Author: gilesmorris

A reader recently called what I do in this column “simple-minded pablum.” Another reader, maybe I could even call him a fan, called it “an interpretive ethnography of our own people.” It’s not, as you know already, an editorial column in the strictest sense. I don’t interpret the news. Most of the time I don’t even react to it.

Pablum, as you probably know, is not something you want your writing associated with. Pablum in its literal sense is pap, which is essentially gruel. Intellectually, that means my writing is thin soup, easily digested and far from nourishing.  As I got to thinking about what I do, being as thin-skinned as any writer, I came back to pap, and a South African friend who used to speak lovingly about mielepap, the starchy porridge he grew up eating with stew. It was stick-to-your ribs food that staved off hunger and kept the working man working. I felt better (except for the bit about being simple-minded) and told myself that there are worse things than ladling out white collar grits to the working schleps of our post-industrial town.

Actually, the truth is that I write a weekly bit of prose in a couple hours’ time introducing our newspaper’s cover story, always trying to situate in its cultural context, which in turn obliges me, in this postmodern world, to speak as the “I,” the subject overseeing an object. Occasionally, I try to connect that subject to the I-and-I, if you follow, but you’d have to read every week to notice. I never really know how much what I say matters, or how much you care, or even whether I’m blowing like Coltrane, or Kenny G, or a bag of hot air. Stay with me now.

There are no juried prizes at the Virginia Film Festival. In fact there are no awards at all. There are no red carpets and very few A-listers. It is not a place to make deals or to be seen. But as this week’s feature attests, it is a place to discover films and to rediscover what you love about film. For me that’s Alfred Hitchcock’s subjective lens: a peephole, a person peering through, and the fear that at any moment the camera may turn on you.

When I stepped outside Saturday morning, buzzards were roosting in a bare tree at the back of the yard. The plants had frozen during the week and, taken together, the natural signals set off a kind of frenzy in me. I harvested the carrots and whatever else was left growing and trimmed the shrubs to the ground, before spending the remainder of the day hacking back honeysuckle, pulling up ivy, and spreading mulch. I wanted clean lines, a sense of order.

When the seasons change, we talk about the weather: how cold it’s gotten, how early it’s getting dark, when the first snow will blow. It’s all code for something that’s happening inside of us. We used to have markers for this kind of thing. The saints’ feasts days connected nature to the church calendar, and connected the peasants to God, land, and each other. Only a few holidays survived the Reformation and the trip to the New World. Not that any American settler would have noticed. Scraping a living out of the land kept them in touch with what the Lakota called taku skan skan, what moves what moves.

Halloween, the least churchy of our holidays, hangs on because it serves the irreplaceable purpose of answering why we sometimes want to howl at the moon at the moment when the forces of the earth turn inside out. Instead of growing leaves and flowers, the plants pull their life force underground. So we follow suit, as Elizabeth Derby does in this week’s feature, by turning our thoughts to what’s not visible. Do we put on masks so we won’t be recognized? Or so we will?

The more I think about Tip O’Neill’s old adage “All politics is local,” the less it makes sense. When I first heard it in the ’80s, it sounded spot on. People care about their wallets and their backyards, and when they vote, they express those local priorities. But consider the negative space the phrase defines. “No politics is national” sounds patently wrong in an election season during which I have to clear my inbox of vitriolic political spam on an hourly basis to avoid being crushed by it. The financial disclosures in the Cuccinelli-McAuliffe race show that over 40 percent of their money comes from national partisan groups, even though our state has deep pockets.

And then you start to think how totally un-local the messaging feels on television ads and in the blogosphere, and you find yourself in a place where O’Neill’s mantra rings with a resounding absurdity. In fact, if an authoritative, red-nosed Irish pol with a lock on Congress stepped out on the Capitol steps one day and declared “All politics is national,” I’d buy it.

This week’s feature on Delegate David Toscano tells the story of how a local politician has waded into deeper water, dragging supporters from his deep-pocketed backyard into the messy fight to re-establish a statewide party power base. Toscano is every bit a Democrat, but he’s never been seen as a partisan. He is well-respected by his colleagues, well-liked by his neighbors, and well-protected in his district. Virginia Democratic leaders chose him as House minority leader because they knew they couldn’t win swing districts expressing priorities from Norfolk and Arlington. Toscano’s job is to paint Richmond purple.

Meanwhile, at the city and county level, the candidates are running their races close to the center rail. Fiscal responsibility, long a Republican code word for no taxes, is now a shared battle cry, while long-range planning, Democratic speak for government interference, elicits substantive responses from both tickets. Maybe it’s just that we’re situated along the border of the urban-rural divide that has defined the national political discourse for the past two decades, but it makes me wonder if without the third-party money we’d be able to say “All politics is practical,” and sort of believe it.

