Author: erinohare

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Arts

Flutist-guitarist Maxx Katz explores doom with a view

Before Maxx Katz plays a single note of a FLOOM set, she looks out at the audience in front of her and thinks: “We’re all going to die.”

That thought in mind, she rings out one heavy chord on her silver sparkle Epiphone Les Paul and lets it tumble out of her bitchin’ amps and through the crowd like a slow fog, enveloping everyone in the room in a two-sided truth: Death is inevitable, but the fact that we’re alive “is really big and remarkable.”

It’s hard to escape the cloud of sound; it seeps into every corner of the room, and if her listener is willing to join her on that cloud, he might reach a certain level of mysticism. It’s what Katz aims to achieve, for both herself and her listener, with FLOOM, her solo musical project that yokes the weight of doom metal—heavy, heavy metal from a low-tuned guitar played at slow tempos, often with foreboding lyrics—with the haunting lightness of the flute.

We’re all going to die, but before we do, there’s life to live, Katz says, and we might as well fill it with rad music.

Katz, a highly trained classical and jazz flutist and an experienced doom-metal guitarist who’s toured nationally and internationally with Red Wizard and as Miami Nights, recently began combining the two out of boredom and sheer necessity. It’s nothing we’ve heard here in town before.

“I don’t know how other people feel about doom, but in my favorite moments—when the riffs are good—it brings you up to the edge of reality and you look over,” Katz says. “I kind of love the bleakness,” she says, because sometimes it’s empowering to stare down a scary thing, to release a powerful sound upon it.

But after years of touring with doom bands based out of Charlottesville, Philadelphia and Portland, Oregon, Katz tired of playing the same riffs and rehashing the same sounds; she began itching for the expressiveness flute affords her. When she put them together, she found that flute expands doom “not just in a register way, but in an emotional way. It adds this register of delicacy and beauty but still [has] strength and size,” Katz says.

Last spring, Katz applied for—and received—a New City Arts Charlottesville SOUP grant for FLOOM to explore what’s going on in the space between the high-end of the flute and the low-end of the guitar. SOUP dinner attendees pay $10 for soup, salad, bread, dessert and the chance to vote for one of the artists presenting projects in need of funding; in May, they voted for FLOOM. “I had this mindset that I was too weird, that [what I make] is too weird for people, and that I was outside society in this way. But then people voted for it, and I was shocked and very encouraged. Maybe people do want to experience reality in the same way I experience reality,” Katz says with a low, warm laugh.

FLOOM songs—Katz says she’s composed about two and a half of them—are less like songs and more like sonic journeys. Instead of traveling from point A to point B, then to C and back to A, a FLOOM song will jump from A to F, make a roundabout back to B and maybe stop at C along the way. Katz creates an atmosphere with tone and texture, one where every note of the song is played live (“I’m not into samplers; I’m not into recorded things,” she says) to heighten the shared unique musical experience.

When Katz writes for FLOOM, she says she tries to make the seemingly discordant instruments work together by creating layers of sound around and between them. She’s not just looping a guitar chord progression and playing flute solos over that—“That’d be boring,” Katz says. Instead, she plays around with which instrument carries the atmosphere, which instrument creates the texture, when both are needed, and how they can complement or contradict the other. Sometimes she loops the guitar, sometimes she loops the flute. She sings. She strikes. She provokes. The songs are quite composed, but Katz keeps a certain level of improvisation in each FLOOM set—speeding things up, slowing them down, ringing a chord a bit longer—depending on how the music feels that day.

She aims to evoke the intangible through music. Music is an elusive medium in a way—we can’t see it, or hold it in our hands; a chord doesn’t ring forever. But we can feel the vibrations of the sound in our bones and our blood, and the emotion of it in our hearts and minds. Music makes us feel the invisible parts of ourselves.

“There’s this level of heart and life that’s so hard to get to, especially with the way we live. Talking to that level is my goal,” Katz says. Sometimes when she plays, she says reality seems to open up and she feels free to move. Other times, a note will hit just the right sadness, “the good kind of sadness that blooms, and it’s like, ‘Oh, thank you for doing that.’” That’s what she listens for when she’s on stage, on the edge of existence, fully engrossed in life while death looks on from a distance. There’s a bravery, a brazenness to it.

Katz says she’s driven by “the undercurrent of wanting a more complete experience of life. That’s always going to win. The making of things is a necessary thing about living a real life that cannot be avoided,” and music will always be the way she works the chi of life into something we can hold on to together. “If a performer rings their heart like a bell,” she says, “it starts ringing everyone else’s.”

Maxx Katz performs as FLOOM, combining the guttural depths of heavy-metal guitar with the piercing lightness of flute in an emotional sonic collision. Photo by Eze Amos

Categories
Living

Food options aplenty at the new shopping center

You don’t even have to get out of your car to satiate your Panera craving. Photo by Tom McGovern

Loosen your belts, Charlottesville. We’re getting more food, food that we didn’t even know we needed. Here’s a quick roundup of what’s open—or will be open soon—at 5th Street Station.

Wegmans A chain that feels less like a grocery store and more like a marketplace, Wegmans boasts a host of specialty items: organic produce and meats, fresh bakery breads, sushi, a market café with a self-serve bar, made-to-order pizzas, sandwiches, a pub with bacon burgers and fish ’n’ chips, a cheese counter, a large wine and beer selection and more. Open now.

