Month: August 2007

Rough riders: Love Tentacle Drip Society proves this town ain’t big enough for its inventive debut record, Some Kind of Cowboy.

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I remember distinctly the moment in my adolescence when I decided that rock music was cool.

My peers were all starting bands, so I tried to learn how to play the guitar. As I struggled—to this day, I still only know two chords—I suddenly felt silly for wasting several years in the school concert band. Nirvana, after all, did not have a trumpet player. In my 13-year-old estimation, the guitar was the instrument of coolness; flutes, trombones and kettle drums were for nerds.

If the members of Love Tentacle Drip Society encountered this false dichotomy at any point in their development, they certainly don’t show it. On the contrary, they seem to have embraced both the exuberance of rock and the instrumentation of dorks on their debut album, Some Kind of Cowboy, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness.  Cowboy was recorded locally by Lance Brenner, and the first 50 copies come packaged in an overly large cardboard pony—already a more adventurous start than most local bands could dream of.

And it is an adventurous group of young chaps: The governing body of Charlottesville’s nastiest society consists of Charles Carrier on vibraphones, Jameson Zimmer on banjo and vocals, Sean Zimmer on drums and Nicholas "Max" Dreyer on guitar, but the foursome switches instruments often. Everyone seems to take a turn on keyboards and, during their live show, it’s not uncommon for Carrier to literally leap back and forth from vibraphones to drums between every song. The vocals (another shared duty) typically alternate between lighthearted sincerity and sarcastic falsetto. They have more in common with legendary weirdos like Frank Zappa than one might expect from a band whose members are mostly still in high school.

Though it occasionally resembles a medley of absurd vaudeville acts, Cowboy is quite consistent and coherent, especially considering the disparate moments that it manages to tie together. Take the energetic vibraphone/guitar breakdown of "And Then I Started Thinking About My Sister;" the sensitive pseudo-Appalachia of "Mountain Man;" the bleeping alienation of "Future is Today;" the perverse cocktail-lounge charm of "Too Young to be a Dad;" and the drum-fueled fury of "Tom Baker," their almost-unrecognizable cover of the "Doctor Who" theme.  

The puzzling thing about LTDS is that, despite the silly ideas and juvenile whimsy, there’s also a remarkable amount of quality control and great ear for what actually works, musically. The album wanders amiably through several short songs at a brisk pace, and includes several instrumental rockers and ambient interludes that tie the album together and help to balance out a few of the goofier moments.

Things don’t really fly off the rails until the album’s last few "hidden tracks" (an idea whose time has passed, I think, in the age of the MP3). Even then, the problem is the result of poor sequencing rather than aesthetically questionable content; these four bonus breakdowns would have fit nicely anywhere else on the disc.

The Tentacles appear to be channeling some previously unknown, schizophrenic muse.  Despite rumors of a hiatus while one member goes off to college, I’m sure we’ll hear more from the members of LTDS in one chaotic form or another. For now, I just have to find room on my CD shelf for this giant cardboard pony.

We sing the Bard electric! A cross-dressing Viola (Sara Holdren, right) misleads Duke Orsino (Chris Estey) and Olivia (Katy Walker) in Four County Players’ production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.

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"What You Will," the phrase that Shakespeare cast as a second title for Twelfth Night, is a tool, a means to an end. When Countess Olivia of Illyria sends her doting drip of a servant, Malvolio, to steer away a messenger from her suitor, Duke Orsino, she instructs him: "I am sick, or not at home; what you will to dismiss it."

In a comedy heavy with double-crossings (not to mention sword-crossing and cross-dressing), "What You Will" is a call for the guiltless, any-means-necessary action that every generation recognizes (Look at Tony Soprano! Nike and "Just Do It"! Larry the Cable Guy and "Git ‘r Done"!). And so Four County Players director John Holdren followed his muse without questioning it.

Holdren’s oldest daughter Sara (cast as "shipwrecked she" Viola turned quick-tongued fellow Cesario) fed her father a few tunes "by ‘indie rock’ bands she’d discovered at college," including the song "Busby Berkeley Dreams" by Magnetic Fields. Inspired by the director of campy ’30s Hollywood musicals, the tune sent Holdren careening through free associations until, epiphany! What Holdren willed for his production: "An image of Orsino not in Renaissance garb but in black tie and tails, like Fred Astaire."

