Month: January 2014

Categories
Living

Fading memories: Coping with senility in aging pets

Watching a pet age both physically and mentally is never easy, but local veterinarian Mike Fietz advises owners to be proactive. File photo

Pets, just like their human caretakers, face a great variety of health problems as they age. The physical sorts, while awful in their own right, seem easier for us to grasp. There is a sad kind of sense to it. The aches and pains, blindness and deafness, organ dysfunction—we recognize these as the unavoidable price of living inside biological machinery. We reluctantly accept that any machine, no matter how well built or cared for, breaks in time.

I find that my clients struggle more with the non-physical aspect of watching their pets age. I think we understand—intellectually, at least—that senility has the exact same cause. The brain is also a machine, however intricate and arcane. But unlike a leg or a liver, it is intimately bound to identity. It is what makes your animals who they are, and it is painful to see it fade.

Senility is a complex development with no single cause. It is the sort of condition for which the knowledge we do have only serves to highlight the vast amount we don’t. But it is chronic, progressive, and can present in a number of different ways.

Affected animals can be disoriented or confused, even in familiar situations. They may become less playful or more irritable, and they can forget things they’ve known for a long time, including simple commands and housetraining etiquette. Disruptions in sleep schedule are common, and I hear from owners who are kept awake through the night while their animals roam restlessly. Others find their pets engaged in spooky behavior, staring blankly at walls or barking at nothing at all.

It is important to stay on top of concurrent medical problems in senile animals. If your dog has become irritable, then her painful old hips only make it more likely for her to lash out. And if your cat has grown disoriented, the inability to see or hear you clearly does nothing to light his way. Some medical problems are easier to address than others, but your veterinarian can help you sort out which ones are present, and which might be treatable.

Mental stimulation and exercise are known to help slow the process, and it’s important that senile animals aren’t just left to stew in their confusion. Toys and games can give pets something to focus on, and will bring you closer at a time when it’s easy to drift apart. Exercise can keep them mentally engaged during the day, and wear them out so they’ll get to sleep at night. Structure and ritual can help them to make sense of a world that, for them, has been twisted around.

While there is a lot of theory about the ways in which different drugs and supplements interact with the underlying process of senility, the disorder is too complex and variable for tidy solutions, and I have found that much of what sounds promising on paper falls short in real life. Treatment, as a result, is frequently symptomatic and case-specific. I have a great pref-
erence for environmental and behavioral management of senile patients, but I have seen animals that are far happier after medical treatment of associated problems like anxiety and sleep disorders.

For me, the goal with senile animals isn’t to rail against the process, but to help shepherd pets through it. I know it can be hard to see them through the fog, but they are still there. And they need you.

Categories
News

New survey shows more than half of locals want the Bypass—so what’s next?

Paul Wright recently launched Bypass29Now, an advocacy group supporting construction of the Western Bypass. Staff photo.

Since last November’s elections removed from state and local office some of the biggest champions of the proposed Western Bypass, the decades-long debate over whether to build the 6.2-mile, $244 million road around Charlottesville has been in a holding pattern. Albemarle County has seated new anti-Bypass appointees on the area’s Metropolitan Planning Organization, which could block funding for the project. In Richmond, the newly elected Democratic governor and his transportation secretary pick say they may soon weigh in. And everybody has one eye on the Federal Highway Administration, which has final authority to move the Virginia Department of Transportation’s plans for the road forward.

Local proponents of the Bypass aren’t waiting in silence. Paul Wright, a former chairman of the Albemarle County Architectural Review Board who has worked for local Republican campaigns, announced the launch of a new nonprofit advocacy group called Bypass29Now. At a press conference at the County Office Building last week, he made a renewed case for local support of the road, pointing to a newly released UVA study that shows a majority of local residents want it.

“This road needs to be built, because we will never have an opportunity again in our lifetimes where we have the right of way, the money, the state approval, and a design that is ready to go forward,” said Wright.

Opponents claim overpasses at key congested intersections on 29 are a far cheaper alternative, he said, but they don’t take into account the money the state has already sunk into securing much of the right-of-way for the Bypass.

And, as he discussed in detail at the press conference, VDOT’s environmental data contradicts claims made by opposition group Bypass Truth Coalition, another 501c4 formed ahead of the last election, that the road would compromise air quality at the schools along the planned route.

According to a 2012 report on the project, VDOT predicts that thanks to stricter diesel standards, carbon monoxide levels will decrease in the area by 2040, with or without the Bypass—and that they’ll actually drop slightly more should the road be built, apparently because fewer trucks will be idling at stoplights.

“The facts remain that air quality is better and will improve, whether we build the road or not,” said Wright.

That doesn’t satisfy Randy Salzman, one of more than a dozen anti-Bypass activists who showed up at the press conference to pepper Wright with questions and counter-arguments.

