Month: November 2011

The holiday lonely hearts club

Tom is walking down the street and, without warning, falls into a deep, narrow hole. He cannot get out. A doctor comes along, sees Tom in the hole and writes out a prescription which drops it down. Then, a minister comes along and writes a prayer and drops it in. Finally, an old friend comes along and immediately jumps into the hole.

Tom exclaims, "Why did you do that?! Now we are both stuck."

"Yes, but I have been down here before and I know how to get out."

The tale made me gasp, saying so much about life’s vicissitudes, empathy and friendship. It is the holiday season and while this story could be applied year round, it has particular resonance now. I can also almost guarantee that in the coming weeks we will see an article on the emotional perils of the Christmas season. For troubled, lonely people there is always the possibility of some good samaritan coming along to offer comfort (letter tributes to acts are newspaper regulars, though they are more likely to be about a car breakdown than an emotional breakdown). But, no, it is mostly for friends or relatives to come through for us when we’re alone. We should always be on alert.

Some insights from Mr. Gordon Lightfoot: "Rainy day people always seem to know when its time to call….they have been down there too/High steeping strutters who land in the gutters sometimes need one too."
 

Categories
News

PHOTO: Thursday is the new Black Friday

(Photo by John Robinson)

To our knowledge, no shoppers were harmed during Charlottesville’s Black Friday, the annual retail revel that follows Thanksgiving in most places that have a cash register. (That’s more than might be said for Los Angeles, California, where one Wal-Mart shopper reportedly blasted a few others with pepper spray.)

Locally, Fashion Square Mall opened at 4am last Friday morning, while Target opened its doors at midnight, despite a national petition for the latter to open at 5am and allow its employees a full day with family members. Toys R Us opened at 9pm on Thanksgiving, and by midnight, Best Buy (pictured) had a long line of customers waiting to snag electronics for the holidays. Nothing beats watching the Yule Log video in high-definition.

 

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Editor's Note: Small cities as antidote to suburban sprawl

11.29.11 When I was a kid growing up in D.C. in the mid-80s, there were bumper stickers around that read, “Don’t Fairfax Loudoun.” If you’ve spent any time in Northern Virginia over the past two decades, you’ll understand the futility of the position. Loudoun got Fairfaxed in the mid-90s. So did Prince William. Fauquier is the frontier now, if there’s such a thing as a frontier anymore. Working farms hardly exist where they once dominated the landscape. The choice is suburban development or high rent trust land.

Over the holiday, my wife and I drove to the horse country northwest of Baltimore to visit my mother and stepfather. He grew up on a farm right in Towson, even had German POWs helping in the family creamery during the war. He used to take the train to visit friends in the city over the weekends. Now that old farm is a state park with a community garden, and it sits in the midst of a host of subdivisions as part of the suburban ring.

You probably see where I’m going. During my lifetime the I-95 corridor, north and south, has saturated to the point that the roads can’t hold the commuter traffic while the Baltimore/D.C. megalopolis has fused in the middle. Over that same period, commuter populations have moved west, pushing the envelopes of development north towards Pennsylvania and south towards… towards us!

Forgive me for stating the obvious and/or for joining the local conversation late. Driving south on U.S. 15 and U.S. 29 from Leesburg is a harsh awakening. Mounds of cleared red dirt line both sides of the highway, even as the mountains come into sharper relief. By the time you get to Hollymead, you’re inured to the site of choked brown streams and ruined fields. There are always more condos, more giant houses on small lots, more big box stores.

As we weigh the costs and benefits of continued development, consider what it means that the small city may be the antidote to suburban sprawl. We can solve poverty without displacing it, have a lively conversation about issues without getting violent, and maintain a sense of community that other places lost a long time ago.—Giles Morris

Categories
Living

Small Bites: This week's restaurant news

Dinner with a delightful duo
To many, there aren’t two sweeter sounding words than “pig” and “whiskey.” At 7pm on Wednesday, December 7, Rapture will marry the two in a five-course meal that stars the pig from hock to hoof and the drink from single malt to bourbon. A call to 293-9526 and $59 earns you a spot at this squeal-worthy dinner.

Pho sho
It’s Anthony Bourdain’s ultimate comfort food and something that has evaded our little town until now: pho. That Vietnamese noodle soup that hits every tastebud and straddles the line between chewing with slurping is coming to West Main Street by way of Vu Nguyen, owner of Zinc. Keep your eye on the prize.

Only pho a night
For you instant gratification types, head to Ten on Sunday, December 4 from 6-10pm, where Executive Chef Pei Chang will be serving pho (along with other noodles, banh mi, dumplings, and pork belly buns) at a pop-up restaurant he’s calling Handsome Boy Noodles. Chang hopes to pop up regularly—giving our local chefs and cooks a little room to flex their creativity.

