For weekly newspaper writers, commenting on the news is generally limited to an occasional jab or quip. And even in subjective columns and reviews, sweeping ideas that come more from the heart than the mind are left by the wayside. That’s all well and good. But for the first issue of 2008, we wanted to do something different: a year in review with a completely personal touch. Because this project is not meant to be comprehensive, you won’t find any discussion of local elections or the serial rapist, for instance. What you will find is nine C-VILLE writers voicing their insights, concerns and passions about what’s mattered to them most in 2007 regarding everything from The Rant line to "comprehensive plans" to green building to the Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative. Now that’s truly freedom of the press.
When is a joke not a joke?
The Rant forces the question
The year Obama broke
or, How I learned to keep worrying and love campaign journalism
On the defensive
Look for Pentagon connections, end up on Ken Boyd’s shit list
A tinted image
Green building casts a long shadow. What does it hide?
"Required," except when it’s not
County tends to compromise its policies when vocal neighbors speak up
Crowning glory
Wardrobe lessons for the city’s leading activists
Animal house
Why a picture is worth 680 words
At a loss for words
The VQR stirs the question, where is Charlottesville’s literary scene?
Burning the rock candle at both ends
From warehouse floors to nosebleed seats
When is a joke not a joke?
The Rant forces the question
It took me a while to understand what the caller was yelling about. Over the years, I’ve heard from dozens of readers angry about an article or an image in C-VILLE. Usually I can glean the source of their irritation quickly. The talk of "a woman’s behind" in June was unambiguous: a cover story probing why a dozen things aren’t available in Charlottesville—really important things, like a Saks and a strip club. Some people denounced the booty on the cover (and apparently missed its humor). Maybe they didn’t like the dancer’s absurdly round, bikini-clad buttocks; maybe they didn’t like the satisfied expression on the face of the man pictured looking at her.
But the shrill sounds of, "How could you publish something so racist?" caught me off guard.
The offending words, it turned out, were published in The Rant.
The caller was under the impression that the views expressed in The Rant—or at least a rant that was deemed especially offensive—belonged to C-VILLE, per se. The phoned-in "joke" went something like this:
How do you keep a canoe from tipping? Paint it black.
If these had been the words of C-VILLE, that would mean either 1) our good-joke meter was way off-kilter; 2) some of us were unhappily moonlighting as waiters; or 3) there is a heretofore undiscovered alluvial expertise in our ranks; or, maybe, 4) we were racists.
If that rant had not originated with us, then perhaps simply in publishing these anonymous words we were condoning the sentiments. Which I guess means that in publishing the unaccountably popular and recurring rants about socks and sandals we condone the twinning of those two items of dress, too.
To be clear, The Rant is a verbatim chronicle of callers’ views. The guidelines for publishing have been the same for several years: If you keep it under one minute, keep clear of threats or libel, and keep it audible, you can expect to see it published. Mumblers, stalkers and defendants-in-waiting should find another place to play. (Try it yourself. Call now at 817-2749, ext. 55.)
Many rants are infantile or ugly, but even those provide a few moments’ amusement or puzzlement or irritation—but that’s all. Really, who needs to linger with someone’s complaint about rude, text-messaging drivers?
But for a few weeks in the fall, The Rant took on more serious overtones, thanks to the black canoe joke. The joke highlighted what has always been embedded in The Rant, anyway.
If you want to get high-minded about it, The Rant is a free speech vehicle. And what any constitutional scholar will tell you is that while the First Amendment’s free speech protections guarantee that government cannot get in the way, mostly, of what you want to say, it doesn’t promise that everything you’ll hear coming out of everyone else’s mouth will be pretty or nice or smart or meaningful or race-neutral. The government does not protect you from other people’s nasty ideas. And while C-VILLE is not the government, we won’t protect you from the ickiness of your fellow citizen either, at least not as far as The Rant is concerned.
Here’s another principle to consider: The Politically Correct Censor is still a censor, no matter how worthy her ostensible cause. Beware liberal reasoning that the ends justify the means; take caution when someone who claims enlightenment wants to shield you from another’s scabrous notions. Personally, I’d rather confront—directly—the inanity, brutality and hypocrisy that fills people’s minds. I’d rather expose their religious prejudices, anti-intellectualism, bitterness—whatever it is—than suffer the effect when those views are pushed underground. I don’t like what you’re saying, but I defend your right to say it.
Moreover, when it comes to those unpretty thoughts or words, shouldn’t we distinguish them from actions? An offensive joke about race is still a string of words, isn’t it?—nothing more—just as a cartoon showing a bomb in Mohammed’s turban is a drawing. The joke is not an act of discrimination and the cartoon is not an act of persecution. Let’s not demean affronts in the physical world by confusing them with their scant depictions.
It’s not often I venture onto this fancy philosophical ground (though I think it’s solid). But really, what kind of newspaper editor wouldn’t defend free speech, except perhaps one who works for the Central Committee?