And Holdren’s ends justify his means: Each song delivered in Twelfth Night arrives at the climax of a monologue or dialogue, with each character taking a beat, self-consciously engaging the audience with their eyes as the lights shine a bit brighter and nailing a number. Katy Walker’s smitten-if-boy-crazy Olivia lofts "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered" to the audience, and Orsino—who Four County newcomer Chris Estey injects with a crumbling stoicism—knocks the aforementioned "Busby" out of the park, singing of Viola: "I should have forgotten you long ago, but you’re in every song I know."

If the musical numbers give the play a gorgeous dip into the surreal sea of love, then the cast keeps the ship afloat. Sara Holdren (who, in her Cast Bio, lists eight performances as men in Shakespeare plays to her credit) has a convincingly masculine swagger as Cesario and delivers a few tunes in a deep, brassy voice that resonates like a french horn and still manages to give away Viola’s love for Orsino (thanks to a hilarious dance sequence that screams ’30s but comes across like a segment from a Brokeback Mountain musical).

As the increasingly unhinged servant Malvolio, Robert Wray—Charlottesville’s Paul Giamatti—is a riot in his moments of self-fancy and pitiable in his deception at the clever tricks of Olivia’s assistant Maria (Sara Eshleman) and her three memorable cohorts, whose blatant stoogery makes for a great delivery of one of Shakespeare’s most humorous subplots. Though Clinton Johnston and Eamon Hyland are a brilliant pair as Olivia’s "drunkle," Sir Toby Belch and his protegé, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (by way of Jaleel White’s "Steve Urkle"), Allen Van Houzen’s turn as Feste the Fool binds the three, through an unflinchingly giddy, quick-tongued delivery of even quicker puns.

Although relocated from the usual setting (do not go to the ruins! The play is at the Barboursville Community Center!) and packed with pop music, Four County Players’s production of Twelfth Night is entirely rewarding. Play on.

Four County Players present Twelfth Night Thursday-Saturday at 8pm, and Sunday at 2:30pm. Tickets are $10-16 for weekend shows; all tickets for Thursday and Friday shows are $10.

After some procedural wrangling, a decision not to follow its own proffers policy and a 45-minute, closed-door meeting between the county attorney and developer Wendell Wood, the Albemarle Board of Supervisors voted to rezone a 15-acre piece of Wood’s property adjacent to the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) on Route 29N. The Board’s decision means that Wood can move forward with construction of 180,000 square feet of office space and 120 residential units, presumably for NGIC.

A 15-acre piece of property here was rezoned at a recent Board of Supervisors meeting to allow developer Wendell Wood to build offices and residential units.

This piece of property is separate from the 30 acres Wood wants the county to move into the growth area after he sold 47 acres to NGIC for $7 million, presumably under market value. The 15-acre parcel will hold three buildings—two office and one residential—that he hopes to lease to the federal government and its contractors.

At first, though, it appeared Wood of United Land Corporation would have to wait. After a contentious July 10 Planning Commission meeting, county staff recommended that the Board deny the rezoning. But two hours before the August 1 meeting, Wood gave the county a revised set of proffers. As the meeting began, the supes were still wary of the site plan. Because it was designed to meet federal anti-terrorism standards, it doesn’t conform to the county’s Neighborhood Model.

With no guarantee that a federal agency would indeed occupy the building, the Board flip-flopped its schedule, letting Wood speak before it opened the matter to public comments, avoiding a delay in a decision if the proffers changed. It then sent county attorney Larry Davis away with Wood to again revise the proffers. After adding a condition that a building permit be granted only after Wood proved that at least 40,000 square feet of office space was leased to a federal agency, the Board approved the rezoning unanimously.

By voting to approve, members went against a year-and-a-half-old policy that required proffers to be submitted nine days in advance of a decision. Wood revised his as the meeting took place. "We didn’t follow the rules that we set," says supe David Slutzky about the proffer policy. "But [the policy] allowed for the rare circumstance where there’s a public interest to be served."

The added condition requiring Wood to lease at least 40,000 to a federal agency seemed to ease Board members’ minds, though his plan calls for more than four times that footage. Wood says he’s speculating that landing the NGIC contract for the 40,000 square feet will bring in enough government contractors to fill the rest of the space. "That’s the only reason I would build more space," he says. "I’d be stupid to build it if I didn’t think that scenario would happen."

Also: Check out C-VILLE’s past coverage on NGIC.

