Author: john-ruscher

Stretching from Moore’s Creek to the foot of the Belmont Bridge, Monticello Road is only a mile long, but it has wound its way through all of Charlottesville’s long history. One of the first paths to meet with Three Notch’d Road, the well-worn route from Charlottesville to Richmond, it has seen everything from circus parades, which marched along it after unloading at the C&O rail depot, to the hooves of Teddy Roosevelt’s presidential cavalcade, which once pounded through on the way to Monticello.

Given that history, one might be tempted to dive headfirst into the road’s rich past. But for “Monticello Road,” an exhibition that opens Friday at The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative, local photographer Peter Krebs has focused instead on the present. “The best art defines a time and a place so strongly it lasts into posterity, but it can also serve a purpose right here and now,” Krebs wrote on monticelloroad.com, where he’s been sharing his explorations for the past couple of years.

As the culmination of those explorations, Krebs’ exhibition will feature an array of large prints, an 80-page catalog and a slide show featuring hundreds of local faces. He sees it not merely as a showcase of his own artistic expression, but as an engaging community-centric project that will bring people closer together. “When the exhibition takes place, they will see my impressions but the works will also be touchstones to provoke conversation, which is the glue that cements a community together,” he said. In addition to his own active photography, Krebs set up informal photo booths at places like La Taza, The Bridge and Spudnuts, inviting anyone to pose and walk away with their own prints.

Following Friday’s opening the exhibition will host a series of special events through the rest of the month. On Saturday, April 7 there will be a screening of Still Life With Donuts, a 2003 documentary about the Belmont neighborhood, followed by a Q&A with its filmmakers at Spudnuts, the famous donut joint that inspired the film’s title. Virginia Industries for the Blind will host an open house on April 12, and a neighborhood and community planning panel will convene on April 17 as part of National Architecture Week. Local residents will share memories and stories of Monticello Road and Belmont on April 22, and the exhibition will wrap up with an artist’s talk with Krebs and special guests on April 26.

Soul survivor
“Why is it so hard to make it in America?” sings Charles Bradley on No Time For Dreaming, his 2011 debut album. That’s not an empty question, given the path that has taken him from Florida, where he lived with his grandmother until age 8, to the Jefferson Theater, where he’ll bring show-stopping soul music this Friday.

After moving to live with his mother in Brooklyn, Bradley had the life-changing experience of seeing James Brown at the Apollo Theater in 1962. That inspired him to begin imitating the Godfather of Soul, but it would still be many years before he would really be heard. Running away from home in his teens, he lived on the streets before settling in Maine and then, after another period on the road, in California.

Though he took the stage occasionally during those years, it wasn’t until Bradley returned to Brooklyn to care for his mother that he really found his voice. Performing as Black Velvet, a James Brown impersonator, Bradley caught the attention of Gabriel Roth, the co-founder of Daptone Records, the label of another neo-soul star, Sharon Jones. The excellent No Time For Dreaming soon followed, and Charles Bradley: Soul of America, a documentary that explores the singer’s long and bumpy path to musical success, premiered to much acclaim at the SXSW Film Festival in Texas last month.

Equal parts James Brown and Otis Redding, Bradley does justice to his nickname, “The Screaming Eagle of Soul,” and it’s inspiring to see such an amazing talent finally making it after so many years. We highly recommend heading to the Jefferson Friday night, where Bradley will be sharing the bill with another great Daptone Records act, The Budos Band. He might even treat you to his soul-injected covers of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold” and Nirvana’s “Stay Away.”

Thank God It’s Fridays After Five
We’re always thrilled for the first Fridays After Five announcement of the year, as that means that summertime is just around the corner. Yesterday the nTelos Wireless Pavilion released the schedule for the first half of the long-running free concert series, and as usual there’s something for everybody. In addition to familiar standbys like Baaba Seth, Skip Castro, Indecision, Terri Allard, and the Chickenhead Blues Band, we’re also excited for Richmond’s No BS! Brass Band, which will bring its raucous brand of funk on April 27. Love Canon kicks off this summer’s series on April 20 with its irresistible explosion of bluegrass-style ’80s hits.

 It started with an aria. Shortly after arriving at UVA five years ago, music professor Bonnie Gordon was searching for a score to “Cara Sposa” from George Frideric Handel’s opera Rinaldo. Thomas Jefferson’s own copy of the aria, it turned out, was sitting nearby in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. There was only one problem. “I didn’t have enough credentials to actually look at the music,” said Gordon.

That lack of access may have thrown a wrench into her research at the time, but it led to a much larger project, which has produced both “Sound in Early America,” an exhibition that opened last week at the Special Collections Library, and “Soundscapes of Jefferson’s America,” a two-day symposium taking place this weekend.

“Soundscapes,” which Gordon co-organized with fellow music professor Richard Will, begins Friday with lectures and demonstrations throughout the day at UVA’s Harrison Institute, followed by a free concert at Old Cabell Hall featuring Harmonious Blacksmith. “They are kind of a rocking badass early music group that capitalizes on the gritty sounds of early music,” Gordon said.

Saturday the symposium will head to Montalto, the part of Carter’s Mountain that Jefferson purchased and named in 1777. The day will include an old-time banjo performance by Jerron “Blind Boy” Paxton, as well as lectures and presentations by a variety of scholars, including New York Law School professor Annette Gordon-Reed, whose The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in history.

