Month: March 2013

Categories
News

Green happenings: Charlottesville environmental news and events

Each week, C-VILLE’s Green Scene page takes a look at local environmental news. The section’s bulletin board has information on local green events and keeps you up to date on statewide happenings. Got an event or a tip you’d like to see here and in the paper? Write us at news@c-ville.com.

Tree town: The Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards have extended their tree voucher program into the spring. Those who live in the city or surrounding counties on a half acre or less can e-mail CATSTreeVoucher2013@gmail.com by March 30 for a $25 voucher toward a plantable tree redeemable at several area nurseries.

Rollin’ down the river: Register now for the Rivanna Conservation Society’s annual Rivanna River Sojourn. Join fellow paddlers April 27-28 for day trips down the river, with all transportation, guies, safety measures, and daily lunches and snacks provided by the RCS and Blue Ridge Mountain Sports. Feel free to bring along a trash bag for collecting garbage, and whoever finds the “most interesting piece of trash” will go home with a prize.

Get the buzz: Calling all beekeepers! The next Central Virginia Beekeepers meeting will take place on Thursday, April 4, in the Education Center at Ivy Creek Natural Area. Marcel Durieux will discuss his experience in Rwanda with the club, sharing his discoveries on how beekeeping can seriously endanger a protected rainforest. The meeting is free, and members encourage beginners to come check it out.

Hoophouse hopes: City Schoolyard Garden, the 3-year-old organization that provides hands-on gardening education to city students, is raising money for a hoophouse at Buford Middle School. The structure allows students to start their own seedlings, and provides an outdoor gathering space protected from the elements. The group launched a Kickstarter campaign in hopes of raising $6,000 to cover the cost of the project.

 

Categories
News

Bellamy: Clerical error over traffic ticket landed him in court

City Council candidate Wes Bellamy. PHoto by Graelyn Brashear.

Wes Bellamy, the 26-year-old teacher who recently announced a run for City Council, told reporters and onlookers at a press conference outside City Hall this afternoon that a clerical error following a traffic violation led him to turn himself into police this morning.

Bellamy said he was pulled over in February for a traffic violation—driving on a suspended license, according to a CBS19 story, though Bellamy declined to take questions on further details at the press conference—and was issued a court date. He said he later asked for a continuance because of a job-related time conflict. Bellamy said he was given a new date in April, but when he checked on his case Monday, he saw that the court date had never been changed, and that he had been issued a failure to appear notice. But the notice had gone to the wrong Linden Avenue address, he said, and he’d never seen it.

“After coming in and speaking with the clerk, I was sent to speak with the magistrate, who assured me that mistakes occur sometimes, for people are human,” Bellamy said. He was then released on his own recognizance, and was told by the Commonwealth’s Attorney that the failure to appear could be expunged from his record.

“I feel that it is important as leaders to understand that miscommunication happens from time to time, and people make mistakes,” Bellamy said. He called the incident “an opportunity to speak to some of the bigger issues we have in the city,” including education and economic development. “I look forward to working with the city to ensure that matters like this do not occur in the future,” he said.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Joshua James

Joshua James finds musical inspiration in the stories of everyday people and his own existential quest. Image: Courtesy of flickr/buffalojames.

Higher plains

Nebraska musician Joshua James strums his guitar and lets out the crushing ache in his voice, calling to mind long roads through the expansive Midwest beneath a boundless sky. His folksiness embraces the tradition of the genre, the familiar longing coupled with a unique taste of melancholy, and it is in these blends that James’ vision shines. He captures something divinely mystic, and yet far-removed from folk music’s typical earthiness. James possesses a sound and style so well-honed and mature that it elevates him beyond the need for comparison.

Thursday 3/28 $12, 8pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St., Downtown Mall. 977-5590.

Categories
News

Touchdown teacher: Brandon Isaiah takes leadership from the field to the classroom

Former football star Brandon Isaiah now teaches at Walker Upper Elementary and coaches at Monticello High School. Photo: Christian Hommel

Most of Brandon Isaiah’s students have no idea he was a professional football player. Teaching started out for him as an avenue to coaching high school football, but it quickly became a way to give back to the local community he’s loved for 12 years. Now the 30-year-old athlete is an advocate for getting black male teachers in the classroom.

