American Dumpster
Satellite Ballroom
Thursday, May 18
music
In the beginning, everybody is tense, or at least having problems with tense, as evidenced by the sign on the backstage door that says, “Employees only passed this point.”
By the end of the night, however, that had all been washed away by the sharp drop-kick-of-adrenaline snare drum that starts the toy-piano frenzy of Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone”—but that was much, much later, and first came the doorman and a serious case of over guest-listing, but that’s to be expected, because all of Old Weird Charlottesville must be here. And I do mean old—groupies were maxing out in at least the mid-60s. It felt as if someone should be calling BINGO, what with the buffet and round tables, each with signs for the big
Albemarle
County reunion: Batesville class of ‘72, Free Union class of ‘67, Belmont ‘88, and Crozet ‘93. I’m talking serious old man/barely pubescent girl overload, but it’s all in good fun, and once the music starts, the only band in the world inspired by spot-welding plays something. How to describe it? Tom Waits in a group grope with The Pogues? Leonard Cohen gone spastic with the delirium tremens blues again? Whatever it is, you and all these half-drunk old Southern lawyers sure can dance to it, and longtime locals can do the Fridays After 5 shuffle to it, and lordy, lordy how the little girls in American Dumpster panties can shake their Humbert Humberts to it. So much good-natured stomping in one place! The art of falling down onstage, and the inevitable Johnny Cash cover, which, inevitably, works.
(I have a secret fear at every concert that someone on stage is going to trip over a cord and get hurt, and I spend the whole night hoping against hope that it doesn’t happen. Maybe it’s my fear that keeps it from happening. Maybe it’s my fear that keeps us all alive and dancing.)
It is both very easy and very hard to be a local hero. It is strange to have your local hero tell you that “You’re the shit” onstage in front of your friends and family. It is hard, and strange, but not as hard or strange on a night like this. Nights like this are big group hugs for the band and for us because everybody knows everybody, everybody is somebody, and it’s all alright because, for a rock band—any rock band—this moment right now, when they are at the height of their local fame (and as such are still recognizable to themselves, and to us) is as good as it gets, and will never come again, and someday we will all turn to each other and ask “Were you there?”
The weird thing is, I was there at
Martha
Jefferson
Hospital circa 1975, when bandleader Christian Breeden was born, and the first thing he says to me tonight is, “Hey man, you had that cool girlfriend in high school. Whatever happened to her?” I was with him in the bathroom between sets as he stared into the mirror, asking about my old girlfriend, but I bear no grudge, because his band is good enough—nay, great enough, or at least exactly enough of what we all need right now—for me to forgive him.
American Dumpster is the band that
Charlottesville must shore against its ruin.—J. Tobias Beard
PQ: Whatever it is, you and half-drunk old Southern lawyers sure can dance to it, and longtime locals can do the Fridays After 5 shuffle to it, and lordy, lordy how the little girls in American Dumpster panties can shake their Humbert Humberts to it. So much good-natured stomping in one place!
Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean
Four
County
Players
Through May 28
stage
Fresh off the heels of directing the all-female The World’s Wife for Live Arts, Francine Smith’s follow-up project is Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean—which has parts for nine women, and one man. Wow. What’s next for Smith, the testosterone-laden Glengarry Glen Ross?
Gender shmender. All that matters is that Jimmy Dean exhibits the same mix of good casting and professionalism that made The World’s Wife so satisfying.
Ed Graczyk’s play takes place on September 30, 1975, at a five-and-dime store in the town of McCarthy,
Texas (where Giant, the last film starring James Dean, was shot). A cadre of women, former members of the “Disciples of James Dean,” gathers to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Dean’s fatal auto accident. Through flashbacks neatly woven into the action, it becomes clear how the actual presence of an untouchable heartthrob in their town was almost too much for the poor girls’ brains to handle, and why the fact that God is dead, so to speak, continues to haunt them.
