Get out together: Some of the best aspects of the season are on display during a tour of Wildrock’s Winter Wonderland Trail. Track animals and learn their survival habits, get an up-close look at snowflake patterns, and play a woodland game to match gnome mittens. Small groups can make a reservation to enjoy this family-friendly, safety-conscious nature discovery center. The trail is moderately difficult with two stream crossings and an uphill climb.
Louisa native Stephen Canty’s documentary about adjusting to civilian life after Marine Corps deployment to Afghanistan was released in November. A lot’s changed since the UVA alum began working on the film, Once a Marine, more than seven years ago.
For one thing, he is no longer a Louisa resident. Canty followed a girl to New Mexico, and the desert setting, similar as it is to the Afghan plains, appealed to him. The girl’s gone, but Canty’s love of New Mexico remains.
For another, Canty has released a documentary that’s far more introspective than he intended when he set out to tell the story of his own Charlie Company and its deployment to Marjah, Afghanistan.
“I didn’t intend to really go as deep, or bare as much of my soul and my friends’ souls,” Canty says. “It was originally meant to be a little more surface level: ‘I don’t like being a civilian in society, and being in college is annoying.’ Just the irritation and frustration a lot of us felt.”
After returning from his second Middle East deployment as a Marine, Canty wanted to tell the stories he and his fellow infantrymen couldn’t tell civilians back home—the difficulties normies just wouldn’t understand. He figured he could get his combat buddies to speak to him in a way they couldn’t to anyone else.
Canty could see the shift in the film’s tone just a few interviews into the process.
As company mate after company mate dumped their deepest feelings in his lap, Canty realized he would have to handle his film’s subject matter with care. Over seven years, he collected more interviews and B-roll, and found one of the stories that would eventually anchor the film—the apparent suicide of a fellow Marine.
Canty learned more about filmmaking, editing, and tinkering, trying to strike the right thematic balance as his fellow soldiers opened their hearts on camera.
“How do you honor them for their sacrifice and for showing that part of themselves to the audience and to you?” Canty asks. “A lot of the time I spent editing this, it was like trying to find a place where what I showed wasn’t exploitative but still showed the parts where people were sad or hurt.”
The film, Canty’s first, is rough around the edges. The characters are initially hard to follow and the lighting fluctuates, but the combat footage is hard hitting, and the viewer can’t help but be struck by the youth of the Charlie Company boys who are willing to say things and recall images that slicker productions would almost certainly avoid. One soldier and a music composer on the film, Chuck Newton, describes a sordid hand-to-hand combat engagement in which he shot an enemy at point blank range.
“I watched the life come out of his face, and he fell on the ground,” Newton says in the documentary. “And that is an image I can’t get out of my head. Because the image of someone dying as you look them in the eyes is something nightmarish. It’s something no one should ever see.”
Once a Marine features little of the behind-the-battle-scenes partying and lightheartedness Canty envisioned for the film seven years ago. But other elements of the filmmaker’s original intent remain in the final version, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime. The difficulties of returning to a pedestrian life from the battlefield still take center stage, ranging from the mundane—“over there…you don’t have to fucking do homework”—to the morbid.
“Two weeks ago…I shot a dude and blew his shoes off his feet,” a soldier known as Heath says in the film. “Now I’m holding a baby, and I have to change a diaper…Every time I change a diaper, I think about holding someone down and trying to pack a wound. Every time I wipe an ass. I don’t know why. That’s what I think about.”
Once a Marine co-producer Darren Doss also figures prominently. One of Canty’s closest friends from Charlie Company, Doss dealt with heroin addiction after returning from Marjah. Canty hoped working on the film would serve as a kind of way forward as Doss escaped drugs. Doss is clean these days, Canty says, and has settled down, finding “a purpose and a woman.”
Doss and the other soldiers depicted also recognize the purpose in the film. Canty says “they have been very supportive, and they have made peace with what they said and the parts of themselves they showed.”