Trouble was this past fall that my pristine ideal ran headlong into real people’s feelings. Racial tension lingers in Charlottesville and The Rant made that patently clear. Much yelling ensued.
Now, why do people yell? Because they’re in pain. For some, the black canoe joke was like a poke in the eye.
"I don’t open my C-VILLE to see that kind of thing in there," one p.o.-ed reader told me.
I did not tell her that she opens this or any paper at her own peril. I don’t think she was in the mood to assess the consequences of living with a free press.
But I got her message. And where I wanted to dedicate precious work hours to discussing stories about green builders that pollute or the region’s 25 percent poverty rate, I was drawn back to the lingering effects of a pretty stupid restaurant joke.
So, in the couple of weeks that followed, I did what I hadn’t before. I held rants. Cut them right out. They weren’t libelous or overly long; they were just more variations on the same attention-getting remark. Suddenly my proud free speech avenue had become a litter-strewn alley. The scenery was starting to bother me.
That’s what I did for a few weeks; that’s why I did it. This is what I learned: Safeguarding free speech is not for the meek. I also learned a lesson about labeling. So check out The Rant on page 66 of this issue and note: The views expressed there are not the views of C-VILLE, its management or its advertisers. They’re yours. Read, and rant, at your own risk.—Cathy Harding
The year Obama broke
or, How I learned to keep worrying and love campaign journalism
Last February I covered the state Democrats’ Jefferson-Jackson Dinner featuring guest speaker Barack Obama. Seven days earlier, Obama had announced that he would run for president, answering a steady whisper that had turned by then into a dull roar. It seemed insane for him to run—way too early—and yet he was. The joy his announcement brought to many people was enough to make me think that maybe, just maybe, politics was worth caring about.
I dubbed him The Charisma in that article, and it was magic that I hoped to find in Richmond. Obama was still limned with a holy fire. He seemed, in the media at any rate, to be a young saint: too decent and smart for the shit to stick. The audience, young and old, but especially the kids, spoke of him with flushed cheeks and quickened breath, the entire crowd just wanting to touch, see, hear this man. The whole scene was a bit mad; those who shook his hand vowed to never wash theirs again, and someone on the street afterwards said, "I shed a tear when Obama spoke." I shed no tears that night, nor did I feel any magic. But I liked Obama a lot.
My first political memory is of my parents voting and losing. I was 5 when Carter limped through the doomed campaign of 1980, and over the next 27 years I learned that paying attention to politics is a good way to feel horrible about your country. Clinton’s victory in 1992 almost changed this, making me giddy, as though I could feel something of that passion you see in most Boomers’ faces when they talk about politics ("I wish it was the sixties," Radiohead sings, "I wish I could be happy"). But that hope soon faded. I confess I didn’t vote in 2000. I was too stoned, living out my generation’s "slacker" sobriquet. But by 2004 I was awake and aware, just in time to have my faith in the political process ripped from me. Leaving the polling place on that sick, gray day three years ago, I steadfastly refused to wear the "I Voted" sticker. Why bother? What was there to feel proud of? Politics in the 21st century seemed to be the province of the filthy and the cruel. I was certain my vote hadn’t mattered.
To prepare for the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner, my first foray into political journalism, I read Obama’s books Dreams from my Father and Audacity of Hope. It’s not hard to like the person they portray. If I were being cynical, I would say that his books are calculated self-hagiography, and that he probably had help writing them. But I didn’t feel cynical when I read them. I felt entranced—yes, hopeful. They are startlingly open, revealing his past drug use, his frustrations with the Washington money game, and his emotions. These books, I remember thinking, will ruin his presidential bid.
Two sides to the story: As 2007 progressed, Barack Obama had "lost his aura of purity and was starting to sound an awful lot like every other power junkie running for office." |
When Obama surprised everyone by coming to Charlottesville in late October, I went to see him again with a mix of anticipation and ennui. After the Jefferson-Jackson dinner, as 2007 steadily advanced, The Charisma had lost his aura of purity and was starting to sound an awful lot like every other power junkie running for office—hedging, bickering, polling, and raking in the dough.
At the Pavilion the signs of Obama-mania were greater than ever: the screaming, the up-on-tiptoes rapt attention. The Charisma was framed in cell phone screens, as a hundred flashbulbs splatter-painted the air. The crowd was young, and he delivered a loud message, marked with the preacherly thunder that had caught the country’s attention at the 2004 Democratic convention. He was smart and passionate. But here’s the problem with covering politics: There’s little chance for inspiration. More so than most, journalists hear a politician speak and think, "How many times has he said that before? What effect is it supposed to have on me?" I could tell that the Pavilion crowd, like Richmond before it, was inspired, but what does inspiration feel like? If the chirping volunteers wearing Obama t-shirts and vapid smiles were any indication, it feels a lot like being high on Ecstasy.
