Month: April 2016

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Abode Magazines

Ordinary to extraordinary: Julie Bargmann sees beauty in what’s broken

At Urban Outfitters’ campus in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, crisscrossed railtracks became walking paths. Photo: D.I.R.T. Studio

It’s not that Julie Bargmann doesn’t like a vast panorama of green countryside—it’s that she’s more inspired by its opposite.

“Give me a path through a landscape with railroad tracks overgrown with wild and woolly weeds,” says the landscape architect and D.I.R.T. Studio founder. “Give me urban wilds, give me a place that is growing according to its own logic, not ours.”

Currently the associate professor chair of UVA’s landscape architecture program, Bargmann has taken this interest in upgrading the degraded to transform an abandoned pumphouse, a former navy yard and a floodplain covered with refuse (among other locales) into stylish public spaces. She takes a cue from earthworks artist Robert Smithson.

“He saw the conflation of geological and industrial processes as beautiful. They make the ordinary extraordinary,” Bargmann says. “As much as I love plants and trees, I prefer a trip to a factory rather than a walk in the woods.”

Julie Bargmann. Photo: Amy Jackson
Julie Bargmann. Photo: Amy Jackson

Why landscape architecture?

Well, I knew I wouldn’t make a very good race car driver! That might have been more fun, I suppose. I like fast cars. But seriously, I had no idea what landscape architecture was until I was in my late 20s. Before that, I studied sculpture as an undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon, and by the time I got my fine arts degree, I knew I did not want to make art—at least the kind that sat as inert objects in galleries. Then I entered a kind of black hole period, trying to figure out what to do with an art degree. I was living in Boston, bartending and drinking bourbon (hey, it was free!), and I came to the realization that I did want to remain an artist, but in a much different way. Landscape architecture synthesized a lot of things I was interested in—science, environmental and social issues, plants and dirt (yes, dirt). I reread my artist hero Robert Smithson’s essays and realized that his work all pointed toward working with complicated sites in a complex, dynamic way. As Smithson pointed out, art could operate in its most potent form by working with landscape processes.

It does also happen that he’s a New Jersey guy, and I’m a Jersey girl, and he was focused on industrialized landscapes, which became an obsession of mine. Probably because I spent a lot of my childhood driving past a bunch of refineries and other industrial sites, in a station wagon with too many siblings, often on the way to New York to see my father at work. He was a plastics salesman. So, it all came together, I guess. Jersey girl grows up breathing the soot of industry, moves to one of the most industrial cities in the country, Pittsburgh, to study art and then eventually becomes interested in landscape architecture. Granted, this was back in the early ’80s, when not many landscape architects were thinking about working with industrialized landscapes. So I found myself on the margins of the discipline, which is a comfortable spot for me as an artist.

Why did you choose to practice in Virginia?

When I was getting my master’s at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, I was a teaching assistant for both design studios and technical courses, and found that I really enjoyed teaching. Fast-forward a few years, and I decided to teach at the best program in the country—UVA’s Department of Landscape Architecture.

There were some stops in between. I didn’t dive right into teaching. I felt it was important for me to learn and apply the art of landscape architecture before I could teach it. Years of working with Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates built a foundation of loving this discipline, its medium and its message. Then I found a sort of happy medium—the reciprocal relationship between teaching and practicing—during a short stint at the University of Minnesota. It’s there that I founded D.I.R.T. Studio. The practice grew out of my research into mining, which led to my obsession with regenerative landscapes. As you know, it’s very cold in Minnesota. I got tired of hearing weather reports that would tell you how fast your flesh would freeze. I got a call from UVA in February, when, by the way, daffodils were in bloom, with an offer to freely experiment with my investigation of reclaiming post-industrial landscapes. That’s when the feedback loop, with D.I.R.T., really gained steam. It became clear very quickly that my work was filling a niche.

In Dallas, Texas, Bargmann transformed an abandoned pumphouse into an artistic event space. Photo: D.I.R.T. Studio
In Dallas, Texas, Bargmann transformed an abandoned pumphouse into an artistic event space. Photo: D.I.R.T. Studio

What was your childhood like, and how did it lead you to design?

