Author: c-ville-weekly-writers

On February 3, Albemarle County School Board member Ken Boyd announced his plans to challenge incumbent Charles Martin for the Rivanna District seat on the Board of County Supervisors.

Urged by his constituents to run for a seat among the Supes, Boyd says he feels he could be of greater use to the County in a larger role. He has lived in the County since 1981, and for the past 12 years has owned and operated a financial services and investment advisory firm. He takes a decidedly pro-business stance, he says.

He recently discussed his vision for the County with C-VILLE. An edited transcript of that interview follows.

Kathryn E. Goodson: What are the main platforms of your campaign?

Ken Boyd: First and foremost, it’s time for a change, for new blood in that seat. The Rivanna District’s been represented by the same person for 12 years now. We need new ideas, new concepts. I haven’t already become part of the system. And I bring School Board experience with me—60 to 70 percent of our local tax dollars go to education as it is.

We need better coordination between the School Board and the Supervisors so we can work more closely on current issues. If we don’t, we’ll never minimize the amount of redistricting in the future.

I want to open Albemarle County back up to business. As it stands now, the County has the reputation of not being friendly to business—in some places, there’s far too much over-regulation and over-taxation. I fear some major businesses are stepping away from here due to that reputation. This attitude has to change, or the County won’t have the jobs for our young people and in turn, we won’t have the tax base that revenue brings in. We cannot survive on property taxes alone. We don’t have to sacrifice the environment to be pro-business in the County.

We must be proactive rather than reactive about our water needs. We must consider the long-term needs of the Buck Mountain Reservoir. Why not have some fresh eyes on the problem, rather than sit back and wait for another crisis?

For one thing, we’ve raised entry-level teacher salaries to $31,500 from $26,532. That’s a 19 percent increase over three years, accomplished during very trying financial times. With the higher starting salary, we can not only attract more qualified teachers, but keep them, too. I’m also very proud that we opened the door of communication between the County school system and the City school system to discuss collaborative measures for improvement. I think there’s room for that kind of improvement in communication between the City Council and the Albemarle County Board of Supervisors. There appears to be some sort of turf protection going on there.

Do you think running as a pro-business Republican will help or hinder your campaign?

I did not want to run as an Independent, and I didn’t want to hide my roots. I am proud to be a Republican, but I do not want to be stereotyped because I’m in one political party or another. I truly feel that the issues I intend to work for appeal to everyone—on a local level.

On the other side of that equation, I think I’d have a good rapport with our State and Federal legislators. The State legislators are going to re-evaluate the whole taxation structure of the State. And I would really like to have a hand in that, to evaluate what’s best for local control over spending and not have to go to Richmond or Washington, D.C., for that. We are capable of controlling our own destiny.—Kathryn E. Goodson

We need more dough, d’oh!

$94 million proposed budget comes up short  

Many of us here in Charlottesville are feeling the pinch of higher rents and climbing property taxes. The least City Council could do is send each of us a thank-you note for all our pain.

After all, property taxes are about the only things keeping the City financially solvent. Last year, real estate revenue accounted for 73 percent of all revenue growth. For FY 2004, City Council has promised to reduce the property tax to $1.09 per $100 of assessed value from $1.11, just as the City is feeling the brunt of an economic recession and facing massive expenditures for capital products.

City Manager Gary O’Connell presented the bleak forecast to City Council during its regular meeting on Monday, March 3. City Council will review and revise O’Connell’s $94 million budget and pass a final version in April. The City seeks public comment at regular Council meetings or through online postings to its website, www.charlottesville.org.

Charlottesville is finally feeling the national recession through declining revenues from sales, meals and lodging taxes. Real estate and personal property values are growing, says O’Connell, but not as fast as they were a couple years ago. Meanwhile, the City will lose more than $1.4 million in State budget cuts to the Juvenile Detention Home, the Regional Jail, City schools and social services.

According to the FY 2004 budget, the City is undertaking $5.2 million in new obligations while expecting only $3.6 million in new revenue increases. To make up the $1.6 million deficit, every City department was ordered to cut its budget by 5 percent for a saving of $800,000. Some of the cost-saving measures include: eliminating four positions that are either vacant or whose occupants are retiring; reviewing the City’s cellular phone contract; reducing overtime; eliminating return postage on parking tickets; allowing advertising on City buses; and reducing travel expenses.

Doubling the trash-sticker fee will generate another $800,000.

The City will also add five new police officers, costing $220,000, by increasing the vehicle decal fee by $5 per auto. The City also plans to raise more than $1 million for capital infrastructure improvements by increasing the meals tax to 4 cents from 3 cents per dollar.

This million bucks is a mere drop in the bucket compared to what it will take to fix up our crumbling City, according to O’Connell. He says Charlottesville needs about $130 million for capital improvements, mostly to repair buildings like Charlottesville High School and to re-brick the Downtown Mall.

Council agreed that it cannot keep relying on property taxes to pay its bills, but had no suggestions for other ways to raise money.––John Borgmeyer

Piece of Cake

Hackensaw Boys cut a record with John McCray

The gray, barn-like Monticello Dairy Building on Grady Avenue is home to an array of local businesses––a battery store, a Mexican restaurant, a catering business, a paintball battlefield and a multi-million dollar recording studio.

“We thought about calling the record Cat Piss Alley,” says Mark Hahn, a restaurant owner and caterer who also manages local scruff-meisters The Hackensaw Boys. The group is recording their new album in the Crystalphonic recording studio, deep inside Monticello Dairy. John McCray, frontman for the nationally recognized rock band Cake, is producing the record.