Saturday night the symposium will return to Old Cabell Hall for “Jazz Meets Jefferson,” which will feature the Free Bridge Quintet, UVA’s official all-star jazz ensemble, as well as Gordon on viola and Will on violin and vocals. In addition to folk songs like “Oh! Susannah,” “Shenandoah” and “Careless Love,” the concert will include “Let’s Go Inside,” a new composition by UVA trumpet master and composer John D’earth. Exploring the sounds of Jefferson’s time, the piece incorporates everything from fiddle, parlor and ballroom music to slave songs, a graveyard lament and the sounds of nature.

The “Sound in Early America” exhibition at UVA’s Special Collections Library takes on a broader scope, spanning from Jefferson’s time through the Civil War era. Gordon curated the exhibition in collaboration with students from her graduate seminar, UVA’s Music Library, and the Special Collections Library. “The idea behind it was that, although everyone knows that UVA has all of these amazing historical documents, they also have a tremendous amount of interesting music,” she said. The exhibition features everything from “The Death Song of the Cherokee Indians,” a 1786 score that transcribed a Native American song into Western notation, to a recording of a Frederick Douglass speech and a Civil War valentine song.

One item that Gordon found particularly fascinating was a songbook sent to Jefferson by the European musician and composer Maria Cosway, whom he met in Paris while serving as U.S. Minister to France. Though she was married, Cosway and the widowed Jefferson became close, and their separation inspired his famous love letter, “A Dialogue Between My Head and My Heart.” The cover of the songbook features Cupid subduing a lion. “It’s a very expressive image,” Gordon said. See for yourself in “Sound in Early America,” which will be on display through August 20.

The right tone
We also want to congratulate another UVA music professor, Judith Shatin, who has been selected as a Virginia Women in History honoree. Each year, as part of National Women’s History Month, the Library of Virginia in Richmond recognizes “outstanding Virginia women who have made important contributions to Virginia, the nation, and the world.” Shatin, who founded UVA’s Virginia Center for Computer Music in 1987, is being honored for championing “music that blurs the line between acoustic and digital.”

She’s also the subject of a new Chamber Music magazine feature by renowned music critic Kyle Gann, who offered a more descriptive take on her work. “Her music bristles with energy,” he wrote. “Chords pound repeatedly. They are mostly dissonant, and I would generally describe the idiom as atonal. Yet the music often swoops into tonality, and you’ll find yourself in a pool of calm e-flat major before you’re aware the change was coming.” Coincidentally, one of Shatin’s most recent compositions is Jefferson in His Own Words, an orchestral piece based entirely on Thomas Jefferson’s writings.

Sons on the horizon
Last but certainly not least, we’re excited to hear that Sons of Bill will join The Infamous Stringdusters and Sarah White and the Pearls to play the nTelos Wireless Pavilion on May 12. Presented by The Festy, the show will celebrate the 40th anniversary of Blue Ridge Mountain Sports and benefit Big Brothers and Big Sisters of the Central Blue Ridge. Hot off their string of free Virginia shows and set to play at least 20 more East Coast shows in the next few weeks, Sons of Bill will be in good form when they hit the pavilion stage.

What do a basketball legend, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a bestselling novelist, an acclaimed Mexican poet, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning climatologist and an African king have in common? Easy—you’ll find all of them at the Virginia Festival of the Book this week. We’ve highlighted some favorites below, but go to vabook.org for the festival’s full schedule of more than 200 amazing literary events.

Wednesday, March 21
History buffs will love “Stories of Appalachia” (Student Bookstore, 2pm), featuring local historians Phil James, author of Secrets of the Blue Ridge: Stories from Western Albemarle, and Lynn Coffey, author of the Backroads trilogy. “There came a point when I realized those stories needed to be told,” James told us. “Visiting with my elderly neighbors and extended family, I began to learn more about the vibrant lives that preceded us in this place.” James’ book features selections from his long-running local history column in the Crozet Gazette, and he also penned the foreword to Coffey’s Backroads Volume 3: Faces of Appalachia. “Her trilogy reflects her genuine admiration for the mountain folks who live within shouting distance of the Blue Ridge Parkway near Love, Virginia,” he said. “Laurels and Laureates” (UVA Harrison Institute / Small Special Collections, 4pm) will bring together Virginia Poet Laureate Kelly Cherry, UVA’s Paul Guest and John Casteen IV, who shared his perspective as a festival veteran. “A lot of the work we do is lonesome; we tend to write, and to read, in solitude,” he said. “So to have an event like this gives everyone, free of charge, access to exciting work and the pleasures of the written word—it’s a great thing.” Casteen will read from his latest book, For the Mountain Laurel, as well as some more recent poems.

Thursday, March 22
Roald Hoffmann may have a Nobel Prize in chemistry and a slew of other prestigious science honors on his shelf, but he also has a knack for words. Fittingly, he’ll be reading his poems in Jefferson’s great hub of science and scholarship (The Rotunda, 1pm). And speaking of prizes, Harvard professor Louis Menand, whose The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America earned him a Pulitzer, will join UVA’s Matthew Affron and Michael Levenson for “The Education of Andy Warhol” (UVA Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections, 6pm). You’ll also want to catch Chad Harbach, UVA alum and author of bestselling novel The Art of Fielding, which the New York Times named one of its 10 Best Books of 2011 (UVA Harrison Institute/Small Special Collections, 8pm).

