The Kluge-Ruhe collection offers a special Valentine’s tour highlighting romantic rituals from the land down under. Publicity photo.
Mate call
In an exploration of love’s famed hardiness, the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection is hosting a Valentine’s Day Tour of Aboriginal expressions of love and romance. Exhibits include possum fur skirts, a wooden seagull head with feathered strings, a love story about seven sisters and the man who pursues them becoming stars in the night sky—all rich examples of the desire to share our life with another.
Thursday 2/14 $10, 4:30pm. Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, 400 Worrell Dr. 244-0234.
The camellia is an all-around surprising plant. First of all, this evergreen actually blooms in, of all seasons, winter. Autumn-flowering camellias bloom from November through mid-January. And while spring-blooming camellias aren’t supposed to put out flowers until March or April, “last winter and this winter they’re already blooming” by the third week of January, said Jim Murphy, landscape supervisor for the UVA Medical Center.
So if your winter landscape looks too bleak, consider filling it in with camellias. Fortunately, the time for planting is coming right up. Put your camellias in the ground “anywhere from March 15 until May 15,” said Murphy. However, do ask whether your plants were grown outdoors or in a greenhouse. “If they came from a greenhouse, you don’t want to put them out in March because then we’ll get some freezes and they’ll lose their leaves,” said Murphy.
While you’re chatting with the folks at the nursery, ask them which varieties are available.
Another surprise: Varieties hardy enough to grow here were only developed about 25 years ago. Look for names like Winter’s Beauty, Snow Flurry, and Frost Princess.
Camellias aren’t high-maintenance plants, but they do have a few requirements to grow well. The trickiest part is choosing the site. You’ll need a spot that gets part shade or part sun.
Ideally, plant camellias on the north side of your house (or a wall) to protect them from direct sun.
Test the soil and look for a pH between 5.5 and 6.5. And if your boots get covered in red clay while you’re taking the soil sample, you’ll know you need to add some organic matter. Murphy recommends Panorama Paydirt compost or well-composted leaves from the bottom of your leaf pile.
Once your camellia is in the ground, raise a cup of tea to it. The most famous member of the camellia family is Camellia sinensis, otherwise known as the tea plant.
Here is an example of a common question raised by agents and buyers –
Question: “A coworker here was told by an agent in (somewhere in Virginia) that it was a law that he had to sign a buyer broker before seeing or obtaining any info about a house. um, BS, right??”
Answer: Yes. Really; in order to see a property with a real estate agent, the agent legally needs a written agreement with you, even if for only a day, or a single house. Many agreements are for longer periods – six months is a common term. The option of an Unrepresented Buyers Agreement exists, but that’s a story for another day.
The short answer is that Virginia law requires (the Disclosure of Agency and the Agreement) in order to protect you (the consumer). The longer answer is that having something in writing — whether it covers a single property or a months-long relationship — ensures that both you and your Realtor® understand exactly what’s expected from each other.
There’s more to seeing a house (usually) than merely opening a lockbox.
What does this mean in practice for a home buyer?
Here’s an example.
– You find a house for sale that you want to see. You call the listing agent (they’re not representing you/cannot represent you; their goal is to sell the house, not help you). That agent should give you something in writing stating that they are not there for you, and they may try to sell you on the merits of single agent dual agency (if this happens, my advice: be wary)
– You find a house for sale that you want to see. You know you need and want representation so you contact the realtor your friend used last year; you know you’re not quite ready to sign on with them – it’s a first date. Your prospective agent should still give you something in writing that you sign acknowledging this. This date might lead to a long-term relationship, but for now, sign a one-time, über-short-term brokerage relationship.
What does this mean?
Is this process overly cumbersome? Yep. (blame the lawyers and the legislature)
The Rusty Cundieff-Spike Lee collaboration Tales from the Hood is one of the featured works in the film series at Random Row Books.
Random Row Books is far more than just a great bookstore. Not only does the space host a variety of concerts and theatrical performances, but it also functions as a hub for local activists, a home for lectures, free soup dinners, and politically relevant film screenings. Throughout February, Random Row will again show a series of film events for black history month, organized and hosted by Joe Jordan.
