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News

In brief: Swim squad wins big, tax talks

Back-to-backstroke

UVA’s women’s swim and dive team won its second consecutive national championship over the weekend—and set five American records in the process. Junior Kate Douglass put on an absolutely dominant show, breaking national records in the 50-yard freestyle, 100-yard butterfly, and 200-yard breaststroke on three consecutive days. Alex Walsh and Gretchen Walsh also won individual titles for the team, which finished with 551 total points, 145 points ahead of second-placed Texas.

The entire squad—plus head coach Todd DeSorbo and athletic director Carla Williams—took a celebratory jump into the pool after the victory was confirmed, reports NBC29. It’s the 30th national championship that UVA has won across all sports. 

It shouldn’t be a surprise that UVA dominated, given the team’s recent NCAA success and considerable Olympic pedigree: Four Wahoos, including Douglass and Alex Walsh, won medals at the Tokyo games last summer. 

“They just blew my mind. It’s a great group of athletes, a great group of people,” said DeSorbo after the win. “They deserve it.”

“I knew early on, even recruiting her, that she was capable of something pretty special,” he said of Douglass. “I didn’t know if she could do it all at once, in one meet. It’s wild… It’s phenomenal to see her do something like that.”

Taxing talks: City manager suggests 2-cent real estate tax hike 

Charlottesville City Council allowed the public to sound off on multiple key financial decisions at Monday night’s meeting. As council works to craft the budget for fiscal year 2023, it will be forced to make difficult decisions about which projects to prioritize and how to create new revenue—among the key initiatives is a school reconfiguration project estimated to cost $75 million.

Interim City Manager Michael Rogers said his office recommends raising the real estate tax by 2 cents going in to next year—currently, real estate is taxed at 95 cents per $100 of assessed value. Earlier this year, council had considered raising real estate taxes by as much as 10 cents, but it backed off from that number, in part due to the significant rise in real estate taxes around the city, thanks to the tight real estate market. 

During the public hearing, multiple residents expressed support for the reconfiguration project, and hoped council would find a way to make it happen.

Rogers noted that the city is also juggling improving transit, hiring firefighters, potentially collective bargaining with employees, and pushing forward on climate goals, among other things in its budget. 

Rogers essentially recommended slowing down the reconfiguration project to give the city more time to find funding for it. “The proposed school reconfiguration has not been integrated into the city’s capital improvements program in a manner that will allow City Council to make a coordinated funding plan,” said Rogers. The revenue from the 2-cent real estate tax increase should be “earmarked as the beginning of an annual funding program to generate funds for school reconfiguration” to give city staff time “to work on a five- to 10-year funding plan.”

City budget discussions will continue through March and into April.—C-VILLE Staff

Nothing to see here 

Almost exactly two years after COVID first arrived in the Charlottesville region, local case counts are as low as they’ve been in months. The Blue Ridge Health District reports a seven-day moving average of 12 new cases per day, down from 445 at the peak in January. Remember those strange first few days in March 2020? The last two years have been hard on everyone, and there could be more coming, but for the moment our region is keeping the disease at bay.

Image: Blue Ridge Health District

In brief

Meet the new boss 

Amaka Agugua-Hamilton will take over as head coach of the UVA women’s basketball team, the school announced on Monday. Agugua-Hamilton went 74-15 in three seasons as the Missouri State coach. The NoVa native played college basketball at Hofstra before beginning her coaching career. She’ll have her work cut out for her here in Charlottesville—the Cavaliers have posted a 30-63 record over their last four seasons. Agugua-Hamilton will try to return the program to its glory days of the early 1990s, when the team reached three consecutive Final Fours. 

UVA acceptance rate hits record low

Just 19 percent of the 50,000 applicants to the UVA class of 2026 was admitted, a record low, according to The Cavalier Daily. The in-state acceptance rate was 28 percent, and the out-of-state rate was 15 percent. (Low, but not quite Ivy-esque—Dartmouth, the least selective Ivy, accepted just 6 percent of applicants in last year’s cycle.) UVA’s accepted cohort is 52 percent students of color, 41 percent Virginians, 15 percent first-generation students, and 10 percent legacy brats. 