In the meantime
If you can’t wait for pho to get your slurp on, head to the corner of Garrett and Second Street near the ACAC round about lunchtime on Mondays and Fridays for a noodle bowl from the Whole Foods Market truck. Choose your noodle, protein, veggies, and sauce and you’ve got yourself a lunch for under $10.

Categories
Living

The joy of small pours, carafes and half bottles

Americans are becoming a wine savvy bunch. Last year, we drank France under the table, becoming the world’s largest consumer of wine. Vino has become the beverage of choice at restaurants, too. More and more restaurants are recognizing this by offering flexible wine lists that reward diners with the opportunity to try several wines over the course of an evening.

When Steve Dowd, general manager and sommelier at Commonwealth Restaurant and Skybar, was working on his wine list for the restaurant’s September opening, he added a dozen full bottles that could be ordered as half bottles. The equivalent of two generous glasses of wine, a half bottle allows a couple, for example, to each have a glass of white with appetizers and then each have a glass of red with entrées, spending the same, or even less than they would if they bought a whole bottle. In Dowd’s case, these wines would be too expensive as by-the-glass pours, but still wines that many people would appreciate the chance to try.

So what if another table doesn’t order that second half of the bottle that night or even the night after? Commonwealth uses a wine preservation system called Vinfinity, which hooks up to the bar’s soda gun and vacuums the appropriate amount of air from each bottle before it’s sealed with a rubber stopper. If the wines are vacuumed after every pour (which Dowd and his staff do), they stay fresh for about two weeks.

At tavola, Michael Keaveny’s cozy Italian trattoria in Belmont, any of the dozen or so wines offered by the glass can also be ordered as a carafe, which amounts to about two and a half glasses and is less expensive than ordering two glasses of the same wine. Manager Tracey Love sees a lot of parties of four ordering a carafe between them to sip while waiting for a table or looking at the menu.

“It’s convivial because you are sharing with others—and pouring from an open container is less fussy than a bottle,” said Love. Tavola uses a hand pump to store open wines, but because the carafe wines are also by-the-glass wines, they have no problem selling the remaining half before it goes past its prime.

With an 800-bottle, 32-page wine list under his purview, Keswick Hall sommelier Richard Hewitt has a lot of open containers to keep track of. The restaurant doesn’t sell carafes, but they do offer about two dozen 375 milliliter bottles, which offer the same flexibility for diners but without the cost savings. (The packaging of half bottles dictates prices just above half the price of a full bottle.) Hewitt will, however, pour a half glass of something for you to try, although he doesn’t advertise this service. You read it here first, folks.

Siips Wine & Champagne Bar offers a half glass (3 oz.) pour in addition to a full glass (6 oz.) of their 75-plus list of sparkling, white, rosé, and red wines. They also give diners the choice of a 1 oz. or 2 oz. pour of their ports and dessert wines. Oftentimes, an ounce is all you need of these high-octane wines and the price of the smaller pour sweetens the deal.

At Tastings of Charlottesville, Bill Curtis will pour you a half glass and features a flight or two every weekend with three to four wines side by side for $10-12. It’s a fun and economical way to compare wines from the same region or wines made from the same grape. Recently, for instance, he grouped a Serbian gamay, a Morgon (gamay from Beaujolais) and an American gamay together for $10. You’re bound to get a lesson or story from Curtis thrown in there too.

I’d love to see more restaurants offering half glasses, carafes, and flights. Variety is the spice of life and especially fun when that variety comes in the shape of wine.

Uranium mining forces private choices

Take a look at this story from Natural Resources News Source, which investigates the background of the proposed uranium mining in Southside Virginia. The story behind Virginia Uranium, the company that aims to do the mining, is important in its own right. But I’m most fascinated by the first section, in which two local residents talk about their decisions to allow mining on their land, or not.

Having private landowners make this kind of choice is a very strange situation. The potential effects of mining–air and water pollution among them–would be problems for the region at large. Yet the gatekeepers of these common assets are put in a position of weighing their own economic interests against a somewhat abstract communal good.

One source in the story, Bill Speiden, sums it up thus: “It would be nice to become a millionaire off of the deal, but I couldn’t in good conscience risk my neighbors’ downstream water supply and clean air.”

How many of us would make that choice? How many of us could afford to?

I’m seeing a similar conundrum play out in the hydrofracking boom that’s come to my hometown in southwestern Pennsylvania. A neighbor of my dad’s signed a lease with the gas company, and now my dad’s formerly pastoral view contains an enormous gas well on a flattened ex-hilltop. Worse than the aesthetics are the threats to drinking water.

There’s a new well near my mom’s house, too. Drillers there are in the process of burning off the first portion of gas before they begin collecting the liquid gold. This means that every night, from my mom’s kitchen, a towering flame lights up the horizon, making a sound like a jet engine. It’s literally hellish.

