Month: August 2011

THE WIRE: Albemarle Police release names, mugshots for individuals linked to robbery

Albemarle Police Press Release – August 31, 2011

The Albemarle County Police arrested five people in connection with the strong armed robbery that occurred on August 30, 2011 on Newhouse Drive.

Joe Thompson, 33 years of age, with no fixed address; Steven Caldwell, 30 years of age, with no fixed address; Gregory Woodson, 26 years of age of Charlottesville, Virginia; William Johnson, II, 30 years of age, with no fixed address; John Jordan, 46 years of age, with no fixed address have all been charged with robbery.

All five are being held at the Albemarle/Charlottesville Regional Jail without bond.

The Albemarle County Police encourage anyone that may have witnessed this incident to contact the Police Department at 434-296-5807 or Crime Stoppers at 434-977-4000.

Steven Caldwell

Joe Thompson

William Johnson, II 

Gregory Woodson

John Jordan

Albemarle Police Press Release – August 30, 2011 

At approximately 12:15pm the Albemarle County Police responded to the Hardee’s located at 105 Newhouse Drive for a reported strong armed robbery. The victim reported that six assailants attempted to rob him. The victim sprayed one of the assailants with pepper spray causing all of them to flee.

The assailants ran towards Free Bridge and the Shell Station located at 1129 Richmond Road. With the assistance of the Charlottesville Police Department all six assailants were detained and are currently being interviewed at the Albemarle County Police Department.

The victim in this incident has been transported to the Martha Jefferson Hospital with minor injuries.
 

A Q&A with the encaustic painter Martha Saunders

To be a sculptor or a painter these days means living and dying by the photographs on your website. Martha Saunders, who has painted with beeswax for the last decade, often jokes about switching to a medium that’s easier to photograph than encaustic, but she is quick to credit photographer Scott Smith with bringing her work to life online. To the untrained eye, photos of works like “Howling Tracks” and “Song Space” look like abstract oil paintings. A flat, 2D image does little to convey the texture of Saunders’ paintings, or the hours that shespends mixing, carving and melting beeswax to create them.

A Virginia native, Saunders studied printmakingand painting at Maryland Institute College of Art and Virginia Commonwealth University before settling in Charlottesville, which has been her home for the last 13 years. She currently juggles teaching positions at UVA and JMU—where recently, she’s been leading her students in creating scrolls with an old press type—while still finding the time to work in her warehouse studio.

Beeswax has been your medium for over a decade. What brought you to encaustic painting?

When I was in grad school I was actually in a painting program. But it’s hard to make even that kind of division anymore because many of us were working very sculpturally. And when I started drifting more toward sculpture, I started using wax because it can really hold materials. I still like that aspect of it. Encaustic painting—using beeswax as a medium instead of oil or watercolor—it’s an ancient method, but it seems to have risen in popularity lately.

Is “painting” with wax a bit of a misnomer? Are there other steps involved that people don’t usually associate with painting?

Again, it has a lot of common with sculpture. Obviously, wax has to be heated, so you’re always working with heat. But first I have to actually buy pigments. You can get concentrated pigments, or wax that already has color, and you can also mix the two. And before I ever start working with it I have to turn on the heating elements and get the wax to a liquid state. And then I just begin applying it, building up layers of color and texture, and sculpting and reheating surfaces of the painting when I need to. It can feel like an archeological dig; I’ll put 20 layers down and forget what the early ones looked like. And there’s also the collage element. A number of the paintings in the current show are just pigment and wax, but I often include other materials.

Martha Saunders’ "Interior Fog"

Are there more surprises in the studio when you work with wax, as opposed to oil or watercolor?

After this long, there isn’t much surprise in terms of what the material does. But I would say that all of those mediums are unpredictable in their own ways. You’re question is more important to me in terms of surprise as an element you always look for in the studio. I think we as artists are very motivated to stumble across things and to be taken by surprise. “I just made that?” The unpredictable is always welcome, even searched for.

Pretend you’re writing a semi-autobiographical artist’s development novel. Describe an early scene that greatly affects your later work.

