer than the City’s, generally relying on the clause that prohibits people from bothering others with their noise. The County is tougher on cars, specifically forbidding drivers from causing too much noise by peeling out or revving their engines. Like the City, the County exempts noise caused by public events, parades, athletic contests, public facilities, church bells, construction, demolition and yard maintenance. The County also tolerates noise from the lawful discharge of firearms, animals and free expression protected under the First Amendment—as long as it’s not amplified.

As a place where people work, play and live in a public setting, the Downtown Mall is governed by the City’s most liberal noise laws.

Charlottesville’s City Code Section 16-10 covers the Downtown Business District: "It shall be unlawful for any person to make, cause or continue any sound generation in such a manner as to unreasonably disturb the comfort, health, peace, quiet, safety, or welfare of others" from 10pm to 6am Sunday through Thursday, and from 12:01am to 6am on Saturdays.

On Friday, it’s okay to be a little louder, so long as you don’t exceed 75 decibels at 10 feet.

You can also be guilty of a noise violation on the Mall if "a person of normal hearing acuity" offers "credible testimony" that you made a noise "plainly audible above the background noise level at a distance of 125 feet or more from the source of the sound generation." The laws do not apply to a "community event," such as Friday’s After Five, or any event with a special-use permit. Also exempt are emergency signals, public and private transportation and refuse collection or sanitation services.

The Mall flows with Charlottesville’s richest aural streams––a ringing bell, the trolley’s engine groaning through the Second Street crossing. Sandals thwacking. Splashing water. Fragments of conversation: I look 18, don’t I?…I’m enjoying not working…If I don’t like the way it tastes, do I have to pay for it?

Every block has its own music—the hardcore rock sounds of a Fugazi record blasting from an apartment window. Rubber mallets on a wooden "slit drum." Guitars, a lute, male and female voices: It’s corn shucking tiiiime… Bob Marley’s "Iron Lion Zion" greeting shoppers at an office supply store. A Beatles cover band soundchecking in the Amphitheater. A woman named Stormy shaking her hips and a tambourine beside a boom box tuned to some country station, beckoning pedestrians to slip dollar bills into the teakettle at her feet.

"I used to come down here with my sister years ago, and we’d each make like $60," she says. "But now, there’s so much more competition."

Is this music or noise? It depends on the sounds, how they mix and flow and bounce off buildings, says architecture professor Morrish. But it also depends on the aesthetics of the listener.

"The mix of sounds is attractive to some people," says Morrish, recalling the energy of New York City’s aural landscape. "There’s music in it. The Downtown Mall is a great example. It’s such an interesting place because you have everything from voices to harmonicas to the hum of traffic. But if you live in a neighborhood four blocks away, all those sounds are considered a nuisance."

 

The price of silence 

Noise laws have their origin in England’s industrial age, written side-by-side with the first zoning codes that drew boundaries between industry and residential life. "The first noise laws were designed to protect wealthy people from the noise of industry and the rabble of the street," says Morrish.

In Charlottesville and Albemarle, industrial noise is mostly a thing of the past. There are still pockets where it exists, of course—River Road, northeast of Downtown, still screams with the noise of machines, as do the auto repair shops on Hinton Avenue in Belmont. Almost any sound is allowed in such industrial areas, which is why City officials had to find a different reason to close down Belmont’s Pudhouse, a warehouse that hosted underground rock shows [see sidebar, page 14]. CSX and Amtrak trains still rumble through the center of the city just south of Downtown. Every night, the huge locomotives pulling cars full of people or coal shake the foundations of some of the most valuable real estate in Central Virginia.

By and large, however, the noise of industry and the rabble of the street are just memories in Charlottesville and Albemarle. "We ship all those jobs to India," quips Morrish. But sound is still a close relative of our zoning laws.

Most residences in Charlottesville are single-family homes, the choice for those affluent enough to insulate themselves from the sounds of their neighbors—the embarrassing shouting matches you hear from an upstairs apartment, or the equally embarrassing squeaks and moans from the bedrooms afterward.

In Albemarle, the promise that you can buy enough space to escape the unpleasant sounds of your community and your neighbors is taken to an even greater extreme. Despite their name, the so-called rural areas that make up 95 percent of the County allow development. Property can be divided into five units totaling no more than 31 acres, and the rest of the property can legally accommodate one house per 21 acres. The ideals of silence and tranquility make those properties very valuable, especially for people who think Charlottesville has become too urban.

Crozet is one of the fastest-growing suburban areas, as people seek out a combination of rural tranquility and urban convenience. There, a forest of oddly shaped yet perfectly identical brown houses dot the hillside in a subdivision called "The Highlands at Mechums River," where $200,000 will get you a house on about two acres. On a recent afternoon at 6pm, the silence was broken only by the swell and decrescendo of cicadas.

"Everyone comments on how quiet this neighborhood is. That’s what I love about it," says Krista Weih, taking a stroll with her one-and-a-half year-old son, Aibek Quirk. "If a flock of geese is flying over, you can hear the flapping wings. Another great sound here is the ice cream truck that comes through and rings its bell."