Hundreds of studies show traffic pollution has a detrimental effect on child health, Salzman said, and better standards shouldn’t justify putting a road next to schools.

“The first rule of holes is, ‘When you find yourself in one, quit digging,’” he said. “It’s not ‘Grab a jackhammer.’”

Jeff Werner of the Piedmont Environmental Council, a longtime Bypass opponent who also listened in on Wright’s announcement, put it more bluntly.

“The cars on the Bypass could produce oxygen and maybe a delightful odor, and maybe make my teeth whiter, and it would still be a stupid, wasteful, ineffective project,” he said.

But what of the survey results? Tom Guterbock is the director of UVA’s Center for Survey Research, which conducts the biennial sampling of nearly 1,000 residents of Charlottesville, Albemarle, and surrounding counties with a list of questions—some paid for by local nonprofits, some, like the Bypass questions this year, put together by the center itself. Results are carefully weighted to accurately reflect gender, race, geographic distribution, homeownership, and whether the respondent was reached on a landline or cell phone.

Guterbock said that while there’s been some erosion in support for the idea of a Bypass—69 percent of people said they supported one in 2012, compared to 62 percent this year—the fact that 53 percent of respondents said they favored construction of the current proposed road is revealing.

“There’s not a great deal of fall off in support when you switch from a general bypass question to a specific one,” Guterbock said.

Wright said the survey clearly shows public opinion is aligned with current plans to build the road. But Salzman doesn’t think the results offer the whole story. It’s easy to make the Bypass sound good to people, because the promise of convenience is right there in the name, he said. But the arguments against the project—particularly that there’s a cheaper fix—are hard to convey in a telephone survey.

“When you bring your brain to the discussion, you begin to say, ‘Oh my God, look what’s about to happen,’” Salzman said.

“There is a feeling on both sides of this issue that ‘If the public only knew more, then they would think the way we do,’” Guterbock said. “In my own view, this has been a very well-aired debate.”

Whether all the talk at home will sway the state officials who have a hand on the purse strings remains to be seen.

“I think that there are plenty of facts that have already been laid out there, I will evaluate them,” newly appointed but yet-to-be-confirmed transportation secretary Aubrey Lane told NBC29 earlier this month. “A lot of the decisions, the best decisions particularly in transportation, need local support.”

SPEAK YOUR MIND. Consider yourself well-informed on the Bypass issue? Think there’s more to community input than a yes or a no? We want to hear from you. We’re asking readers to submit brief 300-word essays explaining their views on the project (we wish we could let you write longer, but we have to keep ’em short for space reasons). Send yours to news@c-ville. com by February 5, and be sure to include your full name and a phone number where we can reach you.

 

Categories
Arts

Charlottesville teen sits center stage at South African festival

Music Resource Center student Carmen Day (left) won a talent contest that landed her at a festival in South Africa where she collaborated with students from around the globe.

It’s December 7, the height of the South African summer, and the excitement is palpable as the gates open at a warehouse-turned-music-venue in the popular tourist getaway of White River, Mpumalanga.

Concertgoers gravitate to the largest of three stages at the Route 40 Music Festival, as the drummer of the newly formed band Cosmic River counts off into a multi-tempo, cello-driven rock song with unique Middle Eastern influences. At the center of the stage sits the song’s original composer, 14-year-old Charlottesville native Carmen Day.

It has been less than 48 hours since the death of the iconic political leader, Nelson Mandela, but the throng of music lovers seem more interested in celebrating his legacy than mourning, and it has been announced that the concert will be dedicated to Mandela, a longtime supporter of the arts.

Colorful spotlights cut through the machine-generated fog to reveal the group, composed of Day and half a dozen students from the local Casterbridge Music Development Academy (CMDA). The unlikely international mash-up is one of several student bands born at Route 40, an event that is several months in the making and pairs talented young musicians from around the United States and South Africa through a songwriting contest.

Day saw the contest announcement posted at the Music Resource Center (MRC) in Charlottesville where she takes weekly lessons.

The CMDA is a children’s music school modeled heavily after the Music Resource Center, thanks to the influence of South African native and Charlottesville favorite Dave Matthews. In a transcontinental collaboration with several like-minded organizations, CMDA facilitated the Carnegie Hall/Rock School Scholarship/Casterbridge Music Development Academy Youth Songwriting Program. According to MRC Community Outreach Coordinator Terri Allard, the contest lined up with her organization’s mission statement. “The MRC has been inspiring and supporting young artists since 1995 by helping them learn to play instruments, write, sing, dance, and produce original music.”

This year’s songwriting competition was the first opportunity for students of both institutions to work together. “They were all really accepting and excited [that] we were coming from America,” Day said.

The road to White River began when Day picked up the cello, her primary instrument for four years, and “started plucking around.”

