Month: April 2018

Categories
Living

Rum diary: Junction’s mix master shares his secrets for a winning cocktail

Junction bar manager Alec Spidalieri. Photo by Sanjay Suchak

As I walk through the doors of Junction, bar manager Alec Spidalieri beckons me to the upstairs area, adjacent to the kitchen. He’s got something cooking that he can’t leave for very long. In fact, one of the ingredients he’s making is the brown butter-washed rum for the Rum Communion, the winning cocktail in C-VILLE’s inaugural Hooch Dreams bracket contest.

When Spidalieri heard that the daiquiri-style drink had taken the top spot, he was surprised. He knew Junction was up against Lost Saint in the first round, and says he honestly thought they’d get knocked out early by the West Main bar. But, if you’ve followed our cocktail bracket matchups online or on social media, you know why we had to name this drink the winner. The judges’ comments consistently praised the Rum Communion for its sweet yet tart notes, butterscotch undertones and creamy mouthfeel.

The daiquiri is one of Spidalieri’s favorite drinks—“I love rum,” he says—as it represents the holy trinity of the Caribbean: rum, lime and sugar. It may sound simple, but it’s more than the sum of its parts. And the possibilities of riffing off those three main ingredients to create new and seasonal drinks is endless, he says. The idea for the Rum Communion was born out of an online recipe for a rum cake; Spidalieri knew the pineapple and brown butter elements could be shaken up and turned into a cocktail.

His drinks of choice

“Wine, I drink a lot wine—probably too much wine, but I don’t drink as much as people would think. I love most wines unless it’s overtly poorly made. I cannot name a favorite.”

“I like Scotch a lot and I love rum, I really do. I’ll sip those neat mostly.”

“I’m very nomadic beer-wise. I’m not a huge hop-head, but I like porters and dark beers.”

Even though the drink is one of the most time-consuming to make in his repertoire (see below for the full recipe), Spidalieri says he doesn’t mind. And his attention to detail is evident, from the list of hundreds of potential cocktail names he keeps on his phone, to his near-constant rotation of homemade shrubs, syrups and cordials he has brewing and steeping. The laid-back black T-shirt-and-jeans-wearing bartender swears most of his job involves moving boxes around (he mentions his love of spreadsheets at least twice during our interview), but his passion for creating a great drinking experience is obvious.

“It’s a hobby,” he says. “It doesn’t feel like a job.”

When he was conceptualizing the restaurant’s new spring menu, he toyed with replacing the Rum Communion with another daiquiri, but—don’t worry—he kept it as one of the restaurant’s staple drinks. He says he might add another daiquiri on the summer menu, because, really, can you have too many well-balanced drinks that for a brief moment make you think you’re lying on a warm beach next to turquoise water? We don’t think so.

“That’s my job—helping people unwind every day,” Spidalieri says. “It’s really a pleasure to do that for a living: Give people happy juice in glasses.”

WINNING WORDS

In the final round of our cocktail bracket, the Rum Communion squared off against Tavola’s Alpha & Omega.

“As a small child, I was once found under the Thanksgiving table scooping handfuls of sugar directly from the bag into my mouth, so it’s safe to say I don’t shy away from a little sweetness. And while, yes, Junction’s Rum Communion is more dessert-y than some of the other cocktails in our booze bracket—that brown butter-washed rum! that pineapple!—it’s full and creamy and smooth enough for multiple glasses. Don’t stop until you’re under the table.”—Caite White, Knife & Fork editor

 

Rum Communion. Photo by Sanjay Suchak

RECIPE

Junction’s Alec Spidalieri says he first heard of the brown butter-washing technique at Belmont neighbor Tavola, when its former bar manager, Christian Johnson, put a brown butter-washed bourbon drink on the menu. After trying it, Spidalieri said to himself, “I gotta do this sometime.”

Although he says the recipe for the Rum Communion looks intimidating, it’s more of a passive process where you let ingredients sit for a long time.

His words of wisdom: “Don’t burn the butter. Pull it off the heat when it starts to turn caramel brown.”

