Due to a reporting error, in the What’s New section of the March 2008 issue of SUGAR, an incorrect phone number was given for Passages Physical Therapy. The correct number is 979-5559.
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Month: March 2008
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Lady Cavs roll in NCAA opener
Playing its first game of the NCAA tournament, the UVA women’s basketball team breezed past the UC Santa Barbara Gauchos 86-52 on March 23 and will face Old Dominion on Tuesday night. We may have had to consult a dictionary to figure out what a Gaucho is (for the record, a rebel-rousing South American cowboy), but we know that the win spells P-L-A-Y O-N for UVA’s only basketball team in the NCAA tournament.
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Pudhorodsky arrested, awaits sentencing
After an early March trip to the state capitol on behalf of his “grassroots” lobby group Generation Y, 27-year-old Michael Pudhorodsky is now in Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail awaiting sentencing for a 2006 felony charge of credit card theft and a related misdemeanor for failing to appear last May.
 Michael Pudhorodsky, who failed to appear in court on charges of credit card theft, was picked up in Richmond by Capital Hill police. |
| Previous coverage:
Edwards pursuer pursued by police Follow-up Alvin Edwards defends support of convicted teacher Choir director admits to sex charges |
According to Lieutenant Randall Howard of the Virginia Capitol Police, an anonymous tip was received on March 5 alerting them to the presence of the fugitive near Richmond’s Capitol Hill. Shortly thereafter, Officer Tony Gulotta took Pudhorodsky into custody and notified Albemarle County police, which extradited him from Richmond.
Pudhorodsky, a former employee of the HIV/AIDS Service Group, gained brief notice in January for vowing to pursue Alvin Edwards, a city School Board member, former mayor and current Mt. Zion pastor, for his support of Jonathan Spivey. Spivey, former choir director not only at Charlottesville High School but at Edwards’ church, pleaded guilty in 2007 to several charges of sexual misconduct with CHS students. When reports surfaced of Pudhorodsky’s outstanding criminal charges, he went underground until his appearance and subsequent apprehension in Richmond.
Only last week, Pudhorodsky was able to resolve a felony charge of trying to sell stolen property in the city. In 2003, he was found guilty of writing a number of bad checks and a year later was convicted on a petty larceny charge.
“We all make our mistakes,” said Pudhorodsky in early January. On March 19, he entered an official guilty plea for his county charge of credit card theft, and a misdemeanor for failing to appear.
On March 27, he will receive a bond hearing to determine if he can be released from jail until his May 20 sentencing. According to his lawyer, William Tanner, Pudhorodsky is likely looking at a maximum of six months for stealing a Discover credit card and going on an attendant shopping spree.
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
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Debbie Wyatt goes to Richmond
It was a busy week in Richmond for Charlottesville attorney Debbie Wyatt: She argued three cases before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals last week, including the Monroe vs. City of Charlottesville, the DNA dragnet lawsuit, and Stephens vs. Rivanna Solid Waste Authority, a $16 million lawsuit that arose from the death of Wayne Stephens in an explosion at the Ivy Landfill. (For more on the third case, Dena Bowers vs. UVA, click here.) Wyatt seemed as energetic as ever after all the high profile arguments—the Stephens case was heard by retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, before whom Bowers had appeared twice at the nation’s highest court. “I told people I was really disappointed that she didn’t remember me,” jokes Wyatt. “I remember her.”
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Countersuit blues
Plaintiff: Alan Swanson
Defendants: Bernard J. DiMuro, DiMuro Ginsberg P.C., and Katharine Almy
Court: Albemarle County Circuit
What’s at issue: Whether Almy and her attorneys “willfully, falsely, and maliciously” included a statement in a press release that alleged marital infidelity on the part of the plaintiff. In 1998, Swanson, his wife, and novelist John Grisham allegedly targeted defendant Almy for a series of anonymous letters written to Swanson’s wife. A subsequent police investigation cleared Almy, who then countersued her three implicators.
 What’s John Grisham doing here? It’s so hard to keep track of the lawsuits and counter suits filed in regards to a real-life letter writing mystery that we don’t know anymore. |
What’s at stake: $5.25 million in compensatory and $350,000 in punitive damages. Plaintiff says his marital life “has been exposed to scrutiny, not only in [his] own community, but throughout Virginia, the United States and the world, and the subject of his alleged marital infidelity has been the topic of rampant, specious speculation and comment.” A coach at St. Anne’s-Belfield, Swanson claims his relationships with his students, their parents, members of his family, his friends and members of the community have been harmed.