While Canty worked on his film, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Wood also became interested in Charlie Company and its deployment to Marjah during Operation Moshtarak, which featured some of the heaviest combat in the Afghan theater. Canty and others from his company appear prominently in Wood’s book What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars, published in late 2016.
When he sat for an interview with C-VILLE Weekly in September 2013, Canty said filmmaking had become his passion. It made him “awaken” in much the same way combat did. Now, the Santa Fe resident says he’s looking forward to a career making films, though perhaps about less personal subjects.
“This first one, it required me not only to grow as a human being and confront what I had been through, but to find a place for it in my own life. It was such a difficult film to make,” he says. “I am looking forward to making something that doesn’t hurt me every time I look at it.”
She paints the same view day after day, recording the subtle and great changes of hour, season, and weather. Her subject is both profoundly familiar to her and constantly changing. Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” at Second Street Gallery features 90 small paintings (8 inches x 8 inches) and nine larger works (30 inches x 30 inches), all depicting the same stretch of land just outside of town. Painted over the course of 2019, the images are devotionals to nature, inspired by the daily walks Wooten takes with her dog.
Wooten’s mentor, Stanley Lewis, with whom she studied in the 1990s, first at the Chautauqua summer program and then the MFA program at American University, once said something that has resonated with her ever since: “It is possible to find yourself in the painting, a part of yourself that you didn’t know before.”
“This opened me up to the idea of both looking outward and looking inward through the painting process,” says Wooten. “Even within the context of observational plein-air painting, there was the possibility of exploring an inner world. This became a guiding idea in my work for the next 26 years.” To ensure she maintains this quality and prevents the work from becoming too literal, Wooten rarely does preliminary sketches, reconstructing what she’s seen from memory back in the studio.
According to Wooten, the smaller landscapes are “perhaps equal parts looking out and looking inward. The impetus for the series was an enthrallment with the color, light, and atmosphere of the place, but the series continued to develop with an awareness that the landscape is being seen through the emotional lens of the self.”
“View from the Ridge” Nos. 1 and 2 provide a good set-up for what is to come. All the elements of the landscape are distinctly visible. The road bends down through fir trees on the left and a striking birch on the right to where the land opens up to an expanse of meadow. On the far side, wooded hills lead to mountains in the distance. This is the vista that we will see again and again, transforming before our eyes through Wooten’s brush. These two paintings capture the palette of early winter in the Piedmont and also the quality of light—brilliant sunlight in “No. 1” and a more muted version in “No. 2.” They are so evocative that we almost don’t notice the sophisticated brushwork with which they are rendered.
As you proceed around the room, following the seasons of the year, you notice something different about the larger works. In these paintings, created in 2020, the view has “become a stage set,” Wooten says, “an empty tableau upon which to project the imaginings of an inner world.”
In “Tundra,” the meadow, now sheathed in ice, is composed of a series of brittle, horizontal lines with the hills beyond, a rich mélange of paint that’s daubed, smeared, and scraped across the panel. Wooten uses the same horizontal brushstrokes again in the meadow and also the road in “Great Flood, 2020,” a painting that seems to loosen its ties to reality and venture into the expressionistic territory of Emil Nolde. The landscape is still there, but it functions as scaffolding for the remarkable technical effects. As you look at the work, linger on the hills wreathed in vaporous clouds. Here, Wooten applies light blue, yellow, and lavender pigment and then scrapes it off using a spatula-like tool to create topographical features, vegetation, and reflections of light. Infused with golden radiance, another painting, “Meadow Music,” is the summertime counterpart of this work.
In “View from the Ridge No. 34” the horizontal lines of the meadow are replaced by cloud-like blobs of paint that provide a softer effect. We can almost feel the wind that’s ruffling the grasses and producing the blousy, verdant mounds.
