Julie Morrill (left) recently taught a personal safety workshop for female runners. An expert in Krav Maga fighting and founder of Train Your Roar, Morrill says the most important thing solo runners can do is stay alert and be aware of their surroundings. Photo: Eze Amos
By Eileen Abbott
Charlottesville has a robust running community, but it’s not always possible to run with a buddy or a group. And if you’re out solo on the road or a trail, you should know how to run safely. “I certainly do not think running in Charlottesville poses any unique safety challenges,” says Jaime Kurtz, vice-president of the Charlottesville Track Club. “But I suspect that we can all get a little complacent when it comes to assessing risk and protecting ourselves.”
That’s why the track club decided to offer its members a personal safety workshop. “Few people, especially women, can navigate life without encountering some form of harassment—or a violent attack, at worst,” says Julie Morrill, an avid runner, expert in Krav Maga fighting, and founder of Train Your Roar, which offers self-defense training.
On a recent Monday evening, Morrill taught hands-on safety techniques to a roomful of female track club members. “I run by myself a lot, and I don’t always feel comfortable,” says Marie Dorroh. “I run with mace, but I’d rather have other options.”
Morrill offered these six essentials to personal safety:
1. Stay alert
This is Morrill’s top piece of advice. “Be aware of your surroundings,” she says. “Being aware helps you recognize potentially dangerous situations early, so that you can avoid them or prepare for them. Being aware also changes your posture to make you look less like a victim and appear more confident.”
Many runners often only look straight ahead to guide them along their chosen route, but awareness calls for more than this. Morrill recommends using all of your senses to assess what is around you. Scan the scene in front of you as if it were a panorama. Look and listen for unusual movement and sounds.
None of this should prevent you from enjoying your run, says Morrill, who urges runners not to be “paranoid that a bad guy is lurking around every corner.”
2. Project confidence
A runner who exudes vulnerability is more likely to be victimized. On the flip side, Morrill says, “No one wants to mess with someone who is alert, cool, and collected.”
Avoid giving off non-verbal cues, including running with your head down and a halting gait, or appearing to be lost.
Morrill says that if you encounter a “shady-looking character” while running, be proactive. “Rather than lowering your eyes and avoiding his gaze, belt out a confident, ‘Hello!’ and keep running strong,” she says.
This response robs a potential attacker of the element of surprise, and gives notice that a runner is “a force to be reckoned with,” Morrill says. “He should move on—you are not a victim!”
3. Trust your instincts
“You know that little feeling in the back of your mind that tells you something is just not right?” Morrill says. “Trust these feelings and learn to act on them.”
Take some time to think about threatening situations you might face, and consider how you’d respond. “If your intuition tells you something is wrong,” she says, “How would you act? What would you do?”
4. Run like hell
“Fight or flight is instinctual,” Morrill says. “The safest response is usually flight, as we do not know our attacker’s intentions, level of fight training, or if he is carrying a weapon.”
If you feel like an attack might occur, take off. “Never stop if someone yells, ‘Stop!’” Morrill says. “Keep running until you are in a safe place.”
She recommends preparing for an escape by practicing sprints or up-tempo distance running.
5. Be aggressive
“We still live in a society that teaches us, especially women and girls, to be nice, friendly, accommodating, and polite,” Morrill says.
A potential attacker depends on this, so runners should mentally contradict the stereotype, preparing to be assertive and even aggressive. “When someone makes you feel uncomfortable, it is not the time for being polite,” she says. “Do not be afraid of hurting someone or being considered ‘mean.’ If you feel unsafe, leave. If someone is harassing you, shout, ‘Leave me alone!’ and run away.”
6. Learn to fight
“The military has an expression: You fight how you train, so train how you want to fight,” says Morrill, who is trained in the Krav Maga methods used by the Israeli military. “In other words, by training soldiers in a way that simulates a real battlefield, they are better prepared to fight in real battle.” The same is true for a runner’s self-defense. Getting instruction in boxing or a martial art, even just a class or two, “will increase your chances of getting away safely.”
Larry Bowles didn't always want to be a taxi driver, but he's come to love the job after 15 years behind the wheel. Photo: Amy and Jackson Smith
When he was 50 years old, Larry Bowles was a disgruntled car salesman who didn’t see eye to eye with his boss. After getting into a heated argument with his superior, he quit his job in a fury and whipped out of the parking lot, nearly hitting a taxi cab as he pulled onto the road.