Hahn carries the band’s lunch through the Dairy’s rear service entrance, where you can hear the pop of paint guns and see pink-and-orange carnage seeping underneath a metal door into the gritty cement tunnel, which is indeed home to several thin, timid felines.

The so-called Cat Piss Alley ends with a heavy wooden door that opens into the hallway of Crystalphonic studio, where amplifiers and digital recording devices sit stacked beside a rack of metal cans that is the Hackensaws’ percussion section.

The layers of irony here are the stuff of Tom Wolfe––back-porch string music recorded in a high-end professional studio designed to draw big names to a town suffering from an uninspired local music scene. The incongruities seem to be working out well for the Hackensaws, however.

The band caught a lucky break last winter, when McCray asked local singer-songwriter Shannon Worrell (who is married to C-VILLE co-owner Bill Chapman) to open for Cake at the Norva, a venue in Virginia Beach. Worrell, recently retired from the music biz, declined. She recommended the Hacks instead.

Apparently, the Boys won over both the Norva crowd and Cake––last summer, McCray invited them to join the Sunshine Tour. The Hacks performed between sets by hip-hoppers De La Soul, rockers Modest Mouse and artsy heroes The Flaming Lips. After the tour, Modest Mouse invited the Hacks to join them for a series of West Coast gigs.

Now McCray, who produced all four Cake albums, is tailoring the Hackensaw sound to reach the pop music masses. McCray says his role in the studio is like a newspaper editor, telling the band what’s working and what’s not in an effort to create what McCray calls a “pleasing geometry” in each song.

The new album represents a roll of the dice for Hahn and the Hackensaws, since recording with McCray at Crystalphonic ain’t free.

“We feel like there’s a lot riding on this,” says guitarist David Sickmen. “It’s like the difference between thinking about your career and actually doing it.”

Also, the Hacknesaw record could be a boon for Crystalphonic, which opened last summer. Four partners, Berklee College of Music grad Kevin McNoldy, Amy and David Spence, and recording engineer Matt Jagger, founded the studio on the idea that because Charlottesville is home to both beautiful scenery and the Dave Matthews Band, a professional-quality facility will attract enough big names that the studio can subsidize special deals for local up-and-comers.

“We went nuts. We got the best equipment we could, across the board,” says Jagger. “We can record the guy down the street or Elton John.”

Both the Hackensaws and Crystalphonic are hoping that a quality product, be it a record or a recording studio, will translate into fame and fortune. But in the music business, a few ties to rock celebrity won’t hurt.

“I’ll try to introduce a few people to this music,” says McCray. “If it’s a good record, it will stick. If it’s not, nothing I can do will help it.”––John Borgmeyer

On February 26, UVA sophomore and Student Council presidential candidate Daisy Lundy was assaulted in what police described as a possibly racially motivated attack.

By that evening, a cluster of emails and outpourings about the widely reported incident had been dispatched campus-wide, including this confronting question by undergraduate Tiffany Chatman: “Still think racism doesn’t exist at UVA?”

For Corey D.B. Walker, Associate Professor of African-American Studies at UVA and Director of the Center for the Study of Local Knowledge, the answer is, yes, of course racism still exists at UVA.

“I am not surprised that it has degenerated to this,” he says. “I am surprised at the severity of it.”

University Police Captain Michael Coleman reported that an 18- to 20-year-old heavyset white male shoved Lundy’s head against her car early on the morning of February 26. Afterwards Lundy, who was involved in a run-off election for Student Council President, reportedly told friends the attacker said, “No one wants a nigger to be president.” If Lundy wins the now-postponed election, she would be the first black woman to lead the UVA student body.

The immediate response to the assault was a flurry of activity. There was an impromptu meeting of students, faculty and staff, dubbed a “Community Reflection and Response.” A $2,000 reward was posted for anyone with information leading to a conviction.

In a mass email from President John T. Casteen III to everyone connected with UVA, he wrote, “The decades-long efforts to make this University an authentic cross-section of what we are as a people, and the hard-earned progress made toward this goal, are too important to be cast aside by some senseless acts.”

Despite Casteen’s assertions, progress in University race relations remains elusive, say critics.

Chatman, who is a member of UVA’s Black Student Alliance and an outreach group called “Building Legacies and Connecting Classes,” says the racism on campus is shrewd—not usually so overt as Lundy’s attack. “The subtle way that people are generally unfriendly to me…” she says, “I really get this feeling that I’m not exactly welcome here.”

In her courses, for instance, Chatman says, the soft racism is at its prime.

“In my French class last semester, I was so uncomfortable,” she says, “that I was afraid to speak up, afraid to make a mistake. It killed my performance. When we would divide into groups, not one person would walk up to me to be my partner.”

Indeed, racism has become a familiar reality to many African Americans at UVA. Last December, fraternities Zeta Psi and Kappa Alpha were acquitted of disorderly conduct after photos circulated of two white men dressed in tennis skirts and blackface as Venus and Serena Williams. Last spring, students at the UVA Architecture School hosted a “Medallion party.” The legend on the invitations? “Callin’ all chicken heads and thugs.”

“The party was clearly making fun of us,” says Chatman.

Walker believes change won’t come until UVA is more racially diverse. “Less than 2 percent of this faculty is African American,” he says. “What is that alone teaching?”