I used to love to lay and look at the ceiling of the bedroom my sisters and I would share. I would pretend I was walking on the ceiling upside down. I think a lot of kids do this, but it’s a very important experience, to look at something and project yourself into a whole different kind of space. It’s magic, in a way. I think I also had a tightrope extending from my window that I used to walk around town.

Have you been focused on any specific kinds of images lately?

Recently I’ve been very interested in looking at neurological images. How the brain works—that’s a big subject that I think artists have always been trying approach. I think we’re always trying to explore elements of how we’re in the world.

For your 2001 show, "Mind/Skin," you created hundreds of small tiles that wrapped around a room together. Did you have a different relationship with the work when you were churning out a lot of small pieces?

Yes, it was really different. I’m looking at one piece right now, up on my wall. The whole thing was one of my favorite works, and now I call it a dotted line because people have bought sections of it. It was three feet tall and 90 feet around, and so I liked how it played into the architecture of the room.

At the time I was making the pieces my daughter was very young and I was also teaching, so it was almost like a calendar—not literally, but it marked the time I could fit into do it. I loved the fact that they were kind of insignificant in a way singularly, in that people don’t really appreciate them that way, and it was more about working this kind of huge, fabric-like thing together. I needed a grant to create it, because it took 900 pounds of beeswax. The money helped me expand it and really finish it.

Martha Saunders’ “Intersecting Pauses” is on view at Les Yeux du Monde (841 Wolf Trap Rd., 973-5566) through October 2, She speaks at the gallery on Sunday, September 11, at 3 pm.

Categories
Arts

Boldly Going

“Star Trek: The Next Generation” 

Friday 8am-8pm, Saturday 1-6am, SyFy

It’s Labor Day weekend, which means two things: Summer is officially over, and there’s nothing on TV until the new season starts next week. So why not spend the holiday simultaneously going to the past and the future with this “Next Generation” marathon. “Next” originally ran from 1987-1994 and pulled off the rare feat of taking a beloved sci-fi franchise, modernizing it, and somehow making it both cooler and more literate. This marathon features some of the best adventures of Captain Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) and his crew, including some intercessions with the Borg, romps with that lovable scamp Q, and even the series’ two-part finale.

“MDA Labor Day
Telethon” 

Sunday 6pm-midnight, various channels

The Muscular Dystrophy Association’s annual telethon is going through a major overhaul this year. The main broadcast has been trimmed from 21-plus hours to just six. More importantly, comedy legend Jerry Lewis—who was the face of the telethon for nearly 60 years—will reportedly not be appearing, replaced by co-hosts from reality shows and entertainment news magazines, like Nigel Lythgoe (“American Idol,” “So You Think You Can Dance”) and Nancy O’Dell (“Entertainment Tonight”). The talent line–up this year includes Lady Antebellum, Darius Rucker and Martina McBride.

“The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” 

Monday 9pm, Bravo

As I write this, the premiere for the second season of the glitziest installment of the “Housewives” franchise is still set, but that’s subject to change. Two weeks ago Russell Armstrong, estranged husband of cast member Taylor Armstrong, committed suicide, allegedly distraught over his impending divorce from Taylor and massive debt. Bravo has yet to officially say how it’s handling this, but rumor has it that the series is being hastily re-edited to remove any reference to Russell. That’ll be tricky, since the season preview showed Taylor repeatedly melting down over her failing marriage. Fact is, it seemed to be a major source of drama for the season. Time will tell how the network handles this tragedy (and it really is tragic), and whether it will have an effect on the “Housewives” juggernaut as a whole. In the meantime, S2 features all of the original Bev Hills ladies—including Camille Grammer, who got a horrendous bitch edit last time—as well as new “friends,” like Brandi Glanville, infamously cuckolded by LeAnn Rimes, who looks to be a first-rate shit-stirrer.

Categories
Arts

Checking in with Tate Pray

What were you doing when we called?

I was getting off the phone with someone else. Before that I was mixing slurry. It’s a mixture of cement and water that I use to make a paste for filling holes.

