Month: January 2008

Last November, a report by the City of Charlottesville’s Committee on Environmental Sustainability turned some heads when it revealed that the glass collected locally for recycling ends up in a landfill. Fortunately, the situation has improved—and was never quite as bleak as the report made it seem.

Where do all the glass bottles go? For the most part, into the landfill, though as road bedding rather than general trash.

Jason Halbert, chair of the Materials Management Subcommittee, says that the report was actually written last summer, and the situation has since been steadily improving. The biggest problem is a dearth of markets for recycled glass, partially because of the difficulty in sorting, cleaning and refurbishing it. Glass must be strictly sorted according to color, and pyrex, window glass, paper and metal must be removed before returning it to the furnace, making it an expensive process.

“It’s not the city’s fault or Allied’s fault,” Halbert says, referring to the company that handles curbside recycling. “It’s that the markets for green glass are poor.”

If you’re thinking you should start tossing all those bottles in the garbage, it’s not that there aren’t uses for waste glass, however. Bruce Edwards, recycling director for the Rivanna Solid Waste Authority (RSWA), took umbrage at the notion that glass from the McIntire Recycling Center was simply being thrown away. Instead, he pointed out that glass was being used as road bedding within the Ivy landfill in place of gravel. RSWA Executive Director Tom Frederick added that 600 tons of glass replace gravel roads and help with ground water remediation, saving the authority around $10,000 each year. In addition, RSWA has been working closely with a geotechnical engineer to find new markets for the glass, including asphalt mixes (or “glasphalt”) and in concrete.

UVA’s record is a little more complex. Until late last year, glass from the University ended up in a Fluvanna landfill. Again, it was used as road bedding, but also as “alternative fill,” used to separate layers of trash. Now the glass is sent to a facility in Madison Heights, where it is ground up and given to concrete producers. Allied Waste Management sends its glass to Tidewater Fibers in Chester, Virginia, which is a reclamation facility. However, Tidewater did not return calls by press time regarding the ultimate fate of that glass.

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

Chan Marshall’s concert at the Satellite Ballroom in 2005 was everything I’d been led to expect it would be: a few sparse, harrowing blues originals from the nervous chanteuse with the dark bangs in her eyes, interrupted halfway through as she voiced her anxieties, saying she “felt like she was being watched by the KKK,” then grabbed her glass of wine and split the stage. Marshall finished four or five songs in her 90 minutes or so on stage, and only two or three were hers; the others were covers of “House of the Rising Sun” and the Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to do is Dream.”

Nearly a year later, Marshall spilled it all to the New York Times: whiskey and scotch by day, Xanax by night, meltdowns aplenty. But by that point, it didn’t matter: Cat Power’s 2005 record, The Greatest, was reissued with new art, and her live gigs had grown by leaps and bounds, her backing band of soul veterans amplifying tunes from her catalogue as well as providing Marshall herself with an array of talent that she could envelop herself in. “Cat Power” became a group name that Marshall could disappear into rather than a globe she was required to support on her slender, bowed shoulders. She began dotting her live shows with new covers, ranging from The Highwaymen’s “Silver Stallion” to Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears,” huskily murmuring, “People say I’m the life of the party ’cause I tell a joke or two./ Although I might be laughing loud and hearty, deep inside I’m blue.”

Cat Power’s latest record, Jukebox, is her second album of cover songs, following 2000’s The Covers Record (which featured one of the greatest lyrical reinterpretations in modern rock, Marshall’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction” without using the chorus, a purely sexual tease). Jukebox features many of the covers that Marshall unveiled during tours that followed her recovery from addiction: “Silver Stallion” perfectly pairs Marshall’s ash-tipped voice with a dusty slide guitar, while “Aretha, Sing One for Me” drowns her voice in gospel organ and electric guitar gnarls, not altogether pleasantly.

Rather than the soul ensemble of Al Green vets that made up her band for The Greatest, Marshall’s crew features drummer Jim White of Australian instrumental whizzes Dirty Three and guitarist Judah Bauer, once a member of Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. White’s drumming almost succeeds in making Jukebox’s lead track, “New York” (made famous by Frank Sinatra), a repeat of Marshall’s take on “Satisfaction,” and the song’s cymbal-tapped transition to Hank Williams’ “Rambling (Wo)man” (Marshall makes the subject feminine) makes for a dynamite pairing of murky keys and Zeppelin drums, but Chan the Cat has to work a bit too hard to turn the schmaltzy opening cut into something darker.