Not enough men are standing in front of classrooms, Isaiah said, so he takes his role as one of Walker Upper Elementary School’s only black male teachers very seriously. Sometimes, he said, being a role model is as simple as tucking in his own shirt and telling a kid to pull up his pants.

“Kids need to see someone who is, in their mind, like them,” he said. “Seeing a black man teaching shows them that education matters.”

When Isaiah graduated high school in Winston Salem, North Carolina, the school retired his football jersey. He went on to the University of Virginia as a running back, where he earned a sociology degree. After four years on a Division I team, Isaiah tried out for a couple National Football League teams, including the Buffalo Bills. He never signed with an NFL team, but played for indoor arena teams in Kansas and Florida.

Arena leagues run in the springtime, he said, which allowed him to return to Charlottesville in the fall to coach football at Charlottesville High School. For a couple of years, Isaiah was in his element: playing, coaching, living, and breathing football.

“It was hard to imagine saying I was a professional athlete,” he said, still incredulous that his childhood dream came true.

But in 2009 he took a turn mentally and professionally, and decided that he couldn’t fully invest himself as a high school coach if he was going back and forth between careers each year. He still loves playing and said he misses it, but it was time to refocus his priorities.

Isaiah knew from the beginning that if he wanted to coach, he’d have to work in the schools in other capacities as well. He’s at the end of a lengthy licensing process, which was paid for in part by the African American Teaching Fellows of Charlottesville-Albemarle. The local organization provides professional advisement, mentoring, and financial support for black teachers in the area, and Isaiah said there’s no way he’d be where he is today without the group’s help.

Despite growing up with a teaching mother and a coaching father, he said he rejected the idea of the profession for years. But Isaiah ended up taking a substitute position at Walker, which soon turned into a full-time job teaching special ed—something he openly admits he was apprehensive about.

“It was a new age group for me and I was nervous,” Isaiah said. “But I actually really enjoyed myself.”

He’s coached at Charlottesville and Albemarle high schools, and is currently at Monticello. Teaching adolescents and coaching older teenagers gives him new insight into how high schoolers end up the way they do, he said, which helps him better understand both age groups.

“How we teach them at age 10 or 11 is going to affect them in high school,” Isaiah said.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: The Two Noble Kinsmen

Ronald Peet (left)and Grant Davis spar for love in the Shakespeare/Fletcher collaboration, The Two Noble Kinsmen, at Blackfriars. Image: Lauren D. Rogers

Prison riot Even Shakespeare and John Fletcher knew that the rewrite of a Chaucer poem took some serious guts back in the early 17th century. Despite the potential for total demolishment of a poetic monument, the duo lets chaos run rampant in The Two Noble Kinsmen. What happens when two imprisoned cousins fall in love with the same beautiful woman only moments apart? Prison riots and a touch of madness, naturally. The knights toss their stoic fronts aside and duke it out across the stage in the unending quest for the holy grail of a fair maiden. Even centuries ago, love was a bit of a battlefield.

Through Saturday 4/6 $16-40, 7:30pm. The Blackfriars Playhouse, 10 S. Market St., Staunton. (540) 851-1733.

 

 

Categories
News

Businesses respond to Terry McAuliffe’s campaign visit

Governor Terry McAuliffe in Charlottesville. File photo.

When Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe visited Charlottesville last Wednesday, he meandered up and down the Downtown Mall with Delegate David Toscano, discussing the economy and promising to prioritize small businesses if elected.

McAuliffe said he’s running on a platform of job creation and economic development, and wants to appeal to the entire political spectrum by running a mainstream campaign and focusing on economic growth rather than the “social ideological agenda that divides people” that he accused competitor Ken Cuccinelli of pushing.

“The best way you can do it is by listening to folks, like here in the bookstore, who have to sell to folks every single day,” he said during an interview in New Dominion Bookshop, one of several stops he made along the Mall. “They have the pulse of what’s going on.”

After the hand-shaking was over and the candidate had moved on, area business owners talked about what they want to see from both state and local government officials.

Carol Troxell, who owns New Dominion Bookshop, said she wants the government to help level the playing field for small business owners, and hopes new online sales taxes will contribute.

“I think that would be a really good start,” she told McAuliffe.