Tate Pray most recently showed his work in town at Chroma Projects. He writes that his work explores “the unease within beauty, embracing classicism elementally and with a free-play twist.”

What are you working on right now?

I just started a series of paintings. They’re shape paintings based on the negative space shapes of Sol LeWitt’s sculptures—they’re just shapes. Conceptually, I think I started cutting them out and putting them in my notebook maybe about a year ago. I’m basically just living with it to see if I want to move forward. I think it’s in keeping with what I’ve been doing, basically trying to find an avenue into painting through sculpture.

How do you prepare to work on something?

I just start making stuff. I just came off my major show, which was at Chroma Projects in January, and for that I made a very large sculpture out of 3,000 pounds of concrete. It took a while to convince myself to make that, because it was comprised of 178 6" cubes of all different values. It took about two years from conception to completion, and a lot of that time was just convincing myself to do it, because it takes up a whole lot of time and there’s a lot of material involved, and it’s expensive. And of course, what do you do with a 3,000 pound sculpture? Because it won’t sell, and in the end it didn’t sell. Now it’s disassembled in my studio space.

Tell us about your day job.

I do concrete work, things like sinks and countertops and planters. And I’m also a carpenter. When the market fell apart and I was navigating that, I picked up anything I could get for work. So I diversified, and I’m still in that state where I’m sort of doing everything at once.

What is your first artistic memory from childhood?

I don’t know if it’s a fabricated memory, but I want to say I remember seeing a billboard with the banana that Andy Warhol did for The Velvet Underground in Milwaukee. The image is really distinct, just driving down the highway in Milwaukee and seeing that banana. 

Which of your works are you most proud of?

Nothing really stands out as far as one piece. I think it would be my show at Chroma Projects. As a whole I think it worked really well for me, conceptually, and it was both physically and mentally challenging. It was a pretty fun show to do, and I like all of the work that was in it.

Tell us about a recent concert, exhibit or show that has inspired you.

LOOK3, man—it was amazing! I loved Massimo Vitali’s work, and his class was enlightening, the perspective of an older artist. For someone who’s been in it as long as he has to find success at an international level at the age of 50 is pretty cool. A lot of artists think that if you haven’t found success by 20, it’s over, what’s the point. But it was cool that he found success, and he’s doing it really well. 

Who is your favorite artist outside your medium?

What would be my medium? I’m not a photographer. If I can just say my favorite artist, it’s Martin Puryear, no question, but actually he works in wood, which would be outside my medium. He makes primitive looking sculptures out of wood and wire and tar, and does it on a very large scale, and they become kind of playful and whimsical. I think he’s one of the great living American sculptors.

Do you have any superstitions about your art?

No. But I think every artist should own an incinerator, and if a piece is bad, just get rid of it.

Categories
Arts

Where art thou?

Its ending reportedly tampered with since Sundance, the indie-scented dysfunctional-family comedy Our Idiot Brother winds up flattering its complacent middle-class audience, but not for any real reason—there’s no medicine going down with this sugar. To try and imagine what the Weinstein Company might have worried about is to find oneself quoting the movie’s own doofus parolee hero: “You know what? You know what? Wow.”

As the titular chowderhead in Our Idiot Brother, Paul Rudd puts the fun in dysfunctional, testing the patience of three sisters played by Zooey Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks and Emily Mortimer.
Known for his farmers’ market rhubarb and for expecting the best from people, Paul Rudd’s hairy, Lebowskian, quasi-hippie Ned gets sent away early on for selling weed to a cop in uniform. But the dim-bulb dude gets out early for good behavior, and after a mellow custody feud with fellow-farmer ex Kathryn Hahn over their golden retriever Willie Nelson, he winds up surfing on his three sisters’ city couches.
It’s neither a surprise nor a disappointment to behold Rudd’s upstate rube rolling through this movie gallery of girly urbanites, including bi-curious commitment-phobic kook Zooey Deschanel, compromised journo-careerist Elizabeth Banks and resigned housewife Emily Mortimer. (Mother Shirley Knight watches all of them, neatly tucked into nightgown and holding a glass of white wine.) The sisters have challenging significant others of sorts, respectively Rashida Jones, Adam Scott and Steve Coogan, and although the film makes a silly point of Ned’s contagious credulity—by which he becomes a hamper for his family’s dirty laundry, inevitably spilled—it’s more convincingly a matter of contagious hilarity, just a nice upbeat ensemble hangout. Suffice it to say that no illusions are shattered, nor even any dissonance created, by the cheerfully riffing outtakes that run during the ending credits.
In Our Idiot Brother, all this amounts to a movie that gets you laughing, but with the wistful realization that being in its audience can’t possibly be as fun as being with all those pretty, funny people up on the screen, sharing their good time.
 
