Author: andrew-cedermark

Scandinavian legend has it that in April of 1991, the lead singer of the Norwegian black metal band Mayhem, who went by the name Dead, committed suicide in a remote cabin owned by the band outside Oslo. The band’s guitarist, Euronymous, discovered the corpse. Before he alerted the authorities, Euronymous rearranged the grisly scene, purchased a disposable camera and photographed it. Mayhem later used it as an album cover.

For those who had seen Phil Elverum perform his quiet tunes with a classical guitar in years past, it came as a surprise to discover that Elverum was drawing on bands like Mayhem, Burzum and Emperor for inspiration on his most recent album, Wind’s Poem. Mayhem and other Norwegian black metal acts are known in some circles as forefathers of a scene as infamous for its brutal music as for the cathedrals torched and real-life violence perpetrated by its members.

That influence was briefly on display at Elverum’s performance as Mount Eerie last Friday at the UVA Chapel. Before the music, Elverum told the sound man that whatever was fine, “as long as it’s deafening out there.” In the sheer enormity of the first song, “Wind’s Dark Poem,” the band toed into black metal territory. At either end of the stage, thrift store keyboards gargled deep drones. A colossal gong, shaking throughout the set, obscured one of two drummers. Elverum’s guitar was wired to a crackling stack. For a moment, it too was a grisly scene.

And then the doom receded to reveal something closer to the songwriter’s true personality. In the Chapel, the material from Wind’s Poem revealed level arrangements that can’t be heard on the blown-out recordings. These arrangements were reminiscent of Elverum’s earlier work, for which he is arguably more famous; The Glow, Pt. 2, which he recorded in 2002 under The Microphones moniker, is so affecting and distinct that, to date, the world has been spared any imitation of it.

Also on stage with the band was the mythology its founder created around it. After the success of The Glow, Pt. 2, Elverum changed his last name (from Elvrum, adding an “e”)—after a town in Norway, near where he spent a winter in a cabin (long before Bon Iver). He also changed the name of his group from The Microphones to Mount Eerie. He later explained: “I called it ‘Mount Eerie’ to marry myself to this place because it is the center of my universe.” And although the broad aesthetic has changed—from The Microphone’s early experiments with spliced reel-to-reel tape to Mount Eerie’s slow, dark ruminations—the lyrical content gravitated around a single concept: the porous borders that separate people and places.

Elverum, who was sick with a cold, can’t shred like a metallurgist. His melodies slog along, regardless of whether two drummers crank out sixteenths. The music isn’t grotesque, but understated and often lovely. But in the Chapel the point was well taken: The places we know—like the earth-shattering misery of those Scandinavians—are as much of a part of us as they are out of our control.

“I don’t remember any of that,” writes Liz Welch in The Kids Are All Right, a heart-rending new memoir she co-authored with her brother and two sisters about their transition from members of an elite Connecticut family to orphans and outcasts. The book shifts in perspective between the four Welch siblings, whose ages span more than a decade.

The first of the book’s three parts sets family tragedy before a backdrop of opulence. Their father’s death in a suspicious car accident brings rumors of his involvement with the C.I.A. His unsavory business dealings in Central America leave the wealthy family saddled with debt. This forces his widow, a gorgeous soap opera star who is battling cancer, to sell the “house, pool, and poolhouse.” 

In the parts that follow, the Welch children run unsupervised through the emotional gauntlet of young adulthood while their mother ails in the next room. When she dies, parenthood duties are farmed out to a broad cast of characters, good and evil, leaving the orphans to search widely for themselves and each other. They ultimately stake a new claim on family life in Louisa, Virginia, where the oldest child, Amanda, buys a rickety country home and hosts for holidays.

The book’s multiple perspectives unearth meaningful discrepancies that inevitably arise when a family tries to render a collective past. Some of these are less meaningful than others; as Steiff teddy bears and pony rides give way to bong rips and benders, two sisters can’t agree who they paid to kick guests out of a keg party. But elsewhere, it shows the peculiar sensitivity one has to a sibling’s emotions in a time of need.