Timberwood Tap House The sister restaurant of Timberwood Grill located across from Hollymead Town Center on the north side of town, Timberwood Tap House has an approachable (and cleverly written) menu full of American classics like wings, calamari, burgers, salads, spare ribs, New York strip, s’mores baked Alaska and more, plus sizable beer and wine lists. The bar side of the restaurant is filled with TVs, but the dining side has nary a screen in sight if you’d rather have a side of conversation with your entrée, says owner Adam Gregory. Open now.

Panera Bread The time has come, Charlottesville. You no longer have to leave the comfort of your vehicle to get your broccoli-cheddar soup and asiago cheese bagel fix, because this Panera has a drive-thru. Wear your pajamas, if you like. We won’t judge. Open now.

Fuzzy’s Taco Shop This is the first Virginia franchise for the Texas-based, fast-casual, Baja-style taco chain that has built a cult following throughout the South. Franchise owner Pranav Shah plans to open the restaurant early in the morning so that third- shift workers can come in for happy hour margaritas after work. Opening in February.

Other food and drink spots slated to open at 5th Street are: Jersey Mike’s Subs, Red Mango frozen yogurt and Alamo Drafthouse Cinema. There will be a Virginia ABC store there, too.

Rock Barn to close

According to an e-mail sent to its restaurant partners on November 1, “The Rock Barn will be wrapping up this chapter of its life at the end of the year.” As of last week, the field-to-fork butcher was in the middle of its final production run and will continue to sell its remaining inventory through December. “I have been lucky to work with so many talented people both at The Rock Barn as well as all of our restaurant partners,” says founder Ben Thompson. “I will always be grateful for the knowledge (the late) Richard (Bean) and Ara Avagyan imparted on myself and the team. Double H, under Ara’s guidance, is still doing a spectacular job and continues to be an inspiration for me as we plan the next steps,” Thompson says. As to what those next steps are, we’ll have to wait and see.

Mea culpa: Dabney oversights

In last week’s Small Bites column, we wrote about two Michelin-rated D.C. restaurants that boast local ties (The Inn at Little Washington and The Dabney). We regrettably neglected to mention that Ben Louquet, formerly of Zocalo and Tavola, and Brad Langdon, former bar manager at Public Fish & Oyster on West Main Street, are current members of the The Dabney bar staff.

Categories
Arts

Lulu Miller on the fulfillment of making ‘Invisibilia’

The first installment of Think & Drink, a new series from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, features NPR reporter Lulu Miller reading from her upcoming book, Why Fish Don’t Exist. Staff photo

When Lulu Miller was a kid growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, in the 1980s, she’d peel away from her family to write. She’d take reams of computer paper—the kind that’s one long, continuous accordion sheet with tearaway perforations on the sides—from her dad’s printer and write for hours. It felt like sledding, she says, like she could go wherever.

“It was a super happy feeling, making stories up about whatever,” so that desire to tell stories and be a writer “locked in very early,” Miller says.

Miller, who earned an MFA in fiction from UVA in 2013, and now resides mostly in Charlottesville, still writes fiction (she recently published her first story, “Me and Jane,” in Catapult magazine). But as co-host of NPR’s popular “Invisibilia” podcast, which launched in January 2015 and for two seasons has explored “the invisible forces that control human behavior—ideas, beliefs, assumptions and emotions,” Miller and her co-hosts, Alix Spiegel and Hanna Rosin, tell stories that aren’t made up at all. They tell true stories, most of them stranger than fiction, such as the one about Daniel Kish, a blind man who uses echolocation to see (yes, see); and the story of Martin Pistorius, a man who was locked in his body, his brain fully functional but he had no ability to communicate, for 12 years before he was freed; and the tale of a woman who has never experienced fear.

Stories like these are the ones that pulled Miller to radio in 2005.

After studying history in college (“I felt like I needed to know more things,” Miller says) and moving to New York to write, Miller found herself working for a woodworker and listening to public radio—which, for the record, she hated when she was a kid—to “Radiolab” and “This American Life.” The way that radio transported her from her seat on the train and into the story unfolding in her earbuds was a force she couldn’t escape.

For Miller, there was nothing quite like it, and she had to be part of it. So she interned at “Radiolab,” at first answering phones and e-mails and burning CDs, eventually helping “Radiolab” co-host Robert Krulwich edit the “Detective Stories” episode before conducting an interview of her own about an elderly man who had begun having musical hallucinations. “They were very vivid and very real, and he eventually realized it was his subconscious keeping him company because everyone in his life was dying,” Miller recalls. “He ended up crying.”

She’s often amazed at the things people reveal about themselves in an interview. It’s a reminder that when you’re vulnerable, “when you do show your worst side, that can be an act of humanity, because it shows everyone that everybody else is so deeply imperfect,” Miller says. “That can be such a gift, because sometimes people put up such a front.”

It’s her job to break through that front, and she has some favored methods for doing it; for getting Kish’s mom to talk about how she was called reckless by other parents for letting her blind son live his life as any other kid, taking horrible falls off of bicycles and running into poles, for example.

“Really listen,” Miller says. “Really show you’re with them. Sometimes people are almost shocked when they’re very closely listened to.” Once the person is a bit more relaxed, she says she starts poking and prodding gently.

“The range of people and their take on the world, that’s what never ceases to amaze me,” Miller says.

She recalls interviewing a woman who snuck into a mental hospital in the 1970s. Miller says she asked what the place looked like, what it smelled like, asked for physical details, and the woman responded with, “‘Oh, the smell. The smell was like this sour mop that, no matter how much you mopped, it still smelled like that.’ Her voice changed,” Miller recalls, “and it went from this story she’d told a million times to the disgust of that mop. And she started talking more slowly—you could tell she was remembering new information. And then I asked something like, ‘What did that smell mean to you?’ and she paused and said, ‘It’s the smell of neglect.’”

