Author: doug-nordfors

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Pump down the volume

“You can play almost anything —somebody’s going to like it.”

This kernel of equal parts wit and wisdom comes courtesy of one of Charlottesville’s premier working musicians, guitarist Vernon Fischer. And after almost 30 years here, teaching music and doing a few regular jobs but mainly gigging, gigging, gigging (and gigging) solo and with various bands, playing everything from jazz standards to popular tunes to Brazilian fare, in places like Keswick Hall, Farmington Country Club and Cheeseburger in Paradise, there’s lots more where that came from.


Dishing the wisdom after many years as a professional ambiance-maker: “I’ve always told myself, ‘If someone can make a million dollars on a pet rock, I can make a little on music,’” says Fischer.

“Your ego can’t be fragile. One third won’t like you, one third will, one third will be indifferent,” Fischer says. But such concerns take a back seat to the energy he spends whipping up the opportunities to throw his ego to the wolves and the lambs and the sloths. “It’s a game of promotion. Salesmanship 101—you have a product, you have to be willing show it. I’ve always told myself, ‘If someone can make a million dollars on a pet rock, I can make a little on music.’”

Comments like these may make Fischer seem a bit like an automaton with no respect for his audiences. It’s not like that at all. “You have to understand your function,” he says. “It’s a service.”  You want a seasonal tune? You want “Happy Birthday”? “I always try to do requests,” he says. He also anticipates what those requests might be. Though he describes himself as “not really a classical player,” he’s taught himself Pachelbel’s Canon, and J.S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, and many other iconic classical pieces. “If you don’t play ‘em, they’re probably going to ask you,” he says. Maintaining an appropriate volume level is another maxim he’s learned to swear by. “You’re there to add ambiance,” he says. “I noticed that the quieter I got, the more money in tips I made,” he adds, laughing.

Such humility belies Fischer’s stellar musical background and his deep appreciation of virtuosic musicianship.

Born in Baltimore, Fischer absorbed all kinds of music while growing up in the 1960s. “Popular music was very diverse back then,” he says. Hearing the great jazz guitarist Kenny Burrell on the radio one night was one of the many guideposts that sent him on his musical journey. He learned a great deal on his own, but never lacked for fine teachers. He took guitar lessons from a man named Walter Namuth, and later bought a Buddy Rich record for 50 cents and noticed that Namuth had once been Rich’s drummer. Fischer met another guitarist named Henry Merchant while gigging with a band as a young man in Baltimore, and later picked up a lot from him about how to develop as a solo player, which is the key, Fischer says, to making a living as a musician. “When you’re in a band, the revenue gets spread around.”  Fischer went on to study with big-time guitarists like Chet Atkins, Jim Hall and Larry Coryell.

Fischer moved to Charlottesville from northern Maryland in 1980. “I was in between jobs and girlfriends,” he says. But the choice wasn’t just haphazard. “I had heard that Charlottesville had a lot of good old-time string music players,” one of several snippets of information that alerted him to the aesthetic possibilities of the area for a person with a passion for playing music. And then there was the physical beauty of the landscape. “This is where you belong,” he thought to himself while on a visit here.

Eventually, he settled into his life as a superb regional performer, having decided not to shoot for a recording career. Waxing philosophical about his chosen path comes easy to him now. “It’s important to have idealism as a concept,” he says, “to let the fantasy be the guiding light. But it’s another thing to make that a reality. You say to yourself, ‘O.K., fine, I have to compromise.’”

All this has given him a fine-tuned perspective on the discrepancy between media popularity and genuine talent. “When I hear people talk about Jimi Hendrix,” he says, “I want to say, ‘Yeah, he did some interesting things, but have you heard Les Paul?!’” There’s no shortage of other examples to rant about. Fischer’s flabbergasted by the dreck Kevin Eubanks has to deliver as the leader of “The Tonight Show” band, compared to what he can present to smaller audiences. “He’s incredible!” Fischer says.

Fischer is the proud possessor of countless stories about his life as a working musician in the area. There’s the time, for instance, when Mick Jagger stayed at Keswick Hall when Fischer was doing a regular gig there. “He came in with three nice-looking young girls,” Fischer laughs, “sat with his back to me while I played, gave me a nod and left.” And he spins vivid images of how tough and competitive the local music business can be at times. “It’s like sea-gulls on a post at a beach —one pushes one off.”

