Author: andrew-cedermark

Stick a fork in MySpace. Where do you look for music?

There were always two MySpaces. The first was a kind of proto-Anthony-Weiner-space, a forum where boys could tell girls how hot they are, where they could post shirtless cameraphone pictures of themselves. The other MySpace was the place where you went even before stealing a band’s album off the Internet, to hear a couple of tunes, see where the band is from and more. It was where you went to hear new music.

I’m watching with some ambivalence as MySpace sells, again, from Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp to a little-known company Specific Media LLC, whose investors include Justin Timberlake. NewsCorp bought the site in 2005 for $580 million; they are selling it for $35 million six years later. If it isn’t already, it’ll be time to stick a fork in a service that took a great model for sharing music and squandered it by ignoring what people liked about it: it was simple, customizable and versatile.

After an incredibly bad redesign, anecdotal evidence shows that musicians are leaving the website in droves, setting up shop in places like Facebook’s BandPage and the superior, simple Bandcamp. (Facebook overtook it as the most popular networking site in 2008.) Yet, while each of these services improves upon the latest version of the ‘Space, none has provided the sense of community that MySpace did for musicians.

For my part, I spent hours scouring the "top friends" of my favorite bands to see who they were listening to and who their friends were. The "Top Friends" feature created a sense of mystique around physical places. You could know what the Columbus, Ohio’s Shitgaze scene was all about by clicking from Times New Viking to Psychedelic Horseshit. Or about how the Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade were great friends, up in Montreal. If people still looked at it, there would be the opportunity for some local bands to build a positive local buzz around Charlottesville.

MySpace was also the forum where musicians learned to posture themselves in the Internet era. The punk ethos was translated into minimal MySpace layouts and a scourge of capital letters, slashes and exclamation points, all suggesting a crazy typist going through an Iggy Pop moment while filling out an Internet form. The careerist ethos played out in professional HTML design and links to where you could buy the band’s merchandise. The reluctant musician could communicate as much by leaving all fields blank but the media player.

As I became a musician myself, the "page views" prominently displayed became a source of friendly competition—everybody went there. But not anymore. I can’t help but lament the demise of the site where I learned how to find new music on the Internet.

Where do you look for new music on the Internet?

Live Arts announces new Artistic Director

Live Arts announced today that its Board of Directors has completed its search for a new Artistic Director, settling on Julie Hamberg as the theater’s artistic leader.

Hamberg is a theater veteran, having served in a variety of capacities at arts organizations in Ann Arbor, New York City. She was most recently as Interim Producing Director at Southern Rep in New Orleans. She has brought 75 new plays to the stage, according to a release. She will relocate with her husband, a playwright, from Louisville, Kentucky, to begin in September.

Hamberg fills a seven-month personnel void left by Satch Huizenga, the quiet circumstances of whose resignation upset some members of the theater’s large community of volunteers.

Julie Hamberg begins in September.

 

Categories
Living

Play it 33 times fast

It was a big night. Bobo the Mime walked his invisible dog Pinky for the last time. Two dudes shared an emotional breakthrough while watching a football game on TV. A young widow paid an unpleasant visit to her former mother-in-law’s. A date between two puppies went south after it emerged one was not pure Beagle, as was earlier suggested.

Ray Nedzel directed a show called CrazyBusy—consisting of 33 plays in 55 minutes—last week, a fundraiser to bring Cry of the Mountain, Adelind Horan’s (pictured) one-woman show about mountaintop removal, to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe next month.

These were some of the shorts performed at CrazyBusy, a manic theater event hosted last weekend by Whole Theatre at Live Arts. In it, a team of 12 actors performed 33 original two-minute pieces over the course of less than an hour. The performances were a fundraiser for a batch of locals hoping to cover the considerable cost of staging Cry of the Mountain, Adelind Horan’s one-woman documentary play about mountaintop removal, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, next month in Scotland.

As director (and Cry of the Mountain producer) Ray Nedzel explained while introducing CrazyBusy, playwrights generally spend a lot of time writing, and then even more time fielding rejection letters. But in the spirit of the unjuried Edinburgh Fringe—which claims to be the largest arts fest in the world—Nedzel’s call for scripts was, “I don’t care what you write. We’ll do it.”

