Month: January 2022

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Uncivil review board

Bellamy Brown, left, stepped down as Civilian Review Board chair last week. Meanwhile, Mayor Lloyd Snook, middle, and local attorney Jeff Fogel have disagreed over the board's operating procedures. Photos (left to right): Supplied photo, supplied photo, Jackson Smith

The Charlottesville Police Civilian Review Board was among the key criminal justice reforms put in place following the 2017 Unite the Right rally. More than four years later, the board remains mired in controversy, with conflict between its appointed members and persistent legal questions about its powers hampering the board’s ability to keep law enforcement accountable to the city’s residents.

FOIAs and ‘flying monkeys’

At last Thursday’s meeting, Bellamy Brown stepped down from his position as chair, shifting to a position as a regular board member. Brown’s 11-month stint as the CRB’s leader saw the body embroiled in multiple internal disputes. Text messages revealed recently through a Freedom of Information Act request by activist Ang Conn show the extent of the dysfunction within the board.

In August, Brown made a public statement calling for a change of leadership in the police department. Shortly afterwards, Police Chief RaShall Brackney was fired, sparking pushback from some in the community who felt she had been removed from her post because her efforts to reform the internal culture of the department had been too proactive. The Police Benevolent Association, a union-like coalition of police officers, had lobbied for Brackney’s firing, and Brown had met with PBA members over the summer.

During multiple text exchanges last fall, Brown and board member Jeffrey Fracher, a retired forensic psychologist, expressed their strong dislike for Brackney and then-mayor Nikuyah Walker. Walker had supported the police chief and disapproved of the firing.

“The mayor has done nothing to improve racist policing in 4 years except piss off a lot of people by running her mouth and playing to the white guilt of the [Showing Up for Racial Justice] crowd,” wrote Fracher in September. “She is a toxic combination of several personality disorders…So divisive, so cruel, so manipulative, so angry—all in the name of ‘racial justice.’”

“True story,” wrote Brown.

In September, Brown told Fracher he wanted Nancy Carpenter removed from the board. “She is a disaster. Is doing nothing for our mission. In bed with the flying monkeys,” replied Fracher. The following month, Carpenter sent an email to City Council and the board asking Brown and Fracher to resign.

Fracher and Brown strongly criticized Vice-Chair Bill Mendez for introducing a vote of no confidence against Brown during the board’s September 10 meeting. “He’s an activist at heart. His daughter who apparently supports Nikuyah could have gotten to him,” wrote Brown, referencing posts Mendez’s daughter made in support of Walker on Facebook in 2017.

In text exchanges with Fracher in August and September, member James Watson also said he hoped Brackney would leave the department, and expressed his disapproval of the vote of no confidence.

In addition, Brown criticized former city manager Chip Boyles for hiring Hansel Aguilar—and not him—as the CRB executive director. He claimed Aguilar, “a damn introvert and academic,” was not well-equipped to engage with the public.

In many texts and emails, Brown and Fracher discussed their disagreements with public commenters, particularly members of The People’s Coalition, a local criminal justice reform advocacy group, who they claimed were trying to control the CRB.

“I don’t think 5-10 people should represent themselves as representing the whole Black community. Especially when they are all, including Nancy, in the defund the police crowd,” Fracher texted Brown in September. “All the people that I have talked to in the projects want nothing to do with defunding the police. They have to live with all the shootings. They want good police, not no police.”

During last week’s CRB meeting, Mendez and Watson were elected as the board’s new chair and vice chair, respectively. Member Deirdre Gilmore was not in attendance and Carpenter abstained from voting.

Carpenter addressed the leaked text messages. “To think about the terms ‘flying monkeys,’ and identifying low-income neighborhoods as projects, going after someone’s child…you’re asking me to vote in a system that has supported this [and] has not held itself accountable as we want to hold our law enforcement accountable,” said Carpenter.

During public comment, community member Katrina Turner asked why Carpenter or Gilmore were not nominated as chair, and claimed the board needed to be dismantled. “To see you all vote, and vote the men in again, what in the world is wrong with you all?” she said.