 

Rum Communion

2 oz. brown butter-washed Pusser’s British Navy Rum (Blue Label)

1 oz. grilled pineapple cordial

.75 oz. freshly squeezed lime juice

Add all ingredients to shaker, add ice, shake aggressively until well-chilled. Double-strain into a chilled coupe/cocktail glass. Garnish with a floating lime wheel.

 

Brown butter-washed rum

1 750ml bottle Pusser’s

1 lb. unsalted butter

Slice the butter into smaller cubes and add to a medium-sized sauce pan. Heat butter at low heat, then turn up to medium heat when it is all melted. Whisk the butter continuously and keep over heat until it browns (should take about 10 minutes), being careful not to let it burn or boil over. Remove from heat. When the butter stops steaming, add rum, while whisking rapidly for 20 seconds to homogenize. (After this point, stop stirring the mixture; you don’t want it to break.) Let the pot sit out for two hours at room temperature, then put it in the freezer overnight. Once it’s frozen, separate the layer of butter fat that has frozen at the top (it’ll be a disk shape) and discard or repurpose. Fine-strain the remaining liquid and put back into the original bottle. Doesn’t hurt to keep it refrigerated, and give it a nice shake before use. Warning: You will lose about 15 percent of the original amount of rum in this process.

 

Grilled pineapple cordial

1 pineapple

1 tsp. salt

1 tbs. citric acid

3 cups sugar

1 cup dry white wine

1 oz. vodka (to further fortify)

Yield: about 1 quart

Skin pineapple and cut into planks. Grill evenly on two sides, about four minutes on each side; there should be a good char. Combine with all remaining ingredients in a bowl and let macerate for three hours (with salt and sugar covering everything). Blend with an immersion blender on its high setting and then fine strain, pressing against the strainer with the back of a spoon to extract all the liquid. Store in a clean container and keep refrigerated. Should keep for a month or more.

Categories
Arts

Art in Odd Places explores matter and historical interpretation

Pedro Lasch’s “Fire and Ice,” performed on April 1 at the Main Street Arena, recontextualized fire from tiki-torch invasion to positive force. It’s part of Art in Odd Places: MATTER, which continues April 5 on UVA Grounds and April 6 on the Downtown Mall. Photo by Eze Amos

This week, New York-based artist Ed Woodham brings his Art in Odd Places festival to Charlottesville in a two-day, intensely collaborative event with the theme of “matter.” Sponsored by the UVA Studio Arts Board, the mission of AiOP, Woodham writes in the program guide, “is to engage and activate the everyday places in our lives. In creative, unexpected and sometimes unusual ways we claim our shared rights to public spaces, while also making sure to question, subvert and occasionally shake up the socio-political status quo that regulates it.”

Woodham, who takes AiOP to various cities across the country, says, “It’s important for me being an outsider to be very mindful.” During numerous visits to Charlottesville, he has met with and listened to residents, UVA students, community leaders and artists. In past AiOP festivals Woodham has mostly brought in outside artists, but with AiOP MATTER, “the focus here is that there’s so much good work going on in Charlottesville that has been going on for years.” Consequently, the festival features 16 local artists, three regional artists and nine national and international artists. Woodham says the events of August 11 and 12 last year framed a narrow view of Charlottesville that he wanted to reframe by showcasing local artists “doing really innovative, change-making work.”

Local artists Leslie Scott-Jones and Brandon Lee have designed re-enactments for the festival in a work titled “Historical Matters,” which tells “the story of how the other half lived…our ancestors, the names of those Hoo are largely responsible for the building and upkeep of the university,” Scott-Jones and Lee write. Re-enactments on UVA Grounds will portray the lives of enslaved persons who built the university, as well as the first black students. On the second day of the festival, their work will celebrate Queen Charlotte, Charlottesville’s namesake, a descendant of Margarita de Castro e Souza, a black member of the Portuguese royal family. In a procession led by the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps, Queen Charlotte will travel in a carriage from the Rotunda to the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center, before meeting the city’s mayor on the Downtown Mall. The procession will include the Monacan Indian Nation and historical interpreters representing enslaved persons and soldiers from various American war efforts.

