Month: April 2013

Categories
Arts

Fralin Museum’s “Corot to Cézanne” paints a portrait of the collectors

Edouard Vuillard’s “Young Woman Trying on a Hat,” c. 1900, is one of 55 works on view in the Fralin’s French drawings exhibition. Courtesy of Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon Collection, 95.24

One of America’s great art connoisseurs and patrons, Paul Mellon was quoted as saying that he and his wife “almost never buy a painting or drawing we would not want to live with or see constantly.” Having cut his teeth on father Andrew Mellon’s renowned art collection (which formed the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art), Paul Mellon was graced with an extraordinarily refined eye.

This is evident in “Corot to Cézanne French Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts” now on view at the Fralin.

To create the exhibit, Director Bruce Boucher selected 55 works (from 75) that would say something about Paul Mellon because “each collection is in some sense a portrait of the collector.”

Boucher wanted to present the exhibition as if it would appear in a private residence (painting the room a soft green to help convey this), and to separate it out from the rest of the museum. The show follows a kind of thematic pattern starting with the earliest works (Ingres, Delacroix), followed by landscapes comprising three different generations of artist beginning with Corot, then Pissarro (the “father of Impressionism”), then Cézanne, who called himself a pupil of Pissarro. There are also equine works (11 in all), figure studies, and interiors.

The Ingres pencil drawing of the gentle looking Monsieur Jacques Marquet de Montbreton Norvins who, surprisingly, given his countenance and funny little dog, served as the general director of police in the Papal States under Napoleon, exudes a warmth that transcends its astringent precision.

Jean Baptiste Corot, the leading painter of the Barbizon School (named for the town in France where the artists gathered to paint), was a prolific artist whose work, though rooted in a romantic realism, anticipates plein-air Impressionism. Here, he uses subtle gray cadences to render his elegant, petite “Landscape (Paysage animé).”

Of the three Cézannes in the show, “Large Pine Tree, Study” is the most interesting. A preliminary drawing of a famous painting now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, it is a striking rendition of a tree reduced to its essentials.

Two van Goghs provide particular insight into his development as an artist. Seven years apart, the first, one of van Gogh’s earliest drawings, is a highly detailed, even busy work. It features a deep perspective, yet has a flat quality that suggests the influence of Japanese woodcuts. The second one demands attention with its dazzlingly expressive lines and dramatic pointillism. A supremely confident work, it’s clear with this one van Gogh has removed the safety net and is soaring through the air.

There are a number of surprises with works that bear no relation to what we think of as a particular artist’s oeuvre: an almost primitive Delacroix of a narcissus, an uncharacteristically saccharine Toulouse Lautrec, a pre-pointillist Seurat and three Bonnards which exhibit none of the Les nabis style so associated with him. The small Bonnard “Still Life,” a late work (1932-1933) of the artist’s materials, is the one I would grab from a burning building.

Picasso’s “Jester on Horseback” is a masterwork of restraint in terms of composition, line and palette, but Picasso’s little blue horse in “The Horse,” a scrap of a drawing pulls at my heartstrings: There’s something moving about the lone horse lifting its head into the wind which blows back its mane. In the background, a windmill crowns the barren landscape. Delacroix’s beautifully drawn old nag in “Study of a Horse” is broken down and yet somehow still noble.

One marvels at Degas’ ability to convey so much with so little in “Seated Jockey” and “Jockey Facing Left,” using just a line or two to evoke an entire animal: “the presence of the absence of the horse,” as Boucher describes it. It’s no secret that Mellon, deep into the racing world, was a keen admirer of horse flesh and I like to think that it was the accurate rendering of the Arab steed (the ancestor of the thoroughbreds in Mellon’s stables) in Carle Vernet’s “Marmeluke on Horseback with Bow and Arrow” that appealed to him. Boldini’s “Young Woman Driving a Carriage” captures a wonderful vignette of a stylish woman driving a carriage, possibly through the Bois de Boulogne. The slapdash quality of the rendering seems perfectly in sync with the spirited scene depicted. It also makes me laugh because the horse has gone through the same glamorizing treatment as Boldini’s chic society clients.