As he drove off, the image Bowles had stuck in his mind wasn’t the close call—it was the phone number printed on the side of the cab. Bowles took the near-miss as a sign, and decided to take the advice of his uncle (a D.C. cab driver) to get into the taxi business. His outgoing personality and familiarity with cars made him a perfect fit for the job, and he’s been doing it ever since.
Bowles has now been a taxi driver for 15 years, putting over 400,000 miles on his 2005 GMC Yukon XL Denali for Yellow Cab of Charlottesville and rising to the position of driver manager.
“I think the taxi cab business is a good business,” Bowles says. “You can really make good money and you just drive. I don’t know where you can make this kind of money and all you got to do is drive.”
And yet, Bowles, like other taxi drivers in the city, often hears this question: “So what do you think about Uber and Lyft?”
The growth of ridesharing services in Charlottesville over the last five years has posed an unprecedented threat to the taxi industry. Mobile apps, a flood of new drivers, and a young generation drawn to accessibility has allowed companies like Uber and Lyft to corner a significant chunk of the market and begin to render the traditional taxi cab obsolete.
Uber made its way to Charlottesville in 2014, and Lyft followed two years later, both quickly becoming the top choices of UVA students and visitors to the area. This left many local taxi companies scrambling to stay afloat; they lost both customers and drivers to the ridesharing services and were forced to revisit their business models.
But five years after Uber first came to town, local taxi services have shifted their focus and adopted new approaches to the business. It’s a seismic change that’s occurred as a result of the reshuffle in priorities among different players in the transportation industry.
Prior to the ridesharing companies’ debuts, transportation businesses typically focused on one of three areas: taxis, limousines, or paratransit services. Each was profitable and there wasn’t much overlap, allowing all three segments to thrive in their individual markets. But when Uber siphoned off a majority of local taxi drivers’ cash-based trips, their dispatchers were forced to broaden their view.
“The industry is far more diverse than it ever has been,” says John Boit, executive vice president of the Transportation Alliance trade organization (formerly the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association). “Basically, if it involves moving people around from A to B, these companies are looking at everything. Whereas 30 years ago, taxi companies would’ve just said, ‘Well, we’re just going to run taxis and pick up people who hail us on the street or call us directly for a ride.’”
‘Either deregulate us…or regulate them’
When Will van der Linde got into the taxi business in 2012, he bought out a company still stuck in the analog era. The Charlottesville native had never worked with taxis before, but alongside partner Mark Brown, he sought to help Yellow Cab catch up to the 21st century. The partners ditched ham radios in favor of a digital GPS-based dispatch system and added credit card machines in all the company’s vehicles. They also launched an app, called Taxi Magic, that they used for about a year.
Van der Linde, who’s a member of the Transportation Alliance, says he saw Yellow Cab experience tremendous growth in his first few years as part-owner. Even after he bought out Brown and his other investors in 2015, the taxi company remained profitable thanks to its contracts with UVA and social services, particularly by providing non-emergency medical transportation. It’s since merged with eight other Virginia taxi companies to form the Old Dominion Transportation Group.
But when Uber and Lyft began to erode his customer base, van der Linde became weary of the restrictions preventing his company from competing with the ridesharing services.
“The thing that we’ve always petitioned for is either deregulate us as a taxi business or regulate them,” van der Linde says.
Yellow Cab has shifted its approach under owner Will van der Linde. Photo: Eze Amos
In order for a taxi dispatch service to operate in Charlottesville, it must first purchase Virginia operating authority registration and license each vehicle as a taxi with the state, which requires specialized license plates. Before you can install those plates, however, each vehicle must be insured through 24/7 commercial liability insurance. This is an expensive policy that requires the company to cover a significant amount of damages regardless of whether or not a customer is in the car.
Once the dispatch service has its fleet licensed and insured, it can lease vehicles to drivers. But those drivers can’t start giving rides right away.
First, they have to pass a background check with the Charlottesville Police Department and complete a taxi driving test. Many companies like Yellow Cab also require drivers to take a drug test with the Department of Transportation. If they’re using their own car or the company hasn’t done it for them, drivers also must have their vehicle inspected by the police department in addition to getting the standard state inspection sticker.
