Here’s how it seems to have happened in the swashbuckling old days: A developer came along, decided he needed wastewater treatment, and he built a plant hisself, by God!
That was the case with the northernmost stretch of Route 29. In 1990, Wendell Wood, then acting on the part of two companies, Woodbriar Associates (responsible for the Briarwood subdivision) and Gold Leaf Land Trust, dramatically expanded the Camelot wastewater treatment plant, located just north of the North Fork of the Rivanna River, to serve GE Fanuc, UVA’s North Fork Research Park and his own residential projects. But it only took two years for the Albemarle County Service Authority (ACSA) to decide that leaving a treatment plant in private hands was a bad idea.
The Camelot wastewater plant will be decommissioned when the North Fork Pump Station is built.
“The service authority decided, ‘No, we shouldn’t have this going on within the service area, we should be in charge of wastewater collection,’” explains Gary Fern, ACSA’s executive director. A 1992 agreement terminated the earlier arrangement by buying the rights from Wood for $1 million and from the UVA North Fork Research Park for $150,000.
Though the agreement states that Wood gave up control of Camelot and would get no favors in the future, Wood still felt some entitlement to the plant last year when asked by an Albemarle County planning commissioner if there was enough sewer capacity for his plans for two office buildings and an apartment complex next to the National Ground Intelligence Center (NGIC).
“We constructed the sewer plant, we actually built the sewer plant ourselves, paid for it, with enough capacity to serve these properties,” said Wood. “I am confident that we have sewer capacity.”
A year later, Wood’s first office building is under construction, but the Camelot plant is swiftly running out of capacity. Though it was originally rated to handle 365,000 gallons daily, its permitted capacity is only 200,000. In order to accommodate Wood’s project, ACSA is pumping $500,000 into the facility to keep it afloat for two years while a new North Fork Pump Station is constructed. Afterwards, ACSA will decommission Camelot.
Last week, ACSA entered into an agreement with a Richmond-based firm to do preliminary engineering work for the new pump station, which would direct waste to the Moores Creek treatment plant. It will be funded in part by the various 29N players with future development plans: the UVA Foundation, NGIC, Wendell Wood, and North Pointe developers. ACSA plans to spend $7 million on the project in the next two years, with a goal of getting it online by 2010.
North Pointe developers say the timing is right. “If things go according to the rough schedule, then the timing should go very well,” says Valerie Long, an attorney speaking on behalf of Chuck Rotgin’s Great Eastern Management Company, the primary North Pointe developer. The company is looking to finish houses in late spring/early summer of 2010—just in time for the 800 new NGIC employees to hit Charlottesville.
Richard Spurzem, who owns the northwestern portion of North Pointe that consists of 188 townhomes, is having difficulty with preliminary site plan approval, so the sewer situation remains the least of his worries.
“It’s only when you’re about to unlock the front door that you need to have the sewer working,” says Spurzem.
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
There’s been a recent media blitz about an apparent global hops crisis. Due to such factors as bad weather in Europe and the decreasing production of U.S. hops thanks to government subsidies for other crops such as corn (particularly with the current focus on making corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel), hops—the ingredient that lends bitterness and spice to beer—is in seriously short supply. Now, if you’re a fan of cheap swill from the likes of Anheuser-Busch and Coors, you probably have little reason to worry. The big beer companies have long-term futures contracts with hops growers and suppliers (meaning they’ve already arranged for hops deliveries way into the future at set prices). Plus, the macrobrews don’t use much hops in their watered-down, mass-produced slosh, anyway. It’s really only the good, flavorful stuff—the ales, porters, IPAs and other handcrafted microbrews—that are most affected by the lack of supply and correspondingly higher price of hops. Just how are our local microbrewers and restaurateurs weathering this storm? We checked in with master brewers Jacques Landry of South Street Brewery and Taylor Smack of Blue Mountain Brewery for their perspectives. What we discovered is that the hops “crisis” may be a red herring and the real problem, an underreported bust-up in the barley market.
Of his hops supply, Landry says, “We’re in pretty good shape—I’m basically good through next year.”
Handling it: Jacques Landry of South Street Brewery isn’t hurting from the short supply of hops—for now. “I’m basically good through next year,” he says.
Like most other small-batch beer crafters, Landry purchases his hops from Hopunions, a distributor that procures a variety of hops from growers around the world.
“One positive thing that’s happened from the limited supply is that it’s encouraged me to branch out and use some varietals I haven’t used before,” says Landry.