I’m not worried about the government shutdown or the debt ceiling crisis. Neither, apparently, is Wall Street. I feel totally disconnected from the theater of the absurd on Capitol Hill. It’s funny to think that the first home I lived in was blocks away from the Capitol and that my father worked in Congress. Two years ago the country was in a similar situation and the financial community was edgier, but if you watch a pathetic samurai threaten to disembowel himself over and over again, sooner or later you just kind of want to see if he’ll do it.

In this week’s cover story, a photo essay of a Monticello-Charlottesville high school football game, one of the referees remarked that high school football gets bigger as the town gets smaller. That was certainly true where I lived in Western North Carolina—the Tuscola Mountaineers and the Pisgah Black Bears emptied the towns of Waynesville and Canton when they played. Generations of kids grew up dreaming about suiting up on Friday nights for the honor of their mill town mothers and fathers. There was no other game in town.

I’m not really a football fan. I mean, I am, but I support Arsenal, something I picked up from my mother’s two decades working for the Times of London. Not that she was a Gooner or anything, but some of her North London friends were, and, more than that, her colleagues made me want to be a citizen of the world. Growing up in D.C., you never really feel like you’re from anywhere. You have the origin stories of your father and mother’s families (Alabama and Baltimore for me), but you’re making up the rest of your place-based identity as you go along.

Which gets me to what I am worried about: How do you belong to a specific place and to the global community? Think globally and act locally right? Visualize whirled peas too, right? The thing is I want a fight song, and colors to wear, and I want my Congressman to show up at the football game and ask for my vote and I want to boo him, maybe even throw popcorn at him. But his money comes from D.C., which is where he works, and where I escaped from.

How much would you pay to save someone you love? Everything? How much, then, to save something you love from being lost forever? Depends on the value of the thing in question, right? Yet another magic mushrooming of the Internet spore is our obsession with price points. Forget coupon clipping, from E*Trade to eBay, you can play Alan Greenspan and split pennies buying diapers. When a shop fire in Bangladesh kills hundreds, you wonder about the cost of the wicking weave on your back and then buy it anyway along with a pair of brightly colored, featherweight kicks. No sweat, you’ve got to be fast to stay ahead in this dirty old rat race.

Then there’s the stuff that’s priceless. Not your kid’s first smile, maybe, but a Kickstarter campaign for a documentary you believe in or maybe keeping the doors open at your favorite local newspaper. How much is that worth? The bots want you to be impulsive. They know what you like. Buy it now with one click. They’ll take a billion pennies no one else wants and build another factory.

This week’s feature examines a forward-looking conservation program that Albemarle County started a few years back to save parcels of land with rare biological value. It’s exactly the type of initiative that got cut when the real estate bubble burst. How do you, as a taxpayer, value a steep shady grove where the trillium flower grows if you’ll never be able to see it? Isn’t the law of nature to let evolution run its course?

In that spirit I’m writing to let you know that we’re discontinuing The Rant, a staple in the paper for just over a decade. You’ve got one more week to rant to your heart’s content. In the meantime we’ll be asking you some questions and hoping you have the answers.

I remember reading a think piece somewhere (probably in The Stone blog) that talked about the correlation between musical training and academic achievement in school aged children. In the comments stream, a guy had written from France to say how “American” the story was. The intrinsic value of music was somehow not enough to justify teaching it. The language of the gods had to be tailored to our bourgeois aspirations of professional achievement. Sacrebleu.

Last week I bemoaned our country’s failure to remember its past, and sometimes I’ll take a swipe at our exceptionalism or some other native trait that irks me, but that’s usually only because I’m in love with my own country. The source of that love? Even in our too-fast-moving contemporary culture defined by its constantly connected consumer craziness and its obsession with wealth acquisition, the land continues to shape our story. Stay long enough in the Northeast Kingdom and you’ll get a bit frosty. Hang out in Eugene and the green will glow through your skin. Lay up on the Carolina coast a while and see if you don’t start feeling a little tidal.

This week’s feature on two bands that have spent the better part of the last decade reinterpreting the bluegrass tradition is a case in point. I had occasion last week to be asked in public what I thought Charlottesville was all about and I reverted to a prior answer, calling it a preppy town with a hippy heart and deep pockets. It’s also the quintessence of the Piedmont, one eye fixed jealously on the refinements of the capitals and the other searching the Blue Ridge, wondering about the possibilities across the divide.

The Appalachian culture that shaped bluegrass music is gone. Subsistence farming and coal mining no longer support an insular Scotch-Irish population that stretched from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. While we haven’t had muleskinners for some time, we still have the “Muleskinner Blues.” We still have melodies shaped by reels and ballads and gospels to carry the stories of life in the continent’s oldest mountains. When we’re feeling low, we can still take a turn harmonizing a high, lonesome chorus in some little pickin’ shack and feel the better for it.