About a month after the Downtown Mall revival, I was talking to a major Democratic fund raiser about why he was leaning towards Hillary. Presented with two resumés for a CEO, he said, one like Clinton’s and one like Obama’s, he would have to pick the one that most showed an ability to run something well. He would choose skill over inspiration. I couldn’t disagree with him, and yet, part of me remained unwilling to surrender the notion that inspiration counts, even if it’s inspiration by proxy.
Obama is post-Boomer, meaning he sees the world not through the blood-spattered rear view mirror of the 1960s, but through the kaleidoscopic windshield of the modern era. What, I asked the party elder, would it say to the world if America elected someone whose father had herded goats in Kenya? What would it mean to our international profile if we elected someone with a fundamental knowledge of what it’s like to be a foreigner?
Time for your metaphorical, crowd pleasing, end-of-the-speech story: Back in February, standing in a semi-circle of reporters at an outdoor press conference, I leaned forward, freezing, trying desperately to hear what Obama was saying above the locust whir of the speed shutters. It took a while for me to understand that the microphone in front of the candidate wasn’t amplifying his voice, but recording it for the TV crews. As journalists, the tools of our trade necessarily stand between us and the world. We are not, and cannot be, an audience. We are conduits, witnesses. I am a camera, or in this case, a notebook. As a journalist, I try to write about what it might mean for our country to be inspired by someone like Obama, even if, as a citizen, I am still unsure how to gain that inspiration for myself.—J. Tobias Beard
On the defensive
Look for Pentagon connections, end up on Ken Boyd’s shit list
Almost a year ago, I was assigned to write a feature story on the Defense Department’s connections to Charlottesville, a broad request that eventually took me all around Charlottesville, and to companies like Avir and its creator Gabriel Laufer, a UVA professor who developed infra-red sensory technology the federal government decided they could use. The Pentagon had awarded them more than $1 million for 2004 and 2005. A feature story ensued.
Still, the Defense connections beckoned, thanks to an agreement the Board of Supervisors had entered into with Wendell Wood the previous year. The owner of United Land Corporation, Wood had sold the 29 acres the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC) currently resides on. In 2005, a Base Realignment and Closure Order had recommended that the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center relocate certain of its functions next to NGIC in northern Albemarle. The Army approached Wood about more land, some 47 acres, which he was more than eager to sell, except for a snare. Congress had only allocated $7 million for land Wood claimed was worth more than double that. In response, the landowner refused to sell, a position that eventually led to the county Board of Supervisors making a promise to change the land-use designation of another parcel of his along Route 29.
Two months after learning of this resolution, my feature on the circumstances surrounding the deal struck by the county and Wood came out, somewhat unceremoniously. On the cover of C-VILLE was a monster truck from a recent rally at the JPJ Arena. Inside was my 4,000-word piece that told the tale of one of the county’s largest—if not the largest—individual landowners receiving what appeared to be special consideration from the county government. The citizen reaction, while concentrated, was vociferous and left certain involved parties on their heels, most notably Supervisor Ken Boyd, who as chair of the Board was instrumental in orchestrating the resolution at the center of the story.
"Boyd panicked," I had written of the Supervisor when he had first learned that NGIC might move if Wood were not accommodated. When I called him for a follow-up piece, he contended with my characterization. "I don’t ever panic," he said.
"You got a number of things wrong," he had told me, and so a week later I offered him the chance to tell me on the record just what my errors were. We would run it in C-VILLE. I wanted to know, and I thought readers would as well. The truth would set us free.
Unfortunately, Boyd hedged, choosing to forego any further discussion of the subject, but repeated his charge when The Hook, in its November election coverage, asked him about this paper’s, and thus my, reporting of the circumstances.
"They’re trying to make a mountain out of a molehill," Boyd said. Most disconcertingly, he was quoted as decrying "fabrication" in the original story. A week later I got a call from a local blogger who had just posted an entry on Cvillenews.com regarding NGIC and repeated a claim I had made that Boyd had been tipped off by a phone call from someone at NGIC when it looked as if the deal might fall through. With the election only a week away, Boyd’s campaign manager, Paul Wright, had contacted the blogger demanding a retraction, once again accusing me of fabrication, a charge that was then incorporated into the post.
Afterwards, Wright added a comment below the original post. "I want to thank Waldo [the blogger] for making the correction and need to add a bit of clarity and context for why the correction was requested," he wrote. "A phone call occurred but it did not come from anyone working for NGIC. It was our concern that folks might think that this information was leaked by a current employee, which was not the case. Considering the nature of the work done there I hope everyone will understand. If you simply remove the word[s] ‘at NGIC’ from the line about the phone call the quote would be correct. The C-VILLE Weekly did not fabricate the quote, it just got this fact wrong."
Nearly a year after beginning work on the original story, I have learned that I did make a couple factual mistakes. However, the statement that Boyd received a call from someone at NGIC was only disputed to the extent of whether the person who tipped off the Supervisor worked at NGIC at the time. That he had worked at NGIC at one time was not.