Friday, March 23
If you miss Harbach on Thursday, you’ll have another chance to see him Friday, when he’ll be reading with fellow UVA MFA alumni Jazzy Danziger, Brittany Perham, Mark Wagenaar, and Eleanor Henderson (UVA Bookstore, noon). We’re also excited for “Literary Icons—Their Lives, Their Works” (UVA Bookstore, 4pm), which will feature UVA’s Andrew D. Kaufman, author of Understanding Tolstoy, Michael Sims, author of The Story of Charlotte’s Web, and local author Charles Shields, who has written Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, and And So It Goes: Kurt Vonnegut: A Life.

Saturday, March 24
“Dispatches from the Climate Wars” (UVA Clark Hall, 10am) will mark the triumphant return of Michael E. Mann, former UVA professor and Nobel Peace Prize-winning climatologist. Mann’s new book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines, recounts his own experiences in the trenches, from authoring the first paper featuring the “Hockey Stick” temperature chart to the recent court battle with Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli. “My hope is that, through the narrative of my own story, and the experience that I have had as an almost accidental and reluctant public figure in the debate over human-caused climate change, I have a unique opportunity to talk about these issues,” Mann told us. His visit will be “particularly gratifying,” considering the Virginia State Supreme Court’s recent rejection of Cuccinelli’s latest attempt to seize e-mails that Mann wrote while at UVA.

Sunday, March 25
In last week’s column we featured Greg Kelly’s Pigeon, and on Sunday he’ll discuss his work alongside fellow artist Randy Asplund, who uses authentic medieval methods to create beautiful illuminated manuscripts, books and illustrations (Virginia Arts of the Book Center, noon).

Beating the drum
Before sending you off on your literary adventures, we’ve got exciting news about another upcoming festival. The Tom Tom Founders Festival, organized by former City Council candidate Paul Beyer, recently announced its initial musical lineup for May 11 and 12. In addition to headliners Josh Ritter and The Walkmen, the festival will feature Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic and Hospitality, Nashville’s Those Darlins and local favorites The Hill and Wood, Diane Cluck, Birdlips, and Carl Anderson, just to name a few. Shows will take place at The Southern, The Main Street Arena, The Haven and Christ Church, and tickets go on sale today at tomtomfest.com.

Working at a gallery in downtown St. Louis in his early 20s, Greg Antrim Kelly would watch the pigeons outside. “They were kind of this outlet,” he told us. “Like some sort of direct connection to the natural world when I was in that urban environment.”

Years later, while reflecting on a collection of pencil and ink drawings that he created during his first decade in Charlottesville, Kelly remembered those feathered friends. “They’re perceived as kind of rats with wings,” he said. “They’re actually doves, these really beautiful birds, but they have this sort of dirty aura, this lower association. I found that intriguing. I sort of identified with that—kind of like an ugly duckling. There’s a beauty inside all of that.” Kelly decided to name the collection Pigeon after those “underdogs of the urban sky.”

Beginning in 2001 as a collaborative project with a poet friend, Kelly’s drawings continued after the friend moved away. A motley and mysterious cast of characters began to emerge. “The Beast with Gentle Hands” revealed himself. “The Heavy-Drinking Thinker” teetered into view. There were Iron John-like alpha males. “Not something I perceive myself as but something where culturally or personally I feel like I’m supposed to be,” Kelly said. And “The Butoh-Bowie.” “I call it that because it’s this androgynous character that is sort of a combo of a Japanese theater mask and David Bowie,” Kelly explained. “And then there are a lot of sad smokers, but I think the sad smokers in some form or fashion fall into those other categories.”

As Kelly revisited the illustrations, many of which he created at night, following days in his studio and then at the growing Bridge Progressive Arts Initiative, he began to view them as a self-portrait. “I started thinking about where all of these guys are coming from, because there’s no specific intention or concept that was driving the drawings, so those guys were just sort of spilling out,” he said.

Friends like John Bylander, Johanna Drucker and Max Fenton saw the collection and encouraged him to think about turning it into a book. “John in particular was really a very big force in each stage of the game,” Kelly said. “He helped with the layout and we brainstormed a lot of things together and kind of put them together.” Inspired by a deck of playing cards, they decided to present the collection as a three-volume set of illustrated cards. Buddhism played a role as well. “There are certainly elements of different meditation practices that are built into how the book is structured,” Kelly said. “Like the mandalas on the backs of the cards and the nature of the work that was selected.”

After a successful Kickstarter fund-raising campaign and more help from fellow artists including Bylander, Patrick Costello and Thomas Deane, Kelly celebrated the collection’s first limited edition printing in November at Random Row Books.

This month a selection of 20 drawings from Pigeon are on exhibit through March 29 at the Virginia Arts of the Book Center, where Costello and Kelly letter pressed its packaging. “I kind of took the marquee players from the book and threw those into the show,” Kelly said. The VABC exhibition also features additional drawings that weren’t featured in the book, some of the implements that he used to create the drawings, a copy of Pigeon and a collaborative project between Kelly and his dad. “Things that sort of informed, or were part of, or came out of the process over those 10 years,” he explained. “Sort of rogue agents.”