A New Yorker who studied drama at the NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Jordan relocated to Charlottesville last year, after becoming increasingly upset about gentrification in New York. “I’m O.K. being an outsider,” he said. “But not in my own neighborhood.”
Jordan has been active with a local Anarchist People of Color (APOC) group and is organizing the film event as part of a continuing series, which recently included a benefit for CeCe MacDonald and a Take Back the Night march in January, done in part to raise awareness about the disappearance of Dashad “Sage” Smith, the local transgender youth who vanished in November and who remains missing.
He began the tribute to black history month last Wednesday, with a screening of Four Little Girls, Spike Lee’s Oscar-nominated 1997 documentary about the victims of a 1963 Birmingham church bombing. “There was a really good turn-out,” Jordan said, “better than I expected. There were some elder New Africans there [Joe prefers not to use the term ‘African-American’] who had heard about it through the Jefferson School. They’d never heard of Random Row, but they came and brought their grandkids. It was cool to have older black folks there. Usually at events I go to in Charlottesville, it’s just the white hipster kids I know from the bar scene, from the Downtown crowd.”
Four Little Girls is a powerful and important film, but it’s also fairly standard fare for black history month. The rest of the line-up includes much more creative, and less conventional, fare. “When I was with APOC in New York, I’d show things like [Charles Burnett’s] Killer of Sheep,” Jordan said. “But thinking about who goes to events like this in Charlottesville, it’s mostly going to be a white crowd, so I geared it towards films that I want white people to see.”
The result is an audacious and interesting mix, likely to appeal to any audience interested in politics and film. It includes the February 13 screening of CSA: the Confederate States of America, a 2004 satire shot in the style of a documentary made in an alternate reality in which the South won the Civil War. The February 21 screening is Heading South, a 2005 narrative drama about sex tourism from French filmmaker Laurent Cantet, starring Charlotte Rampling as one of an aging group of tourists who head to Haiti to hire young male sex workers in the 1980s.
The series will wrap up on the 27th with Tales from the Hood, a spin-off of the Tales from the Crypt horror-comedy anthology series. It’s perhaps the most unusual choice in the program, a mostly-forgotten artifact of the mid-’90s, starring “In Living Color’s” David Allen Grier (in his only dramatic role) and directed by Rusty Cundieff (who was also responsible for Fear of a Black Hat, one of two Spinal Tap-esque gangsta rap parodies from that era). But the finest film series are always the ones that aim low as well as high, mixing the critically respected with the critically neglected; perhaps Tales From the Hood deserves to be revisited? “It’s not a comedy,” Jordan said. “It’s extremely political, and extremely scary. I mean, like all horror movies, it does have some degree of comedy. But it’s not comedy about black characters for a white audience, like you usually see. It’s one of the few black horror movies I can think of.”
Jordan, who is biracial, is also insistent that a black history month film series should be organized by a person of color. “If white people are the ones propagating racism, but then white people are also the only ones speaking out against it, then what happens to all the non-white people? Do they just disappear? Of course, I understand that there are barriers that prevent people of color from becoming radicalized, but what are those barriers?”
Our conversation continued for the better part of an hour, touching on a wide variety of topics, from voting, to drone strikes, to sexism and homophobia at UVA. Jordan defines himself as a “militant anarchist,” and his main focus is on activist work on behalf of political prisoners and prisoners of war. In conversation he’s both animated and excitable, with an exuberance that can easily read as confrontational. But Jordan is also eager to talk with anyone who is open to engaging with him, and his blunt insights have a way of cutting to the heart of any matter under discussion. He’s also extremely knowledgeable about film, politics, and social issues—easy traits to miss, for those who aren’t willing to look past his thick beard, nose piercing, and face tattoos.
Returning to the topic of the film series, Jordan said, “It’ll be awesome, plus it’s the only game in town. I mean, there’s not that much [radical political activity] happening here. I will show up to anything, and I’m willing to work with anyone. For the [film series], I want people to come, and encourage people of color to come. These are great films, and they need to be seen.”