More importantly, I learned quite a bit about what it is to be a reporter, especially in the follow-up coverage. For weeks, even months, after the original piece, I focused on smaller elements of the story, stoking the fires of citizen outrage, but at what cost? Now, Wendell Wood will no longer speak with me. "I’m disappointed in you," he said.
What I didn’t learn may be just as crucial. While working on the original story I filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the amount of the appraisal the Army commissioned on Wood’s land, the supposedly low-ball appraisal that set off the whole compensatory land-use designation to begin with. They wouldn’t tell, and still haven’t. At press time, we await an answer despite repeated attempts by our attorney at The Rutherford Institute. A lawsuit may be necessary.—Jayson Whitehead
A tinted image
Green building casts a long shadow. What does it hide?
Back in February 2006, when I began editing C-VILLE’s special sections, I didn’t know beans about green building. Conveniently, neither did the public at large. And so, with one of my duties being to oversee the Green Scene pages in ABODE, C-VILLE’s monthly shelter section, I began getting educated. First I learned about specific eco-friendly products (a brochure for recycled-denim insulation sticks in my memory); later I wrote a story about local builder Doug Lowe and his new home in Crozet, which was one of the first LEED-certified houses in the country. Our local area, it seemed, was something of a hotbed not only of green design—architect William McDonough has long been a bright national light—but of green building, too.
Doug Lowe’s (left) home in Crozet was one of the first LEED-certified homes in the country, and one of the many recent bits of local green living news that can distract one from thinking globally. |
It was the first time I encountered the term LEED, but it wouldn’t be the last. A short year and a half later, LEED is, if not a household word, certainly a term with considerable leverage in the local development scene. Albemarle County and UVA have both made public commitments to LEED-certified building. My colleagues in the news department regularly return from planning commission meetings to report on LEED- and EarthCraft-certified projects in the works. Meanwhile, local builders have more and more widely embraced all things energy-efficient, watershed-friendly, nontoxic, and nonpolluting. Charlottesville now has its very own chapter of the James River Green Building Council, a lively schedule of LEED and EarthCraft seminars, and a de facto requirement that any new development must profess its energy efficiency if it doesn’t want to appear hopelessly outdated.
That’s the supply side of the equation. On the demand side, the public is rapidly boarding the green bandwagon. In November 2007, no fewer than 90 people turned out for a free workshop at the Habitat Store, part of an ongoing series called GreenMatters, to hear from experts about basic ways to shrink their homes’ footprints. More telling to me, though, was an almost offhand remark made by a woman I was interviewing while she and her husband were house-shopping. "We’re trying to green our lifestyle," she said. For that reason, they were looking to move from Fluvanna County to the heart of Charlottesville—to slash their commute, and then to renovate in the green fashion (as examples of how they’d do this, she rattled off tankless water heaters and EnergyStar appliances).
These people didn’t seem like hippies, and two years previously, I would have been genuinely surprised to hear that they were making big changes in their lifestyle for the sake of an often abstract greater good. But these days, couples like them are common. And their dollars—for mortgage payments, gasoline, groceries, and low-VOC paint—are starting to really mean something.
Enter Belvedere. Or rather, enter the green version of Belvedere. As I realized in May when I first wrote about the high-profile, 675-home development off Rio Road, its presentation as an enlightened community (organic farm, EarthCraft houses, LEED neighborhood development certification) was not the vision of some altruistic designer as much as it was a savvy marketing strategy. A growing segment of the population wants to combine luxury and moralism in the form of free-trade coffee and eco-friendly resorts. Why not also in the form of a housing development? Stonehaus, Belvedere’s developers, had won approval for hundreds of houses on this site in 2005, long before they’d started calling their plan "sustainable." Now, the image of earth-friendliness would maybe help those houses sell in a faltering market.
This is not to say that the actual development of Belvedere wouldn’t have to be, in many ways, green. You can’t fake bike lanes or rain barrels, and third-party certifications like LEED and EarthCraft are by all accounts rigorous. But the way the project presented itself—with all the well-researched slickness of a Whole Foods cheese-and-membrillo display—seemed to me a signal that "green building" was no longer about doing the right thing. It was about having the right thing. It was a form of consumerism.
What’s more, the rollout of green Belvedere landed in a year rife with media coverage of the sustainability movement. Newsstands sagged with magazines’ "green issues," packed with good news about solutions.
When an enviro image is your primary product—as it is for Belvedere, at least now while the houses still exist only on paper—bad press about pollution sure is a bummer. Just a few months after its May groundbreaking, the project hit its first major PR snag in the form of disgruntled neighbors, who said that a bonfire of felled trees on the 207-acre Belvedere site was coating cars with soot and making people cough. The October incident soon faded from the news cycle after developers gave neighbors car washes, but it left a smoky smudge on Belvedere’s image. In a small way, it felt like a fall from grace.