Miller likes to think of her job in terms of a scene in 1991’s The Addams Family, in which Gomez and Uncle Fester go into the library, Gomez pulls a book, and the bookshelf turns and there’s a secret passageway behind it. “I sometimes think that I’m [rooting] around in people’s memories, trying to pull the right book, where suddenly you gain entrance to this other wash of memories.”

Reporting for radio is “this profession where you still get to be an explorer and go into all these spaces where you wouldn’t otherwise have access,” Miller says, adding that she loves working through these stories with the “Invisibilia” team that is currently planning season 3, which will focus on how we interact with reality. She might have traded her dad’s computer paper for a microphone, but she’s still sledding. Microphone in hand and a world of subjects before her, she can go wherever and take her listeners along for the ride.

Categories
Living

Michelin-rated D.C. restaurants boast local ties

Chefs and restaurateurs around the world work their whole lives in hopes of earning even a single Michelin Star for their restaurant; only a select few earn one, even fewer earn two, and only a portion of those few earn three (just 13 restaurants in the U.S. have three stars). Photo by Amy Jackson

Star chefs

In 1900, French tire moguls Ándre and Édouard Michelin found a creative way to get more people to buy their tires: a restaurant and hotel ratings guide that would get people in their cars, on the road and wearing down tire treads going from place to place.

By 1926, the Michelin Guide started awarding a dining star to select spots; by 1931, the guide expanded its star ratings to two and three stars. By 1936, the guide defined its system: one star for “a very good restaurant in its own category,” two stars for “excellent cooking, worth a detour”’ and three stars for “exceptional cuisine, worth the special trip.”

Decades later, chefs and restaurateurs around the world work their whole lives in hopes of earning even a single Michelin Star for their restaurant; only a select few earn one, even fewer earn two, and only a portion of those few earn three (just 13 restaurants in the U.S. have three stars). The acquisition or loss of a star can make or break a restaurant (and a chef’s spirit). On October 13, Michelin released its first Washington, D.C., guide and awarded stars to 12 restaurants in the district.

Charlottesville has connections to two of them.

Chef Jose De Brito left his position as head chef at The Alley Light in May to join the vast kitchen staff at The Inn at Little Washington. When asked about the stars, De Brito says, “I do not have much to say. I am just the lucky witness to chef Patrick O’Connell’s 38 years of work and vision being rewarded by two beautiful stars.”

The Dabney, chef Jeremiah Langhorne’s casual restaurant known for its commitment to crafting heritage American cuisine from ingredients sourced from the Mid-Atlantic region, received one Michelin Star (Langhorne is from Charlottesville—he trained under chef John Haywood at OXO restaurant before moving on to McCrady’s in Charleston, South Carolina). Christian Johnston, who made a name for himself mixing cocktails at The Alley Light before becoming bar manager at Tavola, will join The Dabney staff later this fall as the restaurant expands its bar program. Tyler Hudgens, who worked at Commonwealth Restaurant and Skybar before heading to D.C. and hiring Johnston to The Dabney team, says she is impressed by Johnston’s “leadership, creativity and investment in his community. He won’t be ‘filling anyone’s shoes,’ and will be able to make his own mark on our constantly honed service and drinks.”

Johnston, who will also work at The Bird in D.C., says that after working in just about every restaurant position—bouncer, sous chef, bar manager—here in Charlottesville, moving to D.C. seems like the logical next step for a C’ville native about to turn 30 and seeking to expand his horizons. What’s more, D.C. ABC laws aren’t as strict as Virginia’s, so Johnston is eager to have access to more cocktail components, though he’s proud of many of the drinks he’s created here in town, particularly the Bittersweet Symphony (Tanqueray gin, Yellow Chartreuse, Aperol, fresh lemon and lime juice) and the Dea Marrone (brown butter-washed Bulleit bourbon, Yellow Chartreuse, brown sugar and Averna syrup, apple cider shrub and fresh lemon juice) served at Tavola.

Johnston’s last shifts at Tavola and The Alley Light were on October 29 and 30, respectively. Steve Yang, who’s worked under Johnston, will take over the bar at Tavola.

Christian Johnston, bar manager at Tavola who got his start mixing cocktails at The Alley Light, will depart Charlottesville for The Dabney in D.C.

Contact Erin O’Hare at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

The Packard Campus’ careful care of audio-visual heritage

The Packard Campus in Culpeper stores and protects more than 5 million items from audio and visual history. Courtesy of the Packard Campus

Fred Ott, a magnificently mustachioed employee at Thomas Edison’s lab in Menlo Park, was known among his colleagues for his comedic sneezes. On January 7, 1894, Ott sneezed in Edison’s Black Maria studio in West Orange, New Jersey, in front of a camera operated by William Heise.

Two days later, on January 9, film director W.K.L. Dickson submitted a paper print—a frame-by-frame photographic print of the film—of Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze for copyright deposit at the Library of Congress. It remains the earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture in the U.S., and it can be streamed online from the library’s website (or watched via YouTube).

The five-second black-and-white 35mm film is one of about 1.4 million moving-image items and 3.5 million sound recordings preserved and collected in Culpeper at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation, a facility gifted to the Library of Congress in 2007 by philanthropist and film conservation enthusiast David Woodley Packard.

Previously, the building had been a Federal Reserve bunker that, at the height of the Cold War, held a few billion dollars in cash and coin that would be used to restart the U.S. economy east of the Mississippi River in case of a nuclear catastrophe. With approval from Congress, Packard bought the building from the government in 1997 and transformed it into the preservation hub that the library needed for its growing audio-visual collection.