My mother, Alice, was incredibly creative and supported my every artistic inclination. I took dancing lessons, made mud pies in our backyard and was always making something with my mom, whether it was a watercolor or a piece of pottery or a quilt. She would watch me scribble in the margins instead of doing my book reports, and I would come home to a sketchbook and pastels she had placed on my bed. Through grade school and high school, I took every art class that I could take. I think of art and design as a continuum, so here I am today, making art on a really big scale.

Tell us about your college experience. Was there a standout teacher who had a lasting impact on you?

At Carnegie Mellon all the instructors were incredible—rigorous while encouraging experimentation. I’ve always appreciated teachers who would allow me to take risks. There wasn’t any single instructor at Carnegie Mellon who I would single out. But I do remember my ceramics instructor. He let me do crazy shit like throw dirt and hay into the clay-making machine, which is usually reserved for porcelain. I wanted to make adobe, not porcelain! And then, in graduate school, my mentor to this day, Michael Van Valkenburgh, also encouraged me to do crazy shit. I was making design models out of earthenware clay while everyone around me was doing clean, pristine ink drawings on mylar. Michael has been very important to me, in my life and work. His teaching was about risk-taking, and always loving what you make. Those are things that I tell my students on practically a daily basis.

The hull of a ship inspired the entry courtyard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard complex, which houses artists’ studios, fabrication shops and film production facilities. Photo: D.I.R.T. Studio
The hull of a ship inspired the entry courtyard at the Brooklyn Navy Yard complex, which houses artists’ studios, fabrication shops and film production facilities. Photo: D.I.R.T. Studio

On process: How does it begin?

It starts with the site, and I mean the site in every respect, its multiple layers of history and its present contexts: social, ecological, political. My process begins with what I call “site forensics,” unearthing as much as possible to work with. You can’t begin to imagine what a site should become unless you know what it was before you got there. I consider design an act of curation, careful editing and restrained addition to stay true to the site. This also means staying true to the people who live and work there.

What are you working on now?

Other than making an attempt to run UVA’s landscape architecture department, I’m working on the redevelopment of a former steelworks in Pittsburgh. Tragically, the city hauled off all the industrial structures except this one mill. Still, the riverfront site is massive and sublime. Our team is trying like hell not to have the developer domesticate it. The other current project is an abandoned limestone quarry in West Virginia. It sits on a mile-and-a-half stretch of the Shenandoah River. The excavated lake is a mind-blowing 250′ wide and a mile long. The former mill is in ruins amidst piles of bright white manufacturing spoils, spent limestone so alkaline that nothing grows on it. [It] also happens to be a significant Civil War battleground.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: M. Ward

Indie-rocker steps away from She & Him project with Zooey Deschanel and performs from his latest release, More Rain. Photo: Publicity photo

Indie-rock poster boy M. Ward touts his new record, More Rain, as a doo-wop effort that offers collaboration with Neko Case, k.d. lang, Peter Buck, The Secret Sisters and NRBQ’s Joey Spampinato. The songwriter is frequently on the playlist through his work with others, be it his side project She & Him with Zooey Deschanel or the supergroup Monsters of Folk. Ward recently lent his talent to Mavis Staples, producing her album Livin’ on a High Note, and penning a few of the tracks, even sharing songwriting credit with Martin Luther King Jr. on “MLK Song.”

Saturday 4/30. $20-23, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4980.

Categories
Arts

Composer Matthew Burtner’s Arctic recordings come full cycle

The environmentally inspired “Ice Cycle” will be performed at UVA’s Climate Cultures Symposium on May 4 at Old Cabell Hall. Photo: Publicity photo

Like many of us, Matthew Burtner gets nostalgic when he recalls his hometown.

“It’s different now than the place I remember as a child,” he says. “In the north, where I was born, the time of ice was a time when you could move across the land. The ice gave you a way across. Otherwise you’d sink into the tundra or into the ocean itself. Now that the permafrost has melted, the houses tip over. Some of them fall off the cliffs into the sea.”

The Alaska-born composer and chair of the UVA music department spent his formative years in a fishing village in the Arctic Circle. “We didn’t live in igloos, and we didn’t ride moose around, but we did hunt moose for food. We did ski to school, and we did snowshoe everywhere to travel across all that snow,” he says. “I remember one time when it got so cold that the thermometer broke, and the thermometer went down to -75.”