There’s an interesting pre-Cubist charcoal still life by Juan Gris and a perfect, tight little Matisse of a repurposed tobacco jar, Finally, three delightful Vuillards that showcase his singular use of light and pattern and as Boucher puts it, his “wonderful way of compressing space.” Boucher seems particularly taken with the Vuillards; as we stand before the one of a woman trying on a hat, he sighs and says wistfully “I wish we could keep some of these…”

 

“Corot to Cézanne” The Fralin Museum at UVA. Through June 2.

Categories
Arts

Living in America: Shabazz Palaces clears the way for Seattle’s new music royalty

Malitia Malimob emerges from Seattle’s growing hip-hop scene, telling stories of Somali struggles and pirate tales. Publicity photo.

Seattle will probably never rid itself of the albatross around its neck that is grunge, but since at least 2005, the home of Cobain and company has been undergoing a rap renaissance, with a scene that rivals the ’90s era for depth and breadth of talent.

Recently, I read an article that made me rethink my assumptions about the city’s place in the music world—and the morality of Somali pirates.

The article was about a rap group called Malitia Malimob, two young men, “Somali born/Seattle bred,” who use the template of American gangster rap to tell the darker side of the modern American immigrant story. I was intrigued, and liked their music, but there was very little information about Malitia Malimob online, besides a link to its current tour dates as the opening act for two other Seattle hip-hop groups, Shabazz Palaces and THEESatisfaction. Clicking the link, I was surprised to find that halfway through the tour the duo was coming to The Southern Cafe & Music Hall.

In 2011, Sub Pop, the indie record label that first signed Nirvana and almost single-handedly sold grunge to the world, released Black Up, the first full-length album from Shabazz Palaces, one of Seattle Hip-Hop’s biggest stars.

Black Up was named best local album that year by The Seattle Times, got a rave review from Pitchfork and a write up in The New Yorker. Palaces co-founder Ishmael Butler is something of an elder statesman on the scene due to his previous membership in ’90s jazz-rap pioneer, Digable Planets.

Like Digable Planets, Shabazz Palaces’ music is experimental and free-form, except now the jazziness has been filtered through a laptop and digitally shredded. The songs are dark and atmospheric, the lyrics political, yet hard to pin down. Shabazz Palaces is often called “difficult,” which I think probably stems from the relatively simplistic idea most rock fans have of rap.

Labelmate THEESatisfaction is comprised of two women, Stasia Irons and Catherine Harris-White, who met at the University of Washington, fell in love, and started making beautiful music together—loopy, playfully political, neo-soul/hip-hop—to make a stab at precision.

THEESatisfaction first came to attention in a guest spot on the Shabazz Palaces album, and there’s a clear kinship between the groups, although THEESatisfaction is lighter, more soulful and groove-filled, and, I suppose, more feminist.

But it’s the opening act, the group no one’s ever heard of, that I find most compelling. The Somali Civil War, which began in 1991 and has yet to end, led to a wave of refugees fleeing to the U.S. (124 have been settled in Charlottesville since 1999, according to the International Rescue Committee), and finding themselves living in the worst parts of their new cities, forced to deal with racism, islamophobia, and the myriad other problems that typically beset strangers in a strange land.

There’s an unofficial video for the Malitia Malimob song “Pirates” that traces the story of Somali piracy back to the 1980s, when men piloted their boats into the Arabian Sea in search of fish not hostages. In the chaos following the outbreak of civil war, huge corporate ships started illegally fishing off the coast of Somalia, and barrels of toxic waste began washing up on shore. So the fishermen took up arms and pointed their boats back out to sea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJJcA43TW24

In many of the cities where they’ve settled, Somali youth have a reputation for above average involvement in gang violence. Guled Diriye and Mohamed Jurato, a.k.a. Malitia Malimob, were carried out of Somalia as children, one of them in a pirate’s boat, and found themselves growing up surrounded by drugs and gangs. Their songs move between both worlds with defiant ease, recognizing that the Somali pirates are mirror images of the boyz in Seattle’s hoods.

