Special short-deadline holiday edition
Tuesday, December 21
Street kid gets 28 years for non-fatal shooting
Gamar Leander Turner, a black Charlottesville man whom his attorney described as a “product of the streets,” according to a report by James Fernald in The Daily Progress, was today sentenced on three charges related to a 2003 Fifeville shooting. Judge Edward L. Hogshire suspended 15 years of Turner’s 28-year sentence, the length of which raises further questions about Virginia’s penal code. Earlier this year, in a different courtroom, a jury handed down a three-year sentence in a manslaughter case that left the victim dead from 20 stab wounds. The perpetrator in that case was an affluent, white, UVA student. Turner’s victim, Eric Anthony Morris, recovered from his head and shoulder wounds. Turner, 20, was essentially an unsupervised minor from the age of 13, according to the DP. “I’m not a bad person,” Turner said, “I didn’t go looking for vengeance.”
Wednesday, December 22
Fed money for homeless not what it seems
As temperatures drop, Senator George Allen announced today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency awarded $12,987 to Charlottesville to help feed and shelter hungry and homeless people. Wrapping the flag around this modest act of decency, Allen said in a news release, “Traditional American values of cooperation and ingenuity are proudly displayed when citizens take the initiative to improve the quality of life of their neighbors.” Charlottesville and the region have “no fewer than 257” homeless people, according to Evan Scully, secretary for the Coalition for the Homeless. Regarding the FEMA money, he told C-VILLE that while it is “certainly helpful and appreciated… the funding levels have been about the same from last year, so there’s a net loss to inflation when you’re talking about a problem that’s getting worse.”
Thursday, December 23
Cavs win in final seconds
Just as it seemed that Santa would give hoops fans a lump of coal, the UVA men pulled out an overtime victory in their match-up against Loyola Marymount tonight, improving their record to 8-1 after more than two weeks off for exams. J.R. Reynolds had the winning basket in the last 1.5 seconds of overtime play for UVA’s 79-77 victory.
Written by Cathy Harding from news sources and staff reports.
Art for sale
Johnny St. Ours lends cinema flair to local TV ads
You may have seen the new television advertisement for Bittersweet running this Christmas shopping season on the recently launched Charlottesville CBS and ABC affiliates, WCAV and WVAW. A Dashiell Hammett-style tableau, the camera races to track a brash, blonde coquette storming into the dingy offices of a down-at-the-heels ad agency. She stops for a clipped, heated standoff with a man at a drafting board, and Bittersweet’s rose logo leaps from a tattoo on her bared shoulder to a sheet of paper held up in the illustrator’s hand.
The spot’s quick pans and stacked noirish references—a fan rotating in a steel cage, a cigar-chomping, hard-boiled boss—thus materialize into a brand identity for Bittersweet, a new and vintage clothing boutique. But the ad’s trick of reaching into a certain alcove of Hollywood mythology and transporting its mystique to the here and now isn’t the only feint for local TV viewers to consider. Those actors in the ad are locals Mendy St. Ours, Jim Johnston and Phillip St. Ours, and, the ad’s polished aesthetic quality notwithstanding, Bittersweet is in fact a local business with a single store in the Glass Building on Second Street SE.
The ad itself was produced locally too. It’s one of six made by Johnny St. Ours (Mendy’s husband and Phillip’s brother) to have aired recently on Charlottesville TV stations. Part of an effort by the filmmaker to apply a cinematic idiom and thrifty production techniques to the commercial format, St. Ours’ push into the medium is giving area advertisers access to a more sophisticated television message than offered by conventional fare.
“The problem with a lot of local ads is that they go into it with some kind of hard sell: ‘Come down now, 50 percent off. You can buy this dress, that shirt.’ Showing them to you,” St. Ours says. In producing the ads, he says, he’s “trying to skirt around the technical roadblocks”—scrounging props and making use of skillfully orchestrated location shoots, for instance—to achieve something more effective and fully realized: “You think of a clothing store, you think of Bittersweet. People think of vintage, they think of Bittersweet. They think of attitude, they think of Bittersweet.”