The driver then can hit the road, but if he wants to participate in the lucrative non-emergency transit contracts, many medical accounts require drivers to pass a passenger safety course. Finally, once drivers begin collecting fares for their services, they’re responsible for paying taxes to both the state and city of Charlottesville and paying Yellow Cab leasing and dispatch fees.
Even for people who purchase their own car and operate as independent taxi drivers rather than work with companies like Yellow Cab, the entire process is expensive and can take up to a month. Although taxi drivers earn a much higher commission on rides than Uber or Lyft operators do, it’s a significant investment.
Uber and Lyft drivers also have to pass background and driving record checks, but they aren’t required to pay for any driving tests or register with the Virginia DMV.
Murphy McGill and Gerald Harvey work for both Uber and Lyft. They each say they were approved by Uber to drive within two weeks, and that Lyft took only one or two days.
It’s been frustrating for van der Linde to see customers choose ridesharing services over his taxi company despite the regulations he has to abide by. It makes sense to him when someone chooses one of the popular apps because they’re quicker for completing a short-distance trip, but sometimes that’s not even the case.
“It’s really sad. I’ll show up at the Charlottesville airport and we have two taxis sitting right…in front of arrivals and we have a $25 flat rate [to anywhere in town],” van der Linde says. “But somebody will stand there on their app in front of our drivers and they’ll wait 10, 15 minutes for an Uber to come up when they could just ride with us.”
There are also times when taxi cabs are cheaper than ridesharing services, such as holidays and some weekends. Uber and Lyft benefit from surge pricing (higher fares at busy times), but taxi companies in Charlottesville must let the city know 30 days in advance when they want to change their prices.
As for drivers, McGill says he would never drive a taxi cab because “it’s like a full-time job and I’m a family man, I can’t do that.” Harvey, who’s been driving since December 2016, enjoys the flexibility as well. Taxi drivers can certainly make more money, but it takes a level of commitment to driving that not many people are willing to make.
‘If you do your job at the best of your ability, you have no competition’
On average, Yellow Cab’s Bowles works six days a week, 13 hours a day—sometimes making as much as $2,000 in a week. He’s built up a base of regulars who still choose him over ridesharing services because he’s respectful and friendly, he says. Bowles says some people also don’t trust Uber or Lyft because of the sheer number of drivers they employ—it’s tougher to monitor that many drivers, and recent cases of ridesharing operators in different parts of the country being arrested on murder or rape charges have left some people uneasy.
Harvey, the Uber and Lyft driver, says Charlottesville police officers do conduct “courtesy checks,” pulling over ridesharing drivers at random and checking their credentials in an effort to keep the public safe.
However, Bowles says “there’s people [now] driving for Uber and Lyft that we had to stop dispatching to for serious reasons.” Yellow Cab has decommissioned drivers who were caught attempting fraud or treating riders poorly. Bowles says he’s also concerned about the amount of rider information Uber and Lyft drivers have.
Yellow Cab uses an app called iCabbie to dispatch rides to its drivers. Using a tablet set up in the vehicle (another expense for drivers), the taxi driver can accept rides but isn’t given any of the personal information for the customer other than their name. When the driver arrives at the pick-up point, he presses a button on the tablet that lets the customer know the car is outside. If he needs to contact the rider, that’s done through the dispatcher so the driver never gets the customer’s phone number.
But many riders, including UVA students, either don’t know about these safety features or are more concerned about accessibility and convenience. Yellow Cab’s Riide app, which customers can download to book a trip, isn’t user-friendly, and some riders have complained about long wait times before being picked up.
To make up for the loss in customers, Yellow Cab has signed contracts over the last few years that allow it to provide non-emergency medical transportation. They serve riders like 67-year-old Hortensia Cruz, a former nurse from Puerto Rico who moved to Charlottesville nearly two decades ago to be treated for a rare medical condition at UVA’s Emily Couric Clinical Cancer Center. Cruz has ridden with Bowles several times and is charged a $6 flat rate every time she takes a Yellow Cab to or from one of her appointments.
“I ride Yellow Cab a lot,” Cruz says. “I have lots of appointments, sometimes more than I can handle.”
There are many Charlottesville residents like Cruz, and they’ve provided a stable number of daily customers for Bowles and other Yellow Cab drivers.
So despite the number of students and visitors who have ditched cab companies in favor of ridesharing services, Bowles isn’t worried about the future of taxi services in Charlottesville. Like many independent drivers, he relies on his network of regular customers.
