When I was 9 or 10, I was asked, by a member of the foreign press corps attending one of my parents’ cocktail parties, what I wanted to do when I grew up. I answered that I wanted to be a lobbyist, which provoked laughter first, and then puzzled amusement. Why on earth would I want to be a lobbyist?
Because, I said, they’re the ones who actually get things done and they don’t have to pretend to be on anybody’s side. More laughter, followed by probing looks at my parents. It was 1984 or 1985, the height of the Reagan administration, and my father worked for the Democratic Congress. I had likely heard him grumbling about lobbyists and asked about it. Edited for his child, “The bastards control all the votes,” had morphed into something more polite. And then when I asked what lobbyists were, he probably said they get paid to argue somebody’s case in Congress and they live in Virginia.
And that sounded fine to me. I knew a few lawyers, and they were rich and good at arguing, I liked politics and had friends who lived in Virginia, and I knew from the playground that real control came from never picking a side. Voilá.
Since the mid-’80s the ag lobby, the pharma lobby, and the defense lobby (and many other lobbies) have changed the political landscape in our country so that it is almost unrecognizable. Sure, there have always been people in Washington asking for favors, but those people didn’t codify their positions over the years with Vatican-like precision, nor did the money they control have the power to guarantee victory in even the most far-flung Congressional precincts.
Over the course of my lifetime, the lobbyists have tightened their chokehold in the Capitol with each successful political revolution, burying their work in the fine print of massive pieces of legislation that no one, especially not freshman Congressmen, can possibly understand. As smart as he is, Michael Clark, the subject of this week’s feature, can’t tell if the Food Safety Modernization Act will kill the livelihood he’s built from scratch. Besides lobbying, agriculture is Virginia’s biggest industry, producing 221,000 jobs and nearly $26 billion in total output. The typical Virginia farmer is 58 years old, runs a farm of 171-acres worth over $1 million, and raises cows or chickens. Maybe the lobbyists can tell me why if agriculture is thriving, farmers are an endangered species.
Paul Beyer, Tom Tom Founder's Fest founder and director, taking in the action at The Haven this weekend. Photo: Tom Daly.
You can never go home again. The line expresses a quintessential sorrow embedded in the American dream. You move up and out. You can’t go home again, because you left and became someone different. When you go back, no one will understand you, and the place you idealized can’t ever live up to the new tastes you’ve acquired. But is the message historical or progressive? Essential or didactic? Was it coined to communicate immigrant longing? Or as a warning to those who made the upwardly mobile journey from the provinces to the city? Or, more basically, does it say something about time and memory?
The Tom Tom Founders Festival was inaugurated last year somewhat breathlessly by founder Paul Beyer, who came home to Charlottesville to help run his father’s real estate business after a stint in New York City. The month-long local version of SXSW fell into place over a short timetable on a massive scale and ultimately couldn’t live up to its billing. What was actually a fairly impressive first showing at times felt like the yardstick by which to measure the gap between our town and Austin.
Beyer learned his lesson. This year he took a whole year to organize a program that took place over one long weekend. He dialed back the mission, putting aside the project of starting a new music festival capable of drawing national acts and focusing on a UVA-backed innovation program paired to a series of community-based showcases for local musicians, artists, and organizations.
If you were at McGuffey Friday night, or dug the farmer’s market on steroids Saturday morning, you tasted Beyer’s success. My moment was the concert at Lee Park . On a glorious Virginia spring day, families spread out over a public park on picnic blankets with their dogs, taking in the tunes emanating from The Garage (a church property turned into a music venue), within earshot of The Haven (a homeless day shelter cum community hub), where Tom Tom Talks covered media, faith, and creativity. It was soooo Charlottesville, and it felt good.
This week’s feature on cool places reflects the fact that the cool you’re looking for can be quaint, even bucolic, like the ‘50s superimposed on the now. Maybe you moved away, tasted the Big City, and came home. Or instead of moving up and out, you stayed put without letting go of your ambition. Or maybe you came here from somewhere else, thinking you finally found a place you could call home again.