Local performance artist Jennifer Hoyt Tidwell will contribute a work titled “Please Move Along, Nothing to See Here.” Four performers atop a pedestal will recreate Charlottesville’s statues of Robert E. Lee and George Rogers Clark in an animatronic-style human tableaux with songs and dialogue.

“This short performance will take place every half-hour at both [festival] locations and promises to be entertaining and absurd, and ultimately raw and personal,” says Tidwell. “I am interested in the juxtaposition of women of color portraying colonizing war ‘heroes.’ I think this is going to be an effective device to allow the audience to have a more visceral understanding of what is hidden or invisible in our community—from the geologic features to the erasure of documentation related to enslaved people at UVA and Native Americans here, to the misrepresentation of history solidified in the statues.”

National artist Pedro Lasch, a professor at Duke University, applied both a conceptual and literal interpretation of the theme of matter. His April 1 performance at the Main Street Arena was the last public event held there before the building’s scheduled demolition. “Fire and Ice” recontextualized fire from tiki-torch invasion to positive force.

“Early on,” he says, “I knew I wanted to do something related to the tension and tragic incident of last fall but I did not want to be heavy-handed about it.” Before he came to Charlottesville, he considered a project involving fire and ice and knew he wanted to honor the life of Heather Heyer. When he arrived, he ambled down the pedestrian mall at night, and the arched windows of the Main Street Arena revealed figure skaters spinning on the ice and the idea sparked.

The final act for the installation included hundreds of votive candles placed in the center of the rink with an invitation to the public to skate around them. “It’s celebratory for both Heather Heyer and the building,” says Lasch.

Categories
Arts

Movie review: Ready Player One turns brain games mindless

In Ready Player One, starring Tye Sheridan, the death of Oasis creator James Halliday spurs gunters on a virtual Easter egg hunt where pop culture riddles hold the key to the game’s ultimate prize. Courtesy Warner Bros.

Before we get into just how much Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One misses the mark, it’s worth noting that its badness has nothing to do with video games and the people who enjoy them. Critics often come down harder on movies about subcultures they disapprove of or simply haven’t taken the time to understand, which will no doubt happen here. There are good stories to be found in the world of gaming, and liking or disliking games should not be used as a defining character trait.

What kills Ready Player One is twofold. On the one hand, there are the same sorts of problems that would kill any movie: dead-end narrative, uninteresting and often unlikable hero, dangling plot and thematic threads and a pervasive feeling of who cares? that permeates every puzzle, action sequence, pop culture reference and character interaction. On the other hand is its posturing as the most mainstream representation of what games mean to those who play them, when in fact it’s not much more than a series of overwrought references and lifeless cameos from games and movies applied in a way that perpetuates the idea that there is a right way to watch movies and play games. For what is supposedly a statement of pride in gaming culture, it’s surprisingly exclusionary and paints a picture of itself that is not particularly flattering.

Ready Player One
PG-13, 139 minutes
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX, Violet Crown Cinema

The story follows Wade Watts (Tye Sheridan), a kid (or teen, or adult, who’s to say?) who, like most of the people in the world at this point, spends most of his time inside a virtual universe known as the Oasis, the creation of legendary game designer James Halliday (Mark Rylance, easily the film’s highlight). After Halliday’s death, he sends out a living will in which he reveals that he has hidden an Easter egg in the Oasis, which can be found after discovering three keys, the location of which are described in mysterious riddles. Whoever finds the egg first will inherit his share of the Oasis, valued in the trillions.

Detailed dissection of the minutiae of Halliday’s life and interests becomes a worldwide obsession in order to better understand the clues, which is convenient since everybody in 2045 apparently has the same encyclopedic fixation on pop culture from the 1970s through the 1990s. Wade—in the form of his avatar, Parzival—and his friends find themselves in a race against evil corporation IOI and its CEO, Nolan Sorrento (Ben Mendelsohn), to solve the mystery of Halliday’s egg hunt, which all boils down to things like who knows more about The Shining.