What’s the status: The complaint was filed on January 14 and has yet to be served.
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
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Smarten up
Just like The Economist is kind of one-stop shopping for the thinking person who doesn’t have time to read The Wall Street Journal every day, More Intelligent Life is one-stop shopping for those poor, busy souls who don’t have time to religiously read The Economist, Salon, ArtForum, The New York Times’ Style Section, etc. The More Intelligent Life blog is a spin-off of the quarterly Intelligent Life Magazine, which is in turn the cultural spin-off of the aforementioned Economist magazine, and it’s a nice looking site (the layout is clean and the images are well-chosen) with plenty of that yummy food for thought I always hear people talking about.
The blog posts original material as well as articles culled from the Intelligent Life quarterly and The Economist; a scroll through the site sends your thoughts darting from global warming to European football to Chinese art to the eternal question, “What Do People Do in Antarctica?” (Answer: Look at it through the window of an airplane.) Regardless, what I’m trying to say is simply that if you read this today, you’ll be primed for your cocktail party tonight. And if you cram correctly, my Magic Eight Ball says the “outlook is good” for you to actually enjoy yourself this evening…maybe even have a stimulating conversation or two about, like, why Anthony Lane is a far superior movie critic to Manhola Dargis, or something. Oh, Anthony Lane. Swoon.
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The Raw deal [with video]
Second-year art major Laura Lin is framing a handful of portraits—many watercolors, a few oil pastels, most still bearing the heavy pencil lashings of a young artist—on a makeshift table beneath a single lamp and an open ceiling. A mass of cords and lamps lay pooled around her feet, the inner workings of her exhibition space tugged out of their skin and heaped onto the half-painted floor in a big, intestinal mess.
| Video from the opening reception at Rawstuff on March 21. |
In the room adjacent to Lin, the curators of the current juried art show at Rawstuff—sculptor Jamin An, printmaker/cinematographer Sean Kelly, painters Heather Beardsley and Ashley Williams, all third-year art majors—are huddled in the center of their exhibition space, deciding what to make of it. Kelly looks at a group of paintings, runs his fingers through his red beard, remarks to An: “If you want to have these in dialogue…”
“Let’s just keep putting the work out and see what we have,” answers An, brushing back his shaggy black hair. The four grow quiet, reconsider their space.
Typically, UVA art students wait until their fourth year to show their work; they amass a functional, expressive body of work and string it up at the UVA Off Grounds Gallery at the corner of Main Street and McIntire Road. But Rawstuff’s show is more of a Frankensteinian free-for-all than a functional body, a collection of spare limbs and extra organs strung up where room allows, thanks mainly to a stroke of good luck.
 Works in progress: Beneath a gutted ceiling, UVA second-year Laura Lin puts the final touches on a painting for Rawstuff’s juried art exhibit. |
This fall, UVA’s studio art program will relocate to Ruffin Hall, the program’s new $11.8 million home on Carr’s Hill. Last summer, associate professor of art William Bennett—also a member of Les Yeux du Monde—made his usual trip to Studio Arts, the supply store on West Main Street owned by local developer John Bartelt. “We’re in temporary facilities,” says Bennett during a phone interview with Curtain Calls. “And I was looking for a place where students could not only exhibit work, but make work.”
Bennett expressed as much to Bartelt, who purchased the Under the Roof furniture store across Main Street with architect Bill Atwood for $3.2 million last October. Bartelt plans to move his operation into the remodeled Roof space and, eventually, to turn the current Studio Arts space into an eight- to nine-story building. In the gap between the destruction of his current building and the creation of his new one, Bartelt offered to lease the top floor of the Under the Roof space to Bennett for the price of utilities. Bennett, long interested in expanding UVA’s art exhibitions beyond the perimeter of the campus, accepted.
The path to Rawstuff is as unexpected as its creation. A few days before they meet in person, CC asks An for directions to the space, and he receives the following abbreviated directions: “Rear side of Studio Arts store. Behind dumpster. Past trash. New parking garage looming. Up fire escape, to Rawstuff.”