St. Ours is a largely self-taught filmmaker, whose work has appeared at the Virginia Film Festival, and a metal artisan, whose notable projects include the steel-framed façade of the Glass Building. He’s also the core force behind Charlottesville’s “Guerilla Film Unit Self-Taught Boot Camp,” an informal summer workshop launched in 2002 during which experimental filmmakers accept a series of topics and produce short films using no-budget tactics at two-week intervals. His foray into television ads was a translation of the Boot Camp concept to a commercial context. In early 2003, hoping to find a venue for paying work, St. Ours approached Bittersweet and Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar with an offer to produce free spots for them and establish a portfolio for himself.
Then, last summer, St. Ours swapped an ad for a website (his commercials can be viewed at www.ironcavetv.com and his metalwork at www.powerhousepiraeus.com) with local web designer Digital Personae. But with none of the three businesses initially willing to buy airtime on their own—sharply limiting St. Ours’ opportunity for exposure—and with St. Ours making note of an expanding market for his work with the arrival of two new Charlottesville television stations, he approached WCAV directly. Impressed by the quality of his ads—which Jim McCabe, the general sales manager for WCAV, feels reflects well on the station—WCAV has offered discount packages to advertisers seeking slots for St. Ours’ commercials. Now, all three ads have aired, and since then St. Ours secured commissions for an ad for Starlight Express, a Charlottesville to New York shuttle service, and two public service announcements for the Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad and the Regional Home Ownership Center—all also on the air. The public service announcements are entering rotation on Charlottesville’s NBC affiliate, WVIR, too. St. Ours is currently working on spots for Plan 9 Music stores.
St. Ours is too early into making commercials to say precisely where he’s headed with it yet. But he says film is his passion, and while finding metal jobs has been harder lately, he feels there’s a viable niche in Charlottesville for commercials with “heart and story.”—Harry Terris
Tommy, can you steer me?
Robotics expert in federal contest to perfect driverless car
It doesn’t look like a very scary weapon. Instead, the contraption in Paul Perrone’s basement resembles a giant, dinged-up metal egg on wheels, more likely to draw curious stares from his neighbors in White Hall than to strike terror in the hearts of Iraqi insurgents.
Still, the Pentagon might be very interested in what’s growing inside Perrone’s rolling metal egg, which he dubs “Tommy.”
Perrone, 36, is a robotics expert and UVA grad, and also an aspiring contestant in the upcoming “Grand Challenge,” a race that’s part X-Prize and part Battlebots, sponsored by the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The goal is to build a robot that can travel by itself from Los Angeles to Las Vegas—about 175 miles of desert—in less than 10 hours. The team whose robot gets to Sin City first wins $2 million from DARPA.
DARPA is a bit like Q’s lab in the James Bond movies. With a $2 billion annual budget, DARPA puts scientists and engineers to work on radical new ideas (such as cyborg soldiers and minesweeping robot lobsters), and it encourages “a complete acceptance of failure if the payoff of success is high enough,” according to its website, www.darpa.mil.
For years, DARPA has prodded big defense contractors like Boeing and Rockwell Collins to build robotic vehicles; in fact, by 2015 the Pentagon wants one-third of all ground combat vehicles to be unmanned. Those companies haven’t produced, so DARPA created the Grand Challenge.
“It’s like NASCAR meets Star Wars,” says Perrone. “The contest is lighting a fire under these big companies. They don’t want egg on their face.”
Last March, 15 teams competed for $1 million in the first Grand Challenge. Many crashed or stalled their machines minutes after starting; a robotic Humvee built by engineering students at Carnegie Mellon University went the farthest—seven miles. Since there was no winner, the prize money has been doubled.
The next Grand Challenge is October 8, 2005, and Perrone hopes to be there with Tommy and “Team Jefferson,” a squad of fellow robotics enthusiasts that includes an advisory panel of UVA faculty. Even if Team Jefferson doesn’t win first prize, Tommy will still be a real-life advertisement for Perrone’s fledgling robotics company.
“The real prize for a lot of us is to showcase what we’re doing,” says Perrone, who built robotic safety equipment for trains and ran a consulting company in Northern Virginia before founding Perrone Robotics in 2003.