Stephen Nachmanovitch and his mentor Gregory Bateson locked horns in a game of chess at the Esalen Institute, Bateson’s cliffside home near Big Sur, in 1979. Photo: Michael Stulbarg. Photo: Michael Stulbarg
UVA employs almost 15,000 people and another 20,000 are enrolled there as students. Of the people who move to Charlottesville for work, nearly every one of them has some connection to the University. The “town and gown” relationship is a false dichotomy left over from a time when being from town meant your social caste separated you from life on Grounds. As our little city grows its professional economy, even the people with no connection at all to UVA are here because of it.
I still find myself falling into the “townie” mode sometimes, grumbling about traffic, rolling my eyes at a perceived hullabaloo in the academic hen house, or coming to a gentle boil while eavesdropping on some masters of the universe conversation between Darden first years out for a night of chest thumping. Silly, since I far more frequently wind up in cool interactions on the soccer field, in my neighborhood, or on the job with people who work and teach at UVA. It’s so easy to think of universities as things or places, but they’re not really that at all.
When was the last time you saw the headline, “Philosophy grad student shoots down Hegelian dialectic”? Big game victories, political squabbles, and salacious campus crime all warrant headlines, but scholarship, in general, doesn’t. Have a Ph.D. and want some ink? Get a patent and we’ll talk. The recent obsession with universities as economic engines has heightened the scrutiny over their governance and funding priorities, but it’s also further obscured the fact that most people in the academy live in a totally impractical world in which nearly every interaction involves the codification of highly-evolved abstract ideas that most of the rest of us regard as extraneous. Academia is a place where theory is real, possibly even more real than “reality.”
For this week’s cover story, I followed the breadcrumb trail of two hot-button catchphrases on Grounds (“town-and-gown approach” and “interdisciplinary studies”) and wound up discovering a scholar who never liked being part of the academy but whose ideas have the potential to unify it. Want to know what it looks like when eminent thinkers engage in mortal combat in front of a live audience? Interested in expanding your mind or, perhaps, even blowing it? Ever wish institutions of higher learning were more like Hogwarts? Pull up a chair.
Gregory Bateson–the anthropologist, philosopher, biologist, psychologist, and high priest of cybernetics–died of respiratory disease at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1980. Photo: Barry Schwartz.
“It takes two to know one.”
One of the many riddles that Gregory Bateson–the anthropologist, philosopher, biologist, psychologist, and high priest of cybernetics–left behind when he died of respiratory disease at the San Francisco Zen Center in 1980 after a lifetime of cigarette smoking.
Bateson was a titanic figure at 6’5″, intellectually intimidating, capable of reciting the works of William Blake or rattling off the scientific names of anything in his path. But people who knew him described a gentle, curious, playful man who treated children with as much respect as his colleagues.
Stephen Nachmanovitch (left), one of Gregory Bateson’s most devoted students, and Nora Bateson, his daughter from his third marriage to Lois Cammack, will join UVA anthroplogist Ira Bashkow to host the Bateson Symposium April 10-12. Photo: Leslie Blackhall
The son of a Cambridge don who coined the term “genetics” and named his child after Gregor Mendel, Gregory Bateson grew up in the uppermost reaches of the academy, but he was never comfortable there. He is, perhaps, best known as the husband of Margaret Mead who collaborated with her on the ethnographic studies of Bali and New Guinea that brought her work to prominence.
“In his childhood there were the Darwins and the Huxleys and all the eminences of British biology. Gregory found a way to get 10,000 miles away from all that by doing anthropology,” the musician Stephen Nachmanovitch told me, during an interview at his home office in Ivy.
Nachmanovitch, one of Bateson’s disciples, is an international leader in the improvisational music movement with a Ph.D. in the history of consciousness. Like his mentor, his relationship to the academy is tenuous.
“I’m definitely outside the academy, but I keep coming in as a guest and friend,” Nachmanovitch said.
Between April 10-12, Nachmanovitch is joining with Gregory Bateson’s daughter Nora Bateson and UVA cultural anthropologist Ira Bashkow to host the Bateson Symposium, an interdisciplinary exploration of ideas funded by UVA’s Buckner W. Clay Endowment for the Humanities. An intellectual can opener with a “town and gown” mission, the symposium will include a screening of Nora Bateson’s biographical film An Ecology of Mind: A Daughter’s Portrait of Gregory Bateson at Vinegar Hill Theatre.