For information on the black history month film series go to randomrow.word press.com.
For those who would gladly toss out the flowers, pink teddy bears, and heart-shaped greeting cards, your redemption lies in Raunchy Love Letters. Hosted by Scheherazade, the open reading series features spoken word performances and old-fashioned storytelling with short works by local talents. Past years have included everything from break-up e-mails to the bonding of soul mates, salacious verses about lady parts, and “Tom Cruise whack-jobs.” Broken-hearted playwrights, forlorn poets, and lovers of all the anguished arts are welcome to participate in a night of heartfelt, and often gut-wrenching, candor.
Thursday 2/14 $5, 7pm. The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, 209 Monticello Rd. 984-5669.
From left: Positively 4th Street, Basil Mediterranean Bistro, Bamboo House. Photos: Preston Long
The cheap date is a tricky proposition. But there are ways to cut corners without necessarily revealing yourself for the broke-ass bounder that you really are. Despite the holdover notion that some here in central Virginia cleave to—the idea that we live in some bastion of Southern rectitude—you needn’t occupy your mind with chivalric conceits. It would be lost on, maybe even looked upon with consternation, by the vast majority of women around here. Let’s face it, these days Albemarle County is about as Southern as Harvey Keitel’s Arkansas drawl in Thelma and Louise.
For instance, there’s not one meat-and-three in the whole burg. And there’s often an acre of empty tables at establishments like Henry’s Restaurant—which serves econo-priced pork chops, meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and cocktails—while people wait in lines at sushi joints all up and down the Mall. There is nary a juke joint nor blues bar in the 434 area code. Heck, you can even get store-bought liquor on Sunday. This is essentially Fairfax County with a better view of the mountains and a much longer drive to Ethiopian food.
And there’s absolutely nothing to be ashamed of in any of that. Our town proffers a different small batch blend of eclectic charms from your typical old sleepy Southern hollow. Case in point, much-ballyhooed, The Local in Belmont has half-price bottles of wine until 9pm on Mondays. And nothing says “this relationship is important to me” like a Monday night date. There are excellent pasta plates in the $13-15 range and you can even get protein dishes for under $20. Yeah, twenty smackers is twenty smackers, but come on, you love her and you’re getting pricey wine at beer rates.
If you’re bold enough to employ the Sunday date gambit, you can start going on about how you’re really in the mood for a gourmet burger during the drive Downtown. “You know, I heard Positively 4th Street serves a pretty mean lamb burger,” you say, decisively. “It’s supposed to have feta and spiced pickles and all kinds of stuff on it.” There’s no need to mention that all burgers and sandwiches are half-price on Sundays.
Sal’s Caffe Italia on the Downtown Mall isn’t exactly giving away entrees, but while perusing the menu you can pull the old, “Geez, it all looks so good, maybe we should do it tapas-style.” Then order the arancini rice ball appetizer, lightly breaded, deep-fried rice balls stuffed with seasoned ground beef that you dip in marinara. They’re terrific and weighty. Add to that the fried ravioli starter, maybe throw in a salad or soup and you’re both stuffed with Italian goodness without breaking the bank. They also have a great $12 personal margherita pizza. Sal’s is one of the few joints around here that has that old school, Teamster-classy feel.
Basil Mediterranean Bistro on the Corner offers a bevy of thoughtfully conceived, meal-scale salads. I tried the salmoni: nicely grilled salmon, moist but sturdy, on mixed greens tossed in a light, creamy Caesar with red onion, mandarin orange slices, Roma tomato, cucumber, and sprinkled parmesan. It’s $14 and Basil has a kind of Costa Brava ambience that lends your date night a fiesta vibe.
For the advanced cheap date daredevil, take a drive north. Three miles beyond the airport turnoff, keep a lookout, and pull into the Bamboo House on the right. Affordable and like nothing else around these parts, the optical centerpiece of the dining area is a diorama of the nuclear deer family. A stuffed daddy buck, mama doe, and a fawn, all set against a lake scene. Scattered about the dining room’s perimeter are all manner of stuffed ducks, squirrels, and foxes. What this place lacks in conventional fine dining prerequisites, it more than makes up for in David Lynchian charm. There’s myriad offerings in both Chinese and Korean cuisine, but ordering from the Korean listings seems to put some pep in the step of the gracious staff.
