Author: gilesmorris

For the past three years, I have pictured you out there, The Reader, and written these weekly letters to you (this being the last one, I promise), even though I know they can’t possibly get through, since you aren’t you at all, but many, many people going about the business of life in this locality and picking me up, as it were, in a grocery cart, or plopping me, as you have done, on a dirty bar, or even using these words, as has been suggested on more than one occasion, to wrap a fish.

Anyone who has read this essay regularly knows my penchant for natural comparison, and there’s no richer source of fuel than the fish. There are other fish in the sea. He’s like a fish out of water, neither fish nor fowl. It’s a big fish/small pond kind of deal, like shooting fish in a barrel. Uggh, just another bottom feeder. Perhaps, in the spirit of Wahoowa, you’d prefer to drink like a fish, or, in Coach Bennett’s case, to be a fisher of men.

And here I am, The Editor, a carp at the base of a dam spillway, sifting through all the press releases, news stories, e-mailed pitches, and gossip, trying to pluck enough protein from the flow to keep from being swept downstream. And I’d rather be a trout than a carp (didn’t Paul Simon say that?), because at least there’s the hope of some unattainable and impossibly little beautiful pool upstream where I could raise small fry and turn gray with age.

Here’s the hook: Nobody wants to hang out in the mainstream anymore, whether because all the social engineering has made the water course so straight and narrow, so fast and furious, that it’s become nearly uninhabitable. Or because there’s so much food available in the side eddies that there’s little reward for fighting the current. Or possibly even because we’re all so focused on Siddhartha’s river that we don’t care very much about the muddy stretch of water winding through town.

I’d like to leave off this stream of consciousness with a quote from Mark Twain, a newspaperman: “The editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind.” But I gave you a fair piece of mine.

It’s kind of a cliché that any media person who comes to town has his eyes fixed on the Rotunda and the Mountain first. Apart from the novelty and force of Jefferson’s attraction, there’s the instinct that you’ve got to understand how Monticello and the University work before you get the rest of the place.

You can mispronounce Staunton and Buena Vista without getting an earful, but you can’t call Grounds “campus” without your inbox filling up. Plus, who knows, the clips might be valuable somewhere down the line when you’re trying to escape the market and the only thing the editor on the other end of the line knows about Charlottesville is that it’s preppy and rich and isn’t UVA down there?

I remember sitting in the Dome Room next to Lisa Provence of The Hook at one of President Teresa Sullivan’s first press conferences in a year that would get much more dramatic for her later on, and I tried to follow along but I kept staring at the roof.

A few weeks later, I was writing a story on Tom Burford and found myself at the Heritage Harvest Festival rapping with a former C-VILLE freelancer who was doing some PR for Monticello. She said something very like, “Everyone’s worked for the C-VILLE at some point.” At the time it felt a bit like a dig, or at least a dismissal, like I showed up for the Dave Matthews show a decade late.

I’ll be handing the keys to the editorial department to Courteney Stuart at the end of the month, leaving the paper to pursue another job in the digital media landscape. A little less than three years later, I see that conversation on the West Lawn differently.

The best part of this job is the people you meet, like walking in the front door at Monticello and ending up shooting the breeze with Cinder Stanton, Peter Hatch, or Gabriele Rausse under a tree. Our paper and its companion magazines published the work of 50 freelance writers and photographers last month.

As this week’s feature attests, every part of the publishing world is in flux, but the people who make their living telling stories have hardly changed a bit. Thanks to all of the creatives who made it such a fun ride; it’s been a real pleasure being your editor.

This job brought me to town. I remember the process of circulating my resume three years ago, starting in early spring, a good time for changes, and winding up in an hour-long phone conversation with Frank Dubec, C-VILLE’s publisher at the time. It’s a six-hour drive from North Carolina’s Tuckasegee River valley to Charlottesville and worlds away. The high mountains were just greening up in early April, but the Shenandoah Valley was already dotted white with newborn lambs.

