Month: November 2008

Two Nelson County residents die in India terrorist attacks

The Lynchburg News and Advance reports that two Nelson County residents, 58-year-old Alan Sherr and his daughter, 13-year-old Naomi Sherr, have died as a result of Wednesday’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India.

The pair, who traveled with the Synchronicity Foundation to Mumbai for a spiritual retreat, were dining in the Oberoi Hotel’s cafe when the terrorists came in and opened fire, according to the News and Advance. Other members of the group stayed in their hotel rooms for two straight days in order to survive the violence.

Alan and Naomi were both members of the Synchronicity Foundation, a group that promotes a form of meditation. They, with Alan’s wife, Kia, moved to the Shrine of the Heart Synchronicity Sanctuary in Faber more than 10 years ago.

Following the attacks, the city of Mumbai was on lockdown. Now, says the News and Advance, Synchronicity’s vice president and managing director Bobbie Garvey is focusing on getting the survivors back to the U.S. "We will be contacting our congressman and senator," Garvey said. "We will need all the assistance we can get to get these people out of India."

As if on cue, Congressman-elect Tom Perriello released a statement this afternoon expressing concern and committing support:

"I am shocked and saddened by this tragic news from across the globe and from right here in our community. My prayers are with the Scherr family and members of their spiritual community during this painful time," the release says. "Acts of terrorism, wherever committed, are crimes against our common humanity, and we have been reminded that conflicts abroad reverberate back home. I pledge to work tirelessly in Congress to challenge these cowardly acts and create a more stable world."

UVA endowment woes highlighted in NY Times

With the declining economy, some high profile universities are seeking to ditch troubled chucks of their endowments, says today’s New York Times. One of the schools that it highlights? The University of Virginia.

The Gray Lady reports that only 21 percent of UVA’s investment pool was in so-called liquid assets—the kind you can cash out when you want—and that the University "plans to sell at least several hundred million dollars in those assets and a comparable amount in its hedge funds through 2010 to meet its capital calls from private equity funds, resource managers and others."

The Times is even able to wrangle out a colorful quote from UVA, albeit one gathered on condition of anonymity.

"It is a little like having to go to a pawn shop,” a UVA endowment manager anonymously told the Times. "People don’t want to admit they have to sell this stuff."

As C-VILLE recently reported, the University’s endowment lost 11 percent in the first quarter of the fiscal year.

UVA’s chief operating officer, Leonard Sandridge, reiterated to the Times what he told C-VILLE, which is that the school has no liquidity issues. Two weeks ago, Sandridge told C-VILLE that UVA didn’t have liquidity problems because it had a good credit rating.

 

Categories
Arts

Vampire's plot is worse than his bite?

I didn’t need a strict press screening policy—no handheld devices with recording capabilities of any kind were allowed in the theater—to understand that the sacred purity of Twilight must not be corrupted.

Adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s bestselling novel, which contains trace elements of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë, not to mention a few archetypally ancient supernatural overtones, Twilight is billed as “a modern-day love story between a vampire and a human,” and not to be confused with Let the Right One In, the novel-based modern-day love story between a vampire and a human set in Sweden, or True Blood, the novel-based modern-day love story between a vampire and a human set in Louisiana.

What big teeth you have! Bella (Kristen Stewart) meets her bloodsucking beau, Edward (Robert Pattinson), in Twilight.

Twilight’s the one set in rural Washington, with Edward (Robert Pattinson) the vampire and Bella (Kristen Stewart) the human. It’s the one with the sudsy tortured-teen dramatics, with characters often yearning and gazing and moving in slow motion, or staying still but having the camera move slowly around them while they steep in pale blue light and breathy, generic power-pop (or, during the closing credits, in pale black-and-white and Radiohead). Obviously a rare and precious piece of intellectual property, indeed.

The truth is that, even with help from my stealth handheld recording device, a notebook, I couldn’t make much of it out.

For this fact, it should be easy to blame director Catherine Hardwicke’s habit of narrative clunkery. Having honed her rapport with transgressive-curious shy girls and ruby-lipped pretty boys in Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, respectively, Hardwicke has no trouble fetishizing the forever young. But in qualifying herself for Twilight, she seems also to have let her basic scene-building skills become stunted. It’s not a compliment to say that just because Hardwicke graduated from high school in the same year Meyer was born (1973) doesn’t mean she can’t take a vampire baseball scene seriously. And screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg, veteran of “Dexter” and “The O.C.,” brings only a vague, unchallenging TV-ishness.