I had the bibimbap: bulgogi beef (which is sirloin minced and marinated in a sweet soy sauce, seasoned, then laid into spinach), shredded vegetables, kimchi, hot chili oil and sesame oil, bean sprouts, and an egg, done over easy, all on rice. Your server will then carefully mix this wondrous medley just so in a huge bowl. An exquisite concoction at $8.95. There’s beer but no hard liquor. But then, you have drive back to town anyway. Good luck.
At last week's meeting, City Council voted unanimously to make the Section 3 coordinator position permanent. Photo: Charlottesville Tomorrow
City Council voted unanimously last week to permanently fund its Section 3 coordinator, a previously temporary position that bridges the gap between the city and the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority. Despite differing opinions on where the money should come from, city officials agree that the position—currently held by Tierra Howard—is essential for the Housing Authority to succeed in its future redevelopment plans.
The Section 3 program requires that recipients of federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funds provide job training, employment, and contract opportun-
ities for low-income and public housing residents in connection with projects and activities in their own neighborhoods.
Former City Council member Holly Edwards pushed for the creation of the Section 3 Coordinator position in 2011, and the city used money from the housing budget to fund it for up to 18 months. The city and the CRHA both receive HUD funding, and Howard’s focus has been on registering businesses, creating program procedures and forms, and building community-business relationships.
“I’m just grateful that the position is permanent,” Howard said. “When you start something, it takes more than a year and six months to actually see it working.”
During last week’s brief discussion, City Councilors agreed that Howard’s position should be permanent, but did not come to a consensus on how to fund it.
“We don’t have to decide how it should be funded, although I think the housing fund is appropriate,” Councilor Kristin Szakos said. “Home funds are used for programming, and I think this is programming within that tightly delineated category.”
Councilor Kathy Galvin said she wasn’t tied to a particular pot of money, but former mayor Dave Norris said he wants to see the money come from the city’s general fund.
“It sends the signal that this commitment to doing Section 3 work isn’t just a passing notion,” Norris said. “It’s going to be a permanent commitment of the city and the Housing Authority.”
Money in the housing fund is specifically earmarked for the renovation and preservation of affordable housing units in the city, and Norris said the city shouldn’t have to reallocate valuable housing improvement money.
“We shouldn’t have to choose between housing and jobs,” he said. “We can do both.”
Funding aside, city officials and CRHA staff are pleased with Howard’s progress as program coordinator, and look forward to the Section 3 program playing a role in redevelopment, which they hope is just around the corner. When the CRHA begins redevelopment in the city, a stock of low-income residents qualified under the Section 3 program will be ready to go to work, providing both employment and improved housing.
CRHA Executive Director Connie Dunn, who’s been pushing for a public housing overhaul and a closer working relationship with the city, said Howard’s efforts have opened new doors for the Housing Authority.
“It’s training us to be in a position to offer employment opportunities as they come along in the future,” Dunn said. “This program is instrumental toward our future redevelopment plans.”
The CRHA has been under fire for its inability to move redevelopment forward, a problem accentuated by federal funding cuts and a revolving door of leadership. But with a successful Section 3 program in place, Norris said 2013 could be the year of change for the agency.
“The progress is inching forward,” Norris said. “Hopefully this is the year when it’ll really take hold and we’ll start moving on the first project.”
"The American Wing" oil on linen by Bradley Stevens from the "Museum Studies. " Image courtesy of Warm Springs Gallery.
An enthusiastic crowd attended Bradley Stevens’s talk “In Search of Perfect Proportions: the Golden Section and Geometry in Art” at the Warm Springs Gallery on Sunday afternoon. Stevens’s show there features his series of paintings focusing on museum galleries. In these works, rooms open up to other rooms giving the sense of receding space and affording glimpses of works of art in the distance. Stevens straddles two worlds with these works: the static one of the artwork he reproduces and the more active one of the contemporary museum visitors who populate his exhibition spaces. His rendering of them reveals a finely tuned eye for those details that breathe life into a figure.