“View from the Ridge No. 57” calls to mind the wonderful pre-abstract paintings of Richard Diebenkorn, with their flattened field of view. The mottled, tawny field contrasts with the blurry yellow-green hills beyond. In the foreground, the road has become just a purple suggestion.
“Carnival, 2020” captures the explosion of color that is high fall. Bold splotches of yellow and orange describe the tree foliage. The slick indigo of the road dappled with yellow smears suggests it has just rained. Green again after the summer heat, the meadow now provides a calm foil to the foreground tree and the riot of color forming the hills on the far side.
Wooten clearly revels in the act of painting and in paint itself, finding in it a means to imbue her work with a deep sensuality and expressive resonance. “I think of each color palette as holding a distinct emotional tone,” she says. “While loving those glorious sharp-shadowed sunny days, I learned to embrace the foggy and gray, those mysterious neutral colors without names. This became a metaphor for being willing and open to examine all parts of myself, with nothing to fear and nothing to hide. Each day was a gift, whatever the view presented, and whatever emotions might come up.”
Wooten also uses brushes, knives, and scrapers to mark her painted surface, giving the pieces a texture and offering another opportunity for expression. “Through addition and subtraction, obscuring and revealing a clear cut shape or a blurred edge, I am exploring the emotional possibilities of the outer and the inner landscape,” she says. “It’s not something I could sketch ahead of time, but something I discover through the process of painting.”
Of “View from the Ridge,” Wooten says, “I made 99 paintings of the same landscape, a place I visit every day, and also 99 paintings of places in myself that I didn’t know before.”
Laura Wooten’s “View from the Ridge” is on view by appointment at Second Street Gallery through January 22.
Last month, Charlottesville public defender Ray Szwabowski announced his campaign for commonwealth’s attorney. Current Commonwealth’s Attorney Joe Platania was elected in 2017 and has not announced if he’s running for re-election. If Platania runs, the two will face off in a Democratic primary in June, a year after a summer in which nationwide protests once again emphasized the importance of local-level criminal justice reform. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
C-VILLE: So why you, and why now?
RS: It has become increasingly clear that we need criminal justice reform in the United States generally, and in Virginia, and in Charlottesville specifically. We’ve learned those lessons over and over again, most recently and most prominently over the summer with the tragic death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and so many others. And in Charlottesville we had the light shine on us back on August 12, and we started talking about criminal justice reform in a real serious way here locally. It seems like criminal justice reform is happening far too slowly here in Charlottesville.
In terms of why me, I’ve been a public defender in Charlottesville for the last five years, but I’ve been interacting with the criminal justice system since I was 11 years old. My uncle went to prison when I was a child and spent 19 years incarcerated. I made countless visits with my family to see him in various prisons. I watched my mom and grandma send him letters, make expensive phone calls, send money orders constantly just to buy simple things like a toothbrush. So I’m familiar with the bizarre and counterintuitive bureaucracy of prisons and jails in this country.
What are some specific changes you want to make, that you think are achievable from the commonwealth’s attorney office?
The signature thing that I’ve been talking about is to stop prosecuting felony simple drug possession. When a person is caught with a small amount of a narcotic that is currently schedule I or schedule II, we should do something other than charge that case as a felony.
Too often, we treat the surface level of what’s happening without getting into and addressing the underlying issue—which in many cases are addiction, a lack of mental health care, and homelessness.
We’re currently treating addiction with jail. That’s not a good way to do it. Plus it costs $91 a day to house someone at the jail. Why don’t we take that money and invest it into real drug treatment that doesn’t involve the jail? Perhaps that means giving more resources in the community—a nonprofit or a community service board like Region Ten. That’s what I’m proposing.
Since you brought up reallocating funds: Should we defund the police?
Defund the police has been an interesting conversation that’s emerged, and it’s really drawn attention to how we’re using our resources. What I take defund the police to mean is to re-examine every aspect of the system, whether it’s the way the police are interacting with the community, how cases move through the court system, or what happens to people once they end up in a jail or prison.