“I hadn’t really written anything serious before, but it just kind of fueled something,” said Day. “I was just so excited [about] getting into music more, and I just thought it was a great opportunity right in front of me.”

In time, a melody took shape around various poems Day had penned and she arranged a time to play the song for Allard, an accomplished musician and Day’s mentor for more than three years.

Allard had expected to suggest more changes, but was surprised to find little criticism necessary. “I was so impressed with her lyrics and melody, as well as with her unique arrangement on the cello,” she said. “It is a striking piece and when she performs it, your immediate response is simply, ‘Wow.’”

The only thing Day struggled with was putting a title on the song. “I’ve been thinking about it,” Day said. “But I just can’t find one because none of the lyrics repeat and it’s pulled from a bunch of different poems that all have different meanings.”

The song otherwise complete, Day took a Canon camera and filmed her performance at the MRC for submission, in hopes of becoming one of the six American finalists. And then she waited.

Day said, “I assumed I didn’t know the results because I wasn’t part of them—then I found out [I was selected] and it was just really unbelievable. It’s quite an honor!”

Nearly eight months and a 15-hour plane ride since first seeing the contest announcement, Day arrived in White River, where she joined five other teen musicians from the United States.

The finalists received a hearty welcome from the students of the CMDA, located four hours outside Johannesburg. “They were all really nice and really talented too,” Day said of her fellow finalists, ages 16 to 18. “They all had different personalities—some were really confident and others were still really shy. Everyone was really supportive of each other.”

Day’s own musical history stretches back to her fourth grade classroom at Walker Upper Elementary School where she settled on the school orchestra as an elective course. “I didn’t really want to take orchestra,” Day explained. “I wanted to take art, but they had people come and actually bring the instruments. This sounds really cheesy, but I felt drawn to the cello and I needed to play it.”

Together, Day and her assigned festival mates retooled her original submission to accommodate the instruments of the CMDA students. “It was composed mostly for a solo,” Day explained, “so we worked in different parts…because there were lots of guitars and bass.”

The resulting piece surprised even its composer. “It’s different,” said Day. “It’s more rock-y, more metal, more indie.”

According to Day, the festival organizers strongly emphasized collaboration, placing each of the American finalists in pre-formed bands of CMDA students. “Every day we’d be paired up with the other finalists and we’d have an hour or so to write a song,” she said.

The 12 student bands ultimately joined South African touring artists, including The Parlotones and Elvis Blue, for an unforgettable three days of music.

Now home from her one-of-a-kind journey, Day looks forward to a rewarding artistic career, perhaps with a few changes. “I’m not even sure I want to do music [long-term],” she said. “I might want to do photography, but [I’ll have] something to do with the arts.”

In a world of possibilities, Day’s aspirations bear a striking resemblance to her winning composition: untitled with room to grow.

~ Danielle Bricker

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Avers

Relaxed roots influences tinged with psychedelica mark the sound of Richmond, Virginia’s Avers. The collaborative quintet is derived from various musical projects including HyperColor, Farm Vegas, Mason Brothers, The Trillions, and The Head and the Heart. Despite its impressive indie pedigree, the group hardly considers itself a side project as it tours in support of the upcoming release, Waiting for the Harvest, full of haunting vocals and gritty sonic texture.

Friday 1/31. $7, 8:30pm. The Southern Café and Music Hall, 103 S. First St. 977-5590.

Categories
Living

Voice over matter: Life coaching and singing lessons go hand-in-hand with Heather Hightower

Heather Hightower works with clients to find their voice through singing. Photo: Martyn Kyle

What would rock my world?

That’s the question Heather Hightower tells her clients to ask themselves before their initial voice session.

Hightower has been singing and studying music for more than 15 years, and she’s always had a fascination with the concept of coaching. After a stint teaching music lessons in Guatemala, two years ago she started working with clients in a way that combines life coaching with voice coaching, and pushes the boundaries of voice and the role it plays beyond singing.

“There’s something magical that happens when you step into the space of making music,” Hightower said. “It has this symbiotic, grounding effect, and connects to the rest of your life.”

As a reporter, I’m used to being the one to ask the questions. And as someone who is utterly tone-deaf and still recovering from being shushed in my high school church choir, I’m used to strictly limiting my singing to the shower and the car. So when I stepped into Hightower’s home studio last week, I was more than a little anxious about the prospect of spending two hours talking about myself and singing with someone I’d only previously met twice.

Clutching a mug of peppermint tea, I settled myself onto one of her couches, eyeing the piano a few feet away and wondering what I’d gotten myself into. When she asked me what would rock my world, what would leave me feeling empowered and energetic when I head back home in two hours, I had no idea.

