Month: February 2013

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News

iPad app created by eighth grade French students has already gone global

St. Anne’s-Belfield eighth grade French students created 2Lingua Kids, an iPad app that teaches basic conversational French phrases. Photo: Mackenzie Dilbeck

The use of tablets and laptops in middle and high schools has created controversy in Charlottesville city schools, but St. Anne’s-Belfield School French teacher Karine Boulle has reason to rave about iPads. After 17 sessions of intense writing, translating, and coding, Boulle’s class of eighth graders completed 2Lingua Kids, a bilingual iPad app that teaches basic French phrases through a historical fiction story. Since Apple approved the free app, it has been downloaded in 26 different countries.

2Lingua Kids follows descendants of Thomas Jefferson and Louis XVI through Charlottesville, from the airport to Monticello to UVA. The app doesn’t include a lengthy vocabulary list or grueling grammar lessons—just casual conversation that is predominantly English, with French phrases and expressions scattered throughout, which can all be found in a glossary at the end. Questions asked in English may be answered in French, and vice versa, and users can tap each phrase to hear it spoken aloud.

“It helps you look at language in a different way,” Boulle said. “It’s not just a direct translation.”

St. Anne’s students use technology in and out of the classroom, from PowerPoint presentations to online class discussions for homework. Boulle was thrilled when all teachers received iPads last year, but she’s careful not to rely too heavily on gadgets. Everybody learns differently, she said, and she created the app project to incorporate skills beyond language and technology.

For Boulle’s students, the app project was daunting in the beginning.

“We were all very scared,” said eighth grader Joseph Milbank. “It seemed like quite an intense project.”

The class split into small groups and worked almost nonstop for more than a month to tackle the assignment. In addition to creating a dialogue with a substantial list of French expressions, Milbank and his classmates traveled around the city taking photos of landmarks, brushed up on the area’s history and culture, recorded themselves speaking each French phrase in the story, and learned basic coding to put the app together.

Milbank, who grew up with a French nanny, said he was amazed by how much more of the language he had learned by the end of the project.

The kids’ app is based on the original 2Lingua French, which Boulle—who’s fluent in English and French, and dabbles in Spanish, German, and Chinese—created last summer with inspiration from her family. A native of France who’s spent the last 22 years teaching language courses in the U.S., she lives in a bilingual household where she, her husband, and their preteen daughter constantly switch back and forth between English and French, “sometimes even in the same sentence.” Even the family dogs, which Boulle said she had intentionally tried to speak to in only English—“because a house sitter would probably speak English”—understand and respond to the word “walk” in both languages.

“Some things are better said in English, and some things are better said in French,” she said. “You can say exactly what you want to say, and just choose what works best.”

Categories
Arts

Thurston Moore keeps thrashing in his latest project, Chelsea Light Moving

Sonic Youth main man Thurston Moore (top left) finds his wings with Chelsea Light Moving. The band of friends plays the Southern on Monday. Photo credit: Carlos van Hijfte.

Wasted on the young

Art rock legends Sonic Youth tentatively called it quits in 2011, but the band’s key members have remained characteristically busy with the usual slew of side projects and collaborations. Guitarist/singer Thurston Moore’s newest group, Chelsea Light Moving, is backed by a band of his protégés and collaborators, including Keith Wood of Hush Arbors (a Virginia native), violinist and bassist Samara Lubelski, and drummer John Moloney, best known for his work with the experimental group Sunburned Hand of the Man, who often walks the fine line between transcendently moving and genuinely confusing.

“All of us had played together before in different combinations, mainly associated with Thurston’s label, Ecstatic Peace!,” Moloney explained. “We were always playing together, seeing each other on tour, crashing at the same places after a show, so for Thurston I think he wanted a band of people who were already friends.”

Chelsea Light Moving’s self-titled debut (due out on March 5 via Matador Records) will come as no great surprise to followers of Moore’s work. The album is heavy with thrashing, jangly punk riffs, underscoring Moore’s trademark vocals, which alternate between wry beat poet commentary and corny classic rock-style exclamations that would almost seem sarcastic if Moore wasn’t still able, at age 54, to imbue them with a raw, optimistic teenage energy.