Highlands resident Andrew Bishop says he doesn’t hear too much construction noise from the homes that are still being built on the hillside. The worst sound, he says, is the mechanical cacophony of lawn maintenance.

"There’s too many blowers. Those are always annoying, especially on Sundays. You hear them all day long," says Bishop.

Much of Albemarle’s growth consists of people seeking refuge from bigger East Coast cities. Those people tend to be more tolerant of noise, says realtor Susan Reppert.

"The thing I’ve noticed," she says, "is that people who move here from someplace else, especially other cities, aren’t particularly choosy about living close to a road. It’s the people who have lived here for a while that are seeking out a little bit of silence."

For some people, even the country is too noisy. "We get complaints about tractor noise in the morning," says Joan McDowell, a County rural planner. "One farmer says when he weans his calves, they make a lot of noise."

Reppert says people are always asking about quiet properties, but no one ever asks for a home where they can hear what Morrish considers the urban symphony. The prospect of noise, especially of cars, can "really detract" from the value of a home in the County’s subdivisions and rural areas, she says.

The City, however, is pushing in a different direction. The zoning laws recently given tentative approval by City Council will dramatically increase the density in Charlottesville. Part of the new ordinance will put expensive condominiums, lofts and apartments in areas that are also zoned to allow commercial activity. Developers are hoping that trends will reverse and people who can afford to chose between city and country housing will opt for the urban symphony of a diverse environment over the tranquil uniformity of the suburbs.

"Around here, we have the contradictory desire to have all the services of a densely packed city and all the evening sounds in a quiet countryside," says Morrish. "Look at Jefferson. He loved Paris, but he set Monticello away from the city. As this region grows and gets richer, it’s going to have to change the definition of what it sounds like."

Say what? 
The listening process is complex and poetic. It can also be dangerous.

Sound forms when an event in the environment causes an object to vibrate. This vibration causes adjacent air molecules to vibrate, and sound waves travel through the compression and expansion of any elastic medium—air, water or solid objects. Since there is no air outside the earth’s atmosphere, outer space is perfectly silent.

When we hear, the question mark-shaped cartilage appendages that keep our glasses secure channel sound waves that vibrate our eardrum. This transmits the vibration across tiny bones in the middle ear—the hammer, anvil and stirrup—which actually evolved from gills that were no longer needed.

These bones act as amplifiers, pushing sound through the cochlea, a fluid-filled bone shaped like a snail shell. On the left side of the body, the cochlea spirals left. On the right side, it spirals right. As waves move through the cochlea’s fluid, they stimulate hair-like appendages on cells that translate the mechanical energy into electrical impulses. The brain turns these signals into images—the whoosh of traffic on 29N, a cash register, the dreadlocked harmonica guy playing a tune. Whether we are asleep or awake, our ears hear everything within hearing distance.

Sound is measured in decibels, which describe the relative wave pressure of two sounds. Typically, decibels refer to the difference between one sound and the ambient background noise of an environment.

How loud is too loud? According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, hearing damage can occur if a person is exposed to sounds at 85 decibels for eight hours, 110 decibels for one minute and 29 seconds, or instantaneously if the sound is greater than 140 decibels. The human ear can perceive changes of about 3 decibels; when a sound increases by 10 decibels, people perceive the sound has become twice as loud.

The table at right lists the decibel levels of some common sounds.—J.B.

 

Sounds like teen spirit
Shopping with the party people at Abercrombie & Fitch

The promenade at Fashion Square Mall resonates with layers of voices and music, from the lite jazz trickling from speakers hung near faux-Jeffersonian skylights to Britney Spears seeping from the bright Disney store.

"It always sounds like a babbling brook in here, the way the voices resonate," says one man watching his children scream and cavort on a Thomas Jefferson play area outside J.C. Penney’s.

Walking past a Precious Memories picture frame stand, the gentle aural mixture disappears in the overwhelming thump of a dance track laced with a songbird voice: I want to be freeeee… The robotic music perfectly compliments the emotionless expression of a handsome, shirtless, tousle-haired young man captured in a giant black-and-white portrait standing in the doorway of Abercrombie & Fitch, the source of the music.

On a recent Friday night, Abercrombie & Fitch is easily the loudest store in Fashion Square Mall. "We get complaints all the time," says a bright-eyed clerk, who asked not to be named, citing a company policy forbidding employees from talking to the press. The national chain is being sued for alleged racially discriminatory hiring practices.

At A&F, the sound sends as many messages as the images about who is—and who is not—welcome there. First, the sheer volume repels adults, reflecting the store’s 18-25 target demographic. The music is strictly white-bread techno, featuring computer-perfect production. No hip-hop, no rock, no funk, no soul. Strange, since the artificially frayed, dirty jeans that sell for $60 at the store exude Hootie and the Blowfish more than Justin Timberlake.