A typical two-hour session usually includes some combination of singing together and talking about anything, deep or otherwise. A lot of her students wander in with a simple desire to learn how to sing, but she said many of them leave with a newfound empowerment and understanding of how they can adapt those skills and use their voice in other areas of their lives. Hightower said she’s worked with clients who struggle with social anxiety so severe that they can barely leave the house.

Despite her own exceptional singing voice, which is widely sought after for weddings, after-school programs, and local performances, it’s clear that Hightower’s passion lies in tapping into her friends’ and clients’ musical talents and making them comfortable as they begin exploring the potential of their own voice.

“If we have a surging of energy that’s coming up through the body and trying to make its way out through this tiny, gorgeous little portal of your voice, and you have no concept for how to support that energy, it’s really common for there to be a physical shutting down,” Hightower said.

Facing both physical and mental shutdown is what her work is all about, Hightower said, and she’s watched clients transform both professionally and interpersonally in terms of confidence and the ability to stand up for themselves. Hightower has a way of creating a safe space, even for those of us who can’t carry a tune in a bucket.

Acutely aware of my intense fear of singing in public, Hightower assured me that we could start out with just a conversation. We’ll see how the talking goes, she said, and we might not even make it over to the piano. O.K., that’s a little better.

After closing our eyes and relaxing for a few minutes, allowing our thoughts to “drift by us like birds,” the conversation flowed surprisingly easily. She remembered a personal writing project I’d mentioned earlier, so we dug into my life as a writer thus far and where I want my career to go. A David Sedaris-style book of essays has been writing itself in my mind for years, and Hightower advised me to replace the “Man, I really need to work on that” thoughts with something more positive and proactive.

“When we change the way we see our world, our world changes,” Hightower said.

I’ve always had lofty career aspirations, but there’s something oddly intimidating about putting them into spoken word. After 90 minutes of discussing my writing routine and how to find the motivation to work on personal projects, she had me say something I’ve never spoken aloud before.

“Sit up straight,” she said. “And say, ‘I am a best-selling author.’”

Once I said it twice, louder and less sheepishly the second time, she grinned and announced that we were ready for the piano.

Hightower parked herself at the piano after we had cycled through a sequence of stretches—which she said are vital for singers—and we dove right into a set of voice exercises. (Much to my coworkers’ disappointment, I turned the voice recorder off for this portion of the session.)

We’d already spent an hour and a half talking intimately, so what’s a few minutes of singing? I certainly won’t be signing up for open-mic nights anytime soon, but I squawked out notes that were higher than I’ve managed in the past, and was surprised at how easy it was to sing along with her. And that’s the whole point, she said. Some clients find they can connect first by singing together, at which point they can more easily open up in a conversation. But others, like myself, need that security through talking before braving the spot next to the piano.

Hightower’s approach to coaching isn’t for everybody. It’s an intimate coach-client relationship, she said, and there’s a lot of vulnerability that comes with singing alongside another person.

“It’s very scary, and it’s courageous to start to exercise an instrument you haven’t used at all,” Hightower said. “But as you get used to feeling that energy, it opens up this whole new experience of yourself, and in that flow, I’ve found that cognitive things sort of reveal themselves.”

And what would rock my world? Being a best-selling author, obviously.

Categories
The Editor's Desk

Editor’s Note: To your health

You might have noticed there’s a little tag on the front of our newspaper commemorating 25 years in business. Our company started in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War and the dawning of the age of global capital and ethnic conflict. Cultural barriers, concrete and abstract, were falling all around us. I was only 14, and more focused on another revolution: the emergence of rap music into the mainstream with Doctor Dré, Ed Lover, and Fab 5 Freddy on “Yo! MTV Raps.”

The idea that a pair of 20-somethings could start their own newspaper would have raised some eyebrows, but it was happening all over the country. People were looking for an alternative to the suburban boxes and urban wastelands that the pervasive fear of global war had helped to crystallize at home. When the Cold War ended, the country started to thaw again, and it needed new kinds of stories.

Fast forward to the present and C-VILLE Weekly is a mainstream media company situated in a revitalized Downtown Charlottesville humming with people working on the latest applications of the digital revolution. In the between time, the health care sector experienced a parallel transformation characterized by fast growth, increased specialization, and unprecedented technological discovery.

Twenty-five years is about the average age of an Olympic athlete. It takes that long to learn the technique, develop the physique, master the tactics, and compete as an adult, with the full knowledge that loss, failure, and injury litter the road to becoming a champion. It normally takes a bit longer to become a doctor. In this week’s cover story, we’ve highlighted some newsworthy health threats and how local physicians, researchers, and patients have confronted them. The elephant in the room (or maybe it’s a donkey) is how the Affordable Care Act will land in Virginia, whether it can deliver on the promise that access to quality medical care won’t fall into the income gap. The medical profession has never been better outfitted with tools to combat illness and disease, and the government has never been more committed to solving the industry’s failing equations. Let’s see if we can heal our political wounds long enough to pull off a miraculous recovery.