There’s a phenomenal waste of money and lives happening currently. And it just happens over and over again. People are stuck at the jail without a real treatment option, they get out, and they cycle through again. It’s a system that I would barely call a system at all—it’s a patchwork of things that happen that aren’t working coherently towards a goal. That’s what’s really frustrating.
One thing that other commonwealth’s attorneys have mentioned in the past is the need for judicial buy-in. Prosecutors can make progressive sentencing suggestions, but without judges on board your power is limited. What can you do to create judicial buy-in for reform?
You do need to get judicial buy-in to make some of the progressive changes we’re talking about. Part of it is going in to court day after day and representing the people of Charlottesville, saying this is what the people of Charlottesville want, they want us to find solutions to addiction and mental health.
The commonwealth’s attorney office is a pulpit from which you can speak. You can call a press conference to say ‘listen, we need more resources to treat addiction.’ You can go down to Richmond and lobby the General Assembly to make changes in the actual laws. That’s how I would see myself using the office.
What does Charlottesville as a community mean to you personally?
Charlottesville is definitely my adoptive home—I came here in 2000 to go to UVA for undergrad, and I’ve pretty much been here ever since. I worked for a consumer electronics company after undergrad, I worked in sales, in Spanish, selling electronics over the phone. I’ve been in the music scene—I’m a drummer and I’ve played in several bands. And I’ve also worked in the restaurant and bar scene during that time. So I’ve dipped my toes into a few of the different communities in Charlottesville…And now I have a 2-year-old. So, recently, most of my waking minutes are focused on making sure that we’re doing our best job raising a child during a pandemic.
U.S. immigrants have faced an amazing array of challenges during the last four years, but as of December 1, 2020, the outgoing administration left them one last present: a significantly more difficult citizenship exam. The exam, something immigrants must pass in order to become citizens, has an English language and civics portion, and the civics element has recently been expanded and revised in a way that immigration advocates say is unfair.
Harriet Kuhr, executive director of the International Rescue Committee’s Charlottesville/Richmond office, which assists refugees and other immigrants with the citizenship application process, is blunt: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services “made changes [to the citizenship exam] without input from stakeholders, and without justification for making it harder,” she says.
Applicants now must answer 20 questions instead of 10, and while the passing score is still 60 percent (12 correct out of 20, instead of six out of 10), applicants will have to answer all 20 questions instead of passing as soon as they have given 12 correct answers. The new test also covers much more material. The number of civics study questions has increased from 100 to 128. There are more questions about the government (up from 57 to 72), and more about the Founders and America’s wars. Applicants must now correctly name five (rather than three) of the original 13 states, and all three (rather than one) of the branches of government.
“Many of these new questions require a higher proficiency in English,” says Catherine McCall, citizenship coordinator with Literacy Volunteers of Charlottesville-Albemarle, which offers preparation classes and individual tutoring for those applying for citizenship. Additionally, some of the new questions seem ideologically motivated, say advocates. For example, the correct answer to a question about who members of Congress represent is now “citizens” (rather than “all the people”) of their state or district, a distinction that aligns with the Trump administration’s efforts to exclude non-citizens from the national census.
The revision process itself has been cause for concern, too. The previous exam, which went into effect in October 2008, took six years to review and revise, including extensive input from educators and immigration organizations, test piloting, and public comment. This time, the entire process took 18 months, and outside review and piloting efforts were minimal. Especially problematic: The new exam took effect less than three weeks after the finalized version was released, “leaving very little time for public comment or outreach to potential applicants,” notes Kuhr.
Given the rushed timeline, LVCA, Sin Barreras, and other local nonprofit organizations offering exam preparation for applicants have scrambled to make extensive revisions to their classes—already upended by the pandemic—when offices were closed for months and all interactions had to move online.