Amanda and Dan, both outwardly rebellious, serve as reminders that, Hamlet aside, eternal tragedies cast juvenile angst in an unflattering light. (“‘You cannot wear leather pants to your father’s funeral,’ Mom pleaded.”) But their evenhanded, often terse explorations show that the tragedy of losing one’s family begets that angst even as it belittles it. The youngest of the bunch, Diana, was too young to remember the earlier events. Her moody reconstructions—when her mother dies, she feels like “cotton floating apart from the stem”—feel more true to the processes of memory. Such ethereal musings go a long way to temper the authors’ natural tendency to narrativize things like death that operate on their own schedule.

As the title suggests, pop culture references do a lot of heavy lifting. The farthest we go into “an ’80s world of alternative music and drugs” is a Buster Poindexter concert. But aside from the occasional “ha” of recollection (much of this stuff happened in the ’80s, folks), The Kids Are All Right is not a funny book, but an affecting portrait of death in panorama. Just happens its authors watched their share of John Hughes films.

It was as if the rainiest night of the summer didn’t come until the first week of autumn. Lucinda Williams, awaiting showtime, was sheltered in one of two identical tour buses behind the Charlottesville Pavilion. Across the Ninth Street Bridge a small group of folks, many of whom appeared to be friends, was assembled at The Bridge to hear Tim Davis read something that was dubbed PerfectlyNormalPoems—a selection of unpublished works that Davis said will likely never be published.

Inside, copies of his 2004 collection American Whatever lay on a small table, next to a handwritten note: “Free—seriously.” Greg Kelly, managing director of The Bridge, introduced the reading as “poetic sideshow to Tim’s big exposition.” Davis, who was in town for a residency at UVA, is known for his work as a photographer—his collection, “My Life in Politics,” is showing at Ruffin Gallery through October 23—much of which explores his fascination with the American ephemeral. “Seven Entertainers,” for example, is a canted view of cardboard cutouts of real-life powerbrokers (Bill and Hillary) next to not-so-real ones (Dr. Evil and Xena). A harsh light glares off the creases at each character’s waist, where the cardboard folds.

Davis shuffled through a Manila folder of loose pages, reacting to them with the audience as if he had just found the poems in some soggy alleyway. His poetry—referential, messy and often funny—hoisted onto language that same preoccupation with preserving the disposable. A brief poem entitled “Retail” winded through variations on the phrase, “For all intents and purposes,” and ultimately came to rest on “For no intents or purposes.” Another poem, “Bumper Sticker Humor,” explored what Davis called a “false sense of community” by re-imagining bumper sticker slogans; among them, “My other car is a terrorist,” and “End hunger: Eat a little snack.”

The surface-level silliness in these lines at times gave way to more serious considerations. Was it the same poet who asked how many orifices a human has (arguably, 11), who poignantly asked, “What is the difference between terror and horror,” and went on to answer, “The old French said it had something to do with trembling”? It was.

In his essay “On Photography,” Davis writes, “America is a symphony of One-Offs. We’re always Supersizing and Downsizing or something. That’s why photographing it matters.” As the group stood to leave, somewhere in America—what Davis calls the “theme park of Flux”—three George W. Bushes were simultaneously broadcast on three flatscreen TVs at a Circuit City. Davis’ image of that moment, when it happened once before, hung on the wall of the Ruffin Gallery. And just outside, as Lucinda Williams began to play songs in the style of a durable American tradition, no one braved the rain on the Ninth Street Bridge to catch a free glimpse.

In the first act of Glengarry Glen Ross, pairs of men in suits use bad words and sip hard drinks in a Chinese restaurant. This is the real estate business, a changing industry, and they’re desperate to keep their jobs by any means necessary. The lights are low and the music cheesy as each pair hatches a plan. There’s one to take the premium property leads, and another to bribe the office manager. It’s unclear which is legal, and which isn’t. But none of them feels right.