What he’s doing is building an operating system for robots, analagous to the operating system that converts buttons on your keyboard to letters on your computer screen. His system, however, will interpret signals from Tommy’s laser radar “eyes” and turn Tommy’s steering wheel or hit its brakes accordingly. Today, robot makers must build their machines from scratch; in the future, Perrone says companies like his will make it cheap and easy to build different kinds of robots.
So far, Team Jefferson has dropped about $95,000 into Tommy, mostly funded by Perrone’s other business, his consulting company, Assured Technologies. There remains about $30,000 of sensors still left to buy.
For now Tommy, sitting on a dune buggy chassis and powered by a 1997 Subaru Legacy engine, can only be driven manually. In the coming months, Perrone will be able to drive Tommy with a video game joystick and, eventually, Tommy will drive itself.
If he wins, Perrone jokes that he’ll take the $2 million to Vegas and find the nearest roulette wheel. But how will he feel if he eventually sees a version of Tommy blowing people up in a war zone?
The question touches on what Perrone calls the “yin and yang of technology,” the potential for new inventions to be used for either good or evil that’s beyond an engineer’s control.
“As a citizen,” says Perrone, “I hope there’s an open debate to make sure there’s good reasons for going to war. It’s arguable whether that happens in our political climate.”
As an inventor, Perrone notes that his robotics software has medical applications, and Tommy itself could be used to deliver supplies or remove landmines.
“There’s no doubt they’re going to put weapons on this thing,” Perrone says. “The way I look at it, it would do what human soldiers would otherwise be doing in hazardous situations, that we’re saving our own soldiers’ lives.”—John Borgmeyer
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HOW TO: Be the life of the party If uncertain that your personality will sparkle, wear earrings that definitely do. Never gossip or speak ill. When your enemy’s name comes up in conversation, throw your head back gently, sip with sophistication from your drink, and say, “Oh yes, met him once. Lovely man, lovely.” Let the lark, not Roseanne, be the inspiration for your frequent laugh. Wear rosy tones or, if it is absolutely necessary for you to wear black, position yourself in warm light—perhaps by the fireplace’s amber glow. Mingle, darling. Extend your hand graciously. “Have we met?” you shall ask the stranger. “My name is Mata Hari.” Or whatever your name is. Speak neither of your diet, your weight, your exercise regime, your in-laws, nor your coupon-clipping habits. When in doubt about appropriate rejoinders, say, “Oh, how lovely.” Unless, of course, the topic is the recent passing of someone’s loved one. Then, you must reply, “Dearest me, how tragic. How very tragic for all of you.” Avoid all foods containing spinach, poppy seeds, or stringy meat. When complimented on your simple but elegant attire, do not respond with mock self-effacement, “Oh, this old thing?” Rather, say, “Thank you.” Do not be the last to leave. And be among the first to call the next day to express your appreciation for a truly delightful evening. |
BAR mitzvah!
Design czars toast a feast of new Downtown architecture
The Downtown Mall just keeps getting snazzier. The storefront at 100 W. Main St., Oliver Kuttner’s Terraces building, will soon get a facelift. On Tuesday, December 21, the City’s Board of Architectural Review approved Kuttner’s plan to renovate the storefront and add a new exit and stair bridge to the building on First Street SE.
Kuttner’s California-based architect, Peter Wilson, presented a preliminary watercolor of the new storefront to the BAR that evening. The new façade, which will replace the Foot Locker now there, will feature copper cladding with a cast stone base. A translucent safety-glass awning will replace the extant corrugated metal, and new windows will be installed in swanky mahogany frames.
Wilson’s watercolor showed the copper façade as an oxidized green, and some members of BAR wondered whether the material would change color as dramatically as rendered. Wilson said he’s considering applying a chemical to the copper to accelerate the tarnish that would result naturally to the copper anyway. BAR members said they favored green.
“The intention is to get it to at least a green-brown,” Wilson said.