Smack similarly has been forced to use new varietals, which, like wine grape varietals, lend different flavors, textures and aromas to different types of beers.
“I haven’t been able to get all the varietals I want, but it hasn’t been a huge problem,” he says. Having opened Blue Mountain along with his wife, Mandi Smack, and partner, Matt Nucci, just this past October (well after the hops doomsday predictions had been made), Smack says, “I created the beers around the hops crisis.” Smack also planted his own crop of the most popular type of hops for U.S. microbrews—Cascade—and says this year’s yield of fresh hops should be enough to share with both South Street and fellow local brewer Starr Hill. By next year, he says up to 30 to 40 percent of Blue Mountain’s hops needs could be covered by its own crop.
But what about the price? As it turns out, so little hops is used in a batch of beer that the increase in costs hasn’t yet trickled down to consumers. For example, Landry is now paying $32 a pound for a varietal he used to get for $4.50, but since only about one to five pounds of hops are needed for every 250 to 500 gallons of South Street’s beer, “It really doesn’t carry through to the price of a pint,” says Landry.
What Landry and Smack say will affect consumers in the coming months and years, however, is the decreasing supply and increasing cost of barley malt—a major component of beer. In fact, Landry was scheduled to meet with his malt supplier just after speaking with Restaurantarama, and it had him nervous. As Smack explains, a drought in Australia and those dang U.S. government subsidies encouraging U.S. farmers to plant corn instead other of grains has the price of barley expected to double in the near future, and that, most definitely, will impact the price of beer pretty quickly.
“Six-packs will go up at least a buck or two pretty soon,” Smack says.
Maybe it’s time to for us beer lovers to lay off our cars and call our congresspeople.
Quick bites
Now that a CVS-pharmacy is set to kick Just Curry out of its Corner location behind Satellite Ballroom, owner Alex George tells us he’s about to move to another, much bigger Corner location. More on that story to come.
You can’t keep a good man down. So, a good 10 years after his last outing, Indiana Jones himself is out of mothballs and back in search of high adventure. With the Hollywood triumvirate of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Harrison Ford back on board, viewers can rest relatively assured of some serious summer movie fun.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull picks up nearly 10 years after the original film. It’s the post-war ’50s in America now; our man Indy is no longer plagued by Nazis but, as the film clears the opening credits, it seems he’s been kidnapped by nasty Russkies. They’ve dragged Jones (Ford, of course) and his adventuring buddy George McHale (Ray Winstone) out to (minor spoiler) Roswell, New Mexico. Seems that an overstuffed (and vaguely familiar) warehouse there is the final resting spot for one of Dr. Jones’ more unusual discoveries.
Who’s whipped now? Cate Blanchett plays a frigid Russky opposite our irrepressible hero, Harrison Ford, in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Without giving too all-fired much away, the Russians (led by a “moose and skvirell”-mouthed Cate Blanchett) are after a mysterious crystal skull from South America. Legend has it that whomever returns this skull to its lost Mayan city of origin will be the recipient of some great power. Naturally, everybody wants to get their hands on it. Naturally, Indiana Jones is caught in the middle.
The opening sequence of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull manages to fit in evil Russian spies, Area 51, a car chase, a massive gunfight, a rocket sled and an atomic bomb. It’s an early indicator that the filmmakers might be trying a bit too hard.
Trailer for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
In short order, Dr. Jones teams up with James Dean wannabe Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf). Seems that Mutt’s mom was one of Indy’s old girlfriends and she’s been kidnapped in South America by some evil Russian spies. (Sense a trend here?) The film remains coy for a majority of its running time about who Mutt’s mother might be, but if you don’t already know going into the film, you haven’t been paying much attention.
The film unfolds as one giant chase scene. There are plenty of thrilling action moments, but many viewers (particularly the older ones) might find themselves missing the subtlety of the first film. There isn’t nearly as much humor and character development in this go-around. One could argue that we already know these characters pretty well at this point. True enough, but Kingdom still lacks the quotable dialogue (“Snakes. Why did it have to be snakes?”) and indelible scenes (Indy shooting the Berber swordsman) that made Raiders such an all-time classic.
Twenty-seven years on, the series is starting to show its age. Characterwise, the filmmakers are smart enough to acknowledge that Indy is getting a bit past his prime. (“It’s not the years, it’s the mileage,” he noted in the first film.) But plotwise, this film feels less like a loving tribute to the movie serials of yesteryear and more like a collage of the last 10 action movies you saw. But it’s hard to grouse about niggling details when Harrison Ford is back swinging a bullwhip. A summer with Indiana Jones is like a summer with ice cream. You don’t just want it, you gotta have it.