Categories
Living

At Kokoro, sushi lovers are in good hands

Renowned sushi chef Yoshihiro Tauchi and his wife Yukiko opened Kokoro Sushi Japanese Restaurant last December, and are serving up classic Japanese food for lunch and dinner. Photo: Elli Williams

Often when I eat out, I ask if the chefs would make whatever they like. While the request can perplex some servers, a little persistence can usually have it delivered to the kitchen. I figure that no one has a more reliable opinion of a restaurant’s food than those who prepare it.

The Japanese have a word for this way of eating: omakase. Say it at any decent sushi restaurant, and the chef will present a parade of tastes, one item at a time. Omakase has its roots in the Japanese term for “entrust,” and it does require a certain degree of trust that the chef will make good choices, rather than exploit the chance to dispose of undesired fish.

Yoshihiro Tauchi warrants your trust. A sushi chef at the upscale TEN for seven years, Tauchi recently left to open the less upscale Kokoro Sushi Japanese Restaurant with his wife Yukiko in Miyako’s former York Place location. The “omakase” that appears on Kokoro’s menu actually refers to a platter of sushi selected by the chef, served all at once. But, with a little coaxing, Tauchi can be persuaded to serve a multi-course chef’s choice meal, particularly on slower nights when the kitchen is not overtaxed.

Ours began with a refreshing salad of greens, sprouts, avocado, and cucumber, with a bright carrot-ginger dressing to spoon atop. Next was a bean curd and seaweed salad, rich in umami, served in a delicate porcelain bowl which, our cheerful server told us, was more than 100 years old. That was followed by a beautiful play on sushi—two cylinders resembling maki rolls, with cucumber playing the part of seaweed, encasing shrimp, raw yellowtail, and avocado, alongside ponzu sauce for dipping.

Then, a medallion of pork belly stood beside a soft-boiled egg, sliced in half, and had the deep, heady flavors of a slow, aromatic braise. Finally, there was a whole head of Japanese fish called madai, from which we plucked flesh to swirl in a bath of thick, sweet sauce reminiscent of unagi.

While all of these were delicious, the star of the show at Kokoro is the raw fish. The ice boat of sashimi and nigiri that ended our meal left no doubt that Tauchi has a way with sourcing and slicing fish.

A native of Japan, Tauchi entered the food industry nearly thirty years ago, processing fish for a seafood company in New York City. All day, Tauchi would deconstruct enormous whole tuna into pieces suitable for sale to top sushi restaurants around New York. When the work began to take a toll on his back, Tauchi moved on to sushi restaurants, where he honed his knife skills even further, and eventually came to Charlottesville in 1998 to run the sushi counter at Foods of All Nations.

In 2006, Nobu-trained chef Bryan Emperor lured Tauchi to join him in opening the kitchen at TEN. Tauchi said he enjoyed his seven years there, but the death of his father last January made him wonder if it was time to open his own place.

“I realized that I have just one life, and I wanted to make something of it,” Tauchi said. In December of last year, Kokoro was born.

Bluefin tuna is not everyone’s favorite sushi fish, with a reputation marred by the tasteless, half-frozen slabs some places serve. At Kokoro, however, it is remarkable, particularly the maguro toro, or bluefin tuna belly. The luscious mouthfeel and clean flavor of Tauchi’s morsels of tuna reflect his years of experience. After all that time Tauchi spent with maguro, it remains his favorite fish for sushi.

Tauchi’s other menu favorites are a nod to his birthplace, Shikoku. Japan’s fourth largest island, it is famous for madai, the Japanese fish we first enjoyed as a whole head. Tauchi flies his madai in from Shokoku, ensuring not just freshness but top sourcing. Prized for its flavor and texture, it was delicious both as sashimi and nigiri.

Tauchi also likes yakibuta tamago meshi, a heaping bowl of rice topped with slices of roast pork in teriyaki sauce and a fried egg. Popular in Shikoku, Tauchi calls it “soul food.”

And, finally, Tauchi loves ramen. This works out well because the Japanese dish of noodles in broth is having its moment right now in American food culture, part of a trend that started in metropolitan areas and is spreading across the country. Charlottesville ramen lovers can get their fix at Kokoro on weekdays for lunch, and choose from a miso or soy broth, both made from scratch.

Kokoro means heart in Japanese, and Tauchi and his wife chose the name, he said, because both the food and the service come from their hearts. And, he said, he wants his guests to leave with their hearts happy. If you follow Tauchi’s lead, that seems a safe bet.