A seminar the following day on Grounds will include UVA professors from across departmental specialties: Bashkow, anthropology; Kurtis Schaefer, religion; Chip Tucker, English; Sandy Seidel, biology; Angeline Lillard, psychology; Deborah Lawrence and Manuel Lerdau*, environmental sciences; as well as Bateson’s former students Katie King, a women’s studies scholar at the University of Maryland and California-based independent anthropologist Phillip Guddemi.
Bashkow is director of graduate studies in UVA’s anthropology department and firmly inside the academy. He first encountered Bateson’s ethnographic studies of the Iatmul people of New Guinea as a young graduate student, and his career as an anthropologist has been focused in that part of the world. In a way, he’s taking the biggest risk by pulling together colleagues with diverse critical approaches to Bateson’s work and introducing them to people so devoted to the man and his ideas. He thinks the discussions will be lively, maybe even fraught at times.
“I can’t think of another person who actually lets you talk to your friends in environmental sciences about something they really care about for their own reasons. And something that mathematicians care about for their own reasons. And something that therapists and family counselors really care about and think is theirs,” Bashkow said. “There’s really a lot of stuff there, and actually I think there’s more that hasn’t been mined.”
The reason it takes so many types of people to unpack Bateson’s ideas is embedded in the ideas themselves. His interest was in connecting the universal to the specific on the grandest scale possible. His early fieldwork in anthropology led him to his conclusions about the importance of context in language and the pathologies of ideas, which later led to his development of the double-bind theory during studies of schizophrenic and alcoholic patients at Stanford University’s VA Hospital.
In the 1940s and ’50s he participated in the Macy Conferences, where he became a founder of the field of cybernetics and a primary proponent of the notion of metacommunication. His work and that of his colleagues inspired the development of family therapy. Bateson’s field research ranged from family structure in Papua-New Guinea to studies of dolphins and sea otters in captivity.
If you want to understand Bateson, you have to understand how he taught. In his signature Hawaiian shirts, with his imperious accent, he told stories that conveyed meaning in “a sort of carrier wave.”
“He had a repertoire of stories, three or four dozen multipurpose parables. Gregory’s explanations were built from these stories, combined, inverted, end-linked in various ways, much as giant protein molecules are built from a fixed repertoire of 20 amino acids,” Nachmanovitch said.
The purpose of the symposium is to start a discussion about the significance of a man whose teachings touched such a wide range of disciplines that they are still being contextualized. But even a casual familiarity with Bateson’s research is enough to indicate the project is more far-reaching than that.
At the end of his life, Bateson was gaining a reputation as one of the most influential minds of the last century for the ideas he cultivated over his lifetime to answer a question he articulated in the opening to Mind and Nature, his last complete published work.
“What is the pattern that connects the crab to the lobster, the orchid to the primrose, and all four of them to me, and me to you? And to the back-ward** schizophrenic and to the poet?”
During the last two years of his life, after a near death experience with a bout of cancer, he became more expansive as a person and teacher.
“He was readier to hug people. He started writing poetry. He reached a kind of outer clarity about what he was saying, and, coincidentally, his audience became much broader,” Nachmanovitch wrote in a biographical article.
There is no simple way to categorize Bateson’s ideas. It’s not even very easy to explain them.
Last Wednesday, California Governor Jerry Brown named Gregory Bateson to the California Hall of Fame alongside Joe Montana and Warren Beatty. An admirer of Bateson’s who appointed him a trustee of the state’s university system during his first term, Brown recognized what Nora Bateson has known from her first moments of consciousness but took half her life to be able to communicate to others. There is no limit to her father’s ideas, and they have tremendous relevance to the challenges we face in a global world.
“If I’m talking to designers in Berlin or anthropologists in Brazil, they’re asking the same question. Which is, ‘How do we grow our discipline? What’s the next level? How do we go further with our studies?’” she said. “And the next level is really about integration. But there’s not a lot of context for even the rhetoric about what an integrated conversation looks like.”
Next month in Charlottesville, for a fleeting moment, the context for an integrated conversation will take shape.
*The print version of this story misspelled UVA environmental science professor Manuel Lerdau’s name.