Extractive industries are not good to live with. But for individual people, personal wealth can be an offer too good to refuse. When states allow companies to make that offer, they essentially guarantee the degradation of the wealth we hold in common.

Categories
Arts

This week in T.V.

"Mystery Movie Night" 

Tuesday and Wednesday 8pm, TNT

Given TNT’s success with original and recycled crime procedurals (“The Closer,” “Bones,” “Rizzoli & Isles,” those never-ending “Law & Order” marathons), it only makes sense that the cable network would stick to a proven formula when making made-for-TV movies. The Mystery Movie Night slate will feature six original films airing over the next four weeks, all of them based on thrillers by best-selling crime/suspense novelists and featuring solid, recognizable casts. Innocent is up first on Tuesday, with Bill Pullman as a judge charged with the murder of his wife. Ricochet follows Wednesday at 9pm with John Corbett as a cop who starts an affair with the wife of the corrupt judge he’s investigating (Gary Cole).

 

"Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show"

Tuesday 10pm, CBS

I am having the worst time getting into the holiday spirit this year, but there’s one trick guaranteed to make me the jolliest bastard this side of the North Pole: the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. Pretty girls! Wearing ridiculous outfits! They smile and wave and blow kisses! It’s all good, clean, giggly, jiggly fun, and I spend the whole show grinning and clapping to myself. And while it’s true that the star wattage of the Angels has dipped substantially since the days of Tyra and Heidi, you’ll still get Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrosio, Miranda Kerr, and other tall, leggy women in their underpants. Cee Lo Green was initially announced as the musical guest but has been replaced by Kanye West, Nicki Minaj, and Maroon 5. Upgrade!

 

“Neverland” 

Sunday and Monday 9pm, Syfy

Syfy’s original mini-series projects have historically been a mixed bag. For every “Battlestar Galactica” (which led to the genius series re-envisioning of the sci-fi property) and Oz-set “Tin Man” (majorly flawed, but with more good than bad) there have been some serious stinkers. This new project sticks to the modern reimagining of a classic property by offering a prequel take on J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” The set up sees young Peter as a Dickensian pickpocket working for Mr. Hook (Rhys Ifans, soon to play The Lizard in The Amazing Spider-Man), who sends Peter and his gang to steal a magical artifact that spirits them all away to a wacked-out fantasy world. There they come into contact with fairies (Tinker Bell is voiced by Keira Knightley), pirates searching for the secret of eternal youth (including Bob Hoskins and “Pushing Daisies” alum Anna Friel), and assorted other pieces of weirdness.

Old Coca-Cola building on Preston to undergo historic rehabilitation

The CityCampus Biotechnology Center on Preston Avenue, the new tenant of the historic Coca-Cola Bottling Company building, may become a catalyst for the creation of an “urban neighborhood,” according to its owners.

The vision for the space is one of a center for innovation and entrepreneurship, said Martin Chapman, co-owner along with Madeleine Watkins and President of Indoor Biotechnologies, Inc. He added that being “a beacon for historic rehabilitation” was just as important.

"The development of this space is really predicated on the fact that functional wet lab space is really not available pretty much anywhere in the state of Virginia," said Chapman. "So, we think we are fulfilling a huge unmet need for this kind of activity."

The old Coca-Cola Bottling Company building is the largest art deco structure in the city, and, at almost 40,000 square feet, it was deemed the perfect stage for the creation of a biotechnology hub close to Downtown Charlottesville with Indoor Biotechnologies as its anchor tenant.

More after the photos.

Rendering: the building’s entrance with broad staircase.

Rendering: the courtyard with a translucent roof.

According to Chapman, who presented the vision at City Space this afternoon to an audience of elected officials, scientists, entrepreneurs and architects, CityCampus will provide a "stimulus for economic development" with the estimated creation of 75 to 80 jobs in the project’s first phase and more than 150 total when the second phase is completed. 

In the first phase, the building will undergo a complete rehab, under the watchful eye of UVA Professor Daniel Bluestone, Director of the Historic Preservation Program, to create wet lab and office space in addition to an open office area, much like Donwtown’s Open Space. The second phase includes the construction of a new building in the adjacent parking lot, adding 30,000 square feet.

The design, by architects UVA Professor William Sherman and Willard Scribner of SMBW Architects, will include a new entrance highlighted by a large-scale staircase and a translucent roof overlooking the courtyard. One of the existing loading and trucking docks will be the new home of an indoor coffee shop.

Sherman, founder of OpenGrounds, an upcoming collaborative and interdisciplinary space at UVA, said that CityCampus will “create the capacity for many possible futures” for the building and establish a culture that values connections between disciplines, in line with the University’s new administration’s goal of creating a "more fluid ecosystem across the University, between external partners," said Sherman.

