Author: lawrencegarretson

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Arts

A handmade tale: Can craft and commerce coexist on the Monticello Artisan Trail?

Blacksmith Gerald Boggs hammers out a perfect circle. Photo: Will Kerner

I am sick to death of reading about food. Over the past decade, the preciosity of the new approach to cuisine has contaminated almost everything. Don’t get me wrong. We certainly could use a rethink of the way we produce and consume what we eat. But does it have to come with so much Church Lady attitude?

The self-congratulation of working with “reclaimed” cuts of meat. The sanctimony of putting the word “heirloom” in front of the word “zucchini.” “Slow” whatever. The preening one-upmanship of celebrity foodies as they slum their way to culinary authenticity followed by throngs of gastronomic status seekers.

I am completely over it. But of course, I’m caught up in it as well. And so, as I pull into the Spudnuts parking lot at 8:45 on a miraculously clear Friday morning at the end of a sodden week, I find myself wondering how they source their potato flour. Then I think that someone should just shoot me already.

I’ll excuse myself the momentary mental lapse by confessing that I’ve been watching too much Portlandia and preparing to go on a full-fledged, day-long authenticity hunt on the Monticello Artisan Trail. At least one of my companions actually remembers the Foxfire movement in Appalachia, rubbed elbows with real live back-to-the-landers, and may have actually engaged in a little of it himself. I’m thinking about the selling of authenticity, and the typewriter in my head is stamping out the word “blowback” on the mostly blank page of my morning mind.

The first time I fired a handgun (a .357 magnum revolver), it literally hit me full in the face. The bullet exploded out of the gun, and the scalding propellant gases and particulates blew backwards to deliver a hot toxic slap right to the kisser. Semi-automatics divert some of that return energy to re-cock the gun. But with an open-backed six shooter there’s nothing standing between you and the repercussions. It’s not a pleasant sensation.

Blowback. That’s what we’re experiencing now. For a couple of hundred years we’ve been sacrificing tradition and quality at the altar of the cheap, the shiny, and the convenient. It’s left us with a serious reality deficit. Slavish foodies, suburban craft-brew tourists, hipster lifestyle faddists are all, understandably, looking for the same thing—a little shot of the veritable, the deep, the true in a world that’s lousy with malls and minivans and megachurches and disposable everything.

Capitalism, though,  is fully automatic. It captures blowback, not just to re-cock the gun, but to effortlessly fire the next round. Like “green” before it, “craft” and its cousins “artisanal” and “slow” and “heirloom” have now been co-opted to provide new opportunities to ramp up sales, to get us all to spend our conscientious dollars to feed the corporation. When Dominos is printing the word artisan on a billion pizza boxes, maybe it’s time to take a closer look at whether craft and authenticity can still mean anything in our marketing-driven world.

Maybe, in short, it’s time for a bag of spudnuts and a road trip.

Gerald Boggs of Wayfarer Forge gets to work early in his Afton shop to avoid the heat of the day. About half of Boggs' sales come from fairs and markets; the other half are custom orders for things like fireplace screens and railings. Photo: Will Kerner
Gerald Boggs of Wayfarer Forge gets to work early in his Afton shop to avoid the heat of the day. About half of Boggs’ sales come from fairs and markets; the other half are custom orders for things like fireplace screens and railings. Photo: Will Kerner

 

‘A’ is for artisan

Wham. The hammer comes down with a dull clang and a small shower of orange sparks flares and dies off the hot metal. It’s 10am and blacksmith Gerald Boggs has been busy for the past couple of hours forging iron bottle openers. You heard me. Forging. Iron. Bottle openers.

I’m standing in his shop with John Conover, a lawyer at the Legal Aid and Justice Center, longtime Democratic Party stalwart, and former owner of Papercraft Printing, which used to reside just off the Downtown Mall. He is asking Boggs where he gets his coal. (West Virginia, it turns out, “not that dirty stuff from Wyoming.”) Will Kerner, photographer, co-founder and current board chair of Live Arts, co-founder of the LOOK3 Festival, is snapping photos as Boggs talks and works.

Boggs’ home and workshop are tucked into a pleasant little bend of the road in Afton, and the forge in the corner is boosting the mid-summer swelter with a couple thousand degrees of coke-fired heat. The five other bottle openers he’s produced already are shaped like squat railroad spikes. The piece he pulls out of the embers now is a more slender, tapered ingot that he is in the process of turning into a han d-chiseled wizard complete with a beard and a pointed hat.

“Nobody likes a straight line,” Boggs says, holding the glowing orange metal over the anvil with a pair of tongs. “The human eye doesn’t respond to it.”

With a few deft blows of the hammer, what had been a straight spike of iron takes on the shape of an arching curve in one direction capped by a delicate spiral scrolling back in the opposite direction. Wizard hat. Damn.

The words deft and delicate don’t often apply to a strapping guy wielding a 10-pound hunk of metal on the end of a stick, but Boggs earns them. He looks as if he might be made of iron himself. Twenty-five years of swinging a hammer and hauling coal and metal and setting up a portable forge at craft fairs and farmers markets will do that to you. But it will also give you skills.

“I made all the tongs you see,” he says, gesturing to a rack of about 15 of them. “I made the forge. I made about half the hammers, all the chisels and punches and stuff. I mean, what’s a blacksmith if he doesn’t make his own tools?”