Based on the book by Ernest Cline, who co-wrote the screenplay with Zak Penn, Spielberg’s take on the story is little more than impossibly layered references that don’t aspire to more than a grunting acknowledgment by those familiar with it. The Iron Giant is great and all, and its presence is not inherently bad, but pop culture knowledge should not be an obstacle to liking or even understanding what is going on. With so many chaotic cameos and references that have nothing to do with each other, it’s like Finnegans Wake of the game world, if James Joyce pounded Monster Energy instead of booze.

Spielberg has been on a massive hot streak for almost a decade, making some of his most interesting, thought-provoking work 40 years into an already storied career. Yet it seems that the closer he feels to the subject matter, the less empowered he feels to take it somewhere interesting. There was a dead-end Jaws joke in the appropriately forgotten 1941, which is echoed here with a Jurassic Park gag. It would still be a bad movie even if it weren’t patting itself on the back for its knowledge of what movie or game came out what year and what the best way to consume it is, but the fact that it has no idea what to do with it all makes a pointless exercise into a headache-inducing one.

Playing this week

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema
377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056

A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, The Death of Stalin, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Labyrinth, Pacific Rim Uprising, Sherlock Gnomes

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

A Wrinkle in Time, Black Panther, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, I Can Only Imagine, Love, Simon, Midnight Sun, Pacific Rim Uprising, Sherlock Gnomes, Tomb Raider, Tyler Perry’s Acrimony, Unsane

Violet Crown Cinema
200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

A Wrinkle in Time, Annihilation, Black Panther, The China Hustle, The Death of Stalin, Game Night, Love, Simon, Pacific Rim Uprising, Sherlock Gnomes, Tomb Raider, Unsane

Categories
Arts

Cry Cry Cry embarks on a brief reunion tour

Cry Cry Cry featuring Dar Williams, Lucy Kaplansky and Richard Shindell makes a stop at the Jefferson on Saturday. The folk supergroup says this is its last outing together. Publicity photo

Cry Cry Cry is back together, but not for long. A collaboration between established folk singers Dar Williams, Richard Shindell and Lucy Kaplansky, the harmony-based trio formed two decades ago to release one album before members went their separate ways to focus on individual careers. The project mostly sat dormant until last summer, when an invitation to perform at the lauded Clearwater Festival in New York brought the three artists back together. Now they’re on a 12-show spring tour, which stops at the Jefferson Theater on Saturday night, but, according to Williams during a recent phone interview, it’s likely one of the last opportunities to see the trio combine their voices on stage.

“I don’t think we’re going to do this again,” she says. “We love performing, and we love rehearsing, but we just couldn’t commit to making a full-length album this time. It seemed like a miracle enough that we were able to come back together.”

News of the short-lived reunion will be a bummer to longtime fans who’ve been hoping for more. The group’s one album, a self-titled effort released back in 1998, is a cult favorite in folk circles. The set of mostly covers found the singers delivering some of their favorite songs by other artists with intricately layered vocal arrangements. Starting with a take on the R.E.M. hit “Fall on Me,” the album goes on to bring sophisticated harmonies, both gentle and soaring, to songs by Robert Earl Keen, Julie Miller and Greg Brown, as well as lesser-known songwriters like Canadian James Keelaghan.

During the comeback shows, the group members have been leaning on songs from their one record, as well as selections from their own solo catalogs. They’ve also found time to add some different material to the repertoire. Back in February, the trio digitally released a recently recorded emotive version of the Jump Little Children ballad “Cathedrals.”

“The first thought is, ‘Do we have anything to bring to the song?,’” Williams says, when Cry Cry Cry choses tracks to sing. “Then there’s just something about adding harmony to a song that’s beautifully written. When you add harmony you show that the song has its own beauty, apart from its original performer, that can grow. That’s an exciting thing, because you don’t know if it will work until you’re doing it. The more you sing together, the better it goes.”