For Burtner, the loss of ice is a powerful symbol of lost communities, lost culture, lost animals, and what he calls “the key to resilience and sustainability of the place. The whole system goes out of balance. That’s what’s happening now.”

The professor of composition and computer technologies has dedicated his career to studying and preserving the music of snow and ice. Most recently, he’s collaborated with New York-based choreographer Jody Sperling to create “Ice Cycle,” a multimedia piece featuring the Time Lapse Dance company and chronicling the transformation of Arctic sea ice as the climate changes and warms.

“Ice Cycle” began when Sperling accompanied a 43-day scientific expedition to the Chukchi Sea, north of the Bering Strait, and danced on the polar sea at a dozen ice deployments. After her return, she reached out to Burtner, who used his experience sonifying glacial melts to create an original score.

Together, they developed a show that brings a sensory representation of climate change to Washington, D.C., New York and now Charlottesville, where “Ice Cycle” will be the marquee event for the Climate Cultures Symposium at UVA.

“We worked together to draw from science into the artist realm,” Burtner says. He describes the change of sound and movement over time, the common language between dance and music. Ice crystals form. Water flows. Melt begins.

“In our lifetime, we will see no ice in the Arctic in the summer months,” Burtner says. “By now, everyone should understand that ice is melting in the Arctic. There’s lots of data establishing this, and we’re using the data to create artwork.”

Data as artistic medium has become Burtner’s calling card. His particular branch of sonic exploration, called eco-acoustics, replicates the sounds of nature through computer modeling.

“When I was growing up, I was much more interested in the sounds of nature than I was in human music because they were the most powerful sounds I heard,” says Burtner. “There’s this great sonic quality to the environment in Alaska, to the wind and the storms.”

It was at the Peabody Conservatory of the Johns Hopkins University that he discovered how to make music from the sounds he loved most. “At the spectral level, I could use computers to create new instruments that were more like the scratchy sounds of snow or the swishy sounds of wind,” he says. “Technology enables the connection between imagination and the environment.”

Every summer when school lets out, Burtner goes back to Alaska. He lives in a cabin where he does his composing and his research, immersing himself in snow and ice to understand glacial behavior. He says the act of listening to the physical environment informs and inspires him in a way a sound effect never would.

“For the last few years, I’ve been going back to the same glacier,” he says. “I put microphones all over this glacier and down inside it, and I just listen to it and learn how it behaves. You can hear it melting.”

Then, somewhere between listening, recording and computer lab modeling, “you find the music.”

Burtner believes art can ultimately aid the science of climate change.

“I did the music for these NASA videos, and they were so excited because they do ice core samples in Greenland, and one of my pieces uses underwater tubes that play at different depths,” he says. “That’s an area that’s valuable for music. We won’t necessarily contribute to scientific knowledge, although that can and has happened. But we can forward scientific knowledge by connecting and inspiring the imagination, the emotional connection to that research through the music that we’re making.”

Ultimately, of course, inspiration to action is the goal of “Ice Cycle.”

“Whether it’s a musician using climate change as the instrument to create music, or the dancer using the forms of ice to drive human movement, we all do whatever we can to address the problem of climate change,” he says. “So if the audience leaves feeling activated to address climate change in their own way, in their own life, that’s my best hope for this kind of work.”

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: Wings

Rock, folk, Latin and Broadway-style tunes combine to give the musical Wings a joyful lift at two locations this weekend. Photo: Courtesy of Theatrix

Taking a musical approach to Earth Day, Peter Ryan’s Wings is a quirky, offbeat lesson on interdependence and survival. Loosely based on Aristophanes’ The Birds, the play follows two men who find refuge in a mythical bird paradise, but soon learn they cannot shake their earthbound problems. Ryan says there’s something for everyone in the uplifting story: “The show’s about flight and mankind’s urge to soar.”

Friday 4/29 and Saturday 4/30. $10, times vary. Friday at Ix Art Park, 522 Second St., and Saturday at Fry’s Spring Beach Club, 2512 Jefferson Park Ave. 249-2803.

