It’s haiku season.
Sling your wildest words out there.
You could last longest.
Wednesday 2/19. Free, 8pm. Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, 414 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 293-9947.
Categories
Month: February 2020
How wonderful it is to see a film about art that treats the creative process as an essential part of the human experience, free of the fetishization of suffering, or the detachment of genius worship. The narrative of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire centers on the relationship between a painter and her subject, but it examines the miracle and tragedy of human creation of all kinds, including music, storytelling, recreation, and especially love.
Marianne (Noémie Merlant), a portrait artist and art instructor, is commissioned to paint Héloïse (Adèle Haenel) without her knowledge, at the insistence of her countess mother (Valeria Golino). Héloïse is engaged to a man she does not know, and had refused to sit for a previous painter following her sister’s suicide. Marianne is introduced under the guise of a walking companion, stealing glimpses of her features when she can. When the first painting is complete, Héloïse rejects the work as made without true emotion. She then agrees to sit for a new painting while the countess is away, and in this time alone, the hints of attraction boil over. The painting of Héloïse’s portrait becomes a time and space for the two women to express themselves. What was compulsory becomes voluntary, what was technical becomes emotional, and with the burden of expectation removed, they discover new levels of freedom not allowed by their stations in life.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
R, 119 minutes
Violet Crown Cinema
Sciamma’s minimalistic direction brings out dimensions of the story that might have been lost in a more conventional film. The only music is diegetic, coming from a harpsichord, an orchestra, or a group of women around a fire. There is no villain, there are no twists, and no on-screen violence. There is sex, but the eroticism exists in all things: glances and stares, shapes, sounds, and silence. The only struggle is to find the best way to express emotions that have been suffocated, entombed by fear, sadness, past experiences, societal expectation. It is a simple love story told with elegance, sophistication, and masterful craftsmanship.
The creative process is often inadequately captured in film not because it is ineffable, but because it is so tangible. It is a great labor to have a film about an artist that is made with the same attention to detail that its subject demonstrates. Many filmmakers fall victim to the temptation of portraying an artist’s life as a series of anecdotal struggles that culminate in the spark of creation, resulting in a great masterpiece. Artistic inspiration can come from anywhere and might be indescribable, but the act of creation, the form and technique used to create, and the feelings that creation evokes are as foundational to us as the process leading up to it. We don’t memorialize ourselves and our emotions out of vanity. We do it out of necessity.
Local theater listings
Alamo Drafthouse Cinema 375 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056.
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213.
Violet Crown Cinema 200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000.
See it again
The Color Purple
PG-13, 200 minutes
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX, February 23
Categories
Arts Pick: Ross Martin and Adam Larabee
Adventurous Strumming: Ross Martin knows guitar, and his deep knowledge of the instrument has led him on explorations of jazz, bluegrass, country, folk, experimental, and classical music. Over the course of his many tours and projects, he’s perfected both the entrancing acoustic duet and the invigorating electric duel, and taught guitar workshops all over the country. Local banjo player and fellow music educator Adam Larrabee has skills steeped in jazz that extend to bluegrass, and rock music. His resume includes performances with Bruce Hornsby, Josh Ritter, and Charlottesville’s own Love Canon.
Saturday 2/22. $12-15. 8pm, The Front Porch. 221 E. Water St. 806-7062.
Categories
Arts Pick: Drive-By Truckes
Breakdown lane: The Drive-By Truckers are unapologetically political on The Unraveling, their first album in three and a half years. “I’ve always said that all of our records are political but I’ve also said that politics is personal. With that in mind, this album is especially personal,” says band co-founder Patterson Hood. “… Watching so many things we care about being decimated and destroyed all around us informed the writing of this album to the core.” Making the record at Sam Phillips Recording in Memphis gave the group a vintage sound and perspective that’s resulted in a raw and honest look at the state of American dreams.
Wednesday 2/19. $25-28, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 245-4980.
Growing up on the Torres Strait Islands of Australia, Brian Robinson drew on walls, windows, the kitchen table, the back fence. “Pretty much everywhere,” he told C-VILLE last month. “That creativity continued to grow and flourish” over decades of art-making, says the artist, who is now in his 40s, and has works in major public collections all over Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia.
About a dozen of Robinson’s recent linocut prints and etchings are currently on view at the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection in “Tithuyil: Moving With the Rhythm of the Stars,” through May 31.