In Belmont, Tavola owner Michael Keaveny said there needs to be more collaboration between government officials and business owners, but political promises to improve the economy and support small local businesses don’t mean much to him.

“I’m tired of hearing about politicians championing small businesses,” he said. “The government might give them loans, but that just helps them open. They do nothing to help sustain businesses.”

Zocalo owner Ivan Rekosh was impartial to McAuliffe’s visit, and more concerned about what local government is doing to help small businesses, especially in regard to safety on the Downtown Mall. Loitering, panhandling, and fighting have been recurring problems outside his restaurant during the warmer months, and he said he welcomes the use of tax dollars to fund the Downtown Ambassadors, a pilot program intended to address loitering and assist tourists.

“The perception of the Mall as a safe place is what’s most important to me,” Rekosh said.

Business has been slower over the last couple of years, he said, and he hopes City Council’s attention to Downtown safety will boost sales.

A block down the Mall, Chaps Ice Cream owner Tony LaBua agreed that business is slower than he’d like, and said he has to employ a “skeletal staff” to cut labor costs. With loyal customers still coming in for grilled cheese sandwiches and milkshakes, the 28-
year-old Downtown diner has stayed afloat, but LaBua is unimpressed by politicians’ attempts to fix the economy. He thinks businesses would be in better shape if elected officials focused their efforts elsewhere.

“We would all be better off if the government gets out of the way and lets business work,” LaBua said.

Categories
News

New suit filed against Stonefield developer

The Shops at Stonefield, the largest development in Albemarle County's history. Photo: Jack Looney

Only days after The Shops at Stonefield developer and Charlottesville City Council came to an agreement that ended a long legal dispute over stormwater management, a new lawsuit has been filed in the Albemarle County Circuit Court that may halt construction of the shopping center’s second phase.

According to a press release from Monday, March 25, Pepsi-Cola Bottling Company of Central Virginia, Inc. and a subsidiary of Great Eastern Management Company, which owns Seminole Square Shopping Center, are suing Stonefield developer Edens as well as Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville. The plaintiffs claim that their properties, located within city limits across the street from Stonefield, will be “unlawfully inundated by millions of gallons of stormwater.”

At more than 1 million square feet of restaurants, shops, residential space, and a movie theater, The Shops at Stonefield is the largest development in Albemarle County history. The city issued a citation last June after Edens placed a 72″ pipe underneath U.S. 29 as part of its stormwater management plan. Great Eastern Management argued that the pipe would unfairly dump water on its property and cause flooding.

As part of the recently announced settlement of that argument, Edens posted a $150,000 bond to cover the next five years’ worth of potential stormwater damage. But according to the press release, the plaintiffs claim that the stormwater will “flood and damage Sequel and Pepsi’s private property at 50 times the frequency of current conditions.” It also says that the development plan fails to meet state requirements of the Virginia Stormwater Management Program, the Charlottesville City Code, the Albemarle County Code, and other Virginia law. Both the county and city are named in the suit, the press release says, because they both misapplied stormwater regulations to the project.

The two complainants seek a permanent injunction barring Edens from allowing water to pass onto their property.

 

Categories
Arts

Screening process: New gallery puts printed works at the forefront

Photo: Elli Williams

Charlottesville’s newest art gallery, Telegraph, opened its doors on March 1. Pre-opening hype promised “exclusive new screenprinted poster editions” from a variety of comic book artists, and touted a sharp logo, heralding the imminent arrival of some interesting work at its Fourth Street location (just off the Mall, between O’Suzannah and C’ville Smoke Shop). It came as a pleasant surprise upon walking through Telegraph’s door to find not just a new gallery space, but a full-fledged store, carrying zines, prints, coffee table books, and graphic novels from a wide variety of contemporary mark-makers.

The gallery’s walls are nothing to sneeze at either, offering prints by a dozen emerging and newly-established artists each month, all made specifically to match Telegraph’s curatorial theme, and at the affordable price of $28 a pop.

With just one month under its belt, and upcoming shows on the way, Telegraph has already experienced remarkable success with Charlottesville’s Downtown crowd. It’s the brainchild of David Murray and Kate deNeveu, former locals who met years ago while studying at UVA, who have returned to town to settle down.