Using those tools, Boggs puts the twist in the hat, chisels a few stars into it, creates a face with eyes and a moustache and a beard, opens a slot in the metal with a punch, and with something called a drift coaxes the slot into the classic church key shape. He then scrubs the hot metal with a brass wire brush, which imparts a slightly golden cast, and coats the whole thing with a paste wax which smokes and sets as the iron continues to cool.

When he’s done, he holds up his work to the light. It is beautiful. Rough-hewn, but also surprisingly detailed, considering that he whacked out its facets with a bunch of dull metal implements. About half of Boggs’ income comes from the bottle openers, hooks, drawer pulls, and door handles he makes to sell at markets and shows. The other half comes from custom orders for wrought iron tables and fireplace screens and railings.

Who buys his stuff? “They’re people who want something made by hand. And not the ambiguous, fluffy use of hand-made. Truly made by hand.”

Boggs’ craftsmanship is impressive. But I’ll admit to being skeptical. The idea of an artisan trail has a kind of tourist board, marketing confection feel to it. And it seems like you can’t turn around in Central Virginia these days without finding somebody slapping up a few signs and a website, drawing a map, and waiting for the tourists to start spending. The Brew Ridge Trail. The Monticello Wine Trail. Next week, I’m launching my own tourism trail, the Trail of Trails, which will no doubt in future years be remembered by its back seat, car seat-restricted victims as a kind of metaphoric Trail of Tears commemorating a prolonged, enforced roadside encounter with the real.

A couple of weeks before the road trip, I interviewed Sherri Smith, director of the Artisans Center of Virginia, at the organization’s offices overlooking the new Native American Village at the Frontier Culture Museum in Staunton. The Artisans Center runs the trail and is tasked with supporting the state’s small artisan businesses. Smith is a market development pro, an artist herself, and an enthusiast. That enthusiasm is infectious.

“The businesses that we represent are so amazingly creative,” she told me. The center’s mission is “to embrace that innovation and creativity and try to figure out how we can start to stabilize it and help the small businesses that are the people who make our communities interesting and rich and wonderful.”

The Artisans Center was formed in 1997 with the original goal of creating a series of retail gallery hubs around the state to showcase the work of local craftspersons. But the craft center model suffered in the financial crisis of 2008, and the idea arose of developing a series of trails with a more localized, grass-roots feel. According to Smith, “the idea for the trail system actually originated in northwestern North Carolina with ‘Hand Made in America’.”

Living here in Virginia, you can begin to develop a bit of a complex about our neighbor to the south. Sure we were here first, and we’ve got all these presidents and all. But it seems like North Carolina is otherwise constantly beating us to the punch. More tobacco, better barbecue, the pork industry, the whole research triangle thing, the furniture industry, basketball. Now the trails idea. Hell, I’ve driven through North Carolina, and damnit if the grass isn’t actually greener.

Be that as it may, the first Virginia artisan trails were developed in the southwest part of the state, where the landscape and local heritage are rich and the economy is poor. There is now a total of 15 trails wending through southside Virginia, operating under the collective name of ’Round the Mountain.

The Monticello Artisan Trail was the first effort to bring that model to another part of the state. It covers Albemarle and Nelson counties, and its roster encompasses not just traditional craft businesses like pottery and textile and glass blowing, but also agri-businesses like orchards and wineries, restaurants and brewpubs, and B&Bs and tourist information centers. The goal is to build a self-reinforcing community of small businesses.

“When we go in to build a trail it isn’t just about identifying people and marketing them,” Smith explained. “It’s about getting them connected to one another. To strengthen one another. The way we look at it, when we build a trail it’s development. Community development. Once we launch it, it’s tourism. It’s marketing. It’s getting people out there.”

Categories
Living

Stargazers: Charlottesville scientists are helping build the most powerful telescope in history

Joe Greenberg working on the prototype of the computer that will be able to image the black hole at the center of our galaxy. Photo: John Robinson

The President of Chile is running about an hour late. Not surprising, perhaps, considering the dedication ceremony he’s attending is being held 25 miles from the small tourist town of San Pedro de Atacama, up a long and desolate road, in a support facility nestled at 9,000′ in the high desert of the Chilean Andes. Assembled dignitaries, politicians, scientists, and press mill about a large, white tent, planted improbably on the dusty soil of a site that’s important because of its lack of water. Crystal clear high-altitude sunlight diffuses through the sides of the tent, illuminating dark suits, professional smiles, and rows of white-sheathed folding chairs.

Some of that light enters the lens of a video camera. The lens focuses it onto a CCD chip, which pulses out a discrete raster of image data 30 times every second to a computer workstation and from there to an Internet server. The server dissects the data into packets, which it sends skittering out onto the Web. Around the globe, hundreds of other Internet routers requesting the feed pull it together, buffer it, and serve it up as streaming video.

In a small auditorium in Charlottesville, a projector jacked into a laptop casts the images onto a screen. Sixty or so people gathered in that auditorium are doing the same thing as their colleagues 5,000 miles away—smiling, chatting, and waiting. They are all employees of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)—scientists, engineers, technicians, and support staff. They are here to watch, from a continent away, the inauguration of ALMA—the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array—the most powerful telescope on earth. They are, despite the delay, in a celebratory mood. And they should be, because they helped to build it.