You could call it a vanity project, if only a vague one. Director Jesse Peretz is, among other things, the brother of Vanity Fair contributing editor Evgenia Peretz, who wrote the script with her husband David Schisgall. And something is odd about the sight of Rudd running a faintly Capra-esque course of superficially healing chaos. His sweetness doesn’t seem disingenuous, exactly, but it does sometimes seem like a mask worn over a real talent for social savagery. He wants points for puncturing pretense, but that desire itself might cost him a few.
 
This might have something to do with the years Rudd spent stewing in supporting-playerdom. A couple of his Our Idiot Brother co-stars have that heat too, and it suits them: Coogan knows just how to bare his teeth, and its clearly time for the hilarious Hahn to hold a proper movie of her own.
 
But then, maybe the desire for more than mere buffoonery is what got the Weinsteins worried about declawing Our Idiot Brother in the first place. To quote Ned again, “Who’s the man?”

 

Categories
News

Setting the sails

When Scottsville resident Barry Long put the finishing touches on two-and-a-half years of work, he was only half-sure it would fit through the door. In his spare time, Long had built two flat-bottomed sailboats in his basement, and now he was prepared to alter the doorframe to get them out.

Barry Long documented his boatmaking experiences on his website, eyeinhand.com. His two Melonseed skiffs took more than two years to build by hand.

“I have twin daughters, so I also have twin boats,” said Long as he admired the painted red cedar hull of the Æon. The varnished deck of its counterpart, the Cæsura, practically shimmered under the overhead lamp. Long also beamed. 

“I wanted to be able to take the whole family out, but I knew that whatever I built would need to be small enough to leave the basement.”

Which they were, by an inch or two. On Sunday, August 21, Long and the guests of his boat birthing party hauled the watercraft out, christened them with single malt whiskey and baptized them with a splash of water from the James River. As Long would write on his blog, “Whiskey seemed more appropriate for duck hunting boats than champagne.”

The first Melonseed Skiffs were built in the late 19th century, and named for the kernel-like combination of their tapered bows and blunt sterns. As Long explained, “They’re designed to be taken out with only a dog and a shotgun, and driven by one small sail.” In the winter, coastal farmers from Virginia to New Jersey spent mornings hunting duck and then sailing to nearby cities to sell their hauls, often sleeping curled up in the hull on overnight trips.

Long is more poet than hunter. It’s easier to imagine the serene, soft-spoken Virginia native hoisting a Nikon than a shotgun, even if you aren’t familiar with his award-winning work as a photographer. And though he won’t hunt in them, Long will honor the history of the Melonseed Skiff when he takes his boats to Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge in the winter to photograph the duck migrations.

Until then, Long’s camera will stay trained on the boats themselves, as he attaches the masts and prepares for his first outing. The “marginalia” blog on his website, eyeinhand.com, has featured photos from his skiffs throughout all stages of their construction. Over the years, Long has watched his website trend in Siberia, Japan, Australia and even landlocked Montana, as amateur and professional admirers alike started linking to his posts. On YouTube, a video by Long entitled “Steam Bending Wood in the Microwave” has over 32,000 hits.