Indeed, undergraduate black enrollment has decreased to 1,436 in 2002 from 1,698 in 1991. And for the 2002-2003 school year, out of 18,250 students at the University overall, 9.3 percent is black, according to UVA statistics.

Still, Walker says the tense racial situation on campus has its roots in the misconception that race problems don’t exist. “The unwillingness to face it,” says Walker, “only advances it. The faculty must be charged with teaching the unvarnished racial history of our area.”

During the “Community Reflection and Response” meeting, UVA Dean of Students Penny Rue had much the same response.

“Goodwill and trust have been eroded here,” she said, making the question not how to get it back, but was it ever there in the first place?

Walker suspects what’s required is a systematic change from the senior administration down. “We need new strategies in thinking, more research of the continuing significance of race in our society,” he says. But when asked to put a timeline on when some new strategies might start to pay off, his answer is grim.

“Definitely not in my lifetime,” he says, “that’s for sure.”—Kathryn E. Goodson

You go, G.I. Joe!

Campus hawks rally ‘round the flag

On February 24 area Republicans gathered in front of the UVA Rotunda to rally around one message: It’s high time we stopped protesting the start of a war already in progress, and started supporting President Bush and our armed forces.

After a brief prayer by Reverend Peter Way, who once held Republican Rob Bell’s seat for the 58th District in the House of Delegates, the crowd recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The succession of Republican speakers began, from Bell to Matthew Rubin, head of ‘Hoos for Israel.

“How many of you support the war on terrorism,” Keith Drake, Chairman of the Albemarle County GOP asked the riled crowd. “We’re already at war. We’ve been at war since September 11.”

“We will show our support for the military,” said Ben Beliles, President of the UVA College Republicans, who organized the rally, “which is preparing to go into harm’s way to defend the freedoms we are all privileged to enjoy.”

The rally, a protest opposing recent anti-war demonstrations, drew more than 100 area Republicans armed with signs such as “Fight for peace” and “God bless President Bush! God bless our troops!” The Rotunda stairs, enshrouded with a large banner signed by College Republicans and members of the rally, read “We Support Bush!”

The overall sentiment was clear: UVA College Republicans stand in support to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, even if it means going against the grain.

“I am here today because my brother’s in the Navy,” said College Republican Kristin Hendee, “and he tells me of how disconcerted they all are with the protesting. He thought it was amazing I was coming here today to show my support.”

Lindsay Brubaker, another UVA Republican added, “We’re here to express our willingness to support Bush in this endeavor.”

The pro-Bush stance wasn’t the only message delivered during the line of Republican speeches, however. Four UVA Democrats (one with a Burberry handbag in tow) came bearing signs of peace and asking for more time for inspections, not war.

“When I saw the pro-Bush rally going on,” said undergraduate Devon Knudsen, “I wanted to come and see what the [Republican] positions were. Then I realized I didn’t want anyone there to think I was supporting what was being said.”

That’s when Knudsen grabbed a yellow poster board and marker and squatted on the sidelines to scrawl a statement of her own.

“I don’t want [the speakers] to get away with this without seeing another side to think about,” she said.

U.S. Senator George Allen couldn’t attend the rally in person, so someone read a letter from the former Republican governor: “Senator Allen says he is completely behind our troops and our President. Saddam Hussein has no right to be the leader of any country.”

Congressman Virgil Goode, drawing continuous clapping and cheering from the crowd, painted his own down-home view of Saddam Hussein.

“I would love to see that Saddam Hussein has decided to destroy all these weapons of mass destruction,” he said, “but it’s kind of like being in the room with a rattlesnake. Are you just going to wait until it bites you?”

Goode, ending his speech with thanks to those who attended the rally in support, also took a minute to thank the anti-war demonstrators.

“I want to say thanks to those who came today in opposition,” he said. “This is the home of the freedom of the press and freedom of speech. But I dare say, your free speech wouldn’t be welcome in Iraq.”—Kathryn E. Goodson

You have been disconnected

But not everybody has gone surfin’ with Wi-Fi Internet

There was a time when there was only one seat in the house for Downtown regulars seeking Internet access and a cup o’ joe—the lonely workstation at the back of Mudhouse. Caroline Cobb would head there at lunchtime to check her e-mail. Same for Mike Winn, a computer-less continuing-ed student at UVA. But now, thanks to a tech trend known as Wi-Fi, Web users have their choice among the 40 seats in the coffeehouse. If they’re willing to invest an initial $50 for a wireless modem and then shell out $25 per month for service, that is.

Wi-Fi, or “wireless fidelity” access, has been a mainstay in bigger cities for the past couple of years. It’s creeping into Charlottesville, not only at Mudhouse, with several providers promising access elsewhere soon. In the case of Mudhouse, Web surfers will need to create an account with the wireless firm Airpath, which charges $25 per month or $3 per hour. Once established though, users can access the satellite Web service anywhere that Airpath, or its partners, provide service (called “hotspots”). Sounds good, but right now the only other Airpath location in Charlottesville is the Doubletree Hotel near Sam’s Club on Route 29N, not exactly the stomping grounds of coffeehouse regulars.

Internet junkies with slightly broader roaming instincts may want to wait until April when Ntelos will begin to offer unlimited wireless Internet for $50 per month. The $100 set-up fee will get you going and includes the external modem. Initial coverage in Charlottesville will be only “south of Rio Road” but, according to a rep, that should expand over time.