By connecting the African immigrant story to the African-American inner city story, Malitia Malimob’s music joins a long tradition of songs, from “This Land is Your Land” to “Straight Outta Compton,” that help define what it means to live in America. Malitia Malimob is less interesting musically than the two groups it’s touring with, and the pair has the same faults as many of their peers (casual misogyny, glorification of violence), but like all great rebel music, they give voice to the voiceless, speak hard truths, and send a shiver up your spine.

Shabazz Palaces with THEESatisfaction and Malitia Malimob/The Southern Cafe and Music Hall/April 29.

Categories
News

New library heralds era of growth in Western Albemarle

The new Crozet Library stands at more than 18,300 square feet, and will be open to the public this fall. Photo: Laura Ingles

After years of discussion, planning, and vigorous fundraising, construction of the new Crozet Library, a big step in the effort to expand the town’s downtown area, is nearing completion. The two-story building on Crozet Avenue still smells like sawdust, but the power tools and paint cans will soon be replaced by 70,000 books and more than 30 computers. Construction is on schedule to be complete this summer, with an expected grand opening in September.

“It’s really a symbol of the infrastructure that the county needed to provide in one of its most rapidly growing growth areas,” said Albemarle County Supervisor Ann Mallek. “I’ve seen really impoverished little communities get their act together and build a library, and it changes their lives.”

Change has already come to Crozet. The small town just west of Charlottesville has seen a significant influx of recent development, with more than 4,000 new dwelling units planned between 2004 and 2007. About half of those units have been built thus far, Mallek said, which has doubled the town’s population in less than 10 years. The library in the 1,700 square foot former train station isn’t cutting it anymore.

“The new facility is not going to be an empty place of books,” Mallek said. “It will be a hopping place full of reading programs.”

The new library, an 18,300 square foot building with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking an unobstructed view of the mountains, will feature large sections for children, adults, and teenagers, computer stations, a fireplace, a self-checkout counter, and separate rooms designated for studying, conferences, and meetings. Outside, the parking lot will accommodate more than 50 vehicles. Mallek said she hopes the library’s location will encourage visitors to park and then walk the block to Mudhouse and other businesses downtown, and said libraries are often the core of small but growing towns.

The County covered the cost of the $5.8 million building, and the community has taken on the responsibility of raising money for books, shelves, computers, and other furniture and equipment. According to Fundraising Committee Chair Bill Schrader, they’ve raised about $750,000 thus far from community events, local groups and Dave Matthews’ BAMA Works Fund, and are still actively seeking donations of both money and books.

The fundraising committee is less than halfway to its goal of $1.6 million, but Schrader and Jefferson-Madison Regional Library Director John Halliday said they have faith in the community’s ability and desire to fill in the gap, as the discussion about a new library began more than 20 years ago. In the final stretch, they’re asking people to help fill the shelves by browsing the Crozet Library Wish List on Amazon, which includes dozens of titles for all ages.

But in growing Crozet, the library is about more than books. Unemployed residents without computer access can use the free Internet for job hunting, children will stop by during the summer for reading programs, and the facility will be available for emergencies like last year’s severe storms.

“Libraries are a community meeting site now,” Schrader said.

Categories
Arts

Spy games: Live Arts’ Or, explores the life and loves of Aphra Behn

Jenn Downey, Chris Patrick, and Claire Chandler star in a farce-fueled spin on 1660s counter-culture in Liz Duffy Adams’ comedy of manners, Or,. Photo courtesy Live Arts.

Liz Duffy Adams’ Or, is Live Arts’ latest offering, a deftly minced hodge-podge of a play, primarily consisting of what may be incompletely described as a retroactively considered Restoration comedy. Now, when was the last time you had a serious hankering for a Restoration comedy? Some ambivalent theater-goers find Shakespeare intimidating and obscure (they shouldn’t, by the way), but seriously, a Restoration comedy? Here’s the thing, though: Most of them are brilliant, full of wit, humor, and humanity, if you can follow them, and some of the best contributions to the genre came from a woman in 17th century England named Aphra Behn. And it just so happens that she’s the protagonist of the aforementioned play.