“Everybody loves movies. But I don’t know that we’ve done enough to ensure the continued existence of these films from the past,” says Mike Mashon, head of the moving-image section at Packard. “In some ways, we’ve embraced the history, glamour and storytelling splendor of movie-making while ignoring the reality that films are physical artifacts that can shrink and fade and disintegrate into dust in less than a lifetime. Our mission at the Packard Campus is to preserve as much of our nation’s audio-visual heritage as we can, as quickly as we can, because we want to make it accessible to people,” Mashon says, adding that in addition to screening hundreds of films and sound recordings each year, Packard annually loans about 400 films to theaters around the world.

“Movies are the people’s art form,” he says. “They tell us who we were, who we are. They tell us where we’re going.”

Moving-image section processing technician and Charlottesville resident Dave Gibson agrees. Gibson says it’s culturally, historically and socially important to preserve “the record of what things looked like, how we behaved, how we acted.” Watch a Buster Keaton movie from the 1920s and you’ll be surprised by how much has changed, but you may be more surprised by how much has stayed the same, Gibson says.

The Packard Campus is equipped with everything needed to preserve moving images and sound recordings and make them accessible to the public: various physical and digital formats, plus playback equipment, laboratories, temperature- and humidity-controlled storage, 100 miles of shelving (Culpeper is about 50 miles from Charlottesville) and a data center.

When an item comes in—say, a 35mm film, it’s copyrighted, cataloged and described; then the film goes to the moving-image division where a processing technician will rehouse the film reel in labeled archival cans and send those cans into the vaults. Sometimes films are digitized for streaming online, or for viewing from the Library of Congress reading room in Washington, D.C.

“The misconception is that moving-image archivists sit around watching movies and TV all day, and I wish that was the case,” Gibson says with a laugh. While processing Little Shop of Horrors, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, lyricist Howard Ashman’s collection of production materials, Gibson watched some of the footage to better describe it for the library catalog. He says the collection contains different versions of the films, audition footage and even live-action footage of an actress mouthing The Little Mermaid dialogue to give animators an idea of how Ariel might move.

But the collection isn’t limited to feature films or motion pictures deemed important by critics and cultural historians. Gibson says there are plenty of home movies in the collection, and they can be just as valuable—the footage of President Kennedy’s assassination was a home movie that happened to capture a pivotal moment in American history. But even a reel of a 1956 family visit to Yellowstone National Park can tell us a lot: what the park was like in 1956 and how it’s changed; what people wore, drove, ate, bought or read.

Gibson says that in a single day at Packard, he might work on the Ashman collection in the morning, and then in the afternoon, work on a collection of Apple II video games (video games are a growing part of the library’s moving-image collection), and then discuss how to best preserve born-digital media like YouTube videos and even memes with the same care they’ve given a 35mm print of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” music video and a three-quarter-inch tape of one of Spike Lee’s student films.

“It’s a constant cabinet of wonders around here,” Mashon says, with wonder palpable in his voice. “It’s probably a few times a week I run across something and say, ‘We have that? We have that?’”

Contact Erin O’Hare at arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

First Fridays: November 4

Brielle DuFlon’s “We Made You This,” a series of composed collections of curated, discarded and lost items found around town, is at The Bridge PAI this November. Photo by Martyn Kyle

First Fridays: November 4

First Fridays is a monthly art event featuring exhibit openings at many downtown art galleries and additional exhibition venues. Several spaces offer receptions.

Brielle DuFlon enjoys making textured work that she says “stirs our basic responses and impulses,” and her exhibition “We Made You This”—a series of composed collections of curated, discarded and lost items plucked from sidewalks, roads and parking lots here in town and hand-sewn onto canvas—does exactly that. “I wanted to clean up the city a little and come to know the people of Charlottesville more intimately through the objects that they had lost and thrown away,” DuFlon says.

DuFlon organized the objects by color, which she says “places them in a new context that is approachable and enticing, where people are willing to reconsider the items and find beauty in them; that would be more difficult if they were clustered a little more haphazardly.”

She hopes that upon seeing “We Made You This,” viewers will experience a tenderness toward the city and the people who had a connection to the objects before them, and feel the desire to care for the city and one another. “In my ideal world, people would have flashbacks of seeing specific objects on the street from months ago,” she says, and “I imagine some fingers will be tingling to touch certain items.”

Art on the Trax 5784 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “A Collection of Photographs,” featuring work by Stacey Evans. Opens Saturday, November 12.

FF The Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative 209 Monticello Rd. “We Made You This,” an exhibition of nine hand-sewn assemblages on canvas, composed of found, discarded and lost items. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF C’ville Arts Cooperative Gallery 118 E. Main St. “A Colorful Journey: Adventures in creating with polymer clay and more,” featuring decorative and wearable sculpted pieces by Judith N. Ligon. 6-8pm.

FF Chroma Projects Gallery 201 E. Main St. “Tactility,” featuring sculpture by Alan Binstock and paintings by Kathleen Markowitz. 5-7pm.

Crozet Artisan Depot 5791 Three Notch’d Rd., Crozet. “Flowing Colors,” featuring watercolor paintings and hand-painted garments by Peg Sheridan. Begins November 12.

FF Fellini’s #9 200 Market St. “Let There Be Light,” featuring watercolors by Phyllis Koch-Sheras. 5:30-7pm.