Still, Mudhouse’s Wi-Fi service seems custom made for Raman Pfaff, ExploreLearning’s chief architect, who says he “lives in the wireless world.” But, despite his assertion that “whenever I’m here, I’m online,” Pfaff says that after the free trial period is over, he won’t be signing up. His thinking is that since Mudhouse already pays for Internet access, it may as well provide free wireless access.

Mudhouse is not the first coffeehouse to get into the Wi-Fi game. Nationally, Starbucks has partnered with T-Mobile to provide hotspots in all its stores. The newest Charlottesville Starbucks on Pantops already has equipment in place, but, according to manager Sheri Craft, it won’t go live until the other two area stores are wired and ready to go. Access at Starbucks will not be free, either, although rates are not yet set.

“Free” is the going rate at Everyday Café, also on Pantops, but the Internet service is not wireless, it’s T1 Ethernet. Still, it might satisfy somebody like Corey Brady, a UVA graduate student who says she chooses a café “more and more based on whether Internet access is available.”

But free wireless is on the horizon locally. John Leschke will be opening a new Ivy Road café, Java Java, in April. There he will offer 14 wired Ethernet ports and up to 14 wireless connections. And the former UVA professor doesn’t plan to charge for the Web. “I’m a coffee shop!” he says.

Clearly, demand for Wi-Fi is on the rise, if for no other reason than to raise Charlottesville’s hip quotient. (Imagine the e-mail: “Hey bro, I’m sipping a café breve and smoking an American Spirit out on the Mall. Gotta run.”) Without any advertising, 25 people signed up in just two days for the Mudhouse service with about 40 total to date.—James Weissman

One of the most striking aspects of life in Third World countries is information starvation. Because they’ve learned not to trust their state-controlled media, people in authoritarian backwaters carefully debrief newcomers. What’s going on abroad? What’s going on here? Did you get any foreign newspapers or magazines through customs?

News is a component of infrastructure every bit as important as roads and telephones. Businesspeople need to know if a border with a neighboring country is open so they can decide whether or not to send out a truck. Citizens need to know their government’s international standing—are those falling bombs their leader’s fault? Hunger for news hurts a country almost as much as hunger for food.

The First Amendment enshrines freedom of the press in the U.S. Constitution, but a variety of forces conspire to prevent totally free access to information. Residents of most cities rely on one large daily newspaper, usually part of a media conglomerate that itself owns the biggest local radio and television stations. Directors of that corporation and the editors who work for them are frequently loathe to offend influential government officials and business tycoons, for if they get cut off—excluded from access to press releases, interviews, leaks, etc.—their ability to collect news is impeded. One might argue that such “news” is little more than worthless propaganda, but fear of causing offense often inhibits the media’s natural role as a watchdog of democracy.

Our government very rarely censors the media. It doesn’t have to.

A new, subtle form of self-censorship has recently become commonplace. A news story is covered in full, minus a crucial fact that changes the entire tenor of the piece. That missing bit of information is invariably something that would make someone important look bad.

The American media has, for example, devoted extensive coverage to political unrest in Venezuela, where mobs loyal to President Hugo Chávez have clashed with striking employees of the state oil company. The crisis sparked an attempted coup d’état in April 2002. To busy Americans, this looks like a simple story of a right-wing Latin American dictator crushing poor workers. That’s because three key facts are regularly omitted from the story. First, the oil company strike was called by its wealthy managers, not its workers. Second, Chávez was democratically elected. Third, the coup plotters were backed by the Bush administration. “We were sending informal, subtle signals that we don’t like this guy,” said a U.S. Defense Department official quoted in The Guardian, an English paper that has become an important post-September 11 resource for Americans in search of objective reporting. The bully, it turns out, is us—not Chávez, who is standing up for his nation’s poor.

Similarly, the North Korean crisis looks like a simple case of crafty Commies welching on their agreement not to develop nukes in exchange for economic aid. Repeatedly left out of the thousands of words spilled daily on this topic are the contents of the 1994 North Korea-U.S. Agreed Framework, in which President Clinton promised to develop full diplomatic relations with Kim Jung Il’s regime, and North Korean warnings dating to 1999 that they would resume nuclear research unless the United States kept up its end of the bargain.

North Korea is violating the agreement. But the United States broke it years earlier.

The closest thing to a “smoking gun” found by U.N. arms inspectors in Iraq is 12 warheads found at an ammo dump south of Baghdad. Americans know that the White House considers this discovery a “material breach” that justifies war. Few are aware that, as reported January 17 in the U.K. Telegraph, the canisters were empty, and are probably American-made shells sold to Iraq by the Reagan administration. Not much of a “smoking gun.”

Scratch the surface and you find this sort of thing all over the “news.” Democratic complaints that the Bush tax cuts only benefit the “richest 1 percent” of Americans are duly reported, but leave out a definition of the term. Did you know that you have to earn more than $330,000 a year to be in the top 1 percent? Nineteen percent of Americans don’t. They told Time that they think they’re in that top 1 percent.

Perhaps you’ve read that American soldiers are fighting off guerrillas loyal to warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in eastern Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, the Associated Press says, is “believed by Afghan and U.S. authorities to be allied with Taliban and Al Qaeda remnants.” That may be true. But Hekmatyar was always a sworn enemy of the Taliban—until the CIA tried to kill him last May, with a Hellfire missile fired by a Predator drone plane.

One missing detail. Changes the story a little, doesn’t it?