**The print version of this story said “backwards schizophrenic” instead of “back-ward schizophrenic,” changing the meaning of the phrase.
There aren’t many things you can’t learn in school. You can learn to be a poet or a cake baker, a philosopher or an engineer, a composer or a chemist, a carpenter or a priest. But, in spite of Jack Black’s best efforts, you can’t learn to be a rock star. There’s irony, I think, in the notion that our identities are increasingly professional at a time when our professions are less likely than ever to satisfy our dreams of financial success. So there is satisfaction in writing about people in a creative industry in which the promise of money is fast evaporating. There is no bad weather for artists.
Our cover story this week focuses on five people who are trying to make a living singing and playing their own songs. It began as an exploration of our town’s musical ambitions, and it could have taken any number of forms, focusing more on the industry side, like the band managers, digital marketing crews, venue operators, and software engineers who are coping with a publishing landscape turned upside down. It could have focused on the different types of music that flourish here, jazz for instance, or electronica. Or it could have focused on a different subset of singer-songwriters than the one I chose, because for a small town, there are many. It went the way it did because I got interested in a question. People who stand up on stage alone with a guitar have no one to blame for their failures, and these days, little reason to expect a reward, or even a living for their efforts. So why do they do it?
It’s a deceptively simple question that can shake the foundations of heaven and earth if you let it. It might seem like a leap to link the file-sharing revolution in the music industry to the fact that, for the first time in generations, Americans are not likely to fare better financially than their parents, but there’s a sense in which every story I write comes back to one idea: We are all in the business of making dreams real.
Sarah White and Josephine performing at The Southern Cafe and Music Hall during a WarHen Records artist showcase earlier this month. Photo: Martyn Kyle.
“Why isn’t Charlottesville Athens?” James Wilson said, repeating a question I had posed to him. “They have R.E.M. We have Dave Matthews. We both have about the same amount of venues, same size. It’s a tough one. It really is.”
It was clear, watching Wilson, that it wasn’t the first time he’d considered the subject. In a sense, he’s been living it ever since he got together with his brothers five years ago and started a band, Sons of Bill, named after their UVA literature professor dad. Wilson is a singer-songwriter. The kind of person who wakes up every morning thinking there’s a melody waiting for him and it’s his job to find it.
He’s also the kind of person who showed up late for an interview at his own house twice, once because he needed cigarettes and the other because he had to walk his parents’ dog. The second time, he unfolded his 6’2″ frame out of a weathered Jeep, apologized profusely in his mannerly and down-home way, before leaning up against the back of the truck, hanging his boot heel on the fender and turning his face to the sun to light a cigarette.
James Wilson is a sepia-toned hero of honky tonk stuck in a digital world that makes his literate head spin. Ask him a question, and you can see him turn inside out chasing the answer, like it’s as elusive as a song, or like you’ve asked him about Faulkner’s portrayal of the Southern man.
That morning, leaning back against his truck just off Avon Street, he treated the industry question with a practical philosophy, like working out how to get a truck out of a ditch.
“Dave could sell out Trax every single fucking Tuesday night. And then he’d go to the Flood Zone in Richmond on Thursday night and sell that out. Every week,” Wilson said. “We’re one of the bigger bands to come out of Charlottesville and we can only sell out the Jefferson three times a year. And that’s overplaying. Our agents are pressuring us to not play so much because it’s too hard to get people to come out.”
Sons of Bill frontman James Wilson says his new song “Bad Dancer” was inspired by John Cusack’s portrayal of Lloyd Dobler in the film Say Anything and by Homer’s The Odyssey. Photo: Jack Looney.
Sons of Bill got together when three of the four Wilson brothers (James, Abe, and Sam) found their way back to Charlottesville in 2007 for various reasons and picked up two friends who could play drums and bass (Seth Green and Todd Wellons). They entered a UVA battle of the bands contest after a couple of practices and won the contest, which furnished them three days of free recording time. Two weeks later they recorded their first record, paying out of pocket for four additional days in the studio. That spring they sold out Starr Hill Music Hall twice and unloaded the 1,000 CDs they made almost overnight.