But none of this is why I missed some of Twilight’s finer nuances. The real reason, which should come as no surprise, was the audience full of screaming teen girls. They were loud, and numerous, and all-powerful. And you must understand, as you here endure yet another comment on the screaming girls of Twilight fandom, that (A) yes, it probably is the most important thing about this movie, and (B) social phenomena are as hard for journalists to resist as fresh-smelling humans are for vampires.

For a while there, it seemed like every time a hot guy showed up on the screen, particularly the impressively coiffed Edward and the gleaming-toothed Jacob (Taylor Lautner), his apparent rival for Bella’s affection, the audience issued a shrill, concussive wave of rhapsody. Or, whenever Edward told Bella something like, “I don’t have the strength to stay away from you anymore,” it brought a crescendo of cooing. They liked him leaping between the uppermost branches of the evergreens with Bella on his back, or playing the piano for her in a room decorated only by slanting shafts of light, too.

Maybe they’ll soon be writing reports about Twilight as an allegory of abstinence and anticipation. I’ll at least have gotten the main point about how hard it is for him not to eat her.

 

 

Categories
News

Gov. Nutzoid

We won’t lie—the recent conclusion of the heart-palpitatingly exciting 2008 presidential election has left us with a gaping hole in our political soul the size of Sarah Palin’s ego. In fact, the combination of Barack Obama’s improbable Old Dominion victory and Virgil Goode’s epoch-ending defeat left us totally gobsmacked, with the creeping fear that we might never have anything interesting to write about again. Really, what are we supposed to do? Make fun of Tom Perriello’s hilarious history of helping the debilitated and destitute in Darfur? (Try saying that three times fast.) Or make yet another joke about Obama’s hypoallergenic puppy? (And no, that isn’t the President-Elect’s pet name for campaign manager David Plouffe.) In fact, we were so down that we had resigned ourselves to penning an entire column about Del. Dave Albo (R-Dumbass) waging a losing war against his own Wikipedia entry. But then—praise Clinton!—the political heavens opened up, and out tumbled notoriously unhinged Hillary spokes-loon Terry McAuliffe (a.k.a. the Macker).

Crowning carpetbagger Terry McAuliffe as governor may not make sense for the Old Dominion, but his gubernatorial bid is excellent for the Odd Dominion.

Yes, the man who spent the final stages of the presidential primary season impersonating Baghdad Bob on every available cable news station, making ever-more-implausible claims of an impending Clinton victory (once while sporting an eye-flash-inducing Hawaiian shirt and brandishing a bottle of Puerto Rican rum) is now threatening to enter the Virginia gubernatorial race—and we couldn’t be happier!

Sure, the Macker’s links to our glorious Commonwealth are tenuous, at best (born and raised in Syracuse, New York, McAuliffe has used McLean, Virginia, as his home base for almost two decades, but travels incessantly). And yes, the man is a bit of a state-executive tease, having previously expressed interest in running for the governorship of both New York and Florida, where his in-laws reside. (In fact, as the irascible blogger Not Larry Sabato pointed out, McAuliffe has already been caught on tape referring to the “research institutes and all the universities we have here in Florida” while talking to voters in Prince William County.)

But who cares? Not us, that’s for sure. C’mon, this is a guy who wrestled an alligator for a $15,000 contribution while working on Jimmy Carter’s 1980 re-election campaign. That’s the sort of lunatic commitment to the wacky world of politics that you rarely see outside of the Italian parliament, and it fill us with the giddy joy of an eggnog-besotted child on Christmas morning.

Of course, the two existing Democratic candidates, Alexandria state Delegate Brian Moran and state Senator Creigh Deeds, are already painting McAuliffe as a partisan loudmouth and a dilettante, but they’re going to have to do more than point out the obvious to trump the Macker’s notorious fundraising ability. With insiders already speculating that McAuliffe could raise upwards of 75 million semolians for his Virginia effort, Deeds and Moran (say, didn’t they have a 1970s mime-based variety show?) can only hope that McAuliffe’s inexperience and lousy track record proves his undoing. After all, the man has never run for elected office before, and almost every presidential campaign he’s ever worked on (Carter, Dick Gephardt, Hillary Clinton) has ended in defeat.

But let the naysayers say their nays all day, we say! Personally, we can’t get enough of the Macker, and hope that he’s truly in it for the long haul. Hell, if he promises to wrestle Jim Webb in a wading pool full of cranberry relish while wearing the Cavalier mascot outfit, we might even vote for the guy!
 