Aphra Behn was a woman of her time, one of those poorly behaved women who tend to make history; she was England’s first professional female playwright, a spy in the service of King Charles II, and an accomplished poet and novelist, among other things. Much of her history is guesswork, but it is rumored (though not confirmed) that she was openly bisexual. But the veracity of her biographical information isn’t important. She was a lady shrouded in myth, and that’s where Or, comes from.

Adams’ script is a strange cocktail. Premiered in 2009, its structure is clearly influenced by Restoration comedy, though it wantonly snubs some of its most hallowed conventions, namely that it employs only three actors, two of whom play multiple parts. Many of the themes and plot devices are taken directly from the Restoration style in which Behn carved out her spot in history, and yet the whole thing is rife with Molière-style French farce. It’s built on the shoulders of Tom Stoppard and his quasi-historical treatments, and therefore houses intentional anachronisms in speech and convention, but goes just that little bit further by capturing a semblance of the original presentation style instead of re-contextualizing. All in all, it’s a good script worth its level of acclaim, though it does cultivate one of my theatrical pet peeves: It plays somewhat to the exclusionary, in-joke nature of theater communities, and some of the most incisive and humorous moments would be lost on someone who didn’t have an extensive theatrical background.

The play is directed by Christina Courtenay and I applaud her on handling as much as this production required. It’s a boisterous script played out in a black box theater, so the inherent energies are immediately at odds. I’m a stickler for motivated blocking and, truth be told, there were times where I felt almost none of the movement on stage was warranted by the script, yet I do understand the need to keep this play moving and share the genuine fun of watching lustful characters throw each other about onto settees and the like while spouting brilliant witticisms. The production also benefited from the broken fourth wall humor necessary in a space too intimate to completely mask the stagecraft. Characters make breathless entrances after quick changes behind curtains that we can see fluttering from backstage activity, but the entrance is all the more enjoyable for being tongue-in-cheek.

As for the actors, I’m becoming more and more a fan of Chris Patrick every time I see him. He plays his characters not only with intelligence and sincerity, but with careful sensitivity to the overall aesthetic of the play, mindful of his place in the production, and that’s something only instinct carries. Also, his Lady Davenant was so hilarious that it made my face hurt from laughter. Claire McGurk Chandler was fun to watch, and not that overbearing, forced kind of fun either. She was sweet, sexy, and likeable. My primary note, though, is that I never saw any real vulnerability from her. She had it right under what she was doing the entire time, but either her choices or the nature of the production prevented it from coming through.

The play revolves around Aphra, though. Jen Downey’s performance was insightful and precise, all the more admirable considering she never actually leaves the stage during the show. Anyone who’s ever played a part like that knows how surprisingly exhausting it is and with good reason: Actors often cite the sustained development of character throughout a show as one of the primary advantages of stage performance. In film, you’re only a character between takes, but with a part like Aphra Behn, you essentially follow about two hours of the most important moments in your character’s life, and you do it every night. I also give her a huge commendation for embracing the somewhat foreign meter/cadence and vocabulary of the time and script, delivering it with casual ease. My only complaint is similar to that about Ms. Chandler: I didn’t see enough vulnerability, though I did see some. Much of her performance was so precise that it came off excessively practiced and lost the verisimilitude that grounds a seemingly silly, yet thoughtful play like this. That being said, I watched her onstage for the entire show and never tired of her, and that’s really what it boils down to.

Overall, Live Arts’ production of Or, is good. Not the best it’s ever done but worth the time to see it, worth the effort to produce and perform it, worthy of the obvious labor of love it required of its all-volunteer cast and crew. It’s this kind of show that theater people will continue to stubbornly mount because it’s good and it says something worthwhile. It’s theater for people who love theater.

 

Or, Live Arts, Through May 4.

Categories
News

Tourism, tech, and the race to brand Charlottesville

The “Aspen vs. Austin vs. Arlington” debate at the Tom Tom Founders Festival helped frame a big question: What does Charlottesville want to be? Photo: Gina Proulx

At the start of the Tom Tom Founders Festival two weekends ago, a crowd filled The Haven on First and Market to rehash a question that Charlottesville loves to ask, but rarely manages to answer: Who are we?