In the wake of becoming the town’s new “it” band, Red Light Management swooped in and got their signatures. Fifteen years ago, that narrative could have been the prelude to a meteoric rise through the ranks of the music industry. But the Internet has changed the business. Sons of Bill recently broke with Red Light to go it alone. Wilson and his bandmates make what he calls “a very small living” playing music professionally.
“It was mutual,” he said of the management split. “We didn’t make enough money that it was affecting anything significant to them. At the same time it was our lives and we needed more attention that they couldn’t give us. It was in our best interest to go on our own.”
The band will release two brand new songs this month, recorded at White Star Sound in Louisa County and pressed as a vinyl 45 by Warren Parker and Michael Hennigar’s Charlottesville-based label WarHen Records.* They are still looking for new management, but in the meantime, they’re set to employ a new business strategy with the help of local digital marketing company Vibethink (who made C-VILLE’s new website and does digital marketing for The Festy Presents) to get their music to fans and promote their album Sirens, which was released last year.
I interviewed five singer songwriters with really different perspectives on the music business in a town full of musicians. All of them are working hard and none of them is getting rich. Is it the town? The painful and slow adjustment to a new model in the music industry?
The fact that we can even ask why Charlottesville isn’t Athens is probably a sign of the town’s musical ambition. The University of Georgia is quite a bit bigger than UVA and more connected to its downtown, but there is still the sense that because of the Dave Matthews Band and Coran Capshaw and Red Light, Charlottesville is poised to become a new industry hub, a place where singer-songwriters can come to meet the business folks who will take a chance on their talent. That would make it, the logic follows, the type of town where the top local acts might have a leg up on landing a space on a national tour with a big name act, or at least, a decent chance at building a regional following.
The question can also be used as a lens on the industry. Take the acts that put the two towns on the musical map a half decade apart. Thirteen years and nine albums after R.E.M.’s first record Murmur was named Rolling Stone’s Record of the Year, the band scored an $80 million record deal, the biggest in history at the time, when they re-signed with Warner Bros. in 1996. In the interim, bands like Widespread Panic, Indigo Girls, and Drive-By Truckers flourished, turning Athens into the “Liverpool of the South.”
DMB released a live album, Remember Two Things, on Bama Works in 1993, breaking industry rules by letting fans share nonprofit bootlegs and pre-empting the file-sharing issue. By the time they released Crash in 1996, they were the biggest band in the world. By keeping their publishing and merchandising rights and working each record on long summer tours, the band created a formula (not dissimilar to The Grateful Dead’s) that’s preserved its financial success across the file-sharing revolution. But another major act hasn’t come out of Charlottesville since then.
“When Athens really made its name, the music industry was still heavily fueled by record sales and success was gauged in that specific way,” said David Purcell, a professor of music business who also operates Music Royalty Solutions, a firm specializing in business management and financial solutions for independent recording, performing, and songwriting artists. “I don’t know that a scene is going to develop in the same way any more.”
Purcell has spent the last decade watching the music business change, as a professor at Berklee College of Music in Boston and then as part of NYU’s music business program before landing as an assistant professor at Columbia College’s Arts, Entertainment, and Music Management program. He preaches a mantra of new opportunity to artists that includes pushing subscription platforms, merchandise bundling, themed tours, sharing fan bases, and pursuing licensing opportunities in the U.S. and abroad.
He also delivers a healthy dose of reality. File-sharing platforms like Spotify and Pandora won’t ever generate revenue for what he calls “the super-majority” of artists and he doesn’t buy into the notion that there’s money for everyone on the road. Instead, he sees the file sharing world as a kind of primordial soup out of which to grow a new species of music success.
“The likelihood of artists getting famous because they’re on Pandora or Spotify is miniscule. That being said, it’s still important that they use all the platforms. They really need to have a checklist of all the different tools and platforms,” he said.
Ultimately, Purcell doesn’t have any magic bullets. Streaming, file sharing, YouTube videos. iTunes and BandCamp, Spotify and Pandora. Placements in film and TV, and international publishing deals. Artists need to push in every direction, but they also have to recognize that the scale of success isn’t what it used to be. May never be again.
“Do they aspire for it to be a primary vocation and revenue-generating part of life or not?” Purcell asked. “If it is, you need to look at the reality. There are opportunities to make money, but you have to really target your audience and the amount of money you can make has changed.”
