Month: October 2011

Categories
Living

Stephan Said brings it all back home

When the first wave of protestors took to Zuccotti Park in mid-September, few could have predicted that the Occupy Wall Street movement would soon spread throughout the globe, but Iraqi-American singer-songwriter Stephan Said can claim some prescience on that front. Said’s sixth album, Difrent, released on September 20 on his own Universal Hobo Records, has in its liner notes a call for “a nonviolent international movement for a more equitable society.”

Iraqi-American singer-songwriter Stephan Said, who has worked with antiwar movements since the 1990s, brings his message to the Southern on November 6.

“The timing seemed perfect,” acknowledged Said (pronounced Sy-eed), who, beyond forecasting the Occupy movement, went on to become one of its most prominent balladeers. During the second week of the Wall Street protests, Said led a crowd in reciting “Aheb Aisht Al Huriya” (I Love the Life of Freedom), an Egyptian civil rights anthem he covered during the Tahrir Square demonstrations and made available online to “all those who are nonviolently working to build the international movement for a more just society.” Said played a Zuccotti Park show after a rumored Radiohead concert failed to materialize, and in October, he helped a 92-year-old Pete Seeger lead about 1,000 demonstrators in “This Little Light of Mine.”

So when Said plays the Southern on November 6, the seated show should have a special resonance with Charlottesville’s own Lee Park occupiers (assuming they’re still out there braving the cold). For Said, who spent a lot of his youth in Nelson County, “getting to know every nook and cranny of those hills,” the concert will be something of a homecoming. Though he hasn’t yet filled the shoes of an oft-quoted piece of Billboard Magazine praise—“the closest thing to this generation’s Woody Guthrie”—Said’s advocacy for the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movements have made him into something of a household name as an American protest singer.

But Said hasn’t always enjoyed the support of a popular movement. On September 11, 2002, he released “The Bell,” one of the first major antiwar songs that came in the wake of 9/11. In a political climate in which an offhand denunciation of war with Iraq inspired the public burning of Dixie Chicks records, the viral popularity of “The Bell” found Said effectively blacklisted from touring in the U.S., as most bands and managers could no longer afford his name on the bill. In 2003, the same year that Dave Matthews covered “The Bell” on a solo tour, SWAT teams were called on Said during a public radio-sponsored show in Tucson, Arizona.

In response to his own trouble retaining a booking agent, Said started the non-profit Universal Hobo Touring, organizing concerts at student rallies and benefits for peace. In 2003, aside from releasing New World Order, his fourth full-length solo album, Said collaborated with Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth and Zach de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine to launch Protest Records, a web archive of contemporary protest songs. His current project, Difrent, which shares its title with his latest album, is a broadcast platform meant to “brings numerous organizations working for equality, peace, and environmental sustainability together with artists for releases that support initiatives having a direct impact on communities worldwide.”

As the handmaiden of Difrent the organization, Difrent the album has a decidedly more world-music feel than Said’s earlier work. It’s also the first album Said released under his given name. Raised with his stepfather’s last name as Stephan Smith, he tried to reclaim the name Said in his early twenties, but was told by record company executives that “there was no way I was going to have a career in the U.S. with an Arabic name, as if the very idea was a joke.”

But in the end, Said is grateful for the experience. Raised as an “all-American boy who went to St. Christopher’s school and liked to fix up classic cars,” Said grew up without “the armor necessary to deal with anti-Iraqi prejudice when I was hit with it as an adult. But that gave me a very unique perspective after I took the name Said, to see how drastic people’s assumptions about me changed.”

Stephan Said’s songs paint in broad, goodwill-affirming strokes. “Take a Stand,” off of Difrent, finds him at his most tackily genial: “We all know that we’re all one family / A couple green leaves growing on the same tree / All we ever wanted was to be free / Can someone please help me with some harmony?” But as cheesy as this kind of language may sound, it resonates with the storm-weathered possibility expounded across generations of protest music. One can’t help but think that Woody Guthrie would be proud.

Homemade Halloween

Best thing about holidays? Having an excuse to make something other than food. I love making Christmas cards, picking Thanksgiving bouquets from the woods behind the house, and–as I’m discovering–putting together Halloween costumes from whatever weird stuff is lying around the house.

The other day, I was about to go to the fabric store to get some material for Elsie’s costume, and had a small epiphany. Why spend money, use gas and stress out over a purchase when there’s a mountain of crafty stuff in the attic? Surely we can come up with a good costume using materials we already own.

Behold: the Unconventional Witch Costume.

The first key element is, of course, the hat. We were lucky to have a pointy knitted cap made by a friend, to which we added a brim (a donut shape cut from leftover matboard).

Then there’s the toddler-sized broom: a stick from the yard, and dried flower stalks lashed to it with twine.

And finally, the cape. A readymade! I’d picked up this upholstery fabric sample from The Artful Lodger a couple of years ago (it was free or very cheap; I can’t remember which–they were getting rid of it). It happened to be the perfect size, and came with these super handy grommets! Through which we tied orange ribbon to keep it around Elsie’s neck.

The rest of the outfit consisted of clothes we already had around. (Fortunately, toddlers tend to own stuff like red patent leather shoes and stripey leggings.)

I must say I was pleased with the results. As for me, I wore an old red bridesmaid’s dress, plus a red cape that I’ve owned since high school for no reason at all. It pays to be cheap.

Categories
Arts

This week in T.V.