Now, standing around a pile of paintings, prints and sketches of wildly varying quality—100 submissions in all, pared down from an original 180 submitted pieces—the foursome seems perplexed as to where to begin hanging, as if their journey to the space has left them too dizzy to begin. It is only days before the show opens, but Bennett told Curt that he will not renew the lease on the Rawstuff space; both Rawstuff and the Off Grounds Gallery will swap exhibits weekly from April until the end of May, and both will be vacant by June 1.
On one hand, the Rawstuff crew is inventing a gallery from scratch and destroying it only months later, too quickly to learn how to interact with their beloved monster. On the other, their enthusiasm lends the space a sort of identity: A fake wall in the space’s gut has been sliced in the shape of a man, the silhouette of cheap, white wood pulled out, yellow insulation puffing out like a dissected stuffed animal. There are plans to screen six short films on a loop during the show. The floor is half-painted and, while An tells Curt that it will be finished by the time the show opens on Friday, March 21, CC wishes the four would leave it be.
Lin finishes framing her paintings, bids farewell to the Rawstuff staff and exits the space, leaving down the red, metal stairwell that runs up the back of Studio Art. Curt decides to abandon the space as well, but stops at a pair of paintings by a girl named Rachel Spence, another second-year student. He reads a note attached to one of her paintings, written in a looping, juvenile script: “The piece can be hung with pushpins or nails or any other simple hanging aid.” There is no solid identity here for gallery or artists—not yet—but there is something being made.
Navigating the Book Fest
Where is it?, you’re wondering. The author interviews? The schedule? The words about words, the text about texts, the requisite Virginia Festival of the Book write-up?
Curt has a question for you, readers: How do you decide what to read? You pick a book or a writer that appeals to your tastes in humor, narrative, whatever, and then try to cram it into your free time. You struggle to polish off a few pages during lunch and curse yourself when you can’t work through a full chapter before bed each night. And the writers don’t have it much easier.
Take Jennifer Zajac, who started her first novel a few years ago. Between her work hours as an editor at SNL Financial, Zajac pens the best type of clear-headed motherhood essays for WINA-1070 and local National Public Radio station WVTF. Rather than crank out a half-hearted novel, Zajac compiled some of her most enjoyable essays and published I Read It Somewhere, So It Must Be True, which she’ll sign during the festival’s book fair at the Omni Hotel from 9am to 5pm on Saturday, March 29.
Or, there’s Taylor Antrim, a graduate of UVA’s creative writing program with a master’s degree in fiction, back in town to read from his first novel, The Headmaster’s Ritual, on Thursday, March 27. (For a complete listing of authors and events, visit www.vabook.org.) Currently an editor at ForbesLife, the 33-year-old still fields loads of freelance assignments (read his February profile of actress Rachel Weisz in Men’s Vogue) and is already off and running on his second novel, set in New York City following a flu pandemic. How does a writer pick his battles?
In the end, readers, the Book Fest rises and falls based on the books you’ve read and the books you haven’t, what you can cram into the word counts of your lives. And Curt’s word count is up; choose wisely, local literati.
What books are on your nightstand? E-mail curtain@c-ville.com with arts news and book recommendations.
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Advance America’s pocketbook
Advance America, which has two Charlottesville branches, is the nation’s largest payday lender, with more than double the stores of its nearest competitors, Check ‘n Go and Check into Cash. The company, based in Spartanburg, South Carolina, is also one of the few publicly traded payday lenders, which means that it must produce an annual financial report.
 Now hiring: With a 120-percent annual turnover rate, Advance America’s employees aren’t happy. But its stockholders sure are. |
| More features:
Caught! Advance America’s pocketbook Know the score Leading the lending fight Q: Why go to a payday lender? You call this reform? |
In addition to info on revenue, profits and stores, the financial report suggests that payday lending employees aren’t exactly in love with their jobs. Annual turnover rates are 58 percent for managers and 120 percent for other employees.
Total payday centers in U.S.: 24,200
Total payday centers in Virginia (2005): 756*
Total Advance America stores: 2,832
Of those, stores in Virginia: 150
Number of Advance America payday loans: 12 million
Daily loans per store: 11.6
Average amount of payday cash advance: $361
Average charge to customer: $55
Average length of payday loan: 16.5 days
Total Advance America revenue: $709.6 million
Net income for Advance America: $54.4 million
*Source: Center for Responsible Lending; all other data comes from Advance America’s 2007 Annual Financial Report.
On the last day of February, the highest court in the Commonwealth delivered this message to aggrieved UVA hospital patients: Litigate away!