In July, LVCA was able to start offering Zoom citizenship classes (one in civics, one on the English-skills portion of the exam). Enrollment has been increasing, according to McCall—the July-August session had 25 students; the November-December session had 43 students, requiring two sections of each class; and for the upcoming cycle starting January 15, she’s already planning on three sections. To make things harder, LVCA now has to offer preparation for both versions of the civics test, since those who applied by December 1 are still taking the old exam. IRC’s Kuhr says her organization, which usually assists on about 125 citizenship applications annually, urged clients to get their applications filed before the changeover.
Complicating matters, the backlog on processing applications was severe even pre-pandemic. Applicants from our area, whose tests are administered by USCIS’ Washington, D.C., office, now face a waiting period of 11.5 to 15 months before taking their exam, according to the agency’s website. Kuhr says under the former administration, the waiting period was more like three to six months. (For context, the Atlanta office’s current wait time is 12 to 32 months.)
Last year USCIS attempted to increase the citizenship application fee from $640 to $1,170 to decrease the availability of income-based fee waivers or reductions, though the changes were challenged in court by immigration advocacy groups and have not yet gone into effect.
Immigrant advocates are hoping these changes will be rolled back by the incoming administration. But in the meantime, those seeking to become U.S. citizens are faced with doing a whole lot more studying.
“I’m on board with revising the citizenship test to better prepare people to become Americans,” says McCall, who is also a high school civics educator. “But this new test is not going to make them more effective citizens.”
The following are among the new questions on the citizenship exam.
1. What is the purpose of the 10th Amendment?
2. Who appoints federal judges?
3. Name one leader of the women’s rights movement in the 1800s.
Answers:
1. The powers not given to the federal government belong to the states or to the people.
2. The president
3. Examples: Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The local vaccine rollout process continues. About a month after the first coronavirus vaccines were shipped to hospitals across the country, Charlottesville’s frontline health care employees who work outside of hospitals are now getting vaccinated.
On Monday, the Blue Ridge Health District (formerly known as the Thomas Jefferson Health District) began offering the first dose of the Moderna vaccine to area emergency service providers, dialysis center staff, and Region Ten residential facility staff at its location on Rose Hill Drive.
To expedite the distribution process, on Wednesday the district will begin hosting at least three appointment-only clinics per week for these select health care workers in a new temporary structure set up in the former Kmart parking lot. Red Light Management and the Bama Works Fund contributed funding to set up the facility.
“There are over 1,000 EMS [workers] that we need to vaccinate. There are folks going in and out of the hospital as well. So we want to get them done first,” says Kathryn Goodman, spokesperson for the health district.
The shots will be administered by public health nurses, who received their own vaccinations (and vaccine training) at the end of December. The district is currently working to vaccinate the rest of its staff.
The health district hopes to vaccinate about 500 to 600 people per week at the pop-up clinic.
Because both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines require two doses to be fully effective, district staff will use a new state Vaccine Administration Management System to properly track appointments and alert patients when they need to return for their second dose.
As more vaccine shipments arrive in the next few weeks, the clinics will open up to other frontline health care workers (hospice employees, primary care providers, dental practice employees, pharmacy workers, Department of Corrections health care personnel, K-12 school nurses, and more) who have had potential contact with COVID or with high-risk patients.
“We’ll have the information sent out to these groups,” says Goodman. “We have quite a long list already of thousands and thousands of individuals who need to get vaccinated as soon as possible.”
UVA and Martha Jefferson hospitals continue to vaccinate their own employees. Other health care entities in Charlottesville and surrounding counties must fill out a BRHD survey indicating how many of their employees need to be vaccinated. The district plans to host additional clinics for health care employees—and eventually other essential workers and high-risk individuals—down the line.
To date, 89,326 people have received the vaccine in Virginia, including 1,542 in Charlottesville, and 1,615 in Albemarle County. However, none have been administered their second dose, according to the Virginia Department of Health vaccine dashboard.