Categories
Arts

Rita Dove talks about a new film on her life and work

Eduardo Montes-Bradley (right) takes a visually poetic approach to his subject in Rita Dove: An American Poet. The film will premiere at a free event honoring Dove’s myriad of accomplishments.

Poetry might be the least ostentatious of the arts. It’s a private affair conducted between a writer and a blank piece of paper. Michelangelo was said to seek out the hidden shape within the stone when he was creating a sculpture. What reserves of patience and focus do you need to find the hidden words within an 8 1/2″ x 11″ piece of emptiness? You’d have to be a page whisperer.

Out of her solitary communion with the page, Rita Dove has built a big, public career with an extravagant set of accomplishments and accolades. She arrived in Charlottesville to teach at the University of Virginia in 1989, with a Fulbright Scholarship and three books of poetry already under her belt. One of those books, Thomas and Beulah, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995, and as Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. She was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Clinton in 1996, and the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2011. Her complete list of honors and awards (and the inevitable obligations that accompany them) would easily fill this article. But even in the past 20 years, when the demands of her public role have been at their highest, she’s managed to continue to publish sustained, important, substantial works of poetry: On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), American Smooth (2004), and Sonata Mulattica (2009), along with a collection of short stories, a collection of essays, a novel, a play, a song cycle, and an anthology of poetry.

How can one successfully work both ends of a demanding, high profile career that is built on the quality of one’s most quiet and private moments? In a recent conversation, I had the chance to ask Dove. When we talked, she was in the throes of reading through 200 manuscripts—submissions to the UVA Creative Writing Program and candidates for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, an annual prize for which she serves as a jury member. “I do feel torn,” she said. “A lot of my life is taken up with trying to find the uninterrupted time to just forget all of that and let the world drop away. That means saying no sometimes to things that are absolutely worthy.”

She did not, ultimately, say no to filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley whose film Rita Dove: An American Poet premieres on January 31 at the Paramount in an event honoring her. But she did try. “It took some convincing. At first I said no. But we did meet, and I liked him. I liked what he was doing. I liked his eye. I liked the way he looked at the world. He had a real sensitivity to the artistic.”

Montes-Bradley, who hails from Argentina but has lived in the U.S. for 30 years, has had a long career as a writer, photographer, and filmmaker documenting the life and work of artists and public figures here and in Latin America. He confirmed that Dove set up a high hurdle: “She’s tough,” he said. “But you understand. She has to be cautious. I think what intrigued her was that my line of questioning was different than what she’s probably accustomed to. Not better or worse. Just different.”

The film pays Dove the compliment of exploring her life and her work on her own terms. Much of her poetry operates like a montage, especially the book-length works like Thomas and Beulah, about the lives of her grandparents, and Sonata Mulattica, about a forgotten black musician who was a protégé of Beethoven. These books are made up of what Tennyson called “short swallow-flights of song,” bursts of poetic exploration that build up, layer by layer, into a narrative. The film does something similar. It uses family photos and home movies to give us snapshots of a lived life. It weaves those together with archival footage, interviews with the author, and passages from her poetry, to achieve its own kind of cinematic lyricism—a visual poetry that pays homage to Dove’s own techniques.

Montes-Bradley calls the film a “biographical sketch” and said that, rather than trying to tell the whole history of her life, he tried to tell the story of “the making of the poet.”

“It’s always partial views, right?” said Montes-Bradley. “Glimpses into the inner fabric of a certain individual. You can’t go beyond just glimpses, flashes.”

“What I love about the film,” said Dove, “is that it manages to maintain some mystery. It resists the stamp of ‘this is Rita Dove.’ And his attention to the influence of music in my life—I am just extremely grateful for.”

Dove’s work adroitly plays big themes—race, history, death, art, reputation—against the smaller-scale textures of daily life—food, clothes, books, work, family. She is constantly burrowing, exploring, unraveling, and sussing out the ways in which the big and the small are really one and the same. And music is very often the go-between that mediates them.

In Thomas and Beulah, her grandfather, like her, is musical, and mired in the laborious demands of work. Music is his release.

“To him, work is a narrow grief/and music afterwards/is like a woman/reaching into his chest /to spread it around.”

In the poem “Gospel,” peppered with snatches of lyrics from “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” the music that came out of slavery and lifted the black church and the civil rights movement is “a humming ship of voices/big with all/the wrongs done/done them.”

“From a fortress/of animal misery/soars the chill/voice of the tenor, enraptured/with sacrifice.”

It’s as good an image of how her poetry works as any. Exploring the narrow griefs of work, home, family, or the broader griefs of history and race. And responding the only way a songbird can. With song.

Categories
News

Deeds interviewed, red-light camera company in court, city to tackle Landmark: News briefs

An interview with Creigh Deeds aired Sunday, January 26 on CBS' "60 Minutes." Photo: CBS

Pick up a copy of C-VILLE each Wednesday for the latest stories and news briefs—this week’s are below.