Brown and Fracher claimed that their use of the term “flying monkeys” was not racist, but was a “professional psychological term” and referred to the blind supporters of “narcissistic” Walker.

Fracher also criticized the FOIA for compromising members’ privacy. In public comment, Conn later maintained that the FOIAed information was public business, and urged Brown and Fracher to resign.

City Councilor Michael Payne encouraged the board to focus on filling its empty positions and fixing its tarnished image. He suggested the members go on a retreat to address their internal divisions.

“If the board is not able to be successful and do these things in a professional manner, the people who are going to be sitting back and smiling [are] those who don’t want to see police oversight,” said Payne.

Privacy powers

Meanwhile, debate continues over the specific operating procedures and legal powers of the board. A state law passed last year to grant broader authority to civilian review boards around the commonwealth left certain points open to interpretation. At issue at the moment is the amount of public information that must be disseminated during the hearing process.

In a public statement last week, The People’s Coalition wrote that it was “concerned about some aspects of the ordinance” that establishes the board’s powers. “We are particularly concerned about efforts by City Council to have all hearings and evidence in secret…secret proceedings are in direct contrast to the purpose of the Board which is to provide open and transparent oversight of the police department,” reads the statement.

Mayor Lloyd Snook explained in several emails that council wanted the board to be able to make disciplinary recommendations based on confidential information, and not have to release that information to the public. The board would hold a public hearing to determine whether police misconduct occurred, but deliberate in closed session and announce its decision to the public.

The current state law does not specify whether or not a police oversight board can do anything in private. There is at least one bill, HB 631, currently in the General Assembly that would clarify these rules, said the mayor.

“There is also one (hopefully rare) case where there might be some confidential information on the question of whether police misconduct occurred—that situation would be where the allegation is of a sexual impropriety, and the complainant does not want to have their private humiliation relived in public,” wrote Snook. “We want the [board] to do all that it can out in the open, and to have access to confidential information as they make a decision that will be publicly announced.”

Local attorney Jeff Fogel pushed back against the mayor in an email, claiming that HB 631 would allow all board hearings and evidence to be heard in private. According to the bill’s proposed summary, it would permit the board to “hold a closed meeting to protect the privacy of an individual in administrative or disciplinary hearings related to allegations of wrongdoing by employees of a law-enforcement agency, where such individual is a complainant, witness, or the subject of the hearing.”

“One definition of private is secret. You have also advocated for secrecy for all evidence,” Fogel said. “There was never a public discussion about whether secrecy was appropriate and there should have been.”

The 2022 Virginia General Assembly session, which could provide clarity on this point, began last week.

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Arts Culture

Pick: Pride and Prejudice

Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen. Photo: Focus Features


Love actually: It’s universally acknowledged that Mr. Darcy is the ultimate swoon-worthy love interest. It’s sometimes acknowledged that Joe Wright’s 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is the best, though a few BBC loyalists (and C-VILLE staffers) might beg to differ. Lovers of the iconic hand-flex scene will be pleased to learn that the movie is returning to the big screen for a special brunch screening. Enjoy your boozy breakfast as Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen bring to life one of the greatest love stories of all time.

Saturday 1/22. $10, noon. Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, 5th Street Station. drafthouse.com

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News

In brief: Youngkin’s executive orders

Glenn Youngkin. Supplied photo

Glenn Youngkin’s First Day

Glenn Youngkin was sworn in as governor over the weekend, and right away he signed nine executive orders. Number one is entitled “Ending the Use of Inherently Divisive Concepts, Including Critical Race Theory, and Restoring Excellence in K-12 Education in the Commonwealth.” Though educators say that critical race theory, an advanced conceptual framework for discussing the interactions between race and law, is not part of the curriculum in K-12 classrooms anywhere in Virginia, Youngkin used the term as a bogeyman throughout his campaign.

“Political indoctrination has no place in our classrooms,” reads the executive order in which a politician attempts to dictate what can and cannot be taught in Virginia’s classrooms.