The official noise policy at Fashion Square Mall is that stores can play whatever music they chose, so long as it stays inside the "lease line," says Misty Parsons, marketing director at Fashion Square. She says she most often hears noise complaints about Abercrombie & Fitch, as well as Sam Goody.

"We don’t have too much problem with noise here," says Parsons, although she says she’s seen e-mails concerning A&F’s problems with noise in other malls.

According to a customer service representative for A&F, company policy dictates that an outlet’s music should always be kept between 80 and 85 decibels.

"That’s within OSHA’s regulation," says the rep, named Denise. "Technically, if a customer comes in and complains, the manager isn’t supposed to have access to change the volume."

If the problem ever came to a head at Fashion Square, Parsons says the mall’s general manager would have to call A&F corporate headquarters to negotiate a solution. Customers may not be too upset, but what about the employees? Is it hard to work in an environment where bad techno pulses as loud as a shouted conversation? "I just try to tune it out," says the clerk. "All I can say is, this is the only store I’ve been in where we see customers dancing."––J.B.

Requiem for the Pudhouse
Noise and a club crawl doom the City’s coolest rock venue 

For legions of gutterpunks, goths, hip scensters and indie rockers, the Pudhouse was more than just a practice space for rock bands. In recent years, the twin warehouse buildings on Goodman Street in north Belmont served as a flophouse, anarchist ‘zine library, clubhouse, woodworking shop, art space and socialist rock utopia. But for all the anti-capitalist ranting and libertine cavorting of staple Pudhouse bands like The Racists of Farmville and The Dirty Fingers, the most dangerous thing coming out of the Pudhouse, apparently, was soundwaves.

According to local oral history, the Pudhouse was born in 2000 when Bostonites Colin Matthews and Tom Hohmann moved to Charlottesville and leased room A3 at 106 Goodman St. from landlord Richard Spurzem. With a cabal of creative and often unwashed cohorts, Matthews and Hohmann brought in underground rock bands who performed with the promise of a free meal, an attentive crowd and the proceeds from a passed hat. Residents in the neighborhoods east of Downtown, however, didn’t care to hear the strains of Aluminum Noise or Praying for Oblivion at 2am (not an uncommon starting time for Pudhouse shows).

The diverse bands had one thing in common––high volume. But there was nothing City officials could do. The lot is zoned M-1, or light industrial, and therefore not covered by the City’s noise ordinance.

"There were complaints about [the Pudhouse] for a long time," says City attorney Craig Brown. "But the noise ordinance only applies to sound that’s generated in a residential district."

Then, in July, a music writer included the Pudhouse in an article about local clubs. This gave City zoning and planning director Jim Tolbert an idea.

"The article talked about the Pudhouse as a music venue, but that building wasn’t designed as a music venue," says Tolbert, citing the Pud’s lack of restrooms and handicap accessibility.

The Pudhouse does have a bathroom, though. And since no one ever charged admission or sold drinks there, it’s hard to see the difference between a house party with a band and a Pudhouse show. Furthermore, music venues like Starr Hill and Tokyo Rose—not to mention most of the UVA frat houses that host bands—aren’t handicap accessible, either. "That place [the Pudhouse] is approved for storage, period," Tolbert replied.

On July 11, Tolbert told Pudhouse leasers Tyler Magill and Davis Salsbury that they didn’t have an occupancy permit, and the Pudhouse had to stop holding "illegal assemblies." Tolbert says the Pud could host shows again if the renters and Spurzem approached the City and drew up a new site plan for the site that would include new entrances and exits plus more parking.

"That’s not going to happen," says Magill. "If we had known people in those neighborhoods could hear us, we would have taken care of it. But, there won’t be any more shows at the Pudhouse."––J.B.

 

The sound of wine-ing
County winery has to fight for its right to ferment

"Good fences make good neighbors" says the famous poem by Robert Frost. But when sound crosses property lines, it’s time to call the lawyers.

Last year, Albert and Cindy Shornberg announced they were planning to open a retail space at their Keswick Vineyards. Neighbor Art Beltrone, who owns a horse farm 600 feet from the winery, launched a campaign to stop the Shornbergs, complaining about dust from incoming traffic, strangers milling about and noise. Beltrone boards horses on his property, and he says several customers decided not to leave their animals there because of the noise.

At the June 11 meeting of Albemarle’s Board of Supervisors, Beltrone’s lawyer, Richard Carter, said the Board should force the Shornbergs to install a noise suppressor on the chiller units.

The Shornbergs unleashed their own lawyer, of course. Their attorney, Garrett Smith, told the Board that Beltrone––a former publicist for Keswick Winery––harbored a "long-standing animosity" toward the Shornbergs, who refused in 2001 to purchase Beltrone’s property. At the June meeting, Beltrone denied there was any animosity.

In the end, the Board of Supervisors rejected Beltrone’s arguments and approved the retail space. For one thing, the County’s noise ordinance doesn’t apply to agricultural uses (the Board didn’t buy Carter’s claim that the winery constituted "tourism" and not an agricultural use). Furthermore, the chiller units are part of the existing winery, not the retail space.