When Wilson was a kid, his dad, also a singer-songwriter, was playing Shakey’s Pizza and James was trying to sneak into Trax. Now he’s playing the biggest venues in town, but he can’t figure out how to make money.
“Nobody knows what to do to make music profitable. It was boring in the ’90s but you knew what you had to do,” Wilson said. “You found a band, you signed ’em and you got ’em on the radio, and it either exploded or it didn’t. It all revolved around selling the disc.”
Even if you sell a venue out, smaller bands have a hard time commanding the price tag to make it worthwhile.
“It’s cool for bands to bash the venues and I get it. I’ve been screwed. I’ve gotten my teeth kicked in. But I feel for them. A lot of times when they take risks they take huge losses and they’ve got to kick in the teeth of the bands they can make money off of,” he said.
As a songwriter, though, Wilson is in high feather. He spent a few months dabbling in working for a Nashville publishing house, an effort that produced a joke country song called “50,000 Times More Country Than You Are” and he’s about to release a sensitive single inspired by John Cusack and, true to Wilson’s literary roots, Homer.
“Bad Dancer” is the story of the angst-riddled boy who will love you best, the type of guy who can’t dance necessarily but won’t ever let you go.
“Have you read The Odyssey? I haven’t read that book in years. How he killed off all her lovers and burst into tears,” the song ends.
“The awkward lover is actually the best lover, but he’s on the outside, just like Holden Caulfield,” Wilson said.
* An earlier version of this story omitted Michael Hennigar as the co-founder of WarHen Records.
The Dow Jones broke records and the unemployment rate found its way to a five-year low last week. Look around and you can tell the construction industry is perking up. Roofs are coming off and going back on all over town. Site prep is moving forward on some major development projects. “Under contract” signs are popping up like daffodils, signaling a turn in the real estate market. It’s tempting to think, as we teeter on the verge of a Virginia spring, that the economy is about to bloom again. But I’d be shocked if anyone really felt that way wholeheartedly.
The NY Times Economix blog recently pointed out that a new pattern has emerged over the past few years in which job vacancies remain high even as the jobless rate falls. The explanation for this adjustment of the Beveridge curve is that employers aren’t hiring new people full-time to replace jobs they cut in leaner times. Instead, they’re cautiously scaling up to meet demand with part-timers, hiring the occasional overqualified replacement at lower pay. The numbers show, according to Economix, that “if you include both part-time workers who want full-time work and people who have stopped looking for jobs but still want to work, the unemployment rate is actually 14.3 percent.” Meanwhile, closer to home, the sequester is likely to hit NoVA harder than anywhere else in the country. Much as it pains me to say, what’s good for NoVA, at least economically, is good for the Piedmont. And so while the economy may be turning around, the rattled confidence of the American worker, who doubles as the American consumer, hasn’t. With all dues respect to The Boss, it takes more than a spark to start a fire with damp wood.
O.K., now for some good news. Charlottesville’s unemployment rate is low and our city is still attracting people to jobs in emerging industries. According to our official unofficial jobs poll, most of you (72 percent) are happy where you ply your trade. This week’s feature focuses on people who found their vocation by listening to their whispers, from a horse masseuse to a newspaper editor, reminding us that landing in the right place to work can have more to do with the dowsing rod than the HR checklist. Which leads us to the lessons transmitted through our collective sojourn through financial adversity. Your house is a place to live, not an investment. Your job can’t be your primary source of self-esteem, because it might go away. Unions might be passé, but the idea that workers need to have a say with management in order to believe in progress is oh-so-current.
Target fixation is a term I learned riding a motorcycle, but it’s become a useful teaching metaphor. The lesson is basically to look where you want to go, not where you’re afraid of going. I learned my lesson when I almost hit a curb and catapulted into the Delaware River after trying to avoid a tractor trailer on a narrow bridge, but I apply it to all manner of things.
Since President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind over a decade ago, assessing the performance of our public schools has become a national obsession. NCLB was designed to tie federal Title I spending, the government’s flagship aid program for disadvantaged students, to yearly standardized tests. It was a response to Clinton-era spending increases, and it was supposed to bring market forces to bear on urban education at a time when costs were spiraling out of control without affecting performance.
