Month: February 2008

Following Monday’s arrest of one Walton Middle School student in connection with a pistol seized from a locker on February 1, a second boy was charged on Tuesday, according to Albemarle County police. Both students are under 14, and so police are especially tight-lipped about what particular charges have been brought. Details about the weapon, too, are scant: “We still have witnesses to speak to and we don’t want to release any specific information about the weapon,” says Lt. Todd Hopwood, a county police spokesman. In a letter to parents dated Monday, principal Betsy Agee explained that on Friday, one student had brought the pistol onto school property, then passed it off to another. School officials were notified about the gun that evening; they in turn called police, who investigated and discovered the weapon.

Previous "This Just In" articles from this week:

Less than super [February 6]
Virginia waits for state primary on February 12

Local roadblock [February 5]
UVA historian implicated in 9/11 cover-up

The following is a verbatim transcription of the dialogue between my id (which we’ll call “Blabbermouth Brendan”) and superego (“Neurotic Brendan”) during a performance by UVA Klezmer Ensemble leader Joel Rubin and Pete Rushefsky, a friend of Rubin since the two performed regularly together in upstate New York.

Torah the Explorer? No, it’s Joel Rubin and Pete Rushefsky, who put on a brilliant mix of klezmer tunes at Gravity Lounge.

Rubin and Rushefsky take the stage, the former in a black turtleneck, slacks and black ankle boots, the latter in a black button-up shirt. They open the night with a short traditional tune: Rubin’s clarinet squeaks through klezmer’s quarter-note scales and Rushefsky’s vaguely oriental-sounding tsimbl (a traditional hammered dulcimer) pulls Rubin back into a simple, conversational chorus.

Blabbermouth: Sounds like the score of a Disney movie. And what the heck is Rushefsky playing?

Neurotic: A tsimbl. He hits those strings with the two sticks he’s holding. I think it’s a charming balance to Rubin’s clarinet. Listen—see, Rubin’s trilling and screeching away, but Rushefsky can play quick enough to keep up and mellow enough to complement him.

Blabbermouth: I think those mallets look like Q-Tips. And Rushefsky looks like Jimmy Kimmel.

The duo gets a hearty round of applause from the crowd, 30 or so people counting the students from Rubin’s Klezmer Ensemble that came to listen. Rubin announces that the next number is a suite of music that runs from 19th century traditional Yiddish tunes to “contemporary Sabbath” songs. The suite was written for Vanessa Ochs, director of Jewish Studies at UVA. Without a rhythm section, the pair masterfully shifts through movements with almost undetectable glances.

Neurotic [cowers, looks concerned]: We’re stuck in the only non-Jewish person here, and he’s lanky enough to draw attention to himself! Eep!

Blabbermouth: Tsimbl, hmm? I like it. It sounds like mice running around in organ pipes and knocking each other out.

[Neurotic glances at watch, looks nervous]

Blabbermouth: I can barely see Rubin’s hands move, but he’s going wild. Listen to him, hopping octaves and bending notes so smoothly! Man, that dude shreds like Eddie Van Halen.

Rushefsky makes a crack about the instrument being named after “Ephraim Tsimblist,” and the audience chuckles. He then plays a lengthy solo piece that he calls a “wordless prayer,” a series of firmly struck bass notes that resonate as he slides his two mallets up in tender scales. He and Rubin loosen up a bit and joke about songs for festive occasions; “Are you sure you can dance at a bris?” Rubin asks him. “We’ll have to get a rabbinical ruling,” Rushefsky answers.

Blabbermouth: It took at least five centuries for this to become a traditional style of music, and it will take at least another five centuries until we got out of here. And do all the jokes have to be about speaking Yiddish? [Listens as the song concludes] There! Rushefsky just said it’s a Yiddish audience!

[Ego arrives and wedges himself between the pair]

Ego: I caught the last song from the back of the room. What’d I miss?

Blabbermouth and Neurotic [in unison]: Five others just like it.

Ego: That’s not too fair, is it? I mean, how frequently does a traditional Jewish style of music get a Downtown Mall venue? I think it’s a pretty nice change of scenery. And these two read each other so intuitively.

Blabbermouth: Oy vey.

