C-VILLE News Desk
FEEDBACK: Charlottesville music & arts from Andrew Cedermark
GREEN SCENE: Erika Howsare on renewable living in Charlottesville
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Month: June 2009
Hello, friends. Welcome to the longest few days of the year. Perhaps not coincidentally, Green Scene is feeling a bit sleep-deprived, but not so much that our interest in Charlottesville’s ongoing greenness begins to flag—no, not one bit! Bravely we lift our heads from the pillow in order to report the following local green newsbits! Up and at ’em!
Number one, all the national parks in the, well, nation are going to let us in for free on June 20 and 21. That would be this Saturday and Sunday, in case you didn’t know, and we have a national park right up there on the mountain, in case you didn’t know. Shenandoah, I think it’s called. The free days will happen again July 18-19 and August 15-16. Here’s my spiel about national parks: It’s a shame how they embody the idea that "nature" is a special thing that lives on a mountain and that you have to take a trip to see, as opposed to something that is always everywhere around us. Since Shenandoah is free this weekend, it’ll be a little easier to remember that it is not an island with clear boundaries, except on human maps. As far the bears, tulip trees and whippoorwills are concerned, it’s continuous with the rest of the environment.
Sermon over; moving on to number two. This week, Charlottesville City Council talked about the idea of spraying pesticides around the city to control mosquitoes. It doesn’t sound like they’ll do it, which is good, because as Council’s own agenda item says, the pesticide in question is harmful to honeybees. We ain’t a green city if we’re killing honeybees; we don’t care how many lips are "swelling and itching for days."
Number three, as has been extensively covered elsewhere, we are getting a "SmartGrid" from our mighty power company, Dominion. Green Scene does not like Dominion. But we don’t see how we could fail to support this idea.
Number four, if you have too much food from your CSA or you’ll be out of town on a pickup day, you can call the Charlottesville Community Food Project and they’ll get the food into the hands of someone who needs it. Hurrah! Write to cvillecfp@gmail.com or call 804-6441.
Number five, Green Scene is on Twitter as CVILLEGreen. I’ll follow yours if you follow mine.
And that is all for now.
UVA baseball’s historic season came to an end last night when the Cavaliers fell to the Arkansas Razorbacks 3-4 in the 12th inning of the fourth-longest game of the College World Series.
Virginia managed to outhit Arkansas 16-12, but the Cavaliers gave up their 2-run lead at the top of the ninth when Razorback Brett Eibner homered to left with Zack Cox already on base.
The battle continued for three more innings and the scoreboard remained empty until the top of the 12th when Andrew Darr doubled to the left off of Cavalier Andrew Carraway’s pitch and Jarrod McKinney scored.
The Cavaliers were unable to rally in the bottom of 12th and after Steven Proscia doubled to the left in a promising start to the inning. Jarrett Parker, John Hicks and Franco Valdes struck out to end the game.
The Razorbacks will play LSU in the next game of the series, schedule for Friday.
I’m working on my column for next week’s C-VILLE and the theme that seems to be emerging right now is one of mash-ups, or convergences, or coincidences. (See: Girl Talk; Lawrence Weschler; and what happens when hundreds of bands decide to name themselves after wolves at the same time.) Or, perhaps, musical adaptive reuse.
But I’m getting ahead of myself and my deadline. All this is to simply say that ATO Records clients Rodrigo y Gabriela—no strangers to strange combinations and interpretations—will release a new full-length in September. The album is titled 11:11 and will be released through ATO.
Coincidentally, I’ve been listening to R&G’s cover of "One," by Metallica. Below, a prime example of adaptive reuse in the musical world—a cover that ties up not only an old Metallica classic but also Dave Brubeck’s jazz standard, "Take Five," with the duo’s own style in a way that reduces unnecessary musical sprawl. Take that:
Listen to the collective "Whoa!" from the crowd when R&G switch from those muted triplets into 5/4 time. "Darkness! Imprisoning me!"
Share some of your favorite examples of musical adaptive reuse below. Covers, mash-ups, whatever you’ve got.