Youngkin’s second executive order states that “parents should have the ability to decide whether their child should wear masks for the duration of the school day.” Already, the order has drawn pushback from school districts around the state, including here in Charlottesville. On Monday morning, both Charlottesville and Albemarle public schools released statements confirming that the districts will keep mask mandates in place. “We are following Virginia Senate Bill 1303, which requires schools to follow the mitigation recommendations of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ‘to the maximum extent practicable,’” reads the Charlottesville City Schools bulletin.

Below is a brief summary of the Youngkin administration’s nine first-day executive orders. Opponents of the Republican have questioned whether all of these edicts will stand up to greater legal scrutiny in the coming weeks.

EO 1: Directs the state superintendent of public instruction to remove “inherently divisive concepts” from school curriculums.

EO 2: Allows parents to determine whether their children wear masks in school.

EO 3: Adds five new members to the Parole Board, which had become more lenient during the Northam administration, and orders a review of the board by the attorney general.

EO 4: Orders an attorney general investigation into sexual assault at Loudoun County Public Schools.

EO 5: Creates a chief transport­ation officer to review the performance of the DMV and the Virginia Employment Commission.

EO 6: Orders a review of state-mandated COVID safety practices for businesses.

EO 7: Creates a commission to fight human trafficking, through increased enforcement and penalties for perpetrators.

EO 8: Creates a commission of governor appointees “to study antisemitism in the Commonwealth, propose actions to combat antisemitism and reduce the number of antisemitic incidents.”

EO 9: Ends Virginia’s participation in the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, an 11-state cooperative program aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

In brief

Provost off to Penn

UVA Provost Liz Magill is leaving for a job as the next president of the University of Pennsylvania. Magill has headed UVA’s academics since 2019, after serving as the dean of Stanford Law and a UVA School of Law professor. She starts her new job on June 1, replacing outgoing Penn President Amy Gutmann, who headed the Ivy League university for 17 years. Ian Baucom, currently the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, will be UVA’s next provost.

Fool me once

The winter storm earlier this month left thousands of area residents without power for as many as five or six days. Naturally, news of a second snowfall found central Virginians checking the batteries in their flashlights and in some cases preemptively booking hotel rooms. Though some snow fell, real disaster never struck—on Monday morning, less than 24 hours after the snow began to come down, PowerOutage.US reported just 12 Dominion Energy customers without power in Charlottesville and Albemarle combined.

Kessler won’t go away

Unite the Right organizer Jason Kessler has filed a motion challenging the decision in Sines v. Kessler, a month-long trial that late last year determined he owed $500,000 in punitive damages for his role in setting up the deadly 2017 rally. James Kolenich, attorney for Kessler, argued that the damages were “unconstitutionally excessive,” reports The Daily Progress.

Photo: Eze Amos

Former mayor is anti-snow day

When Charlottesville City Schools announced a snow day on Tuesday, former mayor Mike Signer took to Twitter to call for remote instruction during inclement weather. “Gov’ts largest agency is dark. While other systems have more progressive snow day policies,” the current WillowTree exec wrote. Our 2 cents? Get out there and make a snowman, Mike. Live a little.

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News

Life in the ‘univercity’

Davarian Baldwin says universities are turning their cities into “playgrounds for the creative class.” Supplied photo

By Kristin O’Donoghue

According to urban historian and cultural critic Davarian L. Baldwin, residents of Charlottesville are living in the shadow of the University of Virginia.

Baldwin’s book, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities are Plundering Our Cities, argues that the powerful expansion of higher education institutions like UVA has created “univercities.” He says it’s important to recognize the control modern universities have over economic development and local governments across America.

Jalane Schmidt, associate professor of religious studies and director of the Memory Project of the Democracy Initiative at UVA, discussed the book with Baldwin at a January 13 event hosted by the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Baldwin’s experience as a postdoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at UVA “served as a prelude to what became In the Shadow,” he said.

Baldwin recounted being “haunted by the visual” of buses full of Black women going to work crossing the railroad tracks to work at the university hospital.