Looking sharp

It will soon be legal to carry a switchblade in Virginia—Governor Glenn Youngkin signed a bill that passed the General Assembly with bipartisan support. The knives were outlawed in the ’50s, but aren’t actually connected to crime statistics in any meaningful way, reports the Virginia Mercury.

The bill to legalize switchblades sliced through the General Assembly like a knife through butter. File photo.
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Arts Culture

Pick: Joe Troop

For the record: Having grown up as an openly gay man in the South, musician and activist Joe Troop is familiar with controversy. The bluegrass player has been threatened and chased off the stage, but that’s never stopped him from engaging in social activism through song. While on a year-long break from touring with his Argentinian-American string band Che Apalache, Troop returned to North Carolina, where he worked with progressive organizers to get the vote out and interviewed people affected by the Trump administration’s policies. This inspired his debut solo album, Borrowed Time, an energetic record of protest, plucky banjo, and Argentinian rhythms.

Friday 3/25. $20, 8pm. The Front Porch, 221 E. Water St. frontporchcville.org

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Arts Culture

Pick: The Moth

Gather ‘round: A cowboy, a UVA professor, and an astronaut walk into a bar…or something like that. You never know who you’ll meet at The Moth, a live storytelling showcase that brings people from all walks of life together. The New York-based production’s events, workshops, podcast, and “The Moth Radio Hour” take you on an intimate journey through a stranger’s psyche in celebration of the diversity and commonality of the human experience.

Friday 3/25. $24.75-39.75, 7:30pm. The Paramount Theater, 215 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. theparamount.net

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Arts Culture

Figuring it out

By Matt Dhillon

In February, Saul Kaplan marked both his 93rd birthday and the release of a new book of artwork. The self-published Sketches: Faces of Life & Love highlights what is perhaps the artist’s most discreet and most intimate medium, his drawings.

Having retired to an apartment in Martha Jefferson House, the ceramics and painting that were the priority of Kaplan’s artistic career became more difficult. But Kaplan cannot sit down with a pen without coming away with a drawing. It’s a habit he’s developed from over 60 years of practicing.

“Drawing is a muscle memory, eye muscle coordination,” Kaplan says. The memory that keeps returning to the muscles of his fingers, wrist, and arm is the memory of human faces.

Over the years, Kaplan has drawn thousands of human faces, and on every page his book is populated with that most familiar of images.

“The human face expresses everything,” he says.

Kaplan’s simple lines craft expressions on the shifting array of faces, digging for the bare-bones of emotion buried there. We see eyes meet, or downcast, or slitted, eyes tired, or gentle, or cunning. Lips are curled, puckered, pouting, or tense. Noses sharp and soft, cheeks broad and narrow.

Kaplan released his third book, Sketches: Faces of Life & Love, just before his 93rd birthday. Image courtesy of the artist.

Perhaps it is this simplicity of bare lines that makes drawing, as Kaplan says in the book’s prologue, “the most intimate and direct form of visual communication.” While intricacy serves to expand and amplify, the simplicity of the line drawings in Faces of Life & Love go in the opposite direction, seeking to distill the essence of an eyebrow, or a lip, and identify the essential lines that carry emotion. In the most minimalist renderings, Kaplan refines a somber face into just a handful of lines.

Kaplan also alludes to ancient Egyptian drawings. “The style of the Egyptian eye has been repeated over history,” he writes. “The eye I draw, like Picasso did, had its beginning in Egypt.”

That eye—drawn over and over for centuries—mirrors Kaplan’s endless creation of faces throughout the years. In this obsessive repetition and focus on the geometry of shape, Kaplan’s drawings search for something basic about the human face, its composition, and its familiarity. As the Egyptians did, Kaplan attempts to use the very specific and precise lines of a face to strike a resounding chord.