The “Aspen vs. Austin vs. Arlington” debate pitted several concepts of place against one another. Should the region aim to be a destination for tourists and retirees? An innovation hub? NoVA’s little cousin? The discussion among the business leaders and policymakers played largely on questions of growth—how much is too much, and what kind is best. But there’s already more than one effort underway to define Charlottesville in the eyes of the outside world, and they look very different.

The most noticeable is the Charlottesville Albemarle Convention and Visitors Bureau, which launched its new brand identity before a crowd of 200 people at the Paramount Theater in February.

The new brand, created for $35,000 by local PR firm Payne, Ross & Associates, is part of a larger plan to sell Charlottesville that calls for well over half a million dollars in marketing, advertising, and PR spending. It’s funded with accumulated surplus from the CACVB’s annual infusion of about $1 million in hotel and room tax revenues from the city and county—money the bureau was last year told to use or lose.*

And use it they did. The branding side of the big marketing push includes a new logo that features the requisite Jefferson-esque dome and columns, a website overhaul, a slew of promotional videos featuring historic sites and vineyards, and a new slogan: “Where tradition is always new.”

CACVB Executive Director Kurt Burkhart** said promoting the area’s strengths is vital to the economic health of the city and county. “We’ve got some 5,000 people employed here in the tourism and hospitality sector,” Burkhart said. The most recent reports show $430 million in direct visitor spending annually, and those dollars have to keep coming.

But that’s not the only Charlottesville story being told. Tom Tom also included the launch of Cville Made, a ground-up branding initiative conceived by the tech gurus at the startup incubator Hack Cville.

Cville Made is meant to be a rallying point for all things innovative in Charlottesville, and in many ways, it’s everything the CACVB’s brand concept isn’t. Open-sourced and undefined, it’s merely a text logo available free from a website where startups of all stripes are invited to add their names to a roster of cool companies. It isn’t the least bit Jeffersonian, and it hasn’t cost anyone anything, beyond their time and the cost to register a url.

But Hack Cville founder Spencer Ingram hopes the simple concept will foster a tribal identity among those in Charlottesville’s burgeoning entrepreneurial community, and paint the area as a place where innovators want to move—and stay.

“There are a lot of really awesome cities vying for our youth talent,” Ingram said, so it’s important to celebrate what the city is producing, whether it’s software or shoes. “Who are the people shaping this town and creating this economic force? That’s the basis for the narrative we want to create.”

It’s a tale of two approaches for two audiences, but can they coexist without confusion?

Tom Tom founder Paul Beyer thinks they can. The developer and former City Council candidate shortened and narrowed his festival in its second year and made it a celebration of the city’s tried-and-true strengths and its aspirations, from local food and homegrown music to high-stakes pitch competitions, and managed to draw more than 10,000 people and break even with a budget of $100,000.

As a branding effort in microcosm, it did well, perhaps because it embraced the area’s different identities. Wine country and tech hub—“they go hand in hand,” Beyer said. Look at northern California. Make a place appealing, and you can make it cool, and good things will follow. “The vibe of the place is what draws people, and it’s the same vibe that lets this startup culture emerge.”

*Initially, this story implied that the branding initiative cost more than half a million dollars, when in fact, it’s one $35,000 piece of a much larger marketing effort.

**The earlier version of this story identified the CACVB’s director incorrectly as Kurt Burkholt.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: You Can’t Take it With You

The extended Vanderhoff family in You Can’t Take It With You, by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, at UVA’s new Ruth Caplin Theatre. Photo by Michael Bailey.

The UVA drama department closes its 2012-13 season and busts open the doors of the much anticipated, state-of-the-art Ruth Caplin Theatre with the 1936 classic screwball comedy, You Can’t Take It With You. The players light up the shiny new stage with all the fireworks (literal and figurative) and hilarity that ensues when the daughter of a family of freethinking eccentrics falls in love with the son of a straight-laced banker.