I’m not sure it really was, though. A tarnished corporate image is one thing; a global crisis is another. Over my time at C-VILLE, as I’ve reported on many small facets of the green-building trend, it has very clearly taken its place in local culture. And if I were reading and writing about only green building, the world would seem like it was headed in quite a good direction. Except there are other things happening too—things like this year’s drought, the second in the only six years that I’ve lived here, and traffic and meat recalls and bottles of insecticides lined up on the shelf at Lowe’s. It’s impossible to say with any confidence that Charlottesville or America or the world at large is thinking deeply about its environmental woes with the same energy that we’re drawing up blueprints to adhere to LEED standards.
What’s the lesson here? I wouldn’t presume to say. For me, though, there is a reminder—that the routine of the news, whether one is producing it or consuming it, can be a distraction. And that the management of images is, truly, the least of our problems.—Erika Howsare
"Required," except when it’s not
County tends to compromise its policies when vocal neighbors speak up
"You can’t fight City Hall," the adage goes. Maybe. But you sure can boss around the Board of Supervisors (and City Council, too—see "Crowning glory"). Local government doesn’t just listen to citizens who come out to speak at public meetings—whenever it can, it will bow to pressure, particularly when it comes from neighborhood associations, even when doing so is in direct contrast to its own policies.
This is how the system is designed to work: Localities create "comprehensive plans" to guide the decisions of its governing boards. When developers come in with new projects, government staff use those comp plans as their Bibles to justify every change to a development that they recommend. So developers change their plans because of the comp plan, thinking it will make city councils or boards of supervisors more likely to give the green light.
But developers had better do their homework about which comp plan policies really matter to those boards. The most commonly compromised policy in Albemarle County is the one that says that neighborhoods should be connected. The comp plan "requires interconnected streets within developments and between developments so that pedestrians can walk easily to many destinations, traffic has alternative routes, and car trips are reduced in number and length."
Because the comp plan "requires" connectivity, county staff will fight hard to get (often reluctant) developers to connect to other neighborhoods. But the developer soon discovers that "requires" has a far different definition than they thought, mostly because county leaders don’t have the stomach to tell residents of adjoining neighborhoods that they have to share their streets with other neighborhoods. The compromise solution is to make developers set aside the land for a future connection—to be made only if the older neighborhood wants it.
Thus Biscuit Run—the largest proposed residential development in county history, with 3,100 units on 820 acres of land—will directly connect with exactly…one neighborhood around it. That single neighborhood, the Southwood trailer park, is slated to be redeveloped as mixed-income housing. Residents who live on all other sides of the project showed up at the meetings, particularly residents from Mill Creek South (itself a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs, the development pattern the county says it wants to stop), and made sure that only a bicycle path would link it to Biscuit Run.
One can sympathize with the plight of the neighbors. They bought their property, thinking that they would be the last to come along. Now a road might bring in scads of cars that could maim their children and drive down their property values. Why should they have to suffer because the guy who owns the land next to them wants to make a buck developing it?
I feel sorry for them, but also see that their comfort comes at the expense of other neighbors who might not be so organized but might very well have greater cause for complaint. In general, future residents and those who don’t come to meetings—often poorer residents—lose out to well-organized, well-educated and often wealthy residents. This all isn’t particularly new, or unique—just about every town falls prey to it somehow. But it can be the price of public input.
And sometimes that public input only amounts to one person. In early talks about the most recently approved section of Hollymead Town Center, the county Planning Commission was set to O.K. the idea of a multistory parking deck—something the county says it wants to encourage in order to reduce the amount of farm land paved over for cars. But all those ideals went out the window with a few words from one woman, who had bought a townhome that would face the parking garage.
"You’re talking about blocking our mountain view or our view of the sky," said Ellen Newberry. "It will be like living across from a factory."
The developers—who probably got comments from county staff suggesting that they build a parking deck—had to go back to the drawing board because a lone woman spoke out at a meeting.
Sometimes those changes don’t contradict the comprehensive plan as directly but nonetheless amount to concessions made because no one from another side was there to argue against them. In August, residents from Forest Lakes in northern Albemarle successfully fended off advances from the Places29 master planners, who proposed a connector to Route 29N that might have gone through a trailer park. Forest Lakes neighbors thought it could drive down their property values to have to travel in sight of mobile homes. So the Planning Commission moved the connection to make it go through county land on the other side of Forest Lakes.
Potentially, that’s good or bad for the trailer park residents—it could be good because a road doesn’t cut through their neighborhood, or it could be bad because they are more isolated and mass transit is less accessible. In either case, no one from the trailer park was there to say one way or the other.—Will Goldsmith
Crowning glory
Wardrobe lessons for the city’s leading activists
If I’ve learned anything from the past six months of near-religious attendance of Charlottesville City Council, it’s this: pre-caffeinate. O.K., that’s not true. While a cup or five or pre-meeting coffee is essential, the greatest lesson I’ve gleaned from watching City Council has to do with how the political process works and why a sash, prom dress and tiara are your best tools to get things done.