The Fralin Museum at UVA 155 Rugby Rd. “The Gift of Knowing: The Art of Dorothea Rockburne”; “Ann Gale: Portraits”; “The Great War: Printmakers of World War I”; “New Acquisitions: Photography,” featuring work from Danny Lyon, Shirin Neshat and Eadweard Muybridge; and “Oriforme” by Jean Arp.

FF The Garage 250 First St. N. “Dappled Things,” a group show featuring art inspired by the written word. 5-7:30pm.

The Green House 1260 Crozet Ave., Crozet. An exhibit featuring landscape and still-life paintings by the BozART Fine Art Collective. Through December 17.

FF Kardinal Hall 722 Preston Ave. “Heavy Air,” featuring landscape oil paintings by Elizabeth Flood. 4-6pm.

Kluge-Ruhe Collection 400 Worrell Dr. “On the Fabric of the Ngarrindjeri Body,” drawings, prints and photography by Australian aboriginal artist Damien Shen.

Les Yeux du Monde 841 Wolf Trap Rd. “Annie Harris Massie: Lightness,” featuring landscape paintings that explore the qualities of light that reveal and obscure form, and “John Borden Evans: Red Cow,” featuring new paintings by landscape painter John Borden Evans, which opens November 18.

FF Lynne Goldman Elements 407 E. Main St. A show featuring the work of Susan Krieg. 5-8pm.

Martha Jefferson Hospital 500 Martha Jeffer-son Dr. “River,” featuring paintings by Linda Staiger of the natural landscapes of the James and Rivanna rivers in the first floor gallery. Bold and texture landscape paintings by Caroll Mallin hang in the main lobby floor.

FF McGuffey Art Center 201 Second St. NW. “Faraway…so close,” featuring photographs by Will Kerner of India, Iceland and Haiti, in the Sarah B. Smith Gallery; “Summer in New York” by Kelly Oakes and new paintings from Jane Paul Angelhart in the Lower Hall North; “Pairings” by Cynthia Gusler and Ashley Sauder Miller in the Lower Hall South; “NOW! 2017 UVA Studio Art Majors” in the Upper Halls North and South. 5:30-7:30pm.

FF Second Street Gallery 115 Second St. SE. “Digital Media Gallery,” a partnership with the Virginia Film Festival showcasing the works of intermediate and advanced UVA cinematography students, taught by Kevin Everson; local youth filmmakers from Light House Studio; and UVA photography professor William Wylie. 5:30-9pm.

Shenandoah Valley Art Center 26 S. Wayne Ave., Waynesboro. An exhibit featuring the artwork of the Beverley Street Studio School.

FF Spring Street Boutique 107 W. Main St. “Fortune Cookie Buddha Collages,” featuring work by Toni Gonchoroff. 6-8pm.

FF Studio IX 969 2nd St. SE.  Paintings that (r)evolved around each other over a long arc of time by Dave Moore.  5-7pm.

FF Telegraph Art & Comics 211 W. Main St. “The Chris Danger Art & Print Extravaganza!,” an exhibit featuring new prints and original work by illustrator and animator Chris Danger. 6-8pm.

FF Top Knot Studio 103 Fifth St. “Abstracts plus One,” featuring mid-size abstract paintings by James Brewer. 5pm.

FF Welcome Gallery at New City Arts 114 Third St. NE. “I Wish We Could Still Make Beautiful Paintings Of Muscular Horses,” featuring paintings by Hank Ehrenfried. 5-7:30pm.

FF WVTF & Radio IQ Studio Gallery 218 W. Water St. “Between the Two of Us,” featuring prints, drawings and paintings from Katie Wood and Nina Thomas. 5-7pm.

FF Yellow Cardinal Gallery 301 E. Market St., second floor. “Found & Lost: Objects and Abstractions,” featuring work by Mineko Yoshida, Andy Foster and Jane Goodman. 5-7pm.

Categories
Living Uncategorized

Vitae Spirits opens for sales and tastings

Ian Glomski makes a foray into the local drink scene with his molasses-based liquors at Vitae Spirits. Photo by Amy Jackson

For Ian Glomski, 2012 was a watershed year. He turned 40 and narrowly escaped a massive wildfire while on a birthday fly-fishing trip in Wyoming. He served as a juror for the George Huguely trial and fought cancer for the first time.

“All of that added up,” he says, and with mortality on the mind, he started thinking about what he wanted to do with his remaining years. He had a good job as a professor of microbiology specializing in infectious disease at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, but knew he’d regret it if he kept doing what he was doing.

But his midlife crisis wasn’t a red Porsche or a young girlfriend, he says with a laugh. It was a distillery.

Glomski left his professor gig to open Vitae Spirits at 715 Henry Ave., next door to Ace Biscuit and Barbecue. Since 2015, he’s been making high-quality rum and gin to better serve the Virginia cocktail community, which has a cornucopia of local beers and wines, but few local liquors.

Glomski says he initially got into alcohol production to skirt the law—when he was 18, he could buy hops and yeast, but not beer, so he started making his own while a student at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Frustrated with the “crappy beer” he was brewing, he took a microbiology course to learn how to isolate and remove the microorganisms that were ruining his brews.

For a scientist interested in alcohol, he says distilling was the next mountain to summit, and he started with rum. In his opinion, there’s “no better spirit to pair with fruit juice than rum, especially white rum.”