“Hell on Wheels” 

Sunday 10pm, AMC

Those still lamenting the loss of the late, great HBO Western “Deadwood” might want to give this new offering from AMC a try. This basic-cable channel, currently riding high on the massive success of zombie thriller “The Walking Dead,” continues to take chances with a series set in the 1860s. Relative unknown Anson Mount plays a former Confederate soldier tracking down the people who murdered his wife. His quest for vengeance takes him to the violent moving city that surrounds the creation of the transcontinental railroad. As he gets drawn into the shady wheelings and dealings around the nation’s western expansion, the Cheyenne lash out over the tracks being built on their ancestral land. The cast also includes rapper/actor Common and Colm Meaney (“Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Deep Space Nine”).

 

“The Heart, She Holler”

Sunday 12:30am, Adult Swim

If you’re into weird, twisted stuff on the cutting edge of humor, Adult Swim is your channel. Cartoon Network’s awkward teenage brother is best known for pop-culture bait like “Robot Chicken” and “Venture Bros.,” but it also includes some totally bizarre shows, like this new six-night mini-series that sends up everything from “Dynasty” to “Twin Peaks.” The series follows what happens after a wealthy tycoon who more or less runs an isolated Southern town leaves his entire fortune to his long-lost son (Patton Oswalt, Ratatouille), inducing his crazy hick sisters (one of them played by Kristen Schaal, formerly Mel on “Flight of the Conchords”) to try to murder him. The preview is bananas—there’s sex with disembodied ghost hands. What else do you need to know?

 

“Kung-Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness” 

Monday 5:30pm, Nickelodeon

As far as computer-animated kids movies go, you could do a lot worse than Dreamworks’ Kung-Fu Panda and its recent sequel. The animation is slick and lush, the setting is interesting, and the characters and plot, though not terribly original, are fun enough for kids (talking animals that do martial arts!) and relatively tolerable for adults. This spin-off TV series throws the same characters from the films into new kung-fu adventures. Don’t listen for the voice actors from the movies, though: Jack Black, Dustin Hoffman, and Angelina Jolie are kind of busy. However, Lucy Liu will reprise her role as Master Viper. (Translation: someone please get Ling Woo a regular on-screen job.)

Categories
Arts

Ralph Stanley’s old-time roosts in Staunton

When Dr. Ralph Stanley and His Clinch Mountain Boys played the Mockingbird Roots Music Hall in Staunton, Virginia back in August of this year, tickets sold out fast. After all, it isn’t every day that lovers of old-time mountain music get the opportunity to see a performer as celebrated as Ralph Stanley in a listening room with a premium on intimacy.

You may know him from his rendition of the Appalachian dirge “O Death” on O Brother, Where Art Thou, but Ralph Stanley was the godfather of old-time long before the Coen brothers found him. 

“So many of the shows that Ralph and the Clinch Mountain Boys play throughout the year are either big festivals or large theaters,” said Mockingbird booking agent Jeremiah Jenkins. “It’s a rare treat when they get the opportunity to perform in a space where the audience and the artist get to interact and feed off each other’s energy.” At the end of the performance, Jenkins asked Stanley what he thought of the show, and the first thing out of Ralph’s mouth was “When can we come back?”

The answer to that question came when the Mockingbird announced a special two-night encore with Dr. Ralph Stanley and His Clinch Mountain Boys for Friday and Saturday, November 4 and 5. Jenkins said that the music hall wanted to put together a two-night gig simply because it would allow an even greater number of fans the experience of hearing a living icon of American roots music.

The first time I saw Dr. Ralph and the Clinch Mountain Boys play was in the spring of 2002, in the heart of Dickenson County, Virginia, at the Hills of Home Festival just outside of Stanley’s hometown of Coeburn. Held on the grounds of the old Stanley homestead for the past 41 years, the festival was hosted, as it always has been, by Stanley and his Clinch Mountain Boys. Buried on a hillside near the cabin stage are the graves of Stanley’s mother, who taught her son how to play the banjo in the clawhammer-style that made him famous, and that of his brother Carter, who shared the stage with Ralph for 20 years as part of the widely celebrated Stanley Brothers until his death in 1966. 

That year, in addition to seeing Stanley perform two sets, I also saw performances by the late Charlie Waller, Gillian Welch and Dave Rawlings—who were regular guests at The Hills of Home from the late ’90s well into the last decade—and a surprise appearance by Jim Lauderdale, who would go on to share the Grammy for Bluegrass Album of the Year with Stanley for their 2003 collaboration Lost in the Lonesome Pines.

There’s not much to say about hearing Dr. Ralph Stanley that hasn’t already been said a thousand times over, which comes with the territory when you’re dealing with someone who’s spent over 65 years recording, performing and touring. Preferring to call his style and sound “old-time mountain music” in favor of the more commonly used “bluegrass,” Stanley has in his own way become a voice for the peaks of Appalachia. To witness Stanley playing an old banjo tune his mother taught him all those years ago, or to hear a high and lonesome song like “O Death,” there’s no mistaking what it means to be at the heart of those mountains.

By the time I had experienced my first taste of The Hills of Home, the O Brother, Where Art Thou movie soundtrack had already begun changing the direction of roots music. I was working with Allegheny Mountain Radio, a network of rural radio stations that proudly proclaims its motto as “Unique by Nature, Traditional By Choice.” While in some areas, artists like Ralph Stanley were played more as a result of O Brother, he’d been a playlist staple with Allegheny Mountain Radio for decades. Which isn’t to say the importance of the Grammy-winning soundtrack wasn’t noticed, but for us, the soundtrack was important as a validation of traditional music, rather than a discovery of it.

Like Stanley, I too grew up in the mountains of Appalachia, albeit further north along the West Virginia border, in Highland County. I feel like I understand the isolation, beauty, and age that those mountains represent. But even from Charlottesville or Staunton, many of us could take a Sunday drive listening to a Stanley classic like “Rank Stranger” and be able to recognize a similar spirit of Ralph Stanley’s Clinch River. Our mountains have similar stories to tell, even if the characters are different.