When it is completed, ALMA will feature 66 of the most sensitive radio receivers ever made, placed at 16,500' in the Chilean Andes. Photo: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), C. Padilla
When it is completed, ALMA will feature 66 of the most sensitive radio receivers ever made, placed at 16,500′ in the Chilean Andes. Photo: ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO), C. Padilla

Twenty-plus years in the making, ALMA cost $1.3 billion. On March 13, it was officially put into service. When all of its components are in place in the coming year, it will sport 50 39′ state-of-the-art radio antennas, as well as an additional 16 smaller antennas which greatly increase its sensitivity. Each of the larger antennas is the size of a modest house, and can be moved around the vast Chajnantor plateau, a 16,500′-high portion of the Atacama desert, into configurations as large as 11 miles across, allowing astronomers to adjust the size of the slice of sky that the telescope can take in. ALMA will be able to see things farther away, fainter, and in vastly greater detail than we have ever been able to see before. Our view of the universe is about to take an exponential leap.

Like almost all big science in an age of fiscal constraint, ALMA was built by a consortium of countries. But NRAO here in Charlottesville houses its North American headquarters. The people here helped select the site in Chile. They developed the telescope’s specs and its mission. They helped create many of the super-cooled, supersensitive radio receivers that are its ears. And they designed and built, in a little low-slung building off of Ivy Road, the supercomputer capable of 17 quadrillion operations per second that is its brain. This is ALMA’s story, told in snapshots of a few of the hundreds who helped make it happen.

Climbing the ladder

“It’s been a very long haul,” said Paul Vanden Bout, who would know as well as anyone. As Director of NRAO through most of the years of ALMA’s development, Vanden Bout signed the agreements and nurtured the international relationships that made ALMA possible. He also wasn’t above a bit of tramping in the mountains if it meant finding a home for the telescope.

In the early 1990s, Vanden Bout and several colleagues found themselves in the hamlet of San Pedro de Atacama, and the going was not easy: “The other NRAO person [on the trip] was Bob Brown, and he had studied the topo maps and knew that there was high ground and a road. He knew that you could drive up there, which we attempted to do in two trucks. Brown made it up to the high altitude and was very impressed with what he saw. My truck broke down. The carburetor couldn’t take the thin air.”

Unlikely as it may seem, the path that leads astronomers to Chile was, even at the time, very well worn. Because of its abundance of high elevation sites, an aggressive technology development plan, and relatively low costs for construction and manpower, Chile is dubbed by Wikipedia “the astronomy capital of the world.” Charlottesville’s connection to astronomy is just as well founded, though it requires a bit more explanation. It came about because of the invention of a farm implement.

Cyrus McCormick, from Rockbridge County, Virginia, is credited with building the first threshing machine in the 1830s. He and his brother Leander were both heirs to the manufacturing company that eventually became known as International Harvester. In 1877, Leander, who had an interest in astronomy and had maintained an affection for his home state, donated a telescope with a 26″ primary lens to the University of Virginia.

Because of the altitude, technicians need supplemental oxygen when they work on the ALMA Correlator, a supercomputer capable of 17 quadrillion operations per second. Photo: ESO/Max Alexander
Because of the altitude, technicians need supplemental oxygen when they work on the ALMA Correlator, a supercomputer capable of 17 quadrillion operations per second. Photo: ESO/Max Alexander

UVA astronomer Ed Murphy runs the public outreach program at the McCormick Observatory, where the telescope is on display and functioning to this day. “The telescope, when it was finished, was the largest in the United States, and the second largest in the world,” said Murphy from his office on McCormick Road. “It was a very big deal when it came here, and that’s really what put astronomy in Charlottesville on the map.” In the early 1900s, the Observatory embarked on an ambitious program to measure the exact distance from the earth to nearby stars. The measurements conducted here laid the groundwork, step by step, for the measurement of increasingly distant objects.

Climbing “the distance ladder,” as it is called, astronomers in the first half of the 20th century gained a staggering new view of the cosmos. It had previously been thought that the entire universe consisted of our Milky Way galaxy—a homey collection of stars and nebulae 100,000 or so light years across. But by 1950, it was becoming more or less universally understood that our galaxy was only one of hundreds of millions spread out over the unimaginably vast space of billions of light years.

The new science of radio astronomy helped astronomers develop this picture, but after WWII, the United States found itself behind in the radio game. So in the late ’50s, the National Science Foundation established a National Radio Astronomy Observatory, purchasing land in Green Bank, West Virginia, where they built a headquarters, designated a “radio quiet zone” to minimize interference, and started building telescopes. The remote location made it easier to maintain radio silence for the telescopes, but it was an out-of-the-way place to house a national science program.

By the 1960s NRAO was looking for a new headquarters—something closer to the center of power in D.C., and in better proximity to other scientists. The UVA astronomy department, then under the direction of Laurence Fredrick, was aggressively hiring research faculty and rebuilding a national reputation. When UVA offered to construct a new home for NRAO, the deal was done. By the 1970s, between NRAO and the astronomy department, Charlottesville boasted a substantial percentage of the world’s talent, experience, and brainpower in the field of astronomy.