A reception for the exhibition will take place this Friday, March 16 from 5 to 7pm, and on Sunday, March 25 from noon to 2pm, VABC’s Kevin McFadden will moderate a talk about artists’ books and prints with Kelly and medieval-style illustrator Randy Asplund as part of the Virginia Festival of the Book.

Messing with Texas
This week in Charlottesville, as in most parts of the country, you might notice a shortage of musicians loitering about. That’s because many of them are making the pilgrimage to Austin, Texas for the annual music mega-festival South By Southwest. Local indie rockers Infinite Jets have been preparing for their first SXSW trek. After a slow 2011, the Jets have been hitting the road and stage more frequently this year, guitarist Matt Bierce told us, and with their Lone Star jaunt we imagine they’ll kick things up to Mach 5. On their way to Austin the Jets will play in Houston with fellow Virginia rockers Eternal Summers.

Hometown folk rock outfit The Hill and Wood is also Texas-bound, as are brotherly country rockers Sons of Bill, who will be touting songs from their upcoming album “Sirens.” Having our fair share of fond SXSW memories, we’re pretty jealous that we aren’t going. But we won’t begrudge these bands the three most valuable words of advice for enduring that scorching Texas sun: tacos, beer, pizza.

 When Charlottesville was formed on a 1,000 acre tract of land back in 1762, it was named in honor of Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. Known for her patronage of the arts, she admired and supported the likes of George Frideric Handel and a precocious young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. It seems appropriate, then, that a quarter of a millennium later our city is in the middle of Celebrate 250, a yearlong birthday bash honoring Charlottesville’s rich history of arts and culture. The city’s royal namesake is even getting her own turn in the spotlight with “Queen Charlotte,” the latest Albemarle-Charlottesville Historical Society exhibition, which opened at the McIntire Building last Friday.

That exhibition is one of many Celebrate 250 events and programs in store for the rest of the year. Later this month, Celebrate 250 will join forces with the 18th annual Virginia Festival of the Book, which runs March 21 through March 25. City Council Chambers will host a handful of festival talks, including “If Buildings Could Talk” on March 22 and “What You Didn’t Know About Charlottesville,” on March 23, which will both feature local authors and highlight fascinating parts of local history. Council Chambers will also welcome a royal visitor. No, Queen Charlotte’s ghost won’t be checking in to see if we’ve lived up to her name. We’re talking about Peggielene Bartels, the co-author of King Peggy: An American Secretary, Her Royal Destiny, and the Inspiring Story of How She Changed an African Village. On March 23 she’ll talk about how she became the King of Otuam, a seaside village in Ghana. What does this have to do with Charlottesville, you ask? As it happens, Otuam is not far from Winneba, Charlottesville’s Ghanaian sister city.

As the year progresses, Celebrate 250 will dig deeper into local history, both figuratively and literally. The inaugural Virginia Festival of History, which runs from May 26 to June 3, will feature lectures panels and living history presentations, as well as the unearthing of the time capsule that was buried as part of Charlottesville’s 200th anniversary celebrations in 1962. A gala and birthday party will take place in November, and a variety of other events are also in the works, so stay tuned to our weekly calendar.

While 2012 will provide plenty of chances to learn about the city’s previous 250 years, you can also help write the latest chapter in Charlottesville’s history. Next Tuesday, March 13, Celebrate 250 will present a workshop at the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s Central Branch showing Charlottesvillians how they contribute to Cvillepedia, a local Wikipedia-like online encyclopedia curated by Charlottesville Tomorrow.

Friday night benefit
We also want to give a big old Feedback Stamp Of Approval to a great event happening at The Jefferson Theater this Friday. A diverse group of some of the area’s finest musicians will come together to play a benefit concert for Rob and Dana Leonard, who suffered a terrible accident on the last day of their honeymoon in Belize back in September. While the newlyweds were snorkeling in front of thedock of their hotel, a water taxi struck them, causing serious injuries, including the loss of Rob’s right leg. “The Rob & Dana benefit is a particularly dear one for the venue and its staff, as Rob is manager of the theater’s box office and ticketing,” says the Jefferson’s Danny Shea.

With such a good cause, it’s no surprise that a great group of musicians have come together for the concert. It’ll feature the Nelson County mountain music of ex-Hackensaw Boy Bobby St. Ours, the down-home Virginia twang of Sarah White & The Pearls, the hard-hitting melodic rock of Harrisonburg duo The Cinnamon Band, and smart and catchy tunes of Borrowed Beams of Lights. On top of that terrific lineup, the show will also feature a benefit raffle and a silent auction, giving you the chance to snag a wide variety of goodies, including tickets to Bonnaroo and Dave Matthews Band shows this summer, autographed merchandise from artists including Trey Anastasio, Josh Ritter, Tim McGraw and Faith Hill, and gift certificates from local restaurants and businesses.

On the record
Friday’s concert will also be one of your first chances to pick up a copy of Sarah White & The Pearls’ new 7" record. Featuring the songs “Married Life” and “ILY,” which the band recorded last summer, it’s the very first release from WarHen Records, a new local label that plans to release hand-numbered, limited editions “on glorious vinyl.”