Robinson, who is of the Maluyligal and Wuthani tribal groups of the Torres Strait and Cape York Peninsula, and a descendant of the Dayak people of Malaysia, says his works take a look “at life in the Torres Strait, with a bit of a twist.” He writes in his artist statement that these pieces “present an intoxicating worldview, one where iconic works of classical art and popular sources from global culture”—such as the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars and the Tardis from “Dr. Who” in “Mapping the Cosmos” (above)—“are co-opted into the spirit world of the Islander imagination.”
The artist will be at the Kluge-Ruhe for the “Tithuyil” opening reception on February 20 at 5:30pm. —Erin O’Hare
Categories
Arts Pick: Yamato
Heartening beats: With over a thousand years of cultural tradition, 400-year-old instruments, and 25 years of performing globally, the 12-member drumming group Yamato brings a dazzling exhibition of showmanship to the stage. Japan’s traditional Wadaiko drums serve as the foundation for tamashy—translated as soul, spirit, and psyche—which channels the basic elements of life into a performance that’s felt both physically and spiritually.
Thursday 2/20. $24.75-54.75, 7pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. 979-1333.
For most of her life, Margaret O’Bryant has called the library home. After receiving a master’s degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, she worked in libraries at Ferrum College, Lenoir-Rhyne College, and UVA, later moving to the reference department at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library.
While at the public library in 1987, O’Bryant also volunteered with the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society, helping to move its collection from a space on Court Square to the former McIntire Library on Second Street SE, where the society planned to dedicate a room to its archival collection. A year later, the society received funding from the city and county to create a formal librarian position, which O’Bryant eagerly applied for—and got.
Now, after more than 30 years of managing its vast historical collection, O’Bryant has bid the society adieu. She officially retired at the beginning of this month, and is now working on clearing out her things and preparing the library for whoever takes her place. We sat down with her to reflect on her time there. (Responses have been edited for length and clarity.)
C-VILLE: How has Charlottesville changed since you started working at the society?
Margaret O’Bryant: I think the nature of historical attention has changed over this period, in ways that are good, and that are a little more disconcerting in ways to some people. There’s been more attention given to a whole spectrum of history in the community.
What’s the strangest inquiry or request you’ve ever gotten?
This isn’t necessarily strange, and I don’t mean this negatively. But we get roughly 1,300 to 1,500 people per year who come here in person to do research, and the largest percentage of those people are here to do genealogical research. It’s always been interesting how things are passed on in a family about their background or history…and it’s frequently not entirely accurate. It can be amusing, and sometimes can be a little more difficult for people. They have to deal in one way or another with the fact that things are not always what they had thought it had been. It’s an interesting phenomenon.
What’s your favorite memory of working at the society?
I will always remember fondly the reception the society and JMRL put together in December, when the society named the reading room here after me…it was quite moving.
What will you miss the most about your job?
It’s usually the people that you work with that you miss more than anything else. I’ve certainly had a lot of wonderful relationships with the people that I work with and for, and also the people who come here to do research…I’ll also miss the whole process of looking for things, trying to see where they can be found, and finding whatever it is that may be helpful.
Now that you’re retired, what are you going to do next?
I told my husband I don’t want to make any specific plans for several months…but I would like to do some additional travel, both within the country and some foreign travel. As far as locally…I may do some things at the society as a volunteer. That would only be if the new librarian and director are comfortable having me around!
Margaret O’Bryant, in brief
Education: Bachelor’s degree in classical languages from the College of William & Mary, master’s degree in library science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
First job in Charlottesville: Drove volunteers around for Charlottesville’s retired senior volunteer program.
Famous use of the society’s resources: “Finding Your Roots,” a PBS genealogical documentary series hosted by acclaimed historian Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Correction February 19: the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society receives around 1,300 to 1,500 visitors per year, not 13,000 to 15,000 as originally reported.
Keeping our waterways swimmable, fishable, and drinkable seems like an uncontroversial goal—but the Trump administration apparently disagrees. Since assuming control, the administration has made a series of efforts to weaken long-standing protections for America’s waterways. Local environmental groups have grave concerns about the potential effects of these suggested laws in Virginia and across the country.
