Month: August 2013

“If you go to the parking lot of the Ix building, you can hear the creek under you,” said Matthew Slaats. “It sounds like someone’s left their water running, but there’s actually a creek right there. There’s a ton of other underground creek spaces throughout the city. It’s something you never think about.”

Slaats is referring to Pollock’s Branch, one of Charlottesville’s two dozen underground waterways. They’re in every city. Natural creeks or drainage ditches that get covered up, built over, and integrated into a city’s maintenance system as urban areas grow.

Did you ever wonder where all that rainwater goes, once it runs down that grate in the street? In Charlottesville, it’s mostly a small network of underground tunnels ranging from a half-dozen blocks to a few miles in length, draining water and run-off from the city’s urban areas. In larger cities these are often vast tunnels, an arcane and idiosyncratic series of interconnected waterways vital to a city’s daily functions, but invisible and forgotten by its citizens, save for a handful of construction and maintenance workers.

Slaats is the newly-appointed director of The Bridge Progressive Arts Intiative, profiled in last issue. (Full disclosure: this writer was an employee of The Bridge from 2006-2009.) On Wednesday, August 28, The Bridge will screen Lost Rivers, a recent documentary about urban underground waterways around the world. After the screening, Slaats will lead a candlelight walk tracing the path of the nearest underground waterway, Pollock’s Creek. “It’s actually just across the street,” he said. “It goes down along Sixth Street southeast. It runs down through Friendship Court, through the Ix [building], and then pops out just south of Elliott [Avenue]. It drains most of Downtown. All of Downtown basically drains to a point just south of the train tracks.”

“The film is interesting,” he said. “It looks at a group of high school and college kids that started exploring these underground rivers in Russia and Italy. When they first started they were doing it illegally. But over time they got to know these things so well, and the cities started to recognize that, so they made them a kind of organization, and now they lead tours underground. So you’re seeing these kind of Roman structures that have other things built on top of them and then you have these rivers flowing underneath.”

“[The documentary] looks at Seoul and they look at Yonkers, both of which did these ‘daylighting’ projects of a river that had just gotten so bad that they just covered them up in the 20th century. And now they’re uncovering them. Like Yonkers—now all of a sudden they have this beautiful space in the middle of town and people want to be there, and so developers are coming in and developing it. It’s totally the same conversation as [the High Line in New York].”

“In the past I had done some projects about waterways,” Slaats said. “So I thought this film was interesting, and I’d been wanting to show it for a while. I just hadn’t had the opportunity. And it just so happens that there’s an underground creek right across the street from us, so it was an easy thing to make a connection to. But also there’s this whole conversation about the strategic investment area, which is this big development where [the city] has brought all of these consultants in. They’ve been doing this big study of the area south of Downtown to look at how it could be redeveloped. So they’ve been working on this for a while and it just so happens that one of the designs at the preliminary design competition is to ‘daylight’ that creek and make it a centerpiece of this plan.”

“So, the hope is to show this film, which brings up some questions, and then go for this walk,” he said. Slaats has invited several representatives of the city, as well as UVA architecture student James Moore (who has researched Pollock’s Branch), members of the strategic investment steering committee, and the PLACE design task force, among others, with the goal of facilitating further dialogue. He hopes to involve environmental activists, as well.

This kind of communication and transparency to the community seem crucial at a time when development in Charlottesville is expanding at an ambitious and exponential rate. “So many people see it as an either/or, like you’re either pro-development, or you’re against it,” Slaats said. “Development’s going to happen no matter what. But you hope you can do it in such a way that it’s thoughtful. So that people have a say in it.”

Slaats hopes the event will be both informative and interactive, perhaps drawing the sort of audience members that might not ordinarily attend a City Council meeting. “I like the idea of a bunch of people walking down the creek with candles, and marking it out and making it present for a little while,” he said. “It’s kind of performative and I really like that idea of creating opportunities for performance in some way.”

“My big push for the arts, here at The Bridge is that the arts shouldn’t be here ‘just because,’” he said. “I want to ask ‘what use, really, is art, in a community like Charlottesville?’ And so I want to try to push this idea of connection, bringing up questions, talking about art being a catalyst for new ways of seeing the city. So it has a big, more of a functional, mode to it, rather than just kind of being a visual experience. I want to play between those two things. Present the avant-garde film or music thing, but then also [ask], ‘how can music and images be used to facilitate a conversation?’”

Share your thoughts on developing the city’s underground waterways in the comments section below.