“The first time I tried that,” said Long, “I ended up with charcoal in about two minutes.” Long’s unorthodox wood-bending method is only good for molding small pieces, like the white ash struts in the hull of the Æon, but it often saved him the trouble of preparing large buckets of very hot water for the process.

“Wood is an organic material,” said Long. “I had to learn that over and over again. It’s moving all the time, a lot more than we realize.” He traces this lesson back to 2008, when Hurricane Hanna left his basement flooded. Long found much of his handiwork severely warped and had to spend days steaming it, bending it back to shape and properly sealing it.

Of course, it’s always hard to look at a final product and comprehend years of trial and error. When Long was getting started on the Melonseeds—after building a practice skiff out of plywood over three weekends—a friend advised him to constantly change the order in which he worked on the twin boats, to avoid hobbling one with the mistakes of first tries. Long also benefited from the help of his wife and daughters, who varnished the decks and put up with his long hours in the workshop. 

He also owes a nod to Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the late 1930s, the Works Progress Administration employed out-of-work shipbuilders by sending them to measure and diagram old American boats. To make his skiffs, Long worked from the mid-century measurements of a boat built in 1888, copies of which he got from the Smithsonian for $15 per page.

To commemorate the basis for his design, Long embedded coins from 1888 under the masts of the Cæsura and the Æon, like hidden hood ornaments. The tradition dates back to the ancient Greeks, who hoped to provide their sailors with toll for the ferry across the river Styx, in case they were lost at sea. (Little known fact: The U.S. Navy still embeds coins in its ships.)

Long also rooted the names of his boats in ancient tradition. “Caesura” and “aeon” —the implicit pause for breath in the middle of a line of verse and an alternate spelling of “eon”—are both Latinate words, and once shared the “æ” ligature that English-speakers now spell out as two separate letters. In the Old English Latin alphabet, this ligature was called “æsc,” which meant “ash tree.” Long used ash wood for the trim and tillers of his Melonseeds.

“The pauses you take in life—hobbies, diversions—they have quite an effect on you,” said Long. “Æon is named for an unimaginably long length of time, and Cæsura for the time of a single breath.”

Categories
Arts

The DNA of Blues

Martin Scorsese once said that the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré’s music constituted “the DNA of blues.” That puts Vieux Farka Touré next in line, not only as Ali’s son, but as the heir to a musical tradition that reintroduced the American blues to its West African origins. 

Vieux Farka Touré’s latest album,
The Secret, features the songwriter’s
final collaboration with his father,
the Malian blues god Ali Farka Touré.
Photo by Zeb Goodell.

The elder Touré was legendary for merging the melody of Malian folk with the rambling guitar phrasing of blues greats like John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. When Vieux began experimenting with this sound—after secretly taking up the guitar when his father discouraged him from it—it gained an urgent, harder edge, and truly crystalized into what is now called “Desert Blues.” 

Since his debut release in 2007, Touré’s albums have risen to the top of the World Music charts, and his growing recognition earned him a spot at the Opening Celebration of the 2010 FIFA World Cup. With The Secret, released in May, Vieux digs deeper into his own roots while moving forward. Perhaps it is fitting that the album contains Vieux’s final collaboration with his late father, on which the younger man’s expanded, self-consciously electric playing riffs poignantly with the elder’s. (The record also includes Derek Trucks, John Scofield, and a vocal duet with Dave Matthews.) 

We caught up with Vieux Farka Touré via e-mail before his Wednesday, August 31, gig at the Jefferson. Catch him there with Corey Harris—the local bluesman whose 2003 album Mississippi to Mali included collaborations with Ali—before the next wave in blues innovation passes you by.

Your father, guitar legend Ali Farka Touré, was reluctant to have you fol-lowing in his footsteps. Why do you think he encouraged you to join the mil-itary rather than become a musician?

My father did not like the music business and the immoral, dishonest things that happen in it. He wanted to protect me from certain types of people, and I think he also wanted me to have a more stable life and income. It is true that dishonest people exist in the music industry, and it is a very difficult life. But I surround myself with people that I trust and I am always involved in all the aspects of my career. I am careful.