“If Sonic Youth were The Beatles, Thurston would be Paul McCartney,” Moloney observed. “And I heard him say somewhere, he was talking to somebody and he said, ‘this is like my Wings.’”

Of course comparisons to Sonic Youth are obvious, but more than anything, the album resembles Moore’s 1994 solo effort Psychic Hearts. “The guitar tuning is pretty much the exact same as Psychic Hearts,” Moloney said. “We know basically that whole record, and there’s seven or eight songs or so that we’ll reliably pull from during the set. The [songs on the new record] are completely composed; if there’s any improv happening, it will happen when we play the Psychic Hearts songs.”

I was curious what percentage of the newer songs were fully pre-written by Moore, and how much was arranged by the band working together. “He’s just a riff-master of the highest quality,” Moloney said. “I’ve never played with anybody who can come up with all of those riffs off the top of his head. We started out just jamming in my practice space in the back of the record store; it’s very easy, we all make suggestions. He came in with those parts and then we built it together. [Thurston]’s process is so strange for me, because I never see him pick up a guitar when he’s not onstage. I never see him write anything. He’s the magic man, no one knows if he’s been sitting on ideas, or where these riffs come from.”

When asked if it was a major shift to play comparatively more straightforward rock songs than the improvisational, experimental noise jams Moloney has played in the past, he answered “Not at all. Rock ‘n’ roll is exactly what I want to do. I grew up listening to rock ‘n’ roll. The improv/psych stuff was just a product of our environment at the time, and we still do that. We grew up in times when everyone was into everything— you weren’t just a metalhead or an indie rocker, we were all listening to all of it together.”

I related that one of Moloney’s occasional collaborators, Mick Flower (of Vibracathedral Orchestra and Skullflower), had also recently told me that he saw no distinction between playing mellow country-folk and ear-bleeding abstract noise. Moloney responded “Exactly! When we hang out at Mick’s place in Leeds, we basically just listen to Neil Young records until somebody passes out.”

“Sonic Youth is one of my favorite bands of all time,” Moloney said. “I’ve watched [Sonic Youth drummer] Steve Shelley and studied his style. I’ve always wanted to play drums in Sonic Youth, so doing this is kind of my chance.”

Chelsea Light Moving plays at the Southern Café and Music Hall on Monday, March 4 at 8pm. Tickets are $12-15. Talk Normal opens.

WarHen’s house

WarHen Records—named for its founders, Warren Parker and Michael Hennigar—is relatively new, but has quickly made a mark on local music, releasing records by Sarah White, The Fire Tapes, and Red Rattles. “I still love buying music, especially on vinyl,” Parker said. “It sounds great, the artwork is big and I love having my records take up an entire wall at my house. I always thought it would be really cool to release a record, too, so starting a label was an idea that I had toyed with for a while, but I never really found the right partner with whom to join forces until Mike expressed interest.”

“Warren and I have been hanging out for quite a few years now and we’ve both had a lot of the same musical interests, but we also got each other into a lot of new stuff,” Hennigar added. “We’ve had a lot of interest from bands around town, which has given us a great opportunity to put out really cool records.”

WarHen will host a local showcase at the Southern on Saturday, March 2, featuring The Fire Tapes, Sarah White’s new band Josephine, Red Rattles, and Dwight Howard Johnson. Tickets are $8, and the doors open at 8pm.

Categories
News

Should VDOT reroute the Bypass around graves of slave descendants?

The grave of Jesse Scott Sammons, a descendant of the Hemings family of Monticello, was in the path of the Western Bypass. Photo by John Robinson

Jesse Scott Sammons was born a free black man in 1853, eight years before the Civil War and 10 years before Emancipation. A descendant of Monticello slave Mary Hemings—sister of Sally—Sammons attended what is now Charlottesville’s Jefferson School. He went on to become the first principal of the first high school for African-American students in Albemarle County. He died in 1901 a respected educator and community leader and was buried on land he owned near the south fork of Ivy Creek. Sammons’ headstone, along with three others, is still standing today in a wooded area that winds among middle class residences on Lambs Road just outside the Charlottesville city limits. It’s also standing in the proposed path of the controversial Western Bypass, and while a state study says the cemetery isn’t important enough to warrant shifting plans for the road, others say differently.