And since we’re talking vinyl, here’s one more bit of exciting news. This Saturday the Charlottesville Record Fair will set up shop at the Holiday Inn on 29-North from 10am to 4pm. Organized by veteran North Carolina record dealer Greg Neal with assistance from longtime Plan 9 record buyer Jimmy Blackford, the fair is bound to offer up many great records. Go forth and groove!

 A momentous reunion is happening at the University of Virginia. No, we’re not talking about alumni returning to town to relive their glory days. This goes back much further than even Mr. Jefferson himself—all the way to 14th century Italy, when painter Bartolo di Fredi took up his brush to create an altarpiece for a church in his native city of Siena. As he applied his tempera and gold leaf, he surely didn’t imagine that half a millenium* later parts of his painting would scatter across the globe, nor that they would be reunited for “The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed,” an exhibition opening Friday at the UVA Art Museum.

“Bartolo’s most famous work was probably a series of frescoes that were painted in the town of San Gimignano, which is near Siena, in the late 1360s,” Bruce Boucher, who joined the museum as director in 2009, told us. Boucher, along with UVA Associate Professor Francesca Fiorani, co-curated this exhibition, which was inspired by a portion of Bartolo’s altarpiece that found its way into UVA’s collection. “When I came here I thought it would be great for our public if we could try to reunite the three surviving pieces of this altarpiece, to show that the painting, pretty though it was, was merely a small part of a much larger structure,” Boucher said.

While his frescoes might be more famous, Boucher views Bartolo’s “Adoration of the Magi,” painted between 1375 and 1385, as the artist’s biggest accomplishment. “I think this is really his masterpiece,” he said. “He was not a painter of the first rank, like Simone Martini or Duccio, but he was consistently good, and in this painting I think he really outdid himself.” The altarpiece’s upper portion, for instance, not only features the wise men’s cavalcade as they journey to Bethlehem, but also incorporates Siena itself into that Biblical scene. “You see a view of a walled medieval city, which looks very much like Siena, and a building with green and white marble, which looks very much like the Gothic cathedral in Siena,” Boucher said. “It has this wonderful richness of detail, of narrative detail, that has this very obvious attempt to try to connect Siena with Jerusalem.”

“And of course it calls to mind the political fact that the Sienese had entrusted their city to the care of the Virgin from 1260 onwards,” he added, referring to Siena’s adoption of the Virgin Mary as its special patron.

Bartolo’s altarpiece remained in place for around 500 years, but then came the 19th century and the upheaval of the Napoleonic Wars. Like many religious artworks during that period, it was divided and scattered by the art market. The main panel, which depicts the familiar scene of the wise men paying homage to the Baby Jesus, remained in Siena, where it is now in the collection of Italy’s National Picture Gallery. A large portion of the bottom panel, which features Christ’s crucifixion along with a group of on-looking saints, was purchased in Rome by German aristocrat Bernhard von Lindenau, and it is still part of the Lindenau-Museum in his hometown of Altenburg.

Another section of the bottom panel, which portrays seven additional saints, has had the most adventurous journey. Its whereabouts remained a mystery until the 1920s, when it turned up in New York in a Milanese sale catalog, only to promptly disappear again. Then, in the 1970s, those gold-leafed saints surfaced right here in Charlottesville, when a local woman who had inherited the piece donated it to the UVA Art Museum. “Our scholars made the connection with the other panel in Germany in the late 1970s, and so we knew that it was part of this altarpiece,” said Boucher. “The painting may have had other panels to it, or wall frescoes that were part of a larger complex. We just don’t know.”

In addition to the three known sections of Bartolo’s “Adoration of the Magi,” the exhibition will also feature two works by his Sienese contemporaries, a small domestic altarpiece by Naddo Ceccarelli and a life-size crucifixion scene by Francesco di Vannuccio. “With these other two paintings we also show other aspects of the Christian narrative and different types of Christian altarpiece,” said Boucher. “You get to see something of the variety of religious painting in 14th century Siena and the way in which the Sienese regarded these works not only as religious statements but also as statements of political affiliation, of talismanic power.”

“The Adoration of the Magi by Bartolo di Fredi: A Masterpiece Reconstructed” opens this Friday, March 2. The museum will also host some of the world’s leading scholars on Sienese art for a symposium on April 27 and 28, and you can catch a glimpse of the six century reunion through May 27. Take that, Class of 1962.

*Corrected from "half a century"

 Trying for an edgier, hipper vibe, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences enlisted young whippersnappers James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host last year’s Academy Awards. They were likely hoping that Franco would jump into his co-hosting duties with the same gusto as his Best Actor-nominated character in 127 Hours. Instead he “treated the Oscars like his own avant-garde conceptual art project, like the way he went on ‘General Hospital’ for kicks and giggles,” as Rolling Stone’s Rob Sheffield put it.

This year the Academy isn’t risking a repeat of what Roger Ebert deemed “the worst Oscar cast I’ve seen.” When the curtain rises on this Sunday’s Oscars, they’ll turn to the tried-and-true Billy Crystal, who will be hosting the ceremony for the ninth time.