Al Wootten was one of those drawn into the orbit. Wootten now serves as North American Project Scientist for ALMA, but at the time he was an expert who had already made a name for himself studying molecular gas clouds. He came to NRAO to get access to the kind of instruments he needed to pursue his work. “I came here in the end of 1982 to work on a 25-meter telescope, which was cancelled when I hadn’t even been here a month,” said Wootten, with a wry chuckle. “So that was a great feeling.”

He talks resolutely, matter-of-factly, but with an undercurrent of humor that hints that he understands one or two of the absurdities that underlie most things in this world. “So I thought, well, I’d better get involved in this Millimeter Array.”

Categories
Arts

Noises on: Live Arts’ Julie Hamberg throws the switch on The Vibrator Play

Live Arts' Julie Hamberg takes on modern problems in Victorian time with In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, her directorial debut. Photo: John Robinson

Early February. Three and a half weeks before the opening of Live Arts’ new main stage production, In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play), and a major scenic element for the climax of the play was not coming together well at all. The design called for the climactic sequence to be played in front of a backdrop, but the lighting was all wrong and the sight lines wouldn’t work. What was intended to be a magical coup started to look more like a major distraction. “I was not happy,” said Julie Hamberg, who is not only director of the piece but also Live Arts’ newest artistic director.

Well, newish. Hamberg was hired in mid 2011 and started the job in September of that year, taking the reins just as a new season, put together by the Live Arts programming committee, was being launched. One of her first tasks was to begin the long process of talking to volunteers, talking to staff, talking to the board, and to start building the first Live Arts season that would bear her stamp. That season opened one year later, in October 2012, with a slate that included the first ever amateur production of Pulitzer Prize winner Clybourne Park and one of the most lauded musicals of all time, A Chorus Line.

Now it’s Hamberg’s turn to step to the plate, taking on the first play she’s chosen to direct in her new artistic home. She comes to Live Arts with a 25 year history in the theater. She trained at the legendary Circle Rep in New York. The LAB program there was a veritable boot camp for bringing new work to the stage, and her career has borne that out. She’s been involved in over 75 productions of new work in one form or another—producing, directing, or assistant directing—in significant venues from New York to New Orleans to Ann Arbor, Michigan, 15 miles from the small town where she grew up.

The Vibrator Play, which opens on March 1, fits her M.O. It’s written by Sarah Ruhl, one of the current favorites of daring theater companies everywhere. Live Arts has produced two of her plays in recent years—The Clean House in 2007 and Eurydice in 2009. The Vibrator Play is a rich, poetic, funny, humane, and moderately shocking meditation on desire, propriety, and the barriers that separate us from what we want, and from the people to whom we are closest. It takes place in the home and office of Dr. Givings, a physician in the late 1800s, who uses the new convenience of electricity not only to illuminate his home but to treat his patients. He has invented an electrical device to stimulate “a paroxysm” in his female patients, to release “the pent-up emotion inside the womb that causes [their] hysterical symptoms.” As a doctor, he’s compassionate but aloof. But as a husband, he is completely insensitive to the emotional needs of his wife, Catherine, who is condemned to hear and wonder about the tantalizingly intimate sounds coming from her husband’s office.

Ruhl is a canny playwright. She uses the layout of the stage to help dramatize her story. On one side of the stage we have the doctor’s office, on the other, the Givings’ drawing room—one the most private, the other the most public—space in the house. Each room is served by a door, which becomes the focus of the action. One leads into the husband’s inner sanctum, a world where the clinical and the passionate are all mixed up. The other leads out to the wide world of freedom. Which one will they take? Will they choose together, or alone?

With the themes of the play inscribed so starkly in the stagecraft, the setting for the climax (no pun intended) needs to be just as clear. So here is Julie Hamberg, 17 months into her tenure as artistic director, in the throes of directing her first piece at Live Arts, and the damned backdrop for one of the critical moments of the play is just not going to work. “This fits my general philosophy of theater,” she said, with a shake of her abundant dark hair and an easy laugh. “Expect the unexpected. How do you embrace it?”

How? Acceptance is the key, according to her colleague and counterpart, executive director Matt Joslyn. The two are equals at the head of the organization, each answering directly to the board. He is tasked with the business side, she with the creative. Joslyn has had a chance to see up close that Hamberg has what it takes to embrace the unexpected. “Julie is an absolutely excellent artistic director,” he says “She has an incredible sense of craft, an incredible sense of theatricality. She knows how to solve problems, she knows how to talk to people, and she knows when to push and when to accept—and I say ‘accept’ and not ‘settle’—the knowledge that ‘this is where it’s going to get, and I can accept that.’”

So the decision is made. The backdrop is cut from the final scene. Another direction provides another, better, opportunity to serve the play, to serve the characters, and to serve the audience. The final scene, she says, “will be as simple as we can make it. I would rather have simplicity and beauty and clear focus on the actors than some distracting scenic element.” Virtue, meet necessity. Charlottesville, meet Julie Hamberg.

The Vibrator Play is a rich, poetic, funny, humane, and moderately shocking meditation on desire, propriety, and the barriers that separate us from what we want, and from the people to whom we are closest.