The Virginia State Supreme Court rejected a plea by UVA’s Health Services Foundation of charitable immunity, ruling that UVA hospital doctors can be sued for malpractice. With its ruling, the court sent three malpractice suits back to lower courts to be decided on their merits and stripped UVA hospital doctors of a charitable immunity defense in future lawsuits.
Lawyers for the Health Services Foundation argued that because doctors are employed by the Foundation, which describes itself in a vaguely run-on fashion as a “non-profit group practice health care provider organization,” they should be provided immunity from malpractice lawsuits in all but the most egregious cases. In looking at the Foundation’s charitable bona fides, though, the Supreme Court found them lacking.
 The Virginia Supreme Court held that the Health System Foundation’s ratio of revenue to the cost of its charitable work to be too small to label it a “charitable organization.” |
Justices, considering 10 factors that determine if an organization is charitable, wrote, “It is clear that that the manner in which [the Health Services Foundation] actually conducts its affairs is not in accord with the charitable purposes stated in its Articles of Incorporation.”
Don Morin, one of the lawyers representing the Foundation, declined to comment on the specifics of the court’s decision because the cases are still being litigated but offered this statement: “The University of Virginia Health Services Foundation respects the decision of the Virginia Supreme Court in these cases, and now that the cases have been returned to the trial courts, we are going to work toward their final resolution. The Health Services Foundation will continue in its mission to provide high-quality health care, medical training and medical research through its physicians.”
The court cited four factors that it said made it clear that the Foundation “operates like a profitable commercial business with extensive revenues and assets,” and thus didn’t qualify for charitable immunity. The court found that the Foundation’s ratio of revenue to the cost of its charitable work to be too small to label it a “charitable organization.”
The Foundation’s actual shortfall in 2005 for treating indigent patients was about $1.5 million, thanks in part to state reimbursement. That same year, the Foundation’s total revenue and other income totaled $225 million.
According to its articles of incorporation, written in 1979 when the foundation was created, its purpose was to improve the billing and collection process. From 2001 to 2005, the Foundation filed 16,158 warrants in debt, collecting roughly $7 million of the $124 it sought.
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
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Bamboozled
Dear Ace: What is the story behind the Bamboo House on Route 29N? Every time we go by, there are only one or two cars, and it seems a little shady. Do they actually serve food there, or is something else going on?—Skip T. Cal
Skip: Ace is a grown man and, as such, he has built up a tolerance for the worrisome. The unsettling. The downright scary, even. But, as Ace approached the Bamboo House on a cold and rainy evening, he was glad he had Mother Atkins at his side.
“You go in first,” he told her. “Ace is too young to die.”
Once through the orange doors of the nondescript (read: windowless) building on 29 (indeed with only two cars out front, save the Acemobile, one bearing a license plate with “BIZARO” appropriately stamped on it), Ace noticed that were it not for he and his dinner companion, there were only three patrons in the restaurant. Had Ace stumbled upon a hidden treasure? Or was this the beginning of a cliché horror movie with Ace in a starring role?
Luckily, it was the former. As it turns out, the Bamboo House is not a front for organized crime. It is, in fact, just your average Korean restaurant. And taxidermy shop. (Forgive Ace for burying the lead, but he felt it apt, considering the restaurant does it too.)
Turns out, the husband and wife team at Bamboo House are running two businesses, and they’re both completely legal. While she pushes a cart through the restaurant to serve customers (Ace couldn’t make this stuff up! Instead of carrying a tray of food, she maneuvers a cart from the kitchen with the meals on top of it), he runs a taxidermy business in the back. The restaurant (conveniently?) provides a suitable showcase.
As Ace and Mother Atkins sat down to enjoy the beef and broccoli (her choice) and chicken and vegetables (his safer choice), they were suddenly aware that they had…visitors. On the back wall of the restaurant was a bevy of taxidermied animals. A veritable festival of mammalian remains, if you will. Ace noticed a few deer, a fox, and even some squirrels in suspended animation, all contributing to a forest scene. A lesser man would have thrown in the towel at this point. Ace, however, ordered two cups of tea. This is all part of the experience, he thought.
With that said, the food is actually pretty good. But, of course, the fortune cookie is always the most exciting part of Asian cuisine. What did Ace’s say? “Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.” You can say that again.
You can ask Ace yourself. Intrepid investigative reporter Ace Atkins has been chasing readers’ leads for 18 years. If you have a question for Ace, e-mail it to ace@c-ville.com.