Categories
Living

Weather or not

If there is one underrated pastime in the book of life, it is that of talking about the weather. I could talk about it all day long to anyone who wanted to talk about it. The subject often gets mocked as boring, but to those weather-haters, I say, “Nay! But what could be more fascinating than the weather? Than what’s happening outside our windows?” And while the subject gets short-shaft, evidence (The Weather Channel, cable hurricane coverage) does indeed point to the fact that the weather is something of a national pastime. In fact, every morning, I get up and do my part in participating in this national pastime by checking the weather on Weather.com. I treasure those moments alone with my coffee and news of the weather around the country. I treasure them and then I get dressed.

And yet, sometimes I’m rushed. Sometimes I just need to run out the door and don’t have time to think about a tornado here or a heat wave there or an early frost over there or thunderstorms far afield. No, sometimes I just need to know whether or not to grab an umbrella as I am running out the door. That’s when I turn my browser, with no dawdling along the way, to umbrellatoday.com. My browser then directs me to a simple homepage with the words “Umbrella Today? It’s like totally the simplest weather report ever, Julie” at the top and a space below for you to type in your zip code. I then type in my zip code and within a split second there is either the word “yes” or the word “no” in huge font flashing across the screen.

For example, do I need an umbrella today? Apparently the answer is: “NO.”

 

Categories
News

Through a mirror, darkly

Life is strange. It is the human condition to believe that it isn’t going to be—it’s going to just be normal. But thanks to myriad little agendas, paranoias, psychoses, gullibilities, superstitions, love, loss and loneliness, it just goes on, fascinatingly and disturbingly peculiar.

Tim Taunton’s surreal, grotto-style paintings offer outright evidence of this. The works in “Through the Looking Glass” are intimate images of existential situations: Miniature, exquisitely rendered protagonists stand in the midst of some vast place, minimally defined by a landmark or two—a Greek ruin or a geological formation—always brightly illuminated by a benign cerulean sky, which offers a somewhat inexact sense of Divine Providence. And while Taunton may exaggerate the circumstances—and the outfits—just a little, his color-saturated, pared down, shoebox-sized psychological landscapes attain an unsettling déjà vu quality.

“War Child” by Tim Taunton at Migration: A Gallery

Each forsaken place threatens to be rather frightening, but Taunton protects viewers from his characters’ isolation through constricted vertical gateways into each scene, not to mention a few odd costumes. Whether decked out as a harlequin, a bride, or ready to rocket into space under an aerodynamic funnel hat, their clothing conveys their charming individuality and chutzpah. They seem pretty much O.K. with their threatening circumstances; they are the dreamers who composed these places.

Taunton seems particularly interested in division and equilibrium. The realm of the sky balances the volume and clutter of the earth; vertical figures are often balanced by a horizontal shadow; and some scenes are cut precisely in two by a monolith. Doorways divide one space from another, just as the picture’s wide entrance divides us from Taunton’s narrative. These splits make the images feel a little static and contrived, but that’s kind of the point of the surrealistic gamers, who have always had an interest in toying with and halting time. Most important, Taunton’s paintings maintain an almost perfect equilibrium between mild tragedy and dark humor.

Categories
Living

Cork is dead, long live cork

Six years after Randall Grahm, the owner of Bonny Doon winery, held an elaborate mock funeral in New York City to celebrate the death of the cork, many people still refuse to accept screw caps. Others don’t even seem to understand them: I once met someone who tried to open a screw cap with a corkscrew. But screw caps are popping up on more and more bottles as wineries look for alternatives to the good old cork. Which leads us to ask, Is the cork really dead? Should it be?

The biggest problem with cork is its susceptibility to contamination by a chemical known as 2,4,6-trichloroanisole, a.k.a. TCA, a.k.a. “cork taint.” Wines so tainted are referred to as being “corked,” and they smell and taste kind of like old tennis shoes. Estimates of how many total bottles of wine are corked vary from 2 to 10 percent. That’s not much if you’re just a casual wine drinker, but if you’re in the business, one corked wine is one too many. The amount of corkiness a particular bottle may show varies, and some people seem to be better at detecting it than others, so if you’re happily drinking a wine and someone pronounces it corked, don’t feel too bad. It won’t hurt you, but know that the next bottle will taste much better.

Four’s a crowd: Will the screw cap and the glass stopper and the Zork soon make the cork obsolete?