I forgot my bag on the way out the door, so I had to stop at a J.C. Penney in Roanoke to buy an interview outfit, which must have looked pretty funny on me as I came in the office on the Downtown Mall. A skinny, tired fellow in department store clothes, still sporting the crushable felt fedora and long ponytail that signified years of living in the individualistic, quixotic, and hardly workable rural landscapes of the Great Smoky Mountains and the Northwoods, I was looking for a break.

Some people come to Charlottesville because they hear about the lifestyle from friends, or even catch a rumor on the wind that it’s a good place to retire, start over, or settle down. Others come because they’ve known it as students, or think they’ve known it, and figure they can run a seamless transition between a happy college experience and a satisfying professional life with a family down the line.

Some people are born here, and after they go away to experience the big, wide world, it dawns on them that they miss their little town tucked in the green hills of Ole Virginny, with its irresistibly mellow spring and fall and better than average brains. A few never leave, but even they run up against the same essential dynamic: It’s hard to find well paid jobs in nice places.

This week’s feature illustrates how businesses in different sectors are innovating to build a new kind of city. Traditionally, university towns have been one-and-a-half job markets that bank on professional couples from cities willing to make career sacrifices in exchange for lifestyle improvements. The limitation is starting to feel self-imposed.

I first encountered the om prayer in the pages of Rudyard Kipling’s British Colonial picaresque novel, Kim, in which the protagonist teams up with a wise and seemingly guileless Tibetan monk to foil Russian gun runners in the Khyber Pass.

Apart from being a writer with Dickens’ touch in depicting the varieties in language and manners across social classes, Kipling was interested in morality tales with happy and noble endings. He was a Freemason, a Christian, and a royalist, so he wasn’t welcome in English department class syllabuses in the late ’90s, when I went to college. If his name came up at all, it was so that we could deconstruct his basic assumptions about other cultures and his blindness to the colonial caste systems he benefitted from, and, eventually, so we could unravel his morality and ruin his play.

In that window between the Cold War and the global war on terror, I caught the impact of postmodern theory full force. Not a single class of mine in criticism, comparative literature, English, anthropology, or history failed to touch on Foucault, Said, or Barthes. The darlings of the canon, at that point, were theoretical technicians of the subject/object relationship, authors like Nabokov and Proust, or those modernists, like Hemingway or Vonnegut, whose morals reflected the complexities of the wars that inspired their stories.

You will detect, thus far, some feeling of regret about my college experience, but that is only because so much of my childhood reading material was Anglophile and wonderful, and I had to lose it to find it again. Postmodern and postcolonial theory are important. They equip us to deal with the world’s global realities, force us to shed naive assumptions about the other, and teach us not to project our cultural morality without a bit of care. They were a 100-year response to the horrific depravity of the New World endeavor, but they failed to stop us going back to war in Afghanistan.

The ‘I’ is always the actor. And then there is the lama, clicking his beads through his fingers reciting the prayer, om mani padme hum, a part of the whole. This week’s feature, on our area’s unique and thriving Tibetan Buddhist community, gets at the tension and beauty involved in seeking understanding across cultures. Are we hardwired, through language, into our systems of morality, philosophy, and spirituality from an early age? Or are we all following our own rivers to the same ocean? Compassion is the only way to see.

“We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal. . .” read Justice Earl Warren’s majority opinion in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, handed down lo these 60 years. It was the beginning of the end for legal segregation in America and the opening salvo of the Civil Rights Movement.

It’s common knowledge that bears repeating here in the South: African-Americans in this country had already been fighting for equal status before the law for nearly 100 years at that point. An open question: What is the greatest failure of post-Vietnam liberal America? In all of our major cities black and white people still live, for the most part, separately and unequally.