You can stand in front of Council every other Monday night in your sensible shoes and a business suit the color of dirty tar, arguing week after week for lower taxes or more lap lanes all you want. See where that gets you.
But if you want to goose the local political machine (and really, who doesn’t?), I’ve learned one hard, cold power-politics maxim: A little old-school glam goes a long way.
When Jennifer Tidwell got up to talk in front of Council at its October 1 meeting, she wasn’t just your ordinary citizen clutching her prepared statements, unaware of the three-minute time limit or just how to make use of the microphone. Oh no. Tidwell was sporting a blueish prom dress, a tiara nestled atop dyed pink hair and a Miss America-type sash with the moniker that she used to speak at the meeting: "Miss Representation." (Say it out loud.)
Councilors sat up, most of them a little bemused at Tidwell’s getup. Then she began, very eloquently, to make her point, and her point was this: The Lewis & Clark statue at the corner of W. Main and Ridge/McIntire streets, the one that depicts Sacagawea kneeling, crouching and/or cowering behind the two men, is at best a misrepresentation of history and at worst an offensive image.
Tidwell argued that the statue needed signs contextualizing the image to explain the role of Sacagawea in the represented foray into the West—not to mention the destruction of the vast majority of Indians that the journey, in essence, precipitated.
The statue in question is the work of Charles Keck, and it was presented to the city in 1919, when suffrage was more of a women’s issue than corporate ceilings. Keck set out to depict the moment when the party commissioned by TJ himself got its first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, something that no one had ever seen before except for tens of thousands of people.
And sure, the faces of Lewis and Clark hold a kind of "My, what a big ocean you have, mind if we set up camp?" look, but what about Sacagawea behind them, seeming to huddle near their boots?
When Tidwell, in all her ironic prom queen glory, got up in front of Council, she was continuing an old debate about whether she is tracking or cowering. According to a draft nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, "Sacagawea, the Indian guide, crouches at their left."
Crouching, tracking or what? Jennifer Tidwell reopened an old debate about the depiction of Sacagawea in the Lewis & Clark statue and won. More importantly, Tidwell did it in style. |
Keck, who also sculpted the Booker T. Washington Monument at the Tuskeegee Institute and the Lincoln Monument in Indiana, was paid $20,000 by Paul McIntire to create the statue. McIntire, a local do-gooder who made a fortune in the stock market, originally commissioned a statue of just the two men but was happily surprised when Keck insisted on including Sacagawea.
"The contract called for two figures," wrote McIntire. "The sculptor threw in the Indian, and she is the best of the lot."
Tidwell, too, cut such a striking figure in her formalwear that heads turned in attendance as she made her way up to the podium and applause erupted after her to-the-point speech. The fact that she gave her name on the sign-up sheet as "Miss Representation" didn’t hurt her cause either; that’s how she was called up from her seat to speak.
Of course, it’s impossible to quantify how much impact her appearance had on City Council’s decision to have the Historical Resources Committee create some signage to address the problems of the statue’s "contextualization." A few days after the Council meeting, as she was holding a sign that read "Happy Genocide Day" at a protest in front of the statue, Tidwell said, "It helps to have character and humor when you’re protesting."
This can’t be more true. Tidwell was exceedingly polite and downright happy as she delivered her message to council. She blamed no one, and moreover, she made not only the audience but also the councilors feel like they were on the right side, not the wrong side, of the problem. She made people laugh not only at her appearance, but also at the absurdity of the issue she argued.
How much can a sense of humor help when petitioning City Council? Who knows? But I do know this: Brilliant albeit not-so-flashy people like Peter Kleeman and Rich Collins have been trying to kill the Meadowcreek Parkway for the past 800 or so years. My advice? Some top hat-wearing gent may just want to get to work on a "Mr. Ection" sash.—Scott Weaver
Animal house
Why a picture is worth 680 words
There are 33 giraffes in the framed drawing on my wall, all roughly one and one-half inches in height, clustered together. A gift from friends from Jason Polan‘s "1,000 Giraffes" exhibit at the Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative, where the New York-based artist covered the plain concrete walls of the Belmont shack with exactly what he promised to—a flock, or murder, or gaggle of giraffes—and where everyone in attendance was invited to pay as little as a dollar to take a pet home.
I never thought I’d own artwork. But let me qualify that: I never knew why I might like to own artwork until I first stepped into the Bridge.
Art galleries can and will be critiqued on everything they offer. This extends as far as the low spark of high-heeled clientele, the spread of food, the choice of ambient music, whether you can arrive in a tie, or drunk, or penniless, or without a clue as to how or why you’ve arrived. Once critics start talking, reputations are formed and then set in stone. I’ve never felt unwelcome at any art gallery in town, but this is not always the case for others.