Through 4/27 $8-14, 8pm. Ruth Caplin Theatre, 109 Culbreth Rd. 924-3376.

 

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Editor’s Note: Who’s lobbying for small farmers?

Photo: John Robinson.

When I was 9 or 10, I was asked, by a member of the foreign press corps attending one of my parents’ cocktail parties, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I answered that I wanted to be a lobbyist, which provoked laughter first, and then puzzled amusement. Why on earth would I want to be a lobbyist?

Because, I said, they’re the ones who actually get things done and they don’t have to pretend to be on anybody’s side. More laughter, followed by probing looks at my parents. It was 1984 or 1985, the height of the Reagan administration, and my father worked for the Democratic Congress. I had likely heard him grumbling about lobbyists and asked about it. Edited for his child, “The bastards control all the votes,” had morphed into something more polite. And then when I asked what lobbyists were, he probably said they get paid to argue somebody’s case in Congress and they live in Virginia.

And that sounded fine to me. I knew a few lawyers, and they were rich and good at arguing, I liked politics and had friends who lived in Virginia, and I knew from the playground that real control came from never picking a side. Voilá.

Since the mid-’80s the ag lobby, the pharma lobby, and the defense lobby (and many other lobbies) have changed the political landscape in our country so that it is almost unrecognizable. Sure, there have always been people in Washington asking for favors, but those people didn’t codify their positions over the years with Vatican-like precision, nor did the money they control have the power to guarantee victory in even the most far-flung Congressional precincts.

Over the course of my lifetime, the lobbyists have tightened their chokehold in the Capitol with each successful political revolution, burying their work in the fine print of massive pieces of legislation that no one, especially not freshman Congressmen, can possibly understand.  As smart as he is, Michael Clark, the subject of this week’s feature, can’t tell if the Food Safety Modernization Act will kill the livelihood he’s built from scratch. Besides lobbying, agriculture is Virginia’s biggest industry, producing 221,000 jobs and nearly $26 billion in total output. The typical Virginia farmer is 58 years old, runs a farm of 171-acres worth over $1 million, and raises cows or chickens. Maybe the lobbyists can tell me why if agriculture is thriving, farmers are an endangered species.

Categories
Arts

When Art Imitates Pain

Dwayne Johnson and Mark Wahlberg star in Pain & Gain, the insensitive film adaption of the Sun Gym story. Publicity Photo.

Let’s say it’s 2028, and you’ve decided to watch the new film Before The Finish. The plot is based on the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, which killed three and injured hundreds. Despite such a heavy topic, the film features plenty of comic relief, like the person setting the bombs forgetting to replace the detonator’s batteries. Sure, there’s gruesome death in Before The Finish, but it plays out like a comedy.

With the Boston Marathon attack only days old, the scenario sounds ridiculous. How could someone ever create a lighthearted view of such a tragedy, and why would anyone want to see it presented in that way? That’s exactly what some are wondering about Pain & Gain, the new film starring Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.

Pain & Gain, which debuts this Friday, is based on the real-life tale of three bodybuilders turned murderers. Their story was captured in 1999 in a series of articles in the The Miami New Times. In the early 1990s, dedicated members of the Sun Gym—Daniel Lugo, Noel Doorbal and Jorge Delgado—hatched a get-rich-quick scheme that quickly escalated from extortion to kidnapping to torture to murder. For their crimes, Lugo and Doorbal were sentenced to death and currently sit on death row. Delgado turned state’s witness and is serving out his jail sentence.

Zsuzsanna Griga will not be seeing Pain & Gain. Her brother was beaten to death by the Sun Gym Gang. The trio killed his girlfriend by injecting her with horse tranquilizer. The bodybuilders then cut both of them up and dumped their bodies. Griga told The Associated Press that she, and others impacted by the Sun Gym Gang’s crimes, was disgusted to find out that Pain & Gain puts a comedic spin on the events. “It’s horrible what happened to them,” said Griga. “I don’t want the American public to be sympathetic to the killers.”

