Month: October 2007

There’s one big problem with being a voracious political junkie: Sometimes, in order to help you, our gentle reader, we have to read a thuddingly dull, solipsistic political treatise like "The Stupid Party," a recent article by UVA politics prof Jim Ceaser published in the (increasingly inconsequential) right-wing mouthpiece, The Weekly Standard. Sure, it’s got an intriguing title, but it doesn’t take more than a paragraph to realize that Ceaser’s article is just another garden-variety jeremiad against the progressive wing of the Democratic party, right down to the gratuitous potshots at MoveOn.org’s "network of techno-thugs" and the coven of liberal fetishists who apparently run our nation’s universities.

Congressman Tom Davis said on a recent radio report that a moderate Republican such as himself could win in Virginia because it’s "one-third Northern Virginia and the rest Alabama." Now that he’s bowed out of the Senate race, we don’t have to worry about any more bad geography lessons.

Of course, Ceaser doesn’t actually provide any concrete examples of Democratic politicians doing moronic things to earn this label (originally coined by the English wit John Stuart Mill to describe American conservatives, by the way), which is a real shame. After all, if there’s one thing politicians are good at, it’s doing stupid things—so why bore the hell out of your readers with a load of generic platitudes when there’s so much actual idiocy out there to document? And so, as a favor, we decided to do Ceaser’s work for him, searching far and wide (all the way from Google to Ask.com) to see if we could really figure out which of our illustrious state parties truly deserves the "Stupid" sticker.

We started with the Democrats, because we wanted to give Ceaser’s thesis a fair shake. And sure enough, it didn’t take us very long to find one of the most bone-headed pieces of political advertising this election cycle, courtesy of Delegate Paula Miller, a Democrat who represents Norfolk’s 87th District. Seems that her opponent, James Griffin, is a retired vice admiral and ex-commander of the Navy’s Atlantic Fleet Surface Force. So how does Miller decide to attack her opponent’s seemingly sterling credentials? She dregs up a decade-old case involving a philandering admiral who funneled Navy contracts to his mistress, and then accuses Griffin of "conduct unbecoming an officer" because he was in charge of the case, and ended up imposing only a $7,000 fine and 30 days of house arrest for the amorous admiral. Oh, Paula—for someone who represents a heavily military district, you sure don’t know much about winning the all-important horny sailor vote.

Pretty dumb stuff—but what of the Republicans? Well, for an appropriately retarded rejoinder, we turn to Congressman Tom Davis—he of the perpetually simmering senate campaign that, as of last Thursday, was finally yanked off the stove for good. Which is probably for the best, since Davis has recently been exhibiting all of the classic signs of advanced foot-in-mouth disease (or, as it’s known around these parts, "Macaca Mouth"). Just take his recent chat with WTOP radio reporter Mark Plotkin, during which he cheerfully explained that a moderate Republican such as himself could win a statewide race because Virginia is "one-third Northern Virginia and the rest Alabama." Nice—I’m sure that the lower two-thirds of the Commonwealth just couldn’t wait to vote for a guy who wants to cede them to the Heart of Dixie. With campaigning skills like that, it’s no wonder that Rep. Davis ultimately decided that tilting at the Mark Warner windmill would be more trouble than it’s worth.

So there you go, Professor Ceaser—in 10 minutes of surfing the political information superhighway, we have conclusively proven that the "Stupid" crown fits equally well on the heads of Democrats and Republicans alike. And really, we’ve just scratched the surface. I mean, did you hear that Virgil Goode recently reached into his own pocket to contribute to Rep. John Doolittle, the congressman whose Northern Virginia house was raided by the FBI in connection with the Jack Abramoff scandal last April? Come on, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel out here—you really should take your head out of your ass long enough to try it.

As Ann Andrus of the Department of Historical Resources began a public information meeting on the Martha Jefferson neighborhood, a raucous yell came from a child in the back of the Burnley-Moran Elementary auditorium. Andrus didn’t flinch, but mothers—there were many there—turned to look and smile. It was all part of the informality of the October 24 session to present the department’s findings regarding the proposed classification of the neighborhood that includes the Martha Jefferson hospital and the Maplewood Cemetery.

In 1839, construction began at 810 Locust Ave. on a plantation that survived the Civil War. From there, development branched out, most significantly around the turn of the 20th century when the Locust Grove Investment Company—a group of wealthy Charlottesville entrepreneurs—constructed a number of houses that, as the neighborhood’s historical researcher Lydia Brant explained, still "retain a remarkable degree of architectural integrity." "It’s a very intact example of development of its kind," she said.