I am an open-minded fellow. But when I heard I was going to be interviewing an 18-year-old high school student who had organized poetry readings at Mudhouse and was now hosting events at Live Arts, certain unpleasant associations crowded my head, despite my best efforts to banish them. I knew poets in high school—they wore berets, dressed in black and smoked cloves. One did not want to interview them, however enterprising they were.

I was way off base. Tucker Duncan is a bit scruffy, but that’s where the resemblance to the poet of my nightmares leaves off. He’s enthusiastic about his very interesting projects, but he manages to be so without wearing the scarf of sincerity too tightly around his neck. He’s a poet, and surprisingly, kind of cool.

The poetry readings Duncan spent much of last year hosting weekly at Mudhouse were not the poetry readings of my experience, either. They were “poetry slams,” a kind of competitive, performance poetry Duncan describes as “the sport of the spoken word.” Rules are simple: The work must be original. The reading must be completed in three minutes or less. And there are no props. “It’s just you and the microphone,” he says. The influence of and connections to hip-hop are obvious—Duncan, for instance, refers to the rapper Nasir Smith as one of his favorite poets.

Duncan, however, was not content to poetry slam forever. Recently, he and Live Arts regular Todd Ristau have begun to hold “poetry lounges” in the Live Arts LAB space. It is open mic with a live jazz band, which poets may use as accompaniment if they wish. Naturally for a poet still too young to drink alcohol and barely old enough to vote, Duncan’s view of his art is evolving.

“I’d just gotten to this point in my life where I realized that there is so much more to poetry than being judged,” he says. At the poetry lounge, he says, the goal is not winning, but something more fundamental and inclusive: “We want to create a home for poets.”

Duncan’s interest in poetry dates back to one moment that should inspire pride in the hearts of high school English teachers everywhere. He was in ninth grade when a teacher played a recording of Saul Williams, the “spoken-word artist” featured in the 1998 film SLAM. “He just spit out this poem and it just blew me away,” Duncan says.

While his interest in poetry was henceforth a constant, much else in his life was variable after that. Duncan, for reasons he says had something to do with disciplinary issues and something to do with the curriculum, spent the next four years in boarding schools from Utah and Idaho to North Carolina. He would get back from one, he says, “and it just seemed like the right thing to do to try another one.”

Nowadays, still a couple credits shy of graduation, Duncan is finishing up high school from the online Keystone National High School, which gives him the flexibility to get through high school while devoting himself to poetry.

And he’s been more than a little successful on the latter front. He’s been published in two anthologies, and, with typical entrepreneurial drive, has self-published two other books. Another collection of his poetry, When I was a Shorty, is due to be published by Ristau, in connection with Mary Baldwin College.

The big question is whether this restless youth will make Charlottesville his stomping grounds forever. Change is coming, he says, but he’s not sure what it will be. College is definitely not a given, he says.

“If I go, it will be to learn,” he says.

Whatever he chooses, it’s liable to be an interesting path. He is not content just to let things happen to him. Minutes after he concluded our interview, for instance, Duncan called me to make sure I understood the main point about his poetry lounges.

“It’s about giving poetry back to the people,” he says.

Cindy Stratton grew up more than 30 years ago in Westhaven, the City housing project located in the 10th and Page neighborhood. Raised in a poor and racially segregated environment, Stratton says that, nevertheless, she “had no problem with white children.” But Stratton can’t advance that claim for the black kids growing up in Charlottesville nowadays. Nor would she presume inter-racial comfort for the current generation of white children here, either.

Untangle this,” went the accusatory refrain laced through Jett McAlister’s poem. “This” was the mixture of grief and skepticism toward government many people have felt since September 11. By participating in a February 12 poetry forum, McAlister aimed his words specifically at the current debate over war in Iraq. The creative writing student was in line with the evening’s prevailing sentiment: Invited to read poems on any side of the discussion, Charlottesville bards overwhelmingly came out for peace.

An audience of about 60 showed up for the forum in UVA’s Minor Hall, organized by Jim Cocola, a Ph.D. candidate in English. Titled “American Voices, or, The War,” the forum was the local installment of a national event. After Laura Bush cancelled a poetry symposium at the White House out of fear that it would become a political platform, poet Sam Hamill (who’d caused the First Lady’s jitters by refusing her invitation) declared February 12 a national day of anti-war poetry.

Cocola found that reaction intriguing, but somewhat reductive. “Just as Mrs. Bush was trying to avoid conflict in her reading by having a single program for it, Sam Hamill too seemed to be advancing a single program that wouldn’t provide for a full range of voices,” he says.

Hoping to widen the debate and avoid, as he put it, “exclusive monologues,” Cocola invited readers to present poems for, against, or just about the coming war. A dozen people, mostly UVA faculty and students, answered the call and approached the lectern—some clutching their own lines, others verses by Whitman, Ginsberg and Yeats.

Either poets are all a peace-loving bunch, or Charlottesville’s pro-war poets congregated elsewhere. One undergraduate addressed her poem to a “blue-eyed girl,” an Iraqi counterpart whom the speaker wished could experience American peacetime. The poem turned on descriptions of daily life, grocery shopping and sled riding—“this, my anti-war.” Elegiac tones pervaded many selections, including Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (written after Abraham Lincoln’s death), in which the speaker realizes the war’s dead no longer felt pain, but “the living remain’d and suffer’d.”