Individually, all three members of Cry Cry Cry are prolific singer-songwriters. Williams has released nine full-length albums dating back to the early 1990s. Last fall she also published a book, What I Found in a Thousand Towns, about the community-driven resurgence of small cities. Kaplansky, once a staple of the New York City folk scene in Greenwich Village, has released half a dozen albums and collaborated with Shawn Colvin and Nanci Griffith. Shindell, whose tunes have been recorded by Joan Baez, is known for writing vivid story-based songs that he delivers in the first person as different characters. Williams says Shindell’s diligent work ethic deserves credit for the unique dynamics of Cry Cry Cry’s song arrangements.

“Richard will go into his studio with his guitar and emerge at the end of the day not realizing that it got dark outside,” she says. “Music is a really deep language for him, so there are a lot of subtleties that he pulls out in the way that he arranges things.”

The trio’s initial formation was spontaneous; while touring together more than two decades ago, Williams and Shindell started singing duets during sound checks. After realizing they had vocal chemistry, they decided to bring Shindell’s frequent collaborator, Kaplansky, into the mix.

The mission of the group has always been to shine a new light on songs the members mutually admire through three-part harmonies, and Williams believes the singers have a special connection that can be hard to find. One of her favorite memories is getting the group to sing Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind,” the first song she ever learned on guitar.

“Live performance of music is so much of what my life is about, and I’ve had career high points on stage with Richard and Lucy,” Williams says. “We can be singing together without looking at each other with the exact same timing and the exact same phrasing. During the tightrope walk of trying to find those things together, we’ve had magic moments where everything lines up perfectly.”

Because the landscape of the music industry is much different now than it was when the group made its debut, pursuing a second album was deemed unfeasible. They’re planning to release a few more songs from some recent short recording sessions and tour though the middle of the month.

Although Williams seems pretty certain this is the end, she won’t entirely close the door on Cry Cry Cry. “Nothing teaches you never say never like coming together 20 years later, but this is it for the foreseeable future.”

Categories
Arts

Getting a lift: Nine Pillars’ female showcase is brimming with talent

Organizers are confident that Thursday’s all-female Rugged Arts showcase is the first of its kind in Charlottesville, featuring a female host, a female DJ and five female artists, including Sierra “Juice” Stanton (pictured). “I only write about what I know, what I’ve been through, what I go through, what I’m preparing for,” says Juice. Photo by Eze Amos

Last April, A’nija Johnson walked into the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center auditorium ready to speak her truth at the Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Fest’s freshman class competition. Wearing a floor-length skirt, a Tasmanian Devil “I need coffee” T-shirt and a pair of sunglasses, the local high schooler found herself in a room full of peers ready to take the mic—all of them boys.

“What are you doing in here?” asked one. “You’ll see,” she told him. By the end of the competition, Johnson, who goes by the moniker Legendary Goddess, had impressed the judges enough to nab second place.

The self-described “girly-girl” loves proving that she can rap—and about everything, from broken friendships to sexual violence. Legendary Goddess takes the mic on Thursday at the all-female Rugged Arts hip-hop showcase at the Music Resource Center as part of the weeklong Nine Pillars Hip Hop Cultural Festival.

The Rugged Arts series began in summer 2013, but organizers Cullen “Fellowman” Wade and Remy St. Clair are confident that this showcase is the first of its kind in Charlottesville, featuring five female artists (Legendary Goddess, MrsAmerica, Juice, Littlebird and Bonnie Cash), a female DJ (DJ Tova) and a female host (Destinee Wright).

“Hip-hop has a reputation for its misogyny and its disregard for women’s agency,” says Wright. “This showcase is a sort of reclamation. I’m hoping that this show will inspire a sense of sisterhood for the hip-hop heads in the community who are woman-identifying, and hopefully inspire other women artists to continue their work and participate in events such as this.”

It’s rare to see a woman on stage at a hip-hop show, says Lamicka “MrsAmerica” Adams. She suspects it’s because many women put their music on the backburner as they build a career, raise a family and take care of elderly family members. So, to shine a spotlight on female artists, “I think it’s really dope,” she says.