The idea is to have CityCampus open to the community for events and arts exhibitions. Chapman also mentioned that since the center will include incubator space for new and rising technologies, he envisions weekly seminars with invited or local speakers to fulfill that purpose.

"We forsee this not as a sort of fortress biotech research park," said Chapman. "We want this to be an open space so that we can have events going on, art projects going on, film projects going on and you’ll see that there will be plenty of space that we can make that kind of thing happen."

In terms of green features, Scribner said the building will be sustainable “in every way,” striving for a minimum of LEED silver.

The timeline for the project is contingent upon securing financing. Although Chapman said that one of the advantages for investors in CityCampus are state and federal tax credits, he estimates the construction to begin in October of 2012, after the architectural design and engineering are complete.  

Categories
Arts

Melancholia; R, 136 minutes; Vinegar Hill Theatre

It will require a certain disposition to see it as such, but in a way, writer-director Lars von Trier’s gloriously glum, robustly romantic new film Melancholia is the perfect post-Thanksgiving movie. It’s the anti-Muppets.

Kirsten Dunst received the Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress award for her performance in Melancholia, director Lars von Trier’s latest beautiful and frustrating epic, in which a cosmic catastrophe serves as the backdrop for a troubled wedding ceremony. Photo courtesy Magnolia Pictures.

Here, as an illuminating proxy for the filmmaker, Kirsten Dunst plays a new bride suffering from corrosively placid depression. Her populous and peculiar wedding party copes with that fact, and with a rogue planet, called Melancholia, that may or may not be on a collision course with Earth.

Spoiler alert: It is. But von Trier shows the crash right up front, in an extraordinarily strange and beautiful overture that also introduces what must be the best cinematic application of Wagner’s prelude to Tristan and Isolde since Bernard Herrmann riffed it into the score to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. This opening, especially, makes Melancholia so outwardly mesmerizing that its rickety construction and lazy characterization almost don’t matter. Almost.

Claire and Justine are sisters, and relative opposites. Justine, the blonder and curvier and more impulsive one, is played by Dunst. Naturally, Charlotte Gainsbourg’s Claire is darker and sharper and more responsible. Each sister gets a chapter named for her. In the movie’s first half, Claire keeps things together, like Justine’s otherwise chaos-tending wedding reception. In the second half, by the time she finds Justine basking naked in the nighttime glow of Melancholia, Claire is leaning toward chaos herself.

Some context is supplied, but not much. The sisters’ father (John Hurt) is a weary drunkard. Their mother (Charlotte Rampling) seethes with contempt for the institution of marriage, and says so in her wedding toast. The groom (Alexander Skarsgård) does his best to keep grinning and tolerating.

The reception, and all action thereafter, occurs at the enormous country estate owned by Claire’s husband (Kiefer Sutherland), a wealthy and tightly wound man who appreciates astronomy and tells everyone, unconvincingly, that the approaching planet poses no threat. But as the physical embodiment of the mood that ruined Justine’s wedding, how could it not pose a threat?

Matters are made stranger by a vague sense that the actors haven’t agreed on just what style they’re working in, but together they’ve cemented a career capstone for the filmmaker: this apotheosis of luminous, oddly absorbing tedium.

So maddening and spellbinding a thing could only come from von Trier. Having taken up Hamlet’s temperament as some sort of national responsibility, this melancholy Dane even goes so far as to position one of his heroines in homage to John Millais’ famous portrait of Ophelia afloat in a river and just about to drown. It is but one of several exquisite images sent forth to do battle with the general air of eff-it-all nihilism. Although grandiose, Melancholia is not pretentious. It takes up its own self-issued challenges with complete sincerity.

Tree work on U.S. 29N may cause delays

PRESS RELEASE: VDOT–– Tree trimming on Route 29 (Seminole Trail) in Albemarle County will occur over the next two weeks, causing minor delays for the traveling public.

Beginning today at noon, a contractor for the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) will be performing tree trimming work on Route 29 northbound, between Route 643 (Polo Grounds Road) and the Greene County line. The work will continue throughout the week, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily, with left and right lane closures.

Once Route 29 north is complete, the contractor will begin trimming trees along the Route 29/250 Bypass, northbound and southbound, from Route 654 (Barracks Road) to Interstate 64. Left and right lane closures will occur from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. daily.

Motorists should be alert for mobile work zones and equipment and workers near the travel lanes. Weather permitting, the work will finish by December 9.

Real-time road conditions and weather forecasts are available on VDOT’s traffic and travel Web site, www.511Virginia.org. The site also has live traffic camera images for many major highways, including Interstate 64, I-66 and Routes 29 and 250 in Central Virginia. Motorists can call 511 from any telephone in Virginia for road and traffic conditions on all major highways in the state. Call 1-800-FOR-ROAD (367-7623) 24 hours a day to report highway-related problems or request information about Virginia’s highways.