The event also raised questions regarding the role of poetry in politics, and vice-versa. Both Cocola and his co-organizer Bryan Maxwell made brief speeches rejecting the notion that art and politics are best kept segregated. Creative writing professor Gregory Orr introduced his poem, a short piece directly addressing the White House poetry snafu, by saying that poetry positions intimacy against “worship of human power and military all.” Judging by the heads nodding in agreement throughout the room, the readers seemed mostly to be preaching to the converted—and to be falling in line with Sam Hamill’s original plan.

Still, an anti-war stance can be more complex than sloganeering would suggest, and the evening’s 12 poems were hardly clones of each other. One selection offered hope, hinting that human creativity—including poetry—is an inevitable force even in the face of destruction. In William Butler Yeats’ “Lapis Lazuli,” even though “if nothing drastic is done/Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,” in the end there is always “gaiety transfiguring all that dread.”

—Erika Howsare

Welcome to ’Hoo-ville

City banks on higher enrollments 

By order of the Board of Visitors, UVA’s enrollment is projected to swell over the next several years. While this means more traffic in City neighborhoods, more barf in the alleys and louder “not gay!” chants during home football games, City Hall appears to consider UVA’s growth a tax bonanza.

City planners say they expect UVA to grow by between 3,000 and 6,000 students over the next seven to 10 years. That’s a dramatic increase––from 1989 to 1998, the school’s enrollment only increased by 553 students to 18,463. As part of his plan to stimulate the State economy, Democratic Governor Mark Warner is asking all Virginia’s public colleges to enroll more students.

One of the City’s beefs with UVA is that the school only builds enough on-Grounds housing for about 35 percent of its students. City officials say they expect that ratio to hold even as enrollment expands. The other two-thirds of the students rent rooms in the surrounding Jefferson Park Avenue and Venable neighborhoods, prompting a litany of oft-heard complaints from residents: The students take up all the parking spaces, trash the houses, drive up the rents and so on.

Naturally, many homeowners in JPA and Venable were dismayed to learn of the City’s plans to triple the legal density in some parts of those neighborhoods. So-called University Precincts will permit buildings as tall as seven stories with up to 64 units and 150 bedrooms per acre. Developers will not, however, be required to provide on-site parking for each rental unit.

City planners say higher density will actually relieve traffic congestion, because students living close to Grounds will not want to keep cars at their apartments. Yeah, right, say residents. They’ll just ride to class on their flying pigs.

In some states, cities can approve or deny university construction projects, and local governments can—and do—use that authority to force schools to build more housing. In Virginia, however, cities and counties have little say over State schools.

Yet even as the age-old complaints about student rentals pile up, City Hall is not terribly agitated about UVA pumping millions of dollars into a basketball arena and parking garage instead of student housing.

A majority of the new University Precinct housing units will be built and maintained by professional property managers, says Wade Tremblay, general manager of Wade Apartments, which owns existing properties around Grounds.

“When student housing is privately held, it’s a win for the City because the owners are paying property taxes,” says Tremblay. An added bonus, he says, is that students don’t cost the City money because they typically don’t use social services or send kids to local schools.

The more pressing question, however, is how thousands of new ’Hoos wielding Daddy’s Discover card will impact already skyrocketing rents. City planners say the University Precincts will contain students and prevent them from spreading out into other City neighborhoods.

Tremblay, whose 300 apartment units are mostly situated near the University, says the new University Precinct apartments will satisfy students’ taste for fine living.

“The students have grown up in nice homes, and the general trend is that they want nicer housing, more features, high-speed Internet connections,” he says. “And they’re willing to pay for it.

“We know we can get $2,000 for a nice four-bedroom apartment. This is the first year we’ve reached that $500 per bedroom threshold,” he says.

With local landlords expected to rake in at least $75,000 per acre in the University Precincts every month, City leaders are evidently quite happy to pick up UVA’s housing slack. –John Borgmeyer

Budding art historian Aviva Dove-Viebahn is articulate, attractive, friendly and self-assured. She smiles readily. She makes a good first impression. None of that, of course, is very extraordinary. Unfairly or not, one expects a certain polish from the daughter of Rita Dove, a former United States poet laureate under Bill Clinton, and Fred Viebahn, an accomplished novelist.

And why shouldn’t the 20-year-old Dove-Viebahn feel confident? She is in the midst of a remarkable academic career, a career that stands squarely on its own, a career that is extraordinary—though she doesn’t think so.

“I just don’t think of it as that big of a deal,” she says over coffee at the Mudhouse. “I don’t think of it at all, really.”

Perhaps to her it’s no big deal that she began college at 14 years old, graduated at 18 and took the comprehensive finals for her master’s degree in art history the same week she turned 20 (“A nice birthday present,” she says wryly). Perhaps it’s not worth noting that she was recently awarded the first student fellowship endowment, named the Dennis M. Luzak Fellowship fund, ever offered to the UVA Art Museum.

But perhaps it is.

It wasn’t as if Dove-Viebahn was itching to embark on her prodigal journey. She enjoyed middle school, and was looking forward to attending Albemarle High. But during a summer program at Johns Hopkins University, Dove-Veibahn was told about Mary Baldwin College’s PEG, or program for the exceptionally gifted, in which children her age could begin their college career surrounded by others of advanced abilities.

The chance to participate in the program seemed like an incredible opportunity, one Dove-Viebahn—not her parents—decided she couldn’t pass up.