As must be the case in Edinburgh, you wouldn’t expect to see a string of 33 plays and have them all to be great. But because of its relentless pace, with one scene blending into the next, CrazyBusy remained exciting. For “Show Tunes Urinal,” written by the ensemble, local stage regular Nick Heiderstadt simply walked up to a urinal, unzipped and started singing “Jesus Christ Superstar.” It became an awkward moment as Napoleon Tavale ripped into an intense dramatic short called “Pelican,” by the local playwright Robert Wray.

Two minutes is about as long as it takes to tell a joke, and some of the best shorts amounted to punch lines. In Clinton Johnston’s “Carry,” a young woman asks a male friend for help moving a table, her mother emerges to remind her daughter of the crushing weight of adulthood—of childbearing, dragging kids around only to watch your husband leave and your family fall apart!—that makes moving the table seem small in comparison. “Your mom is intense,” the friend riffs, cutting the tension as the mother walks away.

The whip-fast pacing was also good practice for Horan, who performed after CrazyBusy a version of Cry of the Mountain that’s scaled back from its original length, from 86 minutes to 55. Nedzel and Horan will stay in Edinburgh for three weeks, performing the play daily. Running performances of Cry of the Mountain alongside CrazyBusy was a way of “putting it in the setting it will be in,” says Nedzel. The festival hosts about 2,500 shows each day, says Nedzel. “It’s important to be good right out of the gate,” he says.

Especially so for Cry of the Mountain, which in title and concept sounds borderline hokey: a young actress took the verbatim transcripts of conversations with activists and executives on either side of the debate over strip mining. But Horan’s performance blows perceptions about documentary theater—and mountaintop removal—out of the water. The 23-year-old is a gifted performer, readily inhabiting the skin of a former miner whose granddaughter was sickened by groundwater, a young activist who runs afoul of coal companies, and a pair of executives justifying the cost against America’s energy needs.

Even a year after the play’s local premier, Horan was obviously affected by the voices she channels. As one of Horan’s characters explains it in one of the play’s dark comic moments, mountaintop removal is like going to the barber to ask for a haircut. Instead of giving you what you ask for, the barber cuts off your head, neck, shoulders and chest.

If it didn’t ring of truth, it might make for a good punchline.

Places #1: Lisa Russ Spaar

"Places" is a new feature by where local artists show us the places around town that inspire them.

Guest post by Chelsea Hicks

Much like Emily Dickinson who wrote beside a window looking out over a graveyard, the poet, UVA professor and recent recipient of the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship, Lisa Russ Spaar has found her muse living among the noble dead. Although—Spaar takes it a few steps further than Dickinson. Literally.

A short walk away from Spaar’s office window in UVA’s Bryan Hall, is the University of Virginia Cemetery and Columbarium at the corner of Alderman and McCormick Roads. Spaar returns to the graveyard for a moment away from her life as a constant mentor and teacher.

In "No Picnic," a poem about death and seasons, she describes the cemetery as a “supernatural asylum," with “petal-blooded grass” (as described in “Home”) and marble slabs "lined by starlings,” (from "Permit me voyage, love, into your hands") that act as keepers of the graveyard.

It’s not hard to believe that the graveyard has been a wellspring of inspiration for upwards of 30 years since her time as an undergraduate student at UVA.

 — 

What do you do when you come here?

I like being perched partly in the world, but also partly sequestered from it. Porches, windows, places where I feel like I have a sort of sanctuary but I’m also very open to the world. This is also one of those thresholds…You’re outside of time. I feel that here.

Does this site come up in your work at all?

A lot. In fact, many of my poems are set in this graveyard but you wouldn’t know it. I have a poem that will be in the new book (Vanitas, Rough due out from Persea Books in Fall 2012) about a girl [on her cell phone] walking through the graveyard in a really beautiful pair of high heels and she says something like, “That’s so not on my vagenda.” […]

Vanitas is a school of painting where you mix up things that are decaying or dying: like skulls that represent time passing, musical instruments that have come unsprung or flowers with bugs coming out of them, fruit that’s partly molding. 