In this collection, we see the warm human population that Kaplan has created as a result of that repetition. Most of them are not alone, drawings occupied by two or more figures in some form of relationship to each other. Often, their bodies overlap or blend so that we see two faces that share one eye, or three heads that share one torso. In these fusions there is a sense of togetherness, of something shared that merges the characters in a visceral way. 

Each drawing, he says, is a kind of personal signature. “[As artists] we are making our mark some way or another. It’s a kind of waving and saying, ‘I’m here.’”

Kaplan, like his characters, tries to merge with something bigger than himself, participating in the collective story. “That’s what an artist really does,” Kaplan says. “He tries to use the medium he’s in to express something—it could be anything—but it is now part of history, a part of mankind.”

In the same way that the thousands of Egyptian eyes are actually one eye, iterations of the same form, Kaplan’s endless faces resolve into one face, waving at the world.

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News

In the running

Since defeating Dr. Cameron Webb in 2020, 5th District Representative Bob Good has stayed true to his Trump-loving, Bible-thumping platform. In addition to introducing bills attacking abortion rights, criminal justice reform, gun control, and refugees, the Republican has rejected the 2020 presidential election results, voted against investigating the Capitol insurrection, and supported fellow far-right conservatives, like QAnon conspiracy theorist Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

At an in-person forum last week, two Democratic candidates hoping to challenge Good—Andy Parker and Josh Throneburg—introduced themselves and shared their priorities for the district. The third announced Democratic candidate, Warren McLellan, did not attend the event, which was hosted by the Goochland, Louisa, Powhatan, and Albemarle Democratic committees.

Parker is a former member of the Henry County Board of Supervisors, and has been an outspoken advocate for stricter gun control since the 2015 murder of his daughter, 24-year-old journalist Alison Parker. While conducting a live television interview in Moneta, Virginia, Parker and her cameraman, Adam Ward, were shot and killed by a former employee of their news station, Roanoke’s WDBJ.

Andy Parker. Supplied photo

Parker also wants to hold online platforms accountable for showing graphic violence, specifically by repealing section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects websites from being held liable for illegal posts. Since Parker’s death, footage of the shooting—which her murderer uploaded to Twitter and Facebook—has circulated across the internet, despite her father’s efforts to get it removed.

To prevent and reduce gun violence, Throneburg—an ordained minister and small business owner—suggested Democrats “work together” with Republicans “who care about safety.” However, Parker claimed that electing more Democrats was the only way to get critical gun control measures—like universal background checks and assault weapons bans—passed by Congress.

“There is no cooperation,” said Parker. “If you can’t change their minds, you change their seats.”

Throneburg announced his candidacy in the summer of 2021, and had raised $207,000 by the end of the year, according to the Virginia Public Access Project. McLellan has raised $11,000, and fundraising reports are not yet available for Parker, who announced his campaign in February.

Last year, the 5th District, which has voted Republican in four consecutive congressional elections, was redrawn to include Fluvanna, Louisa, Goochland, and part of Henrico, and exclude Fauquier, Rappahannock, and Madison counties. According to election data from FiveThirtyEight and The Washington Post, the new district has a nearly identical partisan composition as the old one. 

Raised by a Republican family in a rural community, Throneburg claimed he is well-equipped to reach out to Republican voters and discuss bipartisan issues, like health care and broadband. “If there’s anybody who can actually access space in those communities and have them consider a Democrat as their potential representative, I think it’s me,” he said. 

Parker argued he could also find common ground with Republicans with his platform. “[Social media has] created this underbelly where you’ve got all this misinformation, video of my daughter’s murder, illegal drugs…this is what I found resonates across both sides of the aisle.”

Rural communities across the district continue to lack access to high-speed internet. To support broadband expansion, Parker proposed governments work directly with phone carriers, while Throneburg suggested treating broadband like a utility.