The burial site made news in late January when the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) first reported it would have to be moved to a new location to make way for the Bypass, which was first suggested in 1979 and resurrected in 2011. Since the announcement, one of Sammons’ descendants has come forward to ask VDOT to reconsider.

“The Commonwealth knew about the cemetery since before they purchased it, but to my knowledge, no state actor made any effort to systematically try to contact people that are related [to the interred],” said Erica Caple James, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology anthropology professor who is a descendant of the family and in touch with others in the line. “I have written to say, ‘Please take no action until family members have had a chance to weigh in.’”

VDOT spokesperson Lou Hatter said discovering family plots during roadway development is not uncommon, and the department has “policies in place for situations like this.” Locations of historical importance might warrant rerouting a roadway. But if a cemetery in the way of a development is deemed to lack significant historical value—and in some cases even when it does have such distinction—it’s the plot that gets relocated, not the project.

Government agencies use eligibility for the National Register of Historic Places as the benchmark for determining a cemetery’s importance. The firm that surveyed the Sammons plot for VDOT, Cultural Resources, Inc., found the cemetery was not a candidate for listing based on the register’s four criteria: association with significant historical events, association with a person of great importance, exemplification of high-end craftsmanship, or potential for significant archaeological resources.

A spokesperson for the Virginia Department of Historic Resources said the department’s review of the report “is in process.”

“VDOT is working with the Virginia Department of Historic Resources to complete the cultural resource investigation that is required of all such cemeteries,” Hatter said. “The final determination has not yet been made.”

James, along with several local historians, found fault with parts of the publicly released report, and questioned its methodology. Because African-Americans have lacked the power to impact the written record, she said, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to proving their historical importance.

“It seems to me the report may have been deliberately hastily done so as to produce no other conclusion than that the cemetery—viewed in exclusion of the physical context in which it is located, the history and contributions of the persons buried there and of that specific region of Albemarle County—could not be categorized as possessing ‘national historic value,’” she said.

Cinder Stanton, a retired Monticello historian widely regarded as the top authority on the area’s slave history, has also questioned the validity of the report, calling it “superficial and full of factual errors.”

“This was not just one cemetery and…one man,” Stanton said. “We think it is very important and has a lot of historical significance.”

According to Stanton, Sammons was one player among many in a large commercial hub that served as a safe haven for African-Americans making their way in the new society that emerged after the Civil War, and a member of a family that left an important legacy here. After emancipation, Sammons’ father Rollins was able to purchase a portion of the Hydraulic Mill, the enterprise that gave the community its name. In what’s been called an “imposing” brick home adjacent to the mill, Rollins and Sarah Bell Scott Sammons, a direct descendent of the renown Hemings slave family, raised their 12 children, one of whom was Jesse Scott.

In addition to his career as an educator, Jesse Scott Sammons was active in politics, running for a position in the Virginia General Assembly in 1880. While he failed to win election, he later served as secretary of the local Republican Coalition Club and held a state-level office in the Baptist church. Along the way, Sammons and his wife had two sons and two daughters, including Eva Sammons, who in 1929 married George Ferguson, the first African-American physician to sustain a practice in Albemarle County.

Ferguson’s grave is also located in the Sammons family cemetery in the proposed path of the Western Bypass.

Still, the report commissioned for VDOT says that while the Sammons family itself might well have been historically significant, the physical cemetery isn’t necessarily integral to their story.

“There’s not a malicious intent [toward the family], at least on the part of the agencies,” Department of Historic Resources spokesperson Randy Jones said. “Everybody wants to determine these things up front as part of the environmental review process.”

Hatter said VDOT intends to do all it can going forward to accommodate the desires of the Sammons and Ferguson family members, none of whom other than James have raised concerns with the department.

It’s unclear how the families’ increasing involvement might influence the course of the long and winding story of the Western Bypass, plans for which are still awaiting final approval from the Federal Highway Administration. But Charlottesville City Councilor Dede Smith, a vocal opponent of the roadway, said the more important story is that of the African-American community that once thrived in its proposed path.