The Academy may have decided to give up on today’s youth and the avant-garde, but we are keeping the faith. That’s why we’ve decided to highlight a couple of local events happening this week that can serve as great alternatives to Mr. Crystal and those little gold-plated statuettes.

First up is The Bridge/PAI’s film series, which has been offering local experimental film junkies a steady fix since 2006. The series’ reputation made it all the way to the folks at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, one of the country’s most esteemed showcases for experimental film. They approached The Bridge about hosting one of the festival’s traveling programs, which will bring 80 minutes of film shorts from around the world to town this Thursday.
“Our showings over the past five years have tended to focus on trolling the rich history of experimental film with a few bits of contemporary experimental film caught in the net,” film series director Jordan Taylor told us. “We think this collection will be a great way for students, artists, and community members to see how currently working filmmakers are recasting the world.”

The program is one of The Bridge’s many upcoming film events, including a March 15 showcase of work by avant-garde pioneers Robert Breer and Jordan Belson, who both died last year. Taylor told us he is also particularly excited for the April 17 return of Flicker Poetry, a special showcase bringing together poetry and experimental film. “We are working with Lindsay Turner and local writers to come up with a nice mix of local poets, and the films should be another great collection of the rarely-if-ever seen films associated with the Beats, New York school, language poetry, and maybe even a few other odd subcultures thrown in to boot,” said Taylor. Also on the horizon are Cine de Noche, a bi-weekly Spanish-language film series starting in March that aims to foster bilingual discussion and exchange, and a showcase of experimental shorts created by students at Light House Studio in May.

Speaking of Light House, while Hollywood dons tuxedos and gowns and heads to the Kodak Theatre on Sunday, the local youth film organization will roll out its own red carpet at The Southern. High school and middle school students who participated in the studio’s inaugural music video workshop last summer will be premiering the videos that they created in collaboration with Borrowed Beams of Light, Downbeat Project and former Feedback columnist Andrew Cedermark.

Borrowed Beams’ Adam Brock, who is also a mentor at Light House and appears in the video for his instrumental surf number “Hang 1000,” told us about the experience. “The kids bounced ideas off of us and got to really explore things like giving direction,” he said. “Once they had developed their story and storyboarded it and everything, we had a really fun day shooting at the sand volleyball courts near Alderman and Clemons. They developed this cool surf-y crime spoof concept.” In one scene, Brock had to run in place next to a stationary car while two students, dressed as police and donning fake mustaches, shouted at him and pretended to be in hot pursuit. “The passersby loved that,” Brock said.

Sunday’s premiere will also feature live performances by Borrowed Beams, Downbeat Project, and The Fire Tapes, who are slated to participate in Light House’s next music video workshop this summer, as well as special giveaways and ongoing Oscar updates.

If you want the full-fledged Oscars experience, you can head to The Paramount Theater, which is hosting one of only 49 official Oscar Night America viewing parties. You’ll still be supporting local arts, as the event will benefit the Virginia Film Festival, and you’ll get to enjoy a selection of local food and wine, a silent auction of film-related items, a live broadcast of the Oscars on a high-definition screen, and a copy of the official Academy Awards program.
Finally, we’ll leave you with a zinger from Steve Martin: “Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town.”

Russell Perry remembers WTJU’s first rock marathon. “We were raising money to change the signal from mono to stereo,” the former DJ told us. “After raising the money and making the improvements, we switched over to stereo with great fanfare and inaugurated our new status by playing ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ It didn’t seem like such a hackneyed choice in the mid-’70s.” As Jimmy Page’s guitar solo soared into the stratosphere, a great tradition was born. Quoth Robert Plant: “When all are one and one is all, to be a rock and not to roll.”

WTJU General Manager Nathan Moore has a good grip on the rock marathon and, he says, big plans for the station’s future, like a greater Web presence. “That is, hundreds of volunteers creating content, curating music and sharing stories in an online and digital environment,” he said.

Point your radio to 91.1 FM or your computer to wtju.net (do it, right now!) and you’ll hear the latest WTJU Rock Marathon, which kicked off Monday and will broadcast nonstop all week. In addition to programs delving into everything from Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound” to West African guitar music, the marathon will also feature live in-studio performances and a weeklong countdown of WTJU’s top 50 songs since the station took to the airwaves in 1957. “It’s not just about the new rock and the contemporary rock and the deep cuts that we often play,” General Manager Nathan Moore told us. “It’s also about looking at the history of rock and roll.”

As Moore nears his one-year anniversary at WTJU, he’s got a good grip on the essence of the rock marathon, even though this one is his first. That’s a big relief following the brief and stormy reign of Burr Beard, whose proposed changes in 2010 fired up DJs and listeners alike, but not in the way that he intended. “One function of that is it got people at the station to realize that, hey, maybe the status quo isn’t all there is,” Moore said of his predecessor’s inadvertent impact. “There was an energy in the air already when I got here, and so I was able to slip in and say, here are some of the things that we can do.”

From the start, Moore set about making WTJU more versatile and tech-savvy. Within a few days of his arrival last April, he had worked out a new live remote broadcasting system. In June, after a storm knocked out the connection between WTJU’s studio and its Carter Mountain tower, he drove out and connected his iPhone directly to the transmitter, broadcasting the online stream over the airwaves until things could be fixed. He also plans to further improve and expand WTJU’s web presence. “We need to re-envision our website and digital platform as almost another radio station in some way, using the same community-driven and volunteer-driven models,” he said. 