I remember as a freshman in college listening to Cornel West deliver his first lecture in the “African-American Autobiography,” his signature course. I found the fluid logical-poetic reinterpretation of history mind boggling. His story? I also remember that the first three rows of McCosh Hall were full of black students, the talented tenth so to speak, and that the rest of the auditorium stretching back to the rear corners I liked to inhabit was white, the 1 percent, if you like.

For me and my group of friends, the reality and subtlety of a segregated society hit us when we went away to school, because we were becoming adults and feeling the weight of the truth. Our opportunities would be, to one degree or another, separate but unequal; cue black anger and white guilt.

The allegory, call it history, of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass is a profound one. The white voice of the Abolitionist movement, who opened the coffers of industrial New England to the anti-slavery cause on the back of his moral authority, befriended a black man capable of defying every definition of the day. But when Douglass’ The North Star began to shine brighter than Garrison’s The Liberator (these were newspaper men!), a rift emerged in the relationship that reflects the insidiousness of the race divide. It would be hard to deny that both Douglass and Garrison desired the same end and shared an affection for one another, but their experiences were so separate that they could not navigate their mistrust.

This week’s cover story is about a local attempt to move past the junction of black anger and white guilt to the confluence of black and white priorities. It reflects, I think, a generational acceptance that equality is an idea, reality is the firmest foundation for solutions, and history is a broken record.

I don’t write a lot of love letters. In fact, I don’t write many letters at all, which is a shame, because I love letters. It may have something to do with the fact that I work at a newspaper, or that I write a column that uses the word ‘I’ and blends a public and private persona.

Or it may have something to do with the fact that one of the things I love about my wife is her dogged privateness, which is like a protective hide pulled over a heart so deep and abiding that it can drown you. Bethany hates it when I mention her in my writing. I understand why. But in the age of oversharing, sometimes I feel like a prude not to drop her name, or at least deceptive, like I’m holding out.

Since this week I’m introducing a feature that consists of seven people telling stories about love, I can’t help getting in on the act. And since Bethany and I just had Lyle six months ago and are in a decidedly loving-but-not-that-romantic moment in our relationship, isn’t it kind of a good time to think back through that high speed video montage to the moment when our eyes first met, hers blue lamps casting a cool light on my soul, asking the only question I can never really answer.

On our first vacation together—an ill-advised, ambitious canoe trip with too many mosquitoes, and portages, and rainy days—we got into a fight delving into past love stories as we descended the eastern shoulder of the Sawtooth Mountains towards Lake Superior, gitchi gummi, that mysterious blue hole in the middle of the continent. I felt something break and I let it. Such a different feeling from the hot, breathy, questing kind of love I’d always dreamt of and practiced—willing, unwitting, or unrequited.

It’s a funny thing about love. I once knew a monk who would always say, “Jesus likes you,” because he hated the idea that his personal God practiced something Hallmark could define. We mythologize the capital ‘L’ word, something Tristan and Isolde died for, but the ferocious force we feel as mates is so different. We finish each other’s thoughts and break each other’s rules. We make love and we made Lyle.

What does an artist need? A clean, well-lit place? Genius? A tortured soul? Or is the answer less poetic? Cheap rent, time to spare, and a bit of pocket money. Does an artist need theory, training, and genius underneath it all? Or will his art spring like a geyser from the darkest, deepest place in his being if it’s placed under enough pressure? These aren’t the types of questions local government normally takes up.

This week’s feature offers a lens on the Piedmont Council for the Arts recently created cultural plan, an expensive and time-intensive study that included input from hundreds of people in the community. We are a university town, so we like to study our problems and build consensus before we move our chips across the table. For people who have drilled down deep into particular subject areas, it’s hard to scratch the surface of an issue without taking it all the way apart.

There’s nothing wrong with that. With the recent improvement in lateral drilling techniques, we may be able to turn all of our silos into a tunnel to the other side of the mountain. Joking aside, when you ask an open question about the civic value of beauty, it’s never going to be easy to settle on a price.

