Month: December 2010

Sizing up the year in green

Well, kids, it’s that time again! You know the year is almost out when you see a still-perky Christmas tree discarded on the sidewalk, and consider taking it home and celebrating all over again, just because it’s there and begging for reuse. That happened to us yesterday as we were driving on Rugby Avenue. (We did not actually succumb to the impulse.)

For us, 2010 has been a big year–first and foremost because of the birth of our daughter, but also in terms of progress on our little homestead. We were having fun this morning reminiscing about some of our projects from 2010:

We planted five fruit trees. As of now, they’re still alive and well. Coming in 2011: asparagus patch!

We had to refinish a floor and took the opportunity to learn about nontoxic materials–pure tung oil and a solvent made from oranges.

In other house news, we installed cellulose insulation and noted the way it boosted the toasty factor in the house. Having a tighter home should save energy, which in our case comes from waste firewood.

We put up a clothesline which, it turned out, is a really enjoyable way to dry laundry. And we became users of cloth diapers and purchasers of secondhand baby clothes and toys.

We got chickens!

We grew food in the garden, joined a CSA for the third year, and were regulars at the farmers’ market. Results in the garden were mixed, and we didn’t preserve as much as we did in 2009, but we did manage to dry lots of peppers and pickle lots of cukes.

And of course, we kept on recycling and composting and using too much water and keeping our old cars running and lamenting how much we have to drive and guiltily throwing away little bits of plastic and buying local and in general continuing the imperfect dance that is green living. Here’s to 2011, folks! We’re going to start it off by setting up the new worm compost system that we got for Christmas. More on that later.

What green stuff did you do this year? What are your plans for 2011?

Feedback Session: Carleigh Nesbit

The latest installment in our guerilla style feedback sessions captures the local folk songstress Carleigh Nesbit playing a couple of excellent acoustic jams, appropriately quiet for the location: the stacks at UVA’s Alderman Library. Nesbit plays on New Year’s Eve as part of the First Night Virginia on Friday at the First United Methodist Church with a serious local wrecking crew: Landon Fishburne (of The New Best Recipe), Jared Lawson (of Rock River Gypsies), Gerald Soriano (of Downbeat Project) and Shankar Srinivasan on violin. Find out all the details on First Night here.

If you’re looking for other fun New Year’s ideas, pick up a copy of this week’s C-VILLE (or simply click here) for a comprehensive guide.

A Feedback Session with Carleigh Nesbit.

Who else would you like us to capture on video?

Hoos Lose to Iowa State 60-47 Without Injured Scott

Will Sherrill returned to the Virginia lineup Thursday night for the first time in a month, but he did not provide much of a spark as the Hoos lost for the second time in a row.

Leading scorer Mike Scott was a game-time scratch from the starting line-up for the Hoos, as his surgically repaired ankle was too painful and stiff to play on.

Iowa State shot 46% from the field, and 38% from three-point land.

Virginia (8-5) shot an atrocious 32%, and was 3 of 24 from behind the arch.

The Hoos had no players score in double-figures, and were led by K.T. Harrell with nine points.

Iowa State (12-2) led 24-15 at halftime, and Virginia missed thirteen of their first fourteen shots in the contest. Honestly, this was one of the most difficult performances to watch I have ever witnessed as a lifelong Virginia fan. Yikes!

Virginia returns to action Sunday when LSU comes to the JPJ for a 5:30 p.m tip-off. Go Hoos!
 

Perriello honored by Daily Beast for “going down swinging”

While he lost the Fifth District Congressional race to Republican Robert Hurt, Democrat Tom Perriello still managed to notch a few wins last week.

The Daily Beast blog recently awarded Perriello the "Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky Award," named for the Pennsylvania Congressional Representative who served a single term and lost a reelection bid after she cast a decisive vote in support of former the 1993 Deficit Reduction Act, which boosted income tax rates for the top percent of wage earners. (Fun fact: She was also reportedly the first single American woman to adopt a foreign child.)

Samuel Jacobs writes that Perriello showed his gratitude for the swell of Obama supporters who helped elect him through his subsequent support of the stimulus act and health care reform.

"Democrats say these votes make Perriello a profile in courage," writes Jacobs. "Republicans say Perriello got his just deserts, losing to GOP businessman Robert Hurt in November."

Perriello also offered a more recent round of thanks via the Augusta Free Press. The paper recently published the Congressman’s parting comments following passage of his Helping Heroes to Keep Their Homes Act, which protects soldiers from home foreclosures for up to nine months after they return from deployment.

And, just last night, PBS aired an interview with Perriello conducted by Judy Woodruff—part of a series of conversations with representatives who lost seats in the midterm election. Watch it below.