Still, the County planning commission required the Shornbergs to pave the road leading to their winery. Also, before it opens, they will have to put in vegetation to shield the noise from the chillers. Beltrone now says he’s satisfied. "Things are much quieter now," he says.––J.B.

Fall. The leaves change colors. The sleeves get longer. And enduring sad girls with guitars replaces tubing on the James as the recreational activity of choice. The new cultural season is almost here, and C-VILLE has selected the best bets in music, art, stage, film and more to keep you busy from now until December. Some names to remember: Zephyrus, Kiwirrkura Village, How to Marry a Millionaire, Roxana Robinson, Loudon Wainwright III and Bernarda Alba. All these and more will carry you from perfecting your summer tan to more intellectual, but no less excellent, adventures in the coming months. And check in every week to C-VILLE’s GetOutNow section to find out who else should be on your need-to-know list in our City’s culture club.

MUSIC

Some may harrumph and grouse about the supposed poverty of exciting bands slated to play the City this fall. Pop fans squealed in anticipation when a certain Ivy-based music website recently floated the rumor that Jewel had booked Starr Hill. It proved false (shocking!), and if your idea of excitement is a folk star turned dance diva, the coming months will indeed find you sorely out of luck. However, if you crave alt-country heroes, wild fiddlers, the return of ’80s pop stars, ’90s grunge rock beauties and, more importantly, the return of a beloved local musician, then start saving your pennies.

The Gravity Lounge, the Internet café/art gallery/performance venue recently opened in The Terraces, closes out this month with the return of Lauren Hoffman on August 30, hosted by well-known local performers Devon Sproule and Paul Curreri. Not long after the release of 1999’s From the Blue House, Hoffman—a former Virgin Records artist and one of the City’s cherished virtuosos—abruptly ended her “Shut Up and Listen!” concert series, quit the music scene and vanished. Even if briefly, she’s come home for an anticipated and, no doubt, well-attended performance. Hoffman plays again on September 18, joined by Jan Smith, who fills the venue’s Thursday night slots this fall. The next night Pat DiNizio of The Smithereens, the classic ’80s “new wave” band found on the Desperately Seeking Susan soundtrack, joins Lance Brenner, the lead singer of local group The Naked Puritans. Halloween may find you back at the Lounge to soak up the fiddling prowess of Laura Light, a nationally respected locally-based singer and composer.

DiNizio isn’t the only ’80s rock demi-god in town on September 19. Even Fridays After 5, the consistently rained-out series brought to us by the Charlottesville Downtown Foundation, has something to offer. Foreigner’s lead singer Lou Gramm, this year’s postponed superstar, finally graces the Downtown Amphitheater on his solo tour, and we pray he retains the good sense to sing “Double Vision” or “Waiting for a Girl Like You” through that frizzled mop of hair.

All the mindless ’80s music may send you screaming and full of thanks to The Prism, the bastion of Rugby Road and favored stop of solid, earnest, acoustic acts. September 25 brings together Darrell Scott, a Nashville singer/songwriter now known for penning Dixie Chicks hits recently crushed by pro-war bulldozers, and Beppe Gambetta, a lush Italian guitarist. The Athens, Georgia, group Dromedary visits on September 27 to play their eclectic and acclaimed music (Bolivia meets Spains meets Turkey meets Appalachia), before they hit the big time, at least as The Prism sees it, and country bluesmen Cephas & Wiggins settle down with harmonica and guitar on October 24.

Such respectable and shadowy tunes may not satisfy your urge to rock out or your deep-seated need for star identification. No Robert Plants have been confirmed, but Starr Hill Music Hall can offer you Loudon Wainwright III, one of America’s great, insolent singer/songwriters, and father of Rufus (a rising star in his own right), on September 13. For more insolence, The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash play the next week, on September 21, and no, they’re not illegitimate offspring, and no, they don’t sound like Johnny Cash, but they play newfangled country so well that the Man in Black would be proud. Recipients of critical accolades, Robert Walter’s 20th Congress unleash their top-notch brand of jazz and funk on September 23 to support the release of the new album Giving up the Ghost. The bagpipes and electric guitars of the Celtic modern rock outfit Seven Nations on October 1 precede the appearance of indie-punk superheroes Built to Spill on October 5. Flocked by leagues of loyal fans, Built to Spill love their Stratocasters and riff with electric distortion in maddeningly intricate ways. Then, of course, there’s Evan Dando. The little-grunge-heartthrob-who-tried and former Lemonheads lead drops by on October 12, in perhaps the season’s highest star wattage performance, to show off his solo album Baby I’m Bored. We hear Juliana Hatfield plays drums for Dando, too, and he’s sharing the stage with Georgia’s Vic Chestnutt, a legend in alt-country circles. Hot off a tour with Beck, The Black Keys spin hot, electronic sounds from their new record Thickfreakness on October 15, and then bluegrass superstar Sam Bush and his mandolin fulfill the City’s obsession with Americana roots music on November 1. On the local front, funk soul brothers Man Mountain Jr. hold a CD release party September 5 with hip-hopsters The Beetnix, while C-VILLE faves Vevlo Eel play September 19.