Though Fischer’s not rich like a Rolling Stone, and though the road—or the beach—can get bumpy, nothing gets in the way of his determination to play music. “I know what the alternative is,” he says, referring to the various regular jobs he’s done, including construction and carpentry. “A guitar is the heaviest tool I want to pick up.”

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News

My Father’s House

words

Memoirs—such a hot genre in the current book biz that a certain James Frey was willing to pass off fiction as fact in his notorious A Million Little Pieces—tend to come in two forms: 1) dramatic personal events that demand expression, and 2) ordinary personal events made dramatic through description and analysis.


Beatrix Ost recounts her life during wartime in her memoir My Father’s House.

What’s interesting about part-time Charlottesville resident Beatrix Ost’s memoir My Father’s House, published in Germany in 2004 and recently translated by the author with Jonathan McVity, is how it essentially straddles those two subgenres. The book concerns Ost’s childhood in wartime rural Bavaria—a situation rife with drama (such as American planes strafing her as she walked home from school), but more often than not affecting her in a cursory, or purely psychological, way (how much, for instance, could her young mind grasp of her father’s narrow escape from court martial for defeatism?).  This is no World War II soldier’s memoir, in other words, and yet it proves that into one colossal event there are many entrances.

While the memoir walks a fine line, it leans toward the second subgenre. The reader’s interest is largely dependent on Ost’s presentation. Local writer John Casey, in his back-cover blurb, calls the memoir “a gorgeous book.” (Is there a link between this comment and, um, Ost thanking Casey in her acknowledgments for “his fruitful private writing lessons”? Oh, the sometimes amusing world of writers-supporting-other-writers…) Casey’s pronouncement bears the stamp of truth mainly because of Ost’s wealth of detail, which springs from both her keen memory and her artistic patience.

One chapter opens, for instance, with an extended description of her grandfather’s smoker’s ritual: “He probed the lower pockets of his jacket with his long, slender fingers—Ah, there it is, my tobacco—then drew out a pouch. Actually it was a wooden toad, an antiquity from China, with a frog sitting on it as a lid. A wonderfully polished ivory pug hung from a cord as weight.” The passage, which continues for several more sentences, accentuates the humanity at the still, small center of a maelstrom. In another chapter, Ost shows us natural innocence warring with war by detailing how the family adopted a stray doe.

It’s not clear how the process of translation may have contributed to Ost’s at times powerless writing style. For every deft turn of phrase there’s a cliché, such as “the news traveled through the house like wildfire,” and “sirens from the city sliced through the day like a knife,” or a feeble attempt at originality, such as: “Like Superman, we overcome time and space.”

But this quibble shouldn’t deter readers looking for the next good memoir to satisfy their fix.

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A night in Tune-isia

For facile or recklessly daring musical minds, “fusion” is just another word for “confusion.” For Brennan Gilmore and his bandmates, however, intelligently mixing together two distinct genres of music creates a potent potion.

Kantara plays “Arab-Appalachian music,” and if that conjures up an image of Mohammed and Jesus dancing a jig on a prayer rug, that’s partly what it’s designed to do. In 2005, Virginia native and guitarist Gilmore, while posted as a foreign service officer in Tunisia, was introduced to Riadh Fehri, a Tunisian musician known for his oud (Middle-Eastern lute) playing and for several cross-genre projects with various international musicians. Gilmore and Fehri started playing together informally, and hanging out and talking in the garden of Fehri’s conservatory while his elderly parents drank tea. “We soon realized,” Gilmore says, “the importance of showing a positive example of Arab-American cooperation, given the current tension between these communities.”


Kantara brings their blend of Western tunes with a Middle-Eastern bent (or is it vice versa?) to Gravity Lounge on May 27.