“We moved around the country a lot,” Murray said, “and wherever we were, I always had a day job in a print shop. I’ve always done illustration and t-shirt design. I’ve been running an online t-shirt business for the past seven years and Kate was doing sales at the last shop I was working at, Forward Printing in Oakland. We’d been planning on opening a shop like this, when we moved back.”

“We came back [to Charlottesville] to get married,” deNeveu said. “Both of our families live here, or nearby. We weren’t planning on moving back until summer, but then we saw this space, and said, ‘this is perfect, we have to do it here.’ We made the decision that day, and actually moved back from California early to be here.”

Each month Telegraph will ask 12 illustrators to design prints based around a single theme. For March it was Monstrous, April will be Galaxy, and May’s theme is Junk Food. The participating artists include several who have recently made their mark in the world of underground comics and illustration, such as Michael DeForge, Zak Soto, and Niv Bavarsky, in addition to lesser-known names who are just starting to have their work seen. “We met most of these artists just from traveling around, working shows with them,” Murray said. The original illustrations are sent to a printing company that pulls a hundred copies of each color layer for each print.

The decision to branch out into zines, comics, and graphic novels was a natural one. “A lot of the artists working in this lowbrow pop style are doing a lot more than just art you can hang on your wall,” deNeveu said. While those looking for the latest fix of Batman or The Avengers are still advised to visit Atlas Comics in the Rio Hill Shopping Center, Telegraph carries a fine (and growing) selection of alternative comics, many of which are made by young artists crossing over between media, knocking down the boundaries between illustration, printmaking, zines, bookmaking, and narrative comics work.

Telegraph’s browser-friendly displays are front-loaded with funny, accessible, one-joke pamphlets (sample title: “Never Date Dudes From the Internet”), but visitors won’t have to dig deep into the store to find high-quality, contemporary work like Dash Shaw’s restlessly inventive postmodern narratives, James Kochalka’s adorably simple joke diaries, and Johnny Ryan’s merciless bad-taste assaults.

The store also carries a healthy amount of recent work by long-standing indie comics legends. Charles Burns, author of “Black Hole,” is currently turning European adventure and American romance comics into surrealist nightmares with “X’ed Out” and “The Hive.” Dan Clowes’ “Ghost World” remains perennially popular, but his recently reprinted story “The Death Ray” might be his true masterpiece. Gary Panter’s decades of mind-melting punk cubism are perhaps best sampled in the recent “Dal Tokyo” collection. All of these artists have been active since the early 1980s, and serve as godfathers to the current indie comics vanguard.

While it’s refreshing to have such work easily available in a Downtown storefront, most of Murray and deNeveu’s attention remains focused on organizing the monthly gallery installations. So far the enterprise has been wildly successful. “We’ve seen phenomenal enthusiasm,” deNeveu said. “The amount of people coming in here has been really flattering. A lot of people get excited about art that’s not in the $1,000, or even the $100 price range. We definitely have the best dollar-to-square-inch ratio for art in town.”

“We’ve sold a lot,” Murray said. “A lot of people were coming in, asking ‘who are these people, can you tell us more about their art?’ and that’s good. We want to bring artists that Charlottesville doesn’t already know about.”

Telegraph’s rough plans for the future include a Sunday Comics Day, meet-ups with local artists, and screenprinting workshops where participants can bring clothing to have an image silkscreened on it right in the store.

“It’s been great so far,” Murray said. “It’s only been a few weeks, but we already feel like we could do this for another 10 years.”

Who is your favorite screenprint artist? Tell us at www.c-ville.com/arts.

Categories
Arts

A Tiger In Love

Sports power couple Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn embrace the future.

I recently learned two things about Tiger Woods. First, he is cheesy. This is why he and Lindsey Vonn, skier and two-time Olympic medalist, took to Facebook to announce that they’re dating. The two posted pictures of themselves that were so oddly staged, they looked like they were taken in a Sears studio. The only thing missing was a laser-filled backdrop and a comment about Sears’ exceptional selection of washing machines.

The second thing I learned about Woods is that he needs Vonn. Woods, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, needs to be loved in order to succeed.