C-VILLE welcomes news tips. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

Two weeks ago the Charlottesville City Council called out Albemarle County on what it perceived as the county’s unwillingness to move forward on transportation projects supporting the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP). County officials answered with the bureaucratic equivalent of turning their pockets inside out: pointing to a budget stretched thin by a decrease in state funding.  

One solution to a budget shortfall? Raise taxes. A report released on July 30 by Charlottesville Tomorrow shows that of the 1,045 county residents surveyed, 56 percent would support a modest increase in taxes to fund priority transportation projects. Could that be the answer to the construction of the Eastern Connector? Not likely, says county Supervisor Dennis Rooker.

County Supervisor Dennis Rooker says, regarding the proposed Eastern Connector, that it would mostly benefit the city.

"We have an interest in pursuing transportation projects in the interest of the county and the city," says Rooker. "That project is being pursued largely at the request of the city."

The Eastern Connector would connect Pantops to Route 29N and run mostly through county land. City councilors point to it as one of the most important roads in the regional transportation network. Without it, they argue, the MCP would essentially serve as a city cut-through for country traffic, placing an even larger volume of traffic on city residential streets.

While the city is moving forward on the MCP, the Eastern Connector is stalled in planning stages. Supe David Slutzky says that even if the county did raise taxes, work on the Eastern Connector wouldn’t move any quicker.

"If we had good data to tell us the degree to which the Pantops area and places east of there need to be connected with 29 North, I think it would be a no-brainer that we’d want to build the Eastern Connector," he says. "What’s not clear to me is where it should go whether it should be all-transportation modality. There’s obviously got to be more study until we figure that out."

While Rooker can sympathize with the city’s worries about cut-through traffic, he says taxes or no taxes, the Eastern Connector is at an early stage and a long way off. "We don’t even have the traffic component from the study," he says. "Right now I don’t know if the route that might be selected is a $10 million project or a $100 million project."

C-VILLE welcomes news tips. Send them to news@c-ville.com.

music

The heat is overwhelming to spite the setting sun: Sweat stains spread on the backs of shirts like Rorschach ink blots, and a mix of indigo and amethyst lights catch in the wispy backdrop of the Pavilion. With the white big-top and Southern aristocrat dress of some of the folks on hand, the scene looks like a backwoods revival in reverse; darkness seems to leak out from beneath the tent and color the sky as the night progresses.

Devil in disguise: Fiona Apple channeled the spirits while the inventive bluegrass band Nickel Creek kept listeners in the throes of ecstasy at the Charlottesville Pavilion on Saturday night.

And a revival isn’t too far fetched. The three virtuoso musicians in Nickel Creek—mandolin wiz Chris Thile, violinist Sara Watkins and her brother Sean, the group’s guitarist—have a working knowledge of bluegrass, country and folk that extends well beyond their years (the oldest member of the group, Sean Watkins just cracked 30), dipping as far back as the ’40s and ’50s when they could’ve played the backing band to a spiritual leader’s wild-eyed, raving homilies. In fact, following Nickel Creek’s opening song “This Side”—a spare, string-popping number that earns approving noises from the audience—band leader Thile makes a crack about the revival feel of the evening.

“You know you’ve started off on the wrong foot when you forsake your loved one for the devil,” the lanky, invigorating mandolin-man says with a laugh. “What a project, though.”

And Fiona Apple has the devil in her. Thanks to a series of sit-in performances with the Creek during a weekly club gig in L.A., Apple accepted an invite to hit the road with the trio of string geniuses for their “Farewell (For Now)” tour. As Nickel Creek expertly controls the momentum of the evening—working the crowd to an applause-wracked mess during up-tempo instrumental numbers that see Sara Watkins playing a human metronome, swinging her skirt side to side, then granting the congregation rest during the sea chantey “House Carpenter”—there is a monster lurking backstage ready to captivate the souls in the tent. Until, finally…

Sara Watkins and Thile pluck out the opening strains of “Extraordinary Machine” as the waifish Apple steps onstage in a loose orange housedress, timidly steps to a microphone stand and opens the mouth that has stirred listeners to sin since she released her first record at age 18.