Parker promised to prioritize challenging big pharma, and bringing prescription drug prices down. Throneburg stressed the need to fight against climate change, and invest in green energy and jobs.

“We need more solar. We need more wind. Those things have to happen immediately,” said Throneburg. “We also have to do it strategically and with some thought and care.”

Throughout the forum, both candidates expressed support for implementing Medicare for all, overturning Citizens United, protecting abortion rights, stopping voter suppression, and passing the Equal Rights Amendment. They also vowed to support diversity, equity, and inclusion in education, as Republicans like Governor Glenn Youngkin try to ban “critical race theory” and censor books in schools. 

“Kids should be taught factual history…the good, the bad, everything that happened,” said Parker. 

In their closing statements, the candidates encouraged voters to show up to the polls, and rally together to flip the district to blue in November. 

Over on the Republican side, Bob Good is facing a primary fight of his own. Challenger Dan Moy, who spent 27 years in the Air Force, will face off against Good during a Republican congressional convention in May.

“You deserve a congressman that actually knows how the economy should work, how our communities work, and our country,” said Parker at the forum. “Right now you don’t have that—you deserve better.”

Democratic congressional hopefuls have until April 7 to file to run, and the Democratic primary will be held on June 21.

Categories
Arts Culture

Pick: Railroad Earth

Return to rock: Americana quintet Railroad Earth has been performing bluegrass with rock ‘n’ roll spirit for over 20 years. The band’s upcoming album, All For The Song, marks both the end of an era and the start of a new chapter—it’s the group’s first full-length studio record since losing founding member Andy Goessling to cancer in 2018. The songs blend wistful, narrative lyrics with lively, foot-tapping horn, harmonica, banjo, and fiddle. You can hear Goessling’s final ukulele and high-strung guitar recordings on the moving “Driftin’ The Bardo,” among other songs about road trips, biblical rainstorms, and a cathartic retreat to New Orleans.

Friday 3/25 & Saturday 3/26. $29.50-50, 7pm. The Jefferson Theater, 110 E. Main St., Downtown Mall. jeffersontheater.com

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Arts Culture

Robotic delivery

If Terry Gilliam remade “The Jetsons,” it might go something like Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Bigbug. This French science-fiction comedy takes a generally dark movie sub-genre—robot servants revolting against their human masters—and transforms it into an outwardly sunny, pastel-colored farce. The results are a hilarious, fascinating satire that’s seemingly light, but overflows with pointed observations about unchecked technological evolution at its worst.

Set in near-future France, suburban divorcée Alice (Elsa Zylberstein), her date (Stéphane De Groot), ex-husband (Youssef Hajdi), his secretary (Claire Chust), and others are sealed inside her house as malfunctioning security androids launch an insurrection outside. Meanwhile, her robotic servants faithfully try to protect their owner. (No giant insects here—the titular “bug” has infected the computer systems that manage the characters’ lives.)

Bigbug echoes—and affectionately parodies—Blade Runner, Westworld, Demon Seed, and other excellent works about artificial intelligence in revolt. Like those films, it confronts a major modern conundrum: Where does A.I. end and sentience begin? How much human-like behavior makes a robot human? 

As Jeunet takes his viewers on a windy trip through the “uncanny valley” between mechanical and flesh-and-blood life, he keeps Bigbug compelling by raising dozens of intriguing questions, and offering few pat answers. But the film’s opening image—leashed human beings led on all-fours by androids—sets the tone: Our own labor-saving technology ultimately enslaves us.

Bigbug’s reviews have been mixed because it’s definitely not for everyone, especially anyone who only knows Jeunet’s breakout hit Amelie. Bigbug is more akin to Delicatessen and other off-kilter early collaborations with Marc Caro. Be warned: Some viewers will find Bigbug overly frenetic and unconventional. But for those who stick with it, it’s a rewarding and hysterical film. (Be sure to watch the French-language version—the dubbed one sounds awful.)