These reputations lead artists and crowds to make judgment calls: In an art auction, the amount of money Person A bids for a print depends as much upon the artwork as it does upon which gallery Person A is bidding in.
The Bridge’s youthfully simplistic mission statement—the cultivation of a local art scene that draws from all pools of talents and areas of interest—perfectly encapsulates their exhibits of the past year. What’s more, the Bridge has still managed to avoid a static reputation, and has enriched a larger audience because of it. Many Downtown gallery-goers have perhaps not been to the Belmont-based gallery this year, but if you ask someone that has visited the space whether that venue thrilled or provoked her, the answer is likely to be "yes."
In the last year, co-artistic director Greg Antrim Kelly led me into the woods to walk among warehouse wreckage and marvel at a mural by a world-class Tibetan painter that is buried between spray painted scribbles; I spent an hour nailing postcards (numbering in the thousands) with pictures of mothers and fathers, hand-drawn by residents of all ages and income levels, to the inside of a mobile chicken coop with artist and curator Johnny Fogg; watched a 90-minute soccer match-turned-art house film as part of a (packed!) night during the gallery’s film series; and spoke with some of the angriest historians and legal experts you could imagine as part of Columbus Day weekend assault on the myth of the American Dream. And now I own 33 giraffes.
In the next year, the Bridge has plans for an audio exhibit comprising concerts, hands-on workshops and art installations; many will likely be free. Photographer Ross McDermott will present "The Generations Project," a documentary photo-and-audio project pairing senior citizens with local high school students, in February. And Steve Kelly, an artist based in St. Louis, will invite locals to contribute to a mural installation that will be up in April.
Without a steady audience, a gallery is more like an art shop. The Bridge has managed to cull participants—new spectators that had never visited a gallery, new artists that had never exhibited in one—from all over the county for a range of events, and people are starting to return to the space with greater frequency. In 2007, the gallery and its artists made art accessible by keeping the price tag low, but kept art valuable by emphasizing the rarity of the exhibits and projects that they hosted—everyone got to walk away with some small piece of some large statement, the best reason for buying a painting or drawing that I can think of. The challenge, and my hope, for the Bridge is how it will maintain its mobility and inventiveness for a crowd that will regularly expect an unlikely grandiosity, 1,000 giraffes in a room.—Brendan Fitzgerald
At a loss for words
The VQR stirs the question, where is Charlottesville’s literary scene?
Putting together a newspaper every week is—cue melancholy strains of an oboe above tender strings—hard and sometimes stressful work. Taking a few seconds off here and there to partake in some humor is one of the things that help us keep our heads in the game. One humorous moment that occurs like clockwork four times a year is when the new issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review arrives at our office.
| Reviews of the Virginia Quarterly Review’s 2007 issues:
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No, there’s no giggling like schoolgirls at the earnest profundities of this illustrious journal. There’s the laughter following the inevitable groan that emanates from me when the VQR hits my desk, and once again I’m faced with the challenge of providing in a mere 350- to 400-word review a summary of its hulking mass of excellent, erudite, eclectic articles, essays, symposiums, short stories, poems, photographs, art, etc.—as well as throwing in some choice criticisms and trying to articulate my raves.
Don’t get me wrong: After almost three years of reviewing VQRs, I’ve grown (no pun intended) to relish the challenge, and the groan has become more of a theatrical reflex than a true emotion. Still, the task is daunting. It seems the span of time it takes me to recover is exactly the span of time between issues, which makes four times a year feel like 52. "VQR," I joked once post-groan, "is America’s only weekly literary journal."
This year, however, my thoughts about C-VILLE’s commitment to covering VQR have taken on two other, far more important dimensions.
First and foremost: Shouldn’t C-VILLE, as a newspaper in a city with such a writerly reputation, be truly inundated with literary stuff? Shouldn’t my groan be replaced by a blood-curdling scream as another local literary journal arrives at our office a week after VQR does, and another one three weeks after that—these, unlike VQR, with all local contributors? Shouldn’t we be getting more than a trickling stream of press releases about local literary events? Shouldn’t we be almost at a loss as to how to cover all these aesthetic goings on with the necessary depth? Moreover, even though the fact that we don’t receive more fine local books of poetry and novels has a lot do with the limitations of the publishing industry, it still seems that we should run out of space to put them all.
Behind the exaggeration lies a plain fact: While Charlottesville is without a doubt a comparatively literary city with big events like the wonderful—even if oddly named—Festival of the Book, it’s not a vibrant literary city. Typically, the blame for this situation is placed on the writers themselves, which is to some extent warranted. A competitive spirit, and not simply solitary time spent behind closed doors in pursuit of the right word or sentence or line or character detail, can put a damper on a literary community. But readers in general (which should, for God’s sake, include writers) have to band together in order for serious sparks to fly.