As someone who worked in a school funded nearly entirely by Title I money, I’ll admit that reform was necessary. You can’t just throw money at bad schools in poor neighborhoods to make them better. But apart from instigating an important conversation, NCLB didn’t work. Today we have a system that’s obsessed with its own failings, desperately afraid of taking its eyes off of where it does not want to go, particularly with regard to its disadvantaged students. We still haven’t brought costs under control, and the achievement gap is as wide or wider than it was when the conversation started.
Lest you think this is a thinly-veiled partisan rant, allow me to submit that Bill Clinton initiated the charter school movement and the notion of empowerment zones, high-profile money pits in major media markets. Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, was Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s charter-pushing, union-busting superintendent who came to his job with practically no experience in schools and learned to play the neighborhood power game very quickly. The focus on bundling assessments and federal money has politicized, nationalized, and privatized the conversation around education policy. It needs to become more local and more specific, lest we forget the real money still comes from our property taxes.
Anyone who has ever worked at a school or sent their kids to one knows they are cultural institutions. To improve them, you have to improve their cultures. Accountability is one way to do that, particularly if leaders on the ground buy into the criteria, but raising pay to increase the caliber of personnel is more effective. Want to cut costs? The upward cost trend in education is the result of retirement funds and health insurance (financial services and insurance companies), growth in administrative oversight (paper pushers), lawsuits (insurance companies and lawyers), and bussing students around (gasoline). Finding the money there will take reforming more than Title I spending. We have a whole new generation of motivated, idealistic, and well-trained teachers who like the job for its intrinsic draw, the vacation, and the kids. Let’s figure out how to pay them to stay there.
In the beginning, the city’s visual arts community had two centers, Second Street Gallery and the McGuffey Art Center. The acropolis and the agora. The gallery was a place to recognize inspiration, to elevate its status through the ceremony of formal exhibition. The center was a pure democracy in an old schoolhouse, a rabbit’s warren of creative industry that celebrated process. In the intervening years collaborators and competitors, or both, depending on how you look at these things, have filled in the landscape. For the rest of us it’s meant an embarrassment of riches. The Bridge/PAI, Piedmont Council for the Arts, New City Arts Initiative and other arts nonprofits push programming forward, all the while accounting for the convergence of art media, while established galleries like Chroma Projects and Les Yeux du Monde are hanging shows worthy of bigger markets.
This week’s feature celebrates Second Street Gallery’s 40th anniversary, which it recognized February 11, and tells the story of how a contemporary art nonprofit founded as a rejection of the status quo became an institution with the power to define it and the mission to resist it. I’ve written about our 40 year problem a few times: the idea that the cultural and social problems identified in the early ’70s are essentially still unresolved. When Second Street Gallery was created, its board wanted it to contest the commercialization of the art market, on the one hand, and set the bar for local artists, on the other. Democratizer and Tastemaker.
Those of you in the academy may boil in your blood when you hear someone say they do something old “with a modern spin,” but I’m sort of tickled by it. Modernity came and went. So did postmodernity, and now we are at a loss for words as we try to describe where we are in relation to our past. “Contemporary” is a slippery mooring. As the movements of one generation have turned into the institutions of the next, the Internet has thrown Pandora’s box wide open. These days anybody can kickstart a cultural nonprofit with a few clicks of the mouse. The problem? We never know if we’re drinking the nectar of the gods or sipping air at our own imaginary tea parties.
This past Saturday at the Savannah Book Festival, I listened to Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. talk about his new book Freeman, the story of a freed slave tracking down his wife after the Civil War. During the Q&A, in an auditorium mostly filled with middle-aged white women, the conversation turned to the subject of a piece Pitts wrote to commemorate the January anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, which unpacked our country’s racial constructs:
“‘Black’ and ‘white’ are equally artificial, but black fairly quickly took on the contours of a real culture. The people to whom it was applied, after all, were required to live in close proximity to one another, sharing the same often-squalid circumstances, the same mistreatment and oppression, conditions that no degree of personal excellence or achievement could mitigate or help them escape. These pressures shaped them, drew them together. ‘White,’ on the other hand, was held together only by the single condition of being not black, being a member of the advantaged class. It has little existence apart from that.”