Art galleries are a bit like the Hokey Pokey—either your left foot is headed in, or your left foot is out. Maybe you’re the type of person that makes time in your life to see John Doe Michelangelo’s latest oil paintings, and maybe you’re not. These two types of people are as separate as collage and Crayola. It’s that simple; no need to shake it all about.
Brendan Fitzgerald gives a video tour of some of the works of art in "The Other Show" at PVCC.
But shaking it up means progress. Think Bob Dylan going electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, or Orson Welles moving from the radio chaos of “War of the Worlds” to the big screen for Citizen Kane. During a span of 20 years, Pablo Picasso jumped from Blue Period to Rose Period to African Period to Cubism. Ehrich Weiss was already a magician by the time he changed his name to “Harry Houdini,” but the new label gave the performer a second, and greater, act.
“Connect the Skull,” one of Noah Scalin’s “Skull-A-Day” designs on display at “The Other Show” at PVCC.
“The Other Show,” the current art show at Piedmont Virginia Community College that runs through August 21, is based on the space between vision and revision, the move from a comfortable idea towards a less comfortable one. Curator and local artist Rob Tarbell collected 40 pieces of art from 20 artists—one exemplary of each person’s style, and another that strays from each person’s norm. “I asked fellow artists, ‘What do you do?’ But I followed with ‘What else?’” Tarbell writes in a book accompanying the exhibit. “And the answer was always interesting.”
Tarbell’s collection of oddities is a mental maze of a show, a mix-and-match of the usual and the “un-.” It also may be one of the city’s most exciting and interactive art shows in years. The only thing missing until now is a primer. C-VILLE spent a few days at “The Other Show,” and let it turn us all around. Here’s what it’s all about.
1. Bring your running shoes
For those of you that haven’t been, the PVCC’s V. Earl Dickinson Building is shaped like a large circle. Works for “The Other Show” line the perimeter, with one work by each artist on each side. This encourages the feeling of running around the track at your high school, but the exhibit rewards legwork. Let yourself dash back and forth between the two halves of the circle, gulping air while trying to find which two wildly disparate pieces come from the same artist. A curious mind and quick legs pay off for art fans that want to find each artist’s two creations. Which brings up point No. 2…
2. Treat it like a scavenger hunt
The 40 pieces in “The Other Show” aren’t linked in ways you’d expect; the exhibit requires a bit of mental flexibility. And, although each artist takes a logical step from their usual medium or subject or style to their “other” effort, it might be a step backwards, or sideways, or off the side of a cliff.
“Action to Object,” a sculpture by Brad Birchett
Take Brad Birchett’s two contributions. An associate professor of art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Birchett takes the urban grid of Richmond as his inspiration for two pieces, “Action to Object” and “Urban Renewal.” The first is a cairn—a pile of rocks that denotes a pathway or a burial site—that plays a recorded loop of a one-hour walk by Birchett during his journey to collect the stones. The second is a set of 12 small paintings, fragmented and scarred, that resembles evenly spaced tenement houses or groupings of mountains along the Appalachian Trail.
“Urban Renewal,” Birchett’s second contribution to “The Other Show”
In short, use the Dickinson Building as the grounds for your scavenger hunt. Bring a few friends, start on one side of the gallery space, look at everything, then sprint to the opposite side. Avoid the placards with the artists’ names—that’s like cheating. Mention clues conspiratorially to your fellow explorers. Take a red pen to the pricing list and use it like a checklist for your finds. Here are a few to get you started:
Who is the only artist to show two pieces on the same side of the gallery?
What artist’s work hangs alongside pieces from his mother and father?
Which artist attended the University of Virginia in 1988? (Hint: See No. 9.)
3. Radio, radio
When you first arrive at the Dickinson Building, remain in your car. Turn the radio frequency to either 98.9FM or 101.3FM and, for the next 10 minutes, keep your eyes closed as the radio broadcasts the noise of impending disasters—wreckage by wind, water, fire, all of the natural elements.
The woman behind that sonic manipulation, “Vague Apocalypse,” is Alyssa Salomon, and she is primarily a photographer. The northern portion of the PVCC gallery is filled with her daguerreotypes, photos developed on the chemical compound silver halide that bear names like “Nothing, Blue Skies” and kinda resemble holograms.