But because music is already the universal language, that angle only begins to tell the story. After Gilmore and Fehri played a few shows together in fall of 2005, the duo expanded when Gilmore invited longtime friends Ann Marie Calhoun (violin), Zack Blatter (bass) and Brian Calhoun (guitar), with whom he collaborated when they were students at UVA, to join in; he also added Lassad Hosni (percussion) and Amel Boukhchina (vocals).  As the band began playing throughout the Mediterranean region, they knew they had something: fusion that is beyond mere posturing and even beyond political clout, that—borne aloft on a high dose of musical acumen—revitalizes the concept of originality.

Using examples from Kantara’s self-titled 2006 EP (the band is poised to record a full-length effort at Bobby Read’s Small World Audio studio outside of Charlottesville in the coming weeks), Gilmore lays it all out for the layman:

Sometimes, he says, they’ll play a straight-up Appalachian tune like “Wayfaring Stranger, “ but with a Tunisian rhythm. “As opposed to Appalachian music where often the rhythms are rather simple and uniform, Tunisia’s rhythmic traditions are tremendously varied, and often complex—these can completely change the feel of an otherwise straightforward bluegrass/old-time tune.” Other times, he says, they’ll do the complete opposite—take a Tunisian tune like “Hobbi” and bend it until it’s straightforward.

In another respect, Appalachian music is less simple than its counterpart. “In Malouf music, and much of traditional Arab music,” Gilmore says, “there is little if any harmony—all the instruments and the vocalist play/sing the melody. In Kantara, we’ve taken a lot of those tunes and added chords and harmony—Westernizing them, but through the Appalachian prism.”

And then there are the band’s own compositions, which are as challenging to describe as they must be to play. In these tunes, Gilmore says, “the fusion is less adding one part Tunisian, one part Appalachian, but rather through a mix of influences from the start, less immediately recognizable as either Arabic or Appalachian in nature.”

If you need to hear the music to believe it (or even if you don’t), check out the band’s show at the Gravity Lounge on Sunday, May 27 ($5 for kids, $15 for adults; 7pm).

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Streetcar’s conductor

“I can’t sleep,” says Ronda Hewitt, thinking about her upcoming performance as Blanche DuBois in Live Arts’ production of Tennessee Williams’ classic drama, A Streetcar Named Desire.


Looking up to Tennessee Williams: Ronda Hewitt is excited about conveying her respect for A Streetcar Named Desire to local audiences.

Nervousness? Nah. Hewitt, a graduate of American Conservatory Theater (“the Juilliard of the West”) in San Francisco, is beyond all that. In addition to acting in numerous productions around the country, she’s been a regular at Live Arts since 1999, displaying a remarkable range—from projecting just the right degree of eeriness in the apocalyptic Far Away to a brauva comic turn as a saucy wench in Tom Jones to her bewitching multiple roles in The World’s Wife. 

Excitement? Oh, yes. She says she’s always likened the post-rehearsal acting process to a runner’s high—that second wind where being and doing are one and the same. But this time around, there’s more to it than that. Streetcar isn’t quite like any other play, and Williams is the kind of playwright who practically demands reverence.

While practicing a scene at a recent rehearsal, Hewitt had a revelation: “The scene is a play unto itself.” And her thoughts kept on multiplying. “The play is made up of these huge arias. It’s operatic.” She had a similar epiphany about Williams’ way with words. “This isn’t Mamet-speak,” she says, referring to her role in David Mamet’s Boston Marriage at Live Arts several years ago, “this is Tennessee Williams. There’s poetry here. It’s so rich and so deep.”

“I’m hearing Williams’ voice in my head,” she says. “I’m an emotional basket case.”


A portion of Ronda Hewitt’s Live Arts legacy: Top, from left to right, The World’s Wife, Tom Jones, Picasso at the Lapine Agile. Bottom, from left to right, Coffeehouse 13, Far Away, Boston Marriage.


Has she spun out of control? No way. It’s all part of the acting method she’s cultivated. “Everything I need to know is in the text. If you look at the text first, all the emotional stuff comes out of that.” Ironically, she says, giving herself over to an imaginary character frees up her real self. “You have to become vulnerable. That’s where it gets fun.”

Blanche, the Southern Belle who comes to stay with her sister, Stella Kowalski, and her husband, the rough and carnal Stanley, in New Orleans’ French Quarter, is many characters in one. “Sinner, saint and clown,” Hewitt calls her, and goes on to explain two ways of approaching such complexity.