A 21st century revamp won’t come free, though. So, like the station’s effort to go stereo four decades ago, this year’s rock marathon will raise funds to help WTJU get with the times and stay afloat in the rising digital waters. With a $30,000 goal, rock DJs are enticing listeners with the usual station swag—hats, tote bags and umbrellas—as well as the latest in a long line of storied rock marathon t-shirts. “In the ’80s there was an extraordinary run of hip musicians making t-shirts as premiums, including Jad Fair, Robert Loveless from Savage Republic, and maybe even Daniel Johnston,” said Chris Funkhouser, a DJ from ’83 to ’87.

Friday at noon listeners can hear a soundtrack to Michael Azerrad’s chronicle of ’80s underground rock, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and snag their own copy of the book with a $60 pledge. Other premiums include a vinyl reissue of Pavement’s Slanted & Enchanted, an album heavily influenced by Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich’s time as WTJU DJs. “Everybody puts down what they’re doing and gets cool for a week… or nerdy depending on one’s perspective on underground music culture,” Nastanovich told us when we asked about his memories of marathons in the ’80s.

“My favorite memories are the way the marathon seems to bring out this crazy kind of passion,” said author and Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield, who DJed in the ’90s. “Charlottesville is a real hotbed of music fans, and something about the rock marathon seems to unleash the beast, so to speak. Like Don Harrison’s Dylan extravaganza—every year, that show would fire up all the hardcore Dylan freaks of central Virginia and they’d start calling in to pledge and request crazy songs like ‘If Dogs Run Free.’ The last hour of the show would always be these Dylan songs you never knew anybody liked. And even if you can’t stand ‘If Dogs Run Free,’ you have to admire that kind of passion.”

While Harrison isn’t doing a Dylan show this year, he will be spinning everything from ’70s disco singles and classic rock deep cuts to Brian Wilson’s Smile Sessions and Virginia funk and soul. The beast, we’re pretty certain, has been unleashed.

With only a few hours left until the curtain goes up, you are seeing the score for tonight’s show for the first time. This could be a performer’s recurring nightmare, akin to that dream where you show up to a test unprepared or the one where you suddenly find yourself naked in front of the entire high school auditorium. But for UVA music professor and composer Ted Coffey, it’s a position in which he deliberately places himself before each performance of Story/Time, a new piece that finds him collaborating with world-renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones.

Composer Ted Coffey just wrapped up a few East Coast performances of his latest collaboration, with choreographer Bill T. Jones. Said Coffey of his work: “I feel like I’m using all of my wits and capacity and sensitivity.” Photo by Cat Thrasher.

After the two met last February during UVA’s “Design Thinking Mashup” symposium, Coffey began working on the score for Jones’ Story/Time during a series of subsequent residencies, including stints at UVA last spring and fall. Inspired by John Cage’s “Indeterminacy,” Story/Time draws from both that formal structure of Cage’s piece—a string of consecutive minute-long stories—and its use of chance to govern how things unfold. A performance of Story/Time features around half of the 140 or so one-minute narratives that Jones penned for it, and Coffey’s score draws from a similarly large arsenal of musical possibilities that he has at the ready, from processed audio samples and thematic vignettes to live performance and interactive manipulations. Which of those elements will be included in a new performance of Story/Time, however, aren’t determined until shortly before the show starts.

If Story/Time adhered rigidly to Cage’s rules of indeterminacy, it would be an easy but erratic piece—just a matter of rolling the dice and letting the Fates choose what stories, choreography and sounds will populate its 70 minutes. Instead, Jones and Coffey assume a more complex relationship with chance. “Bill is more interested in dramatic arc than that,” Coffey told us after wrapping up the final performance of Story/Time’s world premiere run at New Jersey’s Montclair State University. “We’re not just going to inherit that piece and make one of those. So we’re in this negotiation between that situation on one hand and full on meddling on the other, forming what we hope to be a compelling dramatic arc.”

While chance is central to Coffey’s Story/Time score, he applies and shapes it with his own discretion. Using a computer model of Cage’s favorite composition tool, ancient Chinese divination text the I Ching, Coffey randomly selects and generates different pitches and sonic textures in real time. “But I can constrain that randomness and have certain kinds of tonality and intonation from which these instruments choose,” he said. He also uses the I Ching to determine where to place material within each of the piece’s one-minute segments, as well as when his score will support Jones’ choreography and narrative or follow its own logical tangent. “That adds another dimension to the piece’s total objects,” he said. “So either I come back into the fold or I’m opening up the field.”

When Coffey is in the fold, the music makes tangible connections with Jones’ stories. “Bill talks about ‘Blossom Dearie,’ then all of a sudden I make three vignettes of ‘Blossom Dearie,’” he said. “Or when he talks about ‘John Henry,’ I am playing stuff on guitar that’s keyed to ‘John Henry.’” Conversely, opening up the field produced one of the most intense and abstract moments of the Story/Time performance that we caught in New Jersey. About two-thirds of the way through the piece, Coffey unleashed a low, floor-shaking rumble that filled the theater and drowned out Jones’ voice. The inclusion of that dissonant and powerful element in the night’s score was determined by chance, but its placement wasn’t random. “We didn’t want to spend that thunderous stuff in the first 10 minutes of the piece,” Coffey explained. “On the other hand, we didn’t want to have that at the very end either. So then we think, where can we fit it? It’s like a puzzle.”