“It was clear to me that we had been here before,” Baldwin said. “From the plantation to the factory to the campus, [this] is the latest stage of what we call racial capitalism.”

Over time, and especially when he left UVA, Baldwin said he was struck by press releases and media coverage that touted Charlottesville’s high standard of living and called the city one of the best college towns in the U.S.

“I realized that I had borne witness to the scene of a violent crime,” he said.

He now asks: What happens when your city becomes a campus?

In order to entice people to come to their campuses, universities have converted surrounding areas into “playgrounds for the creative class,” Baldwin said.

He recalled that multiple mayors of Charlottesville had received architecture degrees from UVA, and as public officials, they oversaw the extension of Grounds through the city.

Baldwin claims that many public universities are only public in name. There’s a “public good paradox,” he argues—at some point, servicing a public good like a school becomes a way to transfer public dollars to the private interests of universities, with little public scrutiny.

The “univercities” problem requires proactive solutions, he said, both from inside and outside the ivory tower.

Baldwin talked about the University of Winnipeg, where the university established its own internal development office to build housing that would be open to the whole city at various rates. UVA has started to address the deficiency of housing in Charlottesville, and plans to “support the development of 1,000 to 1,500 affordable housing units over a decade on land in Charlottesville and/or Albemarle County that is owned by UVA or the UVA Foundation.”

Schmidt, acknowledging her status as an employee of the university, asked Baldwin what solutions he’d suggest for Charlottesville community members. “We effectively live in a company town,” Schmidt said.

Baldwin advised that groups should pressure local governments to keep a closer eye on what is happening on Grounds. In particular, Baldwin suggested that Charlottesville regulate UVA’s acquisition of property more closely, and that a system should be established whereby campus expansion would have to be approved by the board before being passed.

Baldwin also clarified that he was not anti-university. Universities can be a “site for liberatory transformation,” he said, but hoped to call attention to their larger role in the cities where they’re situated. “The book is just the beginning,” he said.

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Arts Culture

Pick: Anderson East

Anderson East. Supplied photo

Into the groove: Anderson East is known for his careful blend of R&B, soul, and roots rock. East’s powerful vocals and soulful rasp helped him climb the charts and win awards for his 2018 breakthrough album Encore, which includes the Grammy-nominated “All On My Mind.” The Alabama born, Nashville-based singer-songwriter mixes things up on his latest, Maybe We Never Die—an emotionally fun record full of ’80s pop influence and smooth R&B vocals.

Sunday 1/23. $25-27, 8pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. jeffersontheater.com

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Arts Culture

Song and social advance

Tracy Cox stars in Victory Hall Opera’s Fat Pig, an original opera based on a play by Neil LaBute that champions body justice and positivity. Supplied photo

There might be a few local residents who haven’t yet heard of Victory Hall Opera. But rest assured that opera aficionados nationwide—from the Deep South to the Pacific Northwest—have begun to take notice of the Charlottesville-based company.

Victory Hall is turning heads thanks to its embrace of cutting-edge productions, like its latest, a world premiere of the original opera Fat Pig.

“A big part of our mission when we started was to take the usual structure of opera and reinvent it,” says Miriam Gordon-Stewart, Victory Hall’s co-founder and artistic director. “Rather than singers being slotted in, the productions are based around the cast and our ensemble. It functions like a troupe. It’s the kind of model you might have seen…at some major theater companies.”

Now entering its seventh year, Victory Hall has put on 26 original productions, more than most similar opera companies stage in a six-year stretch. Five of them have been world premieres; several have been Virginia and U.S. premieres.

The company’s mission and production schedule have drawn the attention of critical U.S. opera onlookers. The Music Academy of the West has given VHO two national Alumni Enterprise Awards for putting on “revolutionary” shows. And The Washington Post called it “the future of the field.”

Now, Victory Hall has attracted a major national talent to star alongside its ensemble in Fat Pig, which premieres on January 22 and will be reprised on January 27.