In 2005, Eric Herman got permission from your teachers and other community elders to get your first album produced in Brooklyn, but you still continued to do most of your recording in Mali. Is recording music a different experience there?

Yes, there is a difference between recording in Mali and in the U.S. I prefer to record in Mali, where my soul feels at peace and where we have more time to take everything in. They are both great, but very different experiences. For The Secret, the majority of the recording needed to be done in Mali.

Some would say that your innovation comes from your fresh perspective on blues and rock. In your mind, are the genres very different?

No. To me, rock music is just a little more upbeat, but in terms of the construction of the music I see them as basically the same thing.

Ever since your debut album was remixed for the album UFOs Over Bamako, you’ve been a big supporter of remixes of your work. Do you have a favorite remixed version of one of your songs?

I really love the Yossi Fine “Ma Hine Cocore” remix and the Nickodemus “Sangaré” remix. I think those must be my favorites.

You were initially trained as a percussionist. Does that come out in your guitar playing?

Yes, definitely. My style of playing guitar is very percussive. It is a direct evolution of my drumming.

If you could collaborate with anyone you haven’t worked with yet, who would it be?

That is a tough question. There are so many! I love Phil Collins. I love Jay-Z. One of those two, I guess.

Do you like being on the road?

I would not say that I enjoy always being on the road, but I am quite comfortable with it. It is now very routine for me, and normal to always be waking up in a new place. I do love to meet people from everywhere. It is this cultural learning that keeps me sane and happy on the road.

Have you felt inspired by any recent records?

I love Watch the Throne, the new collaboration between Kanye West and Jay-Z. Jay-Z is the master of rap. I would like to invite him to play in Bamako. I’ll arrange everything —he just needs to say, “O.K., I’ll do it,” and I’ll take care of the rest. Tell him that.

Vieux Farka Touré
with Corey Harris and the
Rasta Blues Experience
Wednesday, August 31
The Jefferson Theater
(800) 594-TIXX
Categories
News

Making nice

Much of the campaign for the Democratic nomination to City Council was spent drawing lines between the candidates who supported the construction of the Meadow Creek Parkway (MCP) and the ones who didn’t; the ones in favor of a new earthen dam at Ragged Mountain and the ones who preferred dredging the South Fork Rivanna Reservoir. Now that the three nominees have been chosen, those two hot-button issues may take a back seat. But did the split mark a divide within the Democratic Party?
From left: Kathy Galvin, Satyendra Huja, Dede Smith

Jim Nix, co-chair of the Democratic Party of Charlottesville, says no.  

“I don’t see that there is any problem, but there has been talk about it,” he says.  

Mayor Dave Norris, who endorsed nominees Dede Smith, Colette Blount and Brevy Cannon, says that during elections, “factions form,” but when the election is over, “the party comes together and most people in the party support the ticket and I suspect that’s what’s going to happen this time.” 

In fact, Nix tells C-VILLE that the three nominees, incumbent Satyendra Huja, current School Board member and local architect Kathy Galvin and Smith are working together on a “unified campaign.” 

“For the most part, Smith, Huja and Kathy Galvin are largely in agreement on most of the issues that are important to Democrats,” he says. The water supply plan and MCP are only two issues, “and that’s not the big picture by any means.”

The nominations of Huja and Galvin, who support the MCP and a new dam and were endorsed by councilor Kristin Szakos, have been seen by some as a challenge to Norris’ endorsements. The backing of three candidates by Norris stirred controversy, but Nix says that it was not “precedent-setting.”  

“I don’t know how much good it did for them. You can see that his trio didn’t fare very well,” says Nix. 

In an early August press conference, Galvin called out fellow Democratic candidates for having a “bunker mentality about a particular issue or set of issues.” 

“It seems to me that by my election and by Mr. Huja’s by a very clear majority of the voting population, that we are being tasked with completing the work of Council,” says Galvin. “We now have the votes to make sure we are not going to revisit the water plan and we are not going to revisit the parkway, and those were the two issues that were highly charged and the voting public had said enough. They did.” 