The point that some viewers miss is that Bigbug’s background is its foreground. The humans’ antic interactions are funny, but what’s most intriguing is Jeunet’s intricate world-building. With most of this claustrophobic story occurring inside a single house, its vision of future life unfolds through background details within this ecosystem. Alice, for instance, keeps her journal with pen and ink, which have become as obsolete as IBM punch cards.

The cast is strong, particularly Claude Perron as the robotic maid Monique and Zylberstein in the lead. The voice acting is equally good, with André Dussollier standing out as the sanguine Einstein. Keep an eye out for cameos by Jeunet movie vets like Dominique Pinon, too.

Aline Bonetto’s retro-futuristic production design is marvelous, equal parts Bauhaus and mid-century modern by way of Betty Crocker. Outstanding credit is also due to special effects supervisor Pascal Molina, robot designer Jean-Christophe Spadaccini, and visual effects directors Alain Carsoux and Jeremie Leroux for their excellent work on the non-CGI mechanical co-stars. Most notable among the robotic cast is Einstein, a scuttling, six-legged head that looks like a caricature of its namesake crafted from typewriter parts.

Bigbug isn’t a masterpiece, nor is it as good as some of Jeunet’s more recent underseen gems like Micmacs. At an hour and 51 minutes, it’s 10 minutes too long. But it’s very funny, highly imaginative and intelligent, and the kind of science fiction movie that matters most: one about ideas.

Bigbug

R, 111 minutes
Streaming (Netflix)

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434 Magazines

Follow the reader

Former librarian Flannery Buchanan had always dreamed of opening
her own bookstore, but financial limitations forced her to get inventive: She bought a 1966 Banner camper and turned it into Bluebird Bookstop, a bookstore on wheels. The curated collection includes a little something for everyone—by design.

“Right now times are hard and stressful and I’ve found that people just want human connection,” Buchanan says. “Books are the perfect way to connect with other humans.”

434: Tell me a little about your background and how it led you to the Bluebird Bookstop. 

Flannery Buchanan: I trained as a librarian and worked briefly before staying home to raise my four children. My oldest is now 16 and all four are avid readers and bookstore fans. Whenever we travel, we love to find the local bookstores and discuss what we like, what their collection was like. It’s always been a dream for a family bookstore but the financials of owning a bookstore can be tough especially in a high cost-of-living area like Charlottesville/Crozet. So in response, I figured out an asset-light model: no rent, low overhead, take the books to the people! We live in such a beautiful place with so many outdoor meeting places, that it was easy to dream about parking the trailer at vineyards, breweries, markets, anywhere that people are already gathering. 

Did you renovate the camper yourself? How long did it take and what was the process like?

Ha! I’m not very handy, but I’ve certainly learned a lot! I bought the camper gutted, however, I tore out the flooring and stripped the roof of old sealant. After that, I turned it over to my contractor John Garland and his team. 

What genres of books do you stock in the camper? 

I like to think I have a little bit of everything, something for everyone. I carry mostly new and notable because of the space constraints and so that whenever you walk in, there’s something fresh and new that maybe you haven’t seen before. We have a very healthy and diverse Young Adult and middle grade section. It is a family business, and my children love to help me curate those sections. They have great taste and they’re great salespeople. 

Where can we find you?

I am usually parked every weekend at vineyards, breweries, coffee shops, markets. I keep a calendar on my website and I post every week on Instagram where I will be. I also love to do special events like author events, Bookish meetups, and book clubs. 

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434 Magazines

Reduce, re-use…

Back in the spring of 2020, while a student at UVA, Alec Brewer noticed something outside of his apartment complex that didn’t sit quite right: mattresses stacked 20-high, ready to be sent to the landfill. Around the same time, he was learning about the concept of customer discovery in one of his classes. He put two and two together and, with four co-founders, came up with Refurnished.