“I see the Western Bypass as a great opportunity to tell the story of this community,” she said. “It’s a change in direction of the very negative way the [African-American] story is usually told. I hope it makes people pay attention to this very rich history.”—Shea Gibbs

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The Editor's Desk

Editor’s Note: Contemporary art and the 40 year problem

In the beginning, the city’s visual arts community had two centers, Second Street Gallery and the McGuffey Art Center. The acropolis and the agora. The gallery was a place to recognize inspiration, to elevate its status through the ceremony of formal exhibition. The center was a pure democracy in an old schoolhouse, a rabbit’s warren of creative industry that celebrated process. In the intervening years collaborators and competitors, or both, depending on how you look at these things, have filled in the landscape. For the rest of us it’s meant an embarrassment of riches. The Bridge/PAI, Piedmont Council for the Arts, New City Arts Initiative and other arts nonprofits push programming forward, all the while accounting for the convergence of art media, while established galleries like Chroma Projects and Les Yeux du Monde are hanging shows worthy of bigger markets.

This week’s feature  celebrates Second Street Gallery’s 40th anniversary, which it recognized February 11, and tells the story of how a contemporary art nonprofit founded as a rejection of the status quo became an institution with the power to define it and the mission to resist it. I’ve written about our 40 year problem a few times: the idea that the cultural and social problems identified in the early ’70s are essentially still unresolved. When Second Street Gallery was created, its board wanted it to contest the commercialization of the art market, on the one hand, and set the bar for local artists, on the other. Democratizer and Tastemaker.

Those of you in the academy may boil in your blood when you hear someone say they do something old “with a modern spin,” but I’m sort of tickled by it. Modernity came and went. So did postmodernity, and now we are at a loss for words as we try to describe where we are in relation to our past. “Contemporary” is a slippery mooring. As the movements of one generation have turned into the institutions of the next, the Internet has thrown Pandora’s box wide open. These days anybody can kickstart a cultural nonprofit with a few clicks of the mouse. The problem? We never know if we’re drinking the nectar of the gods or sipping air at our own imaginary tea parties.

Categories
Arts

Fast forward: Second Street Gallery celebrates 40 years of contemporary art for the people

Local artist Clay Witt moved his studio into Second Street for the month of February to curate additions to his exhibition “In Thunder, Lightning, or in Rain” on site. Photo: John Robinson

“Perhaps we aren’t being controversial enough,” Steve Taylor, the director of Second Street Gallery, joked during a recent interview after explaining that no one had walked out of a show in a huff recently.

Beneath the joke lay the inherent tension in Taylor’s job: Second Street’s mission for the past 40 years has been to bring contemporary art to the people at no cost. The task involves keeping a nonprofit board engaged and motivated, raising an operating budget, selecting exhibitions that appeal to the general public in a small Virginia city, and attracting the work of cutting edge artists from around the world without a huge budget and major art market as bait.

“We show work that you wouldn’t otherwise see,” Taylor explained. “Part of our job is not just to open eyes but to open minds. . . If somebody says, ‘I hate contemporary art,’ I’ll say, ‘Well what kind of art do you like and why?’ I’m not going to try to convince them to like something they don’t like . . . You can’t convince people to like things, but you can open their minds to the idea behind it.”

Second Street was founded as Central Virginia’s first artist-run alternative art space on February 11, 1973 by a group of artists and academics searching for a place to show their work where survival did not depend on making sales. The gallery, one of the longest surviving nonprofit organizations in the nation focused solely on the art and ideas of the time, has held 10 to 15 shows per year for the past four decades, approximately 500 exhibitions of painting, photography, and installations in total.

Second Street Gallery Director Steve Taylor stands at the intersection of compelling, cutting edge art and the Charlottesville community. Photo: John Robinson

While the organization’s mission has remained remarkably stable over that period, the times they have a-changed. The gallery has moved three times, before finding a permanent home in 2003 at 115 Second St. where they now share a building created specifically for the gallery, and for fellow arts nonprofits Light House and Live Arts. Downtown has gone from a little-used sleepy corner of the city to its thriving cultural center. And the fashion sense of Second Street’s board of directors has, well, um, altered.

