Month: December 2006

cd This album-length single was commissioned by Nike to serve as a soundtrack to a 45-minute run, and it’s only available online as a $9.99 download from Apple’s iTunes store. Music composed for exercise has a very specific set of challenges: It’s got to push you forward without burning you out, and it has to change over the course of the experience. What sounds good in those first few steps is very different from what you want to hear when the endorphins peak.  

James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem gets it. When he’s not recording dance-punk records for New York’s hippest bands as half of the production duo the DFA, he likes to unwind with a jog, so he understands the ritual arc of the workout.
First, logically, comes the warm-up.

The opening gurgle of analog synths here serves that purpose, and then 45’33” picks up speed and gives way to a funky, neo-Latin piano incorporated into a shuffling disco beat. Gradually, the piece becomes faster and more mechanized, as early vocals and song-like structures flow into a gliding sense of perpetual motion, pushed by tightly sequenced synths and relentless drums.

Allusions to funk and synthpop touchstones from the ’70s and ’80s abound—a little bit of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” here, a touch of New Order’s “Temptation” there, continued references to Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn”—and lend a welcome sense of familiarity. By the half-hour mark, 45’33” is humming, approaching purely electronic techno from its more organic beginnings. It cultivates a feeling every runner can appreciate, that moment when you sense your mind and body fusing as you become a tireless robot bent on forward motion. The final seven-minute cool down of wispy New Age, cheesy in any other context, is soothing and earned.

Obvious political questions arise when a hip independent band partners with everyone’s favorite global sports giant/anti-globalism punching bag: Is LCD Soundsystem up for sale? Are they comfortable being associated with Nike? Should we care?
These may well be yesterday’s questions. The reality in this era of media saturation and diminished sales is that bands are doing whatever they can to get their music heard. And 45’33”, however it came about, should be heard. You don’t have to be running while it plays, but you will want to be moving; it’s the perfect soundtrack to your next New Year’s resolution.

The City of Charlottesville recently reported a substantial budget surplus for fiscal year 2006. However, the only thing remarkable about this surplus is that it was actually reported in the local press. Collecting surplus tax revenues has been a dirty little secret for more than a decade.

According to the “Historical Revenues” data posted on the City’s website, between 1996 and 2005 the City government collected an average of over $4 million per year in excess of stated budget requirements for a cumulative total surplus of about $42.8 million. Actual revenue collections for 2006 have not yet been posted, but will certainly add to this total.
The persistence of such surpluses year after year calls into question not only the necessity for the tax increases of the past 10 years, but also the process by which the need for such tax increases was evaluated.

City Council does not have a good system for evaluating spending requirements and the attendant need for tax increases. Instead, City Council has simply permitted a virtual tidal wave of revenues from rising real property assessments to flow into City coffers with no attempt to assess the need for those additional tax revenues.

If you doubt this conclusion, consider the following. Had the real estate market been stagnant rather than appreciating over the past 10 years, City Council would have had to set the tax rate at $2.33 to support the current budget. Even the most ardent proponents of government spending would not likely have shown the political courage to raise the tax rate by $0.12 per year for 10 consecutive years. The people would have demanded an accounting.

Yet City Council has in fact specifically voted to raise those taxes each year because Virginia law otherwise requires the tax rate to be reduced to compensate for the increase in assessed value. Our legislators in Richmond grasp what many City Councilors do not; namely, that, in the absence of demonstrated need, it is fundamentally unfair to tax paper wealth unrelated to a person’s present ability to pay his taxes. However, the law is poorly understood; thus, City Councilors have been able to mask their votes to raise taxes by reducing the tax rate slightly and claiming falsely to be providing tax relief.

It gets worse. Each year City Council specifically directs the City Manager to program those tax increases into the budget and to publicize the budget before the necessity for a tax increase has been demonstrated. This process is exactly backwards and virtually guarantees that public hearings on the budget will be highly politicized.

Most City Councilors seem to realize that we simply cannot sustain the present rate of growth in City spending. But none seem willing or able to demand more of the City Manager, the one employee specifically paid to find efficiencies in government.