Tracy Cox, a Dallas native and current Los Angeles resident, has become an in-demand soprano around the world. In addition to performing on some of the biggest stages—she’ll travel to New York to perform at the Metropolitan Opera for a to-be-determined run later this season—she’s also a prominent voice in the body positive movement, with more than 17,000 followers on her fat activism-focused social media platforms.

Cox’s combination of singing talent and activism came together to make her the ideal choice for Fat Pig. The subject of the opera convinced her to add two shows at a small, young opera company in central Virginia to her performing schedule. The show is “a story that we felt has never been represented in the opera—the story of a fat person’s experience,” Gordon-Stewart says.

For the lay opera observer, the notion is odd. Stereotypical opera singers are often big-bodied—“the fat woman with the horns,” Cox suggests. And the ability to sing at length without tiring goes hand in glove with body size, Gordon-Stewart admits. But bigger players are often cast in farcical roles and openly pilloried—never before, the Victory Hall artistic director says, has a lead operatic role been given to a fat person who is celebrated as such on stage. “Often, larger singers are asked to appear thin while playing their roles, or they are dressed to minimize their body and ignore the fact that they are fat,” Gordon-Stewart says.

Fat Pig is based on a play of the same name by Neil LaBute, with its original libretto written by Gordon-Stewart and music by Matt Boehler. The adaptation is Gordon-Stewart and singer/composer Boehler’s first opera, which will be performed at the V. Earl Dickinson Theater at Piedmont Virginia Community College with a small cast and chamber orchestra.

Cox, who had heard of Victory Hall and its repertory through her professional and personal network, believes Fat Pig is an important production for both the opera industry and body justice.

“I was instantly floored by the concept of the project,” she says. “Because there really has never been anything like this. Never has there been a piece where the romantic lead is cast as a fat woman.”

The LaBute play itself has drawn plenty of attention, winning multiple Off-Broadway awards while courting controversy. “He’s been accused of being misogynistic, but we both view his work as presenting misogyny as something you just have to deal with,” Cox says. “The piece presents a fat person who I feel like I understand but is not necessarily me.”

Gordon-Stewart says she and her team approached LaBute about turning Fat Pig into an opera because “we loved this play—it is controversial, and it is relevant.” LaBute, she says, gave them free rein to do what they would with the piece.

Gordon-Stewart says her own perspective as a singer afforded her a unique perspective when adapting Fat Pig to the opera. She found herself cutting significant text and adding new material while attempting to preserve LaBute’s voice. For Cox, the resulting adaptation was a revelation.

“For the first time in my career, I wasn’t worried about my body when I showed up on day one,” she says.

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News

On the rise

Drive-through testing sites, like this one at Fashion Square Mall, have seen record numbers of patients in the last few weeks. Photo: Eze Amos

Nearly two years after arriving in Charlottesville, COVID is still here—and it’s more prevalent than ever. On January 10, the Blue Ridge Health District reported 610 new cases, the most in a single day. Before the surge of the last three weeks, the highest single-day case total was 245, in February of 2020. The surge can be attributed in large part to the omicron variant, which has taken over as the most common variant in the U.S.

In a town hall last week, BRHD officials and local doctors offered additional insight on the surge, and detailed a variety of testing options.

“What we anticipate is that [cases] will continue to increase,” said BRHD COVID-19 Incident Commander Ryan McKay. “We also recognize that these numbers are probably underreported numbers,” thanks to at-home tests, asymptomatic carriers, and infected people who have not been tested. McKay encouraged those who test positive using an at-home test to report their case to the health district.

Dr. Michael Williams of UVA Health urged people to not go to an emergency room or urgent care for a COVID test, especially if they are asymptomatic.

“As the numbers have gone up, the stress and strain on hospital personnel staff, and also resources, has gone up in lockstep,” said Williams. “You will wait and you will wait and you will wait [for a test].”