One is to identify with Blanche personally. Hewitt grew up in a small town in Illinois, but her mother is from the South. Playing Blanche, Hewitt says, is “a way to connect with my Southern side.” And, amazingly enough, Blanche and Hewitt have the same birthday, September 15. Hewitt can also identify with Blanche’s “search for survival,” as Hewitt puts it, in the way that everyone can. “She’s trying to find a place when she has no place to land.”

The other approach is an objective one: to simply present her story. Hewitt says, “I don’t want to judge her. The audience can decide for themselves.”

The audience can share in the excitement starting with this Thursday’s Preview Night. Opening Night is Friday, and the production, which is directed by John Gibson, and also stars Mark Valahovic as Stanley and Priya Curtis as Stella, will run through June 9.

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Living

All it needs is…nothing

“Bellair is a very desirable location,” says Realtor Jim Duncan with no hesitation. No hesitation whatsoever.


Bellair’s lake is a picture-perfect finishing touch in a well-groomed landscape.

No wonder. The entrance—just past the 250 Bypass as you drive away from UVA along Ivy Road—looks a bit like the entrance to a national park. Once inside, you’re greeted with a sign saying, “SLOW. Children Playing and People Walking.” Actually, “People Playing” wouldn’t feel like a misnomer in this enchanting place. The rolling landscape complete with a pristine lake (complete on this spring day with Canadian geese) at the center is home to many a home, but with no corresponding lack of green space, and more old-growth trees than you can shake a branch at.

“I think of subdivisions as house house house; this is more like a development,” Duncan says in between discussions of the precious few homes for sale in Bellair at the moment—a situation that isn’t likely to change any time in the future.

Technically, Bellair is a subdivision, and it was one of the first in the Charlottesville area. The mid-1940s, when it was established, was an era when visually pleasing and entirely peaceful locations for development were there for the picking and little or no concessions had to be made.

There was no 250 Bypass back then, and no Barracks Road Shopping Center. And even 60 years later, Bellair residents, tucked away in their homes within the established confines of the neighborhood, may be aware that the outside world is encroaching on them, but they’re not obliged to feel it.

Right choice

Two of those residents are Lisa Ross, who on weekdays makes the easy commute to Downtown, and her retired husband, Bob Moorefield. The couple moved to the neighborhood in 1988. Their sizeable, ranch-style house, built in 1959, never made it onto the market in ’88. They discovered that the house was going up for sale and went straight to the owner. “We pretty much begged her,” Lisa says.


A long and winding drive leads to Bob Moorefield and Lisa Ross’ house (left). which they snagged in 1988 before it even made it onto the market.

They couldn’t be happier with their decision. When thinking about the neighborhood’s advantages, it’s difficult for them to know where to start.

“It’s close to anywhere,” Lisa says, though their main concern is the atmosphere surrounding them when they go nowhere. “We have a blue heron that lives right down there,” Bob says, pointing out the window of their elegant, low-ceilinged living room (a product of the days before cathedral ceilings were the rage) to their backyard. Also close by, he says, is a fox with three legs and her cubs. “Our children built forts out there,” Lisa says.

In addition to all the timeless nature, they appreciate being part of a human story. “What’s appealing about the neighborhood,” Lisa says, “is that there are still people here who can give you a sense of the history.”

Bob has in his possession a copy of the original Bellair bylaws, one of which specifically forbids people of non-Caucasian descent from buying a home there. That part of the lore of the neighborhood, the couple says, is long gone. With protection from the bustling world outside doesn’t come seclusion from 21st century enlightenment.

On a far plainer level, after living in Bellair for almost 20 years, the couple themselves can provide new residents with a sense of the hardly cataclysmic, but significant changes the neighborhood has undergone. When they moved in, “you could count on one hand the number of children in elementary school,” Bob says. “You saw this gradual transition,” says Lisa. “Now the majority of new residents are couples with children.” A lot of them, she says, have lived in other neighborhoods. It’s easy to imagine them waiting patiently in the wings and pouncing on an opportunity to live in Bellair, just as Lisa and Bob did.