The Clean Water Act prevents people, farms, and factories from dumping waste into water and using chemicals that could lead to harmful runoff. The most recent piece of Trump legislation, announced in late January, would redefine which types of waterways are protected by the act.
“These rules will reduce the scope of Clean Water Act protection in an unprecedented way, in terms of putting hundreds of thousands of acres of wetlands in Virginia at risk,” says Jamie Brunkow, senior advocacy manager at the James River Association.
“There are industrial and other interests that stand to profit by a narrower scope of Clean Water Act protections,” says Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Jonathan Gendzier. “That includes big industrial agriculture, homebuilders, and other polluting industries.”
Trump’s rules “reflect a simplistic notion that we should only be regulating navigable waters,” says Chris Miller, president of the Piedmont Environmental Council.
Confining the Clean Water Act’s jurisdiction to “navigable waters” means leaving out smaller tributaries that feed in to larger waterways. Vernal pools, intermittent streams, prairie potholes, and other seasonal but critical water features could lose protection. Since all of these waterways are interconnected, pollution anywhere means pollution everywhere. “All the little ravines that have rocks in them and no water until it rains, if you’re allowed to dump whatever you want in there, the second it rains all that is going to come into your streams,” says Bryan Hofmann, deputy director of Friends of the Rappahannock.
The Clean Water Act was initially passed by the Nixon administration, with bipartisan support, in 1972. It’s widely considered an environmental success story, and has directly resulted in improvement of water quality in places like the James River, says Brunkow.
“It’s hard to imagine, but we didn’t have any rules in place that prevented you from directly putting sewage into waterways,” Brunkow says. “The James in Richmond was largely considered an open sewer prior to the Clean Water Act.”
This rollback is bad news for people and animals alike. Brook trout, endangered Shenandoah salamanders, oysters, otters, blue crabs, bald eagles and even dolphins all rely on the Rappahannock system, says Hofmann, and any pollution wreaks havoc on those fragile systems. Meanwhile, “In Charlottesville, most of the public drinking supply comes from surface water, which runs off the land,” Miller says.
Repealing the federal rules means more responsibility falls to states. Virginia has decent protections in place, compared to neighboring states like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, says Hofmann, but the rollback means fewer staff and a decreased budget.
The rule change “puts an additional strain on our state agencies,” Brunkow says. “It’s really a devastating blow to have lost that national standard.”
The Southern Environmental Law Center has been fighting against Trump water deregulation since the administration took office, says Gendzier. They plan to challenge this new rule as well, and anticipate a months-long legal battle.
“Having a big power plant go through and discharge whatever they want into the water, farms having their cattle sitting there all day long and defecating into the stream—” Hofmann says, “The Clean Water Act prevents those huge bad things from happening.”
Barracks Road Shopping Center’s go-to location for bird feeders, peacock wind spinners, and outdoor furniture is nearly empty now. Plow & Hearth will end its 30-year-plus run at Barracks Road March 1, and increased rent was a factor in the decision to shutter the store.
“Our lease was coming to term and it had some economics that didn’t work for us,” says Paul Abugattas, Plow & Hearth director of retail operations. “Our online business is healthy while retail continues to decline.” The company has closed five of its 23 stores in the past year, and plans to invest more in its Madison properties, including a flagship store there, he says.
Ten or so employees at the Barracks Road location will soon be out of jobs.
The area’s oldest shopping center once boasted a zero percent vacancy rate, but about 6 percent of Barracks Road’s square footage currently is unoccupied, according to its website. That includes the still-empty, 16,000-square-foot former CVS store and Brixx Pizza.
The Brixx space is available for an eye-popping $25,000 a month, according to Jerry Miller, CEO of VMV Brands and I Love CVille Real Estate. “Two different restaurateurs told me that,” he says. Asked to confirm, Federal Realty, which owns the shopping center, says it does “not share details pertaining to leases.”
“Because the rents are getting to be so high,” says Miller, “the local mom-and-pop and brick-and-mortar stores are priced out.” Those establishments, he says, will filter to midtown (West Main) and downtown, where former Barracks Road tenants Shenanigans and Lynne Goldman Elements, respectively, have migrated. He predicts Barracks Road will become a “bastion of national brands that have very little ties to this community.”
Many retailers across the country are struggling and closing stores, despite the strong economy. The New York Times reports 9,000 shuttered in 2019, with another 1,200 closings announced so far this year. Fashion Square Mall has seen a steady stream of vacancies, losing anchor Sears and most recently Gap.