One of the parts of the plan that caught my eye was the expressed need for more and better art criticism. As the editor of a paper that takes the arts seriously, both as an economic and creative resource, I get the message loud and clear. There’s an important balance between marketing a scene and helping to define it with an objective eye. More and better aren’t the same, and the greater good can play the enemy of the best.

You might have noticed there’s a little tag on the front of our newspaper commemorating 25 years in business. Our company started in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down, signalling an end to the Cold War and the dawning of the age of global capital and ethnic conflict. Cultural barriers, concrete and abstract, were falling all around us. I was only 14, and more focused on another revolution: the emergence of rap music into the mainstream with Doctor Dré, Ed Lover, and Fab 5 Freddy on “Yo! MTV Raps.”

The idea that a pair of 20-somethings could start their own newspaper would have raised some eyebrows, but it was happening all over the country. People were looking for an alternative to the suburban boxes and urban wastelands that the pervasive fear of global war had helped to crystallize at home. When the Cold War ended, the country started to thaw again, and it needed new kinds of stories.

Fast forward to the present and C-VILLE Weekly is a mainstream media company situated in a revitalized Downtown Charlottesville humming with people working on the latest applications of the digital revolution. In the between time, the health care sector experienced a parallel transformation characterized by fast growth, increased specialization, and unprecedented technological discovery.

Twenty-five years is about the average age of an Olympic athlete. It takes that long to learn the technique, develop the physique, master the tactics, and compete as an adult, with the full knowledge that loss, failure, and injury litter the road to becoming a champion. It normally takes a bit longer to become a doctor. In this week’s cover story, we’ve highlighted some newsworthy health threats and how local physicians, researchers, and patients have confronted them. The elephant in the room (or maybe it’s a donkey) is how the Affordable Care Act will land in Virginia, whether it can deliver on the promise that access to quality medical care won’t fall into the income gap. The medical profession has never been better outfitted with tools to combat illness and disease, and the government has never been more committed to solving the industry’s failing equations. Let’s see if we can heal our political wounds long enough to pull off a miraculous recovery.

When we publish our food listings magazine, Bites + Sites, the restaurant categories are always a bit of a conundrum. What do you do with a Russian-Turkish bakery or a French-owned restaurant that serves Virginia food or an Algerian-Mediterranean fusion joint or a Nepali-Indian place?

When I was growing up in the ’80s, the Cold War meant the world had clearly defined boundaries, even if they were artificial (perhaps because they were artificial), and the food world mimicked them. In the sprawling immigrant neighborhoods of New York and L.A., you could find specific cuisine sold under its own name, but in most places restaurants contorted themselves to fit American expectations, even if it meant crossing loyalties in a way that would have been unthinkable at home.

A Ukrainian might be content to run a Polish restaurant, a Dominican could sell Cuban food, a Pakistani may run an Indian buffet, and a Greek would turn Sicilian if that’s what it took to make money.  The food landscape has undergone successive revolutions since then, spurred on by the fusion frenzy of the ’90s and succeeded by the taste for regional authenticity of the 2000s.

Now we’ve pushed both frontiers to the point that they’re folding back over on themselves in an attempt to source ingredients closer to home (and make new TV shows). It may be harder than ever to label what we’re eating. New American is as lame as Continental used to be; Southern is very close to becoming more vague than useful; and Fusion makes me think of Bobby Flay in sunglasses playing a conga for Carlos Santana. Welcome to the pervasive power of convergence.

This week’s feature  introduces the first of two Charlottesville Restaurant Weeks, chances to explore (maybe even label) some of the best restaurants around town in a way that benefits the Blue Ridge Area Food Bank. Consumption and charity go hand in glove in support of a nonprofit that helps the people who most need it at a time of year when it’s most needed. It’s not a bad chance to remember that our little town has become a port of entry for immigrants from all over the world, from Myanmar and Bosnia to Somalia and Kenya, to a large degree because of the efforts of another nonprofit, the IRC. More flavor for the melting pot, so let’s make sure everyone gets enough.