Bob, along with other residents, helped on the project to remove a road, which allowed for more controlled access and made the neighborhood even safer. And it took five years of lobbying by residents to get a stoplight outside the front entrance.

The price of perfection

The couple is hard pressed to think of any drawbacks to living in Bellair. Even with the nice signs, speeding can be a problem, but only with nonresidents. When it’s very quiet, Lisa and Bob can hear cars on the Bypass. And yet, ironically, there aren’t many neighborhoods that would ever reach such a level of quietness that remote sounds can be heard. “There are maintenance issues,” Bob says, referring to the age of the average house in the neighborhood. The couple has plans to do some renovations in the coming years.


Lofty heights: Bellair home prices have averaged nearly $800,000 since July 2006.

That’s something that will be on the minds of new buyers. Another ranch-style house currently for sale—list price $649,900—was built in 1949. A Colonial-style house—list price $1,250,000—was built in 1954. Duncan says that many of the houses that go on the market in Bellair already have been renovated (one reason for the above price discrepancy), but there’s always potential for more work.

“You make that concession,” Duncan says. “Location can outweigh other considerations.” Ah yes, location location location. “There’s nothing that has this type of location and this type of house,” Duncan says after pondering whether there is anything else in the Charlottesville area that matches Bellair.

For Lisa and Bob, these practical considerations are certainly a worthy topic of discussion, but there is no shortage of other positive angles for them to take when they muse on their Bellair experience. “There are a lot of nice people here,” Bob says.
   


AT A GLANCE

Distance to the Downtown Mall: 3.3 miles

Distance to UVA: 2.8 miles

Elementary School: Murray

Middle School: Henley

High School: Western Albemarle

Number of homes sold since July 2006: 4

Average price of these four sales: $783,962.50

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News

The Virginia Quarterly Review

words

Eclectic, heterogeneous, multifarious—spiffy words that, either by themselves or lined up like cherries on a slot machine, can’t truly capture the range of material in any given issue of The Virginia Quarterly Review. Trying to absorb it all seems to produce a mass of tiny bubbles in the brain, and the only way to keep from drowning in them is to resort to a compressed list of reactions. Let’s call the following not a David Letterman Top 10, but an Oprah and Uma Top 5 Reasons To Read the Latest Edition of VQR:


Now 50 percent more eclectic! The latest VQR features stimulating essays and fiction from a Nobel Prize recipient, a former Marine and a famous dead guy.

5. Mark Ehrman’s “Borders and Barriers.” Part of a VQR Portfolio about (mostly Mexican/American) border issues called “Drawing the Line,” this essay argues that walls have never worked as political-problem-solving devices. Sounds boring? Ehrman takes the reader on a mental journey from Berlin to the West Bank to medieval France and has him scaling the heights of anthropological bad wisdom in search of a finer world. What could be more bracing than that?

4. Mark Twain’s “The Walt Whitman Controversy.” Yes, that’s the Mark Twain. This previously unpublished, mock letter to the editor asks the question: How can you censor certain passages in Whitman’s poems when great writers from Boccaccio to Rabelais to Shakespeare to Swift have been attempting to shock the benumbed reading public for years? Or, as Twain puts it in his famously crisp, derisive, sardonic and finally indescribable way: “Which are more harmful, the old bad books or the new bad books?”

3. David J. Morris’ “The Image as History: Clint Eastwood’s Unmaking of an American Myth.” This essay by a former Marine, centered on Eastwood’s film Flags of Our Fathers, explains how Eastwood avoids fetishizing combat violence by employing a narrative method that “seems to mimic post-traumatic stress disorder.” It’s a solid look at the flimsy bridge between patriotism and war.

2. Nadine Gordimer’s “The Second Sense.” Though this isn’t Gordimer’s best short story, and cowers under the heft and unremitting virtuosity of the Nobel Prize-winner’s novels, it’s one more instance of her rare ability to offer substance without forgoing style.

1. Alessandera Lynch’s “The Mice of the Mother’s House” and “Carousel.” These poems might remind some readers of revisiting a Brothers Grimm story as an adult and seeing straight through the innocent artifice to the tortuous psychology. Macabre, harrowing, ghoulish…you name it.

