Month: June 2011

There’s a whole bunch of one particular plant growing alongside our house, and thought they might be stinging nettles. Though this would have made clearing them out a bit tricky (they’re not contributing much to the looks of the place), I was excited to try drying and using them.

After a brief online search, though, I concluded that these are not nettles at all. I’m not sure what they are.

Nor do I know what the tiny black bugs are called that cling to every leaf and tendril of our Concord grapevine.

Given the way said grapevine is climbing up onto our porch, under the porch swing, onto the screens of our living room window, and toward the front door (as though it plans to come on inside!), I will soon be hacking it back in an attempt to save the house from its creeping advances. And I won’t be too sorry to remove those thousands of little bugs from our immediate vicinity.

I don’t know why the stinkbugs have vacated the house (for now), but I’m very, very glad.

I don’t know why the phoebes decided not to nest on our porch this year, but I miss them.

I don’t know what these berries are that are growing in the chicken run, but they look like they’d be worth a try. (Best guess: Black raspberries.) I don’t know why fireflies sometimes come in the house or how we’ve gotten so lucky with deer and rabbits so far (knock wood!) not eating the garden.

If I’m ever feeling a lack of mystery in my life, all I need to do is ponder the various creatures with whom I share my home, and how they are going about their business with little or no input from me, and how much I don’t know about what they’re up to.

Former Fifth District congressman Virgil Goode, who switched political parties on occasion and once wrote that the Koran was "not going to be on the wall of my office," will be the featured guest at the Jefferson Area Tea Party’s third annual July 4 celebration. The event will take place at Jackson Park in Court Square from 1pm to 3pm, and will also feature Virginia Gun Owners Coalition President Mike McHugh, who will dress as Patrick Henry.

The Jefferson Area Tea Party has received a bit of attention during recent months, while Goode has largely been quiet. However, after he was named the Constitution Party’s preferred presidential candidate, Goode’s profile has been a bit higher in recent weeks. He told the Roanoke Times this month that he would consider a presidential bid "as the year progresses." 

"Places" is a new feature by where local artists show us the places around town that inspire them.

Guest post by Chelsea Hicks

Much like Emily Dickinson who wrote beside a window looking out over a graveyard, the poet, UVA professor and recent recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, Lisa Russ Spaar has found her muse living among the noble dead. Although—Spaar takes it a few steps further than Dickinson. Literally.

A short walk away from Spaar’s office window in UVA’s Bryan Hall, is the University of Virginia Cemetery and Columbarium at the corner of Alderman and McCormick Roads. Spaar returns to the graveyard for a moment away from her life as a constant mentor and teacher.

In "No Picnic," a poem about death and seasons, she describes the cemetery as a “supernatural asylum," with “petal-blooded grass” (as described in “Home”) and marble slabs "lined by starlings,” (from "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands") that act as keepers of the graveyard.

It’s not hard to believe that the graveyard has been a wellspring of inspiration for upwards of 30 years since her time as an undergraduate student at UVA.

 — 

What do you do when you come here?

I like being perched partly in the world, but also partly sequestered from it. Porches, windows, places where I feel like I have a sort of sanctuary but I’m also very open to the world. This is also one of those thresholds…You’re outside of time. I feel that here.

Does this site come up in your work at all?

A lot. In fact, many of my poems are set in this graveyard but you wouldn’t know it. I have a poem that will be in the new book (Vanitas, Rough due out from Persea Books in Fall 2012) about a girl [on her cell phone] walking through the graveyard in a really beautiful pair of high heels and she says something like, “That’s so not on my vagenda.” […]

Vanitas is a school of painting where you mix up things that are decaying or dying: like skulls that represent time passing, musical instruments that have come unsprung or flowers with bugs coming out of them, fruit that’s partly molding. 

Does the graveyard remind you of any other places?

It reminds me of my grandparents’ farm in South Jersey that we don’t have anymore. It had orchards and this sort of casual order of horticulture. It’s New Jersey, so all around us were highways and across the river on a certain kind of day you could see northern Philadelphia but on the other hand it was this 100 acres on a river with big sycamore trees, lawns, birds. Going to this farm was where my imagination unrolled.

As a writer, perched in windows at my grandmother’s house and looking out over the river and farm I found sort of an inner life. Like I had an inside. I think my beginnings as a writer were in a place like this so I think I seek them out.

(Photo by Anna Caritj)

 — 

Back in her office, Spaar marks up some of her “graveyard poems” for me to look over. Behind her, a portrait of Emily Dickinson looms out of the dim light beneath the window. I notice the cover of her 2004 collection of sensual and sacred poems, Blue Venus: a window with blowing curtains. It suggests the sequestration of graveyards, of Spaar’s childhood at the farm, and of Dickinson looking at neighboring tombstones from that liminal space between isolation and the world.

Dickinson seems as comfortable below the window as Spaar does in the graveyard, and I consider the irony: they’re living half-lives through each other. Dickinson’s heavy bun, iron-straight nose and budding lips exude all the pathos of the graveyard, of Spaar’s poems and the “horrifying and wonderful” prospect of Lisa and Emily sitting together in the graveyard or even beside the window, here—in their office.
 