The always-impressive Virginia Quarterly Review raises the question: Why don’t more local literary journals arrive at the C-VILLE office? |
It’s also dawned on me this year, courtesy, in part, to a November 2007 article in The Daily Progress, that there has been a lack of local excitement even about VQR itself. The article, which the Progress obtained from its parent Media General News Service, is headlined, "VQR garnering awards with new outlook." While the journal’s editor, Ted Genoways, whose picture accompanied the article, must surely have been pleased by the coverage, he also must have thought to himself: "Old news, guys." Way back in 2005, when C-VILLE decided to start reviewing VQR, the journal’s revamped, slick design and "new outlook" was an established fact. In that same year, the journal picked up some national awards, and in celebration C-VILLE published a profile of Genoways and his editorial magic.
My aim is neither to denigrate the Progress or other media in town and praise C-VILLE (well, O.K., maybe a little bit) nor to condemn those people here who do make an effort to bolster the literary community for not doing enough, but to wonder if Charlottesville has the capacity to ratchet up its literary reputation several notches—not to the level of a Dionysian frenzy, just to the point where it truly is a huge part of the city’s character.—Doug Nordfors
Burning the rock candle at both ends
From warehouse floors to nosebleed seats
March 18, 2007
I’m walking up a Sisyphean-like flight of stairs to my seat in John Paul Jones Arena. I’ve just missed pop singer Pink, but I’m just in time for the main event: Justin Timberlake, the new King of Pop. "John!" someone shouts. Scanning the mass of people, I spot an arm waving at me. My sister. I wave back and keep climbing. Also in attendance that night: my boss, my future editor, my ex—who knows, maybe even, to borrow a couple words from the title of Justin’s last album, my future love. The background music fades out and the lights go down. As Justin emerges to subterranean synth beat, thousands of teenage girls scream and pull out their camera phones.
From up close to far out: Justin Timberlake was part of the wide spectrum of music that came to town in 2007. |
May 11, 2007
I’m sitting on a small cushion, back against the wall, feet splayed on the unfinished wooden floor of the warehouse. There are three other people in the room with me. One of them, the show’s organizer, sits nearby while the other two, Matthew Golombisky and Quin Kirchner, who make up Chicago’s GKDuo, bang away at an upright bass, melodica and assorted electronics, creating a frenzy of improvisational, free-jazz sounds. The song ends. The two audience members clap. "Thanks," responds Golombisky warmly, before the duo busts into their next number.
September 27, 2007
My mom is sitting next to me as we watch Elvis Costello rip through a solo rendition of one of my all-time favorite songs, "Alison." We’ve got a better vantage point than I did for Justin, and, once Elvis has shown us his aim is still rockingly true, Dylan takes the JPJ stage and barrels through his set with a business-like but inspired seriousness, wrapping things up with "All Along The Watchtower," which the rusty-voiced folk star has taken to the stage well over 1,000 times since he laid it to tape in 1967.
October 19, 2007
Back in the dimly lit warehouse, I’m sitting in roughly the same spot. This time a girl is plucking an amplified banjo, letting the room fill with its tinny, screeching feedback. Two scruffy males augment that wail, working diligently with the mess of guitar pedals and odd instruments surrounding them. The three musicians are from Austin, Texas, and the audience consists of me, a musician who performed earlier and his wife. The drones of noise come to an end, and the six of us go outside to catch some fresh air. "So this is Charlottesville?" asks the banjo player.
This is Charlottesville. Over the past year, I’ve attended shows where, were it not for me, the band would have outnumbered the audience, as well as concerts where I floated amid a sea of star-struck thousands. Sometimes I sat alone listening to experimental sounds that were played almost solely for me. Other times, I bonded with family members and shared concert-going experiences with friends, acquaintances and countless strangers.
JPJ, which won the Pollstar‘s "Best New Major Concert Venue" award in February, brought some of music’s biggest names to town. At the same time, our underground flame stayed lit, bringing bands that, though they may be too small to draw much of a crowd, played passionately and kept the music alive.
In 2007, Charlottesville became a place known not only for its vibrant local music (which we still love and cherish, of course) but also for its likelihood as a stop for pretty much any type of touring band you can imagine. We had Arena blowouts, obscure avant-garde acts that were just looking for enough gas money to make it to the next city and pretty much everything in between.
As an aspiring music writer (and, I’ll admit, concert addict) this makes things both exciting and a tad overwhelming. Every time I step outside, there’s a good chance I’ll bump into a tour bus or stumble upon an intimate concert in one of Charlottesville’s more offbeat music spaces. 2007 has offered a musical calendar as long as those seemingly endless stairs in JPJ and as diverse as the sonic spectrum that I’ve heard resonate between warehouse walls. As a fan, I can’t wait for more, whether it’s Springsteen, Van Halen or some unknown band that books a last-minute show at the Tea Bazaar. As a writer, I just hope I can type fast enough to keep up.—John Ruscher