In the Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)/March 1-23/Live Arts

Categories
Arts

A new film from “The Sopranos” creative team opens the Virginia Film Festival

Photo: Courtesy Virginia Film Festival

There’s a moment in Not Fade Away, the new film by “The Sopranos” creator David Chase that’s screening as the opening night feature at the Virginia Film Festival, that will simultaneously cause a chill to walk up your spine and a smirk to slide across your face. That reaction is well-known to fans of “The Sopranos,” the groundbreaking series that opened up premium cable, long-form television as the most vital, rich, and satisfying vein for Hollywood’s creative class. Much of that show’s brilliance came from Chase’s ability to weave together menace and humor and take us to whole new places when it comes to sympathizing with, (and passing judgment on), our protagonists.

So when James Gandolfini, a harried, bottled-up pressure-cooker of a New Jersey dad in the early ’60s, leans out a car window and says to his teenaged son, played by John Magaro: “You show up at that restaurant without a tie and a jacket….you and me are going to tangle my friend,” it’s hard not to hear a little bit of Tony. But the reaction of Magaro’s character to his father’s threat—a gentle, rueful, almost invisible smile—shows that although we may be in New Jersey, we’re miles from the mob and the “waste management business.” The smile says that the young man realizes his father is a limited man, and he accepts that the gruff gesture is what passes for affection from the man he’s got to lock horns with in order to earn the right to break out and live the kind of life he wants to live.

Don’t let that little flash of Tony Soprano lull you into thinking that Chase and Gandolfini are haunting the old neighborhood and re-fighting old battles in Not Fade Away. The north Jersey setting and the presence of key members of “The Sopranos” creative team are about the only things that Chase’s first feature film has in common with his television classic. Although Gandolfini’s presence is vital, and his performance deep and rich and moving, the heart of this film is a coming of age story, about kids finding themselves in an era of tumultuous change. And about how music is the key to everything.

“I don’t want to brag about the ’60s,” Chase told press at the New York Film Festival in October. “But the music was great. It was our way into everything. It’s how I first learned about art, fashion, humor, film. It all came from there.”

In Not Fade Away, Chase reached back to his own teenage years, a time when he and his friends were so worked up over the music coming out of their transistor radios that they started a band “for like 15 minutes.” The plot line of kids starting a garage band in the Jersey suburbs served as a platform for Chase to dive into the nuance and texture of the seminal era of rock and roll: “I’ve been saving these songs for this movie. It really is a compilation album of some of my favorite songs, is what it comes down to.” But it also provided a challenge in getting the level of realism Chase wanted: “We had to work it out such that it would be logical, it was right chronologically, and that the band could theoretically do it with their level of expertise.”

To help make that work properly, enter a third alumnus of “The Sopranos”—Steven Van Zandt, who, besides having played strip club owner Silvio Dante on the show, was himself running the streets of Jersey a half dozen years after this film is set, forming bands and alliances and life-long friendships with guys like Southside Johnny and Bruce Springsteen. Chase enlisted Van Zandt’s garage-band cred and encyclopedic knowledge of the history of rock and roll (he programs the Sirius XM radio show “Little Steven’s Underground Garage”) to coach the actors in how to be a band, and to produce the music for the film. “We went to boot camp for like six months in my studio,” said Van Zandt. “They were amazingly dedicated and all learned how to play. They’re a band now, and could literally perform at a party tonight. And that was extraordinary to watch.”

With one key exception, which you’ll have to see the film to learn about, the music they learned to play was all real music from the period. “Part of the authenticity,” said Van Zandt, “is that most bands are cover bands for the first few years of their lives. You spend a few years learning other people’s songs. That’s how you form your identity.”

Categories
Arts

Virginia Film Festival celebrates 25 years of changing with the times

Charlton Heston at the Virginia Film Festival in 1991. Photo: Courtesy Virginia Film Festival

The phrase “calm like a duck” comes to mind. It is late September, 11 days before the announcement of the lineup for this year’s 25th Anniversary Virginia Film Festival, and festival director Jody Kielbasa and his staff are scrambling to pin down films and featured guests. Kielbasa is a pretty high-octane guy. Former Virginia Governor Gerald Baliles describes him as “the equivalent of a five hour energy drink.”

Despite the RPMs, there’s a strong sense about him of polish, ease, and even something that might be called calm. But you also sense that, like the duck, he’s paddling pretty hard below the surface.

With the schedule announcement only a week and a half away, very little is set. “We’re going to have far and away the strongest schedule we’ve had in the four years I’ve been here,” says Kielbasa. But even with dozens of films already slated for inclusion, there isn’t much that can be nailed down until the special guests, actors, and directors (referred to in the business as “the talent”), start to commit. “At the moment we’re still chasing talent. And when I say ‘chasing’ I mean we’re talking with managers and agents and assistants to see how schedules work out and who can and cannot be here.”

Progress is excruciatingly slow, and, in fact, come announcement day there are still significant slots left to be filled. “When I was a kid in the back seat of the car,” Kielbasa confided, “I’d ask, ‘When will we be there?’ The answer was, ‘Over the next hill.’ Well, there’s always a next hill.”

Richard Herskowitz served as director of 13 festivals and programmed two before handing off the reins to Kielbasa in 2009. He uses a different mode of transportation to describe the stress of scheduling a world-class festival with film industry talent: “It’s like a locomotive coming at you. It gets closer and closer and scarier and scarier. The weeks leading up to it are incredibly intense, because when it comes to getting the headliner talent and the film premieres, that happens really close to the last minute.”