“I’m going to tell you something my dad taught me when I was a kid: If you do your job at the best of your ability, you have no competition,” he says.
‘There is a threat to this funding’
As important as non-emergency medical transportation has become for taxi services like Yellow Cab, there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick around forever. Medicaid laws currently require states to set aside funding for such rides, but Congress has discussed removing that requirement, and allowing states to decide whether or not to provide it.
Although the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services has pushed back its plan to consider stripping the requirement to 2021, the Transportation Alliance has lobbyists on Capitol Hill who are aiming to persuade lawmakers to continue providing this funding.
Ridesharing companies are also trying to get their piece of the pie through programs like Uber Health and Lyft Concierge. As a result, many taxi companies are expanding to multiple services like shuttles and luxury vehicle rides to help broaden their customer base as much as possible.
“Many companies have moved away from thinking of themselves as taxi companies, and they’ve moved into looking at themselves as transportation companies—and that really is a big distinction in this…industry,” Boit says. “I’m seeing an increasing number of companies who are not even using the word ‘taxi’ in their name. They’ve completely rebranded.”
In Charlottesville, Jefferson Area United Transportation (JAUNT) has provided shuttle service for disabled residents of the city and surrounding counties for both medical and recreational trips since 1975. Chief Executive Officer Brad Sheffield says he’s seen the demand for paratransit rides spike over the last few years, paving the way for both JAUNT and taxi services to have success in the market.
As taxi services continue to try and adapt to the ever-changing landscape of the transportation industry, their biggest focus is staying ahead of the technology. Uber and Lyft took advantage of a lack of forward-thinking among the thousands of taxicab companies around the world.
Now that they’ve shifted their approach in favor of new business models, taxi services are hoping to change the narrative around ridesharing services’ control of the transportation industry. Perhaps when riders get into Uber and Lyft vehicles, they’ll start asking a new question.
“So what do you think about taxis?”
Fare value
On a recent weekday afternoon, we took the same 1.5-mile trip across Charlottesville with Uber, Lyft, and Yellow Cab. Here’s how the services stacked up.
Uber:
Booking fee: $2.90
Trip fare: $5.20
Total: $8.10
Driver receives: $4.88
Wait time: 5 minutes
Lyft:
Base fare: $2
Minimum fee: $2
Trip fare: $4.66
Total: $8.66
Driver receives: $3.63
Wait time: 8 minutes
Yellow Cab:
Base fair: $2
Convenience fee: $1
Trip fare: $4.40
Total: $7.40
Driver receives: $7.40
Wait time: 11 minutes
Driver ID
Each service also lets riders know how to identify the car that will pick them up. Uber and Lyft send push notifications to the rider’s phone, while Yellow Cab shoots them a text.
Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio deliver career-high performances in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Image courtesy Columbia Pictures
Delight is not a word you often associate with a Quentin Tarantino film, but damn if you don’t leave Once Upon a Time in Hollywood with a smile on your face. The delight is usually QT’s, who every few years gets to share his latest pastiche, a focused fever dream informed by childhood obsessions of exploitation films, Sergio Leone, and 1960s television. Most of his influences are reflections of the world around these subjects, tackling social issues through either literal-minded melodrama or metaphors set in a heightened reality—a hall of mirrors effect in which you can’t tell where the original begins and the copy ends.
This is part of the Tarantino experience; he truly enjoys the power of cinema and finds real value in mining its history for raw materials from which to forge new stories. He wants us to be as in love with his influences as he is, for our own sake.
As many of us remember from childhood, when someone wants to share their toys this badly they can become obsessed with the “right” way to play with them. A Tarantino story can take lengthy detours as his characters monologue about Superman comics (Kill Bill), or the minutiae of stunt driving (Death Proof). He’s at his best when his interests are crucial to the foundation of his cinematic world and not just window dressing. Inglourious Basterds used the Nazis’ self-aggrandizement through film propaganda and the flammability of film stock as narrative tools, and Tarantino squeezed every last bit of suspense he could from them, while employing his trademark circuitous dialogue as an interrogation tactic.
Because Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes place in the time period most Tarantino films evoke, no one needs to wax poetic about the industry of old or what happens on a film set. They can just live it. Tarantino’s encyclopedic knowledge of entertainment history and love of Los Angeles forms the backdrop of the film, freeing his imagination to run wild with his characters and dialogue, allowing his two leading men (Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt) the space to deliver the best performances of their careers. Not a moment in its 165-minute runtime is wasted, and though it more than earns its R rating, it’s far from the epic journey of cruelty that his previous period pieces have been.