Creigh Deeds: “It’s clear the system failed”

State Senator Creigh Deeds spoke in detail of his son Gus’ November 19 attack on him and subsequent suicide in an interview on CBS’ 60 minutes earlier this week, offering more details on the tragedy that has brought new attention to failures in Virginia’s mental health care system.

Deeds requested an emergency custody order for his son the day before the attack, but officials claimed they couldn’t find a psychiatric bed for the 24-year-old before the legally mandated time limit on the order ran out. He said he was concerned that if Gus came home, “there was going to be a crisis.”

Father and son sat across from each other at the dining room table at their Bath County home that night, Deeds said, as Gus scribbled furiously in a notebook. The next morning, when Deeds went out to feed the horses, Gus attacked his father with a knife, slashing his face and stabbing him multiple times before going back in the house and shooting himself.

Deeds said he later went back and read the journal.

“He had determined that I had to die,” he said. “That I was an evil man. That he was going to execute me and go straight to heaven.”

Deeds has introduced a mental health reform bill in the current legislative session that would, among other changes, extend the state’s time limit on emergency custody limit to 24 hours.

“I really don’t want Gus to be defined by his illness,” Deeds said. “I don’t want Gus to be defined by what happened on the 19th. Gus was a great kid, he was a perfect son. You know, it’s clear the system failed. It’s clear that it failed Gus. It killed Gus.”

Company responsible for local red-light cameras battles bribery allegations

The company responsible for installing red-light cameras in Albemarle County is facing allegations from a former top executive that it regularly bribed officials in municipalities across the country where it was looking to do business, according to news reports.

The Daily Progress reported this week that a $2 million Chicago bribery scheme Redflex uncovered in an internal investigation last year has ballooned thanks to testimony from a fired exec now suing the company.

Former executive vice president Aaron Rosenberg claims Redflex showered gifts on officials in “dozens of municipalities” in states across the U.S., including Virginia. Besides Albemarle, the company has contracts in Richmond, Newport News, Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Virginia Beach.

A county spokeswoman told the Progress that Albemarle has examined its contract with Redflex, and that the county officials responsible for negotiating with the company have not benefitted. For its part, Redflex denies Rosenberg’s claims of widespread bribery, saying it will continue to defend itself and prosecute its claims against the alleged whistleblower.

Charlottesville City Council to weigh in on Landmark

City officials’ efforts to force the owner of the unfinished Landmark Hotel to secure and improve the 9-story Downtown Mall building moves to the Charlottesville City Council next week.

Earlier this month, the city planning commission recommended declaring the structure blighted and giving owner John Dewberry, an Atlanta-based developer, 30 days to secure the building or be billed for the work, and 90 days to complete a structural report, with quarterly updates to follow.

The body also recommended the city consider demolishing the structure should Dewberry do nothing.

Council may accept some or all of the commissioners’ recommendations at its February 3 meeting. Mayor Satyendra Huja indicated then that he’s ready to take a firm stance. “[Dewberry] needs to improve protections, and if he doesn’t want to do it, we’ll do it for him,” Huja said.

 

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Health issue 2014: Local docs on the controversy over breast cancer screening

Dr. Lynn Dengel, a breast surgeon at Martha Jefferson Hospital’s Virginia Breast Care, joins local peers in sticking to the recommendation that women start getting annual mammograms at 40. Photo: Elli Williams

This story is part of our 2014 health issue, which also includes articles on concussions in young athletes, rhabdomyolysis, and gluten intolerance.

Just over four years ago, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—an independent, federally funded panel of physicians—rocked the cancer community when it changed its breast cancer screening guidelines, recommending that women get mammograms every other year starting at age 50, instead of annually starting at age 40.

The decision, based on a growing understanding of mammography’s flaws as a detection method, ignited a firestorm of debate over costs and benefits in medicine. Both UVA Medical Center and Martha Jefferson Hospital have stuck with the old guidelines, but doctors who are fighting breast cancer from different corners—radiology, surgery—say they aren’t ignoring the complexities inherent in seeking and treating the disease.

Dr. Peter Ham is a family medicine specialist and a UVA associate professor who teaches information mastery classes to medical students—courses that aim to instruct future doctors in how to weigh information gleaned from scientific studies and statistical analyses. Understanding the controversy over breast cancer screening comes down to some very basic principles, he said.

“There are three sins a doctor can commit,” he said. Physicians can mistreat a patient—diagnose them wrong and give them the wrong therapy. They can undertreat somebody. Then there’s overtreatment—ordering tests and procedures that don’t do any good.

“I see us really happy to address the undertreatment,” he said. “That means more medical care, and that’s good for us as a hospital and an institution. And we can call that quality. But we have to address the overtreatment.”