The nonprofit matches those in need with donated items—sofas, dressers, rugs, and, of course, mattresses.

“We’re the only nonprofit in the area that will accept mattresses under 10 years old with tags,” says Morgan Chung, the organization’s head outreach specialist. 

Here’s how it works: After asking for furniture requests, Refurnished matches a donation with a recipient. From there, volunteers take care of the handoff. 

“We realized that many people do not have a vehicle large enough to transport furniture or can’t afford a U-Haul, so we do everything from pickup to drop off,” Chung says. The nonprofit even cleans each donated piece before it gets matched with a recipient, who is often found through Refurnished’s partners, Habitat for Humanity and Come As You Are Cville.

Chung says inventory is at its most plentiful toward the end of the school year when students are moving out of their apartments, but the nonprofit has a catalog of currently available items on its website, refurnishedcville.org.

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434 Magazines

Call it a comeback

Jacquelyn Lazo thinks a lot about communications. So, as the Charlottesville resident spoke to a friend whose child was having trouble with the COVID-19 pandemic, she was really listening.

A former Darden Report managing editor and current poetry magazine proofreader, nonprofit communications consultant, and engagement specialist for Save the Children U.S., Lazo sprung to action. She started talking to kids. What were they feeling as the pandemic evolved? 

Lazo’s initial discussions within her circle led to wider conversation and eventually to a new book, Comeback Kids: A Pocket Guide to Post-Pandemic Parenting, written with family friend and University of Pittsburgh Professor of Psychiatry Frank DePietro.

Lazo, who will host three fireside chats about Comeback Kids at Jefferson-Madison Regional Library on March 24, April 21, and May 19, recently spoke with 434 about the book and beyond.

434: How did you come to the idea for the book?

Jacquelyn Lazo: I was talking to a former colleague around the time the pandemic started. It was her daughter’s birthday, and the party had to be canceled. Then her daughter started to show some signs that were a little concerning—just asking a lot of questions her mom didn’t have answers for. She didn’t even know where to start, who to talk to. I have always been interested in mental health issues and working with children, and it got me thinking. I wanted to see if I could find a way to help other families.

So the process started well before you decided to write a book?

In April 2020, I made a short questionnaire to get some feedback, to start the dialogue with kids. It was five questions trying to get everyone to start talking about this. How do you start to talk to your kids about something you don’t know anything about? What we found from those who responded was that it did allow them to open up the conversation. And, it was not necessarily this big scary thing.

What was the next step?

I thought it was going to turn into a children’s book. But as we got responses from people all over the United States and even internationally, it became a whole journey. My background is in writing and communications; I am not an expert on mental health. Frank is a family friend who has watched all of my husband’s family grow up. After looking at the kids’ quotes, he said, “What kids need to hear is that their parents are okay.”

So how should people read Comeback Kids?

It really is meant to be a pocket guide. Dr. DePietro and I are both parents. He is a father of four. I have a little girl at home. We were coming at it as parents. Parents know their kids best, and this book is to be used at their discretion when it’s helpful.

Is there a specific type of parent or family that would benefit most from the book?

I would say it’s even for the broader audience of caregivers—the people that care and are paying attention. There is so much data pointing to the fact that having a good, loving relationship with adults is instrumental for kids. And while the book is specifically around the pandemic, it is really about helping communicate during times of stress and change. We put it at a relatively low price point because we want it to be accessible. We’re doing a lot locally with the library. The goal is to begin to create a community of caregivers.

What about the caregivers who are feeling pandemic fatigue?

That is huge. We all feel that. Some days you won’t want to pick up this book, some days you will. And as much as we don’t want to hear about the pandemic more, the nice thing about the book is that it is forward thinking and hopeful. The book is really focused on tapping into humanity. Your kids are little humans, and raising them is a hard job anytime. Now, we are faced with doing it in a time of greater stress. This next generation has been forced to grow up a little faster, and in a way, that is going to serve them well.