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Getting the word out

A little thing known as The Big Read, a program of the National Endowment for the Arts, began in 2006 with several communities around the United States encouraged to “read a great book together.” This year, the program is nationwide, and the Virginia Foundation Center for the Book is one of 72 organizations to receive a grant to participate. While in the Newport News Public Library area, for instance, citizens are encouraged to read Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God, in our area it’s F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. With all due respect to the Foundation’s publicity machine, we at C-VILLE thought we’d do our bit to get the word out. Here, then, are our Top 10 Reasons to Read The Great Gatsby:

10. It’s either that or get ticketed for breach of civic duty.

  9. Three words: rich people suffering!

  8. Fitzgerald wasn’t drunk while he was writing it—only before and after.

  7. It’s much better than the sequel, The Enormous Fatsby.

  6. No other American novel succeeds as well in enacting an allegory of this country’s unravished illusions and ineluctable declivities, as Gatsby’s Platonic conception of himself clashes with the loneliness of his dream-quest, and signs and causes correspond to create a univocal, panoramic deconstruction of one nation’s sense of self.

  5. The movie sucks.

  4. You’ll never get West Egg, Long Island, and East Egg, Long Island, mixed up again.

  3. It’s roughly 500 pages shorter than Moby Dick.

  2. The average American novel today reads like a tax-code manual in comparison.

  1. Why not, old sport?

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News

When is a black market not a market?

What in the name of Bill Gates is the Internet? The man himself wrote in 2000 that it’s “the center of attention for businesses, governments and individuals around the world.” Well, that’s a stab at describing its function. But what is it? Is it an actual entity, like a shoe or a file cabinet or Larry King’s seventh wedding license? Well, not quite. Diana Saco, author of the book Public Space and the Internet, says the Internet has a “partial nonphysicality.” Huh?

One thing (well, not a thing, but a concept) is for sure: The Internet provides the setting for an immeasurable amount of communication that doesn’t require face-to-face contact. Letter writing and phone calling are pitiful mutants in comparison. 

Enter the criminal element. Imagine a mask that not only covers your face but everything else about you, so that you’re dangerously alive and simply invisible in the same breath. Consider the Dateline NBC TV series “To Catch A Predator,” about men seeking sex with underage girls. Behind the scenes over the Internet, the men’s language is slick, savvy and confident. It’s a different story, however, once they’re caught on camera. Through the windows of their eyes you can see their souls imploding.    

That show is a rare case of successful Internet crimefighting, made possible by lunatic biological urges that induce men to take risks. In the case of most websites conducting illegal business, when the FBI or other law enforcement organizations attempt to shut them down, the shadowy perpetrators just switch to another URL, and once again all is right (i.e., wrong) with the world.

But let’s stick to some soft-core examples that don’t make you wonder if God created evil but do illuminate the unprecedented power of the Web to aid cheaters. In the past, acquiring a fake diploma, or a plagiarized term paper, required some level of physical connection and potentially hazardous exposure. Now all you need to do is type in www.phonydiplomas.com or www.termpapergenie.com and you’re on your guilty yet merry way.

On the homepage of phonydiplomas.com there’s a substantial list of options. At the top of the list: “Realistic Diplomas with Real Names.” Now why would you want a fake name on your fake diploma? Could it be the people who run this site can only pretend they graduated from high school? Next on the list: “Very Realistic College Degrees.”  Suggestion for a company slogan: “When realistic isn’t good enough…” “Diplomas” on this site, by the way, cost between $160 and $230, depending on the size. Considering college tuitions these days, that’s quite a bargain.

Turns out there’s also a website called phonydiploma.com (look closely, there’s no “s”). This one makes clearer the fact that in addition to diplomas they create GED and regular transcripts. These sell for just under $100—a small price to pay for keeping your head empty of a vast array of crucial knowledge. Both sites throw a spotlight on the fact that “novelty” is an amazing word. Attach it to the word “diploma” and suddenly you’re peddling goods that are “chiefly decorative” or  “comic.” Harmless enough (think of George on “Seinfeld” saying to Jerry: “You know I always wanted to pretend to be an architect”), except if the surgeon who’s about to operate on your colon didn’t actually graduate from Las Vegas State Medical School. Another loophole: Real school seals are never used—oh no, that would be a copyright infringement. 