Amidst this record surge, local residents have reported waiting for hours in line to get tested, while area stores have quickly sold out of at-home tests. The state health department opened a new community testing center at the Pantops Shopping Center last weekend. The site offers PCR tests by appointment, and is open Saturday through Thursday from 9am to 5:30pm. The Blue Ridge Health District also offers testing Monday through Thursday at each of its health departments, and in the JCPenney parking lot at Fashion Square Mall on Friday. Appointments can be scheduled online at vase.vdh.virginia.gov, or by calling the BRHD hotline at 972-6261.

UVA Health continues to offer free drive-through and walk-up testing at Church of the Incarnation on Mondays, and Mount Zion First African Baptist Church on Tuesdays. (This week, testing will be held at Church of the Incarnation on Wednesday.) Next Molecular also runs a testing site at the JCPenney parking lot throughout the week. Testing appointments are available at local pharmacies too.

UVA Health now has the highest number of COVID patients that it’s ever had, said Dr. Taison Bell. While a majority of these patients are unvaccinated, those who are vaccinated typically have severe high-risk conditions, like cancer.

“The vaccines were specifically designed to prevent serious illness, and they continue to do that consistently,” said Bell. “As opposed to last year when we were taking care of [patients] who were getting sick because they were not vaccinated, this year we’re not taking care of [anyone] who has been fully vaccinated and especially boosted.”

Omicron is also impacting children more severely. “The number of children, including infants and newborns, who have become infected and have been critically ill and/or die is still a very small number, but it’s much higher than it has been to date,” said Williams.

Dr. Paige Perriello of Pediatric Associates of Charlottesville says she’s seen an uptick in kids coming into her office with coronavirus, and stresses that the increased demand for testing has had a major impact on health care workers.

“What happens during [testing] surges is both you need more people and they’re hard to come by, and people themselves are getting sick and they’re not available to participate in the testing sites,” says Perriello. “We started with staffing shortages and then you add an incredibly contagious variant on top of that, and those shortages go down even more.”

The surge has also had an impact on local schools. Since returning from winter break, Hannah Helm, a teacher at Charlottesville High School, says she has seen more absences in her classes than usual. Though she appreciates the school district’s mask mandate and other safety measures, she wishes the administration would implement stricter cleaning guidelines.

“Last year, we had a very clear-cut card system. At the end of the day when you would leave, you would ensure that there was a red card that was visible, so that custodial staff [knew] that that room had not been flipped,” she explains. “Now this year we’re not doing that, or if we are doing that, I’m not aware that we should be.”

This week, thousands of students from around the world will also return to Charlottesville. UVA has required all students, faculty, and staff to be vaccinated and boosted, but Stephen Marrone of United Campus Workers of Virginia at UVA believes the school could be doing more to protect the community.

“It’s a good idea to have boosters and vaccinations required…but if you look at the numbers of people getting infected, and the number of people getting really sick, it’s clearly not enough,” he says. “By the time you have symptoms, you’ve already been spreading the disease.”

Marrone wants to see mandatory weekly testing for everyone, and also wishes the university would consult its employees when making major decisions. “The number of people who currently have any say in our working conditions and the community’s living conditions is really, really small, compared to the people who are being put at risk,” he adds.

Health officials strongly encouraged everyone to get vaccinated and boosted to protect themselves from the highly-transmissible variant. Walk-ins and appointments are available Monday through Saturday at the Community Vaccination Center at Seminole Square.

What’s the mood on Grounds?

Amid the rise in coronavirus cases, UVA’s vax-mandated students, faculty, and staff will return to classrooms, dining halls, and fraternity houses this week.

“In-person instruction is a core part of our mission as an institution,” wrote President Jim Ryan on January 7. “UVA public health experts have advised us that classroom spaces are low-risk environments for infection.”

Some students are relieved to be returning to Grounds. “I don’t think the new variant will change the behavior of UVA students as a whole,” says Sullivan, a second-year student. “At this point, most students have become fairly unconcerned.”

Others are more wary about the return to in-person instruction.

“Although I’m of course eager for things to return to normal, I don’t think that’s currently possible with how many cases there have been even in just the UVA community recently,” says third-year student Maryann. “I think it would’ve been better to wait for the surge to slow down before introducing thousands of students back to Grounds.”