Jukebox makes a few more missteps in song choices: Joni Mitchell’s “Blue” should’ve been canned, and a few tracks from a bonus disc (namely Nick Cave’s “Breathless” and Hank Cochran’s “She’s Got You,” made famous by Patsy Cline) should’ve made the cut. But Marshall’s re-imagining of “Metal Heart,” an eight minute track of tinny Danelectro guitar and a vocal double from 1998’s Moon Pix, speaks volumes about the record. The song is sliced in half, but Marshall’s voice, without studio support, soars as something new as her band rocks behind her like her past catastrophes. Marshall isn’t quite the life of the party anymore, but she seems a little less blue.

In the 2006 General Assembly, the Republican majority made a substantive rule change that allowed for House bills to be killed in subcommittee where votes are not recorded. Before that, a bill could only be voted down before a full session where the vote is recorded. That year, 459 bills were quashed in subcommittee, and the following year 603 died there, including a Democratic proposal for a statewide smoking ban in restaurants and bars. As it was voted down in subcommittee, the public had no say in its determination.

"The way the rules were changed so that bills can be killed in the dead of the night is not right," says Delegate David Toscano.

This year, the still-Democratic minority tried to attack this disparity with a two-fisted approach. Delegate Ken Plum (D-Reston) introduced a rule that would have required subcommittees to record votes and House Minority Leader Ward Armstrong (D-Henry) also introduced a rule that would have required the House to provide the live broadcast of the session to the public.

House Republicans were not fooled and shot both of them down along a straight party line vote. “That’s not the way to ensure accountability,” says Delegate David Toscano (D-Charlottesville), who says he once had a bill referred to a subcommittee that never even met. “The way the rules were changed so that bills can be killed in the dead of night is not right.”

“Transparency in government works best,” says State Senator Creigh Deeds. Unlike the House, the Senate records subcommittee votes, although Senate bills cannot be killed in subcommittee anyway. “If you’re making a binding vote, you shouldn’t be afraid to reveal it.”

“They don’t want to record it because they fear a backlash from their constituents,” says Jan Cornell, president of Staff Union at UVA.

“They should have the courage of their convictions to tell people how they voted,” says Deeds in chastising the Republicans. “I applaud the House Democrats for their attempt.”

However, House Democrats aren’t always up for having votes on the record. On January 24, House Republicans forced a vote on a bill that would have given state employees the right to unionize, according to The Washington Post. House leaders bypassed several committees without any testimony or debate and wouldn’t honor a request from the bill’s patron to withdraw it, in order to get a vote on the record that could be used against Democrats in later elections. All but two Democrats abstained from voting.

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

Ten years ago, author Greg Bottoms and I worked together at a local arts and culture magazine called “Gadfly” in an office on the middle level of The Rutherford Institute (which bankrolled the mag). Upstairs, my dad was busy suing Bill Clinton, but down in our purgatory, Greg and I would talk of fringe religious artists like James Hampton, Jr., a Washington, D.C.-based janitor who also made a 180-piece sculpture out of tin foil-wrapped refuse, all for the purpose of announcing the end times as told in the Book of Revelation. As a Christian, I could offer some perspective on religious belief to Bottoms who, as an agnostic, was always a little uncomfortable in his immediate surroundings. That same tension is everpresent  in his newest book, The Colorful Apocalypse, an account of his “journeys in outsider art.”

Devilish works: Greg Bottoms uncovers the wild side of Christian art in The Colorful Apocalypse.

Over the course of 180 pages, readers follow the former UVA creative writing student as he travels to Georgia on the first anniversary of the death of Howard Finster (who died in 2000), whose fundamentalist art construction “Paradise Gardens” made him famous enough to be commissioned by both R.E.M. and Talking Heads to do album covers. There, Bottoms meets artist Myrtice West, who only began to paint her visions from God after her daughter’s murder. In Baltimore and then South Carolina, the author tags along with William Thomas Thompson, whose nerve damage preceded a life of painting apocryphal anti-Semitic portraits. His sometime-partner Norbert Kox leads Bottoms to frozen rural Wisconsin, where he finds the artist constructing sculptures attacking the Catholic Church and the pope as the anti-Christ, all after a bad LSD trip.