Home, they say, is where the heart is, and for 65 years now Dr. Ralph Stanley has been playing from that heart. By all accounts, it also sounds like Stanley and his brand of traditional old-time mountain music have found a flicker of that home on the stage of the Mockingbird Roots Music Hall.

Categories
News

Here's looking at you, Virginia Film Festival

When Flynt finally got back to work, he continued to grow his $400 million media empire from a golden wheelchair.

The man in the golden wheelchair

Larry Flynt regrets nothing, or at least very little

After Larry Flynt was shot in the spine by a sniper—a neo-Nazi who had been offended by a spread featuring interracial sex in an issue of Hustler magazine—he spent a decade recovering. When Flynt finally got back to work, he continued to grow his $400 million media empire from a golden wheelchair. The golden wheelchair is sort of a metaphor for Flynt’s life: He calls lowly hardcore porn “a serious form of expression,” talks about it as if it were a fine wine, and spent years of his life in America’s most elevated halls of justice fighting for our right to consume it. Some people make lemons out of lemonade; Flynt gold-plates the weaknesses of the flesh and serves them to the masses. 

Flynt’s transition from humble beginnings to publisher and defender of First Amendment rights is the subject of director Milos Forman’s The People vs. Larry Flynt, which gets the 15th anniversary treatment at this year’s Virginia Film Festival. Flynt himself is one of the festival’s most esteemed guests—we hope he arrives in the private jet that’s so prominently featured in the film—but it is not his first time in town.

The Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression hosted a talk between Flynt and an unlikely acquaintance, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, in 1997. The pair butted heads when Hustler ran a fake Campari ad that included a Q&A with Falwell detailing his first sexual experience—it claimed that Falwell had sex with his mother in an outhouse, as a goat stood nearby. Falwell sued for libel and character defamation. “The Reverend Falwell knew what he was selling, and I knew what I was selling. I think we respected one another. That was a very long and protracted court battle,” Flynt said of the landmark case. “And I won.” (Falwell, for his part, took a special pride in having forced Flynt to spend $2 million in legal fees on the way to that victory.)

In the film version of his life, the Larry Flynt character is played by a sleazy Woody Harrelson. In an amusing bit of irony the real Flynt makes a brief cameo as the judge at an early obscenity trial who sentences Harrelson-Flynt to 25 years in prison. These are some of the film’s most charming moments: Flynt in his wheelchair wearing an American flag as a diaper; his outrageous responses to simple questions from a prosecutor. “Milos was helpful enough to include us in the process, and I think it’s a better film because of that,” Flynt said.

But eventually we see Flynt chastened by the seriousness of his task, which amounts to crusading for the most disgusting, abhorrent things imaginable so that common people don’t have to worry about their right to be far less offensive. “I wouldn’t advise anyone to behave the way I did in court over the years, but you’ve got to understand…It seemed like I had been dragged through most of the courts, and Alan [Isaacman, Flynt’s lawyer played by Edward Norton in the film] and I were fed up with it, and I just had the attitude that, if they’re going to treat me like a gimp, then I’ll just act like one.” 

Was he pleased with the way he was represented in the film? “Yes, but it’s because I understand Hollywood. When they make a movie they want to focus on the most bizarre, outrageous aspects in order to sell tickets, to make it a commercial hit,” he said. 

Courtney Love plays Flynt’s wife, Althea—his only one in the film, but his fourth in real life—who develops a nasty drug addiction, contracts AIDS, and drowns, tragically, in the couple’s hot tub. 

“A lot of the movie is very embarrassing, but that was my life. So I’m not complaining about that,” he said. “Definitely, I had a lot of fun, and a lot of it is really sad, and really disturbing, and horrible. It was almost 10 years that I was recovering from a gunshot wound.”

Today, Flynt says his battleground in the fight for First Amendment rights is continually shifting. “Censorship may not apply to a magazine or to a film, but there’s other forms of censorship that are just as pervasive,” said Flynt. “We’re defending a young woman in Texas who was having a Tupperware party, but she was really selling sex toys. She was arrested simply because it was a phallic symbol. There’s a lot of states that have laws against anything that resembles the phallic symbol. Some of the laws are absolutely juvenile.” 

In the film, and in real life, Flynt brought Hustler into the national spotlight by publishing photos captured by an Italian paparazzo of Jackie Kennedy Onassis sunbathing nude.

Today he remains interested in cutting religious leaders and politicians down to size. He recently offered the disgraced Congressman Anthony Weiner a job at Hustler; he offered the accused homicidal mom Casey Anthony $500,000 to appear nude in the magazine; and he’s released a $1 million query for anyone with a steamy tale to tell about Texas Governor Rick Perry. Flynt also released a book this year co-authored with a Columbia University professor called One Nation Under Sex, which explores how the sexual predilections of world leaders have influenced domestic and foreign policy. Of course, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings get high billing. “I wanted to see if I could find that the big sex scandals have been around since the founding of the nation, and surprisingly I did,” he said.

Here’s looking at you, Larry.—Andrew Cedermark

Fest Five

Our critic’s take on this year’s must-sees

You know it’s a fine festival when you feel vaguely annoyed because there’s more good stuff to see than time allows. Try breaking it down by category! (Individual recommendations included; substitutions may apply.)—Jonathan Kiefer

THE BUZZ MOVIE

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia may not be as inherently sensational as his “gynocidal,” genital-mutilating art-horror flick Anti-christ, but it comes with some alluring baggage of its own. Namely, the director’s “I’m a Nazi” gaffe at Cannes, and advance word that this might be the pinnacle of Kirsten Dunst’s career (her performance in the film, that is, not the look on her face when he said that). If nothing else, it looks sumptuous, ecstatic and very strange. Melancholia is not just a feeling, by the way, but a planet on a crash course with Earth. 