And now for the ultimate loophole: The homepage of termpapergenie.com announces: “Click here to get a custom non-plagiarized term paper.” Which means…what? That the person who wrote it didn’t plagiarize it? That’s meaningless, like saying that neither the chicken nor the egg came first.

Wouldn’t you know it? There’s another website called non-plagiarized-termpapers.com. This one charges $9.95 per page if you want them in five days or more. And it’s $24.95 if you want them within 24 hours. Cheating and procrastinating…why commit one sin when you can commit two?

Ah, if only all Internet bad behavior were this amusing.

Categories
Living

Neighborhood: Heart of the city

To those not in the know, Fifeville sounds like one of the remote towns outside the pearly gates of Charlottesville, where you can’t get a $3 coffee drink if your life depended on it. 
Nothing could be further from the truth. Fifeville is an old Charlottesville neighborhood named after the Fife family, whose farm once covered a good portion of the 250-acre area. It was originally developed for railroad workers at the beginning of the 20th century. 

Adjacent to the W. Main Street Corridor, Fifeville stretches from Ridge Street to Valley Road Extended. Driving west along its main thoroughfare, Cherry Avenue, toward UVA, you pass one of the oldest shopping centers in town and then slope uphill past the new Roosevelt Brown Boulevard. At that point, Cherry becomes like a roller coaster ride. Up and down you go (for God’s sake, slow down and get a thrill some other way!) through a peaceful residential section.

We spotted Nate Winston near the corner of Grove and Jones. One of Fifevile’s great assets is its proximity, by foot, to Downtown.

The neighborhood may be old, but in terms of the real estate market, it’s entering a new phase.

Realtor Heather Griffith compares the rise in interest in Fifeville property to what happened in Belmont several years ago. One big factor is UVA’s continuing expansion. “The new cancer center, the South Lawn Project,” Griffith says, “that’s why Fifeville is a good investment.”

We visit one house on Grove Street Extended, just on Fifeville’s western border, whose owner rented it out for many years to UVA students. The market has changed. “They saw the value of selling,” Griffith says. Like many of the neighborhood’s houses, it was built in the 1920s. To the question of whether it needs some interior renovation, Griffith says, “Very much so.” That’s no tragedy for many a buyer today, however. The square stucco house, perched on top of a tiny hill, with its solid, historic charm and immense backyard, seems worth its $244,900 price, plus any extra money
for renovation.

Sweat equity

Ray Nedzel knows all about renovating. He lives on Oak Street, right near the eastern border of Fifeville, in a house built in 1925 that he bought a year and a half ago.

Ray Nedzel knows his house inside and out after doing major renovations. "There were times during the work when I would think, ‘I don’t know how this house is even standing,’" he says.

“It had to be jacked up and all the beams replaced,” he says. “There were times during the work when I would think, ‘I don’t know how this house is even standing.’” Currently, he occupies the second floor while he’s refashioning—a euphemism for grueling, painstaking renovation—the bottom floor, which includes a closed in room that used to be a side porch. By this June, he hopes to do a switcheroo: move downstairs into a pristine new space, and rent out the second floor.

The bottom floor has an atmosphere of controlled chaos: tools and plaster dust scattered everywhere but with an incremental goal clearly in sight. Nedzel is doing a heavy share of the work himself. “I’ve hired a few people here and there,” he says. He also had to enlist a bulldozer to clear the backyard of all manner of junk: car parts, oil cans, broken bicycles, etc.

Especially now that he’s well on his way to fulfilling his vision, Nedzel appreciates what’s happening to the neighborhood. “When I bought the house there were four nearby properties condemned by the city, literally padlocked shut.” None of them ended up getting torn down. “Renovations as opposed to knockdowns,” Nedzel says, clearly pleased. “The neighborhood will never be quite gentrified.”

Nedzel values this section of Fifeville for another reason besides the opportunity to purchase a fixer-upper. “I wanted to be able to walk Downtown,” he says. “It’s closer here than when I was living in Belmont.”