Worn in Red has been on something of a roll since the release of 2008’s "Vital Joys" split 7". Not that you would know, unless you’ve been listening very carefully. But that’s selectivity for you.
Now roughly five years old, Worn in Red has rarely played local gigs more often than once a month. Full-length albums aren’t exactly easy (or possible) to come by; in fact, save for "Vital Joys," I’ve only located the six-song Autumnus Ortus. And that phrase "split 7"" isn’t a typo any more than it’s a big financial boon for the band: Modern hardcore and vinyl are on opposite sides of the room at the school dance.
Not to split definitions, but the qualities that make Worn in Red vital might work against it being essential. All the more reason to catch the band’s gig at IS on Friday. (If you don’t plan to catch Sons of Bill at The Paramount, that is.) Worn in Red don’t flood the web with poorly branded band clutter, the streets with half-baked albums, or local restaurants with free gigs. But while they might not always bait a huge crowd, I’m yet to attend a Worn in Red gig where the band fails to reel in every listener in the room.
The band’s drummer and de facto PR man, Brad Perry, sent me a couple new tunes by the band—"Mise en Abyme" and the terriffic "When People Have Something to Say," which is three-and-a-half minutes of slowly burning fuse and 90 seconds of dynamite at the end. Worn in Red’s particular brand of punk rock perfectionism may not always reward the band with a huge crowd, but it always rewards the crowd itself. Be part of the mob on Friday night at Is—$7, 9:30pm.
My question for you: What other local perfectionists deserve bigger crowds at their gigs?
Red is our color: Catch Worn in Red at IS on Friday at 9:30pm.
Construction equipment being used for the Meadowcreek Parkway was set on fire on Melbourne Road near the Charlottesville High School football field Tuesday night, according to an Albemarle County press release.
City fire personnel responded to the call at 9:56 pm and completed a preliminary investigation. After establishing that the fire was intentional and occurred in the county, City officials turned the investigation over to the County Fire Marshall.
County spokesperson Lee Catlin said it was still too early to know whether this act of vandalism was meant to protest the construction of the parkway, and the County Fire Marshall is now looking for more evidence with the help of the County Police and the FBI.
The damages total about $110,000 and include a destroyed backhoe as well as additional vandalism that Catlin refused to comment on further.
In preparation for the upcoming season, The New York Times’ college sports blog, The Quad, ranked all college football teams, dropping UVA in the ranks to No. 81 from last year’s No. 51.
The drop is in large part due to Virginia’s less than spectacular season: five wins and seven losses last year, including a 31-3 loss to Duke, which gave the Blue Devils their first ACC win in a decade.
According to The Quad and ESPN, the biggest concerns for the upcoming season are whether the Cavaliers’ new offensive coach Gregg Brandon, Bowling Green’s former head coach, can improve UVA offense and how quickly he can do it.
If Brandon is able to make a big difference, The Quad predicts the Cavaliers will finish the season with at least a 7-5 record and third place in the ACC, but if he cannot help the offense and the defense is short of stellar, Virginia may stumble to a 4-8 ending.
Regardless of the predictions, it will be interesting to observe how UVA will respond to this ranking. It was last season when UVA football’s ticketing system was changed, to the chagrin of some longtime fans.
In my last post I mentioned vermiculture, otherwise known as worm compost. It’ll be part of the Nourish(meant) project that Emily Nelson and Graham Evans are undertaking. As luck would have it, when I met them on Monday I was fresh from a weekend in which my husband and I had acquired a worm system of our own. At the risk of sounding like a weirdo, I will relay my excitement about this. Here goes. Dude!! Our very own worms!!
We were given the worms by my wonderful sister-in-law, who got a vermiculture system up and running about a year ago at the school where she’s a therapist. (And blogged it!) The basic idea is to have a bucket or bin in which you keep some bedding (shredded paper, in this case) and some red wiggler worms (here’s one place to order them). Some black plastic on top keeps moisture in. Here’s our setup:
Then you put in most of the same kinds of stuff you’d put in a compost pile—ground eggshells, fruit rinds, veggie trimmings, banana peels—and the worms turn it into a nice, rich, fluffy fertilizer. (“Castings” is the polite term.)