Yet “Vague Apocalypse” arguably nabbed Salomon more attention, including a 2007 “Best in Show” nod from the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia. Tarbell says that “Vague Apocalypse” and the daguerreotypes are both examples of antiquated technology, outdated media, but that’s not the only connection between Salomon’s work. While one radio transmitter hidden in the PVCC gallery broadcasts disaster after disaster, another plays Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” This radio broadcast will continue, 24 hours a day, until the show ends in late August. Forecast: Blue skies, with a 50 percent chance of annihilation. You’ve been warned.
4. Meet your maker
One of Rob Tarbell’s eyes is two different colors, which seems an appropriate metaphor for “The Other Show.” A tall, stubbly bear of a man, Tarbell both moves and talks with a studied calm that could make a golfer swoon. His own work is an equally unlikely pairing of savagery and grace: His “Smokes”—large canvases that look painted in black breath—can be seen at Les Yeux du Monde. In February, he displayed a collection of stuffed rabbits, bears and gorillas at Second Street Gallery that he de-stuffed then packed with porcelain and baked, creating a zoo of eerie, ivory-colored creatures.
Tarbell splits his time between Richmond and Charlottesville, working as an adjunct professor of art at both VCU and PVCC; he is represented by galleries in both cities as well, from LYDM in Charlottesville to the 1708 Gallery in Richmond, where he serves on the gallery’s board. In short, Tarbell is neither here nor there, not wholly of one place or medium. The perfect mad scientist for the show; if you spot him at the gallery, pull him aside and ask for a tour.
5. Eat up!
Amidst this glut of art, you’ll find evidence of that other medium that we most casually experiment with—food.
Chris Norris unleashes his other half as part of a six-person artist collective called FEAST, a confectioner’s dream and a diabetic’s nightmare. FEAST was originally conceived as a photography group; Norris’ other piece, “Drunk on Doughnuts,” depicts a buxom brunette licking her dainty, aristocratic fingers before a pile of sweets. But the ensemble’s exhibits evolved into cream-filled, frosted puff pastries of performance art, in which women dressed in red satin distribute candy and keep tables of brownies and Twinkies fully loaded. The spread in “Drunk on Doughnuts” is a rich one, but the model is restrained; the photo is a nice counterpart to Norris’ “Crown of Swans,” an ornate painting in which a trio of swans rise from the head of a deer, hissing and spitting, wild and unruly in a way that the gluttonous woman struggles to resist.
Jake Urbanski is a bit more straightforward when it comes to playing with food. As part of the Ink Tank collective (founded in part by Matt Lively; see No. 6), Urbanski and a crew of friends painstakingly scanned meats, cheeses, breads and other fixings, then set up a lunch counter in which they “prepared” meals for customers by printing their desired munchies onto t-shirts. A sample of this buffet is on display on one side of the gallery.
A selection from the “Meat shirts” menu, a series of custom t-shirt concoctions by Jake Urbanski.
In “4 Unhappy Children,” however, Urbanski gets a bit more meditative. By staining light-sensitive photograph paper with blue and red popsicles, Urbanski offers a painting that is designed to decompose as it is exposed to light. (Prior to the show’s opening, Urbanski’s piece was covered by a cloth to keep it from changing colors.) There is also a digital print of the original popsicle painting so gallery goers can compare the two. As the sticky-fingered artist offers in his statement accompanying the show, “[Viewers] must consider whether they would want to own the original image and accept the inevitable change…[or] a part that would remain unchanged indefinitely.” Dig in.
An example of Urbanski’s "other" work, light-senstitive popsicle prints.
6. What’s the Matt-er?
“Hew.” Verb. To cut or to separate one thing from another. The only difference between “Matt Lively” and “Matthew Lively,” folks, is a “hew.”
On one side of the gallery is Matt Lively’s standard fare, an oil painting called “Flight.” The painting is one in a series of surreal suburban scenes in which 1940s homes and fixtures take on personalities and become characters in front of a background of comically sinister gray skies. The scenes are playful, reminiscent of both Virginia Lee Burton’s The Little House children’s book and California painter Mark Ryden, who illustrated a pair of Stephen King book jackets depicting cartoon-inspired neighborhoods. The full scope of Lively’s work is online at www.mattlively.com.
“Flight,” a painting by Matt (not “Matthew”) Lively.
Not to be confused with www.matthewlively.com, where work from Lively’s 2006 show at Richmond’s Art6 Gallery, “Dead/Alive”—a collection of 72 sculpted sheep and various paintings of the bleating bags of wool—is on display. “Matthew” Lively contributes “Abide,” a piece originally conceived for the “Dead/Alive” show that shares a palette with Matt Lively but a hazy, more ethereal style. Of the artists in “The Other Show,” Matt Lively may be the only one to submit another personality as his project. What a difference a “hew” can make.