Ask Paul Wagner, documentary filmmaker and long-time friend of the festival, what it must be like to build the festival year after year and he just shakes his head and chuckles sympathetically: “I really feel sorry for them.”

Legislative legerdemain
That the state of Virginia has any official interest whatsoever in courting the film industry is due to a sneaky little piece of legislative sleight-of-hand conducted back in 1980 by a then four-year veteran of the House of Delegates. In the classic holiday film White Christmas, Bing Crosby says to Rosemary Clooney, “Oh come now, Miss Haynes. Surely you know that everybody’s got a little larceny operating in them.” He didn’t add, though he might have, that even politicians are not immune to a little well-meaning swindle every now and then.

Before he was governor, before he was attorney general, Gerald Baliles was a delegate from Henrico County. He tells the story with the gleam in his eye of an old campaigner who savors looking back on the occasional bit of mischief. Baliles had seen a study about the effects on the local economy of a movie that had been shot in Virginia Beach. He decided to sponsor legislation that would create an office to promote film production around the state, but the bill didn’t pass. So, as a member of the House Appropriations Committee, Baliles, in his words, “slipped it in the back of the budget, in the fine print.” The budget was passed without anyone noticing that a small new program had been created. “And so,” said Baliles, “the Virginia Film Office was born.”

Seven years later, during his term as governor, Baliles read another article about film festivals as a boon to tourism. This time he needed no shell game to make something happen. As he tells it: “I thought of the idea and talked to the Kluges. John Kluge [billionaire media tycoon and Charlottesville resident] owned Orion Pictures. Earl Hamner [creator of “The Waltons”] was a fishing friend at the time, and it struck me that he could be useful. I asked the Kluges to host a reception, and they offered cash and connections.”

In this milestone year, Baliles is being honored by the festival with the Founder’s Award in recognition of the essential role his political clout played in its creation. The joint recipient of the award, the woman whose cash and connections were also essential in getting the festival off the ground, has her own story to tell about the founding.

Success has many parents
Patricia Kluge, co-recipient of the Founders Award, was patroness of the festival throughout its early years. She too was there at the inception, though her memory of how the festival came together differs significantly from Baliles’.

“I had a big house party at Albemarle,” said Kluge. “And David Brown [producer of The Sting, Jaws, Driving Miss Daisy, Cocoon] and his wife Helen Gurley Brown [author of Sex and the Single Girl and long-time editor of Cosmopolitan magazine] were staying there. At dinner I was asking David what did he think would be the kind of event to attract the right kind of tourists to Charlottesville. And he said, ‘Why don’t you have a film festival?’ And so I thought…if we did an American film festival, that would be very good at the University…. We called some friends in Hollywood and they thought it was a brilliant idea. Then we felt that we needed to have the Governor involved.”

Bob Gazzale, now head of the American Film Institute, served as the festival’s inaugural full-time director from 1989 to 1991. Before that, he had been present at the initial planning meeting hosted by then-University President Robert O’Neil: “They gathered the titans of American film for that very first conversation. It was Jack Valenti [long-reigning president of the Motion Picture Association of America]. It was Jeannie Firstenberg who ran the American Film Institute for 27 years. It was Lewis Allen who was a wildly successful Broadway producer, but also a great filmmaker and a graduate of the University…. They had the best minds at the table.”
When asked about the different stories told by the founders, Gazzale laughs. “Well…success has many fathers. And mothers. It was a marriage of opportunity. There is no question that Gerald Baliles was a driving force, and it would not have happened without him. I can say the same of Patricia. And I can say the same of Robert O’Neil. Those three parties came together and said there is an economic development angle, there is an academic angle, and then Patricia arrived with ‘let’s not forget that the movies are fun.’”

High profile, low key
The early years of the festival saw Patricia Kluge’s money, connections and penchant for fun combine with the University’s academic prestige to lure a significant roster of alumni supporters in the industry. The result was an explosion of old Hollywood glamour in a sedate University town. Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Charlton Heston, and Robert Mitchum all attended in the early years. The roster also sported a parade of younger artists, writers, and industry names: Robert Altman, Nick Nolte, Norman Mailer, Jerzy Kosinski, John Sayles, Jane Alexander, Horton Foote.

Independent Producer Mark Johnson (Diner, the Narnia films, “Breaking Bad,” and Best Picture Academy Award winner for Rain Man), himself a University alumnus, was a participant at the inaugural festival in 1988. The next year, he was tapped to be a member of the Advisory Board, which he has now chaired for more years than he can recall. Johnson is probably responsible for bringing more films and industry players to the festival than anyone else. His stalwart service as the festival’s primary industry champion over the past 25 years is also being formally recognized this year with a proclamation from Governor Bob McDonnell.

Johnson recalls the black tie gala at the Kluge estate that first year: “It was a grand affair. In fact, there were helicopters bringing in people from D.C. As you may have heard, that festival almost bankrupted any future festival because it was so expensive. It was fun to try to do it on a grand scale, but the festival stepped down in its ambitions substantially since then, and I think, quite frankly, to the benefit of the spirit of the festival.”