Local attorney Jeff Fogel is representing five panhandlers who will be filing a lawsuit against the City of Charlottesville over parts of the soliciting ordinance City Council approved last fall.

“Both I and the ACLU had opposed the amendment of this ordinance when it came up last year,” Fogel tells C-VILLE. “I testified before the Council against the ordinance. My testimony wasn’t really focused on the Constitution, as much as it was focused on it’s the wrong thing to do. There is not reason to treat this class badly.”

The lawsuit is expected to claim that the cited portions of the ordinance criminalize some form of speech, such as soliciting money, and violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

Last fall, City Council approved an ordinance that banned "soliciting," which was changed from "panhandling," in numerous locations: within 15′ of any entrance or exit of banks during business hours or ATM machines; from any person seated at the Mall’s various outdoor cafés; from any vendor or cart; and within 50′ in any direction of the Mall’s two vehicular crossings on 2nd and 4th streets.

Fogel says that he has approached Council with an alternate ordinance similar to that of the City of Indianapolis.

“This ordinance is almost identical to the ordinance that we have. The only thing it does different from ours is to say not included with these prohibitions are passive forms of solicitations,” says Fogel. “If somebody doesn’t verbalize anything, if they simply hold up a sign, holding a cup, have an open guitar case, those things are excluded from any prohibitions.”

City Attorney Craig Brown said he won’t comment on a pending litigation, but tells C-VILLE that the City has up to 21 days to file an answer to the suit.

Read more about the lawsuit in next week’s C-VILLE.

C-VILLE’s Spencer Peterson expands upon the week’s Open Studio interview with samples of the art by the artist he interviewed.

This week’s Open Studio is a chat with painter Aaron Eichorst, who in his recent works has pushed portraiture into the realm of the surreal. If you have kids at Greenbrier, Walker or Clark Elementary, they probably know him as their art teacher.

"Blackberry Lily and Hibiscus Bud"

"Blackberry Lily and Hibiscus Bud" is part of a larger series in which Eichorst uses pastel, tempera and acrylic paint to render his friends as human/flora hybrids. Seeing these pieces, it comes as no surprise that he’s a fan of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a 16th century Italian court painter whose portrait heads made entirely of things like produce, fish or books were largely ignored until they were rediscovered by the Surrealists.

"Sanctuary"

A fortuitous trip to Italy led Eichorst to his latest series, which he describes as an attempt to confront us with our cultural history. "Santuary" is his favorite from one of many takes on the Ancient Roman Grotesque, a decorative style of fresco that, back in its classical heyday, featured human figures surrounded by architectural and natural embellishments. Like the other contemporary locals enshrined in Eichorst’s Grotesques, this green-eyed girl has stare that reveals as much about her as it does your own status as an onlooker. Whether it’s natural or historical, for Eichorst, juxtaposition creates meaning.

When he talks about his work, Eichorst is refreshingly pragmatic and sober. Check out the rest of his oeuvre at http://www.aaroneichorst.com/ to see how his work ethic pays off, or head over to the Gleason Building, where he will have three pieces up through July.

Don’t worry, dear reader. Though this week we give you a ranked list of Charlottesville’s most powerful, even we recognize the inherent ridiculousness of ranking people based on such an elusive concept. Like all ranked lists, this one intends to raise questions rather than supply definitive authority—we hope that you will point out our oversights and over-inflations. The exercise did get us thinking, though. Charlottesville is close to a company town, and UVA employees accordingly garnered six spots on our Top 20 list. Still, in considering local power, we realized that this isn’t a dictator’s realm. No one person can control Charlottesville, as Muammar el-Qaddafi did Libya and, to only a slightly lesser extent, Michael Bloomberg rules New York. It says something that our most powerful person, UVA President Teresa Sullivan, only moved to town last year—and what it says is comforting: That around here, us little people aren’t that little. Read the cover story here, and don’t forget to leave comments. 

Charlottesville City Council voted last night against the construction of the Western Bypass in a 4-0 vote. The abstaining councilor, Satyendra Huja, is also a member of the Metropolitan Planning Organization, which is slated to take a consequential vote on July 27th after two hearings.

Huja tells C-VILLE that he “wanted to listen to citizens” before making a decision on the bypass.

UPDATE (4:45pm): We reached out to City Councilor Kristin Szakos for her comments, which she submitted via e-mail: 

"Even if I supported the bypass project itself, which I don’t, I would vote against it at the MPO meeting next month because of the undemocratic, public-process-subverting tactics that have been used to get it on our agenda ahead of projects like the Hillsdale Extension that we have decided as a region to prioritize, and that will do more to reduce congestion and serve our community. 

"We have had a very public process to develop our regional transportation priorities, supported by expert analyses – all of which determined that the western bypass would be a very expensive way to very minimal gains in transportation efficiency through Albemarle County.  We shouldn’t throw all that out and make long-range transportation decisions based on midnight policy switches and backroom deals."