Faulty corks can also leak, letting in air and causing the wine to oxidize. Proponents of cork claim that minute seepage of air is crucial to wine’s ability to age properly, something that won’t happen with airtight screw caps. This, however, is debatable, as studies have shown that wine ages anaerobically and that a properly fitting cork is airtight. The jury is still out on this one, but common sense tells us that the precise purpose of any closure is to keep air out and wine in.

Enter the screw cap. Screw caps mean no more corked wines, and they won’t dry out, crack, or otherwise let in oxygen. The biggest downside to screw caps is what I call “hobo-taint.” Many wine drinkers turn their noses up at what they presume indicates inferior wine. This is absurd. A few seconds’ reflection is all that’s needed to realize that how a wine is packaged has no logical connection to its quality. A rose by any other name, etcetera etcetera.

But is cork dead? Not yet. There are people out there giving renewed attention to cork quality, including the development of TCA-free corks. And there’s the image question to consider. Despite the introduction of a few cool looking alterna-closures like the Zork and the glass stopper, the cork has at least one advantage that’s very au courant: It’s green, baby! Cork comes from the bark of living cork trees, about six million acres of which grow worldwide. Every nine years, the bark is stripped off and then grows back. Cork is sustainable, renewable and recyclable. Not so the screw cap. And without the wine industry, those cork trees might very well be lost.

So, despite Randall Grahm, don’t write off the cork just yet. In 2002, as word was spreading that cork was dead, the Portuguese cork industry started fighting back. According to a Wines & Vines article from that year, the Cork Information Bureau (go ahead and laugh) started sending “international wine journalists on cork-focused trips to Portugal.” That’s right, cork junkets. See how glamorous this job is!

Categories
Arts

Variety is the spice of life

“Rosie Live”
Wednesday 8pm, NBC

Rosie O’Donnell has been itching to bring back the primetime variety show for about as long as I can remember. (Then again, she also used to openly lust after Tom Cruise and talk about taking over “The Price is Right,” so take that as you will.) Now she gets her chance with this special/pseudo-pilot very much in the vein of “The Ed Sullivan Show” mixed with a bit of “Laugh-In” and “The Carol Burnett Show.” Expect musical guests (Alanis Morissette, Ne-Yo), comedians (Kathy Griffin, O’Donnell herself), and…other guests who defy categorization (Elmo, Liza freaking Minnelli). O’Donnell isn’t as bankable as she was during the height of her mega-popular daytime talk show in the ’90s, but love the woman or hate her, you have to admit that she demands your attention. Oh, and it’s live, which could make for some gloriously uncomfortable moments. (Remember ChingChongGate on “The View”?)

“Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade”
Thursday 9am-noon, NBC

It’s just not Thanksgiving without the terrifying visage of Al Roker scaring the sleep from your eyes. This year’s “musical” line-up (as if they actually sing…) includes tween favorites Miley Cyrus and David Archuleta (Disney property the Cheetah Girls got pulled last week due to one of them having a nudey pic scandal—young ladies of America, please keep your clothes on in photos!), Broadway diva Kristen Chenoweth, country star Trace Adkins, and suitably redundant pop stars Darius Rucker and James Taylor. Stay on after the parade to watch J. Peterman from “Seinfeld” host the National Dog Show.

“Britney: For the Record”
Sunday 10pm, MTV

It’s Britney, bitch. Remember 2007, when Britney was going totally apeshit, shaving her head, attacking her car with umbrellas, flashing her ladybits all over the place, and just generally seeming totally cracked out at least 90 percent of the time? Seriously, that was sad. It looks like Britney got her stuff together; she looks great, is able to talk without sounding like a redneck hopped up on Oxycontin, and hasn’t gotten pregnant in at least a year. Now, on the eve of her newest CD release, she’s sitting down to talk about her nuclear meltdown, and about how destructive the celebrity life can be. I know—cry me a river, Brit. (Oops, that’s your ex.)

Categories
Arts

The C-VILLE Minute! [with video]

 Brendan Fitzgerald also writes Feedback, c-ville.com’s music blog, and Curtain Calls, C-VILLE’s weekly arts and music column.

Categories
News

Singing in tongues

Often, roots music like the a cappella gospel found on Como Now is approvingly described as raw, when in reality its perfect pitch and apt use of harmony could be more accurately categorized as sophistication that takes risks. The various soloists and ensembles of Mount Mariah Church push their voices to ragged extremes to make plain the joy and danger of a God so present in them only extreme sounds can communicate the essentially incommunicable.

The funk label Daptone deserves credit for capturing a world so outside of music business timelines it blows away our mediated realities.