Without abandoning its appeal to Hollywood names and high profile films, this downscaling of the opulence factor turned out to be a key to the festival finding its niche. “It’s not trying to be one of the big flashy festivals,” said Johnson. “It has its own personality, which is more quiet.” And this has a great deal of appeal to the artists who are contemplating coming here. “It’s very low key, no one is trying to sell them anything. No one is trying to take advantage of them. There are no flashbulbs in their faces.”

Charlottesville filmmaker Paul Wagner, himself the winner of an Academy Award for Documentary Short Subject, agreed: “Why spend a lot of effort trying to make it the hip indie festival when Sundance and South by Southwest have that locked up? Why make it a big press event when New York and Toronto have that locked up? Why not take what you have that’s unique and expand on that?”

Nothing endures but change
The Virginia Film Festival has survived its first quarter century through a potent mix of star power, ego, heaps of goodwill from volunteers, donors and audiences, intellectual rigor, and sheer enthusiasm for the art of the cinema. It has had founders like Baliles, Kluge, and O’Neil who have put their stamp on its identity. And it has had a number of directors, some of whom served for only a year or two, but three of whom—Gazzale, Herskowitz, and Kielbasa—have presided over and ushered in most of its defining moments.

Gazzale’s Virginia Festival of American Film, under the sponsorship of Patricia Kluge, was awash in the glamour of old Hollywood. Under Richard Herskowitz, the festival was challenged to become more fully a part of the University, and he dropped its emphasis on American film in an effort to explore broader themes. Herskowitz also broadened the reach of the festival in another sense—inaugurating an expanded series of festivities, events, panels, and happenings that reached out to communities outside the University.

Jody Kielbasa, has continued that effort. One of his first acts was to drop the focus on an annual theme. “It’s really opened things up,” he said. “We still screen classic films, but we try to encase them in a purpose.” The festival has been beefed up to well over 100 films, making that last minute imminent train wreck scramble for talent all the more harrowing. But as a result, in the past few years the festival has shattered its attendance records. “In screening 100-plus films we can reach every segment of the community with a subject. We can do things on sexuality and religion and politics and art…you name it. We can create partnerships within the community to explore these issues, and a lot of people who wouldn’t ordinarily come to the festival start coming.”

Bob Gazzale, present at the founding and still active as an advisor, has had the best seat in the house for evaluating the major changes the festival has gone through. The festival that he helped create, the one focused on American film and on an annual theme, is gone now, but he sees that only as good and inevitable and right: “Nothing endures but change, particularly when you’re celebrating an art form. If you don’t change the conversation occasionally, you’ll be lost in time.”

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Freedom is just another word for Kris Kristofferson

At some point quite early in your long life it dawned on you that you had already written the words the world is going to want to see on your tombstone. That’s not a particularly easy thing to live with. You wrote them in the song “The Pilgrim: Chapter 33” about a rogues gallery of men you ran with or admired in the 1960s—Chris Gantry, Dennis Hopper, Jerry Jeff Walker, Johnny Cash—men who at the time were busy crucifying themselves on drugs and alcohol and bad behavior. Some of them, like you, found a way down off the cross. But the words stuck, and they still hang about you:

“He’s a poet, he’s a picker, he’s prophet, he’s a pusher

He’s a pilgrim and a preacher and a problem when he’s stoned.

He’s a walking contradiction, partly truth, partly fiction

Taking every wrong direction on his lonely way back home.”

Now, in retrospect, it seems like old tales about pills and the bottle are the least interesting thing about you. But when you’re Kris Kristofferson, even your least interesting feature is pretty damned interesting to the rest of us.

Let us count the ways: Rhodes scholar, boxer, degree in Literature from Oxford, trained as an Army helicopter pilot, Airborne Ranger, assigned to teach English at West Point. He then walked away from it all to move to Nashville to write country songs. For years he worked as a janitor in a recording studio, taking occasional stints flying choppers to oil platforms. He was on a long slow drive down the road to nowhere, but always refining his craft. He wrote some of the most recorded songs in country music history sitting on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico with barely a penny in his pocket, and his feet coming out the bottom of his shoes.

Kristofferson’s breakthrough came in 1970, after he landed a helicopter on Johnny Cash’s lawn and gave him a copy of the song “Sunday Morning Coming Down.” The stunt worked. Cash recorded it, and it topped the country charts, winning CMA Song of the Year. From there, the trajectory headed straight up. In 1972, three of the five Grammy nominees for Best Country Song were his. He won for the exquisitely crafted erotic ballad “Help Me Make It Through the Night.”

Rolling Stone called “Sunday Morning” “the greatest song ever written about a hangover.” It’s easy to see why. The first lines alone are quintessential country: “Well I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn’t hurt. And the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t bad, so I had one more for dessert.” The song shambles along for a couple of evocative, desolate verses. Then it does that gospel lift-off, with the music reaching for the rafters just as the words nosedive to the emotional bottom:

“And there’s nothing short of dyin’

Half as lonesome as the sound

Of a sleeping city sidewalk

Sunday morning comin’ down.”