Does the graveyard remind you of any other places?

It reminds me of my grandparents’ farm in South Jersey that we don’t have anymore. It had orchards and this sort of casual order of horticulture. It’s New Jersey, so all around us were highways and across the river on a certain kind of day you could see northern Philadelphia but on the other hand it was this 100 acres on a river with big sycamore trees, lawns, birds. Going to this farm was where my imagination unrolled.

As a writer, perched in windows at my grandmother’s house and looking out over the river and farm I found sort of an inner life. Like I had an inside. I think my beginnings as a writer were in a place like this so I think I seek them out.

(Photo by Anna Caritj)

 — 

Back in her office, Spaar marks up some of her “graveyard poems” for me to look over. Behind her, a portrait of Emily Dickinson looms out of the dim light beneath the window. I notice the cover of her 2004 collection of sensual and sacred poems, Blue Venus: a window with blowing curtains. It suggests the sequestration of graveyards, of Spaar’s childhood at the farm, and of Dickinson looking at neighboring tombstones from that liminal space between isolation and the world.

Dickinson seems as comfortable below the window as Spaar does in the graveyard, and I consider the irony: they’re living half-lives through each other. Dickinson’s heavy bun, iron-straight nose and budding lips exude all the pathos of the graveyard, of Spaar’s poems and the “horrifying and wonderful” prospect of Lisa and Emily sitting together in the graveyard or even beside the window, here—in their office.
 

Open Studio files: Aaron Eichorst

C-VILLE’s Spencer Peterson expands upon the week’s Open Studio interview with samples of the art by the artist he interviewed.

This week’s Open Studio is a chat with painter Aaron Eichorst, who in his recent works has pushed portraiture into the realm of the surreal. If you have kids at Greenbrier, Walker or Clark Elementary, they probably know him as their art teacher.

"Blackberry Lily and Hibiscus Bud"

"Blackberry Lily and Hibiscus Bud" is part of a larger series in which Eichorst uses pastel, tempera and acrylic paint to render his friends as human/flora hybrids. Seeing these pieces, it comes as no surprise that he’s a fan of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, a 16th century Italian court painter whose portrait heads made entirely of things like produce, fish or books were largely ignored until they were rediscovered by the Surrealists.

"Sanctuary"

A fortuitous trip to Italy led Eichorst to his latest series, which he describes as an attempt to confront us with our cultural history. "Santuary" is his favorite from one of many takes on the Ancient Roman Grotesque, a decorative style of fresco that, back in its classical heyday, featured human figures surrounded by architectural and natural embellishments. Like the other contemporary locals enshrined in Eichorst’s Grotesques, this green-eyed girl has stare that reveals as much about her as it does your own status as an onlooker. Whether it’s natural or historical, for Eichorst, juxtaposition creates meaning.

When he talks about his work, Eichorst is refreshingly pragmatic and sober. Check out the rest of his oeuvre at http://www.aaroneichorst.com/ to see how his work ethic pays off, or head over to the Gleason Building, where he will have three pieces up through July.

 

What’s your favorite regular music act?

 In this week’s column, I write about the kind of night where nothing’s happening at the Jefferson, the Paramount, Pavilion, Southern, the galleries, and so on. On those nights I usually surrender, don a robe, crack a book and go to bed early. Not last Wednesday, when I tasked myself with the impossible: to see all of the regular Wednesday night acts.

Of course, I quickly met with my limitations—there’s kind of an 8-11pm window (excepting some stragglers) and it takes about 45 minutes to enjoy a beverage—but I did see some some of Wednesday’s flagship performers: Jim Waive at Blue Moon, John D’earth at Miller’s and the popular Love Canon gigs at R2.

In my travels it became apparent that many locals have deeply personal relationships with these musicians who show up same time, same place, often to place the same songs each week, particularly at Waive’s shows. But I thought I’d kick a question over to readers.