Griga’s stance on Pain & Gain begs the question: Should there be ethical standards for art? Could Before The Finish—starring Will Ferrell as a lovable, shirtless terrorist—come out next year? Is it even okay for a film to depict horrific, true life acts with a side of hilarious hijinks? I want to say that art can be whatever the artist wants it to be. But then I ask myself, what if it was my daughter who was dismembered? What if it was my brother who was killed in the bombing? I don’t know the answers, but maybe the fact that I’m asking so many questions is the only goal art ever needs to accomplish.

Dos and Don’ts of Downtown ACAC:

Do: Run around the tiny indoor track if you’re cool with people watching you and wondering why you just don’t run outside.

Don’t: Be that guy who spreads his crap all over the lounge area of the men’s locker room. It’s a common space, not your bedroom. This concludes “Passive Aggressiveness With Chris O’Shea.” Next week: Damn Whole Foods, Just Donate My Bag Refund Yourself.

Do: Say hello to Joe, one of the nicest staffers there on weekday mornings.

Don’t: Use the middle treadmills equipped with TVs. The AC and a fan blasts those machines, and that means hard nipples. No one likes the Nipple Man.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Picks: Spring for the Arts

Award-winning, Appalachian-style musician Mark Campbell upholds the deep legacy of mountain music at Spring for the Arts. Photo by John Herzog.

Spring is here and it’s time to put a little art into it. Leading the charge is the Piedmont Council for the Arts (the only organization providing services for artists, arts organizations, and audiences in the Charlottesville area) with its annual Spring for the Arts gala. Old time fiddle and banjo player Mark Campbell provides musical accompaniment (along with PCA’s Rising Stars Award winners) to a silent auction, hors d’oeuvres and drinks, and a who’s-who in the creative community.

Wednesday 4/24 $40-60, 5:30pm. CitySpace, 100 Fifth St., NE. 971-2787.

 

http://charlottesvillearts.org/rsvp/

Categories
News

Anatomy of a hack: Examining Root The Box’s attack on UVA’s website

This screenshot from UVA third-year Andrew Kouri’s computer shows last week’s UVA homepage hack in real time.

Last week’s high-profile defacing of UVA’s website may not have led to a serious security breach, despite threats of e-mail infiltration and stolen data by two hackers calling themselves “Root the Box” who took to Twitter to boast and threaten during a 24-hour battle with University Information Technology Services. But it definitely got peoples’ attention—in Charlottesville and beyond—and sparked a conversation about how we secure schools’ online information.

“It was certainly not a sophisticated attack on UVA’s website by any means,” said third-year computer science major Andrew Kouri, who managed to conduct a chat interview with the pair of hackers. “In fact, I’d like to think that most CS students here could figure out how to exploit the vulnerability if they actually cared enough to do so.”

Kouri thinks the repeated takeovers of the UVA homepage, detailed in a string of news stories and picked up by the Associated Press, were overblown. But there are a few takeaways, he wrote in an opinion column for the Cav Daily. Chief among them, “as the hackers say, no system is entirely secure.”

The fact that we know how the hack unfolded is largely due to some deft work by Cavalier Daily reporters, who joined other students in watching a full day’s worth of hacker antics in real time, capturing them with screen shots and talking it all over on Twitter. Their reports lay out the details: At about 9:10pm on Monday, April 15, visitors to UVA’s homepage were redirected first to a white-on-black image of the words “ROOT THE BOX” and a grimacing, broken-tooth skull over what looked vaguely like an alien from the Space Invaders arcade game, then to a Twitter feed with the handle @R00tTh3B0x.

For the next 40 minutes, the hackers—going by the names n3tcat and x86, according to their redirect page—appeared to do battle with ITS, with the homepage flicking between its normal state and the high-tech Jolly Roger five times before the main page returned for good at 9:53pm.

An hour after the site reverted to normal, Cav Daily editor-in-chief Kaz Komolafe wrote a tweet asking the hackers for more information, and a 20-minute conversation followed.