7. Cross bones
On June 3, Noah Scalin completes his “Skull-A-Day” project (skulladay.blogspot.com), an undertaking that earned the graphic artist both a 2008 Webby Award and a book deal. (Lark Books plans to publish Skull, documenting Scalin’s work; see page 19 to connect the skull.) Scalin has a graffiti artist’s obsession with the simple image; images from his blog run on a video loop at PVCC and contain skulls hidden in tea leaves, Tinkertoys or human hands.
Scalin offers a number of cultural and historical interests in skulls—the Mexican Day of the Dead, modern gothic culture, works by Damien Hirst and Hans Holbein. In the preface to the forthcoming Skull, Scalin writes that demanding an original skull from himself each day was like a dare to see an image of death in everything: “Lacking a societal alternative, my project became my own daily meditation on death.”
Not that Scalin is a particularly glum fellow. His other work, part of a project called “Plant The Piece” (www.plantthepiece.com) is a collection of 9mm handguns filled with seeds, one gun for each of the 101 gun-related murders committed in Richmond in 2004. Two of the seed guns are on display at PVCC, one inside the gallery and one outside, where it can take root and fire.
Speaking of the great outdoors…
8. You missed a few!
“The Other Show” begins well before you step inside the gallery, starting with the excavation site to the left of the gallery’s entrance—a series of long, slender holes carved into the ground, illuminated by a construction light. On the opposite side is a collection of rough metal sculptures made by Daniel Calder to evoke “pig irons,” a compound metal that can be easily melted down and reshaped. “The Pigs and Pig Bed,” as Calder calls this two-part installation, are frozen in their present form; inside the gallery, “Avoidance,” an abstract painting of obscured vertical bars, evokes the same turmoil of melting down iron rods into a malleable substance.
“Avoidance,” an acrylic painting by Daniel Calder.
And, in the grass a few dozen steps from the gallery’s entrance, you can find Allison Andrews’ “H2,” a 7′ by 6′ by 17′ scale model of a Hummer framed by metal bars, but otherwise completely transparent. Primarily a sculptor, Andrews’ other work, a video reimagining of the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution shown over audio clips of The Lord’s Prayer and the Islamic call to prayer, is an interesting idea, but lacks the wallop of her invisible gas guzzler parked on the front lawn.
9. Sticky situations
Gordon Stettinius is one of the only participants (not counting Tarbell) with a local connection. He graduated from UVA in 1988 before moving to Richmond, where he is an adjunct faculty member at VCU as well as a former president of the 1708 Gallery, where many of “The Other Show”’s artists have previously exhibited.
“Burlesque,” a blood silkscreen by Gordon Stettinius.
A photographer frequently drawn to the human form, Stettinius chose to put a little bit of himself into his other work—namely, by drawing blood from himself and substituting it for the ink in a silk-screen procedure. As a result, “Burlesque”—a rapturous nude photograph—is given the lurid, sinful tone its name commands.
“Burlesque” is one in a series of prints that Stettinius has manipulated with unconventional materials. Rather than waiting for Crayola to issue colors like “Pepto Pink” or “Translucent Blue Detergent,” he has used the raw materials—molasses and chocolate syrup, honey, salad dressings and olive oils, and the aforementioned products—to draw some unnatural convergence of subject and object out of each work.
10. Lose your marbles
We don’t mean literally. Unless, of course, you’ve found Tommy White’s “Marble Boy,” a wooden structure based on a ghost story about a child that haunts Savannah College of Art and Design, playing a creepy game of keepsies while he shoots his marbles around the rafters. At the base of White’s painted box is a drawer filled with marbles of different weights that trigger different latches and levers within the box when dropped into the top. Roll one down the chute and spook yourself.
One of Jesionowski’s “Topographies,” a series of mixed-media drawings
“The Others Art Show” is as interactive and joyful as a kid’s game, as inventive as a ghost story or tall tale, something that simultaneously dares and delights its creators and audiences. Flip through Rosemary Jesionowski’s two-sided postcards, with which she asked friends and strangers “Where are you going? Where are you from?,” then peek at her “Topographies,” which have never been show before. Peer inside Cindy Neuschwander’s equally secretive handmade books, originally composed for the eyes of her husband alone. Try to mentally piece together Robert Walz’s “Disassembly,” a deconstructed collection of model kits, then ask yourself how it might connect to his unobtrusive, polycarbonate ladder, titled “Closer.” (Hint: Walz loves lucite—look for it.)