For the second act these jagged bits and pieces—four real estate agents, the dupe, the office manager and a cop—are jammed into an office, where the drawers of a filing cabinet lay ajar. The premium leads, which were the only sure sales bets, have been stolen.

David Mamet based the wild game of foul-mouthed finger pointing on his experience as real estate broker in Chicago, and perhaps this is how Glengarry feels so distant, but so real. These characters, whose deafening humanity renders them almost superhuman, talk in a jargon equal parts familiar and alienating. (What exactly are “premium leads,” and why are they so important?) Here lies the peculiar power of David Mamet’s Glengarry: One walks away feeling clobbered by the gist, knocked down by the wind.

Director Boomie Pedersen gives the Pulitzer Prize-winning script the meat-and-potatoes treatment, with sparse, iconic set design—all the way down to the bottle of Kikkoman—artfully choreographed language and forceful performances from a veteran cast. Glengarry is Live Arts’ fourth Mamet production, which makes him one of that organization’s most produced playwrights. The relationship works.

Whether these characters are good or evil, they’re good capitalists, and the intimate Live Arts Upstage theater hangs moral unknowns in the rafters, out of plain view but where you can smell them. A cop metes out justice behind closed doors; the perpetual and amorphous threat of “Mitch and Murray,” the bosses, circles overhead; and the wife is always at home.

It is the last of these pressures that forces James Lingk (Bill LeSueur) into the mayhem of Glengarry’s second act. One can almost smell the sweat and talcum powder on Ricky’s (Michael Volpendesta) neck as Lingk, the consummate milquetoast, tries to gracefully renege on the deal. Slimy, yes. But Shelly Levene (playfully rendered by Jim Johnston) is the most slippery of these snakes. He brags and fawns in turn as he gains and loses the upper hand, and laments the changing industry that has come to reward performance instead of longevity; he only has the latter.

Kevin O’Donnell absolutely bludgeons the role of Dave Moss, the cast’s most conniving meathead. The theater tilts in his direction as he pounces about in the second act. His scene with George Aaronow (Harold Langsome), the plaid-wrapped wimp, might be the play’s most entertaining—if it weren’t for Mamet’s mesmerizing mess of a second act.
Much lip service has been paid to Glengarry’s relevance in the modern day. Twenty-five years have passed since its Broadway debut, and yet men still work on commission, seek to increase their share by depleting ours and cite in doing so the rules of the game. And really, it’s disheartening to have to share the real world with the likes of these characters. But bad things happen to some of them. All the more reason to, as Artistic Director John Gibson said, “Enjoy the fucking show.”

On the day that I set out to walk the future route of the Meadowcreek Parkway, a friend and I spoke about the old Vinegar Hill neighborhood. The vibrant Black community was razed in the early 1960s to make way for Charlottesville’s expanding business district and a north/south road that would connect Ridge Street to McIntire Road. Officials cried Urban Renewal as they forced 160 families and 30 businesses to resituate at Westhaven, the low-income housing project that was itself built on the remains of another historically Black neighborhood, Cox’s Hill.

For those who remember the old Vinegar Hill neighborhood, Ridge/McIntire, which runs through it, must serve as a constant reminder of the dueling imperatives of progress and preservation. So as I mounted my bike near the Lewis and Clark statue and rolled down Ridge/McIntire Road without so much as pedaling, it occurred to me that whatever it was that rolled through the Vinegar Hill neighborhood a half-century ago is still rolling. And it’s headed for McIntire Park (1).

It was my first trip to the park itself, which I had seen many times but had never bothered to explore when I was a student in town, perhaps because the intersection—where Downtown traffic is choked east and west through a t-shape—is peerless in the severity of hazards it poses to cyclists and pedestrians. But over the clack of skateboards from the skate park nearby, I dreamed for a moment that I hadn’t stopped at the stoplight, and had instead let my momentum carry me through the intersection (2), to the clearing just to the right of the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial, where a path looked to lead deep into the park.