If elected, Galvin will find a seat on the same council as Norris. Although the mayor opposes the MCP and still believes that the adopted water supply plan is “overpriced and overbuilt and not good for the environment,” he says he has been able to work with councilors who disagreed with him in the past.

“I can’t expect people to just give up their heartfelt beliefs, but that doesn’t mean that Council as a whole can’t get a lot of things done,” he says. 

For Norris, disagreements are never personal. Norris has served with Huja for years and although they don’t see eye-to-eye on all matters, Norris expects him to become the new mayor. “I will support him in the transition to that role, assuming that’s something that does happen,” he says. 

Galvin says she is looking forward to working on new city issues and on old ones that have been put aside. 

“Already I know that Mayor Norris and I have common ground on a comprehensive plan to address unemployment,” she says. 

For the first time in more than 30 years there won’t be an African-American on council. Blount, who finished fifth in the primary, was the only black Democrat and Independent Andrew Williams is the remaining black candidate. 

“Unfortunately, a lot of people wanted to make sure that we had a City Council that voted a certain way on a couple of these hot button issues and, in the process, didn’t really take into consideration what kind of Council we are going to have in terms of diversity,” says Norris. 

For Galvin, however, the “almost overshadowing emphasis” on the MCP and the water supply plan did not resonate with the African-American community. 

“I walked many streets in the African-American neighborhoods. Those two issues were not the issues, first and foremost, for the people I talked to. It was jobs and it was good paying jobs,” she says. 

Galvin, Huja and Smith will square off against five independents—Andrew Williams, Brandon Collins, Bob Fenwick, Scott Bandy and Paul Long—in the November election.

Categories
Living

Around the Corner

Whether you’re a fan of the UVA hubbub or you normally avoid it at all costs, tiny Elliewood Avenue offers a cool, shady haven from the action on the Corner. A perfect place for people watching, Elliewood’s dining scene is more about homespun charm than Charlottesville’s many excellent—and more citified—downtown eateries.

A word from the president
We asked Andy McClure, Corner Business Association president and owner of The Biltmore on Elliewood, for his thoughts on the Avenue:
“Elliewood Avenue has turned into one of the quaintest and most diverse streets in Charlottesville. The offerings are as local as they are broad, and all of the newcomers have contributed to that. Every business on Elliewood helps each other when they do
well. Our goal is to introduce as many people as possible to this quirky microcosm of local offerings.”

If you’re lucky enough to find yourself at the cottage-like Pigeon Hole for Sunday brunch on the patio, order the Sweetie Pie bread basket: homemade coffee cake and a “Giant Li’l” blueberry muffin. During the week, try the stone ground grits, “made the way God intended.”

For lunch, Take it Away sandwich shop carries an assortment of side salads and a build-your-own sandwich menu. Try the Virginia-style Smithfield ham with Asiago, watercress and roasted tomatoes on freshly baked pumpernickel or onion rye bread. For a multicultural spin on classic Southern barbeque, try Buttz BBQ’s smoked bratwurst with braised cabbage and a side of candied jalapenos.

The Backyard serves both lunch and dinner at its breezy outdoor dining space. For a weeknight dinner, order a spicy pork and peach sandwich with Sriracha, peach chutney, bacon, romaine and goat cheese on ciabatta with a bowl of parmesan–garlic or curly Backyard fries. If you’re feeling celebratory, go for the homemade black pepper fettucine alfredo topped with bacon-wrapped cod. The eclectic-feeling Sushi Love serves an assortment of Japanese classics, including the habit-forming Unagi bowl: freshwater eel, rice and the addictive, sticky brown sauce.

Categories
News

Trying our patients

Beginning with a 5am meetup, and the first patient on the move roughly two hours later, Martha Jefferson Hospital started the transition to its nearly $300 million new home on Pantops Mountain. Construction of the 176-bed hospital began in June 2008 and concluded roughly three years later. Hazel Jones (pictured), 90, was the last patient to move into the new facility. According to reports, all patients were relocated before noon to the hospital, which is larger than its predecessor by half.