Photo by Amy Jackson
Photo by Amy Jackson

Glomski says the production of Vitae rums (and gin) begins by fermenting sugar cane molasses into a molasses beer that’s about 8 percent alcohol (Glomski estimates Vitae uses about 27,000 pounds of Louisiana molasses every three months). They load the molasses beer into the custom-built copper pot still and heat it. Compounds in the beer that boil at low temperatures transition from liquid into vapor, and the vapors rise out of the top of the still. Once outside the still, the vapors are cooled back down to room temperature and turn into a liquid. Glomski says the very first vapors to boil off the molasses beer taste awful, but once they’ve boiled off completely, most of what’s left in the beer is water and ethanol (drinking alcohol). With continued heating, ethanol is next to vaporize, and those are the vapors cooled into a liquid to make rum.

The Alley Light bar manager Micah LeMon uses Vitae’s Platinum Rum in his Rose Hill Ruby cocktail; it’s different from most other white rums (e.g., Bacardi) in that it’s not filtered through charcoal, a process that can strip flavor from rum. “When you taste the molasses and then you taste the rum, you understand why people call liquor ‘spirits’: It is the fortified essence of molasses,” says LeMon.

The Golden Rum, infused with sugarcane grilled on Ace’s hickory next door, “is a great component for a split-spirit-based tiki cocktail” for its strong char, oak and molasses flavors, he says.

Glomski explains that to make gin, the Vitae team loads the still with ethanol drinking alcohol, and adds 17 different botanicals before heating it up. The vaporizing ethanol carries the aromatic oils from the herbs and spices out of the still and into drinking gin, while leaving the bitter flavors of the herbs and spices behind. Vitae’s gin is unusual in its molasses base: Glomski estimates that of the 800 craft distilleries making gin in the U.S., only about half a dozen of them use molasses, instead of corn and wheat, in the alcohol to make gin.

“The molasses is more muted in the gin [than in the rums], but still present, and complimented by lemongrass, lavender and pepper on the palate,” says LeMon.

All three liquors are available at Vitae’s tasting room, which opened October 15. The Platinum Rum hit ABC shelves April 1 of this year, but the Golden Rum and Modern Gin are special order bottles.

Per Virginia ABC laws, Vitae can serve a maximum of 3 ounces of liquor per person per day (that’s about two full-size cocktails), and can only serve alcohol produced on the premises. If Glomski wants to mix and serve a cocktail with a complementary alcohol, he must make it himself.

For those purposes, Glomski has a few other products in the works, including an orange liqueur made with local trifoliate orange zest, a coffee liqueur and an anisette made with fennel and Buddha’s hand zest. But for now, Vitae’s small bar serves up single-alcohol cocktails, such as the Gold ’n’ Stormy (Golden Rum, muddled lime, Reed’s Extra Ginger Brew), the Platinum Daiquiri (Platinum Rum, lime juice, vanilla bean-infused simple syrup) and the Modern Tonic (Modern Gin, muddled lime, Fever Tree Elderflower Tonic).

Vitae will sell about 3,500 cases of spirits per year, and while that’s enough to make it a successful business, Glomski expects the output to evolve as he incorporates more products and distillers reserves (like those liqueurs and some barrel-aged rums) into the repertoire.

He doesn’t plan to match big-distributor output or visibility, but he does plan to invite the community in. He’ll test plenty of products on adventurous tasting room customers and offer tours of the facility. He’s open to hearing tasters’ ideas and even doing custom production runs for those who have the means.

“We can’t beat the big guys on production, on quality control,” says Glomski. “So we have to offer something else—and that’s the direct connection to people who are vested in the product. We can adapt quickly, and we can be creative.”

Contact Erin O’Hare at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Categories
Living

Meet Blue Ridge Pizza Co.’s new owners

Former Clifton Inn chef Yannick Fayolle and restaurant veteran Nikki Benedikt plan to revamp the Blue Ridge Pizza Co. menu but keep the name. Photo by Rammelkamp Foto

With its portable wood oven hitched to a pickup truck and fired-on-the-spot pizzas generously topped with local ingredients, Blue Ridge Pizza Co. has been dishing out personal-sized pies at Lockn’, the Heritage Harvest Festival and other social gatherings in town and around the county since spring 2013.

Yannick Fayolle, former Clifton Inn executive chef, and Nikki Benedikt, who’s worked in the restaurant industry for years, first as a server and later behind the bar and in management, have recently taken over the company.

Fayolle, a classically trained chef who went to school in Switzerland, owned a restaurant in his native Mauritius and cooked at a few eateries in Dubai before coming to the U.S. and cooking at Farmington Country Club and the Clifton Inn, where he served first as executive sous chef and in October 2015 rose to executive chef.

Fayolle left the Clifton Inn this past August, after he and Benedikt decided to pursue a private, in-home chef and catering business, Fayolle’s Table. Then, the Blue Ridge Pizza Co. opportunity “just fell into our laps, really,” Fayolle says, adding that taking ownership of the pizza company quickly facilitated the move and immediately gave Fayolle a working commercial kitchen for both businesses. The duo plans to keep the Blue Ridge Pizza Co. logo and the wood oven, but that’s about it.

They’ll change up the menu and the look of the truck and trailer. Fayolle says he’s having fun using the wood oven and learning the science of making dough. His pie-of-the-moment? The Fall Foliage, topped with wood-fire-roasted pumpkin, crispy kale, goat cheese and balsamic drizzle. “Very simple, but very fall,” he says.

Roast of the town

In 2012, after years of serving coffee—beginning from a City Market cart in 1993 and later at the flagship café on the Downtown Mall—Mudhouse Coffee founders Lynelle and John Lawrence decided to get into the coffee roasting game for themselves. They wanted to learn the craft and expand their company, so “it was an obvious next step for growth…and way too much fun,” Lynelle says. Their work has paid off: Mudhouse was recently named Micro Roaster of the Year for 2017 in Roast magazine’s 14th annual Roaster of the Year competition. According to Roast’s website, the awards are meant to “help inspire further excellence and success in the roasting industry.”