If I had done so, I would have rolled along what might be the first leg of the Meadowcreek Parkway, which follows a well-worn and largely unpeopled path. After locking my bike, my first steps along the route revealed a dilapidated wooden shed, slouched in a stout cathedral of sycamores. The shed signaled the first boom of foliage. To the left, a tall row of trees walled off the golf course, and to the right a dense forest came alive with the persistent chipper of birds. A gopher—the first of many that I saw—fled to its hole at the sound of my footsteps.

The shed was built to hold dynamite for the C&O railroad—a city parks planner later told me that plants on the Downtown Mall that can’t withstand low temperatures are kept there during winter—which was the first bit of infrastructure to exploit the route that I now walked. The tracks were laid in the 1920s and torn up in the 1950s, after which the path has received a regular mow. It hadn’t been mowed in some time, however, and even if it had been, shorter grass would have done little to combat the odd feeling that I wasn’t supposed to be there.

Next was the shallow slope that cradles the fourth and fifth holes of the McIntire Golf Course (3). The rugged grandeur of the landscape caught me off guard, and I paused for a moment to appreciate the tall, dead grass that lined the slopes, the mosquitoes and lost golf balls therein, and in the distance, the oak trees pricking at the huge sky—all of it golden in the evening light. But soon I was in the line of fire, and a pair of golfers, men in their mid-20s, hollered and shooed me from the green.

Beyond the course the path jutted left, where a shroud of invasive ailanthus trees loomed overhead at odd angles, bringing welcome shade. Each breath beneath that canopy felt as if I was drawing equal parts air and water. As I continued along the path, what appeared at first to be stumps turned out to be two secluded manholes. These are the only sign of the other piece of infrastructure that runs along this phase of the path: a sewer line.

It wasn’t long before I saw Schenk’s Branch, which will border the future Meadowcreek Parkway to the east, trickling ahead, its rocky, black banks strewn with trash. The creek runs west here, in effect separating the park’s south side, with its proscribed opportunities for leisure, from the shaggy north side, overgrown and largely without trails. As I passed the stone path across Schenk’s Branch, I could hear the whir of air conditioning units from the nearby Melbourne Park townhouses. And soon, there they were: big and yellow. The route ceased to be a path here, and I was left to kick through the brush. Beyond there I found a service road that was pocked through with weeds, and followed it around to a concrete-laced basin, where the Parks Department once dumped leaves, and through which the parkway will go. I couldn’t distinguish between the sound of intermittent traffic and the summer breeze as Melbourne Road (4) grew near.

This is what I saw above the treetops: the arm of a hydraulic excavator rising above two huge mounds of red dirt. I slipped beneath a padlocked fence’s gate, out of the park. Across the street, lined with parked cars, a congregation of excavators, fellers and loaders lay beside concrete sewer pipe and piles of uprooted trees. Aerial maps of the area still show two sanded squares with single round edges—softball fields. Here Meadow Creek ricochets eastward, towards the blinking FCC tower, and sinks down a forested slope of its own design. Signs warn “Trail Closed,” where construction has sundered the Rivanna Trail, and “No Trespassing” everywhere else.

Vandalism has been a problem here—arsonists (5) recently caused $110,000 in equipment damages—so I wandered through this long expanse, feigning absentmindedness, staying close to the high school facilities and repeating my if-caught scenario spiel. Where summer rendered the CHS football field vacant, and the scoreboard off, I felt the breeze as it whipped through that void. As soon as I was out of sight from the road, my fears totally overblown, I jogged deeper along the road.

The foundation between here and Rio Road is laid deep in vermilion, its edges fringed with the towering canopy that once stood in its path. Not far ahead, where Meadow Creek returns to border the route, I noticed a footbridge. The bridge serves, or served, a spur of the Rivanna Trail that once passed through the patch of land north of McIntire Park. I crossed the footbridge as the road’s foundation soared above a hill to the left. The spur soon mounted that hill at a better angle and met the route, where it was erased beneath the packed layer of dirt. I saw the Norfolk Southern tracks to the left, beyond which a young father and his son silently heaped garden dirt into a wheelbarrow.