Instead, criticisms of the process have been met with varying degrees of silence, defensiveness, misinformation and even personal attacks. But facts are pesky little critters. Persistent revenue surpluses juxtaposed with a skyrocketing tax burden stand as sentinels to an increasingly unresponsive and inefficient government. City Council, not the tax assessor, is wholly responsible for both.

Charlottesville may aspire to some mythical “world-class” status, but she will not survive solely as a haven for the underclass and an amusement park for the idle rich and the vagabond young. The community, in order to be a community, needs the civic virtues and dynamic energy of small business entrepreneurs and a broad middle class committed to the urban idea. Yet, it is precisely these two groups who are most at risk—insufficiently poor to qualify for special tax relief and insufficiently wealthy to endure the tax burden.

We do not need another program of “targeted” tax relief. We need a City Council willing to establish and enforce spending limits and to impose some long-term and long overdue fiscal discipline on City Hall.

Charles L. Weber, Jr. is a local attorney and the founder of the Charlottesville Taxpayers Association. He has resided in the Charlottesville area since 1993 and in the city since 1995.

art Collaboration tends to attract a lot of puzzled-sounding critical ink—who made which part, whether the match is fruitful—but when artists with compatible interests work together, the work speaks for itself. Divisions of authorship, real estate-style, are not really the point, as Dean Dass and Clay Witt’s show beautifully illustrates. Each artist contributes a body of work with its own obsessions and techniques, and in several collaborative pieces these strains effortlessly merge.

Both are working with complex, multi-stage printing techniques (including inkjet and intaglio) that speak deeply of time and result in objects more precious than the gold leaf and lapis lazuli that bedeck them. Dass’ delicate compositions often recall display cases in a natural history museum; for example, “Shield” uses a ground of hand-stitched linen, like a cleaned-up fragment of mummy wrapping, on which shards of mica and bits of gouache on paper form careful rows. Witt returns to central, circular forms; whether celestial or cellular (the lonely, waiting ovum), they function as ancient and elemental icons of nature.

The alchemy of the artists’ processes—intensive and mysterious—makes for endless particulars: the fractal complexity of the surfaces, the nearly geologic layers that reach off the page and beyond the mechanically reproducible status of two-dimensional photos or prints. The works are almost sculptural in their response to materiality. Whereas Dass’ work suggests human arrangement within nature’s enormity, Witt’s revolves around the abstract as it decays into something specifically, physically present before the viewer.

It’s no less alchemical when the two artists work together. New forms emerge: the meandering gold thread in “The Eighth Day,” for example. And these different approaches to the world’s abundance of natural forms seem to agree with one another on a molecular level.

stage Although 60-degree days may try to fool us, Christmastime is in full swing. There are cards to write, presents to buy, cookies to bake—all kinds of chores to be done. How can any adult avoid it?

Of course, lest we forget, we once were children, and Christmas was something very different then. On December 15 in Live Art’s black-box theater, 15 teenaged actors, supported by four young colleagues backstage, performed Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales and made it clear that the real joys of the season are in the experiences of children.

For the first few minutes, my attention bounced from one engaging performer to the next, until I realized the show was not about the individual actors. The ensemble followed director Jennifer Peart’s beautiful and complicated choreography and blended together to create one universal child. They turned A Child’s Christmas in Wales, Thomas’ holiday memoir, into every child’s Christmas everywhere. The narrator wasn’t 6 or 16, boy or girl, rich or poor; he was all of these. He was all of us.

As the actors debated the merits of mediocre useful presents and (better yet) useless presents, replayed snowball fights, laughed at smoking uncles and tipsy aunts and ventured through scary streets to carol for the neighborhood Boo Radley, I immediately and fondly recalled my own childhood presents, snow ramps, aunts and uncles, and neighborhood adventures. 

Before the play, the audience was treated to a performance by an ensemble, LA:T4. Twelve performers and one light board operator, under the direction of Daria Okugawa, tackled the tricky art of clowning. Every piece was a joy to watch, and it was clear that these teenagers will continue to grow in the art form. There were a few moments of simple, sublime hilarity and a couple of stand-out performances, notably the physical comedy of Jeremy Weiss.