There are the words and then there is the context. I was not in Savannah for the book festival but to visit my father. As a writer, I can’t stand listening to writers talk about themselves in those venues. I had never heard of Pitts, even though he’s one of the most widely read black journalists in the country. I grew up in Washington, D.C. with a multiracial group of friends and learned about race from Chuck D, from being, as a 10-year-old, the only white person in the gym at Clubhouse #2 of the Metropolitan Police Boys & Girls Club on a cold Tuesday night, and from being accused of racism as an after school program director in Boston. My dad, on the other hand, grew up in Sheffield, Alabama during segregation, the son of a man who believed in the separation of races in a state where George Wallace and the Ku Klux Klan would soon hold sway.
As a city, Savannah is about 60 percent African-American, but the crowd in Telfair Square for Pitts’ presentation was 95 percent white. I would guess that most of the people in the auditorium voted for Barack Obama and nearly every one of them approved of the message. This is a long-winded way of setting up a simple point: The problem of race for my generation does not have to do with our ideas about race or the laws that enforce equality. It is cultural and it has to do with the auditorium. If the leaders of the previous generation, black and white, used the force of ideas to stand up to violence and coercive authority, break the color barrier, and end legal segregation, the leaders of our generation, like me and like the subjects of this week’s feature, have to bring the same courage to the project of integration. We have to sit next to each other, eat food together, watch our kids play side by side, and stand up for each other. We have to own each other’s issues.
If you read this column in the newspaper, it ended there. But I had more to say. Sometimes the restriction of the print deadline and the space constraint lend a formality to the process that inspires me. Other times, those factors make it harder to say what I mean. In any case, I’m adding on this week.
While race may be a construct, unequal opportunities for a large section of the African-American population in our city are a stark reality. A recent community health survey showed that Charlottesville’s black community has a much higher infant mortality rate and a considerably shorter life expectancy than the rest of the community. School statistics show African-American students lagging behind in nearly every category. A recent Pew study with a national scope concluded that African-American males who haven’t finished high school have a better chance of going to prison than getting a job. The widely circulated Orange Dot Project report, which evaluated our city’s income gap by neighborhood using information gathered in the 2010 Census, shows that the city’s traditionally black neighborhoods are its poorest. The realities of school segregation and limited job opportunities have created an underclass in the middle of a thriving and affluent town. It’s a shame. An even greater shame is that the lack of affordable housing in our city will whitewash it in less than a decade. Is that a future you’re buying into?
Since I’ve been in Charlottesville, I’ve seen the community’s notion of exceptionalism practiced in inspiring and less inspiring ways, but I’ve always been impressed by the idea that our people don’t accept status quo solutions, whether it’s chloramines in the drinking water or a shoddily planned highway or an ugly version of the Belmont Bridge. On March 4, City Council will vote whether or not to create a permanent Human Rights Commission with enforcement authority. As a legal improvement, it may not be a game-changing step, since in the case of a commission in northern Virginia only about 1 in 600 complaints yielded a finding against an accused party. But as an opportunity for us to put our money where our mouth is with regard to racial equality, it’s a huge opportunity. It’s a chance to send a public love letter to the black community, and to all other minority groups in the city. It’s also a chance for us to put aside anger and guilt, which are personally and publicly destructive forces, and embrace innovation and faith, which are creative forces.
To finish, I’d like to thank Quinton Harrell, Corbin Hargraves, Sarad Davenport, and Wes Bellamy for their courage to step into the spotlight and take on the responsibility of providing a voice of leadership for a younger generation that’s not well-represented in local government. I’d also like to acknowledge the people who have helped develop them, some of whom are named in the story and many others who are not, including Rick Turner, Holly Edwards, and Kristin Szakos, to name a few.
If you’ve ever felt guilt about the way our city’s racial divisions separate us or anger at how you’ve been treated, show up at City Council next month. If there are 11 of us or 2,000, it will feel good and maybe someone who knows all the words to “Lift Every Voice and Sing” can lead us in a song and we can send a positive message to the rafters together. You don’t have to stay for a five hour meeting, just come for a few minutes and cut loose.