Last week, many neighbors surrounding the Martha Jefferson Hospital came out to support a proposed National Historic District Designation.

The 30 or so people in attendance were then treated to an explanation of what National Historic District Designation does and does not do. Mostly honorary, the designation recognizes the architectural and historic significance of an area and qualifies a property owner for state and federal Rehabilitation Tax Credits. It does not require government approval of housing changes or demolition.

Nearly all of the public’s objections to federal and state designation typically arise out of the fear that it will lead to local preservation status, a measure which brings the individual properties under the control of the local Board of Architecture. This classification means that a private owner must receive Board approval before making exterior changes to their house.
 
Two days before the meeting, I strolled along Locust Avenue and adjoining streets with one of the neighborhood’s residents, Melanie Miller, who has helped lead the charge for the region’s recognition. "Some people are fine with the national and state [designation], but they don’t really want local designation, because they don’t want anyone telling them they can paint their house purple or not," she said. "I can see that."

According to Mary Joy Scala, the city’s historic planner, paint color is handled administratively and usually receives approval unless it’s "hideous." As she explained at the meeting, the city currently has five national register districts and all but one is also locally controlled. That suggests that national recognition could lead to local regulation.

Nevertheless, resident reaction was unanimously positive to the possibility of national and state recognition. The neighborhood’s nomination will next go before the National Register and State Review boards at the Virginia Historical Society in Richmond on December 5.

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UVA faculty think their work is valued at the department level—but not as much at the administrative level. Profs want more money and support for their grad students, and want tuition benefits for their children—as well as subsidized parking.

Such is what’s suggested by a faculty survey conducted by the UVA Faculty Senate in the spring and due to be formally released in mid-November. Of the 3,500 faculty solicited, about 2,000 responded. Roughly half of the respondents were tenure track professors. The survey looked at three broad areas: the academic community, faculty priorities and benefits.

Provost Tim Garson says he’s not surprised that profs feel more support from departments than from the administration. "I would wonder whether that’s not the same thing in corporate America, where you value your close family more than your extended family."

When it comes to the academic community, most faculty—78 percent—agreed that UVA is "collegial," and are generally satisfied with undergrad students and other faculty. More than 70 percent agreed that their department valued their teaching, their research and their service. The highest levels of faculty dissatisfaction are with the larger university: 36 percent were dissatisfied with support for their discipline within the University, and high percentages also weren’t pleased with efforts to retain valued faculty and support for their department within their school.

In ranking priorities for administrative support, faculty are much more interested in seeing transparent administrative polices (49 percent) than departmental office space (28 percent). Nontenure track profs want a clearer understanding of top-level decisions. One of the other top priorities for faculty is seeing streamlined administrative policies.

As for research support, faculty’s top priority is their grad students. Next on the list is support for travel to conferences. When it comes to benefits, profs generally like their retirement programs, but don’t like paying for parking or for gym memberships. Down the line, they’d like tuition benefits for their children and subsidized parking.

Faculty response created a muddled picture on the subject of diversity. More than 70 percent agreed that diversity is valued by their department, though faculty who actually are women or minorities were less likely to agree. Yet when it came to research and teaching support priorities, "enhanced diversity, including minorities and women," wasn’t ranked by nearly as many white men as it was by women and minorities.

Provost Tim Garson hasn’t seen the full report, but has had a cursory peek at the results and isn’t all that surprised that profs feel more support from departments than from the administration. "I would wonder whether that’s not the same thing in corporate America, where you value your close family more than your extended family," says Garson. "On the other hand, I think there are ways that are extremely important that the extended family does demonstrate value." He thinks the report on the Commission on the Future will show faculty that UVA is taking their concerns seriously.

Garson would like to get comparable data from other universities in order to isolate which concerns are UVA specific. But one result from the survey he thinks looks particularly good in context is the percentage who find the school collegial. "That’s what Jefferson had in mind," says Garson. "I have gone to friends at other universities and asked that question, and the answer that I get is 15 to 20 percent, not 77 percent. Nevermind spiritually collaborative, we are statistically collaborative."

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University of Virginia English professor Mark Edmundson was in his late teens when he stumbled across a copy of The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud while at a friend’s house, and began to read an excerpt from The Interpretation of Dreams. "I thought it was simply terrible," Edmundson recalls, but a few weeks later, when he found himself back at his friend’s, he tried Freud once more. "I picked it up again and skipped the first chapter and from then on I couldn’t stop," he says. "It was the most fascinating damn thing I’d ever read."