At Barracks Road, “Our business is down from a year ago,” says HotCakes co-owner Keith Rosenfeld. The gourmet café and bakery has been in the shopping center since 1992, and he doesn’t remember seeing so many open spaces.
He says Barracks Road is “still the best, most established shopping center in town,” with Stonefield in that same high-end niche. But if local specialty shops can’t afford to be there, “you get more schlock, more national chains.”
And restaurant chains make it tougher for establishments like HotCakes, which makes everything in-house and employs around 50 people earning double-digit hourly wages.
With the rise of e-commerce, the trend in the shopping center industry is more “lifestyle experiences,” says Rosenfeld, because “visitation and spending in malls is going down.” Some, like Stonefield, have a movie theater to draw people, and there are more restaurants.
“Unless the industry can figure out how to get people to eat two to three lunches, it’s very hard to grow sales,” says Rosenfeld.
Many locals have wondered about the viability of Stonefield, which is losing Pier 1, and saw the closure of Travinia and Rocksalt last year.
But others say business is just fine. “Stonefield has worked out great for us,” says third-generation retailer Mark Mincer, who opened a Mincer’s there in 2013. “We’re reaching a lot of area people who don’t necessarily come to the Corner.” And his business has gotten better since L.L. Bean opened next door, he says.
Mincer notes that his rent goes up 3 percent every year at both the Corner and Stonefield. “I don’t love it,” he says. “If we want to go to Ruckersville, we could find something cheaper.”
The Times attributes the decline of retail not so much to e-commerce, but to factors like big box stores and income inequality, which mean retailers catering to high- and low-income customers are seeing growth, but those targeting the middle class, which has seen an unrelenting decline in income, are suffering.
HotCakes’ Rosenfeld agrees, noting Charlottesville’s “extremely high rents and cost of living.” Would-be shoppers paying $1,200 a month in rent for an apartment don’t have as much disposable income, he says. He also thinks the number of centers that have opened in the past few years have impacted existing stores.
The upcoming opening of Chick-fil-A in Barracks Road Shopping Center is expected to generate traffic to the mall—although that isn’t likely to help establishments like HotCakes.
Federal’s VP of asset management, Deirdre Johnson, says the center has recently added Zoom and Club Pilates “in response to the demand for boutique fitness.” Spring Street Boutique and a Mahana Fresh franchise will be opening soon.
“Most of the new stores are locally owned, providing Barracks Road a healthy mix of local, regional, and national merchants to best serve our community,” she says.
Spring Street owner Cynthia Schroeder is bucking the trend of area retailers exiting Barracks Road. “I think it’s the first place people think of to go shopping,” she says. “It’s one of the best malls in the country. It’s where people go to go clothes shopping.”
She declines to say what her rent is, but acknowledges: “It’s not inexpensive.”
Schroeder will close her Downtown Mall store and expects to open the new one in the spring. She isn’t worried about the empty storefronts at Barracks Road. “I think they’re going to fill those.”
The Shenandoah Valley Battlefields Foundation, a historic preservation group that installed a monument to Confederate soldiers in Winchester last year, is now angling for a $1.6 million grant from the state of Virginia for the creation of a different kind of monument—an African American history center.
Some local black history organizations have expressed concerns.
“We were sort of dumbfounded when we learned that they had requested funding for the Shenandoah Valley African American history center,” says Dorothy Davis, a board member at the Josephine School Community Museum, a black history center in Berryville. “They generally have not been forthcoming to support African American groups, organizations, museums, in the valley.”
The Battlefields Foundation uses private money as well as $435,000 annually from the National Parks Service to acquire, maintain, and interpret Civil War sites in an eight-county bloc in the Shenandoah Valley. It hopes to open a center focused on the region’s black history in an old building across the street from its office in New Market.
A budget amendment, submitted by Republicans Chris Collins and Emmett Hanger, would give the group $825,000 each year for two years to support the black history project, as well as unspecified “visitor improvements to the New Market Battlefield.” Collins says the Battlefields Foundation has done good work in the past to encourage lucrative Civil War-based tourism in the area, and though he’s heard criticism, he has no plans to pull the amendment. Hanger’s office did not respond to request for comment.