It’s difficult at first to know what to make of the grown women. Have they matured at all? Are their exhumed pasts, and seemingly trivial obsession, worth caring about? Smith wisely doesn’t force the characters on us, which is good, since the play eventually contains almost too many sensationalistic details and stabs at profundity for the audience’s poor brains to handle. By the time we learn that Mona (played with just the right degree of solemnity by Liz Porter) may have actually, um, touched the untouchable Dean, and notice that Joanne (played with consistent subtlety by Jen Downey) bears some resemblance to Mona’s teenage friend Joe (Greg Miller), the production is firmly grounded in reality, and Graczyk’s fanciful and aggressive plotting goes down as easy as an Orange Crush on a hot Texas day.—Doug Nordfors
Blake Hurt
“Not Just a Pretty Face”
McGuffey
Art
Center
art
Blake Hurt’s colorful, kinetic “ink collages” are portraits of friends, but they’re also a portrait of a brilliant mind—his own. This is a man who acknowledges it takes years to write a computer program to portray a single individual. And “pretty” is not the first word that comes to mind. Try meticulous. Magnificent. Mad. Surely, he must be out of his mind—but in a good way. (Think What the Bleep Do We Know!?)
In any given portrait, Hurt includes a myriad of relevant images in different sizes, shapes, and colors, overlapping and intertwining inside the drawing of a human face. But in “Greek,” one of his most powerful pieces (and a quantum leap from earlier works made up of simple, repetitive symbols that look like pixels on a computer screen) he relaxes the use of his trademark grid, and begins to leave behind the confines of the technology he so reveres. Hurt arranges the elements asymmetrically within the symmetrical outline of his subject’s face. The result? A more creative, chaotic effect that illustrates the nature of a mind in motion, and suggests that the greek scholar portrayed in “Greek” is on the verge of some brilliant discovery—as are we.In addition, Hurt’s work explores the question, “What would happen if the multitude of one’s thoughts were recorded on one’s face?” Sure, all that we think is etched within the hemispheres of our brain, but the inner workings of our mind are never fully seen, only alluded to in the works we conceive and birth. And oh what things Hurt’s mind has made! These kaleidoscopic portraits vibrate off the walls, and there’s no limit to what he, or the viewer, might do next (though a little meditation would be in good order).—Karrie Bos
NBA Ballers: Phenom
Xbox, PlayStation 2
Midway
Rated: Everyone
video game
Anyone who’s been following the NBA playoffs as they drag inexorably into midsummer can rattle them off like open 15-footers: Nash versus SamIam. Lebron James in round two. Plucky point guard Devin Harris, trying to will the Mavs past a hobbled Tim Duncan.
You know, the storylines.
Professional sports leagues—at least the ones like the NFL and NBA , who have honed the means of marketing themselves to fans—know that player-based storylines sell sizzle better than close matchups. Cavs versus Wizards looked like a small-market snoozer, but Bron-Bron versus Gilbert Arenas equaled six games of riveting rivalry.
Sports videogames have been slow—we’re talking Shawn Bradley slow—to pick up on this strategy. While developers have captured the feel of shooting a free throw or accurately approximating Jason Kidd’s assists-to-turnovers ratio, they’ve done comparatively little to give us a pixellated sense of what it’s like to actually be J-Kidd. Or a rookie trying to make it in—or, better yet, to—the NBA.
Electronic Arts gave us a hint of this sports-RPG experience in last fall’s Madden 06. In NBA Ballers: Phenom, the second installment in Midway’s streetball series, the concept is front-and-center—even if it’s not yet fully developed.
The game’s set in
Los Angeles during the NBA Finals. (Sorry, guys: Detroit would have been the safer pick.) You play the story mode as a streetballer who’s looking to make his name and pick up a sponsorship contract—just like the one your former partner sold you out to get last year. (Hello, instant rivalry subplot.)
While big chunks of the game are—what else?—one-on-one matchups in which you’re bouncing passes to yourself off your opponent’s grill or stair-stepping his shoulders to a monster dunk, there’s more here than just arcade-style hoops. You can also stroll around glitzy
Los Angeles buffing your stats, RPG style, in a host of non-basketball events and tasks (rap competitions, pasting up posters) that a hopeful trying to distinguish himself from the rabble might actually do. It’s not as deep as it could be, but it’s certainly a good baseline move. Now, if the developers can make the control scheme as intuitive as EA’s NBA Street series and fix the long PS2 load times, we’re talking some big-money ball.—Aaron Conklin
Wednesday, May 17