“I’m pretty much as nervous as I was at the start of spring semester last year,” says Patrick. “I definitely think it’s wise to keep a low profile and not party too much the first two weeks so I can see how many COVID cases are active when we get back on Grounds.”

Alyssa is conflicted about the return, given the value of in-person education and how much students have already missed due to the pandemic. “I think I am happy with the decision to return to in-person school as long as students are responsible and conscious of their interactions with the community,” she says. We’ll see how it goes.—Kristin O’Donoghue

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Arts Culture

Pick: Immigrant: Courage Required

Golara Haghtalab. Supplied photo


Longing for home: As a 21-year-old, Golara Haghtalab immigrated to the United States from Iran after her family was randomly selected to receive diversity visas. They settled in Charlottesville, and Haghtalab went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in chemistry and studio arts from the University of Virginia. Inspired by social justice movements and the need for all voices to be heard, Haghtalab shares her journey in the new memoir, Immigrant: Courage Required. The moving story of change and adaptation follows Haghtalab, now 30, as her day is broken up with vivid thoughts and flashbacks that examine immigration, identity, race, gender, and death.

Saturday 1/22. Free, 4pm. New Dominion Bookshop, 404 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. ndbookshop.com

Categories
Arts Culture

Behind the muses

Ryley Walker spent his quarantine time developing his compositional acumen, making some changes in his personal life, and testing out country living. Supplied photo

By Dave Cantor

Delving into a Ryley Walker album might offer up some tuneful, ’70s-style folk and rock songs, dispatched in a relatively traditional way. Or you could hear a batch of improvised psychedelia. He’s also got a full-length re-interpretation of a Dave Matthews Band record.

The singer-songwriter’s latest—Course in Fable, released in spring 2021—is one of those more traditional albums, though his arrangements make room for knotty melodic twists, and artfully crafted couplets that are as rewarding as they are confusing. Walker’s sense of adventure is likely to be pushed further than his most recent recording when he performs at the Southern on Sunday. Avant-garde drummer Chris Corsano is set to join the troupe for the performance.

“I moved out to the country for a while to get a little pond-swimming action and fresh air, but I’m a city slicker. So, I’m back in Brooklyn,” says Walker, who called Chicago home for most of his life but spent a portion of the pandemic in rural Vermont. “I gave it a good try. It’s not my thing. I grew up in the city. I like driving through nature, but I can’t live in that shit.”

The first few recordings Walker issued, including a collaboration with Fredericksburg native Daniel Bachman, grasped at the tradition of acoustic guitar as promulgated by visionaries like John Fahey and Sandy Bull. Walker, though, soon tired of the medium’s strictures, and after 2015’s Primrose Green he began branching out with more experimentally inclined works, like Cannots alongside Chicago drummer Charles Rumback.

While working to attain sobriety and hold on to it, the guitarist settled on an aesthetic that came to fruition on Course, which he released through his own Husky Pants imprint. The record’s full realization has at least a bit to do with the guitarist’s own mental health.

“Wherever you go, there you are. I could have problems in any corner of the universe,” Walker says. “I just get older and take better care of myself. My heart goes out to anyone who’s sick and suffering. I never believe that I’m fully healed from these things; it just becomes more manageable if you put the work into it—for me.”

While developing his internal life, Walker’s devoted himself to the further exploration of music. And on tunes like “Lenticular Slap,” he turns in a spindly and surprising arrangement while still dispensing lyrics like, “Sketchbook charcoal, I can’t trace daylight / Only refracts when I’m shocked blind.”

It’s tough to delve too deeply into the writer’s intent here, with songs referencing bums, burnouts, seekers, and tweakers. There’s purposefully no narrative to follow, and Walker describes an approach to writing that sounds a bit like the cut-up technique used by William S. Burroughs.

“Before, it was just bad lyrics,” he says. “I didn’t really know how to write. It was really unfocused. You do it long enough and you develop your own voice, hopefully. I just write stream of consciousness; just throw shit at a wall and edit out the stuff that’s not funny. I never have a narrative; I’m never like, ‘The barista down the street is beautiful. I’m gonna write a song about her eyes.’”