Stevens works in oil because of its slow drying time, which allows him to manipulate it, softening it and blending it. He uses color, in concert with the arrangement of shapes, to balance the composition. His scenes are not exact; he will reposition paintings or change the color of the walls because, in the end, it’s about the integrity of the finished work, not the reality of the subject.
With their photographic realism, the paintings showcase Stevens’s technical skill and his adulation for art history. His biography states that he “spent five years copying over three hundred Old Master paintings at the National Gallery of Art.” He’s very good at reproducing famous artworks and this museum series affords him ample opportunity to do so. Like a Rap artist sampling music, Stevens plays with perspective and size presenting an entirely new version of the initial artwork. This not only produces a renewed appreciation for the piece, but it also allows the buyer of the Stevens work to, in a way, possess the masterpiece depicted. It’s an acceptable copy of the original because it’s been transformed by another artist and is now an entirely new artwork.
As might be expected from the title of his talk, Stevens is very keen on the golden section and geometry, they’re the guiding principle for organizing his compositions. “Literally it’s how you divide a distance or a space into the most asymmetrical balance or the most dynamic symmetry, the most perfect proportion.”
Working at an easel and using string as a compass, Stevens demonstrated how to determine a golden section through basic geometry. The golden section is used to describe perfect proportioning within an artwork (the ratio of small elements to larger elements is the same as the ratio of larger elements to the whole, basically). This corresponds to the Fibonacci Sequence and the mathematical pattern that is endlessly occurring in nature from bacteria to spiral galaxies. It’s so ubiquitous and fundamental it stands to reason that we are hardwired to intuitively respond to the pattern.
But I wonder… while I’m certainly impressed with Stevens’s skill, if not his lackluster and somewhat dumbed-down presentation, I find his paintings’ perfection cloying. Beyond a clever idea, which I’m sure has many admirers, there’s nothing here that captures my fancy.
As we put together C-VILLE’s annual job issue, we want to hear from you. Hate your job? Love it? Constantly working late? Take our survey and tell us!
Follow this link to answer seven quick questions. Then share it with friends (use this link: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/cville-job-survey) and pick up the jobs issue March 12 and see how C’ville works!
I watched the Grammys last night. Well, I watched the first hour of it anyway, which is about all I could manage. I’ve been interviewing singer-songwriters recently and have been thinking a lot about the chances they have at success in today’s music industry. There was Taylor Swift, the child bride of Nashville, former teen idol blossomed into starlet. When will her heart really break? Rihanna and Chris Brown, tapping into the Ike & Tina, Whitney + Bobby narrative; behind every caged bird, a hustling thug.
There were performers who wrote their own songs, like Adele, and managed the excited electron leap from a small orbit of stardom to a spacious one. And there were the people who wrote other people’s songs, like Gotye and Frank Ocean, who through talent and street smarts elbowed their way into the publishing game. And then there was Jay-Z, who writes part of every rap song and gets a piece of all the action.
The funnest part of the Grammys is the cultural genre battle, where R&B and country collide, all smiles on the outside but no doubt some muttering under the breath here and there. Imagine a cocktail party with Jack White and the Black Keys, Kanye and Wiz, Blake and Miranda, Mumford and fun. The DJ cues T Swift on repeat because they are never ever ever getting back together.
I heard two types of songs last night: the ones that ended in bouncing crescendos and the ones designed to be remixed into club anthems that transcend the economically limiting barrier of language and end in bouncing crescendos. The message was mostly the same: We are alright. You are alright. A message to believe for a couple of minutes at a time to get through your runs, or work days, or breakups.
Our copy editor, Susan, who does a terrific job, was shaking her head and smiling to herself last week. She’d gotten the Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” stuck in her head, in particular the horn part, and couldn’t shake it as she was reading this week’s feature, on couples in love.
The song debuted as part of the world’s first live satellite telecast in 1967, globalization’s birthday anthem. Lennon called the sneakily straightforward message “propaganda”: “Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be you in time. It’s easy. All you need is love.” Got it?