All this talk and nothing about the plot? That’s partially by design, but here’s just enough to pique your interest. Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) is an actor in the late 1960s who was once the star of his own Western television series, “Bounty Law,” but mostly works as the villain-of-the-week. His stuntman/housesitter/chauffeur/best friend is Cliff Booth (Pitt), a veteran with a possibly shady past. Dalton lives next to two infamous people from real life, actress Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) and director Roman Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha, though he has almost no dialogue). All three actors are complete naturals in their roles, and the greatest sequence is the one that juxtaposes how they all spend one fateful day: Dalton’s artistic and professional redemption, Booth’s encounter with the Manson family, and Tate enjoying her rising star by watching a movie starring herself.
If you learn what happens next or how it ends, the experience won’t be ruined, but watching the story unfold is part of the joy. Tarantino knows your expectations, and figures out how to use them against you in the most effective way, from his tendency for nonlinear storytelling to the dread that comes from his character’s proximity to key figures in the Manson family murders. Once Upon a Time is partially a riff on two Sergio Leone classics, Once Upon a Time in the Old West and Once Upon a Time in America, but make no mistake: This is a quintessentially American fairytale.
"Memorial," an immersive audio-visual installation, at Chroma Projects Gallery. Image by Bolanle Adeboye
Openings
Chroma Projects InsideVault Virginia, Third Street SE. “Memorial,” an immersive audio/visual installation by Bolanle Adeboye, Richelle Claiborne, and Leslie Scott-Jones, with music from Lou “Waterloo” Hampton and Mike Moxham, that considers the African American perspective and makes space for communal creation, remembrance, awareness, and compassion. 5-7pm, performance at 5:30.
CitySpace 100 Fifth St. NE. “Gone But Not Forgotten: Unearthing Memories at the Daughters of Zion Cemetery,” featuring photos from the Holsinger Portrait Project. 5:30-7:30pm.
C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Brilliant Botanicals,” featuring earthenware jewelry textured with pressed plants by Jennifer Paxton. 6-8pm.
Eichner Studios Gallery 2035 Bond St. #120. A show of work by Anita Severn and a number of local artists working in a variety of media. 6-8pm.
The Garage 100 E. Jefferson St. “Remedios caseros,” featuring Karina Monroy’s works in acrylic paint and embroidery thread on muslin. 5-7pm.
IX Art Park 522 Second St. SE. “Start to Finish,” an exhibit of spray paint, oil, and acrylic paintings, each with a solvable maze, by Bernie McCabe. 7-11pm.
New Dominion Bookshop 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Poetry in Color,” an exhibition of watercolor calligraphy and oil and acrylic paintings by Terry M. Coffey. 5-7pm.
Thea Gahr at Studio IX
Studio IX 969 Second St. SE. “Wellspring,” featuring 12 original Risograph prints by Justseeds Artists’ Cooper- ative members, each exploring our contemporary relationship to water. 5:30-7:30pm.
VMDO Architects 200 E. Market St. “Wanderings and Wonderings,” a show of original paintings and drawings in a wide variety of media by Lindsay Knights. 5:30-7:30pm.
Welcome Gallery 114 Third St. NE. “Swarm,” Rayne MacPhee’s exhibition about the plight of the honeybee, presented in graphite, ink, and bee taxidermy on paper. 5-7:30pm.
The Women’s Initiative 11o1 E. High St. “Serenity,” a show of watercolors, acrylics, and oils by Terry Coffey. 5:30-7:30pm.
Other July shows
Albemarle County Circuit Court 501 E. Jefferson St. An exhibition of work by members of the Central Virginia Watercolor Guild.
Annie Gould Gallery 109 S. Main St., Gordonsville. Work by Joan Griffin, Frances Dowdy, Anne de Latour Hopper, and 30 other artists, both local and national, through August 11; and a show of work by Linda Verdury opening August 15, 5-7pm.
David Amoroso at Carpediem Exhibit
Carpediem Exhibit 1429 E. High St. A perpeptual group exhibit, this month including works by David Amoroso and Nina Ozbey. Opens August 18, 2-5pm.
Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Romeo Glass,” a show of blown glass by Minh Martin. Opens August 10, 1pm.
C’ville Coffee 1301 Harris St. “Cosmic Views,” featuring oil and acrylic paintings on canvas by Patty Ray Avalon. Opens August 1.
The Fralin Museum of Art at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “Of Women, By Women,” an exhibition curated by the university’s museum interns that explores the power inherent in the act of taking a photograph; “Asian Art from the Permanent and Select Private Collections”; “Otherwise,” exploring the influence of LGBTQ+ artists, opening August 9; “Time to Get Ready: Fotografia Social,” opening August 9; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.
Jefferson School African American Heritage Center 233 Fourth St. NW. “Ernest Withers: Picturing the Civil Rights Movement 1957-1968,” a show of 13 works from the African American photojournalist best known for capturing 60 years of African American history in the segregated South.
HotCakes Gourmet 1137 Emmet St. Ste. A, Barracks Road Shopping Center. “Local Landscapes,” featuring work by Julia Kindred, through August 17; and “Wake the Dreamer,” featuring watercolors by Kari Caplin, opening August 18.
Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “Shane Pickett: Djinong Djina Boodja (Look At the Land that I Have Traveled),” featuring work by one of western Australia’s most significant contemporary Aboriginal artists; and “With Her Hands: Women’s Fiber Art from Gapuwiyak: The Louise Hamby Gift.”
Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Landscape Reimagined & Summer Sculpture Show,” featuring the work of 27 painters and 10 sculptors who take landscape as their subject or use their art to literally inhabit and intersect with nature, through August 11; and “Arrivals,” by Sanda Iliescu, opening August 24, 4:30-6:30pm.
McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. In the Sarah B. Smith Gallery, “Un-Becoming Peter Allen,” a show of works in colored pencil and collage that explore the nature of identity; in the North and South and Downstairs Hall galleries, the McGuffey member artists summer group show.
Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St., Downtown Mall. “Aerial Colors,” featuring mixed-media pieces by Remmi Franklin.
Sri Kodakalla at Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist
Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church Unitarian-Universalist 717 Rugby Rd. “Entries of Thought,” featuring the wood and fiber works of Sri Kodakalla. Opens August 1, 11:30am.
Vitae Spirits Distillery 715 Henry Ave. “Winding Down,” a show of work by Judith Ely. Opens August 5.
First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many area art galleries and exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions. To list an exhibit, email arts@c-ville.com.
Night watch: A series revolving around how we perceive the natural world, Films of the Outside, Watched in the Outside, features 10 short movies including 1953’s Daybreak Express by DA Pennebaker, and 2019’s fryar hole punch v.1 by Will Jones, who will be in attendance to discuss his work. Screened using a projector in a park setting, the films immerse you in nature. Bring a blanket and picnic basket for a unique movie-going experience.
Friday, 8/2. Free, 8pm. Belmont Park, 725 Stonehenge Ave. 218-2060.
The Flaming Lips take you on their wild ride on Tuesday, August 6, at the Pavilion. “I sometimes still think that it’s just some hallucination that I’ve made up,” says Wayne Coyne (center). Publicity photo
Wayne Coyne is sitting in a hotel lobby in Indianapolis, polishing off three espresso shots from the adjacent Starbucks kiosk. “I always say, energy is happiness,” he muses after taking a sip.
Doling out fortune cookie philosophies about something as mundane as caffeine intake is what you hope for from The Flaming Lips frontman, who deals in absurdity and keeps audiences on their toes night after night. In a 30-plus year career, the Oklahoma band has become known for its experimental art rock and cosmic live performances, complete with oversized hamster balls and furry animal costumes. Through it all, Coyne’s been at the helm—the ringleader in a circus of confetti, rainbows, and glitter—with a sense of innovation that continues to take things to the next level.
“I’m always doing too much and I don’t really know what of it is good and what of it is ridiculous,” Coyne says. Take The Flaming Lips’ 1997 release, Zaireeka. In order to hear the intended sound, the listener has to play four CDs at the same time.
“I was a very rational, normal person thinking that we could do that with 100 CDs and we would actually make these, you know, there would be 100 different pieces of music,” Coyne recalls. “Luckily our manager [is] practical and he said, ‘Well, Wayne, would you consider 20 CDs?’ And I thought, ‘Who wants that? That just seems too normal.’”