“This is the tippy top, the third Michelin star. This is the highest preeminent award for all coffee roasters in the U.S. and abroad,” Lynelle says. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants, of course, and now we sit in the company of the top coffee roasters in the world. It is an incredible honor, and it belongs to the whole crew at Mudhouse.”

Good weird

Yearbook Taco will close its doors by the end of the year. “One gets the sense that the Yearbook Taco concept has almost run its course at this location,” says owner Hamooda Shami. “But rather than be dramatic and somber about it, we’re keeping things light and closing things out the right way…with tacos and booze,” Shami says. Every day from now until Yearbook closes, the restaurant is offering one of its top-shelf tequilas for half price until the bottle is empty. The space won’t be empty for long, though. Shami plans to introduce a new concept that “will be a better fit for the space and the neighborhood. Things are going to get weird (in a good way), and hopefully it’ll capture the imagination of the city.”

Contact Erin O’Hare at eatdrink@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

Telegraph Comics grows in size and diversity

Following a move to a Downtown Mall storefront, Telegraph Comics has more to offer—more books, more genres, more voices—and Kate DeNeveu and David Murray have a better idea of what they want their shop to be: representative of Charlottesville and all of its people. Photo by Amy Jackson

Telegraph Comics co-owner Kate DeNeveu loves watching first-time customers walk into her store on the Downtown Mall. They’ll wander in, eyes scanning the bookshelves near the door. They’ll take a few more steps into the shop and suddenly, their faces will change, says DeNeveu. They almost always ask, “Are all of these…comic books?”

Yes, all of these are comic books, she tells them, delighted by what they’re about to discover. It’s not just Batman and Superman, though the shop carries plenty of superhero comics. There are also science fiction and fantasy comics, and humor, horror, LGBTQ, kids, drama, art and romance sections.

Comics isn’t a genre of its own, but a medium, and a broad one at that.

Late, legendary comics artist Will Eisner described comics as sequential art; comics artist and expert Scott McCloud points out in his book, Understanding Comics, that, when taken individually, pictures are pictures. But when part of a sequence—even a sequence of two—“the art of the image is transformed into something more—the art of comics.” It’s a different way of telling stories.

One of the biggest misconceptions is that comics are for kids and for adults who don’t want to grow up, McCloud says; Telegraph, with its massive selection for adults and children alike, explodes that myth with a POW! and KA-BLAM!

DeNeveu and her husband and co-owner, David Murray, make a concerted effort to stock Telegraph with titles that reflect the growing diversity of the comics world. “The diversity situation in comics isn’t perfect, but it’s a whole lot better than it was,” says DeNeveu. “More publishers are willing to take chances on people that might not have had their voices heard before,” Murray adds.

It’s how they’re able to stock classics like Calvin and Hobbes and Batman alongside Ed Luce’s Wuvable Oaf, a rom-com set in the San Francisco bear scene; Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home (Bechdel is known for the comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For); Raina Telgemeier’s Smile (“braces, boy troubles and other plagues of the sixth grade,” says the New York Times) and the new iteration of Marvel’s Black Panther series, written by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

One of Murray’s favorites, Brian K. Vaughan’s Paper Girls—a routine paper route takes a weird, “Stranger Things”-type turn—features a group of female protagonists. Representation of voice is important, DeNeveu and Murray say. Everyone should feel like they’re part of a world, and increasingly, readers can find their world in comic books.

DeNeveu says that she and Murray do “a tremendous amount” of hand-selling, talking directly to customers about their interests in order to make solid recommendations. They’ll ask what you like to watch on TV, what kinds of books you like to read. They’ll ask about your favorite movies and what sort of reading experience you want. Do you want to be scared? Excited?

Telegraph stocks posters, prints and toys, too, but most of its income comes from paperbacks and kids’ books—not at all a typical comic shop model, DeNeveu says. Most shops use pull lists—a subscription service/customer wish list hybrid —to know what their baseline monthly income will be; pull lists make up only about 20 percent of Telegraph’s total income, DeNeveu says.

You won’t find an original Superman No. 5 or other vintage comics at Telegraph—Murray says they don’t have the space to do it justice—but plenty of hard-to-find titles, such as the Introducing Graphic Guides series (fresh presentations of familiar topics like feminism, fractals, Freud and fascism), and issues of zines sold only at comic convention booths are in stock.

Peek into a comic to see into a world—familiar, new, entirely fictional—that, through the art of the comic, can surprise, delight and captivate a reader. The combination of pictures and words can be especially powerful, and both Murray and DeNeveu believe that comics have the power to deeply affect a reader, and savor the chance to facilitate that connection.

Just recently, DeNeveu says a customer came in and asked for a book that would teach 11-year-olds about what it is to be a good person. She immediately suggested March, Congressman John Lewis’ series about his own involvement with the civil rights movement and his decades-long crusade for justice and nonviolence.

“There are so many ways that a good [comic] book can impact a person’s life,” Murray says. “The right book hitting the right person at the right time can be so transformative.”

The inside story

DeNeveu and Murray share their favorite scary stories to read in the dark.

Harrow County

Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook

On her 18th birthday, a girl learns of her connection to the ghosts, monsters and other creatures that stalk the woods near her home.

The Woods

James Tynion IV and Michael Dialynas

A high school is inexplicably transported to an alien planet. DeNeveu calls it “a teenage alien horror extravaganza.”