A selection of postcards from Rosemary Jesionowski’s “Where Are You Going, Where Are You From?”
It isn’t a normal art show any more than the Dickinson Building is a normal gallery or Tarbell’s collection of artists is a normal group of people. But before we’re distracted—by the same old thing or something new, by normalcy or the other—we can all take a walk on the wild side.
“Disassembly,” a giclee print by Robert Walz.
“Marble Boy,” a rattling, interactive mixed-media piece from Tommy White.
A week after the county Board of Supervisors decided to consider changing the land use tax program, local farmers are still distraught. Since 1975, Albemarle has granted landowners a tax deferral for a minimum of five acres that meets prescribed standards of agricultural use. Basically, the land must be used for the sale of crops and/or livestock, or be in an approved soil conservation program.
For a small farmer like Kathryn Russell, it can make for a patchwork of tax statuses. Her Majesty Farms falls into various categories, with 19 of 21 acres falling under the deferral system. As part of the land use tax, she must pay full tax on her house and at least one surrounding acre. With the reduced rate, she paid $2,702 for the 21 acres. “I would have to pay twice that much if I didn’t have land use,” Russell says.
Small farmer Kathryn Russell says that the county should extend land use tax to smaller parcels. “You can do a whole lot on two acres,” she says.
Meanwhile, on an adjoining four acres on which she rotationally grazes sheep, she must pay full price, which came to $900 last year. Russell also has another five acres on which she built a house that she plans to sell. While she grazes cattle on much of that land, it is not put under land use because of the presence of the house, which makes for a tax bill of $3,100 a year.
One supervisor has proposed that farmers put their land in open space conservation easement, which bars the owner from ever building on the land, in order to qualify for the land use program. But because many farmers rent the land they farm, that measure would bring its own problems.
“If land use is changed, then they can’t afford to rent to me,” says Dan Holsinger, a dairy farmer in Augusta County, which has a land use tax system similar to Albemarle’s. Holsinger says he can’t afford to buy any more land at today’s prices, especially when he is barely scraping by. “Land use is the one thing that keeps me in business.”
Another reason given for scrapping the tax deferral is the fear that the exemption is being exploited by landowners looking for a tax break.
“Folks may not be following the letter of the law,” says county assessor Bruce Woodzell. He has eight assessors at his disposal, many of which spend a good deal of time out in the county assessing land, and as they do so, checking the land use. Woodzell estimates that assessors view every parcel in the county every 18 months. That will be changing as reports are now required on an annual basis, instead of biennially as they were before.
“They won’t be in the field as much as they used to be,” he says, estimating that it may take up to three years for a parcel to be inspected. Theoretically, that would increase the opportunity for abuse. Still, he cannot remember when was the last violation of land use.
As a result, farmers like Russell reject the suggestion that the land use tax system be changed. In fact, she thinks it should be broadened.
“If [supervisors] were really for small farms like they say they are,” Russell says, “they should extend land use to be helpful to those who work on small projects. You can do a whole lot on two acres.”
C-VILLE welcomes news tips from readers. Send them to news@c-ville.com.
While most folks were getting drunk in front of a grill, UVA’s Somdev Devvarman was kicking tennis tail, becoming only the fourth player in the last 50 years to win back-to-back NCAA men’s singles championships yesterday. Playing in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Devvarman took only 61 minutes to beat Tennessee freshman J.P. Smith (6-3, 6-2) in his third straight title trip. The senior lost as a sophomore. "It’s definitely a great feeling," he told the AP. Devvarman has been ranked No. 1 all season. "This is the way pretty much anyone would like to end their college career."
UVA’s Somdev Devvarman crushed his competition. He is the first college player to lose only one match in a single season since Jimmy Connors went undefeated in 1971.
One of the things I find most fascinating about wine is the disconnect between how it is generally perceived and marketed and how it is actually made. Wine, we want to believe, is nothing but grapes and sunshine. The grapes are picked, crushed, aged and poured. It is sold as a natural product—the pure and authentic expression of a place and a people. This idea abides in advertising and drips from the lips of every winemaker and winery owner. Nine times out of 10, however, it’s far from the truth.
Wine is an incredibly complicated product, and most of the time it takes an array of added chemicals, and all sorts of mechanized processes, to get the “traditional” and “natural” taste that most consumers expect. Increasingly I wonder about this knowledge gap. Why aren’t wine producers more open with consumers about what they do? Why, for instance, don’t they list their ingredients on the bottle?