"I think if Freud looked out on our landscape today he’d see the makings of dictatorship in religious fundamentalism and in George Bush, and the makings of chaos in American popular culture," says UVA English professor Mark Edmundson.

The early infatuation led to Edmundson’s dissertation and first book, Towards Reading Freud (to be republished in November), and what is now a three decade-long preoccupation with the father of psychoanalysis. In addition to a 2003 introduction to a Penguin reissue of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the Harper’s contributing editor has also covered Freud in recent pieces for the New York Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. The fascination has now resulted in his newest book, The Death of Sigmund Freud. "I’ve found Freud illuminating during the 30 years that I’ve been reading him and I imagine I will to the end," Edmundson explains, obviously rejecting the notion that Freud and his ideas are outdated. "People are constantly finding things the world has abandoned or turned away from and making them interesting again. That’s what I hope to do."

To accomplish that, oddly enough, Edmundson has narrowed his focus to Freud as he neared the end of his life in the late 1930s. Riddled with cancer of the jaw and laboring to finish what would be his last book, Moses and Monotheism, an 80-year-old Freud was also faced with having to relocate for his final years, his home country of Austria the first of many conquests for Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich.

While he was primarily known for his writing on sexuality and dreams, Freud had begun to concentrate on religious fundamentalism and totalitarianism. Suddenly, he was confronted with the apotheosis of this in Hitler, who only 30 years earlier was a street beggar in Freud’s hometown of Vienna. Then there was Moses, his final subject and the architect of Judaism, who had characteristically undergone a change in Freud’s possession, becoming a restrained and diverse model of leadership.

Freud was also dying, and Edmundson places us within this complete context, finding the psychologist’s ending years as revealing as his more recognized periods. "He continues to be illuminating," says Edmundson. "It doesn’t mean he has the last word, but once he says something it’s always worth taking seriously and worth debating. Of very few thinkers can that be said."

C-VILLE: In your new book, you outline Freud’s lifelong distaste for America.

Mark Edmundson: The attitude to America is fascinating. The line that stays with me is, "America is enormous but it is an enormous mistake." There are a lot of levels to Freud’s resistance to America. One level just seems irrational. He said everybody in America is a moneygrubber; he said people in America have crummy love affairs. Well, how did he know? He spent two and a half weeks here, and that was it.

The second level is a little more interesting. He thought democracy would eventually devolve in the direction of anarchy and that we would never develop the ability to listen to reasonable leaders. We would either be anarchic or slavish in our obedience to this or that leader.   

Freud always thought that as soon as we had made all the money we could make—because that was our primary interest—that we would eventually embrace chaotic democracy or go over to dictatorship. Whether we are on the verge of either I’m not sure. I think if Freud looked out on our landscape today he’d see the makings of dictatorship in religious fundamentalism and in George Bush, and the makings of chaos in American popular culture.

There’s a third level to Freud’s resistance to America, and that involves his sense that the stories he had to tell about human beings tended to be dark stories, and that Americans were never going to listen to dark stories about themselves. They required a good deal of cheering up and optimism. So when he said, "We’re bringing them the plague, but they don’t even know it," he might have gone on to say, "And they never will know it either because they’ll never really take in the words I have to say, with their idiotic optimism." That was the gamut of Freud’s take on America.

Balanced against that was Freud’s resignation to Hitler, who he seemed to take in stride.

Yes, he did. Freud thought that we had a deep, abiding hunger for absolute authority. It came from our lives as children when we desperately wanted father figures and mother figures to organize experience for us, to tell us what’s good and bad, right and wrong. And Freud realized that when times got tough we were going to want to re-create that early experience of stability even at very high costs. One of the most disturbing things that Freud insists on through his work is that people never willingly let go of an agreeable emotional situation. They always try to get it back. In this case the situation is the security a father brings.  Humanity, Freud thought, is addicted to patriarchy.

What about the dynamic of Freud as a patriarch versus all of his writings about the patriarchal system? There was a duality.

It’s the great paradox in Freud’s work. Freud is himself sometimes patriarchal: He wants to found a major movement; he wants authority; he wants to tell people what’s what. He can be very insistent in his tone; he can be domineering. He was also more than occasionally open to give and take; he could be kindly and flexible, and even to the end of his life he had one of the qualities that an ultimate patriarch or dictator never has, and that is a sense of humor. Hitler probably never told a joke in his life and never laughed at one. The Collected Humor of Adolph Hitler? There’s no such book. Freud wrote a whole volume about jokes with all of his favorites in there. Nobody who writes a book about jokes and loves jokes is a thoroughgoing patriarch. Loving jokes means having the capacity to appreciate off-beat and off-kilter views of the world. It means being drawn to subversion—which dictators hate. Then there’s the fact that Freud wrote so many books and essays designed to unmask coercive authority and our need for it. He was a great patriarch some of the time, yes, but he also wrote and frequently lived to put an end to patriarchy and all other forms of senseless domination.