“We hacked it because we can,” Root The Box wrote back. “For fun, and because of the University’s lack of security. That sums it up.” They later implied the hack was in part in response to a $40,000 Virginia Innovation grant awarded to three UVA researchers last month to develop patented code that would increase Web security. The computer scientists, who aren’t part of ITS, “don’t deserve their award,” they wrote.

The hackers went silent at 11:15pm, only to return the next evening to again deface the homepage and issue a threat: “If you admit your security fails and acknowledge #RTB for our actions we’ll leave you alone,” they wrote, using a self-designated hashtag. “Otherwise, you’ll continue to feel the wrath.”

Normalcy returned shortly. Kouri, seeking fodder for a column, used an encrypted Web app to chat with x86 and nt3cat, and came away both better informed and unimpressed.

The pair claimed they’d hacked the site via its widely used Web platform, WordPress. Specifically, they found a chink in the armor of the Honor Committee website, probably because of a weak password. Once inside, they were likely able to set up new administrator logins, creating new doors to come back through later.

But Kouri believes they were bluffing about their ability to mine the site for sensitive data. They sent him screenshots of files they’d supposedly downloaded, but they were too nondescript to be real proof of a serious security breach. And even though one of them had claimed to have a connection to the University—“The UVa hasn’t changed a bit since I attended”—Kouri thinks that, too, was a lie. They referred to the Honor Committee as “the ‘honors’ site,” which smacked of unfamiliarity, and their screen shot showed they were on Central Time.

UVA has said little about the incident. The only clue online that anything went amiss is a note on the University’s system status page that ITS had temporarily disabled access to WordPress admin pages.

Amateurish as the effort might have been, it did raise some eyebrows. Are UVA and other public institutions more vulnerable than previously thought?

“I think the increasing complexity of software and the increasing prevalence of online software in our daily lives has exposed greater degrees of attack surfaces,” said John Feminella, a local software engineer, former Chief Technology Officer at Cardagin and c0-founder of analytics health monitoring company UpHex*. There’s more vulnerable landscape than there was even five years ago, he said. “That means these incidents are more likely to occur.”

But developers are getting more savvy when it comes to watching for weaknesses, he said. One effective way to do that is to tap into the hive mind of the hacking community and put it to good use, creating communication portals to allow so-called “white-hat” hackers to point out soft spots.

“It’s always good to have someone double-checking your work, especially where security is concerned,” Feminella said, and welcoming suggestions resonates with the kind of experts who would rather get a nod of recognition than make headlines for an epic attack.

But if UVA isn’t particularly progressive when it comes to getting friendly with those who might be secretly poking at its secure perimeters, that’s also understandable, Feminella said. As a public institution sitting on a big pile of personal information, the University has a lot to lose.

“I think they’re required to have a certain conservatism, because they’re dealing with peoples’ lives,” he said of those in charge of the data. And however much of a spectacle Root The Box created last week, UVA is doing a pretty good job of keeping the baddies at bay.

“The fact that there aren’t thousands of these incidents instead of one of them is to their credit, too.”

Rodney Petersen, managing director of the Washington, D.C. regional office of the Educause, a nonprofit advancing IT in higher education, agreed that schools have risen to the challenge of becoming effective protectors of information.

“I don’t see a lot of these kinds of incidents,” he said. “I can think back eight, 10 years ago when website defacement was much more common.”

And even if they don’t welcome hackers in, they certainly try to think like them, he said, turning their security professionals into “people who can defend their networks and anticipate what a bad guy might do.”

They also watch each other, and UVA’s hack had more higher-ed eyes on it than it might have otherwise. As it happened, Root The Box went on the attack while Educause was holding its annual conference for college and university IT security professionals in St. Louis, making for a captive and very interested audience.

“They learn from each other’s mistakes,” Petersen said of school IT teams. “No one wants to be in response and reaction mode.”

*Correction: We previously said John was a co-founder of Cardagin; he was the CTO. Also, UpHex was initially described as a “health analytics” company, but it’s actually an “analytics health monitoring” company. He explains it this way: “We watch your Google Analytics, Facebook, PayPal, etc. and we let you know whenever something statistically surprising happens. We don’t watch your EKG or blood pressure.”