THE LOCAL INTEREST

There is much to be said for the cosmopolitan privilege of seeing the world while actually sitting on one’s ass in a cozy dark theater not far from home. How astonishing, though, that the same venue might also grant the privilege to glimpse the rich culture of one’s own community with fresh eyes. To this end, the fest has several fond documentary portraits to choose from. In Preacher, to take but one example, director Daniel Kraus reintroduces Charlottesville Bishop William Nowell of the New Covenant Pentecostal Church, whose highly amen-worthy choir will perform at the screening.

 

 

 

THE ONE YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO ALREADY HAVE SEEN

Classics, new classics, non-classics: It’s hard to keep up. Is it fashionable now to adore Robert Altman or to be over him? Either way, it’s not like you’ll ever actually get around to renting his 1971 western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, with Warren Beatty and Julie Christie as a gambler and a madam who go into business together at the turn of the century. But that’s fine, because the best way to make a nest in this thick atmosphere of intimate Leonard Cohen songs and Vilmos Zsigmond’s muddy, smoky cinematography is to see it on the big screen.

 

 

THE ONE FOR WHOSE OFFICIAL RELEASE YOU JUST CAN’T WAIT

A Dangerous Method seems well-packaged to delight. Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud, Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung, and Keira Knightley as the woman who influenced both men’s lives and work. That’s already enough, but throw in director David Cronenberg, the oddball auteur of The Dead Zone, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises, and it’s hard not to get, um, psyched. Which brings us to…

 

 

THE HEAD TRIP

Astute readers may by now have noticed a predilection here for intellectual and aesthetic enrichment. Well, why not? The real fun of a film festival is in how it elevates the day-to-day moviegoing experience. For instance, it is not every day at the cineplex that one comes upon a “stylized, idiosyncratic retelling of the history of mass migration to post-war Britain through the suggestive lens of the Homeric epic.” But that’s what’s on offer in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses, an experimental, allegorical mashup of music, literature, and luminous archive-footage imagery. How bittersweet it is to enjoy that arty oddity that might not otherwise ever make it to a theater near you. The headier, the better.

 

 

The National Film Registry was created by Congress in 1988 as a means of preserving films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The Library of Congress selects 25 such works each year and stores them at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, just 45 minutes north of town.

Exposing the archive

Library of Congress series was Kielbasa’s pet 

Over a year ago, as the Virginia Film Festival was gearing up for what turned out to be the most successful run in its 24-year history, Jody Kielbasa was already looking ahead to 2011, with an ambitious plan for widening its scope. “One of the things the Festival had been doing in the years before I was brought on as director in 2008 was to screen a lot of classic films,” he said. “I wanted to shift the focus to more contemporary films. Basically, we were aiming to screen the latest and the best films in any given year. But, I also wanted to include classic films, only in a more focused way.”

By almost any standard, Kielbasa succeeded in the first part of his plan. Last year’s Festival opened with a sold out screening of one of 2010’s most talked about films, the Darren Aronofsky psychological thriller Black Swan, which went on to earn Academy Award nominations for Best Picture and Best Director, and won Natalie Portman the Oscar for Best Actress. This year, on November 3, the 2011 VFF kicks off with another highly anticipated film, Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Alexander Payne’s The Descendants, his first since the widely acclaimed 2004 dramedy Sideways. 

But Kielbasa has also come up with a way to implement the other facet of his vision—namely, to create a coherent program of classic films. Under the banner of “Turner Classic Movies and The Library of Congress Celebrate The National Film Registry,” the Festival will feature screenings of Terrence Malick’s Badlands (1973); the 1926 Buster Keaton silent The General; Robert Altman’s oft overlooked McCabe & Mrs. Miller (1971); John Huston’s epic 1948 Humphrey Bogart drama The Treasure of the Sierra Madre; and, from 1944, the Oscar-winning National Velvet, starring Elizabeth Taylor as a 12-year-old steeplechase contender.

The title may be a mouthful, but the program’s premise is remarkably, if rather ingeniously, straightforward. The National Film Registry was created by Congress in 1988 as a means of preserving films that are “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” The Library of Congress selects 25 such works each year and stores them at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, just 45 minutes north of town. So Kielbasa was simply tapping into a nearby resource for some of the best films in the world.

“I went on a tour of the facility about a year and a half ago,” he said. “It’s built into the side of a mountain, and it used to be a bank vault where they stored gold bullion during the Cold War. If you can picture that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the ark is stored in that government warehouse, that’s kind of what this place is like. There’s also a preservation room where technicians restore damaged films, sometimes literally working with a scalpel on one frame. It’s a fascinating process, and you can see how it’s done on These Amazing Shadows, a new documentary about the Packard Campus that we’re also screening as part of the Festival.”

Festival director Jody Kielbasa.

Once Kielbasa had established a relationship with the Library of Congress, he approached the folks at Turner Classic Movies to help in the selection process. And TCM weekend host Ben Mankiewicz is coming all the way from Los Angeles to introduce each of the films. “It’s hard for me to turn down an opportunity like this,” Mankiewicz said. “It’s a job that’s hard to mess up. You’d have to be really inept to speak about any of these films and not have people want to see them.”

All five films were chosen with a specific purpose in mind. McCabe & Mrs. Miller is celebrating its 40th anniversary, and The General its 85th. National Velvet fit the bill for the Festival’s “Family Day,” and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was actually restored in-house at the Packard Campus. But with Badlands Kielbasa pulled off a major coup. The film’s star, Sissy Spacek, and her husband, longtime Malick art director Jack Fisk, live in the Charlottesville area, and both have agreed to be on hand for the screening.