Thankfully, many of the aforementioned acts take Charlottesville audiences far afield of the loud, artless frat rock and dirty—pardon me, earthy—musicians with guitars and banjos that pervade the local scene. Wild card venues like Tokyo Rose and the Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, whose schedules are more spontaneous, will undoubtedly showcase the exciting fringes of both local and national music. The Rose features Scene Creamers, a dark and funky neo-soul outfit, on October 14, and Palomar’s catchy bubble-gum pop on November 6. Indie rockers and electronic maestros and even a few worthwhile singing guitarists will fly low, under the radar, and wow you when you’re least expecting it. Stay tuned. —Aaron Carico

 

CLASSICAL MUSIC

Charlottesville continues to be the hub of classical music in Central Virginia this fall with a full concert season of series and single events.

The first major event is the Charlottesville Chamber Music Festival at the Jefferson Theater in September and October. Excellent young musicians will perform a series of concerts of music from the 18th to the 20th centuries, including violinist/viola player Timothy Summers, cellist Raphael Bell, and pianists Judith Gordon and Lidija Bizjak, with renowned locals Pete Spaar and John D’earth contributing to the October 2 concert. The program goes as follows: September 18, music by Clara Schumann, Brahms and Dvorák; September 21, works by Beethoven, Dohnanyi and Golijov; September 25, music by Ravel, Kernis and Beethoven; September 28, works by Bach, Britten and Beethoven; and October 2, contemporary works by Kancheli, D’earth, Reich and Adams. The contemporary works, including the Kernis and Golijov, look to be of particular interest. The festival wraps up October 5 at the Woodberry Forest School with pieces by Schumann, Britten and Beethoven.

The Tuesday Evening Concert Series at Old Cabell Hall, always a sell-out, opens September 30 with a recital by the gifted young violinist Gil Shaham, accompanied by pianist Akira Eguchi, playing works by Copland, Bach and Fauré. On October 21 Colin Carr (cellist) with Lee Luvisi (pianist) performs works by Brahms and Schumann, and on November 18 the Talich String Quartet will play music by Schubert, Bartók and Dvorák.

On October 4 and 5 the Charlottesville & University Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of director Carl Roskott, inaugurates its season by performing a work by UVA professor Judith Shatin, Singing the Blue Ridge, as well as Mozart’s Oboe Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2. The soloist in the Mozart concerto will be Scott Perry, principal oboist of the Orchestra. The Orchestra performs next on November 15 and 16, with a program devoted to 20th century music, including Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by C.M. von Weber. Also to be heard are Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and selections from Copland’s Old American Songs with the University Singers conducted by Michael Sion.

Additional concerts include the UVA Chamber Music Series sponsored by the University’s music department, directed by Amy Leung and Ibby Roberts, and featuring classical and modern works, played on Sundays at 3:30pm in Old Cabell Hall by the Albemarle Ensemble and Rivanna String Quartet. Fall dates include September 21, performing Haydn’s String Quartet, Op. 54, Barber’s Summer Music, Britten’s Sinfonietta, Op. 1, and Debussy’s Sonata for flute, viola and harp. On November 9 the series feature a cello recital by Amy Leung.

The Oratorio Society, under direction of Lance Vining, will perform Orff’s Carmina Burana at PVCC’s V. Earl Dickinson Hall on October 19, and will give its traditional Candlelight Holiday Concert in Old Cabell Hall on December 14. Zephyrus, Charlottesville’s own vocal-instrumental ensemble specializing in music before 1700 under the direction of Dr. Paul Walker, can be expected to offer a program at a local church, and organ recitals are often featured at some churches in town also.

Concerts are also regularly given at Piedmont Virginia Community College, and The Prism, usually devoted to jazz and folk music, sometimes presents classical concerts by rising young artists. Keep an eye out. All in all, classical music fans should expect to be kept very busy this fall.—Martin Picker

 

 

ART

The Charlottesville art scene is changing. With the closings of Gallery Neo and Nature, showing grounds for younger—if not better, at least more imaginative—artists have been drying up. At the same time, several events this fall suggest that on some level Charlottesville has reached a new plateau. Shows at Les Yeux du Monde and the UVA Art Museum, and the opening of Second Street Gallery’s new space in the City Center for Contemporary Arts (or C3A) are all important steps.

Of course, there will also be the standard fare of gallery shows. McGuffey Art Center’s fall schedule includes paintings by Gresham Sykes and the Virginia Watercolor Society (September); oil paintings by Caroline Cobb and stained glass designs by Vee Osvalds (October); and collage artist Susan Patrick and Leon Gehorsam’s watercolors (November). Bozart Gallery’s schedule includes member artists Anne Hopper’s oils (September), Amy Mitchell Howard’s work in mixed media (October) and Vidu Parta’s oils and acrylics (November). Both close the year with annual group shows.