The patron saint of Charlottesville is taking several more blows to his reputation thanks to a new book, Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson, reviewed in today’s Washington Post. The book portrays the post-presidential Jefferson as “an irresponsible, impractical, self-serving and self-deluded man who rarely lived up to his ideals.” In one particularly nasty episode, a friend and Florentine horticulturalist had Jefferson look after his American holdings, “only to find out that the Sage of Monticello had sold them and loaned himself the proceeds to continue his architectural experiments.”

Previous "This Just In" articles from this week:

Wise decisions [February 2]
State, feeling public pressure, slows progress of Dominion’s Southwest Virginia plant

The game is on [February 1]
Alabama church steps up for Rutherford’s NFL lawsuit

New job tolls for Bell? [January 31]
Washington Post tabs Rob Bell as possible Attorney General candidate

Going global [January 30]
UVA’s Darden in top 100 business schools…in the world!

Virginia population boom surrounds Charlottesville [January 29]
Fluvanna, Orange and Louisa see highest increase

Due to a reporting error, last week’s Curtain Calls column incorrectly stated that Jack Fisk was nominated for an Academy Award for Art Direction for his work on No Country for Old Men. Fisk was actually nominated for There Will Be Blood. Curtain Calls loved both films and regrets the error.

We admit it: We’ve been more than a little harsh on U.S. Representative Thomas M. Davis III. We’ve criticized his lax oversight of the Bush Administration, too-cozy relationship with corporate lobbyists, unseemly interactions with federal contractors, and even the gutter-politics tone of his wife, Jeannemarie’s, state senate campaign. But lately, we must admit, we’ve actually started to feel a little sorry for the guy. Not only has he lost his House chairmanships to the new Democratic majority, but he’s had to abandon his dream of becoming a U.S. senator (after being thrown under a bus by the state Republican Party in favor of Jim Gilmore) and watch as his wife lost her brass-knuckle re-election fight to Democrat Chap Petersen. So it wasn’t a huge surprise to hear that the man has finally decided to call it quits after this, his sixth term in office.

U.S. Representative Tom Davis (pictured) is outshined in the imperfect department by Senator Ken Cuccinelli, whose piece of English-only legislation even he eventually had second thoughts about.

O.K., so he might have been a soulless, corporatist technocrat—but at least he was a moderate soulless, corporatist technocrat, and seemed genuinely interested in dragging his party back from the immigrant-bashing, xenophobic precipice it keeps threatening to leap off of. And so we’d like to take this opportunity to offer, with all sincerity, these words of praise for Representative Davis: You, sir, are far from the worst politician in Virginia.

No, this week that award has to go to state Senator Ken “The Cooch” Cuccinelli, from lovely Fairfax county, who perfectly represents the sort of egregious, voter-repelling intolerance that must make a guy like Tom Davis slap his forehead in frustration.

You’d think that Cuccinelli would be a bit chastened after his recent squeaker of a re-election, in which he bested Democrat Janet Oleszek by a whopping 101 votes. But circumspection is not the Cooch’s way, and so he went charging into his fourth Senate term with a piece of English-only legislation so daft, even he eventually had to reconsider it.

The bill (SB339, for all of you General Assembly geeks out there) would amend Virginia’s unemployment law to deny benefits to any employee fired for “inability or refusal to speak English at the workplace.” And, as if that weren’t draconian enough, Cuccinelli’s original draft actually read “to speak only English at the workplace,” meaning that an intolerant boss could fire you for shouting “aloha!” to your surfing buddies, and you wouldn’t get a dime. But even the Cooch realized that was taking things a bit far, so he graciously edited it to allow the occasional “hola” or “gesundheit!” Now that’s what we call the milk of human kindness, right there.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Assembly, Delegate Mark Cole of Fredericksburg was introducing HB1472, which seeks to update Virginia’s discrimination laws so that canning someone because they won’t (or can’t) speak English at work “shall not be deemed to constitute discrimination on the basis of national origin.” Gee, it’s so cute when these small-minded meatheads play together, isn’t it?

So there you go, Representative Davis—conclusive proof that, no matter what we may have written in the past, our opinion of you is nowhere near as low as it could be. So godspeed, and good luck in the private sector. Sure, we’ll miss your crafty, corporate-loving shenanigans, but —call us crazy—something tells us we’ll be seeing you around K Street for many profitable years to come.