“To the best of my knowledge, this is the only film festival program of its kind,” said Kielbasa, who’d clearly like to see it become a regular feature of the VFF. “I’ll give you a famous Bogart quote: ‘This could be the start of a beautiful relationship.’”—Matt Ashare

 

 

Movies about riot grrrls carry the rock doc load at this year’s film fest.

RIOT GRRRLS VS. LARRY FLYNT

The marquee for this year’s Virginia Film Festival features big-shot names like Oliver Stone and Larry Flynt, but when it comes to music documentaries, the underground rules.

Perhaps as compensation for Flynt’s presence, riot grrrls get the most screen time, with three films related to the feminist punk movement. From the Back of the Room looks at women’s roles in 30 years of DIY punk, eschewing the riot grrrl label for a more open conversation about gender, music and other social issues. In the true DIY spirit, director Amy Oden shot the film with a borrowed camera and raised funds by throwing benefit shows. Interviewed in From the Back, feminist electro-punks Le Tigre are the stars of Who Took the Bomp?, a tour doc that follows them as they perform for ecstatic audiences on four different continents. The third film, Women Art Revolution, focuses primarily on feminist art, but includes an original score by Carrie Brownstein, of popular riot grrrl group Sleater-Kinney and, more recently, the superb Wild Flag.

Rock dudes, fret not! The festival didn’t forget you. In The Other F Word, musicians such as Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, Devo’s Mark Mothersbaugh and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea share the experience of being punk rock dads (Spoiler: Flea cries!). Such familial reflection contrasts sharply with Better Than Something, which examines the short but prolific life of garage rocker Jay Reatard, nee Jimmy Lee Lindsey Jr. Dropping out of middle school and starting his recording career at 15, the Memphis musician spent half his life churning out great songs and playing raucous shows, right up until his tragic death at 29. “He was almost like this Elvis-type figure, but angrier,” remarks Shermon Wilmot of Memphis’ Shangri-La Records.

The Klezmatics: On Holy Ground, the only non-rock feature, presents the Yiddish folk group as they travel the world, win a Grammy, and deal with the drama of a faltering record industry. Local talent gets some love, too. Alchemy of an American Artist offers a raw portrait of artist and musician Christian Breeden, and We Are Astronomers captures rock quartet Astronomers as they move from basement to recording studio to stage.

So, sure, The Descendants will probably live up to the buzz, and new Cronenberg and von Trier films are always a treat, but don’t miss this rare chance to see some great music docs. You can wait and ask Sissy Spacek about Badlands when you run into her at Whole Foods.—John Ruscher

 

 

The Casons pose for a family photo.

BIRTH OF A FARMER’S MARKET

There aren’t a lot of films about families that make you feel warm and fuzzy inside. Most celebrate the “dysfunctional” or the just plain “messed up.” But Director Doug Bari’s documentary Growing Up Cason is a rare example of a film about a family “that actually makes it work.”

Growing Up Cason tells the story of seven brothers and one sister who were born and raised in Depression-era Charlottesville. When World War II broke out, all seven brothers went to fight in the war, and, remarkably, all seven returned home safely and married hometown girls. Four of the brothers founded the Charlottesville City Market.

Bari and his wife are the innovators behind Doug & Judy Productions, a company that produces digital memoirs for families. He says he first met the Cason clan at their family reunion, a century-old gathering of between 150 and 200 Casons. He was immediately enamored of their rare conviviality. “They just got to grow up in this really nice atmosphere with friendly people. Even though they were really poor, they always had a ton of stuff to eat because they lived on a really big farm…as one of the guys says in the movie, ‘We didn’t know we were poor.’”

In learning about the Casons, Bari also gained insight into a way of life in Charlottesville that is slowly eroding. “These people are telling you stories about walking to school in bare feet and really doing it… The house doesn’t have any electricity, no plumbing, all the kids have all these chores that they do, but somehow they all stick together and they all do the right thing for the most part.” 

Elaborating on this bygone way of life, Bari said, “One of the guys said Charlottesville was always a jewel, and he was really right about that. It’s the way I felt about this place when I came here. But they got to live it without distraction.”

Bari takes a genuine interest in other people’s stories, in capturing their histories. “You have a story. I have a story. Everybody’s story is unique…people will talk about themselves if you open the door the right way.” And each person’s story comes with a different message. With the Casons, Bari hopes that viewers of his film will realize “that life isn’t as tough as you think it is. And that, if you have your priorities straight, it can get you an awful lot of stuff and you’ll come out O.K. on the other side.”—Sarah Matalone 

Categories
Arts

The Rum Diary; R, 120 minutes; Carmike Cinema 6

In The Rum Diary, a suavely scruffy American novelist (Johnny Depp) takes a reporting gig at a shabby newspaper in Puerto Rico, where he contends with various kooky colleagues (Michael Rispoli, Richard Jenkins, Giovanni Ribisi), a smug and greedy land developer (Aaron Eckhart), a luscious love interest (Amber Heard), and several angry locals. Also, he drinks.

Johnny Depp once again channels the late author Hunter S. Thompson in The Rum Diary, an adaptation of Thompson’s rollicking second novel.

The newspaper, unsurprisingly corrupt, happens to be on the brink of ruin. The luscious love interest, surprisingly pure, happens to be involved with the smug and greedy land developer. The colleagues get kookier, the locals get angrier, and our man gets along as best he can, typing it all up. Just about everybody speaks in the eruditely debauched voice of Hunter S. Thompson, from whose novel writer-director Bruce Robinson’s frolicsome film derives, but that chorus effect also makes for agreeably easy listening.