The more compelling shows will be at the big venues. The Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Center fall exhibitions include “Whichaway? Photographs from Kiwirrkura 1974–1996” and “Sacred Circles: The Tingari Cycle in Western Desert Art” (August 23–November). In the former, Jon Rhodes documents 22 years in the life of the Kiwirrkura village in Western Australia. The latter focuses on the symbolism of the graphic circles that represent the Dreaming, the ancestral journeys of the aborigines. Together they present an interesting balance between an outsider’s interpretation and the portrayal of ancient aboriginal lore.

With its recent exhibition “Modern Masters,” Les Yeux du Monde seemed posed to be a bigger commercial dealer. Is there any other for-profit space in the region offering up such art stars as Basquiat and Andy Warhol? With its fall roster of local artists that include photographs by Barnaby Draper (October), paintings by Lincoln Perry (November) and drawings by Beatrix Ost (December), Les Yeux du Monde will, for the moment, return to more local roots. With September’s “Hindsight/Fore-site Revisited,” works by the artists from the last year’s original “Hindsight/Fore-site” project will be exhibited. Many, like Todd Murphy and Barbara MacCullum, represent the growing number of area artists with reputations farther afield. With this exhibition, Les Yeux du Monde reminds us of the strong arts undercurrent running through the community.

Les Yeux also gets in on the 16th Annual Virginia Film Festival, showing a documentary about three VCU artists (October). This year’s festival theme, “$,” will also be the theme of the City-wide Fringe Festival—an all arts collaboration between the studio arts, art history, drama, dance, music, architecture, and creative writing departments at the University taking place October 17-November 2. The Fringe Festival showcases the work of student artists, as well as some locals. In the past, it has been a big, rambling affair with an art opening one night and a large dance party the weekend of the festival. Although the quality of the work is sure to be as varied as the work itself, it promises to be interesting.

Also in conjunction with the Film Festival, the UVA Art Museum will present “Third Memory,” a video installation by Pierre Huyghe (October 21–November 30). The rest of the museum’s scheduled exhibitions run the gamut from “Roads Taken: 20th Century Prints and Drawings from the Collection” (August 16–October 5), new work by Gay Outlaw—known originally for his sculptures built with pastries (August 30–October 12), O. Winston Link’s photographs of the dying railroad industry (October 11–December 21) and “The Moon has No Home,” Japanese woodblock prints (November 22–March 2004).

This fall also marks the culmination of Tim Rollins’ residency at the University. This past year, Rollins brought the Kids of Survival (K.O.S.) project to Charlottesville. Rollins trained University students in his unique teaching methods and led workshops with the children participating in the University Art Museum’s summer program. The students made works based on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream. The result, “Purple with Love’s Wound” (September 19–November 9), is the final stage in the project. The exhibition features the large-scale collage made by the students in the workshops.

By far the most anticipated—and long-reaching—event of the fall will be the opening of Second Street Gallery’s new home in the C3A on Water Street. The old space will close with a fitting tribute to the community that supports it. “Artists Among Us: Art by Second Street Gallery Artists Members” (September 5–28) will feature—well, artist members. The new space will open with “30 Years: Three Decades of New Art at Second Street Gallery” (November 7–February 1), an exhibition of new work by 56 past exhibitors. The exhibition features national artists like Shelby Lee Adams, Emmett Gowin and Mel Chin. Regional artists will include Dean Dass, Sally Mann and Anne Slaughter.

It is a significant achievement to pass one’s 30th year as an alternative art space. This exhibition and the catalogue that accompany it should be viewed as an accomplishment for both the arts community and the City at large. It also signals the beginning of a whole new era for area artists.—Emily Smith

 

 

STAGE

What glistening treasures this fall await the theatergoer’s quest for entertainment? What juicy fruits will bloom on the trees of drama’s autumnal orchard? While dates remain hazy and program changes may occur, here are some first glimmers of what you can expect, what’s likely to seem important and be important, and a few predictions on the good, the bad and the ugly.

On September 19, Live Arts opens Coffeehouse 13, its last show in the company’s current home on E. Market Street before moving this fall to the City Center for Contemporary Arts—or C3A—currently being built on Water Street. The new theater isn’t finished, and funding is stretched tighter than Roseanne Barr’s trampoline, so expect the well-oiled Live Arts publicity engine to hype, hype, hype the new space. The hype is entirely justified, but for the general public this final coffeehouse is the more important event.

Coffeehouses were collections of locally written skits presented in a cabaret style. This show’s theme will be “diversity.” You may think Live Arts discussing diversity is like a cigarette company discussing physical fitness. But that’s the point. Coffeehouses past lampooned Charlottesville, the Downtown scene and Live Arts itself. It was a healthy corrective and a rare virtue in the modern world: ironic self-awareness. Some of the skits will fall flat, some of the acting will be bad, but Coffeehouse 13 should be entertaining overall. And for those of us who remember when the Downtown scene really was a scene and Live Arts a self-governing group of artist wannabes, Coffeehouse 13 will mark a bittersweet goodbye.