With everything else he’s been—movie star, singer, Golden Globe winner (for A Star is Born), sex symbol, activist, hellion—it’s easy to forget that Kristofferson is among the best songwriters Nashville has ever produced. He’s penned at least a dozen that are now an indelible part of the country songbook: “For the Good Times,” “From the Bottle to the Bottom,” “To Beat the Devil,” “Loving Her Was Easier,” “Why Me.” “Me and Bobby McGee” belongs in the pantheon with a handful of the greatest American songs—right up there with “Over the Rainbow” and “Like a Rolling Stone”—each of them a meditation on freedom and longing.

His leftie activism has alienated a few people over the years. He once told Esquire magazine: “I’d be more marketable as a right-wing redneck. But I got into this to tell the truth as I saw it.” Still, Nashville has never stopped recording his songs, and his country audience is finding its way back. Fans and critics are raving about the stripped-down concert act and the finely-honed writing and studio work of his latest albums. Once his songs were about freedom, loneliness and desolation. Now he writes minimalist, gem-like lyrics about transcendence and grace—laced right down among the sorrows of life.

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On life, death, art, and being Sissy Spacek

Sissy Spacek recalls her Texas childhood and staying grounded by staying away from Hollywood in her new memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life. (Photo by Lynne Brubaker)

If there’s a Dorian Gray trade-off that comes with being Sissy Spacek, it must go something like this. Even in recent films like Get Low, where she plays her age or older, there remains something girlish about her face. The freckles, the apple cheeks, the forthright blue eyes call time a liar. But what has unmistakably matured about her is her voice. The crisp tomboy drawl of Badlands and Coal Miner’s Daughter has ripened now. It’s become the voice that generations of Southern women have grown into as they aged—laced with music and meaning and joy and sorrow and sunlight. It’s a voice made for kitchen table conversation or front-porch storytelling, for fixing the cords that bind us into families, and into communities. It was the voice that came at me out of the speaker phone as we discussed her new memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life, written with Maryanne Vollers.

Levon Helm, legendary drummer with The Band, had just died. Helm played Loretta Lynn’s father in Coal Miner’s Daughter, so I began by asking about him. “He was a wonderful man, an amazing musician, and a brilliant actor. People don’t realize that about him,” said Spacek. “He and Phyllis Boyens, who played Loretta’s mother, and her father, Nimrod Workman, who was a revered Appalachian singer—they brought such a sense of the life of the mountains. They just had that story right down to their shoes.” In a central moment in the book, Spacek described the experience of the cast staying at an inn in Wise, Virginia, during the filming. “Levon took over the basement taproom most nights, filling it with guitar players and banjo pickers, singing the old mountain songs that sprung straight up from the land that surrounded us. One of the wonderful things about being a filmmaker is that you get to live all these different lives, in different places, not as a visitor, but as somebody who’s trying to sink down into the bedrock of the community.”

In her own story, bedrock is Mary Elizabeth Spacek running barefoot with her brothers around the streets of Quitman, Texas—“my To Kill a Mockingbird childhood,” she called it on the phone. “There were screen doors, and your parents whistled for you at night, and we played at Magic Hour running around the neighborhood ’til we thought our little hearts would burst trying to catch the last little bit of light.” The story might have stayed right there, but it grew in the telling. “In the beginning, I wanted just to write about my childhood, but when I began to write I realized that my childhood had so informed the rest of my life that I needed to be able to (talk about) my adult life, my career, my life here (in Virginia). It really is true that every experience I’ve had and every place I’ve been and every relationship I’ve had has fed my work.”

The book is organized around place, with big sections titled Texas, New York, California, Virginia. We get to see all the burgeoning talent, the early forays into the folk music scene in New York, the growth of her career through a series of remarkable films, and the impulse to go to ground in Albemarle county so that her daughters can have the same kind of rooted childhood that she had. But the soul of her story is in the details. As she described it on the phone, “the book really explains me. It’s why bugs on the screen and the wind in the trees and geese flying overhead are like a choir.”

My Extraordinary Ordinary Life
By Sissy Spacek, with Maryanne Vollers
Hyperion, 288 pages

Spacek kicks off her book tour here
in Charlottesville on May 1 with a signing at Barnes & Noble.

It’s hard to avoid the impression that Sissy Spacek is not primarily a star, though she certainly plays one on TV. Nor is she at heart a celebrity, though her celebrity stories are good, and warm, and funny, and generous. No, Sissy Spacek is at heart an artist. She’s a gleaner of truths, a miner of gold, a driller for bedrock. She comes by that miner’s impulse honestly. In the book, she describes her mother leaving home for the last time before her final trip to the hospital. “She kept walking around the house looking at everything. This was the place she loved best…. I’ll bet that’s what was flooding through her mind that morning, all those sweet memories. She stood there in the living room a long time, Daddy said, just taking it all in.”

It’s not a particularly sorrowful book, though there are sorrows enough in it. A question starts to form itself, but the interview is over. I never get to ask: Why are so many of the best stories laden with mortality? No matter. Having read this book, I know how she would answer.

“Death is the mother of beauty,” said the poet Wallace Stevens. It’s the shadow on the wall that lends insistence to the day. It goads us to harvest the simple, ordinary, extraordinary things that surround us, and to turn them into meaning—like Levon Helm playing mountain music in the taproom, like all the little shards of blessedness that her mother gathered in that last long look around the house. Like any good artist, Sissy Spacek knows this right down to the soles of her bare feet pressing into the dust.