Categories
Arts

ARTS Pick: The Travelin’ McCourys

The Travelin' McCourys make a stop at The Jefferson on Friday before hitting the road to Delfest. Photo: Publicity photo

McCoury talent runs deep. Brothers Ronnie (mandolin) and Rob (banjo) spearhead the modern bluegrass ensemble The Travelin’ McCourys, joined by Jason Carter on the fiddle and Alan Bartram slapping the bass. After a stop in Charlottesville, the foursome hits the road for DelFest, a Maryland-based festival named after Grammy Award-winning bluegrass musician Del McCoury, who happens to be Ronnie and Rob’s father.

Friday 4/29. $20-23, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater. 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4980.

Categories
Opinion

Drop the mic: The legislative season comes to a welcome end

Gavin Grimm ACLU

We would like to dedicate this edition of our humble column to a brave and tenacious young man: the awesomely named Gavin Grimm, who has (thus far) triumphed in the face of unrelenting adversity and intolerance to champion a basic human right: to pee in peace and comfort. A junior at Gloucester High School, Gavin has long identified as male, and was allowed to use the boys room at his high school for almost two months after he went public with his innate dudeness. But then some local parents got their hate on, and a small-minded district court judge named Robert Doumar ruled that Gavin could not, in fact, use the bathroom that matched his identity.

Luckily, a federal appeals court has now reversed that decision and, for the first time, said that transgender students are covered by Title IX, which bars discrimination on the basis of gender. Even better, this fourth circuit court ruling also covers North Carolina, which recently passed a bill that basically forces everyone in the state to carry around a birth certificate in order to prove they’re in the “correct” bathroom.

The reason we are saluting Gavin at this particular moment (other than the fact that he is awesome) is because, with the final gavel falling on the General Assembly’s veto override session, we have now officially exited Virginia’s annual legislative onslaught without any horrible transphobic legislation becoming the law of the land. This is no mean feat, people! Both Senate Bill 41, which protected gay-marriage-refusing officiants, and House Bill 781, which sought to levy a fine on the Gavin Grimms of this world for simply using the bathroom, could easily have become law.

But they did not, and for that we are profoundly grateful. We are also grateful that not one of Governor Terry McAuliffe’s well-considered vetoes was overridden during the one-day exercise in futility the General Assembly recently endured. Without the Macker’s veto pen, we would now be living in a commonwealth that not only allowed blatant discrimination against same-sex couples, but also propped up the coal industry with taxpayer dollars, cut funding to Planned Parenthood, expanded access to guns, protected all Confederate monuments from being removed from public lands and allowed parents to bar their children from reading any books in school that contained “sexually explicit material” (the bye-bye, Judy Blume bill, as we like to call it).

Of course, Governor McAuliffe also helped draft a bill that would allow the state to obtain drugs for executions under a veil of secrecy, so that nobody would know which compounding pharmacy is blatantly violating the Hippocratic Oath.

But all in all, considering what a horror show the recent legislative session could have been, it feels like we dodged a bullet (in the case of that vetoed gun legislation, quite literally). Then again, with the Republicans firmly in control of the assembly for the foreseeable future, there’s always next year. And the year after that. And the year after that…

Odd Dominion is an unabashedly liberal, twice-monthly op-ed column covering Virginia politics.

Categories
Arts

Film review: Everybody Wants Some!! appeals to base instincts

The ’80s youth culture feature Everybody Wants Some!! is earning comparisons to director Richard Linklater’s cult classic, Dazed and Confused. Photo: Paramount Pictures

If there’s one thing Richard Linklater knows, it’s spiritual sequels. His last film, the award-winning Boyhood, evoked much of the same feelings as his before series (Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before Midnight) in its exploration of the inherent drama of something as simple as the passage of time. His rotoscoped mind trip Waking Life was considered by many to be an extension of his breakthrough film, Slacker, while he revisited the unmistakably trippy style of animation in A Scanner Darkly. Linklater as an individual is evidently fascinated by nostalgia, yet is not worshipful of it in the same way as, for example, Cameron Crowe. Linklater as a director is refreshingly unafraid of revisiting familiar territory, bringing new styles and more mature observations to themes from his previous films.

With the release of Everybody Wants Some!!, Linklater’s unofficial follow-up to the eternally relevant Dazed and Confused, the observation stands, even if the definition of mature is stretched to its breaking point. Where Dazed and Confused followed the lives of several distinct cliques in 1976 at a high school in Austin, Texas, and explored their various intersections, Everybody Wants Some!! sticks with the same group for the whole film as they explore all of the subcultures of 1980s youth. The former film is named after a slow, creepy Led Zeppelin song full of unpredictable, wild twists and turns. The latter is named after a raucous Van Halen party anthem that goes for the jugular immediately, an explosion of sound and energy that leaves nothing to the imagination with an enthusiasm befitting its double exclamation points.