“When we look at the photograph of the founders of Second Street Gallery in 1973, it’s like they are dressed in period costume, and have just come from a Jefferson Airplane concert. Perhaps they have,” said Dean Dass, a local artist and an honorary board member at Second Street. “It is also like they have just come from a Vietnam War protest. Perhaps they have. The founding of Second Street Gallery in 1973 has to be seen as part of a worldwide movement of the creation of cooperatives and alternative spaces.”

As a UVA third year who has interned at another Downtown gallery, Chroma Projects, for the past three years, I have been actively involved in the Charlottesville art world since I arrived from Dallas. I found First Fridays during my first months of school and by last summer I had announced my intention to become an art curator, much to my parents’ chagrin. Whenever I want to feel close to the big city art scene I left behind, or when someone asks me about the local art scene, I usually direct them to Second Street, because it democratizes art. It knocks art off of its metaphoric, elevated pedestal, bringing world class exhibitions into an approachable, intimate space.

The gallery is a place where people can interact, view, question, and experience the art and ideas of our moment without the pressure to buy something and without looking over your shoulder at an NYU grad student with French eyeglass frames. It isn’t even 10′ from a bus stop on Water Street.

A local artist in his own right (painter and photographer), a member of McGuffey Art Center, and a past board member of Second Street, Taylor knows the mission of his gallery is to instigate a conversation, not to make money. And, in some ways, he feels the best way to gauge his performance is to look at the faces of the people who see his exhibitions. Nonplussed? No good. Wide-eyed? Right on.

“Well I love a show with technical bravado and ones that catch you off guard and make you think. I think that’s what we do. Hopefully we are a bit of a visual feast when we can be. But, when we can be visual for the soul, that is when we do our best work,” he said.

Pop art mass producer Steve Keene prepares his assembly line of plywood “canvases” for his Second Street show in 2008. “It’s a performance,” said Keene about his work. Photo: Courtesy Second Street Gallery

Take the Daniel Canogar show “Reboot,” which exhibited in March of 2012. Second Street volunteers had to clean up after the gallery’s annual family day, which saw 350 people in the space; take down a previous exhibition; and transform the place into a light-proof box to showcase the Spanish artist’s magical installations of light projected over ghostly forms created from 70 pounds of multicolored computer wires, purchased and scrounged locally.

The results were worth the 460 hours of volunteer time logged during the monumental six-day effort, since visitation doubled from a monthly average of 600 to close to 1,200 people. It also attracted strong financial support from the Charlottesville Area Community Foundation and a host of individual donors.

Children and adults viewed the Canogar show on various intellectual levels. “It was like a magic garden for them talking about fairies and fireflies. And later, we had a group of older men talking about chaos theory and brain synapses,” Taylor said.

Not every show is a smash hit, though, and some are openly disliked.

“We don’t shy away from that. Not everyone is going to love every show. I don’t love every show. Some shows are more easy to access,” Taylor said.

Anne Slaughter, an early board member at Second Street and a founding member of the McGuffey Art Center, attended the gallery’s opening night, a proper vantage point from which to evaluate the success of an idea she watched evolve into a pillar of the arts community she loves.

“It has survived some very lean times financially. A lot of galleries close. But it has maintained its quality. It has always maintained its national character,” she said. “It’s quite an accomplishment.”

Categories
News

City’s marijuana possession ordinance stalls, but debate isn’t over

Charlottesville’s City Council killed an ordinance that would have scrapped jail time for simple pot possession, saying local policy already makes marijuana offenses a low priority. File photo.

When the Charlottesville City Council let die a proposed ordinance that would have officially eliminated jail time for first-time simple possession of marijuana in the city last week, it signaled the end of a recent push by would-be reformers to write into law the city’s relatively lenient pot policy. But legal observers say it’s likely not the end of the argument.

Charlottesville attorney Jeff Fogel has long advocated for local measures that would scale back a local law enforcement response to pot. He originally suggested possession of under half an ounce be made a Class 4 misdemeanor—carrying only a $250 fine, as opposed to the state punishment of a $500 fine and up to 30 days in jail —for first and any subsequent offenses.