On record, “Extraordinary” hits like an orchestra setting up in a New York jazz bar after a few whiskeys; with a bluegrass chaser, however, the song pops and struts a bit more, as does Apple, hands drumming the demon in her gut. Rather than following the glistening lead track from her latest record with another of her rumbling piano tunes, Apple remains at the mic and sings with Sara Watkins as Thile kicks up “I Wanna Play That Rock And Roll,” a rollicking song by Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings.

Apple is possessed. Removed from her traditional piano, her body convulses from the waist up, as if the keys are the only things that ground her to the earth—her foot taps but she never hits a pedal, her shoulders tense and jut but she never strikes a note. Her black piano remains untouched through the entirety of the concert, and Nickel Creek fleshes out the skewed standard jazz of “Paper Bag” and Patsy Cline’s “Walking After Midnight.”

The listeners rise from their pews and take a break after a first set, and head back into mass for another ripping introductory set by Thile and the duo Watkins, including the Grammy-winning instrumental “Smoothie Song” (with Thile soothing and jarring the audience with minor-stepping solos on the bouzouki). A hushed version of “Anthony,” sung by Sara Watkins while the band circles together around a single microphone, cools down the tent.

The madwoman re-emerges and tears into “A Mistake” and “Oh Well,” the band dropping out entirely on the latter song as Apple belts “What wasted, unconditional love” like Loretta or Dolly. The fragile, ’50s housewife image projected by Apple’s dress disintegrates—she looks like Aunt Jemimah throwing pancakes in a rage, or June Cleaver whupping Wally’s ass.

“It’s time for a bluegrass song,” Thile announces a moment later. “Fiona’s been studying that high, lonesome sound.” Apple’s breakout single, “Criminal,” comes packaged like a revenge ballad and, though the new, twangy edge is rough to get used to, her spiraling harmonies with Sara Watkins give the tune and its composer a powerful second life.

The congregation is pouring sweat and applause now; a few folks dance in the aisle as their spirits demand. And, though Apple and the Creek will re-emerge for a calming encore of the Billy Rose/Lee David tune, “You Belong to Me,” the night peaks at the second set’s finale, the reeling “Fast As You Can.” Nickel Creek’s interweaving strings boil over onto the stove while Apple, ever the possessed housewife, flails in the throes of some fit like an epileptic Iggy Pop. The piano stands ignored, but we’ve got the devil in us now, we’re opening the top of the piano and dancing hellfire on the strings.

For all the hand-wringing in the establishment media about the supposedly insidious influence of bloggers on the national political scene, little is known about who these people are outside of their online world.

You can hear me now: Mike Stark’s stock-in-trade is calling up conservative talk radio shows and calling the hosts on their factual distortions

Charlottesville’s Mike Stark is a case in point. The proprietor of the blog "Calling All Wingnuts," Stark is fairly well known in the "blogosphere," and he has a more significant impact, thanks to an online "butterfly-effect," on national politics than one might think.

Unlike most bloggers, who tend to be observers of and commentors on the political scene, Stark is an activist/videographer in the tradition of Michael Moore, as I learned when I witnessed Stark take on John Edwards after a campaign speech, and an active participant in many of the stories he covers. "I’m kind of an odd component in this new blogosphere," he says, "in that when I blog it’s because I’ve done something, whereas most people blog because they’ve thought about something."

At a George Allen campaign appearance last October at the Omni Hotel, Stark was, in his words, "tackled to the ground" by some Allen aides and supporters after Stark attempted to grill the Senator about his first wife. Allen has since disappeared behind the scenes, while Stark is still making waves.

Stark’s most well-known "something" occurred when, as he puts it, he "managed to get tackled to the ground" at a George Allen campaign appearance last October at the Omni Hotel. The videotaped incident shows Stark attempting to ask Allen about rumors that had been floating around that sealed court documents from Allen’s divorce detailed his abuse of his first wife. Several angry Allen aides and supporters pushed him into a glass wall and wrestled him to the floor. Stark was unhurt, but the videotape brought unwelcome attention to Allen’s campaign, and moved the rumors, whether true or not, into the mainstream media just a week before the election, and just as Allen was hoping to regain his footing in the wake of several self-inflicted wounds, most conspicuously the seminal "Macaca" incident.
 
The video was prominently featured on Yahoo and replayed on TV. Stark appeared as a guest on Keith Olbermann’s MSNBC show, "Countdown," and the story got good play in the print press, including The Washington Post. Allen, of course, lost a very close election.