It’s more the sound of it all, the juxtaposition of words on a store sign and a street name he might see during a day in the neighborhood.

Playfulness like that pervades the guitarist’s work: “Pump Fake on the Death Rattle” is a song title from another recent collaboration issued through his imprint. And Husky Pants’ tagline in a graphic on Bandcamp simply reads “incredibly inexperienced at putting out music.” (Walker ended his relationship with the Dead Oceans label at the end of his contract, not because of displeasure with the business arrangement—it was just a way to make more space for creativity.)

“I got like three or four records that I like a lot that I’m going to put out in the next year. I didn’t start with indie rock, I started with crappy noise bands,” says Walker. “The whole thing was, release everything all the time. Some of the stuff might suck, some not. But that’s the pace I’ve always enjoyed. I’m impatient; I don’t like sitting on things. I try to do the best I can, but I’m not precious enough to spend three years on something.”

Sonic Youth fandom and an independent spirit drilled into him during his time in Chicago helped push Walker to this point in his career. And while moving between a song-based approach and an improvisational one might result in some confusion among fans, it’s not an issue he’s too interested in sussing out.

“I never really think about that, to be honest,” Walker says. “Isn’t the point to make tons of music and do whatever I want? Isn’t that art? I know there are people who like my songs, but hate my improvised stuff. And there are people who like my improvised stuff and hate my songs. Then there are people who like both—and that’s radical. A la carte whatever you please.”

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Arts Culture

Poetry and motion

Pipeline, a new play from Dominique Morriseau, directed by David Vaughn Straughn (right), and starring Aiyana Marcus (left) opens on January 14 at Live Arts. The production will feature a reception for educators on January 22, and an audience talkback on January 27. Photo: Will Kerner

In the early 1960s, African American Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks walked past seven boys at a pool hall, an experience she commemorated in the poem “We Real Cool”:

We real cool. We / Left school. We / Lurk late. We / Strike straight. We / Sing sin. We / Thin gin. We / Jazz June. We / Die soon.

When read aloud, the “we” at the end of each line fades to near-nothingness, a deliberate affectation that Brooks said in a 1970 interview was meant to signify the boys’ questioning of their own existence.

That doubt comes to life in Dominique Morisseau’s Pipeline, named for the American “school-to-prison pipeline” that funnels children, especially children of color, from public schools into the criminal justice system. Under the direction of David Vaughn Straughn, the play is being staged at Live Arts from January 14-30.

In her first major role at Live Arts, Aiyana Marcus leads the cast as Nya, a public high school teacher whose efforts to remove her Black son Omari (Asyra Cunningham) from the ominous pipeline seem in vain when he gets into a fight at his predominantly white private school. The conflict starts him down a path that Nya worries will lead him to the doom Brooks predicted in her haunting poem.

“The cast is really great,” says Marcus. “Everyone shows up really ready to work, and really connected to the roles even from our very first reading. I felt that connection with the actor that plays Omari, my son in the show, and everyone seems to have a connection with the language and with their own characters.”

Rounding out the cast are Tanaka Maria, Sarad Davenport, and Jamie Virostko. Brooks’ “We Real Cool” plays such a big role that Marcus considers it “almost a character” in its own right. The poem is woven throughout the production as a haunting backdrop, somewhere between premonition and echo, along with the characters’ struggles.

Nya first brings the poem to the stage when she writes the words on a chalkboard for her students; later, Omari raises the same aching question as the pool players, faltering on the word “we” as he searches for belonging within two types of academic institutions, both of which threaten to fail him.

“It’s a deep process, I think because a lot of us have some sort of proximity or closeness to the characters that we play,” says Marcus. “There’s a certain amount of labor that comes with that. For us, it’s a story, but it’s also a piece of our own lives. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we did this piece of theater;’ it could have, hopefully, very real consequences in our lives and the lives of people who look like us, and can really make a difference.”