The label ultimately went for it, but capped the project at four CDs. “I think about it now, it’s the most insane thing anybody’s ever done, but they all helped me make it,” he says. “I think they would rather I walk in with way too much and then we all sort out what’s good about it, as opposed to me walking in with not enough.”
It’s that approach that has solidified The Flaming Lips’ status as psychedelic juggernauts turned pop culture icons (the group’s activities in recent years include palling around with Miley Cyrus and making cameo appearances on the comedy show “Portlandia”). The Lips’ latest offering, King’s Mouth, is another installment in atmospheric creativity. First released on colored vinyl on Record Store Day, the band’s 15th studio album is a companion to Coyne’s traveling interactive art installation by the same name, currently on view at the Arts Center of the Ozarks in Springdale, Arkansas.
“When you see pictures of the “King’s Mouth,” it looks like this metallic, drippy head, but the real show is on the inside, you know, once you go in through his mouth, the idea is that you’re laying inside there and you’re peering up to where the inside of his head used to be and you’re peering out into the universe,” explains Coyne. “There’s nothing like sitting in there because of the music and the way the lights are; they’re almost like liquid lights and it’s almost like a hologram hovering above you, it can kind of come at you or around you or through you…it’s meant to be an experience.”
The King’s Mouth album is an expanded edition of what exhibit-goers hear inside the installation, with an added bonus: the oration of The Clash’s Mick Jones.
“I sometimes still think that it’s just some hallucination that I’ve made up,” Coyne says with palpable excitement. “And Mick Jones’ voice is so perfectly eccentric and gentle and warbly and honest. There were some words I’d heard him say in interviews that made me think, ‘I hope he says those words with the exact same inflection,’ and when it came back, it was as though he read my mind.”
The “King’s Mouth” installation isn’t out of Coyne’s wheelhouse. He grew up in a family that valued the arts, and started out drawing and painting.
“The dilemma with really all art that isn’t music is that you eventually want to hear music with your art; with your painting or with your movie or with your sculpture,” he says. “So I just started to make music because I wanted it to go with my other stuff.”
Coyne formed The Flaming Lips at a time when the DIY punk ethos was on the rise in the U.S., and he looked to contemporaries like the Meat Puppets and the Butthole Surfers for inspiration.
“These were people that we knew in real life and it was something more on our level,” he explains. “We would go to see Sonic Youth play to 50 people and we would say, ‘Well, maybe we could play to 50 people,’ whereas seeing Led Zeppelin play to 10,000 people, it was like, ‘How are we ever going to do that?’ So I think we were very lucky that what was happening in our world of music was very encouraging to us.”
Even though he had no musical training and, as he tells it, couldn’t play other people’s songs, he enjoyed making up his own.
“I still don’t really know how music works. I definitely know how to record music, but sitting with Sean Lennon and Les Claypool even yesterday, they start talking about chord structures and key changes and I’m really lost pretty quickly,” Coyne says. “So I’m not really a musician, but I create music. I don’t really know if it makes sense in a mathematical musical sense, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like anything; if you like it, then it’s worth it.”
On Sunday, August 4, The Paramount Theater screens a live broadcast of London's National Theater production of Small Island. Publicity photo
Crossing the pond: Small Island, Andrea Levy’s prize-winning novel, brought to the stage at London’s National Theatre, traces the stories of three people in post-war Britain, all trying to reinvent themselves. Hortense and Gilbert are Jamaicans moving to the U.K. with hopes of a new life, and Queenie wishes to escape familiar Lincolnshire. Their stories intertwine as they face the harsh realities of colonialism and prejudice.
Sunday, 8/4. $11-15, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.
Mike Kroboth, Amanda Lyons, and Rachel Paisley perform in Handle with Care, a Summer Short written by Rachel Martinez and directed by Katherine Mata. Publicity photo
Short break: Gorilla Theater Productions continues its commitment to diversifying theater with Summer Shorts, an opportunity for five local playwrights to get their work produced and performed. The unique series of plays gets a boost from five of GTP’s experienced directors, who draw from a group of 13 actors to bring the stories to life.
Through 8/4. $10-15, times vary. Gorilla Theater, 1717 Allied Ln. 233-4456.