Uzumaki

Junji Ito

A spiral curse infects a Japanese
town—people become obsessed with spirals and twist and turn into spirals themselves.

Last Look

Charles Burns

A psychological thriller that DeNeveu calls “an homage to Tintin and punk parties,” the story switches between real life, where a jerk of a protagonist tries to piece his life back together, and a dark, mirror world with plenty of foreshadowing.

For kids: Alabaster Shadows and Camp Midnight (which includes some light cursing…swears, that is).

Contact Erin O’Hare at arts@c-ville.com.

Categories
Arts

Songwriter Matt Curreri rearranges and rocks out

Matt Curreri & The Exfriends leave the clever pop behind and re-examine things through a smartly crafted rock 'n' roll lens. Photo by Martyn Kyle

Every Wednesday night after dinner, Matt Curreri, Jesse Fiske, Gerald Soriano and Brian Wilson gather in a tiny, warmly lit music studio in Fiske’s Belmont backyard.

They unpack their guitars, bass and drums, and set up mics and amps. Fiske’s Single Barrel Studio is a cozy fit for the four-piece, but they tune up. They plug in. They rock out.

For the members of Matt Curreri & The Exfriends, these precious few hours are time for self-expression, an opportunity to translate the pressures of daily life into notes, rhythms and lyrics. It’s a time to decompress—together.

Curreri, the band’s songwriter, has been writing and recording music since he was a teenager; he says it quickly became his favorite thing to do whenever he found a few solitary moments. He’s released albums every few years and played monthly shows for nearly two decades, but says, “It’s never about success. I just love writing songs. There’s always some music kicking around in my head, waiting to come out.”

When Curreri moved to Charlottesville from San Diego about three years ago, he’d just finished putting that music into a poppy horns record, Get Along, with his San Diego Exfriends. He put together a small band—sax, trumpet, Wilson on drums, former Hackensaw Boy Fiske on bass—but says it was quickly “apparent that we should not play that album with horns. We should just be a new band.”

So they ditched the horns and went fully into rock ’n’ roll.

Curreri, Fiske and Wilson played as a three-piece for a bit before Soriano joined after a birthday party conversation with Fiske, when he confessed his aspirations to be a lead guitarist (he’d played bass in a slew of local bands such as Gallatin Canyon, Ragged Mountain String Band and Faster Than Walking). “Can you rip it?” Fiske asked Soriano. “I know just the band.”

With his new Exfriends formed, Curreri, whose previous records consisted of plenty of well-written, clever pop-rock tunes in a storytelling vein (Fiske likens some of the tracks off Exercise Music for the Lonely and Joy of Life to something one might find on a Wes Anderson film soundtrack), found himself drawn more toward straightforward rock ’n’ roll, partly because he and his bandmates played great rock music together, and partly because he doesn’t feel like being clever in a cute, poppy way anymore.

Perhaps it’s because he’s getting older—he’s married, he has a kid. But, more likely, he says it’s because he can come to Single Barrel Studio every Wednesday and play loudly. The band is “very much a rock interpretation of Matt’s not-so-rock-y” songs, says Wilson, who also plays with The Can-Do Attitude. So, for the past year or so, they’ve taken songs from Get Along and rearranged them for a four-piece rock outfit.

Rock or not, all of Curreri’s songs are about life. They examine the ties that bind us, the forces that loosen those ties and the shears that sometimes sever those ties all together. The Get Along songs cover everything from band synergy and breakups (“Get Along”) to brothers going through life together (“At the Seashore”). Curreri sings about a respectable woman who sings at night, knowing that her daytime society friends would be appalled to know what she does when the sun goes down (“Mary’s Nightlife”); he also sings about love (“All the Time”), losing everything (“Almost Perfect”) and about life’s massive losses evening out over time (“The Old Meandering Song”).

“It’s a sincere expression. I’m not trying to copy a style or pretend to be a rock star,” he says. “These are just my songs.”

Curreri mostly writes from his own perspective, but always hopes that his bandmates and listeners can connect to the lyrics and music. There has to be a purpose for making such personal songs, Curreri says, “and that people connect to it allows me to spend the time doing it. It gives me a reason outside of selfish reasons.”

It also gives the music another purpose, though Fiske is quick to note that what happens in that tiny studio every Wednesday night is purpose enough. “We’re a good band,” he says. “We communicate well with each other when we play music; whether that’s perceived as being a good band on the outside isn’t as important as being in this room and feeling like we’re a good band.”

Curreri’s been writing new songs, too, as he locates new corners of life. “Gonna Freak Out” “started as chords that I was playing around my baby and came together as a song one night when everything seemed too difficult,” Curreri says. It’s a song about looking at the big decisions you’ve made for your life—marriage, parenthood—and freaking out about the fact that you’ve made them, even if they’re good decisions that make you happy. It’s a relatable song that parallels another new track, “Gonna Be a King”—we’ve all freaked out one moment only to feel like a king (or queen) the next, and vice versa. The ebb and flow of life.

Both of those tracks are played live and will likely appear on the next Matt Curreri & The Exfriends album, recorded at Single Barrel Studio and on track for release this winter. The album features cameos from some local music mainstays—Paul Curreri (Matt’s brother), Devon Sproule, Sally Rose Monnes and others—emphasizing the band’s deep ties to the local music community, both on stage and in the studio.

“Playing music can be tricky,” emotionally and technically, Curreri says. But playing “for friends, playing with other bands and artists who are your friends…it’s the ideal situation. Those are the best nights of music.”

Contact Erin O’Hare at arts@c-ville.com.