I am ashamed of my country’s memory. I get it. We were born into collective amnesia—so focused on making the future bright and so afraid of falling back if we looked over our shoulders that the stories we ended up telling were not so much lessons of the past as inoculations from it. No sense in confusing the children. Yes, there was slavery, but there was also freedom. Yes, there was war, but it was usually good for the country. Yes, women had to fight for the vote, but they were bound to have it.

A few hundred years out, we’re still covering our tracks, teaching mythologies, letting decisive moments from the past, like untended gravestones, revert to clay. I got the highest scores in AP history in high school and invested in two years of coursework in college, and no one ever taught me the Vietnam War, even though my father fought in it. Even though militarily, morally, and emotionally it has shaped the issues of my adulthood.

The South has tended its graves and legends and even, in some cases, its facts better than the rest of the country. (We are still in the South, aren’t we sweet Virginia?) But it does no good to remember who the high sheriff of Albemarle County was in 1803 if we can’t recall the arguments when the schools desegregated. There is no sense in understanding Jackson’s Valley Campaign if we leave out Reconstruction.

And now we are talking intervention in Syria. The people are tired of war, even the soldiers, especially the soldiers. Do we remember how in The Cold War, Syria and Iran were Russia’s game pieces, and Iraq and Egypt were ours? Do we teach that? And if those things are not important enough to teach, then how can they be important enough to kill for, or for that matter, to die for?

This week’s feature on Stephen Canty is remarkable. We’ve told veterans’ stories before but never like this. Canty was, very recently, a 17-year-old high school kid in Louisa. More recently than that he was a 19-year-old Marine in Helmand Province, and even more recently than that a PVCC graduate and, briefly, a UVA student. But what is most remarkable about Canty’s story is that he’s telling it without apologizing or stuttering or romanticizing. He’s telling us, like Homer did, what it feels like to go to war and then come home.

I write these little essays every Monday morning. There are some mornings when I don’t feel like writing them. I stare at the blinking cursor and realize there’s nothing to do but lay the words end to end and see where they wind up, because there is a page on the dummy that has to be filled by deadline. I can go weeks without ever seeing a comment or hearing from anyone, but I always write like there are thousands of people parsing every phrase. There’s a mysterious relationship between freedom and structure, a simple fact of writing and music that somehow becomes paradoxical in the rest of life.

This week’s feature is about a group of musicians who play every week in the same place, at the same time, for whoever shows up. They pour out their art while people are eating dinner or drinking or yakking away with friends. While they share the dream of all musicians to play to a rapt audience in a room where every ear hangs on their next note, they understand the value of holding down a regular gig. Maybe they do it because they need a little extra money or because they want to keep sharp, but mostly they do it because they have to have an audience, the chance to move one person in a crowd.

We left out some major players in the landscape by necessity—people like Rick Olivarez, Robert Jospé, and many others—but I wanted to mention Dave Kannensohn, who died in August at 98, and who played regularly at Hamiltons’. At age 16, Kannensohn went on the road with a big band and eventually worked his way through the Great Depression as part of the Musicians’ Union. Half a century later, he held down a regular spot in a Dixieland outfit in a popular Florida resort town and up until last year he played his clarinet alongside younger musicians on the Downtown Mall. I wonder: Did the people who came rollicking into the Beach Club at Siesta Key looking for margaritas care who was playing? Do the people who hear Wilfred “88 Keys” Wilson play “Stardust” know what it means to him?

There’s a climactic moment in the film Friday Night Lights, a Hollywood adaptation of a book that tracks the fortunes of a small high school football team in its pursuit of a Texas state championship, when the coach delivers a halftime speech about what it means to “be perfect.”

When I saw it for the first time, the scene brought tears to my eyes, in spite of the fact that it was essentially an advertisement for the Fellowship of Christian Athletes delivered by Billy Bob Thornton against the backdrop of a music video montage of the Lord’s Prayer. Coach Gaines explains, after years of screaming at his boys, that being perfect isn’t about not making mistakes. It’s about pouring your heart into everything you do so that you can look the people you love in the eye.

The message is simple enough if you’re on a high school sports team, but it gets complicated when you’re out there in the big wide world. Where do you pour your heart when you have to choose between your job, your family, and your dreams? How do you give everything you’ve got everyday without breaking the handle off the shovel?

The best coach I ever had delivered a different kind of message to me when I showed up at an out-of-season practice with headphones on, blaring tunes. He came over to where I was putting my shoes on and said, “You’ve got to be able to get up for it without the music.”

This year’s Best of C-VILLE issue is, as ever, a reader-sourced guide to the best of what’s around in our town, a small city with a long history of pursuing the good life. Because being the best can’t just be about winning a popularity contest, but doing your best sounds too much like a pee wee pep talk, we chose to illustrate what’s best about Charlottesville by highlighting a group of people who love what they do so much they can’t stop doing it.

The lesson I took from my coach wasn’t that I didn’t need the music; it was that the music had to be playing all the time inside me.