The Rum Diary is basically The Hangover for a more self-consciously bookish crowd: stylish, shallow, calculatedly excessive, not hard to like. Depp has been doing the dashing man-boy for his whole career, of course, and there is a sense for better and worse that he deserves this role. Having starred in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and served as the in-house excerpt reciter for the documentary Gonzo, his Thompson-proxy credentials are by now well established. The Rum Diary does raise a vague concern about how many more of these pet projects he (or we) can take, but then it raises a figurative shot glass, with a magnanimous toast to anyone who’d bother getting uptight about all that.

Depp’s castmates take very seriously their apparent mandate to enjoy themselves. Rispoli in particular, as a game but grizzled mentor, is great fun to watch. He does the sort of unwashed,  “crazy” act that Brad Pitt used to do when he was anxious to register as anything other than just good looking, but it’s impossible to begrudge him that. After a while, with its self-delighted mania and adolescent mischief, the whole thing starts feeling like a handsomely mounted college stage production. Even at its most foul-mouthed and faux-cynical, it’s all rather chaste and sincere. Even when incoherent and mediocre, it’s at least sort of touching.

Robinson makes narrative degeneration seem like an aesthetic choice, and straddles a line between period piece and anachronism nimbly enough to never seem stuffy on either front. What a dash of Thompson’s famously eloquent Nixon hatred lacks in currency, for instance, it makes up for in hilarity. As entertainment for its own sake, The Rum Diary doesn’t exactly radiate political or thematic seriousness, but does it need to? By the time Depp’s sitting at his typewriter promising us that he’ll “put the bastards of the world on notice that I do not have their best interests at heart,” it’s hard to know what he’s talking about, or to feel anything other than fondly, slightly embarrassed for him. But after all, it is a diary.

Marva Barnett and Jahan Ramazani Are Honored With 2011 Thomas Jefferson Awards

October 28, 2011 – Marva A. Barnett, French professor and founding director of the Teaching Resource Center, and R. Jahan Ramazani, Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English, are the recipients of the 2011 Thomas Jefferson Awards at the University of Virginia. The awards were presented today at Fall Convocation, held in the John Paul Jones Arena.

Barnett and Ramazani are the 61st and 62nd recipients of the Thomas Jefferson Award, the highest honor the University community bestows upon its faculty. The convocation included recognition of 360 third-year U.Va. students who earned Intermediate Honors and a keynote address by J. Milton Adams, vice provost for academic programs.

The Thomas Jefferson Award selection committee chose Barnett to receive the award recognizing excellence in service, which has been sponsored since 1955 by the Robert Earll McConnell Foundation. Ramazani was honored with the award recognizing excellence in scholarship, established in 2009 by the Alumni Board of Trustees of the University of Virginia Endowment Fund Inc.

•Marva A. Barnett
Professor of French
College of Arts & Sciences
Founding director, Teaching Resource Center

Over more than 20 years, Marva Barnett, founding director of the Teaching Resource Center, has done much to improve the caliber of teaching at the University, according to the dozens of letters supporting her nomination for the Thomas Jefferson Award recognizing excellence in service to the University.

Her contributions "have been nothing short of transformative for the academic mission of this institution," biology professor Claire Cronmiller wrote in her nominating letter.

Barnett stepped forward with her idea for the Teaching Resource Center, or TRC as it is known, "at a time when the University needed to reaffirm its commitment to the educational experience of its students," Cronmiller wrote. "During the last 21 years, she has easily inspired, excited, guided and helped hundreds to become more effective and happier instructors and University contributors."

Barnett holds a master’s in French from the University of Maine at Oroni and a B.A. from Westminster College in Salt Lake City. She received her Ph.D. in Romance languages and literatures from Harvard University, where she studied at the Harvard-Danforth Center for Teaching and Learning.

When applying for faculty positions, she envisioned a university with a center that would provide opportunities for both faculty and graduate teaching assistants to develop and hone their teaching expertise. Although U.Va. did not have such a center, Barnett accepted a position as an assistant professor of French in 1983 and soon began working to design a five-day teaching assistant orientation workshop in the French Department.

In 1990, she got the Teaching Resource Center off the ground, which has since sprouted several ancillary programs, such as Excellence in Diversity Fellows, University Teaching Fellowship and Tomorrow’s Professors Today. The newest addition, the University Academy of Teaching, brings together master teachers who have already helped others reach a higher level of excellence and who are interested in offering their expertise to colleagues across Grounds.

Letters supporting her nomination came from all corners of U.Va., as well as from former faculty and students. Her ability to identify a need and then find a way to meet it is legendary. One writer commented, "She has a bias for action."

"There was a time when, in certain circles, putting effort into one’s teaching was considered less important than research accomplishments," wrote one of the many faculty members who have worked with the TRC. "Moreover, in its first years, some assumed the TRC served merely a remedial function for poor teachers who required ‘fixing.’

"From the beginning, however, Marva demonstrated that the most outstanding teachers are those willing to examine their pedagogy with the same rigor they apply to their research."

She introduced TAP Â\’ the Teaching Analysis Poll Â\’ in which a member of the Teaching Resource Center staff meets separately with a professor’s students to ascertain what’s working in the classroom and what’s not.

One professor said he asked for a TAP assessment out of desperation because of dismal student evaluations early in his U.Va. career. "I expected to be raked over the coals, but I came away from the experience enthused. The scores that second semester came up," said the faculty member, who went on to receive a University Teaching Fellowship. "The center threw a life ring to a drowning new teacher who arrived with precious little instruction on how to swim in the classroom."

Barnett also recognized early on the importance of building a diverse faculty, wrote a former faculty member. "Marva actively developed strategies to ensure that minority faculty members became productive scholars and thus were fully engaged," he wrote.