“My parents were really great about the whole thing, because they didn’t pressure me either way,” she says. “I think they felt it was my decision.”

Dove-Viebahn, whose grandfather, Ray Dove, was a noted chemist, double-majored in biochemistry and theater (while at Mary Baldwin she directed the play Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, written by Alan Ball of American Beauty fame). However, it was in an art history class her junior year taught by Marlena Hobson, a class she “absolutely adored,” that Dove-Viebahn realized her calling.

UVA had a good program, and the school’s proximity to home made it the perfect—in fact, the only—choice for the art historian. Now, with her master’s most likely under her belt by the time this article goes to press, Dove-Viebahn plans to work toward a Ph.D. in the field.

To the reader, it seems like a spectacular resume. But one can’t help but wonder if there hasn’t been something lost amidst all the schooling. Dove-Viebahn maintains, however, that she hasn’t had to make undue sacrifices related to her social life.

“If you’re not going to enjoy life when you’re in school, then you’re just going to be miserable,” she says, adding that she goes out fairly frequently, and throws parties with her friends. Her age doesn’t often come up. “It just doesn’t become an issue, until I can’t get into a bar or something like that,” she laughs.

Asked if she’s ever considered taking some time off to do the things often associated with young adulthood—travel, party, indulge hobbies (Dove-Viebhan says she’s always liked photography, but has no idea how to develop film)—she says she’s thought about it, but has decided to remain committed to her academic goals. It’s a game plan her parents agree with.

“Every time I’ve talked to my parents about taking a year off…my mom especially has pointed out that when people take time off, they have a tendency to lose their focus,” she says.

The reference to her mother invites another obvious question: With such a literary lineage, has Dove-Viebahn herself ever considered writing as a career? “I do like writing—otherwise I couldn’t be an art historian—but I think I lack the motivation for writing full time,” she says.

Once a slacker, always a slacker.

Five pit bulls were euthanized during the last week of January at the Charlottesville SPCA. The dogs would only respond to their owner, who had just been arrested for murder in connection with a Federal drug charge. “Not only were they trying to kill other dogs,” says SPCA spokeswoman Carolyn Foreman, “but they were trying to kill us, too.”

The dogs’ hostility was a sure sign of serious mistreatment, says shelter manager Beth McPhee. “It takes an unspeakable amount of abuse to get this way,” she says. Foreman and McPhee both knew the dogs had been raised to fight, and for the canines, it was a matter of kill or be killed.

Spearheading the effort to eliminate dogfighting, Delegate Rob Bell brought a strict animal cruelty bill before the General Assembly on January 21. If approved, House Bill 2689 will make it a felony to promote, possess, transport, sell or train dogs for fighting.

“As it stands now,” says Bell, “the law is not preventative, and even harder to prosecute.” But until Governor Mark Warner signs on the dotted line, McPhee and Foreman continue to worry about the fighting dog’s plight.

“The biggest problem is that the dog fighting ring is so underground,” says Foreman, who testified in favor of Bell’s bill three weeks ago.

“We see the after-effects and the injured dogs, but all the horror stories we hear, without solid proof, are nothing more than hearsay,” she says.

Sure, an aggressive dog that arrives at the shelter wounded and scarred may have been hit by a car. But McPhee has her doubts. “Household pets just don’t look and act this way, period,” she says.

Fueling McPhee’s skepticism is the money behind dog fighting. It’s said to be a very lucrative business—not only in bookmaking but in the selling and breeding of the animals, too. Catching owners in the act is a constant challenge, to say the least.

“We’ll get a dispatched call about a pit bull dog fight five minutes away,” says Officer Bob Durrer, who for the past 21 years has been an animal control agent for the City, “and by the time we get there, there are dogs, and there might be people, but there’s no fight going on.”

Under the present dog fighting law, an undercover officer must prove not only that a dogfight took place, but also that bets were placed and money changed hands. This outdated legislation is no longer enough. Bell, like McPhee and Foreman, sees the new bill as a necessary preventative measure—save the dogs before they get into the ring.

“With this bill we can prosecute without ever physically going to the fight,” says Bell, offering the key element to his more workable law.

The breeds presently taking all the heat are pit bulls and Rottweilers. As Foreman points out, however, even a French Poodle, if abused long enough, will become uncontrollably aggressive, too.

“The dogs being trained to fight are being fed steroids and gunpowder,” says McPhee. “They’re being hung by their jowls, being allowed to eat a few bites then pulled away from their food by their legs. Their ears and tails are cropped to nubs. They’re forced to carry logging chains around their necks to build muscle.” And the abused dogs that don’t make the cut end up on a shelter doorstep every time.

McPhee and Foreman currently have at the shelter five pit bulls that might or might not have been abused, not counting the five they were forced to euthanize recently. They don’t blame the dogs, though. The responsibility for their condition falls strictly on the owners’ shoulders. “Man’s best friend,” says Foreman, “ultimately goes to his death.”

McPhee declined to comment in detail on the history of the five dogs recently put to sleep so as not to interfere with the ongoing police investigation into the owner. In most cases of dog fighting, owners aren’t caught committing dog abuse—McPhee and Foreman say the dogs are uncovered after a sting operation.

“Nine times out of 10 the police are going in after drugs and guns,” says McPhee. “There seems to be a direct link between the drug and criminal element and the dog-fighting problem.”

But until Bell’s bill is put into place, which could be as early as July 1, Foreman fears the numbers of abused dogs she sees daily will only grow.