You juxtapose the lives of Freud and Hitler. Is there any way in which Freud was contrasting Moses to Hitler?

Perhaps it’s implicit in his 1914 essay on Moses, where he talks about Michelangelo’s statue of the prophet. There he depicts Moses as somebody who is both a leader and an ambivalent individual. He feels two things at once. He’s not going to throw those tablets containing the Ten Commandments down—at least according to Freud; he’s going to restrain himself. He’s angry but he’s in conflict with his anger. He can be a divided being and yet a leader. Freud’s theory of the absolute leader—the Hitler type—is that he never shows self-division; he’s always at one with himself.

What Freud’s suggesting is that if we could become mature enough to have leaders who show self-division—rather than leaders who pretend they are fully unified—that would be a great step forward in maturity. I think Freud might be inclined to measure America by the way we responded to Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. It was hard for a lot of people to say something like, "Yes, he’s a good enough president, but I can’t approve of his personal life."  They couldn’t deal well with a leader they perceived as a divided person, good in some ways, bad or sub-par in others. He had to be all good or all bad.

Our current administration is intent in never varying from the same message. If you were a political guru it would almost make sense to read what Freud had to say about despotic leadership.

Yes, in fact there are people who think Hitler read Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. I don’t happen to be one of them. Bush may have taken some of these ideas in after his own fashion. A salient moment in the first debate between Kerry and Bush occurred when a questioner asked Bush what the most memorable mistake was that he had made as president, and he wouldn’t own up to having made a mistake on anything. This was after the Iraq invasion and after a multitude of other errors. He had plenty to choose from. I came to the conclusion then that Bush would win the election. He was providing that image of unity and total authority that people—no matter what they say—tend to hunger for.

music

It’s a truism that hip-hop in Charlottesville doesn’t get a lot of attention compared to the other genres here that have had break-out local artists. But one hopes that’s changing, as Outback Lodge has started a new underground hip-hop night, beginning with last Wednesday’s Killa, Endless Mic and Touch show.

The show opened up with Dareales, a local rapper. He went on a little earlier than he had planned, and it showed a bit in his stage presence. Although he only performed a couple of songs, Dareales shook off his nervousness and got a call-and-response session going fairly quickly, with a slow, bouncy rhythm to his songs.

Droppin’ rhymes like nerds, ya heard? North Carolina’s Endless Mic give it their geeky-MC best during a set of hip-hop tunes at Outback Lodge.

After the laid-back feel of Dareales, Endless Mic’s sudden energy came on as a bit of a shock. Mostly playing beats off a laptop, they started rapping after the first note and suddenly were jumping around the stage and the audience like the second coming of the Beastie Boys. Endless Mic is just this side of nerdcore—the group is named after a "Pete and Pete" character, reference Skeletor from "Masters of the Universe," and sample from White Town’s "Your Woman." The crowd wasn’t particularly into it, and the fact that they weren’t using Ducktape as a live DJ made it harder to win the audience over.

After a brief break, Touch came on. Another local rapper, he was able to switch instantly from double-timing his verses over the beat from Ghostface Killah’s "Back Like That" to turning Mims’ "This is Why I’m Hot" into an ode to popping pills, with a suitably calm and menacing delivery. He managed to keep his cool throughout the set, even as more and more folks encroached upon the stage. During his last song, as the beat dropped out behind him, Touch kept rapping for another two minutes or so, crouching lower to the stage as the audience surrounded him.

It was nearly a quarter to 1am by the time Killa got up on the stage, following a few quick verses from local kids Q Black and Marqui, as well as Zano from Endless Mic. Killa’s set was pretty straightforward—holding a mic in one hand and a beer in the other, he made boasts over synth-heavy tracks from the DJ. But the late hour was taking a toll, sapping the energy of both the group and the audience. Charlottesville’s newest hip-hop night may have opened up with a burst of energy, but it ended anti-climatically as the crowd filtered out into the rain.

Describing itself as an "innovative source of news dedicated to serving the University community," the Virginia Sentinel launched its online-only news source October 3 with a story about an Honor Committee report that was released two days prior. The Cavalier Daily, the established student-run newspaper, ran nothing on the report.