As long as you keep them well-fed, moist, and not too hot or cold, the worms happily live and reproduce in the bucket, eventually making enough babies so you can divide them and expand your operation. That’s what my sister-in-law was doing when she got us started. We’ve already used some of the compost from her worms in our garden, and it’s good stuff.
Two big advantages over regular compost: speed and smell. The worms eat through food a lot more quickly than the microorganisms in a compost pile would, and they do it without an odor. All you city dwellers with nowhere to put an outdoor pile, this is your chance.
We’re already envisioning huge, multi-stage worm farming at our place, but for now we’ll just concentrate on taking care of our one little worm bucket and see how it goes. Anyone got advice? Experiences to share?
Virginia’s 5th District representative Tom Perriello will be this year’s featured speaker at the 47th annual Monticello Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony.
Last year’s speaker was former U.S. President George W. Bush.
The event will be held on the Monticello grounds with festivities beginning at 10am. It will be open to the public and free of charge.
Monticello has hosted this ceremony since 1963 and has sworn in about 3,000 individuals as American citizens.
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SoHo comes to Fifeville
At the corner of Grove, Ninth and King streets, following the winding Roosevelt Brown Boulevard, sits a vacant piece of land that is seldom walked on by Fifeville residents. Yet, its proximity to the UVA Medical Center makes the lot a prime piece of real estate.
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The King and Grove project is located in a transition zoning area in the Fifeville neighborhood just south of the UVA Medical Center. “We really want to call it SoHo, like in ‘South of the Hospital,’” says architect Bill Atwood. |
Around 1999, Plaza South Main, LLC, a profit-making subsidiary of Piedmont Housing Alliance (PHA), a regional nonprofit organization that creates housing and economic opportunities for local low-income residents, purchased four city parcels that make up the lot. In 2000, the few buildings and a house that populated the site were demolished.
“[The site] has gone through several iterations through the years with different designers coming up with proposals,” says Mark Watson, PHA’s Project Development Manager. “We finally reached a point where we are ready to do the development.”
PHA’s pending project will be the first one in the city to be built in the transition zoning, approved in 2003 for the Cherry Avenue Corridor to increase economic development in the area.
On June 17, the City of Charlottesville staff and engineers and a architect for the project will hold a meeting to discuss the preliminary site plan that was submitted in late May.
“We really want to call it SoHo, like in ‘South of the Hospital,’” says local architect Bill Atwood, whose firm, Atwood Architects, was chosen to design the project. Like many of Atwood’s current projects in the city—Waterhouse on Water Street and Sycamore Ten Point Five on West Main—this one, too, will have his signature feature. “It obviously has got a water catchment in it,” he says. “I think it’s a one-of-a-kind project for Charlottesville, because it will feature affordable housing, workforce housing, but also market housing all in one building.”
In its current state, the site plan calls for a four-story, mixed-used building with three commercial units for a total of 4,800 square feet, and 30 dwelling units—10 one-bedroom units, 11 two-bedrooms and nine three-bedroom units. “The idea behind the initial purchase of the building was that we would replace the number of units that had been on that block initially,” says Watson. The present site plan includes about nine affordable units. “We are increasing it so it will generally be about a third affordable to be able to be subsidized by PHA funding and other sources.” In the end, he says, there will be a three-tiered pricing structure.
The affordable units will be priced according to a criteria set by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to Watson, the price will be connected to PHA’s clients whose income is no higher than 80 percent of the area’s median income.
“It will be a front street design,” says Atwood. “The building will be centered on a big street, and we are excited about the look.”
In addition to the water element, Watson says the building will follow the strictest rule for an environmentally conscious structure. “That has been first and foremost in my mind,” he says. “We want to try to make every unit we build better than the last one and so we are committed to doing as much green building, energy efficiency, durability, healthy construction as possible on the site.”
And a green building is not cheap. Preliminary estimates put the project in the $7 or $8 million range.
Watson expects the ground breaking sometime in 2010.
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