But under last week’s proposal, anything beyond a first offense would be a Class 1 misdemeanor, which carries the possibility of up to a year in jail. That defeats the purpose of the reform, said Fogel.

“The question was, ‘Was it appropriate to send anybody to prison?’” he said. “And it’s not.”

Others who were more cautious about crafting a local possession ordinance objected on different grounds.

“Generally, it’s not a good thing for a community to carve itself out as an exception to the application of otherwise enforced state law,” said Charlottesville Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Chapman. Prosecution of simple possession isn’t a high priority here, he said, and those charged can usually leave court without a conviction. Changing the rules might mean lighter penalties locally, but there could ultimately be more convictions—and some penalties, like loss of driving privileges, would be unavoidable under state law.

Ed McCann, executive director of Virginia’s chapter of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, argued that the city should codify its views.

“We understand that Charlottesville does not generally jail its citizens for marijuana, but we are one police chief away from [doing] that,” he said at last week’s meeting.

“I don’t decide who goes to jail,” said Charlottesville Police Chief Tim Longo—that’s up to the judge. Department policy allows officers to issue citations instead of making arrests for possession, Longo said, “and I can’t imagine another police chief coming in and having the perceived authority to change that.”

Richard Bonnie sees the debate over institutionalizing leniency as an example of changing American attitudes toward marijuana. Bonnie, a UVA law professor, was associate director of the Nixon-era National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, which recommended legalization in 1972. He thinks the conversation is coming full circle.

“It may not be unreasonable to think that the General Assembly may be interested in reducing the penalties,” Bonnie said. Even hard-right Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli has indicated he’s not vehemently opposed to relaxing marijuana laws. At a meeting of young Republicans at UVA earlier this month, he said his opinions were “evolving,” and called recent state referendums legalizing pot interesting federalist experiments.

“I don’t think that there’s any question but that attitudes are shifting,” said Jeff Fogel—though maybe not among local elected officials. The most recent measure didn’t even make it to a vote. Fogel said he’ll keep pushing for change, but for now, “I don’t know who to push with.”

Categories
Living

Foodie classes, new eats, and growlers to go: This week’s restaurant news

File photo.

If you’re hankering for something sweet, you can soon visit Pearl’s Bake Shoppe at 711 W. Main St. Co-owners Laurie Blakey and Laura Condrey specialize in 140 iterations of cupcakes, wedding cakes, macarons, and plenty of other tantalizing baked sundries. This will be their second outpost, after the popularity of their Richmond location, Pearl’s Cupcake. Serving local sweet teeth 1,200 cupcakes daily, with eight standard cupcake flavors, five rotating, plus vegan and gluten-free options. We recommend the Salty Mermaid: vanilla cake topped with chocolate buttercream and sea salt. Soon-to-come yum!

In food and farming news, UVA’s Morven Summer Institute will continue its second year of intensive learning classes at Morven Farm beginning in May, with admission open now. Interactive classes focus on topics such as the “Politics of Food,” taught by professor Paul Freedman, and “Farmers’ Markets and Applied Food Systems Research,” taught by Tanya Denckla Cobb. The classes are worth three credits over 10 days, with class locations spanning most of the 3,000 acres of the farm. For an application and further information, visit uvafoundation.com/morven/summerinstitute.

You may have noticed the transformation of the former Boathouse Restaurant space in the Seminole Square Shopping Center. Soon to be Plaza Azteca, opening on February 27, this is the restaurant chain’s 31st location after its original opening in Hampton Roads. Since 1994, PA has furnished “high-quality attentive service in a comfortable, authentic atmosphere.” Its specialties include table-side guacamole, an extensive wine list featuring many Virginia labels, and a full bar serving (duh) margaritas.

Thirsty after work? Stop by the Everyday Café on Pantops for a fresh craft beer to go. The gas station’s tapping Starr Hill and Devils Backbone brews (to name a couple) for growler fills with your gas purchase. Gives new meaning to the phrase “fill ’er up,” doesn’t it?