Starting a newspaper from scratch has become easier with the advent of the Web and blogger-ish tools like Word Press, but it’s still not a task for the faint of heart. After its initial post, the Sentinel, at www.virginiasentinel.com, is humming along, posting University-related content daily. And while Editor Grayson Lambert made it clear in an interview with The Cav Daily that the new site doesn’t consider itself a direct competitor to the daily broadsheet, it does pose as somewhat of a challenger to The Cav Daily and the weekly Declaration.

The cartoons of the Virginia Sentinel act as pretty good litmus tests to show its political tilt.

Compared to The Cav Daily’s website, the Sentinel has a much more open and accessible feel, incorporating blogging features like comments and subject tags instead of news sections. And essentially, that’s what the Sentinel is—a blog, albeit one that is run by a three-person staff and posts contributors’ essays and news stories.

The Sentinel sticks to its professed core values of innovation, utility and professionalism (if not AP style), but after little more than a cursory read it becomes clear that the readership the publication intends to serve is fairly right-wing. Among the police-blotter reposts and news stories straight from press releases are cartoons that act as pretty good political litmus tests.

One is titled "Al Gore and Gold." The cartoon shows a vulture-like Gore clutching an Emmy and Oscar in either hand, Nobel metal hung around his neck. The cutline reads: "Value of gold falls in ’07." In another, a squirrel explains why it’s really dumb for people to feel entitled to health care (it didn’t exist when "rights" were established, or something like that). A third features a trout-like Jimmy Carter and makes a stunningly unfunny joke about torture and his novel.

For a proprietary news source, the Sentinel has got a way to go. For a blog that aggregates news, it’s fairly informative. And one gets the feeling that there are plenty of sympathetic readers lurking around the Grounds to support it.

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The house at 502 Park Hill St., just north of Downtown, sits up on a hill, sightlines protected by trees. Even if you were to peer around the trees, to really get a good look at the house, you would see a structure that seems to slowly melt into its surroundings. This is not an accident.

The house’s architect, Eugene Bradbury, enclosed its first-floor walls with boulders that were taken from the site. He also designed a red terra-cotta roof that takes its hue from the distinct color of Albemarle County red clay. In the words of Daniel Bluestone, a UVA professor of architectural history, Bradbury was "seeking to establish reciprocity between the site and house."

Bluestone is something of an expert on Bradbury, who was working in Charlottesville at the beginning of the last century, and Bluestone says that Charlottesville holds the architect’s largest collection of buildings. One of them, though, might not be around much longer. The Jefferson Scholars Program, a group that has long endowed UVA undergrads and, more recently, grad students, is deciding whether to tear down the Compton House ( a.k.a. the Beta House) to build a center for their graduate fellows program. That decision is worrying members of City Council, not to mention Bluestone.

The Compton House, built in 1913, is one of Charlottesville’s most important examples of Bradbury’s work, says Bluestone. It’s in jeopardy of being torn down for a new building for the Thomas Jefferson Scholars Foundation.

The Compton House, built in 1913, is one of Charlottesville’s most important examples of Bradbury’s work, according to Bluestone. By adding a trellis to one side of the house and a sunroom to the other, Bradbury opened up the house’s design to the surrounding landscape. A person can look at the house and its site in the same view and feel the close relationship between the two. Bluestone says that such a strategy was important to designers at the turn of the century. "It stands in pretty striking contrast to the neoclassical houses that are around," he says, "where it’s much clearer where the house begins and the site ends."

The Trotter House on University Circle shows how early 1900s architect Eugene Bradbury resisted the impulse to impose outside structures or ideas on natural sites, according to Daniel Bluestone, a UVA professor of architectural history.

Bluestone points to another example of Bradbury’s work, the Trotter House on University Circle, in which he resisted the impulse to impose outside structures or ideas on natural sites. "You can see that there are these French double windows that come out of most of the first floor," he says. "The notion is that you can step right from inside the house to the outside of the house into the garden." It also features a red terra-cotta roof like the house on Park Hill.

City Council has expressed concern that the Compton House might be destroyed. After approving an $18 million bond in June to the Jefferson Scholars, councilors balked at approving $3 million more when it became clear that the Foundation was considering demolishing the building. The Foundation has said that it can proceed without the extra $3 million if it chooses to tear down the Compton House.

"In June we just couldn’t imagine that they would want to tear down the building," says Mayor David Brown. "It didn’t cross our radar screen that this would be a possibility. What underlies all this is that the Jefferson Scholars is a great program. so we didn’t imagine that this was in the cards."

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