There’s more to it: Will there ever come a day when Virginia wine labels list all the ingredients that go into each bottle?
Last year, eccentric California winemaker Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard announced that he was going to start doing just that. He will not only list the ingredients on the back of each bottle; he will also disclose every item that was used in the making of the wine. “This labeling initiative is primarily intended as an internal discipline,” he said in a press release. “However, we do hope other winemakers will be encouraged to adopt less interventionist practices and rely less upon an alphabet soup of additives to ‘improve’ their wines.” He may not have to hope much longer. Plans are afoot to change wine labeling laws to make the whole process a lot more transparent.
Currently, wine labels are not required to list ingredients because, unlike food, which is regulated by the Food and Drug Administration, wine is controlled by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB), a branch of the Treasury Department. In 2005 the TTB began exploring a proposal that would require wine bottles to list nutritional info as well as any food allergens that might be present.
Allergens? Yes, and for starters, try egg whites, milk proteins and isinglass, a collagen found in fish bladders. All three are commonly used in wine (and many British beers) as fining agents. Given concern over food allergies, it seems likely that labeling proposal will go into effect, though only minute traces of these products, if any at all, are left in the finished wine. The list of other items commonly added to wine includes sugars, acids, enzymes, oak flavoring, concentrated wine color and flavor, clay, and copper. Opponents of full disclosure fear that it will take the romance out of wine and create the impression that wine is a manufactured, and not natural, product.
The truth is most wine is manipulated and engineered. But will it really suffer when that truth is revealed? Most Americans continue to buy food whose multi-syllabic ingredients are often, unlike the additives in wine, incredibly unhealthy. More government regulation is the last thing that the already beleaguered wine industry needs, but I think it would be beneficial in the long run if winemakers took it upon themselves to bring more transparency to their craft.
Are there any Virginia winemakers willing to do as Randall Grahm did? I challenge any who are reading this to let me publish a complete list of ingredients used to make one of their current wines. Yes, a little romance may be lost in publishing it, but perhaps such self-imposed openness will lead winemakers to limit their use of additives. And who knows, maybe one day they will have the pleasure of selling a bottle whose label simply says “Ingredients: Grapes, water, sunshine.”
From the world of press releases, this news: Charlottesville Fire Chief Charles Werner has been elected the new chair for the Executive Committee of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Emergency Communications and Office for Interoperability and Compatibility. Whew!
According to the press release, Werner is a 32-year veteran of the fire service (and Charlottesville chief for two years) who recently received the Virginia Governor’s Award for Excellence, becoming the only person to win the award three times.
As head of the Executive Committee, Werner will be tasked with providing "valuable practitioner expertise and input into Federal interoperability initiatives." Basically, he will guide the committee as it provides state and local perspectives to the federal behemoth he will serve, thereby theoretically creating greater communication so that there will be greater response in times of disaster. Knock on wood.
Charlottesville Fire Chief Charles Werner now can also claim one of the longest titles known to man: chair for the Executive Committee of the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Emergency Communications and Office for Interoperability and Compatibility.
Believe it or not, we here at the Odd Dominion have never harbored any illusions about the fundamentally religious nature of our government. Squawk all you want about the First Amendment, but it doesn’t take a brainiac to figure out that the Establishment and Free Exercise of Religion clauses were designed by the founding fathers to corral a bunch of autonomous states (each with its own state religion, mind you) into some semblance of a working nation, not to make the U.S. government a shining bastion of freethinking humanism.
Like a locust, but with a better-looking wife and kids? Virginia’s own Michael Farris compares Obama to a plague.
If you don’t believe us, just consider this: Not only is trust in the heavenly executive emblazoned on our currency, and new office-holders sworn in on the holy book of his or her choice, but a recent inquiry by the Secular Coalition for America (a lobbying group that “represents the interests of atheists, humanists, freethinkers, and other nontheists”) found exactly one member of Congress willing to go on the record as a nonbeliever. (Representative Pete Stark of California, come on down! You’re the next—and only—contestant on “Who Wants to be a Godless Heathen?”)
Now, we have our own problem with mixing politics and religion, but it’s certainly not due to any deep-seated moral or spiritual convictions. On the contrary, it’s our firmly held belief that the American political system is an irredeemably wicked swamp of iniquity, and that any God-fearing person with a lick of sense in his head would avoid it like Lot high-tailing it out of Gomorrah.
But, as usual, nobody listens to us, and so candidates continue to sully their religious beliefs by mixing them with the black tar of electoral politics, thereby inviting God’s wrath one stump speech at a time.