Political intrigue and deception run deep in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, part of the American Shakespeare Center's Roman trio. Photo by Lauren Rogers Parker
Building Rome: Political intrigue and deception run deep in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, part of American Shakespeare Center’s Roman trio. The characters struggle with their own humanity and morality, as they try to justify power grabs and shady deals. Initially performed in 1599, more than 1,500 years after Caesar died, the historical epic may have been the first play staged at the Globe Theatre.
Through 11/30. $20-59, times vary. Blackfriars Playhouse. 10 S. Market St., Staunton. (877) 682-4236.
Rocket League is one of the three games students will be able to play as part of VHSL’s eSports pilot program. (Photo captured via PlayStation 4)
Virginia high schools will put a new spin on the word “athlete” when they launch an eSports competitive video gaming league this fall.
The Virginia High School League announced earlier this summer that it’ll be rolling out a one-year pilot program for the 2019-20 school year that includes three different video games: League of Legends, Rocket League, and SMITE. Schools can put together teams to participate in any of the three games, with one match played each week during both the fall and spring semesters. Matches happen, and are watched, online, so student competitors may never meet each other in person (so much for the “good game” handshake).
Billy Haun, executive director of VHSL and a former Monticello High principal, sees an eSports league as an opportunity to engage students who might not be involved in other school activities, and doesn’t see them replacing traditional sports.
The digital era has seen a rapid rise in the popularity of eSports worldwide. A study conducted by Goldman Sachs found that eSports’ monthly viewing audience averaged over 167 million people in 2018 on streaming platforms like Twitch. That’s a bigger audience than those for the last Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals, and Stanley Cup—combined.
After receiving several calls over the last few years about eSports, VHSL decided to try a pilot program in conjunction with PlayVS—the official eSports league of the National Federation of State High School Associations. According to VHSL Assistant Director Darrell Wilson, over 30 Virginia high schools have expressed interest in participating this year, including Monticello High.
Three teachers have volunteered to lead the team at Monticello this year, and 20 students have already expressed interest. The high school will pay for the program under its athletics budget.
Although there’s a $64 licensing fee per game, Albemarle County Public Schools spokesman Phil Giaramita says the overall cost of the program is relatively low compared to other sports. Monticello will use an existing computer lab for gaming, and all competitions will be played online, so there are no travel fees. As of now, Monticello is the only area high school committed to the league, but Western Albemarle and Charlottesville High have said they’ll both consider joining for the spring season if enough students express interest.
Haun admits he expects some pushback from parents who might oppose public high schools providing opportunities for students to play more video games, but he says “a lot of kids are already playing eSports, they’re just not playing competitively or under guidance of adults.” VHSL hopes to encourage students who wouldn’t be playing organized sports anyway to get involved with an activity that caters more to their interests.
While eSports may appear unproductive, one researcher has found that most studies about the cognitive effects of video games show the games can help with mental focus.
Marc Palaus Gallego is a Ph.D. graduate in cognitive neuroscience with the Open University of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, who conducted a study on the neural basis of video gaming in 2017. He found that while results aren’t always consistent, there appears to be an overall positive effect on brain development—as long as kids don’t spend too much time in front of the screen.
“Apparently, those who are experienced in video games are more efficient in optimizing the mental resources to focus on a task, specially tasks with strong visual components,” and that can be observed when the difficulty in a game increases, Gallego says in an email. He believes that as long as kids balance extended video gaming with some other kind of activity, there’s no major risks to their brain development.
And while some studies have found negative effects from video gaming, Gallego doesn’t put too much stock in their results.
“These detrimental effects seemed to affect attention, inhibitory control, the processing of social information, and lower verbal IQ,” Gallego says. “However, there are numerous examples of other studies which found improvements in the same areas, so it’s difficult to generalize.”
The three games VHSL is offering each require varying levels of strategy and collaboration. Rocket League, which is a soccer-esque game using rocket-boosted cars, requires players to be in constant communication with one another to set up shots and play efficient defense. League of Legends and SMITE are arena-style battle games, where players concoct strategies and think quickly to best opponents both individually and as teams.
Giaramita says that “engagement in school activities correlates with academic success” and gamers represent an untapped group of students that schools typically struggle to get involved. An eSports league gives many students who have difficulty finding friends a new avenue for breaking the ice with classmates and securing a more enjoyable high school experience, he says.
They’re not your typical jocks, but the number of students interested in competitive gaming will only continue to grow. With the pilot program, Haun and VHSL are hoping to help young gamers bring their passion with them when they go to school.