In early October UVA Drama opens The House of Bernarda Alba by Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca. It’s about matriarchal domination and sexual repression. You thought Russian literature was depressing? Bring your elephant-strength intravenous Prozac boosters to this one.

Also in early October, Barboursville’s Four County Players will present Neil Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs, one of Simon’s sweet, gently comic autobiographical plays. Four County usually does a good job with this sort of material. Watch Bernada Alba and Brighton Beach on consecutive nights to see if the contrast will cause your head to explode.

In late October Offstage Theater opens A Fortune in Antarctica at a yet-to-be-determined location. It’s a story of explorers competing to rescue a fellow adventurer who has been taken captive by penguins. For those offended by C-VILLE’s theater commentary over the last couple years, bring tomatoes to throw. The script is by this paper’s regular theater critic—me. Maybe if you bring a clipping of a nasty comment I’ve written about you, Offstage will discount your ticket.

UVA’s second show of the season will be November’s Way of the World by William Congreve. It’s a Restoration classic, urbane and cynical, about a witty woman and a witty man who want to marry in a world where everyone else is a hypocrite or a fool. The big deal here is the show will be directed by visiting artist Sabin Epstein, former resident director of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco.

Early December brings the opening of Live Arts’ new space on Water Street with Grapes of Wrath. The script by Frank Galati was apparently developed over several years by the famed Steppenwolf Theatre of Chicago. Of course, it’s from the John Steinbeck novel of the same name. Okies, forced from their Dust Bowl homes during the Great Depression, arrive in California to find their troubles have barely begun. Although Live Arts’ new theater isn’t yet finished, the proportions of the stage area are beautiful, and director Betsy Tucker’s reputation should ensure a good talent pool. Grapes should be a moving show.

Also in early December, Four County Players presents an adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. This is a family-oriented show, of course, meaning children will be enthralled, adults will be relieved, and teenagers will feign petulant embarrassment.

In middle-to-late December, Offstage will present a satirical Christmas show for the Scrooge in all of us, with any luck in the new space being completed behind Rapture restaurant.

Staunton’s Shenandoah Shakespeare company also has a full slate this fall in the Blackfriars Playhouse, including continuing summer fare like King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing and Knight of the Burning Pestle (September through November), followed by Moliere’s farce Tartuffe, the world premiere of The Holiday Knight (based on Pestle and featuring holiday songs throughout the ages), and the annual A Christmas Carol. In 2004 look forward to Antony and Cleopatra, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Importance of Being Earnest and Henry IV, Part One.

Also keep your eyes open for shows from Piedmont’s ever-improving drama department, student projects in UVA’s Helms, offerings from the sporadic ACT I and Scottsville’s Horseshoe Bend Players.

Looking ahead to 2004, look for Live Arts to stage the regional premieres of Pulitzer Prize-winner Topdog/Underdog and David Mamet’s Boston Marriage (January), as well as current Broadway smash Nine (based on Federico Fellini’s 8 1/2, March), The Play About the Baby (April) and artistic director John Gibson’s labor of love, Angels in America: Part 1, finally comes to Charlottesville in June.

As for quality, most of the plays above will be too long with too many “deep” melodramatic pauses and way too many slow cue pick-ups. There will be nasty backstage gossip, pretentious stupidity, and zeppelin-sized egos. But there will also be some beautiful scenes, some honest performances, and several shows that hint—and perhaps one which even proves—that theater could theoretically create a form of communication richer, broader and more entertaining than movies or pop songs.—Joel Jones

 

 

BOOKS

While spring’s Festival of the Book draws literati types like bees to honey, the fall offers plenty of book events featuring both nationally touring authors as well as the home-grown variety.

Like John Grisham, whose literary fame mandates number-taking at his New Dominion book signings. Grisham releases his new book Bleachers, an earnest tome about Southern high-school football, on September 9, but the tedium of adoring fans has led him, at least this time, to just hand over signed books to New Dominion—no more face-to-face interaction. September 30 brings Roxana Robinson, a realist author and critic’s favorite, to the bookstore to read and sign Sweetwater, which tells of family conflict in New York City and the Adirondacks. Local hiker George Meek and his book Time for Everything: A Six Year Adventure on the Appalachian Trail arrive on October 4 to reassure the audience that he did not, in fact, get terrifically lost. Don Webster, a National Geographic correspondent, discusses the harrowing defense of China in World War II from his Burma Road on October 15. And An Imperfect God exposes the truth behind George Washington’s relationship with slavery, as local historian Henry Wiencek discusses on October 23.