Any awards you would like to give Perriello? Leave your thoughts below.

Albemarle County: We’re gonna need a bigger court!

We’re gonna need a bigger court! In April, Albemarle and Charlottesville contracted Moseley Architects to study the feasibility of combining general district court operations in the Levy building, a 150-year-old opera house purchased by the city and county. While the Levy hosted the Juvenile & Domestic Relations District Court until it relocated to its current building on Park Street, Moseley Architects told officials that the structure lacked sufficient space for two court systems.

Now, Albemarle County supervisors need to decide whether to keep its district court in in the city, or look for a new site. The Levy building remains a viable option for the county. According to the April study, the current structure has space enough for the county’s case load. And in a memo to county supervisors for a January 5 meeting, staff writes that the City of Charlottesville "did not anticipate the need to relocate and expand its existing [court] facility."

At the same January 5 meeting, county staff will decide whether or not to hire an architecture firm to review the previous court studies, interview court staff and identify alternate sites for a county district court, among other tasks. According to the memo, Albemarle County can cover up to $35,800 with funds in its "Court Square Enhancement" account.

New Year Res: Save one tree

It’s silly that I haven’t done this before, so I’m doing it now as a way to welcome the new year: I’m nixing the junk mail.

I feel like I’m the last one to the party here, but just in case you’ve also been procrastinating on this, here’s how to slow the flow of junk into your own mailbox. But first, why do it? Well, for one thing, it’ll be less recycling to deal with. More importantly, for the average household it’ll prevent the cutting of one entire tree each year.

We got all of this in one day. I suspect we may be above average in junk mail: most folks get 500 pieces per year.

First of all, I registered at directmail.com, which–although it is in the business of sending junk mail, or its preferred term, "direct mail"–is promising to give my name to companies that send mail so they know to remove me from their lists. I’m a little skeptical, especially because the first thing that happened after I put in my info was that I was presented with a page on which I could mark which kinds of mail I DO want to receive! But we’ll see what happens.

Second, I went to catalogchoice.org and started an account through which I can specifically request certain companies stop sending me catalogs. First in my bullseye: The Company Store. (I once bought a shower curtain from them, but I don’t need to read about their selection of pajamas.)

I don’t want to be like these people.

For $20 catalogchoice.com will also provide an "unlisting service," which sounds like a beefed-up version of what directmail.com is doing. I’ll hold off on that for now.

By the way, I learned about both these sites through Better World Betty, our local green-living maven. She’s got a couple other junk mail resources on her site as well.

Anyone else taken these steps already? Did it work for you?

 

Review finds errors in more history texts used in Virginia schools

After a Connecticut publisher offered stickers to cover up an inaccurate sentence in a fourth grade Virginia history textbook, the Virginia Department of Education convened a group of five academics to review other books by the company. Today, the Washington Post reports that a second book by Five Ponds Press, Our America: To 1865, was published and approved for Virginia classrooms with a few more sticker-worthy sections.

Schools in Charlottesville and some surrounding counties used the first book, Our Virginia: Past and Present, but Albemarle schools did not. City and county school officials were not immediately available for comment on whether they use the second text. The Post reports that Ronald Heinemann, a former history professor at Hampden-Sydney College who reviewed the Five Ponds Press books, recommended the books be removed from classrooms "immediately, or at least by the end of the year."

Categories
Arts

True Grit; R, 110 minutes; Regal Downtown Mall 6







Of what does true grit consist? Grit, presumably. But also something else, something that makes it easy to distinguish from false grit. True Grit the film consists of a young teenage girl in 1880s Arkansas and the old, fat, drunk, half-blind marshal she hires to track down her father’s killer. For the girl, true grit is the essential qualification for the marshal’s job. He has it, but as their time together reveals, so does she. A Texas Ranger also joins their quest, and he has some grit too, but his seems falser. 

Jeff “The Dude” Bridges (with newcomer Hailee Steinfeld) switches from white Russians to whatever’s in the whiskey jug in the Coen Brothers’ latest, True Grit, adapted from the novel by Charles Portis.

The story has been a film before (in 1969, starring John Wayne), and before that a Charles Portis novel, and before that a serialized story in the Saturday Evening Post, and before that, maybe, some resilient piece of early American folklore. So the challenge for True Grit is to both honor and renew an old tale. This isn’t a problem for filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote and directed it together, enlisting newcomer Hailee Steinfeld as the girl, Jeff Bridges as the marshal, Josh Brolin, briefly, as the killer and Matt Damon as the ranger. Also, Roger Deakins’ cinematography supplies the essential atmospherics of wintry moods and landscapes. 