The Board expressed unanimous delight that Kuttner, (who recently won a prize from the BAR and was not present at the hearing) would finally be updating the storefront’s washed-out blue tile and pale metal, which clashes dramatically with the stucco-and-brick luxury lofts Kuttner erected above the building four years ago. The developer could not be reached for comment by press time.
The façade facing First Street SE will remain brick, but the BAR also approved new windows and translucent glass awnings for that side of the building, as well as a new staircase that will lead from First Street, over the walkway outside Gravity Lounge, to the Mall-level store.
While Foot Locker occupies the storefront space now, it looks as if a new tenant will soon move in. “The deal is not signed, but someone is willing to take it over as a whole store,” said Wilson.
More progress on the amphitheater
Also on Tuesday, the BAR approved another round of changes to Coran Capshaw’s new amphitheater currently under construction on the Mall’s east end.
The BAR approved a final design for the seating area. The amphitheater’s lead designer, Bill Lenart of FTL Architects, showed the Board samples of light and dark concrete that will be arranged in a patchwork-quilt pattern. Because the amphitheater’s seats will be removable, leaving the space open to the public during the fall and winter, the BAR had suggested a design that would make the pavilion look less imposing. The new patchwork design drew unanimous approval.
The BAR also approved other minor changes to FTL’s design. These include different lights and railings that will fit with the new transit center and plaza that Philadelphia architecture firm WRT has designed for the Mall’s east end.
Also drawing thumbs-up from the Board were FTL’s amphitheater plantings, including cedar, ginko, maple and magnolia trees, although Lenart said he would comply with Board member John Knight’s request that FTL replace the purple wintercreeper ground cover with something “softer.”
“In our experience it tends to end up looking pretty coarse and ratty,” Knight said.—John Borgmeyer
As Told To
Conversations with Old-School Business Owners
Kim Miller: When this store was built in 1942, it was called the Stop & Shop, and it was a high-class grocery store. A real gourmet store, with high-class food items.
I started working in the Mall store, part-time, when I was still in high school. For a while I worked someplace else, and also was a stay-at-home mom for a while. But after eight years, I was back.
Billy Clements: I was a junior in high school when I began working here, part-time. I’ve been here pretty much all of my life. Twenty-one years.
Miller: Our customers are loyal. Some of them who shop here used to shop at the Mall store. Why are they loyal? Because we have the best meat department in town! That, and the service. It’s a personal service we have here, not like what you get at the chain supermarkets, where no one knows you. We know our customers.
Clements: Yes, we do have a mixed clientele here, and we have things here that you can’t find anywhere else, even in the big chains.
Miller: For example, Octagon Soap. We still carry Octagon Soap. And things like spoon bread mix. People come in here for things they can’t find anyplace else. And our prices, our overall prices; we try to be competitive with the large supermarkets. But back to meat—we do have the best meatin town!
That’s our biggest seller, meat. And a lot of people call us, “The hardware store of grocery stores,” because we have and sell everything.
Clements: The best thing about working here is the interaction with people.
Miller: Even when I am busy with paper work, it’s the people I enjoy the most. Neither of us would rather be doing anything else. I grew up in the grocery business. And I love the personal touch with meat. Whenever someone in that department is out, I fill in. Billy doesn’t have anything to do with the meat. That’s mine.
Clements: No, I don’t go near the meat department because that’s all Kim’s.
Miller: We work long hours. The store is open from Monday to Saturday from 8 in the morning to 9 at night, and on Sunday, from 10 to 6. I work eight to 10 hours a day. Sometimes 12 to 15, if we are shorthanded. Billy works every other weekend, andI work occasionally on Sunday, when I need to.
Clements: I don’t think we get any vegetarians shopping here! But we both try to please every customer. We talk about our families with our customers, and they talk about their families with us. Some people come in once, twice—even three times—a day, just for the friendship and for the conversations they have here.
We have a man who comes in every night. He lives alone, and he comes in just for the companionship he finds here. Lots of times, he doesn’t even buy anything. He just comes in every night to talk.
Miller: And, yes, we sometimes help people out. I don’t know whether I should say we do or don’t, but what I can say is that our loyal, longtime customers know that if they ever run a little short of money, we will try not to let them go hungry.