Led by teen singing sensation Alex Chilton and studio mastermind Chris Bell, the band name Big Star and the album title #1 Record were picked in jest, but the choice became increasingly ironic as the band failed to find any commercial or popular success. Though critics adored them, the group often played to near-empty venues. Bell left the band he had founded due to personal troubles, and Chilton carried on in near-obscurity. A third album was shelved without release, and the group essentially dissolved in 1974.

Luckily, Big Star’s music had a second act, as generations of new fans slowly discovered it. Though the Big Star story was tough and often bitter for those who lived it, it also made for a perfect legend, placing the band in the position of underdogs. As millions came to adore it, each new fan felt like he was making a private, personal discovery.

Big Star’s albums continue to be “lost classics” well after they have been “found.” Though they never became a household name, musicians have cited them as a formative influence, and they’re practically required listening for college radio DJs. It’s impossible to imagine the first wave of American indie rock—from R.E.M. and the dB’s through Yo La Tengo and The Replacements—without Big Star.

A new documentary, Nothing Can Hurt Me, tells the history of the band. It’s directed by New York-based filmmaker Olivia Mori (who was raised in Charlottesville) and it paints a full, coherent portrait of Big Star’s history. The film contains archival footage, extensive interviews with many who knew and worked with the band, and is packed from beginning to end with songs from Big Star albums as well as Bell and Chilton’s solo projects.

On Tuesday, September 27 at 7:30pm, WTJU will present the documentary at The Paramount Theater, followed by a Q&A with Mori. C-VILLE Weekly spoke with Mori by phone.

C-VILLE Weekly: Why Big Star? How did you come to make a documentary about that band in particular?

Olivia Mori: The project had actually started several years back, but it wasn’t going anywhere. When Alex Chilton died in 2010, that’s when I heard about the documentary. I had discovered the band shortly after college, so I was already a fan of their music, and I was interested. So production started shortly after his death in 2010, and I sort of immediately involved myself in the project.

So that’s the logical answer to your question. But in terms of the larger question of ‘why?’—we had sort of realized that there’s no comparable story out there. There are a lot of documentaries right now about bands that never made it, or almost made it, but that didn’t quite apply to them. There’s so many things about the Big Star story that you can’t really compare to anything.

I really had no idea how big the story would get. But once you start doing the research… so much of it has to do with bands from Memphis, and the cultural history from there.

I could spend the rest of my life making documentaries about Memphis. It’s completely unique. It has to do with the people. Everyone there is really talkative, and really smart.

That must have made your job easier when trying to get interviews with everyone who was involved in that story?

We actually had a really hard time with that. Mostly because Alex had just died, and [producer] Jim Dickenson had passed away just a year before that. Three or four of our interview subjects were dying of cancer—and these people were young, just in their 60s. There was a lot of death around, and at the same time, I think emotions were still very raw, we got some very candid stuff. A couple of people just weren’t ready to talk. Alex’s death, I think for a lot of people, was just a shock, it came out of nowhere. He was a really troubled character, and he didn’t maintain good relationships. [With] a lot of people, the last time he saw them, he probably was an asshole to them. How do you react when someone like that dies?

I imagine it was also more difficult to assemble all the source material you needed for the documentary when three of the main band members are deceased.

Oh, Alex never would have done it. Even in the late ’70s, early ’80s when the records were still starting to be discovered, the people who did discover them would track him down. So even way back when, he was still being haunted by these records. It was known that he would never want to talk about it, or play those songs. He did the reunion stuff in the end, honestly, to make money, because he was really poor. He did sort of reveal in one interview that he was really embarrassed by the lyrics in Big Star. They represented a certain period in his life. Like a lot of people feel that way about things they did when they were younger, that they were immature. He wasn’t comfortable with a lot of the lyrics, but he knew the music was good. But he also shunned any kind of adoration. If you came up to him and said something about Big Star, he would say ‘fuck you.’ But if you wanted to talk to him about classical guitar or Eddie Floyd or something else, then he could be sweet.

His life was really bookended by success, in a weird way. He had this huge hit with The Box Tops as a teenager, and then was commercially unsuccessful for years, and then finally got all this critical acclaim later in life. It seemed like enthusiasm for Big Star was at an all-time high when he died. 

I didn’t realize this until I started working on the film, but if you know them and you love them, you’re part of a club. That’s part of why the movie’s been so successful. Everyone who knows them loves them and wants to hear the story. Since the movie has come out, at every screening, all of the fans come out. So it’s been really great having the movie out and bringing them together. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. If you meet someone, and the topic of Big Star comes up, you just know you can trust that person. You share something with them.