Even an ideological opponent of Stark’s, Byron York of the National Review Online, grudgingly conceded Stark’s effectiveness. "The incident shows what a dedicated activist…can do, with a little brazenness and a willing press," he wrote.

The name of Stark’s blog, "Calling All Wingnuts," encapsulates his approach. "Wingnuts" is a pejorative term used to describe the rabid, doctrinaire, ideologically driven segment of the conservative movement. Stark’s stock-in-trade is calling conservative talk radio shows, such as Rush Limbaugh’s and Sean Hannity’s, and aggressively challenging the hosts, typically on their factual distortions. He then posts recordings of the calls on his blog.

In addition to the Allen incident, Stark has had more success than many bloggers in breaking through the electronic curtain to reach audiences of print and broadcast media. It doesn’t hurt that, like Moore, Stark makes his points with a healthy dose of humor. For instance, Stark once positioned himself behind Alan Colmes, one of the eponymous moderators of the Fox News show "Hannity and Colmes," during a live broadcast, while holding a large sign reading, "Hannity Sucks Ass." The moment got wide exposure, including on "The Daily Show."

Although Hannity himself laughed it off, Stark’s many conservative critics in the blogosphere don’t find him so funny. Dan Riehl of "Riehl World View," for instance, wrote a post about Stark earlier this year as he was preparing to appear opposite Stark on a TV show. Riehl called Stark, among other names, a "clown," a "political hack," a "moonbat" and a "bug."

And then there is Bill O’Reilly. O’Reilly is a sort of Moby Dick-like presence in Stark’s life, the personification of evil, a representation of the worst of the American political media. "He cannot stand accountability," Stark says of O’Reilly. "When you’re an asshole, you can’t stand accountability, and Bill O’Reilly is an asshole." Stark seems to particularly relish annoying the famously thin-skinned O’Reilly, like the time, Stark recalls, when he got O’Reilly so steamed merely by mentioning a website O’Reilly hated that O’Reilly threatened, on air, to form a mob and take it to Stark’s house.

To the extent, however, that Stark’s brand of activism leaves the impression that he is a heckler, obnoxious or rude, as critics like Riehl have claimed, he is anything but. About to enter his second year of law school at UVA, the former U.S. Marine is fairly low key. He is completely dedicated to his wife and two children. He doesn’t have enough time to play as much golf as he would like.

But when it comes to politics and what he believes in, Stark is passionate, even dogmatic. That said, he sees himself not as a crusader, but a citizen rightfully demanding accountability from his leaders and the media that report on them. He has to, he says, because traditional journalists have fallen down on the job. Take, for example, Stark’s efforts last fall to ask Allen whether he ever uttered the N-word, another Stark-inspired story that eventually found its way into the mainstream media. "He called a brown-skinned person ‘Macaca,’" Stark explains. "Asking him if he used the N-word was not disrespectful. I’m sorry, man. If you’ve used one racial slur, what other racial slurs have you used? If the rest of the media doesn’t have the balls to ask the question, and I do, I’m not disrespectful for that."

I recently attended a conference in Washington, D.C., with Stark in which John Edwards, as well as the other Democratic presidential candidates, spoke. I got to see Stark’s passion and dogmatism first hand. Following Edwards’ speech, Stark was determined to speak with him, and small obstacles like security and an army of aides around the candidate weren’t going to stop him. He high-stepped a rope line and blew past a stunned hotel guard to a back hallway at the Washington Hilton in pursuit of the former senator, where he was intercepted by an Edwards staffer—whom Stark later explained was a friend of his—concerned about what Stark might do. (It probably didn’t help that, at Stark’s request, I was videotaping all this for him.) Stark talked his way passed her, though, caught Edwards on a hotel escalator and enjoyed several minutes of his undivided attention, which Stark used to, among other things, pitch his idea for a centralized, umbrella government agency to investigate illegal and unethical corporate behavior.

Later, as we were discussing the chase, specifically the concern of the Edwards aide, I noted, "You and Senator Edwards had a respectful conversation." I meant it as a compliment, in the sense that Stark had defied the aide’s fears.

"No," Stark snapped, in a tone anything but low key. "Respectful conversation is phrasing it entirely wrong. It was a concerned citizen, two concerned citizens, talking to each other. When you say ‘respectful conversation’ as a member of the media, it almost implies that conversations that I’m going to have are automatically going to be disrespectful. Well, you know what? All I am doing is the job the media should have been doing all along."