What’s your favorite regular live act?

Categories
Living

Wednesday night with the regulars

Last Wednesday was the kind of night where I tend to look at the C-VILLE calendar and my blogs, throw my hands up in the air and say, “There’s nothing going on tonight.” The fact that there is, in fact, a ton of music happening on any given night may be a foregone conclusion for some. But for the music columnist who has trained himself to pick out whatever seems the most exceptional that week, and then to write about it, sometimes it’s easy to forget about the regulars.

Jim Waive is among the cast of local musicians you can count on to play same time, same place, every week: Wednesday at the Blue Moon Diner.

And as sure as Wednesday arrived, Jim Waive showed up to Blue Moon in a wide-brimmed hat and started plucking away on a battered Gibson acoustic just after 8pm. A friend who professes to be at Blue Moon for Waive’s sets literally every Wednesday paused mid-thought to let me know that the cover of “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys,” most famously performed as a duet between Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, was a new cover for Waive. When a fiddler arrived just after 9pm, Waive was emboldened to take on a more ambitious tune, surprisingly well-suited to guitar and fiddle: “Eleanor Rigby.” The smokey timbre of Waive’s voice is a constant no matter how hard he’s singing or where he is on the register, testament to how often he does it (weekly, at least) and how well he does it. A pair at the bar sang along to the choruses, at least as loud as Waive himself. “Look at all the lonely people,” indeed. Tally: One Beatles cover; several Elvis heads, one pint of beer.

I picked up a couple of friends who refused to follow me to my next stop: Love Canon at a regular gig recently moved from The Southern to Rapture. So we all stopped at Miller’s for a pop on the patio. One friend complained about how much better Downtown Charlottesville (Miller’s, specifically) used to be way back when. I wondered, how different could it have ever been, sitting out on the patio at Miller’s on a Wednesday smelling cigarettes while inside, John D’earth, chin down and trumpet up, toots like Nat Adderley from under a cumulonimbus of hair. It being the last week of spring, the option to drink al fresco cut D’earth’s audience in half. Between sets, the backed-up bar crowd, plus a pair sharing a table who seemed to be on a date, clapped wildly for the trumpeter. “Aw, shucks,” he said, affecting a bow, as I walked back outside. Tally: One Charlie Brown moment; several cubic feet of fresh air; one more pint of beer.

And on we went to Rapture, to what seemed to be by far the most popular of the regular gigs. Inside, Love Canon, a group of legit musicians (Jesse Harper, Adam Larrabee, Zack Hickman, Andy Thacker, Darrell Muller and Nate Leath) was drawing from a deep well of chops to provide diversion, donning mock rock star dress and picking out scarily proficient bluegrass versions of 1980s hits. I wanted to hear their cover of Toto’s “Africa,” but as we arrived the band took a break that took longer than it did for me to finish my glass of water, ushering in the kind of body-tired that screams “go home” at the mind. Tally: Nostalgia for a time before my time; various networking opportunities; water.

As my night eyes started stinging, a vague sense of shame lingered. My quest to see everything in a night had only taken me to three places, and not even as far as the Corner, where Reggae Greg Ward was scheduled, or Durty Nelly’s, with its cast of regulars, or even to Carlton’s, which is redefining regularity with nightly jazz.

But hey, there’s always next Wednesday.

Play it now or forever hold your peace: The art of the wedding song

Over the weekend the girlfriend and I went to see a couple of friends get married, and I get the impression that a lot of locals are in a similar spot. Since these were the first of my peers to tie the knot, I haven’t been to lots of weddings—more will come soon, I’m sure, now that this pair has broken the ice. But even in my limited experience with weddings, one moment is emerging as my clear favorite: more moving than vows, the first kiss, I’m talking about the unveiling of the wedding song.

After all the ceremony, the crying, the painted ladies, it’s the first moment when all of the circumstance fades and the couple gets to show its personality. At this particular wedding, the bride and groom shared their first dance to "Have I Told You Lately." (They pulled it off nicely.) And I wasn’t at my parents’ wedding, thankfully, but they danced their first to "I Love How You Love Me," the singer Bobby Vinton’s 1969 version of the song original made popular by the Paris Sisters earlier in that decade. It’s a little sappy, but it worked—they’re still together.