As each performance of Story/Time progresses, Coffey makes a host of similar in-the-moment decisions, reacting to chance determinations and assembling the pieces of that night’s sonic puzzle. “On the whole, it’s definitely taxing,” he told us. “Performing the music is very demanding of me, because I’m doing a lot of actions, and there’s a lot of opportunity to make a mistake. But at the same time, it’s really exciting and really fulfilling. I feel like I’m using all of my wits and capacity and sensitivity.”

Coffey will create many more unique scores for Story/Time, as the piece has a growing string of national and international engagements on the horizon, with Minneapolis’ Walker Art Center and the University of California Berkeley coming up later this month. Charlottesville got a sneak preview with a work-in-progress performance at Culbreth Theater back in November, but we hope Story/Time returns to town for a more formal showing. When we asked about that possibility, Coffey said that nothing has been planned yet. But then he added, “I could see it playing at the Paramount.”

"The Unearthing” started with some digging. Last spring, while local activist and artistic educator extraordinaire Zap McConnell was in California for a dance production, she happened to be doing some research on mountain top removal. On the website Ilovemountains.org, she typed in her zip code and uncovered the fact that much of Charlottesville’s power comes from mountain top removal coal from Kayford Mountain, West Virginia, an area that she visited during her time teaching at the Living Education Center. “When I saw that, it just really hit home,” McConnell said. “I was also just striving to bring together all of these different aspects of my life.” After taking a long walk, she sat down at a café and started drawing. “The images came, and I started trying to make them happen.”

“The Unearthing” transforms the IX Building’s old gymnasium into a dance, theater, music, and visual art venue. (Photo by Will Mays)

McConnell envisioned merging her passions and pursuits in activism, art, dance, and education into one large-scale project. She also imagined bringing together her network of collaborators from Mexico, California and Oregon to help realize that project and facilitate an international artistic and cultural exchange. For many people, such an ambitious idea might never get beyond ink on the page, but McConnell isn’t one of those people. By December 20, she had raised enough money to fund “The Unearthing,” which kicks off its two-week run of performances at the Ix Building this Wednesday.

When McConnell’s collaborators arrived in town in January, the first phase of “The Unearthing” quickly got underway. To offset the carbon footprint of the performers’ travel, “The Unearthing” presented a workshop series at The Bridge/Progressive Arts Initiative, including talks about mountaintop removal and cultural identity. The workshops also allowed McConnell to incorporate activism and education into the project without making them overt aspects of the performance. “Part of that is paying back my carbon footprint, and part of it is actually freeing myself a little bit, so I don’t feel like I have to be so didactic in my art,” she said. “We can be a little bit more poetic.”

It’s fitting that “The Unearthing” will take place in the old gymnasium of the Ix Building, since it’s not far from the site of A Charlottesville Wunderkammer, the legendary carnival that McConnell helped orchestrate as artistic director in 2006. While that production featured a motley assortment of circus and sideshow acts, this show has a more grounded tone. With sculptures by UVA graduate students and local artists and an installation made from discarded materials that were salvaged from around Charlottesville, “The Unearthing” will transform the gym into an intricate backdrop for the two-hour program of dance, theater, music and visual art. During the first half of the evening, the audience will be led from scene to scene. “There are so many different incredible perspectives and vignettes,” McConnell said. The second half will give people the freedom to explore the space and performances on their own, enjoy a drink in the “salon/saloon” and peruse artwork from the installation, all of which will be for sale, with half of the proceeds going to The Ilovemountains.org and other environmental organizations.

A final dance will cap off the evening, sending the audience on its way having hopefully experienced its own personal unearthing. “Ultimately, the most important thing to me is to encourage our imagination—to brush it off, give it a massage, wake it up,” McConnell said. “It’s shocking how the public school system in our country has crushed people’s ability to hold complex thoughts. Everyone says, ‘Just make it simple. What’s the sound bite?’”

When the final Ix performance wraps up on February 12, it will be the last hurrah in Charlottesville, but not the last for “The Unearthing.” Leaving behind all of its materials, the cast will travel to Puebla, Mexico in the spring to present an entirely new version of “The Unearthing” as part of the Puebla Ciudad Mural project, a collaborative mural project in the barrio of Xananetla, and Performática, an the international dance festival. “It’s going to be drastically different,” McConnell said. “There’s something exciting to me about making a piece based on being in the present with all of this stuff and then to go reset it in a location that is an abandoned dilapidated furniture factory in broad daylight.”

As Feedback was searching for the right words to describe “The Unearthing,” we turned to our trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, which told us that “to unearth” means “to dig up out of or as if out of the earth.” That tongue twister of a definition is a great fit for McConnell’s vision, as its words seem to be fighting hard against being reduced to an overly simple phrase, just as “The Unearthing” resists being squarely placed in any category or even country. “I’m not doing one thing,” McConnell told us. “It is complex. That’s what it is.”