Keven Walker, the CEO of the Battlefields Foundation, says the amendment represents an unprecedented investment in the under-appreciated African American history of the region, and that groups opposed to the project have “been spreading half truths and slanted information” in an effort to slow things down.
Robin Lyttle, director of the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project, is among those with concerns about the proposal. She says the Battlefields Foundation didn’t approach her until after the amendment had already been submitted, and that when she asked for more time, Walker said they were going to go ahead with the project with or without her group’s support.
“We ascertained that no African Americans had been included in the planning or discussion,” says Lyttle, who is white. She wants the amendment postponed for a year, so her group and others in the area have time to weigh in.
“No money was put in for acquisition of resources or research,” Lyttle says. “We found out that they thought that would be volunteers.”
The proposed museum would be on the second floor of an old schoolhouse, where black children were taught while white children were taught on the ground floor. Lyttle is worried the black history exhibit will be tucked away and inaccessible in the old house. She says she suggested multiple alternate sites nearby with more significance to local black history, but that the Battlefields Foundation wasn’t open to discussion.
Ultimately, the Josephine School and the Shenandoah Valley Black Heritage Project both declined to sign on to the project.
Walker sings a different song. “One of the things that was very absent in the valley, in our opinion, was a concerted, unified effort to preserve sites related to African American history,” he says, adding that the impressive grassroots work of groups like Lyttle’s has “not been promoted to the level that it should.”
Walker denies the claim that no African Americans were consulted in the process. According to Walker, John David Smith, Jr., the first ever black mayor of Winchester, “supports the project wholly.”
“That is a bold-faced lie,” says Smith, Jr. “I never told him that. I don’t know enough about the project to offer any type of answer.”
Walker also says he spoke with the Northeast Neighborhood Association, a community history group in Harrisonburg, who had been “extremely supportive.” When asked about the nature of that collaboration, the Northeast Neighborhood Association declined to comment on the record.
Other local leaders have come out against the project. Tina Stevens, the first black woman ever elected to nearby Stephens City’s town council, says “It is very disturbing to me that we wouldn’t postpone this budget amendment until next year, when they can really talk to everyone.”
“African American educators, historians, church leaders, organizers—these are all people that should be included in the conversation,” Stevens says, “and we were not.” Stevens says her views do not reflect the official position of the town council.
In 2018, the Battlefields Foundation sponsored an even-handed panel on Confederate iconography at James Madison University, featuring UVA history professor Caroline Janney and former American Civil War Museum CEO Christy Coleman.
But at the same time, the foundation allows the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a nationwide group of descendants of Confederate soldiers, to meet in the foundation’s Winchester museum. The Sons of Confederate Veterans’ website tells visitors that the group is committed to “vindication of the cause” of the Confederacy, and that “The preservation of liberty and freedom was the motivating factor in the South’s decision to fight the Second American Revolution.”
Lyttle also says she is concerned about “the diversity issue” within the Battlefields Foundation’s leadership—their board is composed of 15 white men and one white woman.
Then, of course, there’s the Confederate monument that the Battlefields Foundation installed in Winchester last year, a tribute to a group of Alabama soldiers who died at the Third Battle of Winchester. The six-foot-tall monument, inscribed with a Confederate flag, was paid for entirely by a member of the group’s board of trustees.
At the monument’s dedication ceremony, Walker said, “Unlike some other places throughout the country, here in the National Historic District monuments are going up, not coming down.”
Walker walks back that quote now, saying it was taken out of context by the Winchester Star, and that his group “wants more monuments to go up, monuments to all of our history.”
Larry Yates, a local historian and activist based in Winchester, says the Battlefields Foundation “does a lot of useful things in terms of preserving battlefields” but its museum is “basically a relic collection, with very little attention to African Americans.”
For now, the decision is in the hands of the state legislature. And it’s no sure thing that the amendment will pass. “If we get this budget amendment, it will be the largest appropriation ever given by the commonwealth to preserve and protect African American history in the Shenandoah Valley,” Walker says.
But the Josephine School’s Davis isn’t convinced that the Battlefields Foundation is the right organization for the money. “They haven’t been a very positive force in the valley in supporting African American groups or activities,” she says. “They think they have, but they haven’t.”
Updated 2/19 to to reflect that the organization is called the Battlefields Foundation, not the Battlefield Foundation.