’60s style: Bobby Vinton’s "I Love How You Love Me"

I know I wasn’t the only local who has been out at a winery to catch friends getting hitched. Internet lists of "Best Wedding Songs" veer toward the sappy—Billy Joel’s "Just The Way You Are" tends to rank high—so let’s give the lovers some help this wedding season: What are some of the best wedding songs you’ve ever heard?

My two cents: At their wedding, my brother and his bride went lighthearted with Jonathan Richman’s "You’re the One For Me." The title sounds nice and the song itself is beautiful, but the plaintively delivered tune takes a mock-dark lyrical turn, typical Jonathan behavior: "And it’s too late," sings Jonathan, "because now you’re stuck with me / Better give up, it’s me you choose / I say, "ha ha ha ha, it’s me, you lose."

Everybody got the joke except for grandpa, who couldn’t hear the lyrics.

What’s the best wedding song you’ve heard?

“Art” and art, Star Children and Sarah at Rapunzel’s, Campout East and more

There are some gorgeous posters floating around advertising tomorrow night’s show just south of town at Rapunzel’s, a co-bill featuring We Are Star Children and Sarah White and the Pearls. Catch White before she heads to Jersey City to play the Dave Matthews Band Caravan later this month. 

The UVA Art Museum opens a new exhibit today that’s a little more esoteric than recent shows that centered on Southern photographers and African-American art in the 1970s. It’s called "New Images, New Techniques: Abstraction in British Screenprints circa 1970," which doesn’t scream mass appeal but was apparently a time and place of great innovation in the printmaking form. Read more here.

Terry Frost (English, 1915-2003) Straw, Orange, Blue, 1972

 

On Saturday night, the Jefferson hosts a solid triple bill headlined by the Canadian complicated electronic duo Junior Boys, famous for their quiet and endearing dance music and friendship with Charlottesville’s favorite Canadian electro-rock act, Caribou. Miracle Fortress opens, as does the formerly local pop duo Birdlips, who have a new EP every time I visit their website (except for today). Details.

Something for theater-lovers: Play On! Theatre draws the curtain on its fifth season with Yasmina Reza’s Art, a comedy about a group of friends whose relationships almost combust after one spends lots of money on a nearly featureless white painting, raising questions about what makes art art. The show opened there last night and runs through July; details are here.

Also this weekend is the WNRN-sponsored Campout East, headlined by Sons of Bill and two bands fronted by indie rock legend David Lowery: Cracker and Camper van Beethoven. Also performing is Jonny Corndawg, the foul-mouthed, leather-working, marathon-running country music singer who tends to charm the pants off anyone who can stomach him.

 

New music: Eli Cook

The incredibly deep-voiced Nelson County blues guitarist Eli Cook releases his fifth album tomorrow, Ace, Jack and King, that takes an accommodating approach to the blues. The disc has a lot of hellraising, crowd-pleasing originals that celebrate the blues tradition while compositionally stepping out of the blues camp, and won’t shock longtime Cook listeners.

Check out samples at Cook’s website.

But for as long as Cook stares tradition straight in the face (he covers three Skip James songs), he also shows a knack for picking up and making his own the doleful tumbleweeds that have rolled across the blues landscape. Case in point is his cover of Nick Drake’s "Black Eyed Dog." The original version is striking for Drake’s vocal reluctance—it’s a sketch of an imagined encounter with a dog—but in his new version Cook picks up a 12-string, injecting the tune with what can only be called a li’l bit of boogie.

Nick Drake’s "Black Eyed Dog"

Like his playing (mostly slide), Cook’s is versatile; he sounds just as home singing James’ "Catfish Blues" as he does in his own songs, which take some interesting turns into brawny post-grunge.  

Ace, Jack and King comes out tomorrow. Catch Cook at the Jefferson Theater for a Johnny Cash tribute on June 25. More on Cook in an upcoming issue of C-VILLE.