“For my project I was mainly interested,” Bottoms says near the end of his book, “in the social and psychological situation out of which Christian visionary art came. I didn’t want to be a critic; more like a documentarian. My idea was to talk to the artists themselves about their intentions.” As with this one, Bottoms’ two previous books were as much about him as they were its subjects. Published in 2000, Angelhead was a riveting memoir of his schizophrenic brother’s descent into mental illness and his family’s suffering. Sentimental, Heartbroken Rednecks—a loose collection of stories chronicling the lives of eccentric Southern characters—was released the following year. Whereas Rednecks seemed to suffer from a self-consciousness that overshadowed his characters, the six year span between books shows Bottoms efficiently balancing his own experiences with mental illness against the sheer craziness of these religious artists, people who have transformed their painful pasts into visceral art, much as Bottoms does here.

With fewer stories about Iraq in the media, many Americans are not aware of the great improvements there. Al Qaeda no longer has substantial control of any area of Iraq, normal citizens—Shiite and Sunni—have united to form over 300 neighborhood security groups, the Iraqi Army is increasingly conducting anti-terrorist operations on its own, and violence has dropped to two-thirds of what it was a year before.  Not long ago, it seemed as if we were on the verge of defeat; now it is likely that Iraqis and Americans together will subdue al Qaeda and other radicals in Iraq and build a peaceful and tolerant society. 

The Fixer: Under Gen. Petraeus’ (left) watch, more Iraqis have begun cooperating with the U.S., and former enemies are switching over to our side.

To appreciate the enormity of this accomplishment, and the debt we owe to the man most responsible for it, let us review briefly the tumultuous course of the war.  

In 2003, after Saddam’s swift defeat and overthrow, America seemed on the cusp of a full triumph. But America’s lack of preparation and other errors opened an opportunity for radicals to launch a terrorist campaign. These enemies believed that the majority of Americans were not ready for a protracted war, and hoped that a steady trickle of casualties would destroy our will. 

For nearly three years, we failed to change our strategy to meet this challenge, and by early 2006, America was clearly losing. The bombing of a holy Shiite mosque had ignited savage strife between Shia and Sunnis, and al Qaeda was steadily expanding its territorial domination. Some American commanders considered whole provinces lost and irrecoverable.

America was also losing on the home front. The newly elected majority in Congress began pushing for retreat in January 2007. President Bush (finally) announced a fundamentally new strategy, but most of the media called it “too little, too late.” By July, it looked as if Congress might force the U.S. to surrender.

Meanwhile in Iraq, General David H. Petraeus was quietly implementing the new strategy. He pushed soldiers off their bases to live among the population. He implemented “clear and hold” operations to ensure that cities once taken would not fall back under enemy control. He arranged for assaults on multiple areas simultaneously so hostile forces could not simply dodge American thrusts. 

Remarkably, the enemies in Iraq yielded more quickly than anyone expected. Even before the full implementation of the new strategy in mid-June, U.S. troops began to receive much more cooperation from Iraqis, and former enemies rushed over to the American side. Thousands of volunteers boosted the Iraqi Army to 10 combat divisions (it will reach 13 in 2009). Once the Iraqi people saw that the U.S. was serious about winning, they quickly turned against al Qaeda and other extremists.

Congress could not ignore this progress, and the momentum to retreat eventually died away. Now it is so common for congressmen who once wanted to stop fighting to begin supporting the Iraq strategy that it hardly makes the news. Rep. Baird (D-WA) received national attention for changing his position in August, but Rep. Donnelly (D-IN) received almost none for doing so in December.

This political reversal occurred partly because of the efforts of many steadfast supporters of victory. But Americans could not have been persuaded to persevere in the war if General Petraeus had not started winning it. In less than a year, the Iraq War changed from a probable loss to a likely success. 

Victory has not yet arrived, and it may be years before we can mark its arrival with confidence, but we can reasonably hope to see it.

Time magazine was correct not to name Gen. Petraeus “Man of the Year.” He is “Man of the Decade.”

Josh Levy (peacethruvictory@gmail.com) led a pro-victory rally against Cindy Sheehan last July.