The TRC offers workshops each August and January on topics ranging from the multicultural classroom to course development. Many of the letters said Barnett also helped them in informal ways, listening as they described a problem and then suggesting practical steps to take. "Marva is a mentor’s mentor and a teacher’s teacher," one supporter wrote.

Barnett also teaches courses on reading and writing French texts and on Victor Hugo. Her "Victor Hugo on Things That Matter: A Reader," was published in 2009, and another Hugo text, "Lettres inédites de Juliette Drouet à Victor Hugo," is slated for publication in 2012.

•R. Jahan Ramazani
Edgar F. Shannon Professor of English
College of Arts & Sciences

For his boundary-crossing scholarship in poetry and service to the intellectual life of U.Va., Jahan Ramazani is the recipient of the Thomas Jefferson Award recognizing excellence in scholarship.

In her nominating letter, English Department chair Cynthia Wall said Ramazani is one of the world’s leading literary scholars. After reading the dozens of supporting letters, she wrote, "I am even more astonished at the influence he has had and the respect he has inspired in colleagues and students locally, nationally, internationally."

A College of Arts & Sciences colleague expressed admiration for Ramazani’s editing in 2003 of the "Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry," which he expanded beyond the traditional canon of English-language poetry. "By rejecting a provincial understanding of English poetry, he has indeed remapped the field," she wrote. "With confidence and conviction, he juxtaposes W.B. Yeats or Nobel laureate Derek Walcott with the Indian poet A.K. Ramanujan, the Jamaican Louise Bennett or the Ugandan Okot p’Bitek."

Ramazani is the author of four books, starting in 1990 with "Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy and the Sublime." Wrote a colleague at another institution, "It was greeted by most Yeatsians as one of the few books on Yeats written in the ’90s that has really made a difference in Yeats studies in particular and in poetry studies in general."

His second book, "Poetry of Mourning," was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. With his third book, "The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English," published in 2001, Ramazani declared "that poetry in English emerging from formerly colonial nations had not yet been sufficiently described," another supporter wrote.

"A Transnational Poetics," published in 2009, won the 2011 Harry Levin Prize as the best book in comparative literary history published between 2008 and 2010. The book "does, in my opinion, indicate a wholly new direction for postcolonial and transnational studies to follow," a faculty member at another university wrote, adding, "At the moment, then, Professor Ramazani really is the field of postcolonial poetry."

A Rhodes scholar and Guggenheim fellow, Ramazani holds master’s degrees from Yale and Oxford universities, and a Ph.D. from Yale. An Echols scholar at U.Va., in 1981 he received his B.A. in English literature with highest distinction. During his undergraduate years, he was the jazz director at the University’s radio station, WTJU-FM. A recent graduate, whose father had been Ramazani’s roommate, was so taken with her father’s stories, she enrolled in Ramazani’s "Contemporary Poetry" course.

"As an instructor, Professor Ramazani did for his students what I imagine he did for WTJU listeners: open their minds to an art that seemed esoteric, dissonant and inaccessible," she wrote.

A former Ph.D. student said he changed the course of his research because of Ramazani’s insights. "It is no overstatement to say that Jahan Ramazani opened up a world for me," he wrote.

His contributions to scholarship as well as the life of the University were detailed in supporting letters from U.Va. colleagues in the English Department and across Grounds. Ramazani was the Mayo National Endowment for the Humanities Distinguished Teaching Professor from 2001 to 2004 and English Department chair from 2006 to 2009.

One English colleague wrote, "The centerpieces of Jahan’s tenure as chair were his leadership in revamping the way we fund students in our Ph.D. program, the careful and even-handed way he dealt with the need to cut the department’s budget as the financial crisis took its toll on the University’s finances, and the excellent hiring he was able to do against the strong economic headwinds."

Another colleague, who served with Ramazani in the Faculty Senate, which Ramazani chaired from 1997 to 1998, noted that Ramazani began the "Intellectual Community" initiative, "a simple, yet powerful, idea to bring U.Va. up to the level of the very best institutions in the world, where Â… faculty and students and administrators and staff joined together to improve our collective lives."

Ramazani’s father, R.K. Ramazani, professor emeritus of government and foreign affairs, received the Thomas Jefferson Award in 1994. They are the first father and son to each have won the award. 

The Mock Star’s Ball, Experimental Dance, St. Vincent and Charles Wright

Last year, The Southern rang in All Hallow’s Eve with a two-night rock ‘n’ roll resurrection called the Mock Star’s Ball, wherein a handful of local bands got dressed up and played entire sets as classic rock groups. Charlottesville’s previous rock-related Halloween tradition Mass Sabbath had pretty much run its course after five or six well-attended years, and as a spiritual successor, Mock Star’s did a good job of upping the ante and boosting the camaraderie. This year, the ball is back and bigger than ever, with a lineup that goes a little something like this: Friday night stages Astronomers as The Smashing Pumpkins, Corsair as Thin Lizzy, The Invisible Hand as The Beastie Boys, The Sometime Favorites as The Killers, Borrowed Beams of Light as The Clash and Hunter Smith and the Dead Men as Bruce Springsteen. Saturday night casts kings of Belmont as Pink Floyd, Pantherburn as Violent Femmes, The Eli Cook Band as Nirvana, Sinclarity as U2, Superunknown as Tool and Evil Eye as Fu Manchu. A mere $15 gets you into both nights, which should tide you over on Spinal Tap-style humor until next Halloween weekend comes around.

 Borrowed Beams of Light lusting for life at last year’s Mock Star’s Ball. 