The corporate giant we all love to hate—or really, just love—Barnes & Noble brings in the authors to please the masses. Preeminent Civil War historian and UVA professor Gary Gallagher discusses The Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862 on September 18, followed on September 20 by the inspirational churnings of Tommy Reamon, who wrote Rough Diamonds: A Coach’s Journey. The Madam, a novel about a West Virginia whorehouse filled with quirky characters and stilted writing, and its author Julianna Baggott appear on September 29. Barnes & Noble realizes the season would be incomplete without an October 3 reading by David Baldacci of his new book Split Second and a November 4 discussion by Rita Mae Brown of her Full Cry.

If the populist fluff has your elitist heart yearning for depth, fear not. UVA will supply. Historian Andro Linklater reads from his riveting new look at the American dream of property ownership, Measuring America: How an Untamed Wilderness Shaped the United States and Fulfilled the Promise of Democracy on October 7. Don’t forget your coffee, in case he decides to read the title. In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859-1863 receives attention in a reading by beloved UVA History Professor Ed Ayers on November 6. The horrible yet titillating issue of killer children is the focus of Joan Brumberg’s Kansas Charley: A Boy Murderer from the American Past, about a homicidal 15-year-old in 1890 and his execution, in her reading on November 19.

By this time, you’ll probably need to escape into poetry and fiction, which is provided with readings by UVA professors Debra Nystrom, from her long-awaited new verse collection Torn Sky, and fiction writer Christopher Tilghman on November 20. And although the dates must still be confirmed, superstar authors Francine Prose and Anne Carson visit for readings this fall, too.—Aaron Carico

 

 

FILM

Just like the next Matrix sequel, fall is coming quickly, and eager cinema buffs will have a full menu of interesting choices to peruse this season, both from the local camera and national lens.

First and foremost, the 16th annual Virginia Film Festival takes over town October 23-26, and the weekend-long event—an increasingly star-studded venture, with Nicholas Cage and the omnipresent Roger Ebert among last year’s attendees—promises to live up to its established standard of topicality.

While last year’s theme was “Wet,” which was on everyone’s mind given the drought that plagued the City, this year’s festival theme, “$,” tackles money in all its forms. With unemployment hovering around 6 percent nationwide—and also on the rise locally—corporate governance scandals on every horizon and deficits ballooning, the organizers have again shown an uncanny knack for getting right to what interests (or ails) us at the moment.

“Since many believe that our last theme helped bring about the end of the region’s drought,” Festival Director Richard Herskowitz modestly observes on the Festival’s website www.vafilm.com, “we’re hoping this year’s ‘$’ theme will turn around the economy.”

Films scheduled for the festival thus far include Greed, The Lavender Hill Mob, Citizen Kane, Wall Street, Take the Money and Run, How to Marry a Millionaire, Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Gold Rush. Those who find themselves particularly burdened (or is that bird-end?) with money troubles will even have an opportunity to check out the cartoon legacy of Scrooge McDuck. Additionally, the festival will host presentations on such topics as film financing and the world of public funding for non-commercial media.

Speaking of the film festival, those of you who have been enjoying the retrospective of legendary Japanese director Akira Kurosawa’s films at Vinegar Hill this summer will be glad to hear that more have been added to the agenda. According to Vinegar Hill management, the series, which showcases Kurosawa’s collaboration with actor Toshiro Mifune and is itself a collaboration between the theater and the VFF, will show six more titles than had originally been scheduled. Instead of ending with The Seven Samurai on August 21, Vinegar Hill will show I Live in Fear, Red Beard, Sanjuro, Throne of Blood, The Lower Depths and an encore of The Seven Samurai, with the films being shown every other week on Wednesdays and Thursdays, wrapping up November 19 and 20.

In addition to moving to new digs in the City Center for Contemporary Arts in October, Light House, the local film mentoring program for teenagers, will continue its “youth media tower” at Whole Foods Market through September. The kiosk will show Home Again, a collection of short autobiographical documentaries made by young refugees from Togo, Afghanistan, Bosnia and other countries who resettled in Charlottesville. You might have caught the films when they premiered in June at Vinegar Hill Theatre. In September, Charlottesville Public Access Television picks up Home Again, along with Light House’s Reel Stories, which features teens’ thoughts and views on Charlottesville. Check your local listings for details.

The fall should also bring updates on local director Paul Wagner’s journey to screening his recently completed feature, ANJLZ, to an audience. As reported in this paper, ANJLZ was almost entirely a local production, funded with local dollars and with a cast and crew drawn largely from Charlottesville-based technicians and artists.

“Currently we have a very funny, very crazy rough cut of ANJLZ that runs about 90 minutes,” Wagner tells C-VILLE. “Over the next few weeks we’ll lay in some music and then present the film to a few small audiences to get some critical feedback and also to raise the funds we need to complete the post-production. We’re also starting to show the movie to people in the film biz beyond Charlottesville to set up distribution.

“Sometime this fall we’ll throw a private screening for the cast and crew,” he says. “The rest of Charlottesville will have to wait until we get the distribution in place, probably in early 2004.” Which gives us something to look forward to next year.—Paul Henderson