Today any movie western will seem like a nostalgic genre exercise, especially an ostensible remake of one that already reeked of anachronism when it was Oscar bait for John Wayne in the late 1960s. But the Coens have gotten away with nostalgic genre exercises, usually by counteracting sentimentalism with a cool and ironic breed of anthropology, as they do here. It’s not exactly a remake: they’ve gone back to True Grit’s first recorded source, Portis’ fiction. 

It seems safe to assume that the Coens were attracted to Portis’ mordant humor and weird locutions, and that their actors were too. This isn’t just Jeff Bridges imitating John Wayne. For one thing, he wears the patch on the opposite eye. For another, it sounds more like he’s imitating Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade. Whereas the talkative, tightly braided Steinfeld, avoiding contractions and uttering colloquialisms always as if they’re in quotation marks, sounds more like the android Data from “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” “Sleep well, Little Blackie,” she tells her horse, robotically. “I have a notion that tomorrow we will reach our object. We are ‘hot on the trail.’” It’s a confounding, Coen-typical performance, just irksome enough to somehow charm. And of course Damon has a healthy share of too-earnest talk as well, feeding his occasional need to insist that he’s capable of playing an oaf. When Damon tries too hard, so does the movie.

Otherwise it’s great fun—a crafty deadpan caricature of archetypal rough justice, and accordingly true enough.

Categories
Living

A few of my favorite things







If I were a food critic, 2010 would’ve left me with a royal case of gout. But as it is, I write about local art, so 2010 left my brain all wrinkly, my body tired, and all of me excited about 2011. Throughout the year there were a bunch of art-related events that thought outside the box, and, whether or not they worked, they tried—really tried—to be different. Or maybe the events didn’t turn out the way everyone expected. Or maybe they weren’t planned at all. What each of these had in common is they made my job fun. Here are a few local events that made 2010 interesting.

We still have a hard time believing that Lady Gaga played here in September, let alone that she donned the UVA t-shirt the audience threw on stage.

Bloated spectacle

No matter how you slice it, Lady Gaga’s music…pretty much stinks. But even the biggest hater couldn’t have walked out of JPJ feeling unmoved by the Bowiesque spectacle—and surprisingly emotional experience—that was her concert here this September. For a lot of UVA students, seeing Lady Gaga in a glittery Cavaliers tee will be one of their fondest college memories. The rest of us will have to settle for watching Gaga play the power ballad “Speechless” on a flaming piano.

Radio rebound

In a recent interview with a noted physicist, the New York Times Magazine’s Deborah Solomon offered a universal rule to compete with Einstein’s unified field theory: “Everything in the world will get worse.” To WTJU’s small and feverishly dedicated group of listeners, it sounded like the universe was operating on that rule when UVA announced plans that would change programming at the eclectic station. But amid massive public outcry those plans were, for the most part, put on hold. Meanwhile, with two recent fund drives surpassing their goals (the Classical Marathon this month beat its $40,000 goal by $6,000 in pledges) it looks like all it took to motivate 91.1FM’s listeners was to threaten to change it.

Name mismatch

Any room that hosts music around here gets a de facto seal of approval—thanks for doing everything you do!—but sometimes taking the music out of the venue has a way of freshening one’s perspective on things. That was the case when the Vermont vocal trio Mountain Man (one of whose members lives in Charlottesville) played at the gorgeous Christ Episcopal Church on First Street early last month. Who would have figured that a group could learn to be so musical without first learning to plug in a guitar? The three ladies of Mountain Man have some growing up to do. But let’s hope that in growing up they don’t lose their charm.

Alternate universe

Walking into a gallery can feel like a lot of things, but rarely does the experience of walking into an empty room with art tacked to its walls feel like walking into a whole new world. But that was exactly the experience that greeted gallerygoers at “Leaf and Signal,” curated by the local artist Warren Craghead, a bright array of art zines that were chaotically wheatpasted to the walls at The Bridge/PAI. The art itself was hit or miss—some of it done by kids—but culled from a network of lo-fi zinemakers from San Francisco to the U.K., “Leaf and Signal” made Charlottesville feel like a stop on the circuit of world-wise, handmade, eclectic, cheap, beautiful art.

Losing it

Except for the fact that it’s a play, Hank Williams: Lost Highway is much like any biopic about the pitfalls of fame—Ray, Walk the Line, The Doors, The Temptations, the list goes on. But at Live Arts’ production of the play this year, Lynchburg-based songwriter Dallas Wesley didn’t merely act, or impersonate Williams; he was possessed by the two-dimensional version of Williams we wish we knew, who loved his mamma, burped when he drank liquor, and existed exclusively to please an audience. Backed by a crack squad of local musicians (who after the play have come together to perform elsewhere as the Lost Highway) the concerts-within-a-play were, when fictional Hank wasn’t stumbling drunk, among the best of the year.