Tonight, UVA’s Dance Program puts on a second performance of its Fall Experimental Dance Concert, which is made up of a number of short pieces by student and faculty choreographers. According to a press release, the show “reflects a multitude of artistic visions from exploring various states of mind and trance, to the amusing dynamics between a couple at an evening party, to manifesting a sense of play and harnessing youthful energy.” If that’s not enough to bring you out to Culbreth, know that all three of the people this writer knows who attended last night’s performance are going again tonight. The concert begins at 8pm, and has a third showing Saturday evening.

If Sunday afternoon finds you in a literary state of mind, New Dominion Bookshop is putting on something a bit out of the ordinary. Poets Charles Wright, Olivia Ellis and Mary duty are coming together to present poems from an anthology called Poems of the American West—think Robert Frost’s “Once By the Pacific,” Charles Bukowski’s “Vegas,” Nanci Griffith’s “Lone Star State of Mind” or Thom Gunn’s “San Francisco Streets.” Fardowner’s favorite Chamomile and Whiskey will be there, putting these real and mythical visions of the American West to music. This grab-bag of a show starts at 4pm, and won’t cost a penny.

C and W recording “Wandering Boots” in a Nelson County Barn.

The Jefferson’s lineup is notable this weekend, both talent-wise and because of its cross-generational appeal. Passion Pit on Friday, Stephen Stills on Saturday, St. Vincent on Sunday—if you’re going to be at one of these, you know who you are. With that, Charles Wright, reading poems on PBS.

An afternoon at Occupy Charlottesville in pictures

At Occupy Charlottesville, the mood is jovial. A few movement members are sitting on a couch in the middle of Lee Park playing music. Others are gathered at the kitchen tent, the only source of fresh food and water for the entire camp. 

The movement recently obtained a renewable 30-day permit to stay in the park, and members are now saying they intend to stay put for as long as they physically can, even through Christmas.

According to a press release entitled "Declaration of Occupy Charlottesville," the group is occupying the park because they "are tired of corporate corruption within our government and its effects within our community." They are also, apparently, "sick of the minority of the population controlling the majority of the wealth, resources and labor equality." 

The declaration also states Occupy’s core values, which include accepting anyone who is interested in joining the cause: "If you are human and want economic and social justice you can take part. Mutual respect, equality, nonviolence, and helping each other "materially, financially, or spiritually"  are other core values.

More and more tents are popping up every day.

Homemade bread pudding.

The camp lists its daily activities on a board that sits at the foot of  Robert E. Lee’s statue. 

Samples of the calendar of events.

The kitchen tent.


The entrace to the camp from Market Street. Chiara Canzi photos.

The faces of Occupy Charlottesville: member profiles

 

Kali Cichon
Age: 25
Occupation: on disability

Why are you here at Occupy Charlottesville?
 I have had problems with anxiety in the past and I felt that my disabilities were preventing me from helping other people, but when I came here and I helped people I was really excited about it. Maybe I am not changing the world, but I am making somebody’s day better and that’s cool. I have been really interested in homeless outreach since I have been here, I met some pretty amazing guys.

We run completely on donations, we have not been asking for any sort of cash donations, a couple of people will pitch in their own money. We have some people who are here who are homeless and we have extra food, so we are willing to share, we have some people here who are just here for the Occupy movement and we are offering them food as well.

One of the interesting things about this movement is that we have all decided that while we identify as a group, we are autonomous. We do have people who are involved in a variety of local issues. It’s funny because a lot of us don’t really agree politically. A problem and great thing about a movement that encompasses 99 percent of the population is that we don’t have one special interest. We are not here to save the polar bears or reduce carbon emissions. The financial crisis is a big part of it, because it has affected everybody, but we are also here knowing that even if we all have individual interests, we are here to make society better for everybody. We are here to make government and the system suit out needs and that means something different from anybody here.

It’s kind of scary to say that I come here to change the world, I don’t even know how to do that. The way that I try to make myself useful is by focusing on the pragmatic, small details: Somebody needs to do dishes, somebody needs to make coffee, somebody needs to clean up the area. It has been amazing how much the community is helping us. I have been disappointed, though. Charlottesville likes to paint itself as an activist town, but I haven’t seen that many people show up and I want people to know that you don’t have to commit your entire life to this movement, if you just stop by for half and hour and show your support. You don’t have to be a martyr for this cause to be part of it.

 

 

 

Brent Palmer
Age: 31
Occupation: unemployed farmer

The biggest thing is to break the grip of big corporations, corporate powers have on politics and right now they fund most of the political campaigns, which means that Congress owes most of their careers to the 1 percent and not to the people who actually vote for them. We just need to get corporate money completely out of politics. Locally, the big reason I am here is to raise awareness of the national issues, but at the same time, we are able to do a lot for the homeless, we are able to call attention to some issues with the parks, really get people thinking about their community.

We actually have a lot of homeless people who have joined our movement and a lot of them are employed and struggling to get ahead and make a better live for themselves with the current state of the economy is impossible.

The big thing is that homeless people aren’t allowed to sleep in the parks. Right now, the ones who are part of the movement have kind of a lucky break, a lot of others can’t because they are not interested in this sort of thing and don’t know about it. They just want to find a place to sleep and that’s a crime. I have heard that there is a lot of talk going around about stopping them from going to the park and panhandle for money, which for many of them is their livelihood. In a time when the economy is this bad, the most important thing that we can do on a local level is take care of the people who are the most affected by it.

Right now you have a lot of people talking about budget cuts, but budget cuts get rid of services that we all need and they destroy jobs. It’s a double hit to the economy. What we need is things that will create jobs and so that way people do have money to buy things like locally farmed goods. As long as people are employed, it’s better for everyone.

For more profiles of Occupy Charlottesville members check out next week’s C-VILLE on newstands Tuesday, November 1. Photos by Chiara Canzi.