In late 2009, Woods was in a car crash which may or may not have involved his then-wife Elin Nordegren grabbing a club and purposely mistaking Woods’ head for a Titleist. Later it was revealed that Woods had cheated on Nordegren in spectacular fashion. Before these incidents, things were great for Woods—at least on the surface. He was adored by the public and won nine tournaments in 2009. The former part was especially important for Woods, because it allowed the latter to happen.

Rion Summers, the PGA Director of Golf at Meadowcreek Golf Course, has been a PGA member since 1993. He told me that for pros like Woods, the mental hurdles of golf are the toughest to climb. “It all boils down to being able to focus and execute each shot,” explained Summers. “The psychology behind handling emotions, distractions, bad shots, etc., are the challenges of the game that [either] allure you or drive you crazy. Visualizing and executing while being able to sense all of the elements and factors that affect each shot generally requires one to be relaxed and focused.”

Woods and Nordegren divorced in 2010. During that year and the next, Woods was a punchline. He was no longer beloved. He was viewed as a selfish liar at best and a sociopath at worst. As his personal life crumbled, so did his work. Woods didn’t win a single tourney in 2010 and only won two in 2011.

Although Woods and Vonn just admitted that they’re dating, it must have been going on for some time. And if you think Woods wouldn’t be able to hide that from the press, remember, this guy slept with about 473 women (not all at once…I don’t think) and no one knew a thing. Since Vonn filed for divorce from her husband in late 2011, let’s speculate that Woods and Vonn started casually dating in early 2012. How did Woods do that year? Four wins and 15 top five finishes. This year (not counting this past weekend’s Arnold Palmer Invitational) Woods has already won two out of the five tournaments he has played. *

This isn’t a coincidence. Woods is back because the public and Vonn are embracing him. This might seem obvious, but it’s surprising that someone as dominant as Woods requires so much validation. For Woods, a hug and a hole in one are forever intertwined.

* – Yeah, Woods won. He has now grabbed wins in three out of the six tournaments he has played this year and is once again the number one ranked golfer.

Three Golf Tips from a Guy Who Has Only Played Once:

1) No one looks good in pleated khakis.

2) The key to quality putting is nudging your ball closer to the hole when no one is looking.

3) More beer, not less.

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Editor’s Note: UVA isn’t a place or a thing

Stephen Nachmanovitch and his mentor Gregory Bateson locked horns in a game of chess at the Esalen Institute, Bateson’s cliffside home near Big Sur, in 1979. Photo: Michael Stulbarg. Photo: Michael Stulbarg

UVA employs almost 15,000 people and another 20,000 are enrolled there as students. Of the people who move to Charlottesville for work, nearly every one of them has some connection to the University. The “town and gown” relationship is a false dichotomy left over from a time when being from town meant your social caste separated you from life on Grounds. As our little city grows its professional economy, even the people with no connection at all to UVA are here because of it.

I still find myself falling into the “townie” mode sometimes, grumbling about traffic, rolling my eyes at a perceived hullabaloo in the academic hen house, or coming to a gentle boil while eavesdropping on some masters of the universe conversation between Darden first years out for a night of chest thumping. Silly, since I far more frequently wind up in cool interactions on the soccer field, in my neighborhood, or on the job with people who work and teach at UVA. It’s so easy to think of universities as things or places, but they’re not really that at all.

When was the last time you saw the headline, “Philosophy grad student shoots down Hegelian dialectic”? Big game victories, political squabbles, and salacious campus crime all warrant headlines, but scholarship, in general, doesn’t. Have a Ph.D. and want some ink? Get a patent and we’ll talk. The recent obsession with universities as economic engines has heightened the scrutiny over their governance and funding priorities, but it’s also further obscured the fact that most people in the academy live in a totally impractical world in which nearly every interaction involves the codification of highly-evolved abstract ideas that most of the rest of us regard as extraneous. Academia is a place where theory is real, possibly even more real than “reality.”

For this week’s cover story, I followed the breadcrumb trail of two hot-button catchphrases on Grounds (“town-and-gown approach” and “interdisciplinary studies”) and wound up discovering a scholar who never liked being part of the academy but whose ideas have the potential to unify it. Want to know what it looks like when eminent thinkers engage in mortal combat in front of a live audience? Interested in expanding your mind or, perhaps, even blowing it? Ever wish institutions of higher learning were more like Hogwarts? Pull up a chair.