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News

Stormwater and attempted abductions: Charlottesville and Albemarle news briefs

Dave Norris (foreground) and fellow city councilors look on as a Charlottesville resident argues against a new stormwater utility fee. Norris was the sole member of Council to vote against the fee last week. Photo by Graelyn Brashear.

Miss a day, miss a lot. Here’s our regular roundup of the latest Charlottesville and Albemarle news briefs, which hits print Tuesdays.

Council approves stormwater utility fee  

The Charlottesville City Council voted 4-1 last Tuesday to enact a utility fee on all property owners that will pay for a long-delayed overhaul of the city’s stormwater system.

Leaders of several local churches organized a last-minute campaign against the fee, saying that it’s unfair to non-taxable nonprofits like theirs. State law prohibits localities from taxing church real estate, but because the new stormwater measure institutes a fee and not a tax, it will apply to all property owners in the city—including churches.

Starting in January of 2014, property owners will be billed twice a year on a monthly charge of $1.20 per 500 square feet of impervious surface, and according to Charlottesville Tomorrow, the city will increase its stormwater funding from $945,000 a year to more than $2.5 million.

City Councilor Dave Norris voted against the fee, saying the increased cost to property owners amounted to a new tax, and that the stormwater update, while important, wasn’t worth the expense.

UVA moves to dismiss professor’s lawsuit

A UVA engineering professor under investigation for cheating the University out of $1 million via his personal consulting business is suing the school for $100,000, claiming UVA police illegally took items during a search of his home, but UVA wants the suit dismissed.

University police began investigating Paul E. Allaire in November after an internal probe raised concerns that he was using resources in a UVA industrial and machinery lab to benefit his own side business, according to The Daily Progress and NBC reports. But Allaire, who has not been charged with a crime, said a recent 10-hour search of his home resulted in the seizure of privileged information. In a three-page response, UVA called the civil suit frivolous and asked for it to be dismissed, and said that it’s not the proper defendant, as Allaire’s property is now in the hands of the Albemarle County Commonwealth’s Attorney.

The Daily Progress reported that while UVA put Allaire on administrative leave last May, he was still listed online last week as director of the Rotating Machinery and Controls Industrial Program, the lab police believe Allaire used for his own benefit.

Suspect in latest UVA assault attempt still at large  

A female UVA student reported an attempted abduction and assault on Grounds last week, the second such incident this academic year.

According to NBC29, police said the student was attempting to hail a cab along Rugby Road around 2:30am on Sunday, February 17, when a car pulled over and she got in. The car continued driving past her residence, and the driver locked the doors and tried to assault her. According to the report, the student kicked the driver and got out of the car.

Four days after the incident, The Hook reported new details about the suspect, describing him as a “tall and chubby” middle-aged Indian man who spoke broken English. The man was driving a dark four-door sedan that was not marked as a taxi, and UVA police are still searching for the individual.

In November, police arrested a 26-year-old man after he grabbed a 19-year-old student walking alone at night and attempted to drag her into his car.

TJPDC and city to hold public housing workshops

The Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission and the City of Charlottesville have scheduled several meetings in the coming months to discuss public housing and development in the city and surrounding counties. The public input will assist the creation of a consolidated plan that will help guide the use of dwindling federal funds over the next five years.

The first meeting will be held at 7pm Thursday, March 7 at the TJPDC’s offices at 407 E. Water St. A public workshop will follow at 3:30pm Wednesday, March 13 in the same location, followed by a public hearing before City Council at 7pm Monday, May 6 at City Hall.—Allie Cooper and C-VILLE writers

Categories
News

What’s coming up in Charlottesville and Albemarle the week of 2/25

Notes from the news desk

Each week, the news team takes a look at upcoming meetings and events in Charlottesville and Albemarle we think you should know about. Consider it a look into our datebook, and be sure to share newsworthy happenings in the comments section.