Oak is a gem of a street, not so much beautiful as strikingly authentic, with a small-scale, European quality tinged with obvious historic American touches. One house, for instance, has a Southern, old-style double front porch. Sidewalks are sporadic and off-street parking is a rarity. Nedzel feels lucky to have a driveway. “More sidewalks,” he says, “would be key to bringing more of a neighborhood feel.”

But he’s not complaining. In Fifeville he’s found his home—even if it isn’t quite up and running yet.

Authentic ambience

Not all the available homes in the neighborhood need so much grooming. Griffith and I visit another 1920s house farther east on Grove Street, similar in size and design, that’s already had some work done on the interior. This one’s selling for $283,000. The refinished heart pine wood flooring in most of the rooms is especially impressive. Griffith calls them the kind of floorbaords that, if removed and sold separately, “people would pay big bucks for.” There are two large bedrooms upstairs, and two bathrooms—the one upstairs has a clawfoot bathtub.

The house is a tight fit (cozy, if you like), and it’s easy to imagine even further work being done on it. And that’s what Griffith predicts. “A family would buy something like this and fix it up.”

Grove Street is a sort of spruced up version of Oak Street, but projecting the same earthy authenticity, complete with—you’ll believe it if you see it—neatly cluttered porches, and a sense of immiment, as opposed to reclusive, life: As we visit the house, a man is reading on his porch, eyeing us peacefully out of the corner of his eye.

                       Forest Hills Park is one place where Fifevillians congregate.

Grove doesn’t feel as timeless as Oak. University buildings loom visibly in the distance, and six new houses are being built nearby on 10th and Page. But this particular location, and its air of freshness, will appeal to certain types of buyers.

That’s Fifeville for you: streamlined in some respects, but with enough subtle and glaring variations to keep your brain permanently teased. Oh, and a fine place to live. 

At a glance

Distance to Downtown: .7 miles
Distance to UVA: 1 mile   
Elementary School: Johnson
Number of households in 2000: 1,270
Median age in 2000: 32.2
City tax rate: $.99 per $100
Average home assessment in 2007: $145,000
Increase in average assessment since 2006: 32 percent

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News

Iris DeMent

music

A few hundred people were drawn to the Gravity Lounge last Friday night by The Voice.

Iris DeMent, born in the northeast corner of Arkansas, burst onto the country/folk scene in 1992 with the album Infamous Angel, 11 songs sung in a toned-down version of The Voice. Over the years—whether because of evolution or calculation, it’s hard to say—The Voice has gotten even more distinctive. Dolly Parton, who’s no slouch when it comes to singing, would probably give her right arm (get that other image out of your mind) for DeMent’s authentic sound. Lifetimes of British and Irish and Appalachian and Southern DNA seem to crackle like an old record out from its core. It’s so crowded and complex that it’s almost dissonant. It elbows its way, tingling, all the way to your spine.

When, accompanying herself on the guitar, she sang the simple line, “I had a garden but my flowers died” (from “Easy’s Getting Harder Every Day”), I could feel the nutrients retreating from the soil. It actually hurt. Each time she sang the refrain from “When My Mornin’ Comes Around,” while accompanying herself on the piano, my throat gave birth to a tear and the liquid pellet shot up to my right duct. Not since Cheap Trick brushed off the tepid applause and did an opening-act encore back in 1980 have I cried like that at a concert.

Country/folk? Personal anthems like “When My Mornin’ Comes Around” and “My Life” involve far more hymn than twang, so to speak. Nonautobiographical songs like “Easy’s Getting Harder Every Day” and “Our Town,” not only in their lyrics, but also in the way DeMent presents them, evoke the famous anecdote about jazz legend Charlie Parker: When someone asked him why he liked to choose country songs on the jukebox, he said, “Listen to the stories.”

All of it came off like a dream in the intimate Gravity space (“I like this place,” she said. “I’ve seen ’em all, you know”), but also because she often treated fans of her records to fresh versions of her songs, apparently improvising tempos not so radically new as to be unpleasing.

“I look just about average, anyway,” she said after apologizing that some rows couldn’t see her at the piano. The irony—there’s nothing less average than DeMent’s talent and spirit—produced a burst of laughter like a gasp of delight from the audience.