Kink in the road

The best song on Invisible Hand’s self-titled album is the first: “Two Chords” is songwriter Adam Smith’s fond farewell—or is it a fuck you?—to the I-IV progression, the melodic building block for much of pop music. The rest of the Hand’s album avoids any basic structure as the band attempts to rewrite a shrieking rock ‘n’ roll that almost makes you wish it’d been the Kinks, and not the Beatles, that were the biggest British thing to ever hit America.

 
Categories
Living

The year in local wine







Summing up a theme in the Virginia wine industry this year, small is beautiful. Even though a couple of big guys ran into outsized trouble, several boutique producers in the Monticello area nimbly redeemed the industry’s reputation with new products. The year started with a fizz and ended with a flop, and along the way there was sadness and glory as the country’s admittedly diminutive fifth-largest wine producer was celebrated on the big screen. Here’s a glance at the year in local wine.

Corked: Reality TV stars-turned chronic debtors, Tareq and Michaele Salahi provided one of only a few low moments in Virginia wine this year.

In February, Albemarle County planning staff advised leaders on how best to comply with a change in the state’s legal definition of “farm winery,” and Supervisors approved what one wine lobbyist lauded as “model ordinance across the state.” In line with that, planners also adjusted the sound ordinance affecting wineries, which now looks prime for some additional fine-tuning. It will be among the first issue on Albemarle planners’ agenda in 2011.

Also in February, King Family Vineyards’ Matthieu Finot took home the Governor’s Cup, Virginia’s top prize, for his 2007 Meritage. Competing outside the state, Pollak Vineyards’ Jake Busching followed with a gold medal from the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition for his 2007 Cabernet Franc. And Emily Pelton of Veritas Vineyards poured her 2009 Viognier at a State Department event hosted by Hillary Clinton and featuring Michele Obama. Later in the year, this fetching trio of winemakers announced a joint project—3, a new red wine signifying the camaraderie found in much Monticello area wine production. 

Other winemakers took on side projects, too, including Lovingston’s Riaan Roussow, whose labor of love, two elegant reds under the micro-boutique label r, at last made their debut. Michael Shaps and Philip Stafford freshened their wildly successful Virginia Wineworks—both the wine and the custom crush business bearing the same name. Their custom crush operation doubled in size this year. Seems small-scale winemaking has not crested yet. And Shaps and Stafford became the state’s first winemakers to embrace the 3L recyclable box—now sporting a new, more feminine Virginia Wineworks label.

In April, Claude Delfosse escaped foreclosure on his Nelson County operation by filing bankruptcy, while another Claude—Thibaut—released Virginia Fizz, an affordable Cremant-style sparkling wine. And a couple hours north in Loudoun, wine bloggers descended for the drinklocalwine. com annual conference. Many were Left Coasters and New York Staters who experienced Virginia wine for the first time—and declared much of it to be good. In the fall, another group of scribes, the Circle of Wine Writers, hailing mostly from Britain, visited Virginia and were similarly impressed with some of the state’s most elegant wines, including Stephen Barnard’s Verdejo for Keswick Vineyards.

Monticello restored the wine cellar of the state’s original enophile, but the number of visitors who saw it was likely dwarfed by the millions of viewers who watched Virginia wine phonies Tareq and Michaele Salahi on “Real Housewives of D.C.” serve beer from stemware. 

But that dark moment passed. The best of Virginia wine took the spotlight instead when, at the end of October, Silverthorn Films, a Charlottesville-grown production company, debuted Vintage, a loving look at the state industry and the folks who make wine here against all climatic odds. Among the dignitaries attending the debut: Governor Bob McDonnell, whose administration upped the state’s wine promotion budget by 66 percent this year. By the time Vintage was shown at the Virginia Film Festival, it was tinged with sadness, however, as Daniel Neumeister, Sugarleaf’s young winemaker, who was interviewed in the movie, had been tragically killed by a drunk driver.

McDonnell’s financial shot in the arm was not enough to help Patricia Kluge, the onetime would-be queen of Virginia wine. The 906-acre Kluge Estate Winery & Vineyard went into foreclosure in October to the tune of $34.8 million in unpaid bank debt. (Sweely Estate, another disproportionate newish winery, also faced foreclosure that month, but managed to work out a deal with its lender.) The Kluge auction in November was a grim affair, with no one topping the bank’s own $19 million opening bid. Though that was a sad chapter for Virginia wine—and it remains unclear what will happen to Kluge’s massive property—more modest businesses kept giving it a go, with at least three new wineries celebrating their grand openings and another three siting their vineyards and planting vines.