  • The Ablemarle County Board of Supervisors meets Monday from 6-9pm for a public hearing on the proposed FY2013/14 budget. Read through the budget document here ahead of the meeting. 
  • Both city and county planning commissions gather Tuesday. The Charlottesville Planning Commission meets for a work session from 5:30-8:30pm in Council Chambers at City Hall, where commissioners will go over the chapters of the city’s Comprehensive Plan. The Albemarle County Planning Commission meets from 6-8pm in Lane Auditorium at the County Office Building on McIntire Road. There’s one special use permit on the agenda, in addition to a discussion about rural land use in the county’s own Comprehensive Plan.
  • The city’s bicycle and pedestrian coordinator, Amanda Poncy, will meet with Rose Hill Drive area residents to discuss safety improvements and alternative transportation for the Rose Hill neighborhood at 7pm Wednesday, February 27 in Conference Room 3 of the Thomas Jefferson Health District, 1138 Rose Hill Drive.
  • The next city town hall meeting—a two-hour open public comment session devoted to discussing issues brought forward by residents—will be held from 6-8pm Thursday, February 28 at Clark Elementary, 1000 Belmont Ave. This time, the focus will be on issues in the Belmont-Carlton area.
Categories
Arts

Worst. Oscars. Ever.

Ben Affleck and Bryan Cranston in "Argo," which somehow won Best Picture at the 2013 Academy Awards instead of "Amour," which got the consolation "Best Foreign Film" prize. Photo courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures.

Each year we think the Oscars can’t possibly be worse than the year before. And then each year, it’s so much worse than the year before (except last year; nothing will ever out-worse Billy Crystal and his non-eyebrows).

Straight up: I will pay for the next Academy Awards ceremony if they bring back Franco and Hathaway. The stoned-looking guy and the woman having way too much fun to compensate for the stone-looking guy? SOLD. GET ‘EM BACK.

I’m no Seth McFarlane fan, but—no kidding—I’m not a hater, either. To me, he’s OK. Ted wasn’t great, but it had its moments (the white-trash name scene). “Family Guy” has its moments (Brian and Stewie).

During the Oscars telecast, McFarlane had his moments. Then, sometime around his 40th gay joke or the 40th musical number, he lost me, and the show became the same old tired, hackneyed bologna it always is. McFarlane even started telling jokes about the show’s length.

Yuk yuk! The show is long! Get it? It’s always long! Hey, here’s an idea on how to breathe some life into the tired format: Make the show shorter. That way it will be a) shorter, and b) devoid of lame jokes about how long the show is. Producers, you’ll have to hire more writers to write more jokes, but you have a year and you definitely have the cash. Get to it.

Here are the (slim) highlights: Jennifer Lawrence tripped up the stairs en route to accepting the Academy Award for Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook. I wasn’t so surprised that she tripped, just that it hasn’t happened more often. She handled it with aplomb, and her speech was possibly the only moment of genuine modesty the entire night (lookin’ at you, Hathaway).

Regarding aplomb (sort of), who knew Daniel Day-Lewis had a sense of humor? His Best Actor acceptance speech for Lincoln was full of jokes that were much better than any of McFarlane’s. Perhaps Day-Lewis picked up some humor tips from his father-in-law, comedic playwright Arthur Miller, who wrote The Crucible, Death of a Salesman and the totally hysterical A View from the Bridge.

As with all Academy Awards, there were some head scratchers. Brave wins Best Animated Feature? But it’s two features! The movie director Brenda Chapman wanted and the entirely different movie Pixar wanted. Producers, how about double the statues?

And is it just me or is Bill Westenhofer, who won Best Visual Effects for Life of Pi, the biggest blowhard ever at an awards show? Jaws couldn’t kill that guy. The orchestra played shark’s theme, they cut his microphone and he just kept yapping. Maybe he can create some visual effects in which he doesn’t look like a self-important stooge.

Finally, the best moment of the night was the one truly honest moment: Quentin Tarantino wins Best Original Screenplay for Django Unchained, and then tells everyone that not only is his screenplay ridic-good, but he’s also the best casting director in Hollywood. My ambivalence over Tarantino is dissolved and I’m officially on his side. Hubris like that deserves—nay, demands—our respect.

Oh, and Argo won Best Picture. Spoiler alert: They make it out alive, and it’s not as good as Amour. Until next year, kids.