“We have seen confiscated videotapes of these dogfights,” says Foreman, “and there are children in the audience. A lack of compassion begins at an early age, you know.”

—Kathryn E. Goodson

Peace of their heart

Council supports anti-war resolution

Geopolitical debates rarely play out in City Hall, but recently the most popular issue before Council has been a proposed resolution opposing a pre-emptive military attack by the United States on Iraq. Council approved the resolution 4 to 1 during its regular meeting on Monday, February 3, but not without a windy public hearing.

Mayor Maurice Cox extended the usual public comment period to accommodate people waiting in the aisles to speak before Council. They spoke. A lot.

Cox repeatedly asked people to keep their comments under three minutes. Very few complied, however, preferring instead to orate as if they were addressing the United Nations.

Several opponents of the resolution, including attorney Bob Hodus and a clique of local Republicans, said the debate belongs to Federal officials, not City Councilors; speakers from the Center for Peace and Justice, which drafted the resolution, said that with America on the brink of war, everyone needs to voice his conscience. According to Council records, 14 speakers favored the resolution, while eight opposed. Both sides fervently applauded like-minded sentiments, no matter how many times a particular point was repeated.

As it has in the national arena, the war debate inverted the political status quo in Council chambers. Conservatives called for dramatic government action, while liberals pleaded for restraint and warned of unforeseen consequences.

“I don’t want to go home tonight knowing my local representatives are a bunch of cowards,” said one man opposing the resolution, ignoring a shower of boos and hisses from peace activists.

A woman supporting the resolution told Council she believed America “should slow down and be careful.”

Each Councilor, too, resisted the edict to be brief as they expressed their sentiments about U.S. foreign policy. Only Schilling––alone among his peers in opposing the resolution––was succinct. He said it was inappropriate to debate war while the nation “is still mourning the space shuttle tragedy.”

At long (and I mean long) last, Council passed the resolution, which officially opposes “a pre-emptive military attack on Iraq unless it is demonstrated that Iraq poses a real and imminent threat to the security and safety of the United States.”

Council returned to familiar local territory at the end of the February 3 meeting when it approved a study that will examine traffic solutions at the Route 29 /Hydraulic Road intersection. Most of the $40,000 study will be funded by the Virginia Department of Transportation, with the local Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission (TJPDC) pitching in $10,000.

Last fall, the Mayor pushed for a larger study, expecting funding from VDOT, UVA, the City and County, as well as the developers of the Sperry property at the corner of Hydraulic and Route 29, where a 1.7 million square-foot shopping center is in the works. The funds didn’t come through, however, so this study “will not take the place of a fully funded study,” but “it will demonstrate that further study is worth the investment,” according to City documents.

While this may not be good news for critics who say Council spends too much money studying problems and ways to study problems, this project marks a significant change in local relations with the State. In this study, VDOT officials will work under the direction of local and regional planning staff. “It’s unheard of,” says TJPDC Director Harrison Rue. “The State is recognizing that we can come together as a community and make transportation decisions. They want to hear what we have to say.”–– John Borgmeyer

Free to grow

Supes approve 30 percent increase in school numbers

Despite the ever-present worry about the fallout from proposed personal property tax hikes and decreased revenue for programs in Albemarle County, it wasn’t all rain clouds at the Board of County Supervisors meeting on February 5. As further proof that the fingers of local population growth are spreading deeper into the County, Free Union Country School applied for, and received by unanimous vote, approval for 30 percent growth in students and faculty.

At the proposed 125 students and faculty, the country school will now be able to grow larger than most private schools in rural Albemarle. While a positive measure for the school, the additional growth is a double-edged sword for the surrounding area.

Jay Fennell, development co-coordinator and second- and third-grade teacher at the school, is also a longtime resident of Free Union. “I’ve disappointedly watched the growth here increase,” he says. “The roads alone cannot bear any more traffic.”

But he faces the problem of growth with some equanimity. After all, without it new opportunities in the area would never have arisen. “When I was younger, I thought that professionally, I would have to move,” says Fennell. “Now, I’d never think that.”

Free Union Country School, now in its 20th year, has to grow with times, says Fennell.

“If we can reach the minimum number of 100 students,” he says, “it will stabilize us financially.” It will also aid in the expansion of a two-storey, 3,000 square-foot activity building with offices, a 1,800 square-foot pre-school building and playground and 12 new parking spaces.

Three years ago, a consultant gave Fennell and other school officials a figure of 105 students as the baseline needed to achieve financial security and viability for the school. “In terms of expense and income,” says Fennell, “we are not completely tuition-driven.”

The added increase in students will certainly help balance out the numbers, though. With a yearly tuition of $7,500 per student, 15 new students will mean added revenues of $112,500. Twenty extra students boost the figure to $150,000 annually. Judging from historical demand, Free Union Country shouldn’t have trouble adding to its student roster. Within its first decade, enrollment had increased to 55 students from 35. In 1999, the school’s population had nearly doubled to 90.

In other County news: Ron Huber, Charlottesville Assistant Commonwealth’s Attorney, announced his withdrawal from the campaign for Commonwealth’s Attorney of Albemarle County. He cited personal and professional reasons in his February 5 announcement and pressed County residents to keep up the good fight.

“I encourage the people of Albemarle and the County Police officers to join me in continuing to offer suggestions to maintain a positive dialogue with [County Commonwealth’s Attorney] Jim Camblos to effect those changes,” he said.