From a map this stretch of land appears to lie in limbo. It is accessible only for those willing to walk the tracks or the spur of the Rivanna Trail. (It is owned by the state Department of Transportation.) But it looks, feels and smells like classic Virginia. The view here is not unlike what you see while driving along Route 29S, or I-64W. With each descent into a valley, the surrounding woods and hills feel immense and green. With each ascent the capacious surroundings are revealed as bigger, greener and grander.

Meadow Creek eventually pivots to meet the road squarely. This is where the creek has gouged a deep rut in the road’s path. But it is also where the completion of the Meadowcreek Parkway feels most imminent (6): A stretch of foundation was centrally pinned with a pronged support that rose some 30 feet into the air, waiting to be draped in a swooping slab of concrete. At its base was a stone-laid swale, from which I could hear the first sounds of Rio Road, where the parkway will end. I climbed a path over the sturdy, earthen railroad bridge beside the unadorned support, crossing the creek for the last time. The road began its slow ascent that will soon deliver traffic straight to Rio Road. As my walk came to an end I watched the sun set behind Charlottesville Albemarle Technical Education Center, and cast its final throes through the windows of construction trailers that lie there.

There is no sidewalk on Rio Road, and I waited several minutes before traffic slowed enough to allow my safe passage, to a place where I could sit near the Jeffersonian pillars that announce the Dunlora subdivision. As my walk ended I thought about what was once here, at the other end of the road—probably a forest at first, then the Wetzel family farm and now the foundation for what will soon be a road—and about how, once upon a time, everything in the world was something else. About how, once upon a time, there were no roads and no parks and no cars, and then, there they were. And about how communities continued to change in ways that made sense to them at the time.

But for now it was getting dark, and I didn’t want to walk to town alone on the train tracks. So I called a friend to pick me up.

1. On January 18, 1926, Charlottesville City Council adopted a resolution thanking Paul Goodloe McIntire for his recent gifts to the city: about 89.2 acres of parkland that would become McIntire Park and Washington Park. The tract of McIntire Park that the city portion of the Meadowcreek Parkway (MCP) will occupy was originally acquired by the City of Charlottesville from Lena Brice in 1925 in a condemnation hearing. McIntire paid the court $16,000 to buy the land.

On May 24, 1967, a road project that would become known as the MCP is presented to the public for the first time. Return to story

2. The Route 250 Bypass Interchange is a new overpass that would bisect McIntire Road Extended through McIntire Park. In June 2008, City Council chose the final design for the Interchange: a split-grade interchange that features traffic signals at the intersection with the county portion of the Parkway (which ends at Rio Road). The Interchange is sizable: 5.9 acres. The chosen design was preferred over alternatives provided by the Route 250 Bypass Interchange at McIntire Road Project Steering Committee that included an oval-roundabout.

6. The final construction of the MCP was divided in three projects: A), a road that connects Rio Road in Albemarle County to Melbourne Road in the city. This portion is called Meadowcreek Parkway ($32 million, $23.5 million in Secondary funds and $8.3 million in Revenue Sharing). B), A city portion planned through McIntire Park is called McIntire Road Extended, and is state funded ($9.7 million in Urban funds).  And C), the final portion, called the 250 Interchange, which is designed to be a split-grade interchange and is federally funded ($29.5 million in earmarks and $2 million in revenue sharing). The Coalition to Preserve McIntire Park contends that VDOT has split the two-mile road in order to avoid environmental laws protecting parkland. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) requires all federal agencies to conduct environmental impact analyses for planned projects. “NEPA also prohibits segmenting a large project into smaller pieces to avoid disclosing impacts,” said John Cruickshank in a July interview. NEPA also requires all projects to have rational and designated end points. Technically, McIntire Road Extended ends 775’ from Route 250, without adjoining the road with the intersection. Members of the coalition contend the entire two-mile road should be considered one big project, while VDOT officials and proponents of the parkway think of the road as three distinct projects that are funded differently. Return to story