And when it comes to breast cancer, overtreatment is a real problem. Women have long been told early detection saves lives—and it does, just not as many as we previously thought.

In the last decade, major medical journal studies have shown that while annual mammograms are good at detecting early-stage breast cancer, their widespread use hasn’t translated to a reduction in the rate of advanced cancer, and has very little effect on the rate of death from breast cancer. In other words, the false-positive rate in mammography is high, and lots of women are getting diagnosed with—and likely treated for—cancers that wouldn’t have killed them anyway.

Besides driving up health care costs, overtreatment means patients are unnecessarily exposed to invasive and potentially harmful procedures. Overdiagnosis inflates survival rates, and, some argue, skew our cultural understanding of the disease. It’s hard to weigh stats against personal stories of survival.

“The person who is diagnosed with a breast cancer that never would have hurt them is probably out running the women’s 4-miler for breast cancer awareness,” said Ham. “They’ve got a real emotional stake in that. To label them as overdiagnosed, that’s using epidemiological speak, and you’re contradicting somebody’s emotional reality.”

Which isn’t to say that peoples’ emotions shouldn’t play a role in determining their care. “We’re not robots,” Ham said. “We don’t just want to hear statistics and plug them into a calculator. People are allowed to have their emotional, personal stories play a factor in what they do.”

So how do doctors who diagnose and treat breast cancer decide what to recommend?

“We talk about it all the time,” said Dr. Lynn Dengel, a breast surgical oncologist at Martha Jefferson Hospital’s Virginia Breast Care. Oncologists and radiologists at her hospital regularly come together to discuss studies and reach consensus on a range of treatment questions, she said. And at Martha Jefferson, doctors have stuck with the recommendation to conduct annual screening mammograms for women starting at age 40.

One key reason, Dengel said, is that cancers in younger women are more likely to be the aggressive, fast-growing type. They might not be the most common across the board, but they’re the ones where a year of undetected growth can make a real difference in survivability.

And then there’s the fact that mammograms are about more than trying to prevent death.

“If you detect a cancer at an earlier stage, you may be able to offer a woman breast conservation,” said Dengel, while if you catch it later, a mastectomy might be unavoidable. And that’s the problem with looking too narrowly at the benefits of screening. “Two women might have the same survival rate, but different quality of life,” she said.

Across town at UVA Medical Center, Dr. Jennifer Harvey, a professor of radiology and head of the medical center’s Division of Breast Imaging, makes the same recommendation of annual screening at 40 to her patients. There’s a statistical argument in her favor, she said: the cost of quality-adjusted life years saved.

“It’s basically a balance between the cost of scanning a large number of women and how many cancers you’re going to find,” she said. You’re going to detect fewer cancers in women in their 40s, she said, so it’s true that the cost per cancer detected is higher for that age group. But the payoff is significant for those women. “It’s a higher number of years of life saved,” Harvey said.

Both doctors agree that mammography isn’t perfect, but that doesn’t mean they’re pessimistic about medicine’s ability to combat breast cancer. Far from it.

For starters, said Harvey, technology is always advancing. UVA now uses tomosynthesis in breast imaging, a 3D scanning process that allows radiologists to recognize and “see behind” areas of dense or overlapping breast tissue that might show up as ambiguous blobs on a one-dimensional mammogram. That means more hard-to-find cancers detected, said Harvey, but it also means fewer false positives and unnecessary biopsies.

And with time and a bigger data pool comes a better understanding of the disease. Harvey is currently leading a study of 3,500 women that examines a wide range of risk factors with the goal of creating a new risk assessment model—something that’s been hard to nail down for breast cancer in the past.

“Right now, we’re not very good at saying, ‘You’re low-enough risk that you can wait till you’re 50, or screen every three years,’” Harvey said. “We really have sort of a one-size-fits-all approach to screening, and we tend to overcompensate.” But her hope is that their data will fill in some of those gaps. “We’ll be able to help women find better methods,” she said.

Even if there are still big gray areas when it comes to risk, that patient-doctor conversation is critical, according to Dengel. It’s more important than ever when it comes to breast cancer, precisely because there are conflicting recommendations for screening floating around the medical community. The doctor’s office is where concerns about overdiagnosis crash head-on into fear of that diagnosis. The thoughtful discussion of both is what elevates medicine from an art to a science, Dengel said.

“One of the things I love about my job is that counseling conversation, because it’s not the same for every woman,” she said. “It’s my job to educate them and have the conversation, but they’re the one making the decision. Some women have very strong opinions about that, which I’m all for.”—Graelyn Brashear

“We really have sort of a one-size-fits-all approach to screening, and we tend to overcompensate,” said UVA’s Dr. Jennifer Harvey. But with better understanding of risk factors, “we’ll be able to help women find better methods.”