Meanwhile, the health district has seen a record surge in COVID cases and hospitalizations since Thanksgiving, and expects numbers to worsen in the next few weeks following the holiday season. In December alone, there were 2,181 new cases, 86 hospitalizations and 10 deaths—the worst month of the pandemic.
While new cases in the district have remained low since the start of the new year, the district’s positivity rate is currently at 9.4 percent, the highest it has been since April.
The 2021 race for the governor’s mansion in Virginia got a little more complicated last week, when northern Virginia Delegate Lee Carter declared his candidacy for the office.
In his campaign announcement, Carter emphasized economic stratification as the driving force of discontent in the commonwealth. “[Virginia] is not divided between red and blue. It’s not divided between big cities and small towns. Virginia is divided between the haves and the have-nots,” he said.
Carter identifies as a democratic socialist and was a Virginia co-chair of Bernie Sanders’ campaign. He made headlines last year when he spearheaded a bill to cap insulin prices at $50 per month. With the 2021 General Assembly session approaching, Carter has already introduced a bill to abolish the death penalty.
Outside the halls of the state capital, the former Marine and electronic repairman has been active on social media. He’s got more than 100,000 followers on Twitter (six times as many as House Majority Leader Eileen Filler-Corn), and just before his 2018 election he made headlines after tweeting out a memorable self-initiated “oppo dump,” sharing that he was “on divorce number 3” and that “just like everyone else under 35, I’m sure explicit images or video of me exists out there somewhere,” though “unlike Anthony Weiner, I never sent them unsolicited.”
Carter joins former governor Terry McAuliffe, current lieutenant governor Justin Fairfax, state senator Jennifer McClellan, and state delegate Jennifer Carroll Foy in a crowded Democratic field.
McAuliffe, a career Democratic Party insider, announced record-breaking fundraising numbers this week—“the Macker” raised $6.1 million as of December 31. The rest of the candidates will share updates as a campaign finance filing deadline approaches in the coming weeks, but The Washington Post reports that McAuliffe’s haul surpasses any previous total from a candidate at this point in the race.
Spending hasn’t always translated to victories for McAuliffe, however. In his first run for governor in 2009, he outspent primary opponent and then-state delegate Creigh Deeds $8.2 million to $3.4 million, but wound up losing to Deeds by more than 20 percent. In 2013, McAuliffe beat Ken Cuccinelli in the general election, outspending him $38 million to $20.9 million.
The Democratic primary will be held on June 8.
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Quote of the week
“He said that in his many years of doing executive searches, he had never seen a level of dysfunction as profound as what he was seeing here.“
—City Councilor Lloyd Snook, in a Facebook post, relaying the comments of the firm retained to find a new city manager
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State senator killed by COVID
Virginia state senator Ben Chafin passed away last Friday at age 60 after contracting coronavirus. The southwestern Virginia Republican served in the legislature for six years, and was one of four GOP state senators to break rank and vote in favor of Medicaid expansion in 2018. Governor Ralph Northam ordered state flags lowered in Chafin’s honor over the weekend.
You Dew you
The steel and concrete husk of a skyscraper that’s been languishing on the Downtown Mall for more than a decade is now facing further legal trouble, reports The Daily Progress. Last year, the Dewberry Group, which owns the building, changed the building’s name from the Laramore to Dewberry Living—but the Dewberry Living name violated a trademark agreement between the Dewberry Group and a northern Virginia firm called Dewberry Engineers, Inc. Now, Dewberry Engineers is suing the Dewberry Group for copyright infringement. The building itself remains empty.
Eyes on the road
As of January 1, it is illegal for drivers in Virginia to hold a phone while operating a vehicle. If you’re caught gabbing while driving, or skipping that one terrible song, you’ll be subject to a $125 fine for a first offense and a $250 fine for a second offense. Opponents of the law are concerned that it will open the door for more racial profiling by law enforcement, while the law’s backers cite the dangers of distracted driving.