Of course, having said all of that, we’ll be the first to admit that—if you simply must mix your faith and your politicking—there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it.
The right way, as far as we’re concerned, is best exemplified by current congressional aspirant Tom Perriello, whose fresh-faced challenge to Charlottesville’s offensively entertaining U.S. Representative Virgil Goode has (thank the Lord!) spared us yet another election season full of Goode/Weed jokes.
Perriello, who is by all accounts a devout and dedicated fellow, has hit upon an ingenious plan to help folks out and garner votes, while simultaneously highlighting his opponent’s “loathe thy brother” anti-Muslim intolerance. The gimmick goes like this: Perriello asks his dedicated group of volunteers to “tithe” 10 percent of their time to community service projects around the district, thereby evoking all of the decent and charitable aspects of your local church, while also reminding voters of the extensive volunteer work he himself has done in vacation hot spots such as Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Darfur. This is the sort of plan that we’d normally call Machiavellian in its nefarious, poll-tested brilliance—but Perriello seems so darned earnest, we’re willing to put our cynicism aside and applaud him for designing such a smart, community-building campaign tactic. (But don’t push us, Poindexter—we can only hold our snark for so long.)
On the flip side of this politico-religious coin, however, is Virginia’s biggest home-school advocate Michael Farris, chancellor of Purcellville’s Patrick Henry College and 1993’s losingest candidate for lieutenant governor. According to a recent column by uber-Republican insider Robert Novak, Farris—who backed Mike Huckabee for president—has been spreading the word in evangelical circles that, since the Huckster has been thwarted in his divine quest for the Oval Office, God obviously wants to punish America with “an Obama plague-like presidency.”
That’s just great. You’ve got to love it when a purported man of faith speaks vaingloriously for the almighty, disparages his own party’s nominee, and calls the leading Democratic presidential candidate the anti-Christ behind closed doors. Well, you’d better watch out, chancellor: with that kind of talk, you might actually make the cesspool of politics look good by comparison. And Lord knows, we wouldn’t want that!
One is always happy to see that the free expression of ideas is still defended in Mr. Jefferson’s county but, good grief, does the Rutherford Institute [“‘Virginity Rocks’ t-shirts spark Albemarle High controversy,” News from This Just In, May 13, 2008] have nothing better to do with its time than defend the right of a student to wear a “VIRGINITY ROCKS” t-shirt to school?! Or, for that matter, does a school have nothing better to do than forbid it? I cannot imagine that there are that many students who would even want to wear such a shirt, thereby piously proclaiming publicly their virtue in a manner that, according to the New Testament, Jesus himself condemned. One wonders if the Rutherford Institute would defend with equal vigor the right of a student to wear the same t-shirt with the first two letters of “ROCKS” changed to SU?!
Jeff Baker Ivy
Where’s the dough?
I am writing to elucidate two things to the tax-paying public. Occasionally, there are in fact “pizza parties” given to a small number of inmates whose cell block is chosen the winner of the jail’s “Weekly Clean Block Program.” For the more highly populated cell blocks who win, however, their incentive is typically a pack of Nabs. Pizza is a rarity for anyone [“Inside Story,” Mailbag, March 11, 2008]!
As an inmate at ACRJ, I too wonder: Who pays for such things? Is it the tax-paying public, or does the jail’s commissary network somehow regenerate some of their HUGE profits back into the “circular flow” of the jail’s economy?
Our most treasured staple, the Ramen Noodle, cost us inmates 83 cents each and without a doubt generates a HUGE profit for someone, considering they cost $1 for 10 at the local grocer and certainly even less when purchased in bulk.
I would only find it appropriate that these profits help pay for officer training, inmate incentives, and for the many self-help programs us inmates are so fortunate to be offered at this facility.
If it is, in fact, taxpayer money that pays for such things, and NOT these aforementioned revenues, it would certainly be an atrocity.
Paul Wayne Eddy Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail
Nothing uglier
I would just like to comment on the article about Coran Capshaw wanting to build an amphitheater in Roanoke [“Roanoke Times irked by Red Light amphitheater project,” News from This Just In @ c-ville.com, May 20, 2008]. That’s all well and good if it turns out to be a better looking one than what we have here in Charlottesville. I (and I’m not the only one) think the one here is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. I can’t imagine what the entertainment thinks when they come here to do concerts. The only way you can see the stage is if you’re down front or midway back. If you’re in the back, forget it.
I still say one day the rubber bands are going to break on that thing and wipe out the entire Downtown Mall.
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