MrsAmerica was going through a lot when she wrote her 2017 album, Pain and Pageant—she was pregnant with her third child while taking care of her father, who was dying of cancer. MrsAmerica’s husband encouraged her to write, to put her thoughts to music. She thought, “How can I focus on music at a time like this?” But the more she wrote, the better she felt. “It’s music that would lift me up when I was going through” hell, she says, and she hopes it’ll motivate others, too.

Sierra “Juice” Stanton shares many of MrsAmerica’s reasons for making music. “I only write about what I know, what I’ve been through, what I go through, what I’m preparing for,” says Juice.

Her song “Pain” is about an accident in which she was hit by an SUV while crossing the street. Juice didn’t feel the impact; she remembers waking up on the ground, a paramedic telling her not to move while snapping a brace around her neck. She gets chills when she recites the song. “It’s my heart pouring out in the lyrics, over a beat,” she says, adding that as a woman—and especially as a black woman—she’s very aware of the message she puts out into the world.

“Even if we live what [men] have lived and talk about, it’s different, because we are [women],” says Juice, adding that everything from what women say to the way they carry themselves is watched, and often scrutinized closely.

Harrisonburg artist Kaiti “Littlebird” Crittenden is a self-described “100-pound white girl with blonde hair, a tomboy” clad in beat-up Timberland boots and cargo pants, who says she was initially “pretty intimidated” to start performing her rhymes, in part because she’s not what people typically see in their mind’s eye when they think of a rapper.

“Princess Peach on fleek temperamental / Insecurities plaguing my mental / When ya thin as a pencil / Criticism ain’t gentle / Couple that with the fact / Folks been judgmental,” Littlebird spits in one of her songs. She likes to talk about universal experiences such as love and relationships of all kinds, but she’s keen to point out that there’s substance and feeling underneath the surface.

Long before DJ Tova Roth had DJ equipment, she made mixtapes with a tape deck and a radio. As a teenager in California in the early 1990s, she listened religiously to hip-hop and often drove an hour and a half to Los Angeles where well-known DJs sold their mixtapes. She’d listen to them over and over, noting the artists’ moves so that she could mimic them—and rival them—once she got her own gear.

“I want the industry to realize that girls can bring the heat, and that we’re up for any challenge,” says Legendary Goddess, the high schooler who brought down the house at the Jefferson School just a year ago. And a hip-hop showcase spotlighting a group of talented women is a great place to start.

“We’re making history,” says Juice. “This is major.”

Categories
News

City Council approves bigger West2nd

Now we’ll never see more than a rendering of West2nd, the $50 million development of luxury condos and retail space that had been proposed at the current site of a Water Street parking lot since 2014. Rendering Keith Woodard

During yet another out-of-control City Council meeting on April 2, Mayor Nikuyah Walker cleared the chamber and councilors reconvened after a closed session to seek legal advice on how to maintain order. Nearly two hours into the meeting, councilors began to address the city’s business, and by 10pm approved by a 4-1 vote a special use permit for West2nd.

Developer Keith Woodard appeared before council in February seeking another floor and another 28 units in the L-shaped building that will be built on a city-owned Water Street parking lot and will house City Market, parking, office, retail and luxury dwellings.

That plan was rebuffed 3-2, with Councilor Wes Bellamy bartering with Woodard to increase the number of affordable housing units he proposed to build on Harris Street at a cost in excess of the $316,000 Woodard could contribute to the Affordable Housing Fund, as most developers do.

This time, Bellamy “wholeheartedly” supported the permit. Woodard agreed to build eight units that would remain affordable for 15 years, and another eight units that the city would subsidize using property tax revenue from the West2nd project.

Previously, Vice Mayor Heather Hill and Walker nixed the plan because of concerns it would not sufficiently serve City Market. Hill said her concerns about the market had been appeased, but Walker was not swayed and voted no.

“I still don’t support the project,” she said, focusing on the difficulty of achieving equity when nearly 100 luxury units are built downtown and 16 affordable units are built in another part of town.

“To do something bold, we need tax revenue,” argued Bellamy. “This is the innovation people have been talking about.”