It’s in this comparison that the otherwise entertaining Everybody Wants Some!! loses some of its lustre. Where Dazed and Confused could rely on inter-group clashes or solidarity to drive the drama, Everybody Wants Some!! packs as many caricatures as it can into the gang (a college baseball team, also in Austin). If there is anyone in Dazed and Confused who doesn’t engage you, the way he interacts with another student is still worth watching. Because Everybody Wants Some!! is totally centered on characters in one clique, it demands you find their exploits charming in order to be invested in the film.

We first meet incoming freshman pitcher Jake (Blake Jenner) on a drive to his new home in the baseball house. Of course, he’s preoccupied with the women of Austin, leering while he rocks out to “My Sharona.” Once he arrives, we meet the entire team in rapid succession, getting introduced to the culture that’s developed in this Petri dish full of competitive juices and testosterone. These guys want to get laid and play baseball, and the story is about the various ways they try to get laid when not playing baseball. Though Jake is the viewer’s surrogate—not too jockish, not too bookish, equal parts observer and participant in the shenanigans—the breakout star of the movie is Glen Powell as Finnegan, a fascinating motormouth with unflappable charisma who steals practically every scene he’s in.

Everybody Wants Some!! is often hilarious, frequently enjoyable and only occasionally irritating. Unfortunately, irritation is the chief emotion for the first 30 to 45 minutes, until the guys begin exploring beyond their disco and country mainstays, venturing into punk and drama. Once this begins and the real schisms start to reveal themselves, the film earns positive comparisons to Dazed and Confused. In the end, you may not fully like Everybody Wants Some!!, but if you stick it out, you won’t regret watching it.

Everybody Wants Some!!

R, 117 minutes

Violet Crown Cinema

Playing this week

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

Batman v Superman

Barbershop: The Next Cut

The Boss

Criminal

Eye in the Sky

A Hologram for the King

The Huntsman: Winter’s War

The Jungle Book

Miracles From Heaven

My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2

Zootopia

Violet Crown Cinema

200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

The Boss

Deadpool

Elvis & Nixon

Hello

My Name is Doris

The Huntsman: Winter’s War

The Jungle Book

Miles Ahead

Zootopia

Categories
News

UPDATED: Middleditch enters Alford plea, will serve less than half a year in jail

Andrew Middleditch (left) and his attorney, Fran Lawrence, address media outside of the courtroom after he entered an Alford plea in his involuntary manslaughter charge. Staff photo

 

On the second day of his jury trial, prominent realtor Andrew Middleditch, 56, pleaded guilty to his second DUI offense and entered an unexpected Alford plea before the closing statements related to his involuntary manslaughter charge, which came from a Memorial Day car crash that killed 78-year-old Lonnie Branham.

When the judge asked Middleditch if he made the decision to enter the plea on his own, he did not immediately answer yes. He also asked the judge to explain the meaning of an Alford plea after he entered it.

An Alford plea is not an admission of guilt, but rather an acknowledgment that a jury has enough evidence for a conviction.

Once sentenced to five years in prison, with all but 90 days suspended for the involuntary manslaughter charge, and 12 months for the second drunk driving offense, with but 40 days suspended, Middleditch stood and faced the family of the victim.

“I want you to know something from the bottom of my heart,” he said, his voice shaking. “I really wanted to go to the funeral and they told me I couldn’t.” He added that he is “very, very sorry,” and that he was suffering addictions that he has since gotten under control. He also said he still feels like he didn’t cause the accident.

Outside of the courtroom, teary-eyed family and friends gathered around Leigh Middleditch, the defendant’s father who has served on UVA’s Board of Visitors, and Betty Middleditch, the defendant’s mother. “He was so brave,” one said to the parents, and another said, “I’m so proud.”

“Mr. Middleditch still feels like he didn’t do anything wrong,” defense attorney Fran Lawrence said outside the courthouse, adding that his client chose to take the Alford plea because it was difficult to tell what the jury was thinking. He said his client is committed to sobriety, his family and his role in the community.

“Somebody who’s never been in serious trouble has difficulty admitting to himself that he might have done something wrong,” says C-VILLE legal expert Dave Heilberg about why Middleditch might have chosen to take his case to trial. “Sometimes you have to get a jury trial started before a defendant is ready to hear what the evidence against him might be.”

Heilberg says the Alford plea could have been used as a device to keep from having liability admitted.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed against Middleditch by Branham’s family has been settled, according to the family’s attorney, Greg Webb.
Middleditch will report to the Albemarle Charlottesville Regional Jail on May 20 to serve his time.

Read about the first day of his trial here.

In August 2014, Charlottesville author and world renowned journalist Donovan Webster, also 56 at the time, killed Wayne Thomas White Sr., a 75-year-old from Waynesboro, on Route 151 in a similar drunk driving and involuntary manslaughter case that was also prosecuted by Quatrara.

Webster pleaded guilty to the charges in February 2015 and was sentenced to two years in jail.

Categories
News

In brief: 200K felons head to the polls, new theater and more

Historic week, part 1

Governor Terry McAuliffe restores voting rights to 206,000 felons April 22 in an election year in which his friend Hillary Clinton is running for president, and in a state where an estimated one in four African-Americans can’t vote because of felony convictions, according to the Washington Post.

Gavin Grimm ACLU
Gavin Grimm. Photo ACLU

Historic week, part 2

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit rules April 19 in favor of Gloucester High transgender teen Gavin Grimm, who wants to use the boys bathroom at his school. The ruling could also affect bathroom-legislating North Carolina, which is in the same circuit.

Will they all be showing the same movies?

Another deluxe movieplex out of Austin joins Violet Crown. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema says it will open a 33,000-square-foot, 30-craft-beer-serving facility in summer 2017 at 5th Street Station, aka the Wegmans complex.

Our favorite newsletter of the week

Mike’s First 100 Days details the accomplishments of Mayor Mike Signer and his colleagues on City Council, including a balanced budget, a condemnation of the Landmark Hotel and new council meeting procedures. Officially, the position of mayor is honorary and one among equals on council.

$25K a month in alimony

That’s what Peaceable Farms owner Anne Shumate Williams, aka Golan, gets—and spends—according to testimony in Orange County Circuit Court at an April 21 bond hearing. She was charged with 27 counts of animal cruelty in November, and 13 counts of embezzlement in March. Williams was released on $100,000 bond.

anne williams
Anne Williams Photo Orange County Sheriff’s Office

WhatAboutJefferson

 

Trees

Quote of the week

“Murder victims don’t get to sit on juries but now the man that killed them will. A murder victim won’t get to vote, but the man that killed them will.”—Delegate Rob Bell to the Washington Post after Governor Terry McAuliffe restores voting rights to more than 200,000 felons.

Categories
Living

Living Picks: To-do this week

Photo: Staff photo

Festival      

Grand Marquee Gala

Don your Oscar-worthy attire and support the Paramount Theater’s mission and community events during this Hollywood-style evening. Walk the red carpet and then enjoy dinner from Harvest Moon Catering, jazz performances, a silent auction and dancing.

Friday, 4/29. $100-500, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 293-1010.

Nonprofit

bow-WOW-walk

Bring your canine friends to the Charlottesville Albemarle SPCA benefit 2.5K walk and festival, which includes dog competitions, booths, entertainment and treats for both humans and pups.

Saturday, 4/30. $25-35, 10am. Lee Park, Downtown Mall. caspca.kintera.org/bowwowwalk.

Health & Wellness

Montalto Challenge

This uphill course starts at the beginning of the Saunders-Monticello Trail, summits 860 feet and finishes with sweeping views of Monticello, Charlottesville and the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Saturday, 4/30. $35-55, 7:30am. The Saunders-Monticello Trail, Charlottesville. 984-9800.

Food & Drink

Charlottesville SOUP

New City Arts Initiative continues its annual dinner series to support local creative projects. Attendees receive a meal and can vote for their favorite speaker from the community—the presenter with the most votes wins a crowdfunded monetary award.

Monday, 5/2. $10, 7pm. Second Street Gallery, 115 Second St. SE, Downtown Mall. 202-5277.